S ELF -D ETERMINATION

Betty Miller Unterberger

The principle of self-determination refers to the right of a people to determine its own political destiny. Beyond this broad definition, however, no legal criteria determine which groups may legitimately claim this right in particular cases. The right to self-determination has become one of the most complex issues facing policymakers in the United States and the international community at large. At the close of the twentieth century, it could mean the right of people to choose their form of government within existing borders or by achieving independence from a colonial power. It could mean the right of an ethnic, linguistic, or religious group to redefine existing national borders to achieve a separate national sovereignty or simply to achieve a greater degree of autonomy and linguistic or religious identity within a sovereign state. It could even mean the right of a political unit within a federal system such as Canada, Czechoslovakia, the former Soviet Union, or the former Yugoslavia to secede from the federation and become an independent sovereign state.

Self-determination is a concept that can be traced back to the beginning of government. The right has always been cherished by all peoples, although history has a long record of its denial to the weak by the strong. Both the Greek city-states and the earlier Mesopotamian ones were jealous of their right to self-determination. Yet to the Greeks, non-Greeks were barbarians, born to serve them and the object of conquest if they refused to submit. The development of modern states in Europe and the rise of popular national consciousness enhanced the status of self-determination as a political principle, but it was not until the period of World War I that the right of national independence came to be known as the principle of national self-determination. In general terms, it was simply the belief that each nation had a right to constitute an independent state and to determine its own government.

The historian Alfred Cobban has said that not every kind of national revolt can be included under the description of self-determination. The movement for national independence, or self-determination, falls into the same category as utilitarianism, communism, or Jeffersonian democracy. It is a theory, a principle, or an idea, and no simple, unconscious national movement can be identified with it. Struggles like the rising of the French under the inspiration of Joan of Arc or the Hussite Wars are fundamentally different from the national movements of the last two hundred years because of the absence of a theory of national self-determination, which could appear only in the presence of a democratic ideology.

See also A NTI -I MPERIALISM ; H UMAN R IGHTS ; I MPERIALISM ; I NTERVENTION AND N ONINTERVENTION ; R EALISM AND I DEALISM ; R EVOLUTION ; W ILSONIANISM .