False hope is rightly defied
Melbourne Age January 6 2003
The Howard Government is correct to oppose the United Nations' proposed use of the term self-determination, argues Robert Horvath.
>From the recent criticism of the Howard Government's intransigence at the United Nations, one would think that ethnic self-determination must be a good thing. According to the Aboriginal activist Geoffrey Atkinson, the government's solitary opposition to the use of the term in the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was greeted by sarcasm and derision at the UN. If this is an ideological position, declared Atkinson, it is a very tragic one.
But what is really tragic here is the failure to grasp that self-determination is itself a highly ideological concept, with roots in 19th century illiberalism and revolutionary socialism. For much of the 20th century, it legitimised ethnic intolerance, guerrilla warfare and human rights abuses. The result is a trail of carnage that stretches from the Balkans to the Basque region, from Sri Lanka to Mindanao, from Eritrea to Zimbabwe.
The problem with national self-determination lies in its ambiguity. Despite the fact that it is legitimised by the UN Charter, no clear definition has ever been codified. As a result, it can mean anything from minority cultural rights to full statehood. In theory, a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber and a liberal intellectual defending the Turkish minority's language rights in Bulgaria are both advocates of ethnic self-determination.
The consequences of this blurring of boundaries are catastrophic. On the one hand, it encourages intolerant states to perceive civic activism in ethnic minorities as the beginning of a secessionist movement. On the other, it establishes statehood as the ultimate achievement of self-determination, and so benefits extremists within ethnic minorities.
The problems of self-determination can be traced to the fatal conjuncture of the Russian Revolution and Wilsonian diplomacy during the final years of World War I. When the Bolsheviks proclaimed national self-determination as the basis for a revolutionary reordering of Europe, they cynically exploited nationalism to destabilise multi-ethnic states. In the process, they were drawing not only on socialist rhetoric, but also on an illiberal nationalist tradition that stretched back, via the revolutions of 1848, to Fichte. For these nationalist militants, self-determination signified a kind of collective self-realisation that had little to do with liberal democracy.
Unfortunately, US president Woodrow Wilson tried to co-opt Bolshevik slogans, and adopted self-determination as the basis for a post-war peace settlement that would make the world safe for democracy. It was a project that alarmed his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, who warned that the phrase was loaded with dynamite: "It will raise hopes which can never be realised. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives . . . What a calamity the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!"
Lansing's warning was ignored, and the nation-states of the New Europe, constructed on the basis of self-determination, became cauldrons of virulent nationalism and frustrated aspirations. Wilson himself lamented to the Senate: "When I gave utterance to those words (that all nations had a right to self-determination), I said them without the knowledge that nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day . . . You do not know and cannot appreciate the anxieties that I have experienced as a result of many millions of people having their hopes raised by what I have said."
Barely a month after the signing of the Versailles Treaty, Wilson's slogan was incorporated into the program of the Nazi party, which demanded the union of all Germany in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of national self-determination. And it was Hitler who demonstrated the anti-democratic potential of national self-determination, when he convinced Western leaders at Munich in 1938 that for the Sudeten Germans, self-determination meant regimentation in the Third Reich, with its concentration camps, rather than living under the alien freedoms of Czechoslovakia, a multi-party democracy.
The uses of self-determination against human rights were well understood by communist and Third World dictatorships. In the 1960s and 1970s, these states were responsible for the adoption of a series of UN documents that employ self-determination to reinforce the prerogatives of the sovereign state. Unlike the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the two human rights covenants (1966) open with the right of peoples to self-determination, and hence to determine their political status, which is a code for the right of revolutionaries to establish one-party dictatorships.
At the same time, UN resolutions authorised armed struggle in the pursuit of national self-determination. In the process, they conferred legitimacy on a plethora of guerrilla movements, from the PLO to the Tamil Tigers, and justified senseless carnage that has claimed millions of lives across the Third World.
But there are signs that the heyday of self-determination may have passed. For all the sarcasm and derision directed at our diplomats at the UN, the Howard Government is not alone in its scepticism. In Eastern Europe, where the history of self-determination is a record of atrocities and "ethnic cleansing", two great dissident figures have spoken out against self-determination as an obstacle to human rights. In 1993, against the backdrop of the Bosnian civil war, Vaclav Havel warned the Council of Europe against the temptation to open the back gate to the demons of nationalist collectivism with an apparently innocent emphasis on minority rights and on the right of minorities to self-determination.
For Havel, the notion of self-determination calls into question the very principle of civil society and the indivisible rights of the individual, as well as the certainty that only democracy, individual human rights and freedoms, and the civic principle, can guarantee the genuinely full development of even that aspect of one's identity represented by membership in a nationality.
Another outspoken critic of self-determination is Sergei Kovalyov, the former prisoner of conscience, who is today a Duma deputy and the leading Russian human rights defender. No public figure in Russia has spoken out so consistently in defence of the rights of indigenous peoples as Kovalyov, who endured Russian bombardment while exposing the horrors of the destruction of Grozny. But, like Havel, Kovalyov contends that the concept of self-determination runs contrary to individual human rights. In a multi-ethnic state, he argues, the achievement of self-determination for one group invariably means the reduction of another group to second-class citizenship.
Unlike Australia's sarcastic critics in Geneva, Kovalyov's insights are not based on the cliches of UN declarations, but on the brutal realities of ethnic persecution in the wreckage of the Soviet empire. Too many crimes against humanity have been committed in the name of self-determination. There is no place in international law for this incendiary slogan, the bastard child of Bolshevik propaganda and Wilsonian idealism. The UN should be defending multi-ethnic democracies and encouraging coexistence and dialogue between cultures, not separatism and the quest for ethnic statehood.
Dr Robert Horvath is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Melbourne. E-mail: r.horvath at history.unimelb.edu.au