Crown Dependencies as Communities of Practice and Specific Sense of Territoriality – the Case of the Bailiwick of Guernsey

The sense of territoriality changes due to globalization, deregulation of economies and related compression of time and space. That condition especially influences local communities which are have become highly vulnerable in the recent decades. However, what about those communities which have never been dependent on state institution and managed welfare? What about those which specific political culture and social practices related to power and authority have remained unchanged for ages? The paper argues that to have a full picture of challenges which local communities face today we cannot forget about exceptions from widely adopted dichotomies local/central, inside/outside, domestic/foreign. An example of such communities are the Crown Dependencies which constitute a specific and unusual form of self-governance under the suzerain authority of the English monarchs (Crown Dependencies are still the fiefdoms and, therefore, subjects to the English monarchs). Among them there are the Isle of Man, the Bailiwick of Jersey, and the Bailiwick of Guernsey (the last two geographically form the Channel Islands, located between France and Great Britain within the waters of the English Channel). Given that these communities have developed in geographical and social isolation, they were able to save their original cultural practices and political customary order from both strict territorial control and “nation-building” processes. It is due to the unusual construction of authority and order; Crown Dependencies are the subjects to the English monarchs yet they are not the part of the UK or Great Britain. Also, they did not participate in the processes of European integration. Consequently, investigating their order and political culture is profoundly informing for both political science and international relations – given that their specific orders constitute a conceptual boundary between state-centrism and non-state, non-modern margins of contemporary international system in which non-sovereign but not fully dependent entities do not have their proper place. The paper demonstrates how the case of the Bailiwick of Guernsey informs researching territorial communities in context of order constructions and political culture, including the sense of territoriality and how it still shapes identity of the Bailiwick’s inhabitants. The paper reflects upon the chosen topic, basing on the findings from research that was conducted to examine the status, order and political culture of Crown Dependencies in the case of the Bailiwick of Guernsey.