Hold 'Em or Fold 'Em?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal-Pioneer

Why is it that some countries will invest so much effort and money in hanging on to certain territories but not to others?
 
In the last two decades we have seen examples of this seeming inconsistency in various parts of the world.
 
Ethiopia has managed to hold on to Tigray and the Ogaden, areas with long-standing grievances against the Amhara-dominated state, but allowed Eritrea to secede in 1993.
 
Serbia let Montenegro go its own way in 2006 but fought tooth and nail, unsuccessfully, to maintain its control of Kosovo in 1999, and still refuses to acknowledge Kosovo’s sovereignty.
 
Indonesia has snuffed out separatist uprisings in Aceh and other parts of the archipelago but gave up its attempt to keep East Timor, which became a sovereign state in 2002.
 
Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1982 and abandoned Gaza in 2005, while it continues to occupy much of the West Bank.
 
And the Sudan, while refusing to release its genocidal grip on Darfur, finally acceded to the independence of South Sudan this year.
 
Ian Lustick, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, may have an answer to this seeming paradox. In an article published in his co-edited anthology Right-Sizing the State: The Politics of Moving Borders, Lustick tries to explain why states will disengage from some territories, but not others.
 
Lustick suggests that often, a country’s political elite comes to regard a territory as being so integral to the identity of the country, that the area’s status cannot be reduced to a question of interests, costs and benefits.
 
On the other hand, another territory may become seen as a place apart. So leaving it does not alter the state’s very conception of itself.
 
Eritrea, East Timor, and Montenegro had been incorporated into the states that finally let them go for a relatively brief period of time. They had all been separate political entities prior to their annexation and therefore also had well-defined borders. So their departure did not alter the core identities of Ethiopia, Indonesia and Serbia.
 
The Sinai and Gaza have little real ideological significance for a Jewish state. And in the Sudan, the Muslim north had in colonial times been governed separately from the largely animist and Christian south.
 
Darfur, Tigray, and Aceh on the island of Sumatra, however, have been central to the modern politics of the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. Losing these territories would be a blow to each country's sense of self-definition.
 
As for Kosovo and the West Bank (the biblical Judea and Samaria), both have tremendous religious-ideological importance for Serbs and Jews.
 
They are considered the respective birthplaces of their nations and are therefore crucial to each country’s national identity, even though other peoples -- Kosovar Albanians and Palestinian Arabs -- over time had become the majority population.
 
In such cases, it becomes a battle of history versus demography. These are among the most difficult political issues to resolve, because they are fraught with emotions that trump all else.