Legal Aspects of the Border Dispute

Abstract

Traditional international law has often been regarded as an obstacle by the newly independent states since its limited scope for peaceful change tended to retard their emergence. The present legal system, including the results of a long process of authoritative prescriptions, had emerged without the active participation of the new states. Their recent colonialist past was regarded as a dark, illegal and even immoral episode and often an attempt was made to find a new and unprejudiced basis for their statehood in their history of several centuries ago. The Chinese border disputes with India and Burma even produced arguments which went back to the second and third centuries. Actual practice in Asia showed a preference for conciliation rather than application of a legal rule, but the amazing array of doctrines advanced in the Kashmir dispute provided an example of an extensively legalistic approach. In general, recently acquired sovereignty was guarded jealously, acquiring a connotation of absolute authority independent of any control by the world community.¹ This characteristic placed the Asian states halfway between the western concept that modern international law is largely made up of limitations of sovereignty and the communist emphasis on absolute sovereignty.