The Messy Mediterranean | Hacker News Reader

The Messy Mediterranean

sovereignlimits.com

31 pointsBerislavLopac19 comments

Can we please leave politics out of HN? Being Greek I don’t want to see a conflict starting here. With that being said, it would be best if all nations signed and followed UNCLOS [0] guidelines and adopted a strict equidistance-based maritime boundary for all sea disputes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_t...

It looks quite neutral for me, perhaps because I'm from Argentina and we don't have any skin in this game. (We have our land and maritime border conflict too. It's a sensitive topic in all the countries. [1])

The article helped me to understand the recent problem. My fast and possible inaccurate takeaway is:

The land shore of Turkey has a lot of nearby Greek islands. If there is oil nearby, that will surely cause a problem.

[1] Let's pick and easy one, the land frontier of Argentina and Chile. The Andes mountain range is in between. One method to select the border is to pick the highest mountains, other method is to look at the water basins. They are very different, so after a lot of problem we selected a mixed method and then added some arbitrary borders for a smaller section. Now it is quite settled, probably because there is not too much oil under the area. Other borders are too boring or too polemic.

It's complicated to rely on natural barriers as they change too, for instance some parts of the border between Croatia and Serbia were drawn to follow the Danube river, but the river bed is ever-changing as water finds new ways - creating meanders and river islands - so now we have some areas in-between the two countries where ownership is disputed. Some guy even tried to declare a new state in one of those areas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland

Also on the US-Canadian border: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMkYlIA7mgw

The Gornja Siga area (where Liberland is) did not appear over time as the river changed, it's that the Serbians are explicitly using the historical river while the Croatians are explicitly using the contemporary river, which results in Serbia not claiming the piece of land and Croatia declaring it belongs to Serbia.

Actually it's the opposite, and the difference between the two is because the river bed has changed over the time naturally and by human engineering. To quote Wikipedia: "Serbia holds the opinion that the thalweg of the Danube valley and the centre line of the river represents the international border between the two countries. Croatia disagrees and claims that the international border lies along the boundaries of the cadastral municipalities located along the river—departing from the course at several points—reflecting the course of the Danube which existed in the 19th century before meandering and hydraulic engineering works altered its course."

> The land shore of Turkey has a lot of nearby Greek islands.

The problem is that the concept of a "Greek" community precedes the creation of any concept of "Turkish" community by several centuries at best (even 2 millennia, by some calculations). So Greeks are historically entitled to read that situation as "the Greek islands and coastal colonies have a lot of nearby Turkish land". And then you find Atatürk's ethnic cleansing. And then you realize this shit is complicated.

Political geography is entangled in history, which is why it's such a mess.

> if all nations signed and followed UNCLOS [0] guidelines

I guess a large part of the problem here is that the actual land boundaries of such "nations" are not so clear. In that particular case, any claim about north Cyprus should be considered semi-legitimate (to say it mildly), as there's no international consensus on the validity of this occupation.

Notice moreover that, even if you agree in a common set of nation boundaries, the UNCLOS guidelines are still ambiguous. The definition of "internal waters" is meaningless, depending on an unclear separation between "archipelago states" and non-archipelago states. Would you say that Greece is an archipelago state? the UNCLOS does not give an answer, and the definition of internal waters is thus different.

> it would be best if all nations signed and followed UNCLOS [0] guidelines

China has signed the UNCLOS, but that hasn't stopped them going forward with their "9-dashed lines" claims to the entirety of the South China Sea.

Further there are matters of interpretation: Canada’s position on the Northwest Passage is that the Passage is part of its internal waters as per Article 8 of UNCLOS. The US (and others) is going for the argument that the Northwest Passage does fall within the definition of a strait as used by UNCLOS in the context of transit passage (Article 34, AFAICT).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_passage

The US is going this route because (AFAICT) there's a part of Russian waters that they could make the same argument for, and that'd be good for USN access there.

I wish conflicts between sovereign entities (or between entities in general) could easily be solved by sitting around a table and finding an agreement. Unfortunately diplomacy is still very far away from such a situation. International diplomacy agencies like UN are rarely able to guarantee a fair treatment to all players (see, for example, the composition of the UN Security Council, which is as unfair as it can go), therefore they can hardly universal trust, which severely reduce their ability to actually fix things.

(not saying that having UN is bad; simply that it is hopeless to just have the UN decide thinking that everybody will accept the decision as fair)

Google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3...

I was hoping we'd gotten past the era where blog articles stopped loading under a bit of traffic, alas.

Yep, HN hug of death is still real.

This is a very real problem in the Eastern Med. as the article points out.

From a Lebanon perspective, people have been talking about tapping into these offshore energy reserves for a decade+. But the inside conversation is that the Lebanese people would never see a penny from any revenues. They would simply get funneled into various politicians pockets.

It seems like many countries would be far better off without this.

TIL cyprus still has two UK bases. That might help complicate things.

UK, complicating things since 19... wait... 18... 1700s?

Wikipedia says 1688-1914. I would argue that brit foreign policy makers weren't ready to pass the baton until 1957 made it obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony#15th–19th_centuries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis#Financial_pressure

Complicating things has always been the aim of foreign policy for about as long as England has been a thing.

They are also the only part of the UK that uses Euro as a currency.

These bases briefly appeared in the limelight at some point during Brexit discussions/negotiations, since they constitute yet another land border between UK and EU... They were eclipsed by Gibraltar afterwards (northern Ireland was always well-known).

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