Self-Determination (political principle)
Self-determination is a political principle asserting the right of nations to govern themselves independently, influencing both domestic and foreign policies. While this idea has gained prominence in contemporary discussions, its roots can be traced back to the aftermath of World War I, notably during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson championed the concept, advocating that nations defeated in the war should obtain self-governance. However, this principle initially applied only to sovereign states and not to colonized peoples, leaving many indigenous groups without the right to self-determination.
The principle was further solidified after World War II with the establishment of the United Nations, which recognized the right of peoples to self-determine as vital for peaceful international relations. Despite this, the UN's framework still restricts self-determination to established governments, preventing ethnic groups within nations from legally seceding. Recent events, such as the 2014 Crimean referendum and the subsequent controversy over its legitimacy, highlight the complexities and challenges surrounding the application of self-determination in modern geopolitics. Overall, self-determination remains a crucial, yet contentious, aspect of international law and relations, reflecting the ongoing struggle for autonomy and governance among various groups worldwide.
Self-Determination (political principle)
Self-determination is a political principle that refers to the right of a sovereign, or independent, nation to govern itself. This self-governance includes the freedom to decide one's own domestic policy as well as foreign policy with other sovereign nations. Though a commonly known concept in the twenty-first century, self-determination entered the international political mainstream in the 1920s, in the immediate aftermath of World War I.
History of Self-Determination
For much of world history, peoples and lands have been dominated by foreign or domestic rulers, the kings and queens whose armies had conquered them through physical force. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, early modern thinkers began circulating the ideas of liberty from monarchical control and the importance of self-determination, both for individuals and nations. By the late 1700s, these ideas had fused themselves to the American Revolution and later the French Revolution, both of which were carried out to free their respective nations from tyranny in favor of autonomy.
The freedom achieved by the United States and France, however, did not immediately become a trend throughout the rest of the world, and the idea of national self-determination did not rise again in earnest until after World War I ended in 1918. The next year, the Allied powers that had won the war convened for the Paris Peace Conference, where it was decided, most prominently by President of the United States Woodrow Wilson, that the citizens of the nations defeated in the war should be entitled to self-determination. Wilson hoped that by granting this right to the peoples formerly ruled by the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian empires, Central Europe would become freer and more democratic.
But the conference refused to allow self-determination to apply to the various overseas colonies held by these nations. The great European powers that had founded these colonies, in such places as Africa, argued that colonized indigenous peoples were not capable of self-governance because they lacked political experience. Therefore, the Peace Conference's granting of self-determination applied only to nations involved in World War I.
Even in these countries, however, the exercise of self-government did not work as planned. The end of the war had meant the redrawing of certain national European boundaries, which in turn forced a great diversity of ethnic groups to find themselves suddenly the minorities under the control of majority governments. Many of these states began implementing discriminatory programs that favored their own ethnic groups while excluding the minorities, and the international community was forced to accept this based on the ideals of self-determination. It was in this way that, in its early stages, modern self-determination came to apply only to nations, not peoples.
The modernization of global politics following the end of World War II in 1945 helped to change this. At that time, the new international peacekeeping coalition, the United Nations (UN), passed its charter, which declared the right of self-determination of peoples as essential to the development of peaceful international relations. Now filling the omission of the post-World War I Paris Peace Conference, this ultimately led to widespread decolonization—the unraveling of a dominating country's occupation of a weaker country—in the 1950s and 1960s. The UN had called for this by stating that the ongoing oppression of peoples and countries by foreign nations could never coexist with the right to peaceful self-determination.
But the UN also made an important distinction in the international allowance of self-determination, a feature that survives in the twenty-first century. It recognizes only the rights of governments in established territories, not of individual ethnic groups, to chart their own political futures. In simple terms, this means that while nations may self-determine, groups of people within those nations do not possess the legal right to secede from their governments to form their own sovereign states. This was intended to prevent a multitude of race- or ethnic-based conflicts from erupting in otherwise stable countries.
Self-Determination Today
The issue of self-determination on an international scale prominently arose in March of 2014, when the autonomous Eastern European region of Crimea voted to secede from the country of Ukraine to become a federal subject of nearby Russia. The UN and the majority of the Western world scathingly condemned the referendum as illegitimate, as it had occurred only after thousands of Russian soldiers had invaded the peninsula.
Russia, however, referred extensively to the UN Charter to defend what it considered Crimea's exercise of its right of self-determination. The legally elected Crimean parliament had voted to hold a referendum on the subject of secession, Russia said, and the Crimean people had eventually chosen to secede. Russian president Vladimir Putin argued further that Crimea was simply following the example of Kosovo, a disputed republic that had elected to secede from Yugoslavia in 1991 and in 2008 declared itself an independent nation, despite failing to achieve unanimous international recognition. In February 2022, the Russian military invaded Ukraine, attempting to annex the smaller nation and further invalidating its right to self-determination.
The West continued to maintain that the Crimean secession was not an instance of a government utilizing its powers of self-determination. Rather, nations asserted, the vote had been a violation both of Ukraine's sovereignty and of international law, a decision made without the consent of Ukraine's democratic leadership. Meanwhile, some commentators argued that the issue was difficult to resolve. They questioned whether the UN's allowance of peoples' rights to self-determine extended to the Crimean people, while simultaneously stating that Crimea's secession from Ukraine, with the shadowy involvement of Russia, indeed diverged from all other such declarations of independence in the modern age. Self-determination continues to be regarded as a fundamental component in the maintenance of international peace.
Bibliography
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