There are debates over whether states can exist as a fact independent of recognition or whether recognition is one of the facts necessary to bring states into being. In 1815, at the
Congress of Vienna, the
Final Act recognised only 39 sovereign states in the European diplomatic system, and as a result, it was firmly established that in the future new states would have to be recognised by other states, and that meant in practice recognition by one or more of the
great powers. One of the major criticisms of this law is the confusion caused when some states recognise a new entity, but other states do not. Hersch Lauterpacht, one of the theory's main proponents, suggested that a state must grant recognition as a possible solution. However, a state may use any criteria when judging if they should give recognition and they have no obligation to use such criteria. Many states may only recognise another state if it is to their advantage. A "territory" in the international law context consists of land territory, internal waters, territorial sea, and air space above the territory. There is no requirement on strictly delimited borders or minimum size of the land, but artificial installations and uninhabitable territories cannot be considered territories sufficient for statehood. The term "permanent population" defines the community that has the intention to inhabit the territory permanently and is capable of supporting the superstructure of the State, though there is no requirement for a minimum population. The government must be capable of exercising effective control over a territory and population (the requirement known in legal theory as the "effective control test") and guarantee the protection of basic human rights by legal methods and policies. The "capacity to enter into relations with other states" reflects the entity's degree of independence. Article 3 of the Montevideo Convention declares that political statehood is independent of recognition by other states, and the state is not prohibited from defending itself. A similar opinion about "the conditions on which an entity constitutes a state" is expressed by the
European Economic Community Opinions of the Badinter Arbitration Committee, which found that a state was defined by having a territory, a population, government, and capacity to enter into relations with other states. The Montevideo Convention criteria do not automatically create a state because additional requirements must be met. While they play an important role, they do not determine the status of a country in all cases, such as
Kosovo,
Rhodesia, and
Somaliland. In practice, international relations take into account the effect of recognition and non-recognition. It is the act of recognition that affirms whether a country meets the requirements for statehood and is now subject to international law in the same way that other sovereign states are.
State recognition State practice relating to the recognition of states typically falls somewhere between the declaratory and constitutive approaches. International law does not require a state to recognise other states. Recognition is often withheld when a new state is seen as illegitimate or has come about in breach of international law. Almost universal non-recognition by the international community of
Rhodesia and
Northern Cyprus are good examples of this, the former only having been recognized by South Africa, and the latter only recognized by Turkey. In the case of Rhodesia, recognition was widely withheld when the white minority
seized power and attempted to form a state along the lines of
Apartheid South Africa, a move that the
United Nations Security Council described as the creation of an "illegal racist minority régime". In the case of Northern Cyprus, recognition was withheld from a state, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TNRC), created in Northern Cyprus. International law contains no prohibition on declarations of independence, and the recognition of a country is a political issue. On 2 July 2013, the
European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) decided that "notwithstanding the lack of international recognition of the regime in the northern area, a de facto recognition of its acts may be rendered necessary for practical purposes. Thus the adoption by the authorities of the "TRNC" of civil, administrative or criminal law measures, and their application or enforcement within that territory, may be regarded as having a legal basis in domestic law for the purposes of the Convention". On 9 October 2014, the US's Federal Court stated that "the TRNC purportedly operates as a democratic republic with a president, prime minister, legislature and judiciary". On 2 September 2015, ECtHR decided that "...the court system set up in the "TRNC" was to be considered to have been "established by law" with reference to the "constitutional and legal basis" on which it operated, and it has not accepted the allegation that the "TRNC" courts as a whole lacked independence and/or impartiality". On 3 February 2017, the United Kingdom's High Court stated "There was no duty in the United Kingdom law upon the Government to refrain from recognizing Northern Cyprus. The United Nations itself works with Northern Cyprus law enforcement agencies and facilitates co-operation between the two parts of the island". and revealed that the co-operation between the United Kingdom police and law agencies in Northern Cyprus is legal.
Turkish Cypriots gained "observer status" in the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), and their representatives are elected in the Assembly of Northern Cyprus. As a country, Northern Cyprus became an observer member in various international organizations (the
Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the
Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), the
Organization of Turkic States (OTS), the
Parliamentary Assembly of Turkic States (TURKPA), etc.).
De facto and de jure states Most sovereign states are both
de jure and
de facto (i.e., they exist both according to law and in practice). However, states which are only
de jure are sometimes recognised as being the legitimate government of a territory over which they have no actual control. For example, during the
Second World War,
governments-in-exile of several states continued to enjoy diplomatic relations with the
Allies, notwithstanding that their countries were under occupation by
Axis powers. Other entities may have
de facto control over a territory but lack international recognition; these may be considered by the
international community to be only
de facto states. They are considered
de jure states only according to their own law and by states that recognise them. For example, Somaliland is commonly considered to be such a state. Outlining the concept of a
de facto state for
EurasiaNet in early 2024, Laurence Broers wrote:
Semi-sovereign states Sovereignty is most commonly conceptualised as something categorical, which is either present or absent, and the coherence of any intermediate position in that binary has been questioned, especially in the context of international law. In spite of this, some authors admit the concept of a
semi-sovereign state, a state which is officially acknowledged as sovereign but whose theoretical sovereignty is significantly impaired in practice, such as by being
de facto subjected to a more powerful neighbour; Belarus, in its relationship with Russia, has been proposed as a contemporary example of a semi-sovereign state. In a somewhat different sense, the term
semi-sovereign was famously applied to West Germany by political scientist
Peter Katzenstein in his 1987 book
Policy and Politics in West Germany: The Growth of a Semi-sovereign State, due to having a political system in which the sovereignty of the state was subject to limitations both internal (West Germany's federal system and the role of civil society) and external (membership in the European Community and reliance on its alliance with the United States and NATO for its national security). ==Relationship between state and government==