Meir Dan-Cohen (University of California, Berkeley - School of Law) has posted Skirmishes on the Temporal Boundaries of States on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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This paper focuses on the special difficulties of resolving collective disputes, specifically among states, that result from past mischief. Past events are fixed, casting a permanent shadow. So how can collectivities cope with the “dead weight” of history and address past-oriented grievances? In considering this question, I introduce the notion of a state’s temporal boundary, and argue that changes in this boundary, analogous to the more familiar changes in territorial borders, can lift the shadow of the past and relieve past-oriented grievances. I then connect this conceptual framework to the distinction between history and memory as two different modalities of relating to the past. I maintain that a proper understanding of a state’s relationship to the past, and in particular the possibility of changes in a state’s temporal boundaries, offer a way to retain historical knowledge of past wrongs without the rancor and acrimony that mark this knowledge when it assumes the form of collective memory.
