Self-determination

National, Regional, And Global Dimensions

Yonah Alexander, Robert A Friedlander

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367287030
• eBook ISBN: 9781000311204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As part of a national and international revolutionary strategy, terrorism has introduced into the struggle for power within and among nations a new mode of violence in terms of technology, victimization, threat, and response. It has also affected our present concepts and perceptions of self-determination. One of the principal questions addressed in

Part 1
The Concept of Self-Determination

1
Self-Determination: A Definitional Focus

Jordan J. Paust

"Self-determination" is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.

—Woodrow Wilson*

The United Nations Charter states that one of the purposes of the United Nations is to develop friendly relations based upon respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.¹ It is also stated in the Charter that the United Nations shall promote universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all so as to assure "the creation of conditions of stability and well-being which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination."²

Obviously these rights and principles are interrelated in the Charter language—equal rights, self-determination, human rights, fundamental freedoms—but how? Indeed, how are preferred conditions of well-being, stability, friendly relations, and peace to be interconnected with United Nations and member-state obligations "to take joint and separate action" in order to achieve, for example, a functionally effective respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms³ in a context of "stable" governmental control of a people and serious deprivations of human rights? Is self-determination a human right, a fundamental freedom? Is selfdetermination a necessary precondition to a workable peace, stability, and friendly relations? Just what is "self-determination," and are these other rights, principles, and conditions relevant to a proper definitional focus? These are merely some of the questions that necessarily arise in this section, but, as the reader will discover, they are questions that are answered elsewhere in various ways and questions that haunt us at every turn within our own study. The problem is not that these questions are unanswerable but that so many "answers" are possible⁴ and that nearly all of the possibilities exist in the printed writings of scholars or rhetorical orchestrations of governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental actors.

Whatever one's definition or claim may be, one must pay attention to the recent politico-legal expressions of the United Nations General Assembly during its attempt to provide greater content to Charter norms. More than a "mere phrase" or "principle of action," the General Assembly had declared unanimously in 1970 that self-determination is a right with correlative duties. As the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-Operation stated: "all people have the right freely to determine, without external interference, their political status and to pursue their political status and to pursue their economic, social and cultural development, and every State has the duty to respect this right in accordance with the provisions of the Charter."⁵ Moreover, the General Assembly implicitly recognized the interdependence between self-determination, human rights, friendly relations, and peace. For example, the preamble to the Declaration stated that the "effective application" of the principle of equal rights and self-determinaton "is of paramount importance for the promotion of friendly relations among states." The same preamble noted the importance of implementing a peace "founded upon freedom, equality, justice and respect for fundamental human rights" and stated further that "subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation constitutes a major obstacle to the promotion of international peace and security."

Additionally, one should pay significant attention to the definitional elements highlighted by the General Assembly in its important declaration on Charter principles. Within the right-duty passage quoted above, one can also glean evidence of the significant expectation of the international community that a process of self-determination relates most closely to a free or consensual determination of a given peoples of their own political, economic, social, and cultural development. The declaration seems to emphasize this expectation about authority and self-determination by stating clearly in the first paragraph devoted to the principle of equal rights and self-determination that "by virtue of the principle of equal rights and self-determination ... all peoples have the right freely to determine."

The expectation of the need for a tree or consensual determination is also evident in a subsequent paragraph which provides even more insight into definitional elements. As if to illustrate the process of self-determination and to offer a partial definition through the use of relevant examples, the General Assembly declared that "the establishment of a sovereign and independent State, the free association or integration with an independent State or the emergence into any other political status freely determined by a people constitute modes of implementing the right of self-determination by that people." What is most relevant is the free determination of the political status, not the particular form of that status. Thus, self-determination may result in the formation of a new state, a new bloc of states, or "any other political status" and, thus, implicitly the change of state, regional, and substate territorial boundaries.⁶

It seems incorrect, therefore, to define self-determination as the right of a state to maintain its present political status and, thus, its territorial integrity.⁷ Nowhere in the Charter or in subsequent United Nations declarations is self-determination posed as the right of states. It has always been considered in connection with a "peoples," who may compose part of the population within a given state or even part or all of the populations of several states.⁸ The obvious and critical question does not relate to state territorial boundaries per se; the critical question is: who are the "peoples" that are entitled to self-determination?⁹ What is the aggregated "self" among the relatively interdependent and independent groups of people that populate our planet to which this label of right and politico-legal description should properly attach? For example, might Jews of various states, consisting of a minority or majority in various states including Israel, constitute a "peoples"? Might Palestinians who constitute a minority in various states constitute a "peoples"?

Such questions are far different from questions posed with a status quo and territorial referent such as: is the state of Israel entitled to self-determination, is any given Arab state entitled to self-determination, or are the Arab states entitled to self-determination? Further, since the General Assembly did not tie the right of selfdetermination merely to political status but included the right to freely determine economic, social, and cultural rights, one can begin to imagine all sorts of possible applications of such a right beyond the confines of political institutions and status. For example, might not a given people, say American Indians of the Navajo nation or Soviet Jews, be entitled to pursue their own social and cultural determination whether or not they have a separate political or territorial-based status? The author believes that such a claim would be entirely consistent with the General Assembly declaration as well as with several important human rights.¹⁰ Moreover, the relatively free determination of Indian or Jewish social and cultural processes within the United States, for example, would pose no inconsistency. Within the United States, Indian and Jewish peoples might pursue their own social and cultural norms, mores, and so forth while also freely participating in another process of self-determination as citizens and participants in the political, economic, social, and cultural processes intermeshed under the label United States of America.¹¹

These last recognitions also compel awareness of the fact that no social or political process in the present global arena is completely free and "self-determined.¹² The interpenetrations, the global webs of economic, political, and ideological penetrations and interdeterminations, cause one to realize that a functional "self-determination" is a relative "self-determination." And the reverse is true, interdependence is a dynamic and relative interstimulation and interdetermination. Within such a global process then, one might expect the recognition of various sorts of "self-determination" processes as being compatible with, even promotive of, the basic goals of the United Nations Charter, human rights, and other aspects of international law. Indeed, to paraphrase President Wilson, these are socio-politico facts that scholars will henceforth ignore at their peril. For example, it is ludicrous now to argue that adherence to the principle of self-determination allows a given political elite to do whatever it wishes to its fellow citizens (e.g., by depriving individuals of their human right to freedom from torture or other inhumane, cruel, or degrading treatment).¹³

Expanding upon the last point, it is also ludicrous to argue that adherence to the principle of self-determination allows the same sort of political elite to dominate the people of a given state by violence and other human right deprivations and to exclude all other states from rendering any sort of military or economic assistance to the peoples within the state (whether or not they constitute a majority or minority) or to insist upon a maintenance of present state territorial boundaries as the legally recognized curtain behind which such an oppression can continue. Indeed, the legitimacy of self-determination assistance is recognized in the General Assembly Declaration on Principles of International Law, as demonstrable in the case of Bangladesh.¹⁴ Further, as some are apt to forget, the prohibition of territorial dismemberment or impairment is qualified in the General Assembly declaration. It does not recognize a right of present states to a territorial status quo, to territorial integrity uber alles;¹⁵ the prohibition applies only where the relevant state itself complies with the principle of equal rights and self-determination and is "thus possessed of a government representing the whole people belonging to the territory without distinction as to race, creed or colour."

This last quote from the General Assembly declaration contains a key definitional element. A state that complies with the principle of equal rights and self-determination is one possessed of a government representing each and every person—the whole people—belonging to its territory and a government that represents each and every person "without distinction as to race, creed or colour." No other state complies; no other political elite maintains its control in accordance with the "right" to self-determination. Indeed, without a free and full participation of a given peoples in the governmental process, it would be incorrect to state that such a people enjoy "the right freely to determine ... their political status" and it would surely be incorrect to state that the political elite govern in accordance with "the freely expressed will of the peoples concerned."¹⁶ Such a recognition is even more explicit in subsequent General Assembly resolutions—resolutions that not only condemn "the illegal racist minority regime" in Rhodesia but set forth certain "conditions [deemed] necessary to enable the people of Zimbabwe to exercise freely and fully their right to self-determination."¹⁷

For example, in 1971 the Assembly stressed the need for majority rule "on the basis of one man one vote,"¹⁸ and in 1974 the Assembly stressed the need for "attainment of independence by a democratic system of government" and the requirement that any form of independence "be endorsed freely and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Concept of Self-Determination
• Part 2 North and South America
• Part 3 Europe and the Soviet Union
• Part 4 Asia and Africa
• Part 5 The Middle East
• Part 6 International Law and the United Nations
• Part 7 Self-Determination: Future Prospects
• Selected Bibliography
• The Contributors
• Index