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TOC | Key Points | Foreword | Introduction | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Notes | Acknowledgments | Author Sovereignty after Empire Self-Determination Movements in the Former Soviet Union Contemporary Nationalism and the Problem of Self-Determination
History is littered with the wreck of states that tried to combine diverse ethnic Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The approach of this century's end has produced many surprises in the international system. The collapse (or temporary retreat) of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union led to the fall of the postwar bipolar system, apparently reducing the risk of a third world war. Nevertheless, new conflicts of a regional nature are drawing the international community into the process of resolving unexpected, unusual problems, whether in Bosnia, the Persian Gulf, or Chechnya. The collapse of the Soviet system meant less the "end of history" than the beginning of a new era in international politics—one whose unpredictability is attributable to the entry of many new players into the global arena.4 Many observers of international society were not too far off the mark in their visions of increased modernization and urbanization and rapid advances in technology and communications moving the world closer to the vision of a unified "global village," integrated by shared information and consumer preferences. Yet some observers went too far in postulating that such integration would lead to the breakdown of ethnic and cultural attachments and that the ensuing cultural homogenization would make borders obsolete. Contrary to this scenario, nationalism has not weakened in this cosmopolitan pandemonium but has, in fact, gained strength.5 Ethnicity, one of contemporary nationalism's fundamental components, has not disappeared in much of the world's urban population. Quite the contrary, among an increasing number of urbanites, devotion to one's ethnic roots has taken on an almost ideological fervor.6 This development should come as no surprise to some of nationalism's more serious scholars, who see it as a consequence of modernity in international life. In fact, nationalism is organically connected to the industrial age. Nationalism is understood to be, in the words of Ernest Gellner, "a principle demanding that political and ethnic units come together, and also that those governed and those governing within a given political unit belong to one ethnos."7 Despite the divergence of their perspectives, both Marxist-Leninists and Western liberals underestimated the political and psychological strength of nationalism. For the Marxists, the triumph of proletarian internationalism meant the eventual emancipation of the peasantry from traditionalism and its associated prejudices. Proponents of laissez-faire economics assumed that the marketplace would overcome the atavistic peculiarities of ethnic culture. National feelings are rooted in the idea of a linguistic, religious, and psychological community based on the ancient kinship of the members of a given ethnic group. Moreover, the subjective perception of this community turns out to be even more important than objective historic facts. Thus, Walker Connor, following Max Weber, defines a nation as a "grouping of people who believe they are ancestrally related. It is the largest grouping that shares that belief."8 Nations are defined by their territorial domain as well, and anthropology closely connects the examination of a people's ethnic identity not only with its culture but also with the physical environment in which it formed itself over the course of centuries or millennia. Recall for example Montesquieu's principle of geographic determinism. Geophysical conditions and climate largely determine the ethnic group's economy and way of life; these conditions also find their reflection in the folklore and psychology of the people. After the era of Eurasia's Great Migration in the early Middle Ages, ethnic settlements remained more or less stable, and the people in these settlements did not even consider a "national" existence outside their ethnic territories. The American experience in the administration of its territory gave no thought to ethnic factors when establishing internal administrative borders. Such divisions are hardly applicable to present-day Eurasia. The recognition of traditional ethnic territories is highly significant for the peoples of the former USSR, not only for rural dwellers who have lived in the same agrarian communities for generations, but also for relatively recent migrants whose worldview is inextricably linked with their immediate surroundings.9 Unlike the United States, the Soviet Union was a multinational state, despite its centralized, administrative facade of uniformity. Generally speaking, multinational states may be organized according to three basic patterns: Multinational Socialist Federation. A system based on central planning's enforced economic interdependence of regions, a totalitarian ideology, and an extensive security apparatus. The largest nation and its cultural attributes are typically dominant, while minorities are suppressed or restricted to a greater or lesser degree in their own cultural expressions. As the state's economy and military weaken and as the ruling political party and its dominant ideology lose their hold over various ethnic groups, growing centrifugal forces may result in the disintegration of the state and the emergence of new nation-states. Examples of this type are the USSR, Yugoslavia, and the People's Republic of China. Asymmetric Federation. A union of peoples and/or regions enjoying broad self-government, control over their natural resources, and such rights as the pursuit of their own educational and cultural policies and the imposition of local taxes, regulations, etc. Some of these peoples and/or regions may enjoy the privilege of home rule, while others may have joined or renegotiated their membership in the federation as associated members according to special conditions stipulated in bilateral treaties (e.g., the status of Scotland's home rule within the United Kingdom, Canada's province of Quebec, the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and Tatarstan in the Russian Federation). There are reasons to believe that flexible membership conditions tend to make multinational federations more viable and help to achieve more uniformity in economic and political development. Symmetric Federation or Confederation. This arrangement does not offer any special status even to regions with strong ethnocultural characteristics, but it does grant broad autonomy to various constitutive units within the multinational state. The best examples of this type are Switzerland and Spain. The first two types of multinational states are usually associated with various stages of a colonial system's development and eventual collapse. As an example, we can recall various aspects of this type of system in the history of the Russian empire, which passed on to its successor, the Soviet Union, many imperial methods of direct or indirect rule over its colonial acquisitions. During the communist era, the arsenal of such methods was expanded as follows:
The Soviet regime's powerful internal security apparatus maintained this unjust system under the communist doctrine of "proletarian internationalism," so it is not surprising that the empire disintegrated with communism's discreditation. The Soviet republics exercised their right to secede soon after the August 1991 putsch; the first were the three Baltic republics, and others followed. The autonomous territories, however, were not so privileged. Holding a status below the union republics in the Soviet hierarchical system, the autonomous territories had a relatively limited set of rights that constrained their freedom of action, especially since they found themselves under the control of another ethnic group, despite a long struggle for a change in their status. Profound cultural and religious differences between minority and predominant majority ethnic groups contributed to a long history of hostility in the USSR, which could be diminished to some extent by decrees from the central government. The current political milieu has left these ethnic minorities confronting the ruling majority nationalities of yet untested, mostly uncontrolled Soviet successor states, a phenomenon that is not confined to the post-Soviet realm. Yet in the territory under direct Soviet rule (i.e., within the former Soviet republics), the fall of the USSR brought a mobilization of national movements under the slogan of the right to self-determination. The peaceful achievement of national self-determination in post-totalitarian countries is possible only under the institutions of democratic rule. Among the examples of such civilized self-determination movements are the "amicable divorce" of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Russia's voluntary recognition of the results of Ukraine's December 1991 independence referendum as the lawful basis for the creation of a sovereign Ukrainian state. Moscow similarly recognized declarations of sovereignty from other republics of the former USSR. Russia, the core of the Soviet empire, voluntarily refused the role of "Big Brother," and monumental changes in the political status of these republics occurred over the course of a relatively short democratic period after the August 1991 putsch and the collapse of communism. It is doubtful such changes would have taken place as painlessly three or four years later. The Soviet decolonization process is still far from complete, however. Difficulties in Russia's economic and political reform have made the country's current political spectrum much more contradictory and complex than it was in 1991. Right-wing nationalists and advocates of a return to a centralized economy are quickly acquiring much more influence in Rus sia's grand debate over its future. Yet many ethnic groups that have emerged from under Soviet totalitarianism have embraced the right to national self-determination as an inherent part of their regions' political and economic reform. In addition, the destruction of com munism's supranational ideology forces these peoples to search for new sources of identity, the most natural of which is ethnicity, based on a community of shared history, culture, and language. Such an ethnos, to a greater or lesser extent, serves as the foundation for civil society. Both were repressed by the Soviet regime, which recognized only those hierarchical political and economic relations controlled from above; it did not take historical memory and cultural uniqueness into account. In an ethno-nation, in contrast to a state, horizontal connections are widely developed, a clear understanding of common core values exists, and public opinion has a significant influence on self-governance. These factors allow one to see in an ethno-nation the natural embryo of a future civil society. In some cases, only the achievement of actual statehood can save ethno-national attributes, such as history, culture, and language, from oblivion. Only the institutions of the state can resist cultural entropy and the sometimes violence-prone intermingling of distinct traditions.10 These are the principal reasons behind the growing significance of nationalism in post-totalitarian countries.
The Unattainable Right to Self-DeterminationAt a time when ethnic groups are striving to affirm their nationhood—and their statehood in the international arena—more established states react to the principle of self-determination with extreme suspicion. The leaders of many of these states seem to have forgotten that their own countries realized self-determination through secession from past empires. Some seem to believe that today's political map of the world constitutes an ideal and final global configuration. The history of self-determination began around the time of the French Revolution, when the concept was considered the democratic ideal, applicable to all humankind. In the political thought of the Enlightenment, governments should be based on the will of the people, not the monarch. People not content with their government should be able to secede and organize themselves as they wish. This radical strain of political thought meant that "the territorial element in a political unit lost its feudal predominance in favor of the personal element; people were not to be any more a mere appurtenance of the land."11 From its inception, the concept of self-determination was a threat to the legitimacy of the established order. Moreover, this principle offered a method of settling conflicts through mass rather than solely elite solutions. After the Napoleonic Wars, Poles, Italians, Magyars, and Germans—as well as the ethnic minorities living among them—all advanced claims to self-determination. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 did not accept self-determination as a basis for reshaping the map of Europe, but similar demands from the oppressed peoples of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires later received more favorable treatment.12 After the revolutions of 1848, national movements led to the formation of two new unified states, Germany and Italy. It should be noted at the outset that the process of ethnic groups' constituting themselves as newly independent states is more complicated from the international legal standpoint than the self-determination of national or territorial units that already have some degree of autonomy or, in more advanced cases, some attributes of statehood.13 In the latter case, peoples within more or less definite borders can either vote by plebiscite or express their will through a representative assembly. Such democratic expressions may serve as a basis for the legitimate development of the self-determination process. To create a new entity, however, the territory's borders must be determined before its inhabitants can initiate a change in their status. Despite all the ambiguity and controversy surrounding this process, the development of criteria that can support a legal mechanism for such a determination of borders is indeed possible, as we shall see in the concluding section of this study. Only after World War I, when the former European system began to disintegrate, did the principle of self-determination acquire principled advocacy through international figures as ideologically diverse as Vladimir Lenin and President Woodrow Wilson.14 Despite Wilson's goal of enshrining the principle of self-determination within the League of Nations' Covenant, the practical difficulties of realizing the principle prevented its inclusion in the document's final text. Self-determination was only indirectly recognized as applicable to those territories placed under the League's mandate and to those colonies that succeeded their ruling powers after World War I. In fact, the League's covenant essentially established the inequality of peoples. Under Article 22, lands that received the status of mandated territories were to be guided by the "advanced nations." This arrangement essentially legitimized the colonial system. World War II once again changed the political landscape of the world, but the principle of self-determination affected these changes in the immediate postwar era only to a slight degree. Significant difficulties arose during work on the United Nations Charter—specifically, differences of opinion over the use of the words "people," "nation," and "state." The final judgment was the following: "īNations' is used in the sense of all political entities, states and non-states, whereas īpeoples' refers to groups of human beings who may, or may not, comprise states or nations."15 The right to self-determination in the charter is associated only with the notion of "peoples," but the notion of "non-self-determined peoples" corresponds to what was traditionally described as a colony. Determining exactly who (or what) the right of self-determination applies to remains its most disputed aspect. President Wilson and Lenin considered "peoples and nations" to possess this right, but they did not specify these terms, whose meanings contain important nuances in different languages. In the post–World War II era, it has been more or less commonly accepted that the right to self-determination applies only to colonies, which filled the ranks of the United Nations as full-fledged states during the wave of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. The injustice of the colonial system led the UN General Assembly on December 14, 1960, to adopt the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, whose preamble emphasizes that the refusal or obstruction of freedom brings about the intensification of conflicts. Article 2 states, "All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development." Furthermore, Article 3 states, "Inadequacy of political, economic, social, or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence."16 Despite these developments, the debate over self-determination was by no means concluded. There were as many opinions informing the Declaration on Decolonization as there were new countries it applied to. The UN Commission on Human Rights has still declined to define the word "people," and the term acquires little more precision in the UN charter itself. Consider the United Kingdom's suggestion during the preparation of the charter: It might mean "a group of individuals with special ties which singled them out from the surrounding population, the whole population within the frontiers of a particular State, the inhabitants of a particular piece of territory, or even a group who did not inhabit an identifiable piece of territory but considered themselves a people."17 This definition is sufficiently comprehensive to describe any ethnic group or nation-state, but it is far too broad to identify who has the right to self-determination. The first part of the definition singles out an ethnic group, which could be a dispersed minority living among a hostile majority. These circumstances are not always insurmountable barriers to ultimate unification in a more densely populated community or to political self-determination (e.g., Jews gradually united in Israel, Palestinians have gained self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Crimean Tatars are returning to their homeland decades after Stalin's forced relocations). The entire population within the borders of a particular state can sometimes realize its right to self-determination without taking its ethnic composition into account. Governments themselves can attempt to unify multinational states under a supranational ideology, attempting to serve an ethnos-forming role. The population of a territory that is not defined by borders within another state usually has the most difficulty achieving international recognition under the banner of self-determination. One example is the Kurds, who are densely settled at the junction of three states (Iran, Iraq, and Turkey), not one of which is prepared to offer them territorial autonomy. In contrast, the Gagauz (Turkish-speaking Christians) were recently fortunate enough to acquire an autonomous district within the Moldovan state. Even if this aspect of the self-determination debate were settled, established principles of international law pose a much more fundamental problem in the realization of the concept: the contradiction between the principle of self-determination and the principle of inviolable borders of sovereign states (i.e., the maintenance of a state's territorial integrity). The two most important international legal documents of the post-colonial period in this regard are the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966.18 Article 1, identical in both documents, repeats a basic idea of the 1960 Declaration on Decolonization: "All peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development."19 The third paragraph of Article 1, again identical in both documents, lays out the obligations in these covenants: "The States Parties to the present Covenant, including those having responsibility for the administration of Non-Self-Governing and Trust Territories, shall promote the realization of the right of self-determination, and shall respect that right, in conformity with the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations."20 In 1970, the UN General Assembly adopted yet another nonbinding document, Resolution 2625 (XXV): the Declaration of Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation Among States in Accordance with the UN Charter. This declaration reveals the contradiction between self-determination movements and the territorial integrity of existing states. Furthermore, in contrast to the covenants of 1966, the 1970 declaration gives precedence to the principle of territorial integrity. Compare the fifth and eighth paragraphs of the declaration:
The establishment of a sovereign and independent State, the free association or integration with an independent State, or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people constitute modes of implementing the right of self-determination by that people. Similarly, the Final Act of the Conference on (now Organization for) Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE), adopted in Helsinki in 1975, did not resolve the contradiction between these two approaches.22 Both views are expressed in the Final Act, which stipulates that all its sections carry equal force. There exists yet another legal approach to the self-determination dilemma.23 The right to self-determination can be interpreted as a proposition that follows from the fundamental principles of democracy and human rights; that is, as an imperative or peremptory norm, applicable to any state (i.e., jus cogens). External assaults on the integrity of a state threaten its sovereignty and are, therefore, unacceptable by international legal standards. But the right of a people within an existing state to achieve its own sovereignty has no basis for similar condemnation. In practice, the United Nations usually decides when self-determination is applicable and when it is not, even though clear guidelines for making such decisions have still not been proposed. The decisions are therefore often influenced by arbitrary factors, or even the personal preferences of politicians.24 It is obvious that the existing approaches to making decisions that will determine peoples' futures are inadequate. In the twenty-first century, we can expect even more claims for self-determination from the former Soviet Union, the African continent, China, and many other regions. International institutions must be prepared to address these claims adequately. The failure to do so will surely transform a promising era of independence and international diversity into one of unbridled chaos and mass violence.
TOC | Key Points | Foreword | Introduction | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Notes | Acknowledgments | Author
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