Dilemmas of Self-Determination
by Edward A. Kolodziej

Few principles of international law and morality are more basic than the right of a people to national self-determination. The American and French revolutions proclaimed this principle and inspired millions of people to throw off foreign rule and domination in its pursuit. Even as the European states and the United States were acquiring empires around the globe during the nineteenth century, they were also integrating their disparate populations under the banner of increasingly strident and aggressive forms of national self-assertion. Napoleonic France, which had spread the infectious virus of nationalism among the European peoples whom it conquered, contributed decisively to the creation of a united Italy and Germany. The principle of self-determination was expanded, paradoxically, not only to include the creation of new states but to underwrite claims to empire, reflected in Germany’s and Italy’s imperial designs variously manifested in Europe, Asia, and Africa in imitation of their European rivals. The failure of the Europeans to contain these virulent forms of egoistic nationalism in their own relations or to prevent their spread to the peoples of their far-flung empires finally plunged all into a world war.

World War I effectively strengthened, not diminished, the force of national self-determination in world politics. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points rested on a conception of international politics that hinged critically on the purported stabilizing effects of applying the principles more broadly than ever before. Wilson argued, and the Versailles Treaty affirmed, that World War I was caused by authoritarian governments seeking to oppress their own and foreign peoples. If previously suppressed national peoples were granted their own states, their legitimate claims for the redress of their frustrated demands for self-determination would eliminate a principal cause of war. Wilson also assumed that, once this principle was applied to the peoples of Europe, democratic government and peace would inevitably ensue. The pacific union, so much discussed today, was already well articulated in Wilson’s plan for perpetual peace after World War I.

As E. H. Carr persuasively argued in The Twenty Years’ Crisis and as experience confirmed, nothing could have been further from the truth. The Balkans and Eastern Europe continued to be a source of armed conflict among the contentious peoples of this region and a crucible for the destruction of democratic hopes and the violation of civil liberties. Nazi Germany perversely employed the principle in absorbing Austria and the Sudetenland Germans of Czechoslovakia. France was unable—and unwilling—to defend the principle in its failed security treaties with the newly created states of Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the democracies of Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium continued to suppress expressions of self-determination within their respective empires.

Virulent nationalism, which had spawned two world wars, also led inexorably to the loss of Europe’s empires and to the end of the Euro-centric world. This process of European decolonization has only recently come to an end with the collapse of the white supremacist government of South Africa. Its demise followed in the wake, successively, of the Dutch, British, French, Belgium, Spanish, and Portuguese empires. Almost fifty years were needed to implant and fully extend the principle of self-determination as a key building block of international relations, or what Hedley Bull, in The Anarchical Society: Study of Order in World Politics, characterized as the elemental principle on which the society of states comprising the current system of world order rests.

The eruption of violent clashes between peoples and states in the aftermath of the Cold War raises doubts about the unrestricted application of the principle of national self-determination. Ample evidence suggests that it is as much a problem as a solution for the construction of a peaceful, ever-prosperous, and legitimate world order. The implosion of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Rwanda—to note only a few hot spots—suggests that the unrestrained application of the principle is not without heavy costs in life and property. The breakup of Moscow’s empire has given way to war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, civil war in Georgia and Russia, and tensions among almost all of the former Soviet republics. There appears to be no immediate end to the fighting between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, and the danger is clear and present that the bloodshed may well extend to Kosovo, Albania, and Macedonia—and quite conceivably to the Balkans, Greece, and Asia Minor. More recently, unspeakable atrocities have been inflicted by Hutus and Tutsis on each other in Rwanda—a conflict that may well spread to neighboring Burundi.

This brief review of the impact of national self-determination on the explosion of new states and the implosion of once established states forms the backdrop for examining the current dilemmas posed by self-determination as an unqualified principle of international order and governance. First, in the absence of universally recognized and enforced standards or criteria for applying this principle, it will be an invitation to continued violence between states and, more significantly, to chronic civil strife and war as aggrieved groups seek greater political autonomy or independence. Most of the armed conflicts since World War II have been within states, not between them. Any disaffected group can now appeal to this principle and justify the use of violence in seeking redress of their real or imagined grievances. The principle of self-determination actually sanctions force and violence in the absence of universal and enforceable norms to assess claims in the pursuit of this principle. Since few states are ethnically, racially, or communally homogeneous and integrated, as Uri Ra’anan persuasively argues in Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies, few are freed from the threat of armed conflict. A disaffected group’s assertion of self-determination, backed by violence, is sufficient to plunge a state into civil war. The examples cited above testify to these incentives. They are at the core of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. Both states rest on shaky social divisions, defined by unbridgeable religious, communal, ethnic, tribal, linguistic, and regional differences. States like Indonesia and Malaysia also rest on underlying fragile social compacts and problematically effective coercive force to constrain ethnic, religious, racial, and tribal violence.

Second, the principle of self-determination inhibits other, adversely affected states or the world community from effectively intervening in these armed conflicts to contain or resolve them. The logic of self-determination rationalizes the erosion of international norms and standards that might be relied upon to define and assess the claims of aggrieved peoples who seek a solution of their political differences through violence and political independence as well as recognition and support of their struggle. With the exception of peaceful implosions, like that of Czechoslovakia and possibly Canada, self-determination appears to be realized, as Mao Tse-tung was prone to argue, out of the barrel of a gun—through bullets, not ballots.

Third, once political independence is achieved, there is no assurance that the resulting state will be economically viable. It is not enough for a state or government to represent a socially integrated population. It is also expected to provide for their economic welfare if the state and its political regime are to be stable. The proclivity of the international system toward geopolitical decentralization and power diffusion runs counter to the growing economic interdependence of peoples and states. National independence and economic autarchy are not easily reconcilable if sustained growth is an imperative. A proliferation of states complicates the spread and preservation of a liberal trading regime and multiplies the costs of coordinating national economic policies for mutual benefit.

Fourth, self-determination does not automatically lead to democratization, and even when national self-determination and democratization may covary, peace and prosperity are not a foregone conclusion. The experience of the eastern European states and of the former Soviet republics suggests the hazards of relying on these Wilsonian assumptions. The Asian republics of Moscow’s former empire can hardly be said to have embarked on the road to democracy. Those that have—Poland, Ukraine, and Russia—are shaky, and former antidemocratic forces have regained lost ground since the independence of these states.

The heightened nationalism exhibited in Ukrainian and Russian foreign policy also advises caution about expecting an automatic movement toward the peaceful resolution of interstate differences simply because a state has embarked on a process of democratization. The transition process, by no means assured, actually contributes to international distrust, suspicion, and conflict. An authoritarian Communist regime in the Soviet Union might well have negotiated a peaceful settlement of the Sakhalin Islands problem with Japan. A weakened Russian government, buffeted by rising national intransigence, is incapable of addressing the issues although it desperately needs foreign and, in particular, Japanese investment to reform its ailing economy.

Finally, the principle of self-determination seriously hampers intervention by other states or the world community, acting through regional security organizations or the United Nations, to address human rights violations. Authoritarian states like China can claim that no universally recognized human rights exist. These are purportedly determined by culture, history, and national political exigencies, and these differences are protected by the principle of self-determination. Even where such violations are widely recognized as having been committed, there is little incentive among the peoples and states of the world to challenge this principle and to assume the burden of rectifying these transgressions when they seem to be acting against a fundamental principle of international law and morality.

The aim of this all too brief analysis is not to condemn or reject the principle of self-determination. It cannot be dismissed out of hand, because it has served too many good causes and provided too many people with a powerful vehicle to free themselves from oppression at home or from abroad. These positive benefits of self determination, however, should not stand in the way of facing squarely the dilemmas that unqualified, unreserved, and violent application of the principle poses for the peace, prosperity, and legitimacy of a new world order. The world society of states has now reached a new and challenging evolutionary stage in its development that warrants reexamining its prevailing norms to determine whether they should be retained, modified, or surmounted. The principle of self-determination is clearly up for reevaluation to determine its limits and how well it can serve the needs of the six billion people of the emerging world society.

Edward A. Kolodziej is a research professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and a co-founder of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security. He is the author or editor of ten books and more than a hundred articles and reviews on the role of force in international relations and on regional security systems, and he is one of the leading American experts on French arms and security policy. His recent research appears in a book comparing Western nuclear deterrence policies, and in an edited volume on managing regional conflict. His current research looks at solutions to the problems of order, welfare, and legitimacy in the emerging world society.