Partition (politics)

In international relations, partition means breaking a formerly unified territory into two or more separate pieces. Unlike secession, which happens inside existing recognized states, partition redraws borders through a region that at least one community sees as its homeland. Arie Dubnov and Laura Robson describe it as carving up land along ethnic or religious lines to create distinct nation-states.

History

Scholars trace partition’s rise to the period after World War I. Dubnov and Robson link it to the peacebuilding efforts and new ideas about ethnicity, nationhood, and citizenship that emerged then. Postwar agreements, including the League of Nations mandate system, promoted ethnic separatism as central to national self-determination, while also masking the continued expansion of French and especially British imperial power.

After World War II, they argue, partition shifted from an imperial tactic to a core principle of global diplomacy. Ranabir Samaddar agrees that partition gained importance after World War I, particularly with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary, driven by competing national ambitions. By that time, ethnicity had become the main justification for redrawing borders.

Violence is closely tied to partition in the scholarship. Dubnov and Robson trace the precedent for the Partition of Ireland back to population resettlements in former Ottoman territories and the creation of national “majorities” and “minorities.” They emphasize that later partitions, starting with Ireland, included plans to move “inconvenient populations” alongside forced territorial division—a process that had violent consequences for local actors tasked with carving out physically separate, ethnically homogeneous states.

T.G. Fraser notes that Britain proposed partition in both Ireland and Palestine to resolve conflicts between rival national groups, but in neither case did it stop communal violence. Instead, Fraser argues, partition simply gave those conflicts a “new dimension.” Similarly, A. Dirk Moses contends that partition does not solve minority issues so much as relocate them into new containers, where they reappear within the partitioned units. He rejects what he calls “divine cartographies” that try to map peoples neatly into their homelands, arguing they ignore the real-world heterogeneity of identity.

Arguments for partition include: the historicist view that it is inevitable or already happening; the last-resort argument that it should be used to avoid genocide or mass expulsion; a cost-benefit claim that it reduces conflict better than keeping existing borders; the “better tomorrow” idea that it will lower current violence and create more stable, homogenized states; and the “rigorous end” position that heterogeneity causes problems, so homogeneous states should be the goal.

Arguments against

Arguments against partition include: loss of national territorial unity; the view that bi-nationalism and multi-nationalism are not undesirable; the impossibility of a just partition; difficulty in drawing new borders; the likelihood of disorder and violence; the fact that partition alone does not produce the desired homogenization; and security issues within the new states. Daniel Posner argues that splitting diverse communities into homogeneous ones is unlikely to solve communal conflict, because border changes alter incentives and create new cleavages. For example, while the Muslim-Hindu divide was most prominent during the Indian independence movement, creating a religiously homogeneous Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan produced new social divisions along lines other than religion in both countries. Posner notes that relatively homogeneous states can actually be more violence-prone than states with many evenly matched ethnic groups.

Examples include: the multiple partitions of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western halves after the Crisis of the Third Century; the 1466 partition of Prussia by the Second Peace of Thorn, creating Royal Prussia and the Duchy of Prussia in 1525; the 1659 partition of Catalonia by the Treaty of the Pyrenees, giving Northern Catalan territories (Roussillon) to France; the 1757 Treaty of Versailles, in which France and Austria agreed to partition Prussia; the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, where the Sudetenland was ceded to Nazi Germany in 1938 and the country was later divided into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Slovak Republic, before reunifying after World War II; the three partitions of Luxembourg, the last in 1839, splitting it between France, Prussia, Belgium, and the independent Grand Duchy; the three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795, which erased the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; the 1913 Treaty of Bucharest, partitioning Macedonia between Serbia (now North Macedonia), Greece, and Bulgaria; the 1915 partition of Tyrol by the London Pact during World War I; the 1919 partition of the German Empire by the Treaty of Versailles; the 1919 partition of Prussia; the partition of the Ottoman Empire; the partition of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the treaties of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Trianon; and the 1920 partition of Ireland into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, which was only partially implemented.