Territorial Claims. Putting and End to Historical or Geographical Legitimation

International audiencea n d J a p a n a r e becoming strained over the Senkaku/ Diaoyu Islands. The a m b a s s a d o r s o f China and Japan in France successively expressed their views in the opinion column of the newspaper Le Monde in 2012. The Chinese ambassador claimed that history and old French maps would justify China's claims to the islands, while the Japanese ambassador responded that in accordance with the terms of World War II the islands indeed belong to Japan. Behind the appeals to history and the legitimacy of one or other's ownership of these islands lie some latent strategic factors, notably oil reserves and the question of international maritime territory. A similar problem exists with the Liancourt Rocks (Takeshima/Dokdo) between Japan and South Korea: for Japan they are a fishing zone, while for South Korea they have a symbolic dimension as they were annexed by Japan in 1905. In both these cases, it is a matter of islands or rocks which are not inhabited by people. We could choose to analyze point by point the truthfulness of the various historical arguments, putting to the test the legitimacy of the post-1945 order and criticizing an anachronistic usage of maps created in the age when the notion of borders did not exist in the sense that we understand it in today's international law. The list would be long and would doubtless result in a very lengthy contribution to the analysis. But this would be to lose sight of the fact that territorial claims do not constitute a priori an exercise in good faith, a situation in which the problems can be resolved by reason and logic. Because of this, we would hope rather to reflect on political relations, territorial questions, and human sciences such as history, geography, anthropology, even archeology, and "discussions of legitimation" in order to emphasize certain factors that enable us to study current events again at a distance. The human and social sciences are frequently invoked in debates, often endlessly, as a way of trying to demonstrate absolutely, in having "the legitimacy of reason", the "belongingness" of a territory to a country or state. But such knowledge cannot in any case hope to determine the national inclusiveness of a territory and thereby legitimize any such claim. Maintaining such arguments abou