Democracy and Dynamite: The Peoples' Right to Self-Determination
| Published date | 01 September 1996 |
| Date | 01 September 1996 |
| Author | Michael Freeman |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1996.tb01754.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Political
Studies
(1996),
XLIV,
746-761
Democracy and Dynamite: the Peoples’
Right
to
Self-determination
MICHAEL
FREEMAN
*
University
of
Essex
The right to self-determination is a potent and paradoxical political concept. It is
associated with democracy, xenophobia and anarchy. Its explosive potential was
more
or
less held in check during the Cold War by an international consensus that
restricted it to the context
of
decolonization. The unravelling
of
the Soviet Union and
the break-up
of
Yugoslavia have demonstrated the inadequacy
of
the available
theory and practice. Various recent approaches
to
self-determination are reviewed.
These may
be
roughly classified as realist, liberal and communitarian. Although no
approach is wholly satisfactory, the key issues can now
be
more clearly stated, an
emerging consensus identified, and the agenda
for
further theoretical work proposed.
1.
Problems
of Self-determination: Old and
New
If Bosnia-Herzegovina has the right to secede from Yugoslavia, do the Bosnian
Serbs have the right to secede from Bosnia? If Lithuania had the right to secede
from the Soviet Union, does Chechnya have the right to secede from the
Russian Federation? If the French-speaking people of Quebec have the right to
determine their own political future, do the indigenous peoples of Quebec have
the same right? How should we answer such questions?
International law seems to give a simple answer. ‘All peoples’, says the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ‘have the right of self-
determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status
and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development’. Inter-
national law, however,
is
not what
is
seems. ‘[Wlhat emerges beyond dispute’,
remarks one commentator, ‘is that all peoples do
not
have the right of self-
determination. They have never had it, and they will never have it’.’ It is
therefore not surprising that U Thant, as Secretary-General of the United
Nations, said, in
1970,
that the concept of self-determination was ‘not properly
understood in many parts
of
the world’.2
The concept of self-determination
is
both potent and paradoxical. It is
attractive to many because it is associated with the values of democracy and
national community. It
is
repellent
to
others because it is also associated with
*
I
should like to thank the referee for
Political Sfudies
and members
of
the Department
of
Politics, University of Newcastle, especially Simon Caney,
for
their helpful comments on an earlier
version
of
this article. Its faults are,
of
course, wholly my responsibility.
’
R. Emerson, ‘Self-determination in the era
of
decolonization’,
Occasional Papers in Inter-
national Affairs,
No. 9 (1964), p.
64,
cited in
L.
C.
Buchheit,
Secession: The Legitimacy
vj
Self-
determination
(New Haven, Yale University Press,
1978).
p.
129, emphasis in Buchheit.
Cited in Buchheit,
Secession,
p.
87.
T
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Review
Section
747
ethno-nationalist fanaticism and anarchy. It has been an important element in
the political discourse of the twentieth century. Yet it has attracted little
attention from political theorists until recently.
The end of the Cold War has intensified concern about self-determination.
The European Community, for example, based its response to the dissolution of
the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia
on
the principle
of
self-determination. It
assumed that the principle was compatible with the rule of law, democracy, and
human
right^.^
Recent events have not, however, diminished the fear that it is a
disruptive force in the international order.
The desire for self-determination is ancient. The idea of a
right
to self-
determination is modern. Locke laid the foundations of the right by deriving
from the proposition that individuals had certain natural rights the conclusions
that individuals had the right to leave political communities to which they did
not consent and majorities had the right to resist tyrants. The American
revolutionaries interpreted the right of resistance to tyranny to include the right
of secession.
A
different approach was initiated by Rousseau’s doctrine of popular
sovereignty. The French Revolution dramatized the idea of democracy as
popular sovereignty and of the
nation
state. In nineteenth-century Europe
official ideology often treated states and nations as equivalent. This notion was,
however, challenged by the rise of ethno-nationalism. States came into conflict
with the assertion of national rights.
After the First World War President Wilson advocated the principle of
national self-determination as
a
democratic ideal. This idea sank under the
ethno-nationalist complexities of Europe and the persistence of the European
empires. Robert Lansing, Wilson’s Secretary of State, later described it as
‘loaded with dynamite’. The Covenant
of
the League of Nations ignored it. The
failure of the League to develop a just conception of the ri ht to self-
Nazism discredited the idea of the ethno-nationalist state, yet the dominant
ideology of the inter-state community after the Second World War was that of
the integrated nation state. The idea of national self-determination drew new
life from the perception that the war had been fought for democracy and the
rights of nations. The UN Charter declared it to be the purposes of the
organization ‘to develop friendly relations among nations based
on
respect for
the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples’. The dominant
purpose of the UN, however, was the promotion of international peace; the
principle
of
self-determination was not clearly defined; and certain traditional
principles of international relations, such as the territorial integrity of states,
were reaffirmed. The self-determination of peoples was interpreted as equiva-
lent to the self-determination of
state^.^
The current formulation of the right to self-determination of peoples first
appeared in the UN General Assembly Resolution
on
the Granting of
Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (1960). The right to self-
determination was thereby closely associated with, and almost wholly restricted
A. Cassese,
Self-determination
of
Peoples
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995),
A. Cobban,
The Nation-Stateand National Self-determination
(London, Collins, 1969), chsIV-V.
Cassese,
Self-determination
of
Peoples,
pp. 41-3;
K.
S.
Shehadi,
Ethnic Self-determination and
determination facilitated the abuse of this idea by Nazi Germany.
f
pp. 266-8.
the Break-up
of
States
(London, Brassey’s, Adelphi Paper 283, 1993), pp. 17-21.
0
Political
Studies
Association,
1996
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