I must
confess to have been temporarily dumbstruck when perusing a World Cup brochure
a few weeks ago upon discovering that the Nigerian national football team would
be playing their first match in the city of Kaliningrad.
Kaliningrad?
Surely all
the former Russian Soviet cities had reverted back to the original names they
had under the Russian empire. Leningrad is now Saint Petersburg, Sverdlovsk
went back to being Yekaterinburg, while Stalingrad, although not becoming
Tsaritsyn once more, is now known as Volgograd.
To be sure, I
have noted Kaliningrad in recent times when writing about Russia’s attempts to
counter NATOs deployment of anti-ballistic nuclear shields in Eastern Europe,
but did not ponder on it.
Kaliningrad
has a much forgotten historical and geopolitical significance.
Nestled
between Poland and Lithuania, in part of what used to be East Prussia,
Kaliningrad,* formerly known as Konigsberg, serves as a reminder of part of the
radical adjustments made to national borders and the wholesale transfer of
populations after the Second World War.
Not only was
the ethnic German population murdered or expelled by the Red Army, the Soviet
and now Russian occupation of Konigsberg underlines the fact that the status of
East Prussia has yet to be settled by a formal peace treaty ending the state of
war between the victorious allies and Germany. The Potsdam Conference of July
1945, which sanctioned the forcible expulsion of ethnic Germans from parts of
Central and Eastern Europe, provided that the Soviet Union’s occupation of
Konigsberg and the surrounding land would continue until a peace treaty was
signed with Germany.
Thus, it is
argued, mainly by die-hard German nationalists, that German sovereignty remains
compromised by Russian occupation of Konigsberg and United States ‘occupation’
of what was West Germany.
So does a
state of war still exist between Germany and the nations against whom it fought
up until 1945? And to which country does Kaliningrad, nee Konigsberg belong?
Well, in regard
to the first question, one answer is to state that while Germany did not
formally sign a peace contract at the end of World War Two, a state of war can
hardly be argued to persist. The absence of a treaty is, it is argued, covered
by the German Instrument of Surrender signed by representatives of the three
armed services of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. A dictated peace it may be,
but it underlined the objective of maintaining peace between previously warring
states.
An
alternative way of looking at the situation is by reference to the ancient
concept of debellatio. This refers to
where one protagonist in a war has been totally destroyed so that none of its
institutions exist for it to be able to exercise control over previously
sovereign territory. The classic example of this is the Roman conquest of
Carthage. After the Third Punic War, Carthage ceased to exist. An analogy can
thus be made to the state of affairs existing at the end of the war when the
Third Reich disintegrated and was subsequently succeeded by two German states.
So far as the
territory of Konigsberg-Kaliningrad is concerned, the question of ceding it to
the current unified German state or granting it autonomy remains a hypothetical
one. Attempts at resettling the area with ethnic Germans has not met with much
success. By virtue of the Final Settlement Treaty of 1990, Germany renounced
all claim to Konigsberg-Kaliningrad, although it did not formally transfer its
former title to any other party.
But so much
for history and geopolitics. The pressing issue tonight is how Nigeria fare
against Croatia in the second match of what is billed the ‘Group of Death’.
*Mikhail
Kalinin was a high-ranking Bolshevik functionary who became the head of state
of the USSR and for whom the city was named in 1946.
© Adeyinka
Makinde (2018)
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
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