Project Descriptionx

Self-Determination In Focus, a project supported largely by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, aims to provide comprehensive analysis of self-determination demands around the globe and of the implications for national sovereignty and global governance. It will do this by bringing together under one virtual roof—the FPIF's "think tank without walls"—scholars, activists, and government officials from around the world. The resulting synthesis will raise understanding of the new dimensions of international security among all three sectors. In this way, the project will help create a consensus of how nongovernmental organizations, governments, and inter-governmental organizations can—by acting together—reconceptualize traditional concepts of sovereignty and governance in ways that peaceably and adequately address self-determination concerns.

Short- and Long-Term Goals

Project Methodology

Self-Determination: Evolution of Concept
Sovereignty Under Attack: Fragmentation and Integration
New and Integrated Policy Analysis Needed

Short- and Long-Term Goals

The Future of Self-Determination, Sovereignty, and Governance project will--through a series of policy briefs, special reports, electronic publications, an online clearinghouse, and several forums--address the intra-state tensions sparked by self-determination demands and minority-majority tensions. These self-determination demands range from secession and independence, to semiautonomous local rule, to nondiscrimination and political pluralism. In most cases, the self-determination campaigns are waged by minorities who form a majority locally, but constitute an oppressed minority nationally.

Self-determination conflicts cannot be addressed in isolation from the proximate factors contributing to intra-state tensions. Cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences seldom are the sole cause of these conflicts. Profound transformations in the global political economy and in the planet's environment are undermining confidence in and the legitimacy of traditional forms of national and international governance, contributing to increasing outbreaks of intra-state violence and thereby prompting increased calls for external intervention. The international security problem posed by a rising wave of self-determination struggles is compounded by the lack of integrated policy analysis by scholars, involved civil society organizations, and policymakers.

In addressing this policy gap, the project will seek to achieve several short- and long-term objective. The overriding goal is to help advance and to build a broad consensus around policy reforms that create instruments and norms of governance that allow self-determination concerns to be peaceably resolved.

Short-Term Goals

Increase intellectual engagement (through FPIF's "think tank without walls") among scholars and nongovernmental organizations about possible approaches for preventing and resolving intra-national conflicts—with particular attention to the role of the U.S. government and civil society organizations.
Draw attention to self-determination movements and issues that will likely—in the absence of enlightened international attention—lead to violent conflict.
Build a foundation for an active international network of experts—from the university, policy, NGO, and think-tank sectors—that can advance new thinking and policies about the self-determination-sovereignty-governance conundrum.
Respond to emerging self-determination crises with timely, constructive policy analysis.

Long-Term Goals

Institutionalize new thinking about U.S. and multilateral responses to intra-national disputes involving self-determination demands.
Manage an established electronic network and interactive clearinghouse on issues of self-determination and governance.
Play a key role through our analysis and policy recommendations in shaping more coherent and effective responses by NGOs in mediating, monitoring, and building cross-cultural understanding.

Project Methodology

To enable the project to meet its goal of making original and useful contributions on the subject of self-determination in the changing international context of national sovereignty and global governance, the project directors will establish the following methodology:

We will first assign policy briefs that address country- and region-specific issues of self-determination, before assigning any thematic policy analysis. From specific cases, we will be better positioned to select authors to write on broader themes. All contracted experts will be asked to address the same set of questions in the course of their analysis. In this way, the project directors will be better able to direct comparative studies and advance new and well-grounded policy recommendations. The following is a set of questions that all project documents will address:

What regional and global factors contributed to the rise of this particular self-determination struggle?
What is the character of the self-determination struggle—both in type of constituency and in type of demand?
Can domestic political structures be reformed or restructured to foster pluralism (political and cultural) and to address self-determination concerns, thereby preventing or diminishing violence?
Is external intervention—from increased political/economic aid, to unilateral, regional, international military intervention—warranted, and what are the most appropriate forms and objectives of such intervention?
What are the forms of global governance and the kinds of global norms that help resolve self-determination concerns before they generate violent conflict?

All project documents will be subject to a peer review process of three readers, including at least one non-U.S. expert. This referee process catches errors, refines analysis, and strengthens argumentation. It also helps expand and consolidate the virtual think tank. Writers who submit drafts are asked to supply the name of at least one expert who has differences of opinion with their analytical or prescriptive approach.

Writers will be asked to frame their recommendations with particular attention to actions the U.S. government and U.S. citizen groups should take. This U.S. policy focus is in keeping with the Foreign Policy In Focus mission to provide policy analysis that helps make the U.S. a "more responsible global leader and global partner." In addition, writers will be asked to devote special attention to the actual and potential ways that civil society organizations do/can play a critical role in deescalating and resolving tensions raised by self-determination demands.

Self-Determination:
Evolution of Concept

By Tom Barry, Codirector, Foreign Policy In Focus
and analyst with Interhemispheric Resource Center

The peaceful coexistence of religious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities has for five centuries been an abiding concern in the construction of norms for international relations. As nation-states emerged out of Christendom and the Ottoman Empire, rulers and conquerors sought protection for minority groups (usually coreligionists). The new nation-states were, for the most part, multiethnic, multireligious, and multilinguistic entities-not the homogenous societies of national myth. The Peace of Augsburg and later the Peace of Westphalia not only established the concept of autonomous rule (allowing no external intervention in internal affairs) by nation-states but also included agreements guaranteeing the rights of minorities. From its beginning, then, the concept of national sovereignty included limits on state autonomy and recognized the collective rights of minorities.

Such concerns about minority rights continued even as religious strife faded as a cause for war. In the Paris Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson warned, "Nothing is more likely to disturb the peace in the world than the treatment of minorities." The League of Nations did incorporate within its charter and instruments means to address minority concerns, but U.S. resistance to dealing formally with minority concerns (and U.S. nonparticipation in this pilot project in global governance) kept minority treatment from becoming a prominent international concern.

In the aftermath of World War II, the victors created new institutions of global governance, establishing the nation-state as the building block for international peace and enshrining the respect for human rights as an international norm. The United States, which was largely responsible for forming the new institutions for global governance, embraced the concept of human rights, but opposed creating norms addressing minority rights. The term "self-determination" was included in the UN Charter, but its framers limited its meaning to "nations" and "peoples," rather than interpreting it more broadly to encompass the collective rights of minority groups or of those groups not laying claim to a particular territory.

The U.S. government, which didn't have the extensive colonizing history of its European allies or of the Axis powers, backed a working definition of self-determination that covered anticolonial struggles and was at the same time sufficiently abstract to embrace the causes of the subjected peoples of the Soviet Union. Fearing rampant political instability, the framers of the new order did not want to raise a standard of self-determination that would include the causes of oppressed minority groups—or even of oppressed majorities (as in South Africa). Neither did the rulers of newly independent states in Africa, for example, or the governments in Latin American countries with large indigenous populations want to approve a more expansive interpretation of self-determination. To recognize minority rights to internal or external self-determination would, it was thought, give rein to widespread political instability. In this way, the post-World War II system of international governance distanced itself from earlier humanitarian concerns about the treatment of minority groups, in the interest of stabilizing the nation-state and setting standards for the relationship between the state and the individual—rather than with a minority group.

Pressing Need to Find New Solutions

For all those concerned about global affairs, the first and most fundamental question to be addressed must be: How can we create systems of governance that prevent deadly conflicts? As we enter the 21st century, there is a pressing need to find new answers to this persistent question—largely this means addressing the issue of the treatment of minorities within national and global structures of governance. These questions are generally concerned with the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities and oppressed majorities (sometimes called ethnic-political minorities).

Events in the 1990s highlighted the causal link between the mistreatment of minorities and conflict. Such conflicts are the most likely cause of violence in our era, and Foreign Policy In Focus believes that the formulation of a cohesive set of national and multilateral policy responses and international norms to address self-determination demands is a national and global security imperative.

Many factors spark new self-determination struggles by traditional minority groups, including worsening socioeconomic and environmental conditions, disintegration of dominant forms of governance, and manipulation of religious and ethnic issues by external forces and ambitious domestic leaders. When modest demands for nondiscrimination and limited forms of self-determination are not met, political tensions increase and demands escalate—leading too often to violent conflict and calls for external intervention (as the tragic course of events in Kosovo so dramatically illustrated).

By some estimates, more than four million people died in the 1990s as a result of violent political conflict. The presence of such horror in our midst should not, however, be interpreted to mean that we humans have utterly failed our most important test—namely that we have not yet succeeded in designing instruments of governance that prevent disputes among us from erupting into war. Similarly, rushing to blame the shortcomings and failures of our current norms and structures of governance serves little purpose.

Three Challenges

The first challenge we face in addressing this question about preventing deadly conflicts in the future is to acknowledge and understand that humankind is facing profound transformations. An array of emerging and converging forces—economic, environmental, technological, social, and political—are dramatically altering the context for effective governance. These forces play out in a new international political era-one that replaces a half-century shaped by a superpower rivalry that threatened to end in nuclear conflagration, but which served to stabilize the politics of client states. Among the main features of the new era are the rise of intra-state conflict fueled principally by ethnic and religious tensions, the sweep of free-market imperatives, the unprecedented challenges to state autonomy, U.S. dominance, and the crisis of identity and legitimacy wracking institutions of global governance. The end of the bipolar world order, in which each superpower sought to maintain stable client states, has also contributed to destabilizing currents.

This new global conjuncture has created new dimensions of international security. Unfortunately—but predictably—acknowledgment of this new context for international security has been slow in coming, particularly within official circles. To some degree, failure to adjust is due to political concepts that took shape during the cold war period. To meet this first challenge, then, will require that we grasp the character of the transformational forces of our era and convincingly describe the associated new dimensions of international security. It will require national and international security regimes to reorder and downsize to make room for new security thinking that focuses not on regional theaters of international conflict but on intra-state conflicts.

The second challenge then is to lay out—and advocate—appropriate policy responses to these new dimensions of security. Like the first challenge, this second one will require concerted intellectual engagement. It will require a fundamental process of revisioning such fundamental concepts as self-determination, sovereignty, and governance at a time when nation-states' secessionist movements are proliferating (at the rate of 3.1 new countries annually), and demands for local autonomy are spreading among national minorities.

Tacking on the new dimensions to the old conceptions of national and international security is not sufficient, and indeed may be dangerous to the extent that obsolete security regimes are given new portfolios. Traditional military establishments, based in outdated national security doctrine, may not be the best guardians of the new dimensions of security, including those concerning the environment, international criminal/drug cartels, information flows, and conflict prevention.

Key to meeting this second challenge will be new thinking about the appropriate national, regional, and international responses to self-determination demands. Clearly, minority rights as a prominent concern of international relations needs to be reinserted into discussions of the parameters of national sovereignty and global governance. Also, it is now apparent that minority rights should not be subsumed into the purview of human rights law and that the advocacy of democratic political procedures is not enough to guarantee the collective rights of minority groups, such as indigenous populations.

Advancing policies that bolster the legitimacy of the state and global institutions—the two mighty but crumbling pillars of peace and security—is essential. The legitimacy of the nation-state and its government's exercise of sovereignty is not primarily legalistic, resting on the language of past treaties that drew the national boundaries. Similarly, the legitimacy of international institutions rests on more than the founding charters of these entities. Governance at all levels has legitimacy when it provides for the security and welfare of those governed, and its legitimacy starts to erode when citizens believe that the institutions of governance do not represent their interests. Although restoring legitimacy to traditional structures will go a long way toward reducing deadly conflicts, these efforts must be accompanied by innovative mechanisms of governance that respond directly to the parallel forces of fragmentation and integration that are roiling the global political economy.

In real terms, this means adopting new international norms that address self-determination concerns. It means creating new avenues of multilateral political aid that go beyond the narrow focus on political pluralism and electoral political systems that mimic U.S. and European ones, to address ways to protect collective political rights. It will require a new political will to increase international conflict prevention, monitoring, and resolution mechanisms.

The third challenge is to reach out and involve new actors in local, national, and global governance. Security doctrine can no longer be left to the elites from the academy, government, and business. Just as cross-border citizen movements, iconoclast scholars, and thoughtful members of the business community have been in the forefront of both identifying and, often, fueling the era's transformational forces, and of auguring new dimensions of security, so too must these voices now be incorporated into forging the new instruments of governance—ones that respond innovatively to the push and pull of fragmenting and integrative forces.

Responding to this third challenge implies a resolution of some of the main dilemmas of global affairs. Scholars, advocates, and officials (national and multilateral) will need to define the terms of engagement, answering such questions as the following: How can nongovernmental organizations be given an increased role in governance without further undermining the legitimacy of governments and further eroding national sovereignty? How can citizen demands for more local control and democracy be reconciled with competing demands for improved global governance? How can policies bestow increased credibility and participation by nongovernmental movements without fomenting movements for self-determination of ethnic and religious groupings? How can new instruments of governance be created without reducing the purview of existing instruments of national and international governance? How can civil society's role in determining and monitoring international norms be institutionalized without fueling interventionist responses and further strengthening the control exercised by the developed world over the internal affairs of the developing nations? How can viable new states be created or autonomy be granted based on internationally sponsored negotiation, rather than violent conflict?

These three challenges—understanding new global dynamics, advancing appropriate policy responses, and involving nonstate actors—to maintaining peace and stability all relate to the future of self-determination, sovereignty, and governance in the 21st century.

Sovereignty under Attack: Fragmentation and Integration

For three and a half centuries the nation-state and the attendant concepts of national self-determination and national sovereignty have been central to international order. Representing an advance from the competing, chaotic, crisscrossing (and ever bloody) claims of allegiance of the medieval order, the Westphalian solution of territorial sovereignty in the mid-17th century represented an advance in civilization. Within prescribed geographical borders, central governments would be the only legitimate instruments of violence and taxation. The aggressive crossing of one country's border by another country's forces was defined as a violation of this order—thus justifying an armed response and international attention. In contrast, conflicts within nation-state were typically viewed as domestic matters, outside the purview of the international community.

Although the emergence of the nation-state in the 17th century did not eliminate war, it did set the stage for further advances in the institutionalization of the rule of law in global affairs. It took a long time—centuries of international conflicts—but eventually the concept of the collective security of nations emerged, and from this concept arose the League of Nations and the United Nations. The emergence of the nation-state also set the stage for the struggle for democratic control. Governments that controlled these new nation-states could exercise sovereign control only to the extent that they were regarded as legitimate.

The American Revolution of the late 18th century marked a major advance in defining sovereignty and legitimacy. It enshrined the concept of government for and by the people, becoming a model for democratic struggles for representation around the globe. It also established a successful precedent for a struggle for self-determination. It was not, however, until two centuries later—after the mutually afflicted destruction of the world wars—that the hopes raised by the American Revolution for self-determination by colonized peoples were to be realized. The world wars left the colonial political order and mercantile economic order in ruins.

But from these ruins did not arise the new economic and political order based on the visionary principles of the UN charter and the UN conventions. Instead, the longing for international peace felt the world over was quickly overshadowed by the nuclear standoff of the cold war years. The bipolar imperial order left little room for democratic political development at the national or international level, as the two superpowers sought to create and maintain pliant client states. But after four decades of political stasis, the cold war era gave way to a post-cold war era characterized by economic integration, social disintegration, rising challenges to national sovereignty, and an identity crisis in the global institutions created in the 1940s.

Coincident with (and also a causal factor of) the end of the cold war was the rise of new production and marketing systems that accompanied revolutionizing advances in information and communications technology—that is, globalization. Paralleling the integrative forces of economic globalization—such as the rise in cross-border capital flows, new production-sharing systems, intrafirm international trade, and transnational megacorporations—was the rise of the now-dominant ideology of free-marketism. And facilitating this integration of goods and capital markets were new bilateral, regional, and multilateral trade/investment agreements that eroded the economic significance of political borders.

The revolution in communications and information technology has also driven a process of social, cultural, and political integration—the implications of which we are only beginning to grasp. Increasingly, people are becoming global citizens not only in conviction but also in practice. Global climate change and other signs of transboundary environmental degradation have sparked global webs of citizen activism that challenge national and multilateral policies alike.

Integrating trends push against the projections of national sovereignty from the outside, while fragmenting trends pull apart sovereignty from the inside. In part, the forces of fragmentation are the flip side of economic globalization. The disintegration of effective governance at the national and global level is also a factor of the new political conjuncture—one in which the authoritarian regimes of the cold war period have lost their raison d'être and credibility, thereby creating new political space for dissidence and civil conflict. The politics of fragmentation are most evident in the former Soviet bloc nations. But these separatist politics have also gained ground in regions of the "free world" where the authoritarian "national security states" of the cold war have lost the legitimacy they once may have had.

In its wake, globalization has created waves of insecurity as former social contracts have dissolved, labor markets have integrated internationally, governments have found themselves helpless before global bond markets, and market-savvy cultural expressions (mainly, though not exclusively, American) have become pervasive. This sense of insecurity in the face of impersonal market forces has resulted in a backlash against globalization and a rise in identity politics around the world. The inability of nation-states in this age of globalization to provide for the security and livelihood of their citizens undermines the legitimacy of governments. Religious and ethnic pluralism has given way to separatist violence as economic tensions mount and earlier social contracts fade. Nationalist impulses based on self-determination principles are tearing territorial states apart and generating civil conflicts in which there are too often only Pyrrhic victories. The same forces of fragmentation are fueling a reactionary populism, waving the banner of national sovereignty, of both rightist and leftist origins, calling for nations to protect ethnic integrity and lifestyles against the incursion of foreign labor and foreign goods—while also protesting all manifestations of global governance.

The forces of integration and fragmentation are rocking the post-cold war political order, increasing the urgency for the need to reconstitute the concepts of self-determination, nation-state, national sovereignty, and governance. In the process of reshaping these concepts to meet the exigencies of our time, we will also be answering the question of how best to prevent deadly conflicts in the future.

New and Integrated Policy Analysis Needed

New thinking and policy analysis is needed to address the changing dimensions of international security. Particular attention should be devoted to new challenges to the legitimacy of traditional instruments of national and global governance presented by the rise in demands for self-determination (internal and external). Responsibility for this new thinking should not be limited to the traditional sources of global affairs analysis. Just as the concepts of security, sovereignty, and governance need to be recast because of the profound transformations in global affairs, so too should the sources and instruments of this new thinking be new and innovative.

Fortunately, neither the policy environment nor the actual course of international relations is devoid of positive developments. The diplomatic community is responding to the post-World War II absence of international norms and instruments to address minority rights. Symbolizing this new attention was the Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious, and Linguistic Minorities by the UN General Assembly in 1992. The Organizations of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has taken numerous initiatives to monitor and resolve conflicts involving minorities, including the creation of new norms and instruments. This "rediscovery of minorities" in the 1990s, as Stephen Krasner has described it, was also evident in the flawed Dayton Accord of 1995 with the creation of a Human Rights Court to adjudicate ethnic cleansing charges. New, constructive initiatives to address demands for semiautonomy have emerged in Britain, Spain, and Germany.

With the international diplomatic community there has been a marked movement away from hard-line formulations of nation-state sovereignty. There has also been positive movement toward recognition that new political structures are needed to maintain (and foster) cultural pluralism and nondiscriminatory treatment of minorities (and dominated majorities) within national boundaries. The rash of intra-state conflicts driven by the politics of collective identity has reaffirmed the predictions of Isaiah Berlin about the dynamic force of nationalism in modern terms. Modernization does not necessarily diminish nationalist sentiment. Indeed, as disadvantaged minorities suffer because of evolving politics and economic transformations, they often appeal to their collective cultural identities as a way to assert their human dignity—just as so many "bent twigs" spring back after being pushed aside. In the UN, at regional forums, and to a lesser extent in national policy circles, demands for self-determination are being evaluated in terms of conflict resolution, structural changes in internal political systems, and increasing intercultural understanding.

Progress is also evident in the sphere of political aid, as the stress on creating electoral systems is accompanied by small programs to encourage cultural understanding and to address the political concerns of the disenfranchised. For the most part, there is a rejection of the belief that intra-state conflicts are unavoidable because of ancient hatreds and of the proposition that the world inevitably faces a clash of civilizations. Instead, there is a conviction that maintaining cultures and in increasing cross-cultural understanding is important.

At the same time that there are more positive responses to the fracturing tendencies in global politics, there are also encouraging signs that the integrative features of globalization may reduce the social divides. The consolidation of the EU and the widespread acceptance of human rights norms are making way for a pan-European identity that may stem fractious ethnic and religious politics. The information age, ushered in by a revolution in communications technology, increases cross-cultural understanding and decreases reliance on traditional institutions for information. As a result of new information flows and exchanges, members of cultural groups are altering their identities and redefining their interests.

Economic integration is increasing a sense of interdependence, diminishing nationalist reaction. The emergence of vast civil society networks are fostering a new sense of transnational identity as their members consider themselves global citizens and even talk of "earth nationalism." Also hopeful is expanding understanding based on the acceptance of international norms that organized violence is not inevitable and is seldom justified. In the ruins of the international violence of the first half of the twentieth century, the failures of revolutionary wars, and intra-state violence of the century’s last decade, the seeds of a new culture of negotiated solutions have been planted.

International politics is not like the "game of chess" with its fixed rules, as Krasner observed. New rules and new norms are possible and needed to conduct international affairs. The old rules about national sovereignty and international governance require some reforming and revisioning if they are to further peace and security. Such rules should encourage, among other things, the protection of minority rights, promote the incorporation of disenfranchised groups into national politics, create the option for semi-autonomy, and establish procedures for the peaceful separation of two territories. While the priority should be on supporting governance that legitimizes itself with policies that protect the rights of minorities and foster a large degree of local control, attention should also be given to international structures that integrate small states into an economically and politically interdependent global order.

New rules and norms are also needed for external intervention. The "rediscovery of minorities" should not set off a new wave of liberal internationalism that has foreign powers responding to self-determination conflicts with military intervention. Concern with minority rights should be accompanied by a political realism that acknowledges that external intervention is too often driven by the national interests of the interventionist forces and often results in more harm than good.