[OSM-talk] disputed territories

[Tony Bowden]

Gervase Markham wrote:
>> That sounds plausible, as long as it's clear what "control" means. In
>> the L/Derry case, day to day government is in the hands of Derry City
>> Council[1], whose official position is that the city is called 'Derry'.
>> The January 2007 ruling was them failing to have that recognised at the
>> level of national government, where it is still officially called
>> 'Londonderry'.
> 
> OK. So something like "the name used by most senior governing body with 
> effective control of an area".

So in the UK, that would be the EU, then? ;)

>> If we're looking for other examples to ensure we come up with something
>> that works more widely, Kosovo/Kosova is another interesting case, where
>> "control" means something different again.
> I don't know what the issues are there.

I expect that my understanding and explanation of many of the issues
will sound just as farcical as most non-natives' explanation of the
Northern Irish "issue" sound to me! But as I understand it the position
is currently that the UN have de facto control over the region in an
attempt to bring it to a position of "substantial autonomy and
self-government", whilst still recognising the overarching de jure
sovereignty of Serbia. In practice it runs as a quasi-autonomous state:
the stamp in my passport is from UNMIK rather than Serbia, and several
people on the bus produced UNMIK passports at the border - but Serbia
reject the authority of UNMIK to do either of these things, and actively
turn people away at the border with mismatched stamps (i.e. you can't go
from Skopje to Pristina to Belgrade without going back down into
Macedonia again).

I haven't followed the recent negotiations closely, but I believe that
the big issue is around complete independence vs. autonomous republic.

There are various other places where the entity with de jure control has
close to zero day to day involvement: Transnistria/Trans-Dniester and
South Ossetia spring to mind as a couple of other examples, although I
have no idea what city or street naming issues might exist in either of
those!

To bring this back to the question at hand, I'm not convinced that "most
senior" works (the EU comment above was only half-joking). The level of
autonomy accorded has a significant bearing on such issues. I'm actually
not entirely convinced that there's going to be a solution to this that
will work everywhere; I know enough about the theories of constitutional
law to know that the concepts of nationhood and statehood, independence,
 autonomy etc, are a lot more complex than we often think and have a
huge number of localised exceptions. Perhaps we'd be better leaving
things a little more vague and coming up with a process of deciding as
required?

Tony