The Geographical Problem of Political and Territorial Unity : The Reasons for Ukraine’s Independence

Over the past three decades, a confrontation has developed in the world over the dynamics and legitimacy of the fragmentation of state territorial space, its sovereignty and unitary character, i.e., those geographical elements that have dominated European and later world political organization since the end of the medieval age. This confrontation has been stimulated especially by the collapse of the Soviet Empire. The proliferation of declarations of independence forced many scholars of political philosophy, law, sociology and international relations to see that the international order, composed of sovereign territorial states, believed to be immobile and eternal (according to the principles of jus publicum europaeum), was undergoing profound changes. This was particularly so in the case of Ukraine, even though independence had won more than 90 percent of the vote on December 1, 1991. The tendency to overlook the reasons for that independence, its historical motivations, the root causes of the claim of self-rule, of deciding on one's own future, has led to misunderstanding both the complexity of that case, and in general the deep dynamics that continue to unfold in a world mistakenly believed to be immobile and composed of rigid and unchangeable political-territorial realities. Marek Sobczyński has promoted over the course of two decades numerous international conferences and symposia, seminar meetings dedicated to the study of the consequences of these transformations for Political and Economic Geography. This extraordinary organizational and scholarly effort has studied the boundaries and transformations of modern territoriality, minorities, the dynamics of political and economic change in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the problem of coherence between political and economic space, contemporary regionalism, transformations of transborder cooperation, the evolution of large regions, and border cities. The contribution to the writings in honor is in the context of these broad themes, on which Marek Sobczyński has given extensive help in understanding.