Pakistan?
Do countries which decide they’re better off joining the next country over count? Guanacaste was independent for a very short time before asking to join Costa Rica.
After the independence of India much of the Empire lost value to Britain, and a lot of it was accelerated to independence as a means of saving London the cost of administering them.
Russia seemed happy to sell Alaska on, and Napoleon was keen to get rid of the Louisiana Purchase.
Not the Portuguese colonies, no.
Not slums, poorer rural areas.
The West Bank. This was a part of Jordan until 1967 when the Israelis occupied it. Jordan has since ceded it’s claim to the Palestinians.
That was the first thing I thought of when reading the thread title…
Sweden and Norway splitting was a rare occurrence of “let’s be two smaller countries instead of one bigger country” with no killing.
To the extent that the UAE learnt about their Independence from BBC World Service.
Seriously, the British did attempt to keep the empire for about a decade after 1947, but then realised that it would be impractial. Atlee wanted to have a new empire based in Africa.
Newfoundland was similar, joining Canada in 1949. They were actually independent for quite some time.
Panama Canal Zone?
The standout example is when Malaysia kicked Singapore out of the federation in 1965. At that point, Singapore was intending to stay part of Malaysia, but Kuala Lumpur didn’t want them. This situation is unique in the world as far as I know. People that didn’t want independence had it forced on them.
The Bantustans of South Africa may be the next closest example, but are not at all analogous. They never were truly independent, and were never recognized by any other country and of course their sham existence soon collapsed. Singapore has always been a full member of the family of nations.
The only example I know of of a colonial possession getting independence forced on them when they didn’t want it is Brunei. The UK had already decolonized everybody else and retooled for a noncolonialist future, and didn’t see any point in keeping Brunei around. They decolonized it for a clean sweep, against the wishes of the sultan.
The OP having already ruled out cases of decolonisation and the outcome of war or the threat of war, can I narrow the field even further by asking about cases where:
- Sovereignty over some territory was transferred from country A to country B,
- The land transferred was an integral part of Country A and not a dependency,
- No country gained or lost independence in the process (i.e. Country A and B both already existed before the transfer and both continued to exist after the transfer),
- No war or threat of war was involved.
There are some 19th-century examples above that meet all these criteria (Alaska, Gadsden purchase). Any recent examples?
The only example that comes to mind for me is incredibly tiny - a land swap on the Lithuania-Belarus border to deal with a Lithuanian exclave in Belarus.
There was a Dutch border town or two that got switched over to Germany some years back.
Would giving up land willingly to the sea count?
I would assume that some countries have given up land to the sea willingly as coastlines change. I know there was some talk about giving up New Orleans after the hurricane as well as talk about fighting mother nature with dikes and pumps to keep it.
The British handed over Heligoland to Germany in 1890 which they possessed since 1814 (it had belonged to Denmark before that).
Another one (more recently) being the Czech Republic and Slovakia (formerly Czechoslovakia)
The dismantling of the USSR (Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, etc…) probably count as well.
The Netherlands occupied German territory after 1945. Most of the land was returned in 1963. But as late as 2002, the Netherlands ceded back a part of a road which runs through the border town of Selfkant.
The Wylerberg (Dutch name: Duivelsberg) was annexed by the Netherlands and remains a part of the country to this day. This is the only territory Germany lost in the West after WW II (I’m almost sure about that).
Thanks for that; I never heard about before, and it’s a very interesting story. The original Dutch plan was extraordinarily ambitious - they planned to annex huge swathes of Germany including Cologne and Aachen, and deport the German inhabitants.
Here’s the Wikipedia explanation:
Well, you get quite a different story from the Singaporean side. Let’s just say, each country wanted to preserve a particular ethnic majority.