Is Self-Determination a Dangerous Illusion?

David Miller

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509533497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Claims to self-determination are rife in world politics today. They range from Scottish and Catalonian campaigns for independence to calls for the devolution of power to regions and cities. But is self-determination meaningful or desirable in the twenty-first century, or merely a dangerous illusion?

In this book, David Miller mounts a powerful defence of political self-determination. He explains why it is valuable and argues that geographic proximity alone is not enough for groups to have the capacity for self-determination: group members must also identify with each other. He explores the different political forms that self-determination can take, and he suggests some realistic constraints on how it can be achieved, concluding that people exercising their collective agency is still both feasible and important.

Anyone concerned by the theoretical issues raised by the various secessionist and nationalist movements around the world should read this book.

1
Introduction

In 1976, the United Nations re-affirmed its commitment to human rights in two major documents, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Both contained, as Article 1, the following sentences: ‘All peoples 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.’

The presence of this Article is puzzling in several respects. It seems out of place in documents devoted to setting out a long list of individual human rights since the right it proclaims is clearly a collective right, a right belonging to peoples, plural, not to individual persons, as the Article’s wording makes plain. During the long period in which the Covenants were being drafted, several western governments had opposed its inclusion, no doubt foreseeing the implications it would have for their remaining colonial possessions. Then there is the initially surprising fact that no attempt is made to clarify the term ‘people’. If ‘people’ isn’t just another word for ‘state’, who counts as one and who doesn’t? Nor does the Article explain what self-determination involves. The second sentence suggests two things: that a ‘people’ should decide on how it wants to organize itself politically, such as by having its own independent state; and that it should then set its own domestic policy goals. But the Article does not require that it must adopt a democratic form of government. As we shall see later, self-determination and democracy, though they are related, are not the same. By placing self-determination at the head of a long list of human rights, the Covenants imply that a people is being seriously wronged if denied the right to govern itself but give us little clue as to what following Article 1 might mean in practice.

International lawyers have struggled to clarify this alleged right of self-determination. A narrow interpretation would say that it is simply intended to protect established states from external interference. In other words, a ‘people’ is indeed nothing more or less than a state. But in practice it has been interpreted more widely than this so as to apply in two main cases where newly independent states are being created. One of these is decolonization of the kind that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, when European states were forced to relinquish their possessions in Africa and Asia. In this context, the inhabitants of former colonies were treated as separate ‘peoples’ with a right to break free from their colonial masters and found independent states. The other is the collapse of large conglomerates, such as occurred at the end of the First World War when the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires were dissolved. Here, new states, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, were created in order to grant self-government to nations who had been submerged in the former empires but were now given the right to control their own destinies.¹

This indeed was the moment at which the idea of self-determination first sprang to prominence. It was supported for different reasons by the Bolsheviks under Lenin’s leadership and by US President Woodrow Wilson, who played a large part in redrawing the map of Europe in an attempt to ensure that state borders and national borders would henceforth coincide. Wilson announced as his fundamental principle:

that the countries of the world belong to the people who live in them, and that they have a right to determine their own destiny and their own form of government and their own policy, and that no body of statesmen, sitting anywhere, no matter whether they represent the overwhelming physical force of the world or not, has the right to assign any great people to a sovereignty under which it does not care to live.²

But how could this bold claim be put into practice? It appears to assume that ‘countries’ are made up of people who, once given the chance, would all agree on how they wish to be governed, so the problem of self-determination could be solved by going and asking them the question directly. But what if, instead, we find that, in Europe and elsewhere, populations are interspersed in such a way that it is impossible to draw neat boundaries around them and say that we have found homogeneous ‘peoples’ who are then entitled, by Wilson’s principle, to choose their form of government? Then it seems that achieving self-determination for one nation will involve denying it to others, who might form a minority within the borders of one country, or be dispersed across two or more. Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, who was closely involved in the post-war peace negotiations, came to regard his master’s pronouncement with dismay:

The more I think about the President’s declaration as to the right of ‘self-determination’, the more convinced I am of the danger of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress and create trouble in many lands. . . . The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realised. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. . . . What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!³

From the examples he offers, it appears that Lansing’s main concern was the encouragement that Wilson’s doctrine would offer to groups already struggling against their inclusion in colonial empires or large states, and so the violence that he anticipated would occur because the imperial powers would forcefully resist their demands. But Lansing worried too that some self-determination claims might simply be mutually incompatible. If the Boers were granted self-determination within South Africa, how could the other peoples of that region enjoy it too? Or if the Jews were to achieve self-determination in Palestine, as Wilson’s commitment to Zionism implied, what would become of the Arab inhabitants of that area? Lansing’s words were prophetic indeed; and they give us one very obvious sense in which self-determination might be a dangerous illusion. Proclaiming self-determination as a human right suggests that it is something that every human being can enjoy, like the right to food or bodily security. But what if the self-determination of some is always achieved at the expense of the self-determination of others?

The problem Lansing identified is not the only reason for thinking that self-determination might be a dangerous illusion – that by leading people to hope for something it may be impossible for them to achieve, it opens the door to resentment, political alienation and, in the worst case, violence. Although I will argue in this book in favour of the moral and political importance of self-determination, I want to take the case against it seriously as well. Let me add to Lansing’s criticism three more reasons for doubting that collective self-determination is a political goal worth pursuing.

The first takes us back to the silence of the International Covenants on the question of who counts as a people for purposes of self-determination. Is there any non-arbitrary way of deciding which groups should be given the right to govern themselves? To confine the right of self-determination to existing states is effectively to say that only those who have already achieved self-determination are entitled to exercise it. But this makes little sense, morally speaking. How could we justify saying that once the Estonians had their own state, they were entitled to be self-determining, but so long as they were part of the Soviet Union they were not? As we have already seen, international law, despite the fact that its principles tend to reflect the interests of established states, has also recognized self-determination rights in two main cases where groups did not already have their own states. But if we now compare these cases more closely, we see that their underlying logic is somewhat contradictory. In the aftermath of the First World War, when new independent states were being created, their boundaries were drawn broadly along national lines. For instance, a Polish state was created to grant self-determination to the Polish nation, a people united by ties of language, culture and religion, with a territorial heartland and a history of political independence that had rudely been brought to an end in 1795 when their state was partitioned between Austria, Prussia and Russia. So here the relevant ‘people’ was defined first, in terms of national identity, and then the territorial boundaries of their vehicle of self-determination – the state – were drawn so as to encase it geographically.

In the period of decolonization following the Second World War, by contrast, a very different logic was followed. The process was governed by the international legal principle of uti possidetis, which holds that where new state borders are being defined, they must follow existing lines of demarcation between administrative units.⁴ But, as many commentators have pointed out, colonial boundaries were created for different purposes and often as a result of mutually advantageous deals struck between the colonizers, so the areas they circumscribe were unlikely to be suitable as the territories of independent states. Indeed, internal boundary lines within colonies may have been drawn with the intention of keeping the colony intact by cutting across the territories traditionally held by different ethnic groups, but that became a source of problems once these smaller units became independent.⁵ The aftermath of decolonization left many ethnic groups in the position of national minorities who were denied their own rights of self-determination and, in consequence, very often many other rights as well. Colonial domination was replaced by domination by the majority ethnic group in the newly independent state.

In the earlier period and the European context, then, the ‘peoples’ who were considered ripe for self-determination were historic nations defined mainly in ethno-cultural terms; while in the later period and the post-colonial context, the relevant ‘peoples’ were those who lived within pre-existing administrative borders, regardless of their ethno-cultural affinities, or lack of them. The first way of understanding peoplehood might appear superior to the second because less arbitrary, but no one should imagine that the world is made up of neat, consolidated nations potentially able to live within boundaries drawn in such a way that everyone inside is a compatriot (even Iceland, potentially a good candidate, now contains nearly a tenth of its population who are not native-born Icelanders). Often we find that people with contrasting national identities are geographically interspersed over wide areas, so there is no way of drawing clean lines between national communities; or else we find smaller nations ‘nested’ inside larger ones, as the Scots and the Welsh are in Britain, and the Catalans and Basques are in Spain, and the question is whether the right of self-determination is held primarily by the encompassing group or the sub-group. There is no obvious answer, and in practice the issue may be settled by the exercise of power, as happened in 2017, for instance, when the Spanish state forcibly suppressed Catalan demands for independence.

There is already a hint of this problem in Woodrow Wilson’s statement granting rights of sovereignty to ‘any great people’ (my italics). But why not to little people as well (or instead)? Wilson helped to achieve self-determination for the Poles, at least for a time, but there was no such opportunity for the three million or so Ukrainians who lived inside the new Polish state, or for the Silesians, who initially were only allowed to choose, in a plebiscite, between joining Poland and joining Germany. After three violent insurrections, a partition of Silesia between the two states was agreed. But self-determination for the Silesians themselves was never considered.

The point can be put more abstractly: no one is ever in a position to choose all of their fellow citizens, the people with whom they could potentially exercise a right of self-determination. This applies even on a small scale. Each of us can choose whom we want to have as friends, but there’s no guarantee that our own friends will also befriend one another. Society doesn’t divide itself up into neat friendship circles within which everyone loves everyone else. Scale this up to the size of a modern state, and the problem is obvious. We have to share a political home with people, many of whom we’d prefer to avoid associating with if we could. So no way of sorting people into political groups for purposes of self-determination is going to satisfy everyone. In which case, the critics argue, what does all the fuss about self-determination amount to? Let’s return to the Catalonia/Spain case. Suppose Catalonia does indeed become an independent state, and consider the position of any Catalan taken at random. She now finds herself in political association with some 5.5 million Catalans instead of the 36.5 million Spaniards she consorted with before. Apart from the independence issue itself, her new associates will be just as diverse in terms of moral beliefs, lifestyle choices, tastes in art and music, political ideology, and so forth as the ones she had previously. Finding a way to live together under a common political roof...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Series title
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Value of Self-Determination
• 3 The Agents of Self-Determination
• 4 Self-Determination and Secession
• 5 Self-Determination Within, Alongside and Beyond the Nation-State?
• End User License Agreement