Published in The Kathmandu Post
MAY 15 -
Self-determination has been a topic of discourse since the
emergence of the nation state in Europe. Demands for autonomy and
self-government grew to counter the assimilation policies of the
Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman empires. Demands for local
independence also increased. Self-determination was considered a form of
collective assertion of the people against different forms of colonial
domination. Consequently, the invocation of self-determination was considered
to be a political tool—a means to justify overthrowing an alien governing
power.As a sign of the end of the First World War, the Peace Treaties were designed to punish the defeated state and redraw the map of Europe in such a way that defeated states were carved out to create new ones. Self-determination was employed as a tool to break up the old empires. President Woodrow Wilson was considered an advocate of self-determination because he viewed the role of the victorious powers as liberators, dividing the defeated empires for the ‘benefit’ of the populations concerned. But big colonisers like Britain and France did not buy this principle as they sought to retain their colonies.
Self-determination, as a principle, was expressly mentioned in international law for the first time in 1945 in Articles 1(2) and 55 of the Charter of the United Nations. The underlying objective of introducing self-determination as a right under the ambit of the UN was the desire to end colonisation. The original intention was for the term to apply solely to state under colonial domination, collectively exercising their right to decide whether to become independent or not. Though it was introduced in the 1945 UN document (the UN Charter), the right to self-determination was intentionally not mentioned in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is considered the principal document of human rights principles. The former document accepted it, not as the rights of an individual (not as a human rights), but as the right of a group (a strategic tool to divest from the colonial powers).
The accepted view of self-determination is that it is a right exercised primarily by the people living under colonial regimes, which could be exercised once, and once only, to remove the colonial regime in question. But its application to peoples living under non-colonial domination is not apparent, giving rise to the question of ‘territorial integrity’. Article 2 (4) of the UN Charter and declaration 7 of the 1960 UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries reminds the principle of ‘respect of territorial integrity’.
In Czechoslovakia, the population voted to separate and become two states—the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The formal cessation occurred on January 1, 1993. This is a clear example of a peaceful exercise of self-determination on the part of peoples concerned. Very recently, Sudan was divided into two different nation-states as a new example of exercising right to self-determination. Is the Nepali debate on right to self-determination aiming at for a similar fate (or design)?
The ongoing Israel-Palestine war is another fire-breathing claim for the right to self-determination. The designation and re-designation of the Gaza Strip and the transfer of Bethlehem to Palestinian rule in 1995 is a success story for the ongoing Palestinian war for self-determination.
But the UN has been imposing different standards in the application of the right to self-determination. In the case of Macau and Hong Kong, these territories were easily accepted as belonging to China without mention of the right to the inhabitants of those territories to self-determination after a long history of colonisation. Even in India, the formation of Pakistan was the result of the exercise of the Muslim people’s right to self-determination. But Sikhs in India, who also sought for similar right, had to face brutal suppression.
Similarly, the issue of self-determination emerged during the collapse of the communist regimes of the Eastern bloc of Europe.
The West had developed the following criteria in order to claim a separate internal autonomous state with the right to self-determination.
a) a common historical tradition
b) racial and ethnic identity
c) cultural homogeneity
d) territorial connection,
e) common economic life
f) will of the general people to be recognised
as a homogenous entity of ‘people’
But modern societies turned out to be so plural in construct that now, very rarely does any society fulfill these characteristics in order to claim an ethnic/ linguistic/ religious state with a right to self-determination. The West’s own political tool has thus become dysfunctional.
Many existing and emerging nation-states are unable or have failed to satisfy the criteria of the Montevideo Convention on 1933 on the Rights and Duties of State which is considered as the modern statement of the criteria to be fulfilled by an entity seeking recognised statehood. Self-determination has been redefined as a tool to engage in the internal politics of other nation-states through the means of the UN Charter or through ‘sponsored’ rights discourses.
Claims for ethnic, cultural, and religious self-determination are, in general, problematic. Because colonialism has virtually come to end (at least in direct political/military form), it is inevitable that attempts will be made to seek further re-definition of self-determination. The external self-determination (in the decolonisation phase of the world) has now been diverted to ‘internal’ self-determination claims. Considering the origin of the conception of the idea of the right to self-determination, and also the facts on how this tool was historically used to secede from the colonial powers, it is now an out-dated political instrument, only exercised by neo-colonisers to threaten the integrity of the nation-states that are reluctant to become the puppets of their increasing global military and/or economic power.
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