Self determination, sovereignty, territorial integrity and the right to secession

The right to self-determination has become one of the most complex issues for U.S. foreign policymakers and the international community at large. Confusion over the issue stems not so much from whether there exists a right to self-determination, which is included in many international human rights documents, but from the failure of those documents to define exactly who is entitled to claim this right—a group, a people, or a nation—and what exactly the right confers.

At the same time, the international system, particularly in the post–World War II era, has steadfastly defended the inviolability of existing nation-states’ borders, regardless of how and when they were determined.

The absence of a precise definition of what the right to self-determination entails has left the international community, and the states concerned, without guiding principles with which to respond.

Recognizing the challenge to peace posed by demands for self-determination (and governments’ responses to them), the United States Institute of Peace, working with the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of State, assembled a group of policymakers and scholars to examine the origins, growth, and strategies of such movements, and to discuss whether universal principles can be developed to inform international, and particularly U.S., responses. This report summarizes the discussions at that meeting.

Self-determination became officially sanctioned after 1945, when it was included in the United Nations Charter, though it applied to existing states, not to peoples or national groups. However, selfdetermination quickly evolved from a principle to a right, especially after the 1960 UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Peoples, when the term came to denote decolonization. Still, self-determination applied to territories and not to peoples.

Since the 1970s, there has been a move to combine the ideas of minority rights and decolonization, and the result has been a tendency on the part of some advocates to define self-determination as conferring the right to independent statehood on every distinctive ethnic group.

Many observers of this trend share the concern that confusion about what the principle of selfdetermination means and what putative rights it confers is helping to fuel the violence characterizing contemporary independence movements. Yet the realities of the international system provide a rationale of sorts for such movements, including the view that internationally recognized borders are “artificial, arbitrary, and accidental” and that they in fact legitimize the combining of different peoples arbitrarily, and often against their will, within the same territory.

Moreover, the growth of these movements is not a temporary phenomenon, but the direct result of changes in the world wrought by the universal application of Western ideas such as democracy and human rights. Most of the world’s peoples have little experience with the West’s long history of sovereignty and statehood and are thus not prepared to adhere to the Western insistence on the inviolability of existing borders. Those in the West who are alarmed by the growth of these nationalist movements should consider not whether these contemporary manifestations of nationalism are legal or appropriate, but rather that they are happening—and that they very likely cannot be stopped.

Unfortunately, turning to international legal standards on the right to self-determination does not resolve the problem, since the right has never been explicitly defined.

In any case, it is impractical to assume that legal principles alone will resolve what are essentially territorial and political disputes. Because the right has never been defined, the notion of self-determination typically embraces several different meanings, none of which addresses the central issue of how to respond to a national or other identity group’s aspirations for control over the lives of its members.

Without a doubt, any new definition of selfdetermination must include customary human rights standards (e.g. respect for individual and minority rights) and the right of an appropriate body to enforce those standards.

Graham Fuller of the RAND Corporation declared that the United States must be prepared to understand the world “not the way it ought to be, but the way it is,” since all too often in the case of selfdetermination and other nationalist movements “the law is running after reality.”

In examining the causes behind the outbreak of self-determination movements, several realities of today’s world simply cannot be ignored. First, Fuller maintained that existing borders between internationally recognized nation-states are “artificial, arbitrary, and accidental.” Furthermore, they are not permanent. Second, although some states, mostly in the West, are a reflection of the congruence of ethnic and territorial boundaries, most are not so constituted. These other states are typically “mini-empires” or even greater empires of ethnically distinct peoples who find themselves arbitrarily forced to live within the same borders.

Third, the current concern over self-determination is not merely a “post-Soviet blip”; that is, the dilemma is not just a regional, short-term phase following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Many peoples around the globe are going through their own process of self-discovery. More than ever before, these peoples seek liberation to “get back to their history.” The origins of this self-discovery process, Fuller said, are many. There is a growing international awareness that “things do not have to be they way they are,” as identity groups discover that they no longer have to endure intolerable forms of government. This awareness has been accelerated by the contemporary application of the Western heritage of democracy and human rights, and the peculiarly American notion of individual fulfillment. It is Americans, Fuller maintained, who are in fact “corrupting the rest of the world” with these ideas.

According to Fuller, it is perhaps ironic that the attraction to democratic values encourages ethnic self-awareness and, in some cases, secessionist movements. Though it may be a cliché, it is evident that the revolutionary developments in mass communications are largely responsible for the spread of these ideas. In many instances, the introduction of such democratic values as freedom of speech, assembly, and the press are accelerating the development of minority groups’ self-awareness and, in some cases, demands for greater autonomy or even independence.

Summaries from the report of a Roundtable held in February 1995 by the United States Institute of Peace in conjunction with the US Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff - Patricia Carley.