Search Results

City‐states north of the Alps are distinguished by their relatively late formation and by expansion as a collective civic endeavour, not driven by factional interests. These cities often formed leagues (Hansa, Swiss Confederation), though their purposes varied. Northern city‐states also used rural citizenship (outburghership) alongside landholding and protective treaties to buttress territorial expansion. Hansa cities in particular acquired territories by mortgage, and in general northern cities were more concerned with axial expansion along trade routes than with radial control of a market hinterland. Several city‐states (Cologne, Augsburg, St Gallen) used putting‐out to dominate their hinterlands’ economies without ever acquiring sovereign territories. In general, initial economic/commercial or political/jurisdictional motives for expansion were superseded in the fifteenth century by fiscal and military needs.

This chapter examines how the process of deterritorialization of international law, in which territoriality increasingly gives way to functionality as a dominant organizing principle, affects the relationship between international law and national law. It argues that alongside the territorially bound authority of the State, other normative regimes have come into existence. Although these may act out on state territory, they flow from an independent normative source and ultimately circumvent rather than ‘pierce’ the sovereign veil of the State.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the proposed new right to secession. In this new right to secession, groups of people may form a new state by holding a referendum on part of an existing state's territory. If the group wins the vote, the existing state must negotiate independence in good faith. The group's members do not need to share ethnicity, language, or culture; they just have to live in the same place. One might think this is a terrible idea—a formula for chaos, instability, and violence—and one can already think of many objections. Surely the current rule—a legal and political system of states with fixed borders—is a much safer and better way to organize the planet and the people living on it. This book considers why this intuition about fixed borders—which is the conventional wisdom and the commonest sense, even though borders have only been fixed since 1945—may well be wrong, why the objections to secession prove less obvious than they seem, and why it is actually very hard to be so sure that the rule people have now does what people think it does. The chapter then looks at the international order established at the end of the Second World War, which has confined questions about the shape of states—and changes to their shape—to a very limited space.

With 80 percent of its population and associated infrastructure within fifty kilometers of the coast, Australia is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and sea-level rise. Despite calls for a standard national approach, Australian states and territories have each developed their own planning response to coastal climate hazards. The resulting policy and legal inconsistency and fragmentation has been exacerbated by the revocation of these planning benchmarks by new state governments in New South Wales and Queensland. At the same time, the issue of how to adapt existing coastal settlements—through protection, accommodation, or retreat—remains an intractable problem made harder by expectations of compensation and financial support for existing property owners. This chapter explores these issues and assesses the likely future of coastal climate change adaptation in Australia.