AT THE HEART OF THE WEST’S RESPONSE to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was anger that Putin was attempting to do something that was widely assumed to have been consigned to history. “The use of force and coercion to change borders has no place in the twenty-first century,” reported the European Council as it brought in sweeping sanctions against the Russian state.
But in many parts of the world borders are not set in stone, now nor in the past. Secession, annexation, unification, dissolution and all the other modes of changing borders have long been weapons of war. Indeed, the last 110 years — particularly as a result of the two world wars — have been marked by changes to national boundaries that generally coincided with the interests of the major powers of the day.
During the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union encouraged the break-up of the Europeans’ overseas empires as a means of cutting them down
