At the end of the Cold War, the United States came to pursue a policy of “liberal primacy” that would maintain America’s hegemonic status while expanding the liberal institutions that constituted the postwar international order. At least three important, long-standing questions persist about liberal primacy. First, was liberal primacy consistent with, or a radical departure from, US strategy during the Cold War? Second, how did the United States come to embrace primacy as a central objective of its foreign policy in the post-Cold War period? Finally, why did the United States choose specific strategies of expansion, especially its decision to enlarge NATO, rather than pursue other options like Partnership for Peace? We suggest that focusing on the legitimation of US foreign policy can shed light on these questions. Over the decades, US leaders have consistently invoked familiar liberal concepts and tropes to justify US foreign policy. From a legitimation perspective, there is much more continuity than change between Cold War and post-Cold War US foreign policy. We argue liberal legitimation made the post-Cold War strategy of primacy palatable both at home and abroad. Finally, liberal legitimating language bolstered the proponents of NATO expansion, clearing the path for expansionist policies.

The conflict over Ireland seems inherently indivisible, a dispute that began more than 600 years ago and continues into the unrest in Northern Ireland today. However ancient the roots of conflict in Ireland, contemporary disputes emerged after England claimed Ireland for her empire in the Act of Union of 1801. In the years following the Act of Union, Irish elites would work almost continuously to gain back some form of sovereignty, be it in the form of greater representation at Westminster, an autonomous parliament in Ireland, or the establishment of a full-fledged Irish Republic.

From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, Anglo-Irish politics was dominated by the fight for Home Rule. With Home Rule, Ireland would remain a subject of the British Empire, but would be granted a separate parliament to govern its domestic affairs. The push for Home Rule began in the 1830s, when Daniel O'Connell – who through his Catholic Emancipation movement had won the Catholics of Ireland voting rights – argued that the Act of Union should be repealed, and that Ireland should be granted its own legislature. O'Connell, like many Irish politicians who followed him, stressed that Ireland would not cast off its imperial ties to Britain, arguing that “the crown of Ireland [was] an imperial crown, inseparably annexed to the crown of Great Britain, on which connexion the interests and happiness of both countries essentially depend.”

Repeal, however, was anathema to the British, and by the mid-1840s the movement had clearly failed.

INTRODUCTION

In the last chapter I argued that although rational choice and constructivist theories provide important insights into territorial disputes, neither sufficiently explains how territory becomes an indivisible issue. Rational choice theories assume away the problem of indivisibility, reducing it to mechanisms within the bargaining process. In doing so, they fail to acknowledge that indivisibility can be a social, if not objective, reality. At the same time, constructivist theories are overly determinative, reducing indivisibility to ethnic and religious attachments to territory. Yet because identity can be used for political and strategic reasons, it cannot in and of itself determine the divisibility of territory.

I propose indivisibility is constructed through the legitimation process. Whether territory appears indivisible depends on how actors legitimate their claims to territory during negotiations. Although actors choose their rhetoric strategically, in order to gain a political advantage at the bargaining table, legitimation strategies have unintended structural consequences. By resonating with some actors and not others, legitimation strategies either build ties between coalitions and allow each side to recognize the legitimacy of each other's claims, or lock actors into bargaining positions where they are unable to recognize the legitimacy of their opponent's demands. When the latter happens, actors come to negotiations with incompatible claims, constructing the territory as indivisible.

The argument here intersects with a growing theoretical literature that emphasizes the importance of rhetoric and legitimacy in international politics.

The preceding chapters argued that Ulster and Jerusalem became indivisible through comparable political processes. In both cases, legitimation strategies constructed these territories as indivisible: by narrowing the range of legitimate positions, politicians' legitimation strategies constructed Ulster and Jerusalem as indivisible territory, leaving them without the possibility of a negotiated settlement. Ulster's indivisibility sparked almost a century of conflict, ranging from minor spates of violence, such as murders, riots, and sectarian attacks, to organized interstate war in 1919–21, the civil war of 1922–23, the IRAO's “border campaigns” of 1956, and the almost twenty-five years of the Troubles. The unrest, all told, has left 3,624 people dead and 40,000 injured.

In September 2000, as the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed, the second or “Al-Aqsa” Intifada erupted in Jerusalem. What began as riots at the Temple Mount spread quickly to uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Fierce battles followed, as Israeli forces moved to reoccupy Palestinian cities in 2003. Although occasional ceasefires have slowed the violence the truces have been shaky and punctuated by violence, such as in Israel's incursion into the Gaza Strip in 2009. Since 2000, attacks are estimated to have taken the lives of 1,129 Israelis, injuring 6,500, and 4,406 Palestinians, with 31,239 injured.

From 1998 onward, however, Ulster and Jerusalem have appeared worlds apart. Despite ongoing incidents, there is increasing confidence that Northern Ireland is on the road to permanent peace.

Indivisible territory is all too frequent in international politics. Jerusalem's significance as indivisible territory can hardly be overstated; it is perhaps the quintessential example of indivisible conflict. For thousands of years, men have battled over the right to rule the Holy City. In contemporary politics, Jerusalem's indivisibility continues to undermine prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace. Although many Israelis “insist that a united Jerusalem will be the eternal capital of the Jewish state,” Palestinian officials contend that any deal that fails to include sovereignty over Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock is “an unacceptable compromise…[that] will make their blood boil.” With such irreconcilable claims to the Holy City, there can be no doubt that Jerusalem is indivisible, that any agreement acceptable to one side would be unacceptable to the other.

INTRODUCTION

From the beginning of the British Mandate in 1920 to Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, Jerusalem's status was intricately bound to the fate of Palestine. Under the terms of the Sykes-Picot agreement (1916), France and Britain carved discrete states out of the Ottoman Empire, creating mandates under their control. Left undivided was the Mandate of Palestine, a territory stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. During the twenty years of the British Mandate, Zionists – the Jewish leaders who sought an independent state – declared that the British had promised them a homeland in Palestine. Arab leaders protested Zionist claims, contending that they would settle for nothing less than an independent state in all of Palestine.

By the 1930s, increasing violence between Jews and Arabs convinced the British that a unified Palestine was untenable. From 1936 to 1939, Palestinian Arabs revolted against British control and Jewish settlement. In response to the Arab Revolt, the British government established a Royal Commission, under the direction of Sir Edward Peel, to uncover the underlying causes of the violence and improve the effectiveness of British rule. After hearing testimony from Zionist and Palestinian Arab leaders, the Peel Commission declared that a unified Jewish-Palestinian state was impossible. “Manifestly, the problem cannot be solved by giving either the Arabs or the Jews all they want.” Although partition of Palestine might have disadvantages “half a loaf is better than no bread…drawbacks of partition are outweighed by its advantages.

In the nineteenth century, the Anglo-Irish conflict was very much divisible. Far from taking intractable positions, all sides believed that shared sovereignty was a legitimate settlement to territorial conflict. With Irish and British public opinion firmly behind them, Liberals and Constitutional Nationalists introduced a Home Rule Bill on April 11, 1912, fully confident that it would pass by a large majority. Despite this optimism, from 1912 to 1921 compromise proved impossible. By 1912, British Conservatives refused to allow autonomous rule for Ireland unless Northern Ireland was partitioned, excluded from the Irish autonomous parliament. This position, not surprisingly, proved entirely illegitimate to both Constitutional Nationalists and Republicans, who saw partition as an affront to the integrity of the Irish nation. At the same time, the Irish began to frame Home Rule as a republican demand. Whereas Irish nationalism had long been portrayed as commensurate with imperial rule – the Irish could be both a separate nation and imperial subject – Irish parties now rejected any allegiance to the Crown.

Neither identity nor interests are sufficient to explain this change in positions. Certainly one cannot tell this story of bargaining failure without discussing nationalism and religion; yet if identities had not led to indivisible territorial claims in the past, why did they do so now? When viewed as a question of interest the indivisibility of the conflict is also puzzling. However polarized the British and Irish positions, this polarization was not one of interests.

For thousands of years men have fought for the right to rule Jerusalem. From the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Europe and the Islamic world wrestled over the Holy City. In 1070, the Seljukian Turks seized Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire. In response, in 1095 Pope Urban II called for a crusade to rescue Jerusalem from Muslim control, and by 1099, Frankish crusaders lay siege to the city, massacring those within its walls. By 1517, the Ottoman Turks had seized what became relatively permanent control over the city. However, in 1853, conflict over the status of the holy places sparked the Crimean War, as Russia used a dispute between Catholics and Orthodox Christians in Jerusalem as a reason to occupy portions of the Ottoman Empire. Backed by France and Britain, the Ottomans would maintain their control over Jerusalem, until their empire fell in World War I.

In more recent history, Jerusalem has resided at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1948, Israel fought the war that would cement its independence; in the process, Jerusalem was divided, with Israel controlling the western half of the city, and Jordan declaring sovereignty over the east. The city remained divided until 1967, when Israel captured and annexed East Jerusalem in the Six Day War. Having soundly defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, Israel had captured 26,000 square miles of territory, including Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Syria's Golan Heights. Most profoundly, Israel had driven Jordan's troops from East Jerusalem.

In 1967, Israel annexed Jerusalem, yet still maintained divisible sovereignty. From a contemporary standpoint, Israeli policy seems remarkably flexible, with elites willing to divide geographic, religious, and even political sovereignty. Indeed many of Israel's policies in 1967 foreshadowed proposals for the city's division introduced in more recent negotiations over the city. In the 1990s, just as in 1967, elites searched for ways to share sovereignty within the city by devolving power, separating religious from political claims, and by exploiting the city's geographic ambiguity.

But by Camp David, it was clear that such divisions were impossible. On the Israeli side, maximalist definitions of Jerusalem had come to dominate their bargaining position. Claims that Jerusalem was its “eternal, indivisible” capital were increasingly heard in Israeli politics, with politicians from both the left and right pledging to maintain Israel's control over the eastern half of the city. Government policies expanded Israel's claims to the city. After 1967, Labor elites offered incentives for Jews to settle in certain areas of the city – particularly the Old City, which contained the Western Wall. Under Likud (the primary rightist party after 1973) settlement in Jerusalem expanded to include traditionally Arab areas and the eastern outskirts of the city.

The Israeli government also constructed legal obstacles to dividing Jerusalem. If the 1967 law unifying Jerusalem was at all ambiguous, the Basic Law on Jerusalem (1980) left no doubt as to Jerusalem's status; the law reinforced the claim that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel.