Self-Determination in the early Twenty First Century

A Double Edged Concept

Uriel Abulof, Karl Cordell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138186637
• eBook ISBN: 9781317286264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a world in which change is constant, the principle of self-determination is important. Through (collective) acts of self-determination, nations exercise the right to govern themselves. At present the nation-state system with which we are familiar faces several challenges. In Western Europe, sub-state nationalism is on the rise. In the Middle East and North Africa, the state system bequeathed by former colonial powers faces increasing threats from pan-Islamist movements. Overall, the established order faces unprecedented uncertainties. The scholars who have contributed to this volume assess the merits, limitations and trajectories of self-determination in the twenty-first century, pointing to the paradoxes and anomalies that are encompassed by what at first sight is a simple and seductive concept. From the perspective of the twenty-first century and informed by a wealth of experience each of the contributors to this volume offers some valuable and intriguing observations on the future of self-determination and the movements its call engenders.

This book was published as a special issue of Ethnopolitics.

Introduction

KARL CORDELL

Plymouth University, UK

Politics as a recognisable human activity is as old as civilisation itself. Societal and technological change is symbiotically linked and as one changes, so does the other. Such developments also affect the nature of political discourse and structures. Although in a broad sense we may argue that the institutional and psycho-sociological content of politics has altered radically over the millennia, certain themes remain constant. These include the search for stability, the creation of societies based on (competing notions of) justice, the preservation of the status quo or indeed its destruction and the creation of the ‘good’ society. The potential list of politically themed activities is limitless and because it would reach into infinity, the production of such a list would be pointless. Yet we can and should make observations about the nature of politics so that we can better understand the nature of the societies in which we live.

Over the centuries, albeit in an uneven and fitful manner, political activity has evolved from being the preserve of the few, to being the province of the many. Perhaps the most decisive moment in this transformation came with the Enlightenment which began in Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century and whose impact was and remains global. Space precludes any rigorous examination of both the movement itself and its fruits, save to acknowledge that among its myriad achievements was that it acted as midwife to the birth of modern politics, which itself has reshaped the political geography of the globe, challenged belief systems that had been established for millennia and simultaneously brought down the political superstructures in Europe and elsewhere that had long rested upon ancient ‘truths’. In short, the Enlightenment produced a whole new language of politics and demands that were and continue to be made by citizens as opposed to subjects. The striking nature of these changes was most vividly expressed in the French Revolution of 1789, which, it may be argued, among its many novel facets represented a movement for self-determination on the part of people aware of their rights as citizens as opposed to their duties as subjects and who articulated a shared national consciousness. The revolution itself was bloody, its immediate results are still disputed and its consequences are with us to this day. Regardless of how the revolution is assessed, modern politics stems from the Enlightenment and the revolution of 1789. The political architecture that spans today’s Europe and much of the rest of the world can be traced back to the changes wrought in revolutionary France. As such the groundwork for the creation of a new state structure in Europe and by extension throughout the globe was laid in France in the closing years of the eighteenth century. In Europe as elsewhere, this process has been drawn-out and violent, although by and large since the end of the Second World War, Europe has managed to avoid the bloody excesses of the French Revolution. Sadly that is not the case elsewhere. Significantly, many of the political struggles that we witness today centre upon demands that first became apparent in 1789, not among the least of which is the demand for self-determination.

Contemporary self-determination demands can include different types of claims ranging from demands for equal opportunities and enhanced civil liberties within a given state, to demands for the creation of new states carved from the territory of existing states. Thus, two broad categories of self-determination can be identified. First, there are the demands for internal self-determination; states, groups or individuals demand that they be allowed fully to exercise their civil liberties and be provided with equality of opportunity. Second, there are demands for self-determination that advocate the right of a specific territory to secede and either create its own state or be unified with another. The boundaries between the aforementioned categories may be fluid, and although each of the papers in this volume touches upon the relationship between civil liberties and self-determination, they are primarily concerned with issues that arise from demands for national self-determination.

Claims for self-determination are invariably pursued by activists who argue that the distinct characteristics of a given identity group, be they ethnic, religious, cultural or linguistic, in some way render legitimate a demand for equal rights and equal opportunities to participate in the social, economic and political processes of the state and society in which they live. As stated in the previous paragraph, conventionally, such demands may culminate in calls for identity groups to be able to exercise a degree of territorial and/or non-territorial self-governance, and ultimately in demands for secession from an existing state. Secessionism can also serve as a bargaining chip for such groups, who assume that they can achieve a more satisfactory level of self-governance within an existing state if they initially seek full separation from that state. Indeed, by pursuing such strategies, the partisans of sub-state nationalism/secession do not preclude the possibility of pursuing full independence should the political opportunity structure prove more conducive to outright separation. Whatever the case, a cursory examination of the global political landscape shows that demands for self-determination are ubiquitous. As such, they merit further study and examination.

The aforementioned ubiquity of the phenomenon provides the spur for the collection of essays in this volume. They represent the findings of leading scholars in the field of nationalism and related studies on a topic that is of central importance to the study of political science. The right to self-determination is enshrined in international law and is a principle that has been a lynchpin of political practice since 1918, although as mentioned earlier its roots go back to the eighteenth century. In turn the principle rests upon the idea that the base collective political unit through which peoples collectively engage with one another is that of the nation state. The idea of the nation state is paradoxical, because it is superficially clear, whilst closer examination renders it problematic, if only because the term ‘nation’ is open to interpretation and dispute. For some academics and possibly for a majority of the world’s population, nations are natural organic structures recognisable as such by virtue of the presence among the presumed members of the titular nation of a readily identifiable set of characteristics that are unique to said population. It follows that for the partisans of this standpoint, nations are by no stretch of the imagination ‘modern’ constructs, and are instead deeply rooted in shared cultural characteristics and historical experience. For others, nations are in essence (modern) constructs that are contingent upon at some point in the past, there having been a confluence of forces conducive to the creation of a given nation and more importantly acceptance of those criteria by a given group which internalised the ideology of nationalism as being in some way meaningful. Whether or not nations as understood today is simply the contemporary manifestation of an age-old phenomenon or the product of a modern political and cultural enterprise, the fact is that they exist. Further, ever since the birth of nationalism as an ideology in the late Enlightenment era and most particularly during the French Revolution, the ideologues and tribunes of nationalism have demanded that the nation on whose behalf they claim to speak has the right to determine its own future.

Thus we are presented with the doctrine of national self-determination, which pre-supposes that nations should naturally be organised into nation states, and which since the late eighteenth century has been viewed as a cardinal principle upon which politics has been organised. In principle, the doctrine of self-determination is deceptively easy to understand. At its most basic level, it argues that a culturally distinct group of people defined as a nation has the right to determine its own future, independently of those with whom it co-exists and perhaps even coincides. However, like all deceptively simple processes, there is more to this apparently innocent claim than meets the eye.

The contemporary challenge of pan-Islamism to one side, the world in which we live is purportedly made up of nation states, whose inhabitants have at some point allegedly articulated the demand that they be allowed to determine their own future. Were it the case that simple acts of self-determination corresponded to notions of natural justice, we should be living in a world that was free of conflict. However, life is not that straightforward, and the concept and practice of self-determination throw into sharp relief a whole series of paradoxes and anomalies that help to account for the less than pacific nature of domestic and international politics. ‘We the People’ may well be the opening phrase of the Preamble to the US Constitution, but neither the phrase nor the constitution itself gives any real clue to who the people actually are. If we investigate the US case a little further, we find that initially both the indigenous population of the nascent USA and slaves were to be considered to be citizens of the newly emergent country that had just freed itself from the shackles of British imperialism. They were simply regarded as creatures who were is some senses regarded as being less than fully human and as such not deserving of citizenship. The American example teaches us a very basic lesson: that the decision with regard to who actually constitutes the nation may be a matter of political choice made by political elites and their partisans as opposed to assent by the broader population.

Similarly, whereas, as the example of the USA shows, the tribunes of self-determination may consciously refuse admission into a given nation, so ‘members’ of putative nations may themselves be reluctant to identify with a given state that has obtained independence following some apparent act of self-determination. Africa is a particularly potent example of this phenomenon. In the 1950s and 1960s large numbers of new states came into existence in the wake of imperial retreat by France and the UK. Demands for and later proclamations of independence arose in part from a claim to the right of self-determination on behalf of peoples who had for generations languished under the rule of foreign colonial masters. A broad sweep of Africa today reveals some uncomfortable truths and at best the state of affairs with regard to the efficacy and legitimacy of the nation state and the idea of nationhood itself, no matter how you regard it is somewhat mixed. It is so due to the presence of a multiplicity of factors that for a variety of reasons is not conducive either to sustained economic development or for the construction of politically stable regimes. Another element that needs to be taken into account when seeking to address the causes of instability in Africa and indeed elsewhere is to ask what purchase does the titular or supposed nation and state actually have in the minds of its citizens? In other words, it is quite one thing to proclaim independence as an act of liberation and self-determination, it is quite another to then build a state that can actually create and foster the national consciousness that is desired by the political elites, even supposing that the political elites have a shared vision of nationhood that transcends precolonial traditional, religious, and cultural boundaries.

If we shift our geopolitical focus somewhat, we find that the current example of (separatist) insurgency—the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine—highlights a number of (additional) points of relevance to our survey. First, the example of separatism in the Donbas shows that a demand for self-determination may be externally stimulated and manipulated in order to promote the geopolitical interests of powerful neighbouring states. Second, such struggles for power and influence, cloaked within the context of a (legitimate) demand for self-determination, as the example of the Donbas further illustrates, predominantly played out fragile states with weak institutions that are unable to provide security and other basic public goods. Such a state of affairs can be manipulated and boosted by local insurgents and their external backers in order to increase the legitimacy of their political project in the eyes of their target audience. They may be successful in this objective if they can offer a credible alternative to the state that has failed its citizens for a prolonged period of time. There is also a third and particularly worrying illustrative example that the Ukrainian case provides for us, namely that the failed/failing states phenomenon may be spreading from the less-developed to the developed world. Examples of states that fail or are on the cusp of so doing are rarely found within the developed world. Yet with Ukraine, we have a case of a developed state that exhibits many of the characteristics of a failed or failing state. Successive regimes have failed to develop fully functional institutions that create state capacity and thereby enhance the legitimacy of the state itself. One result of such failure may well be a demand, on the part of some, from the periphery for separation from the centre, as in the case of the Donbas. Fourth, the example of the Donbas also illustrates one other wider point: whose interests does the demand for self-determination serve: those of the proclaimed ‘nation’ or those who seek to maximise regional wider geopolitical influence? As the struggles in Kosovo and Northern Ireland have shown, the willingness of diaspora and kin-state networks to lend support to separatist enterprises may be decisive in terms of the ability of separatists to sustain their campaigns.

These observations lead us to another issue that we need to take into account. To the chagrin of nationalists, ethnocultural borders are rarely as strictly delimited as they like to think. So over the generations since 1789, we have sometimes witnessed demands for self-determination being issued on behalf of peoples whose identity is contested by two mutually antagonistic nationalist movements. Historically Europe is resplendent with such examples: Upper Silesia and Alsace-Lorraine are perhaps two of the best known. In the former case, the German and Polish national movements issued demands for national self-determination certain in the belief that regardless of what the inhabitants of the area thought, a plebiscite would reveal the truth, namely that the indigenous population would elect for inclusion in the nation state of the nationalists’ choice. In the case of Alsace-Lorraine, the indigenous population was subject to much the same pressures as their counterparts in Upper Silesia, albeit without a plebiscite, which incidentally solved nothing and was as much as anything else designed to assuage the fears of the ‘international community’. In both instances nation and state were (more or less) eventually rendered congruent by warfare, post-war forced migrations and the post-conflict popularisation of titular national narratives. A deeper examination of these two examples would demonstrate how identities including national identities can be multiple, contingent and not necessarily mutually exclusive. The real problems start when idealists seek to turn their fantasies into reality by forcing individuals to compartmentalise themselves within a ‘national box’, usually with the aid of an appeal to notions of justice qua the right to self-determination. Despite Woodrow Wilson’s romantic ideas, even the Europe of nation states in which some of us live is not the product of voluntary and pacific acts of self-determination; it is above all the product of sustained violence in which self-determination was elevated to an almost sacred level and as such provided its partisans with a leitmotif for unleashing war upon those who got in the way, including those who chose the wrong option when forced to make a national choice. Ironically and perhaps as a consequence of its former imperial pre-eminence, this sad European reality of nation state creation has served as a morally dubious template for other parts of the world.

This observation leads us to confront yet another conundrum presented by the doctrine of self-determination. That is, the fact that all states harbour minorities, both migrant and indigenous. Such minorities are not necessarily subjected to policies of either integration or assimilation, but in a world where national self-determination has become a fetish the temptation to argue that a given ‘nation’ being denied natural justice by means of its inclusion into the ‘wrong’ state is a clear and present danger. So, when it comes to indigenous minorities, given that acts of self-determination seldom, if ever, render state and nation coterminous, both secessionism and sub-state nationalism are rarely if ever completely off the political agenda.

We thus learn a further important lesson: namely, that demands for self-determination can have a multiplier effect. Sub-state nationalism is a global phenomenon that with the possible exception of the Americas currently affects all continents to varying degrees. In Africa we have the recent example of the secession of South Sudan from the rump Sudanese state. In Asia, China faces an increasing violent challenge from separatists in Xinjiang province and in India, a plethora of such movements inhabits the ‘seven sisters’ of the north east. Other examples could easily be taken from Myanmar/Burma and Pakistan, not forgetting the various Kurdish rebellions that their host countries face. In all of these cases we could point to a number of factors that stimulate demand for secession, not least among which would be the lack of robust liberal democratic structures even where they exist on paper. However, sub-state nationalism is not necessarily solely a direct consequence of the lack of democracy within a political system, or indeed simply because of obvious and glaring issues of poverty and the malapportionment of wealth. As Europe shows, sub-state nationalism may easily exist in fully functioning liberal democracies. At one level, the existence of vibrant sub-state national movements in the UK, Belgium and Spain may be taken as evidence that the demand for the creation of states in the name of a geographically concentrated ethnically differentiated population bearing clearly ‘national’ characteristics’ is some kind of natural phenomenon. Yet that is far too crude an argument that obscures a basic puzzle. For example, in the Scottish referendum campaign of 2014, the Scottish National Party (SNP) campaigned for (qualified) independence from the UK. The SNP’s argument revolved around the claim that the Scots constitute a readily identifiable nation, which is different from the other nations who make up the UK. There was therefore an implicit rejection of the civic nature of British identity as being either viable or sufficient to hold the UK together. Curiously this rejection came from a party that made it clear that although there is a distinct Scottish culture and identity, upon which the argument for self-determination was based, an independent Scotland would be built upon civic national ideals. We thus end up in a situation where an ethnically based movement seeks to leave one civic nation state simply in order to establish a smaller one. Such a curious turn of events means that in order to locate the sources of demand for self-determination, we need to be sceptical of claims for self-determination based on the apparent inability of different national groups to live alongside one another in multinational states. In short, if the drive towards demands for self-determination in non-democratic countries is down to the absence of democracy and lack of economic opportunity, there is no reason not to assume that the latter factor plays a decisive role in driving sub-state nationalism in developed liberal democracies. Scotland, Flanders and Catalonia are in their different ways economically distinct from the rest of their wider shared state territory. With Scotland we have a former industrial powerhouse that has never fully recovered from the decline of heavy industry that first became apparent in the late 1960s, and whose voters for decades have expressed a clear ideological preference that is consistently different from that expressed by voters in England. In the latter two examples, we have territories that are economically more developed than other parts of the common state territory. Moreover, it is hardly coincidental that in a time of austerity politicians who emphasise difference put forward the argument that, shorn of the ubiquitous ‘Other’, a bright and sunny future beckons. Put another way, nationalists have a vested interest in emphasising difference and playing down commonalities in order to better pursue their political projects. Times of economic hardship and disruption prompt calls for change. One potential solution is to reconfigure the state on the basis that a culturally distinct element of the polity would be better served through territorial reconfiguration or outright secession. At base what determines whether or not their venture succeeds is the overall political opportunity structure within which they articulate their message.

Self-determination is therefore neither a panacea for all ills any more than it is a straightforward concept. A seemingly simple and uncomplicated demand for self-determination may have both unintended consequences and create a series of paradoxes. Indeed, the foundations upon which the doctrine rests, although seductive, are not necessarily as enlightened as some might like to think. As the cases of Eritrea, Timor Leste and South Sudan or for that matter Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina show, self-determination is no guarantor for either genuine emancipation or economic growth. The lesson is perhaps one of ‘be careful of what you wish for’. This trite observation to one side, the tragedy of the situation is that sometimes self-determination through secession is not so much a choice, but a desperate gamble for survival as the case of South Sudan perhaps shows. Sometimes the demand for self-determination achieves a momentum that is all but impossible to halt, particularly in the face of sustained repression and economic hardship. The question then becomes one of how best to manage the process. Is it best managed by simplistic calls for independence, or would people be better served by creative thinking that seeks to move beyond a model of state organisation that originated over 200 years ago? Despite the various observations I have just made, neither this introductory essay, nor the pieces that follow should be taken as a council of despair. Rather, the purpose of this essay and those that follow is to illuminate and expose some of the issues that surrounds this most seductive of concepts.

Each of the essays in this special issue of Ethnopolitics deals with specific aspects of self-determination. The array of expertise gathered together facilitates both conceptual and empirical study from a variety of angles and standpoints. What all the contributors and contributions have in common is two things. First, they deal with specific aspects and facets of the self-determination conundrum. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Section I: Self-determination and the end of history
• Section II: The dangers of self-determination
• Section III: Self-determination and the politics of identity
• Section IV: Self-determining the State
• Index