Armed guests: territorial sovereignty and foreign military basing

In: Oxford scholarship online

Abstract

In the years around the Second World War, policymakers in the US & Western Europe faced security challenges occasioned by the development of new technologies & the emergence of transnational ideological conflict. In coming to terms with these challenges, they developed the historically novel practice in which a state might maintain a long-term, peacetime military presence on the territory of another sovereign state without the subjugation of the latter. Such arrangements between substantive equals were previously unthinkable: under the inherited understanding of sovereignty, in which there was a tight linkage between military presence & territorial authority, such military presences could be understood only in terms of occupation or annexation. This text applies concepts derived from pragmatist thought to a historical study of the relations between the US & its wartime allies to explain the origin of this phenomenon.