Territorial Imperatives, 1845–1929

Abstract

The nation-state in the eras of imperialism and neoimperialism offers the key to understanding the function of the Haitian-Dominican border. The nation-state arises within a larger context, that of the nation-state system, which, as Anthony Giddens (1990) theorizes, produces a globalizing integration across distances of time and space. A time-space displacement or “stretching process” connecting dispersed regions and periods bears upon local interactions, as with domestic economies and border dealings, in which are assumed the co-presence or proximity of the actors involved. The system is itself self-differentiating, the product of an international division of labor. The broad theoretical framework proposed by Giddens illuminates the character of nation-building as a process by which the intensifying of proto-nationalist or nationalist sentiment responds to the nation-building moves of other powers. In the periods prior to the development of industrialized weaponry and sophisticated telecommunications, and in the case of Hispaniola after the achievement of Dominican independence, it was territorial expansion and the fixing of border demarcations that defined sovereignty and territorial rights.²

When two peoples inhabit the same island, their destinies in terms of foreign initiatives are necessarily interdependent. The survival of one is intricately linked to the survival of the other; each is duty-bound to guarantee security of the other… [T]hese are the powerful motives why our constitutions, from our political beginnings, have declared continuously that the entire island should form a single state. And it was not an ambitious conquest that dictated such a declaration, but a profound commitment to our security.

—Haitian President Fabre Geffrard (1861)¹