Annexation

ANNEXATION. - In the broad sense it designates any non-natural increase of a State's own territory however effected, but the term is more commonly used in the restricted sense of the aggregation to its own territory, by a State, of all or part of the territory of another State. A subspecies of annexation in this second sense is "incorporation," or the "total annexation" of one State by another. In international practice, especially when the term is used in the broader sense, annexation is understood as the fact of the enlargement of territory, distinct from the unilateral or bilateral juridical act from which the acquisition of sovereignty over the new territory derives: 1) occupation of nullius territory; 2) conquest; 3) debellatio; 4) cession; 5) adjudication. It is customary to distinguish from this figure fusion, which consists, according to the prevailing opinion, in the formation of a new State through the voluntary extinction of pre-existing States. Relatively recent annexations are those carried out by France during the Revolution and in the Napoleonic period; those that marked the stages of the formation of the unified Italian State; the Prussian annexations of 1866; the annexation of the Boer State by the British in 1902; of the Congo by the Belgians in 1907; of Korea by the Japanese in 1910; the annexation of Ethiopia to Italy in 1935; the annexation of Austria to Germany in 1938; of eastern Poland (1939), of the Baltic States (1940) and of other territories to the USSR; etc. In constitutional practice and doctrine, one speaks of annexation only with reference to territories that become an integral part of the metropolitan territory.

Besides territorial sovereignty, annexation affects in a mutable and varying measure the relations of subjection, the holding of active and passive international juridical relations that pertained to the extinct or dispossessed State, and the constitutional, administrative, penal, civil and judicial order of the annexed territory.

Gaetano Arangio Ruiz