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Chapter 1 Cases of Asymmetrical Territorial Autonomy Stefan Wolff Territorial autonomy is not an entirely new approach for resolving selfdetermination disputes, but its application has become far more widespread since the end of the Cold War. Prior to that, it was mostly cases in Europe (or overseas territories related to European states, such as the Netherlands Antilles) that benefited, with some success, from the application of territorial autonomy as a conflict resolution mechanism. This is not to say that there are no examples of territorial autonomy elsewhere in the world that predate the end of the Cold War, but few of them have proved viable conflict settlements. Eritrea was granted autonomy within a federal Ethiopia in 1952 on the basis of a UN General Assembly resolution, but within ten years this arrangement had failed, leading to Eritrea’s annexation by Ethiopia in 1962 and the imposition of direct (military) rule five years later, triggering a long civil war that ended with Eritrea gaining independent statehood in 1993 (Hannum 1996, 337–41; Joireman 2004; Benedikter 2007, 29). In Asia, a prominent example of failed autonomy is that of Iraqi Kurdistan. An agreement between the Kurdish Democratic Party and Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party in 1970 initially appeared to provide an acceptable arrangement, but the 1974 implementing law saw the government in Baghdad renege on a number of issues and delimit the territorial reach of autonomy to the areas in which the Kurds formed a majority of the population according to the 1957 census. Taken almost two decades earlier, the latter was clearly outdated and its use for demarcating the boundaries of the autonomous entity was rejected by the Kurds as it would not have included quite a number of areas they considered Kurdish. Moreover, not unlike the situation in Iraq in 2009, the 1974 implementing legislation failed to resolve the status of Kirkuk and ownership of its natural resources (cf. Hannum 1996, 190–94; Bengio 2005, 174). In all these cases, the governance arrangements established were asymmetrical in the sense defined by Marc 18 Stefan Wolff Weller in the Introduction to this volume. Within their own limitations, Eritrea and Iraqi Kurdistan both had status akin to a federacy arrangement , as did Northern Ireland until 1972 and again for a short period of time in 1974. In Italy (after 1948) and Spain (after 1979) arrangements emerged in which there was overall devolution, but which were asymmetric in the sense that different powers and different levels of power were devolved to the constituent regions of the two states. Farther back in history, what we consider territorial autonomy today has some forerunners in the way empires managed their vast territories, partly in view also of avoiding dissent from peoples and communities subjugated to the ruling, or dominant, nation or ethnic group. Examples include a number of provinces of the Ottoman empire, most prominently in the Balkans, but extending to Egypt and Lebanon as well, the Austrian Kronländer, and, after the 1867 compromise, Hungary, in the Habsburg empire, and Finland in the Russian empire for most of the nineteenth century. These, too, were essentially asymmetric arrangements. In the German empire, after 1871, the Reichsland of Alsace-Lorraine is another instructive example of an asymmetric arrangement. Ceded by France to Germany at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, which led to the creation of the German empire, Alsace-Lorraine was not made a federal entity—as were all the other German kingdoms, principalities, city-states, and so on, that formed the Wilhelmine Reich—but placed under the direct rule of the emperor. Over time, this arrangement developed into a form of autonomy more limited than that of “proper” federal entities, but nonetheless with substantial powers of self-governance (see Wolff 2002, chap. 4).1 As a tool of statecraft, autonomy has thus been a familiar, albeit not excessively implemented, mechanism for at least the past two centuries, one that always resulted in asymmetrical state designs. Yet, its significance as a conflict preventing and conflict resolving arrangement increased only over the course of the twentieth century. This is arguably related to the rise of nationalism as an increasingly powerful political ideology and the realization that related aspirations for self-determination needed to be taken seriously and given institutional expression, if violent conflict and redrawing of international boundaries was to be avoided in ethnically plural states. While territorial autonomy is not automatically linked to forms of democratic governance...

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