Self-determination
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In international law, self-determination[1] refers to a people's right to form its own political entity.[2] Self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law, binding, as such, on the United Nations as an authoritative interpretation of the Charter's norms.[3][4] The principle does not state how the decision is to be made, nor what the outcome should be (whether independence, federation, protection, some form of autonomy or full assimilation)[5] Further, no right to secession is recognized under international law.[6][7]
The concept emerged with the rise of nationalism in the 19th century and came into prominent use in the 1860s, spreading rapidly thereafter.[8] During and after World War I, a general principle of self-determination was proclaimed by United States President Woodrow Wilson and others.[8][9] Having announced his Fourteen Points on 8 January 1918, Wilson stated on 11 February 1918: "National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. 'Self determination' is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action."[10] However, neither Wilson and Lloyd George nor Lenin and Trotsky considered the peoples of the Global South as the main target for their statements supporting self-determination. Nevertheless, their rhetoric resonated far beyond the European audiences they aimed to reach.[11] During World War II, the principle was included in the Atlantic Charter, jointly declared on 14 August 1941 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States, and Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who pledged The Eight Principal points of the Charter.[12] It was recognized as an international legal right after it was explicitly listed as a right in the UN Charter.[13]
Implementing the right to self-determination can be politically difficult, in part because there are multiple interpretations of what constitutes a people and which groups may legitimately claim the right to self-determination.[14] As World Court judge Ivor Jennings put it: "the people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people".[15]
History
[edit]Pre-20th century
[edit]The norm of self-determination can be traced to the American and French revolutions, and the emergence of nationalism.[16][17] The European revolutions of 1848, the post–World War I settlement at Versailles, and the decolonization movement after World War II shaped and established the norm in international law.[18] The American example has been seen as the earliest assertion of the right of national self-determination, although this was argued primarily in terms of resistance to a despotic ruler rather than appeals to a "natural right" of peoples to determine their political fate, the latter emerging with the independence of Spanish colonies in Latin America.[19]
These concepts were inspired particularly by earlier ideas from Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant, and by the mid-nineteenth century, "self-determination" had evolved into a weapon for revolutionary nationalism.[19] Thomas Jefferson further promoted the notion that the will of the people was supreme, especially through authorship of the United States Declaration of Independence, which became an inspiration for European nationalist movements during the 19th century.[14] The French Revolution legitimized the ideas of self-determination on that Old World continent.[20][21][how?]
Nationalist sentiments emerged inside traditional empires: Pan-Slavism in Russia; Ottomanism, Kemalist ideology and Arab nationalism in the Ottoman Empire; State Shintoism and Japanese identity in Japan; and Han identity in juxtaposition to the Manchurian ruling class in China. Meanwhile, in Europe itself, the rise of nationalism led to Italy, Greece, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria all seeking or winning independence.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels supported some of these nationalist movements, believing nationalism might be a "prior condition" to social reform and international alliances.[22] In 1914, Vladimir Lenin wrote: "[It] would be wrong to interpret the right to self-determination as meaning anything but the right to existence as a separate state."[23]
In contrast, Rosa Luxemburg called a "right of nations to self-determination", valid for all countries and all times, "nothing more than a metaphysical cliché" that offers no "practical solution of nationality problems" and argued that the very concept of the nation as an "homogenous social and political entity" was derived from bourgeois ideology.[24][25]
World Wars I and II
[edit]Europe, Asia and Africa
[edit]
Woodrow Wilson revived America's commitment to self-determination, at least for European states, during World War I. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia in the October Revolution, they called for Russia's immediate withdrawal as a member of the Allies of World War I. Lenin had used "national self-determination" as a weapon against the Russian Empire, and after the Revolution the party supported the right of all nations, including colonies, to self-determination.[23] The 1918 Constitution of the Soviet Union acknowledged the right of secession for its constituent republics.[14]
In January 1918, Wilson issued his Fourteen Points of January 1918 which, among other things, called for adjustment of colonial claims, insofar as the interests of colonial powers had equal weight with the claims of subject peoples.[14] The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 led to Soviet Russia's exit from the war and the nominal independence of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine, though in fact those territories were under German control.[27] The end of the war led to the dissolution of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire and Czechoslovakia and the union of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs with the Kingdom of Serbia emerging as new states out of the wreckage of the Habsburg empire, along with the unification of all Romanian-speaking lands. However, this imposition of states where some nationalities (especially Poles, Czechs, Serbs and Romanians) were given power over other nationalities who disliked and distrusted them was eventually used as a pretext for German aggression in World War II.
The League of Nations was established as the symbol of the emerging postwar order. One of its earliest tasks was to legitimize the territorial boundaries of the new nation-states created in the territories of the former Ottoman Empire, Asia, and Africa. The League was not consistent in how it applied the principle in the postwar peace treaties and, in many places, had to compensate with highly complex arrangements to ensure protection of minorities.[28] Nor did the principle of self-determination extend so far as to end colonialism, under the reasoning that the local populations were not civilized enough; the League of Nations was to assign each of the post-Ottoman, Asian and African states and colonies to a European power by the grant of a League of Nations mandate.[29]
One of the German objections to the Treaty of Versailles was a somewhat selective application of the principle of self-determination, as the Republic of German-Austria, which included the Sudetenland, was seen as representing the will to join Germany in those regions, while the majority of people in Danzig wanted to remain within the Reich. However, the Allies ignored the German objections. Wilson's 14 Points had called for Polish independence to be restored and Poland to have "secure access to the sea", which would imply that the German city of Danzig (modern Gdańsk, Poland) be ceded to Poland.[30] At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Polish delegation asked Wilson to honor point 14 of the 14 points by transferring Danzig to Poland, arguing that the city was Polish until 1793, and that Poland would not be economically viable without it.[30] During the First Partition of Poland in 1772, the inhabitants of Danzig fought fiercely for it to remain a part of Poland,[31] but as a result of the Germanisation process in the 19th century,[32] 90% of its inhabitants were German by 1919, which led to the creation of the Free City of Danzig, a city-state in which Poland had certain special rights.[33] Though the city of Danzig was 90% German and 10% Polish, the surrounding countryside around Danzig was overwhelmingly Polish, and the ethnically Polish rural areas included in the Free City of Danzig objected, arguing that they wanted to be part of Poland.[30] Neither the Poles nor the Germans were happy with this compromise, and the Danzig issue became a flash point of German-Polish tension throughout the interwar period.[34]
During the 1920s and 1930s, there were some successful movements for self-determination in the beginnings of the process of decolonization. The Statute of Westminster granted independence to Canada,