| |
In the normal way it is entirely up to each state to determine its own name and titles, and international comity suggests that other states respect that choice. However, problems sometimes arise when the chosen name is in a form which another state finds repugnant because, for example, it appears to conflict with that state\'s own constitutional or political claims, or conflicts with its view of the legitimacy of a specific situation. The areas in which problems may express themselves include: the accreditation of heads of mission, the making of treaties, and the name whereby a state is known in an international organization. If, for example, a state\'s purported annexation of a territory is not recognized by another state, the second state will not be able to include the name of the territory in the titles of the first state when accrediting a new head of mission; and the receiving state may refuse to accept the new head without the inclusion in his letters of credence of that name. It may therefore be necessary for the sending state to make do, ad interim, with the despatch of a chargé d\'affaires en titre, whose credentials, being addressed to the foreign minister and not the head of state, do not need to recite the state\'s full titles. This situation arose with regard to Italy after its claim, in 1936, to have annexed Abyssinia. Rather similarly, Ireland\'s insistence after 1937 that its name was simply that (‘Ireland’) led to difficulties with those Commonwealth states whose head of state assertedly was sovereign of, inter alia, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The credentials issue was resolved, but for a number of years Britain\'s head of mission to Ireland had to be known there as the British Representative. In a rather different sphere, the claim of the former Yugoslav province of Macedonia, after it had become sovereign in 1991, to the name, simply, of Macedonia, gave great offence to Greece, on both historical and polit-ical grounds. The issue held up the state\'s membership of the UN, and when she was admitted in 1993 it was by the name which other states have since generally used: the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. It also delayed the conclusion of a status of forces agreement in respect of the UN\'s Preventive Deployment operation in Macedonia.
A state\'s diplomatic mission, permanent mission, or delegation will in the normal way bear the state\'s official name, as in ‘Embassy of France’. But occasionally another, easily recognizable, name may be used. Thus at the 1907 Hague Conference, which was attended by many Latin American states (at that time an unusual event), the United States decided that its name (in French, the diplomatic language [sense 1] of the day) did not begin with {img src=show_image.php?name=U_E_301.gif }tats-Unis but with Amerique, so giving it a higher place at the conference table than such states as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. During the early 1960s Britain – which is formally, in shortened form, the ‘United Kingdom’ – decided, first in respect of its Commonwealth posts and later in respect of its embassies and consulates, that ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ would be substituted for the use of the United Kingdom as both a noun and an adjective (other than in formal legal documents where the full title was required), notwithstanding the fact that strictly speaking Northern Ireland is not part of Britain. But an exception was made in respect of permanent missions to international organizations and delegations to conferences, so as not to lose the advantage in such contexts of the British representative sitting next to the representative of the United States (or, sometimes, almost next, Tanzania having since inconveniently called itself the ‘United Republic of Tanzania’). Thus, while a capital city may have a ‘British Embassy’ or a ‘British High Commission’, Britain\'s permanent mission to the UN is that of the ‘United Kingdom’.
See also alphabetical seating; colony. |
|
