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Abstract
"Irrational" nationalist attachments to territory – and in particular, the perception of certain territories as indivisible from the national homeland – are often held responsible for the intractability of territorial conflict. As I show in this dissertation, however, such domestic attitudes are often useful: they can make even the slightest retreat too politically costly to contemplate for state leaders, thus providing a particualry powerful source of bargaining leverage in territorial disputes. State leaders can thus have incentives to deliberately foster perceptions of territorial indivisibility through nationalist propaganda and education, a tactic I refer to as issuing an "indivisibility claim." This coercive bargaining tactic, however, often risks eliminating entirely the bargaining range, thus inducing intractable conflict. Because indivisibility claims often are a calculated gamble, leaders use them only selectively. My theory, which is formalized in a game-theoretic model, thus explains when and why certain territories are domestically constructed as indivisible, but not others. It also explains why, contrary to what the existing literature suggests, indivisibility can have both peace- as well as conflict-inducing effects. By clarifying each side's bottom line in a dispute, indivisibility claims can sometimes reduce the potential for miscalculation and escalation to war. At other times, however, they can set in motion an escalatory dynamic that drastically undermines the prospects of peace.
I apply my theory to post-1949 China using data collected through both field research and content analysis of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-controlled newspapers between 1946 and 2013. China had a stated imperative to recover all of its "lost territories" after 1949. However, consistent with my theory, I show that while Beijing repeatedly mobilized domestic nationalist passions toward Taiwan and Tibet to bolster its bargaining position in these disputes, its domestic propaganda organs remained remarkably silent concerning the loss of Outer Mongolia, which Beijing was however just as eager to incorporate into the People's Republic. Fostering domestic nationalist attachment to this Soviet satellite, I argue, might have pressured CCP leaders into a very costly conflict with their Soviet patron, a risk they could not afford to take.
