The issue of "at what point land in history did stealing land become something illegitimate that we should reverse" is extremely fraught. It was a major part of both the UN and the League of nations to delegitimise this, but it wasn't systematic.
Israel's seizure of land at the Six Day War seems to be the exact point at which nobody can agree. It's the last of the settler states.
Greece, Iran, Italy, Mongolia, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine all have potential claims.
If annexation by force is no longer a legitimate means of acquiring land, then it is reasonable to say that it was never legitimate. If it is, then going to war to take territory is still possible. But there really is no fair way to declare a fixed epoch and say that forceful annexation was only legitimate in the prior era, and is now unacceptable in the following era.
Either conquest is still okay, or it never was.
If it never was, you must be prepared to support repatriation claims from aboriginal peoples until the end of time. Perhaps there is a case for establishing adverse possession for land sovereignty. If you can take it and keep control of it for 20 years, your claim is presumed valid.
And it could give national rivals a nice, limited territorial war every 18 years or so, to feed their military industrial complexes through hard times, when the world is just too peaceful to make a profit.~
> If annexation by force is no longer a legitimate means of acquiring land, then it is reasonable to say that it was never legitimate. If it is, then going to war to take territory is still possible. But there really is no fair way to declare a fixed epoch and say that forceful annexation was only legitimate in the prior era, and is now unacceptable in the following era.
There's something to be said for systems that, more-or-less, are practical and work without making perfect logical sense or being perfectly self-consistent.
Building a perfect legal regime has a lot in common with building a perfect software application.
I believe the parent's argument was that land seizure by any country which has signed the UN charter after they've signed the charter is not legitimate.
It may not have been legitimate before, but signing the charter saying you agree it's not legitimate does put a nice line in the sand.
I guess that's why no one has done anything about Russia's (re-)annexation of Crimea? Everyone who signed the charter is duty-bound to sternly frown, slowly shake heads, and make "tut tut" noises?
Sibling poster is correct. International law is basically that you can do whatever you want if you have the strength to back it up without backing down. Meaning that conquest is still de facto okay, even if you signed the charter to make it de jure not-okay. And as long as it's still okay, all those conquered peoples that lost their land can go pound... well, I don't know what they can pound, since the sand doesn't belong to them any more.
i don't think that's the right way to think about it. Legitimacy is only meaningful when it can be enforced. Yes, international law is very important in providing a systematic approach to determining what kinds of acts justify what kinds of responses. Ultimately, though, land is yours if you can hold it.
I think the principle of "Finder's Keepers" is completely illegitimate when it comes to transportable objects like artwork, but it's at least a little bit legitimate when it comes to land - in the case of North America, generations of people have been born there and made their lives there, so they have some claim to the land even if its original seizure was a crime.
I think the legitimacy of US sovereignty over its land (or Canadian or Australian etc) is also strengthened by the fact that it is a representative democracy, so to some degree its management of the land is carried out on behalf of all of its citizens, including the descendants of natives. If the US were governed by an aristocracy of descendants of settlers, as in Apartheid South Africa, then that would be clearly unjust to me.
edit: to be clear, I think that native populations in all these countries have legitimate grievances today, I just wouldn't go so far as to say that all their original land is still rightfully theirs.
It’s much easier and feasible to give back artwork. It’s not like millions of people living in the Great Plains are going to be able/willing to move so that we can give the land back to the original tribes. It’s reasonable to consider keeping artwork as indefensible whilst acknowledging the impracticality of giving back land.
Or Thrace, Constantinople, and Ionia? What about Pakistan? Alexander of Macedon clearly left it to "the strongest", not to a gaggle of warring Macedonian officers, and certainly not to a section of a former British imperial territory.
Israel's seizure of land at the Six Day War seems to be the exact point at which nobody can agree. It's the last of the settler states.