As democracy spreads, new countries will be born

In 1921, the 28th President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, gave freedom-loving people everywhere new hope when he declared that "no people must be forced under a sovereignty under which it does not wish to live." Since then, the number of sovereign states in the world has more than tripled. In the process, self-determination aspirations have clashed with territorial integrity, but in most of these cases, the democracy and human rights to self-determination have trumped the stale statism of territorial integrity.

The self-determination right principle looks invulnerable, simply because it lacks any convincing counter-arguments in a system where the state serves society, where human rights are top priority, and where popular will is the source of any power. Borders are not written in stone, and they evolve along with human evolution. Or are we to suspend reality and operate on the false belief that the grotesque European borders and artificial nations that have wrought so much chaos in places like the Congo, Nigeria, Somalia and Iraq are going to be permanent?

These colonial creations were held together by and large throughout the Cold War, but that is changing. Southern Sudan (which votes on independence in 5 more years), Kurdish Iraq, Pridnestrovie (also known as Transnistria), Katanga (Congo) and Baluchistan will all likely see independent or autonomous realities within the next decade. A US policy of standing athwart history, yelling “Stop”, is bound to fail. Trying to sacrifice geographical, ethnic and demographic common sense at the altar of stability is going to prove untenable over time, as our problems in Iraq with the largely three separate communities of Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis prove.

Border changes are a common part of the world's shared heritage. In a 2001 presentation with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, Prince Hans-Adam II, Liechtenstein's head of state, highlighted cases where, in his words, "present borders have not been established in a democratic process" as factors where a claim to territorial integrity is no longer the overriding principle:
"States have lifecycles similar to those of human beings who created them. Hardly any member state of the United Nations has existed within its present borders for longer than five generations. The attempt to freeze human evolution has in the past been a futile undertaking and has probably brought about more violence than if such a process had been controlled peacefully."

When history is written, it will be seen that our current rigid adherence to territorial integrity over self-determination was an aberration which was only adhered to during the Cold War period of conflict between superpowers where it was politically expedient to not upset the delicate balance of power. Today, considerations of fairness, democracy and freedom has given way to political maneuvering and the international community now uses a realist application of self-determination where counter-party claims of territorial integrity are only one factor when considering the whole picture.

This is a return to historical norms where the right of a people to choose how and by who it should be governed have, since the time of the French and American revolutions, trumped the desires of metropolitan states. The principle of self-determination is the principle of freedom, born on the barricades and in the trenches of the French and American revolutions. Since then, more than one hundred new countries have come into being through unilateral declarations of independence, most of them without asking anyone's permission or observing, as it were, the "territorial integrity" of some outside power. With the continued growth of democracy, new countries will be born.

As recognized by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2625(XXV), the claim to territorial integrity is not an absolute claim overriding all others. And lately, the principle of the territorial integrity of states has become less sacrosanct. International law is rife with precedence where legitimate claims to self-determination supercede the often limited claims to territorial integrity.

We can ignore history, culture, religious sects and demographics and try to milk a few years out of an antiquated colonial nightmare, or we can move on to the sweeping AND gradual alterations of borders and nations that are bound to happen sooner than later. Granted, a multitude of options exist for how these (and other) hypothetical borders will come about; free trade zones, conflict corridors or bloody fundamentalist nightmares realized. But where peaceful change is possible, through democratic referenda, the world must lend its hand to consult the people and make it happen. More so, as is the case of Pridnestrovie, where such change merely represents a return to the historic border and a once-and-for-all rejection of an artifical construct made in haste by two of history's worst dictators, Stalin and Hitler. The time to face up to history is now.

Eddie Beaver of the United States 7th fleet is the author of Live From The FDNF.
Assigned to the Navy’s Forward Deployed Naval Forces (FDNF), he is currently stationed on the 'USS Kitty Hawk', the world's only permanently forward-deployed aircraft carrier. The opinions expressed here are his own.