Interpretation Of Self-determination Research Articles

Inherited National Questions: The Soviet Legacy in Russia’s International Law Doctrine on Self-determination

All 15 former Soviet Republics share a unique federal history with a particular understanding of the right to self-determination. Moreover, seven of them were federalised during the Soviet era, amounting to a major challenge to their territorial integrity after independence. While these states confronted their minorities in different ways, the Russian solution to its inherited national question has been the most comprehensive. This has made Russian understanding on self-determination essentially different from the mainstream of the international community, which in turn explains Russian persistent objections over the Kosovo independence (2008) and partly clarifies the events in Georgia (2008) and Crimea (2014). This article analyses how the former Soviet Republics coped with the transformation from the ethnofederal state to independence. The focus will be on Russia as the most affected of them and on the persistent Soviet legacy in its interpretations of self-determination and, consequently, its policies towards its post-Soviet neighbours.

Northern Ireland, Brexit, and the Interpretation of Self-Determination

The legitimacy of the partition of Ireland has been inextricably bound up with interpretations of self-determination. The creation of Northern Ireland following the First World War was just about defensible in terms of the understanding of the principle of national self-determination prevalent at the time. But in the context of the post-colonial emphasis on territory in establishing who was entitled to self-determination, Northern Ireland’s status as a conditional part of the United Kingdom appeared anomalous and facilitated the province’s portrayal as a colonial leftover. The Troubles compounded Northern Ireland’s lack of international legitimacy. In the 1990s there were further changes, including a post–Cold War easing of the anathema against secession. This and other alterations in the interpretation of self-determination meant that Northern Ireland no longer stood out as a relic of imperialism, creating the space for the acceptance of Northern Ireland as an internationally legitimate political entity under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. This favorable external environment for the settlement did not endure. Of the external challenges to the accord, the most serious is Brexit. Its implementation would end what was taken for granted in the 1998 accord, that British and Irish management of the Northern Ireland problem would continue to be facilitated by the two countries’ common interests arising from their membership of the European Union. The article explores the implications of this potential disruption and its bearing on the issue of Irish self-determination.

Self-determination, non-domination and constraints on territorial rights

In Moore’s A Political Theory of Territory, the right to collective self-determination is pivotal both to the justification of territorial rights and to defining their limits. The premise of my critique is that collective self-determination can only be meaningfully achieved in a context of non-domination. Following Iris Young, I suggest that Moore’s theory would be even more compelling if it incorporated such an account. I show that her argument favors a fairly demanding interpretation of self-determination, and is in fact already responsive to domination concerns. However, I find that commitment to a non-domination principle may reveal more constraints on territorial rights than Moore currently endorses, and that it sits in tension with the premise that self-determination rights are not contingent on the realization of any other substantive ideals.

Freedom beyond the threshold: self-determination, sovereignty, and global justice

In current debates about global justice, statist and nationalist theories appeal to the right to self-determination in argument against egalitarianism beyond borders, and in general as a reason for caution about substantive international duties of justice, lest the exercise of self-determination would be too tightly constrained. Has self-determination—an important heritage of decolonization—no longer a role to play in the argument against international inequality and disempowerment? In this article, I examine a dominant interpretation of self-determination in the global justice debate, as defended prominently by John Rawls and David Miller and find it wanting. Specifically, two challenges are raised: at the conceptual level this interpretation leaves unclarified the distinction and relationship between sovereignty and self-determination; at the normative level, this interpretation adopts a sufficiency view of international distributive justice that neglects that problem of relative extents and measures of self-determination, beyond the threshold. While the article's argument is mainly of a critical scope, it is suggested that a more robust theoretical account is required of the content of the right of self-determination, and in particular of the freedoms that the right confers to the right-holders in the socioeconomic domains and their extents.

Federalism in the Baltic: Interpretations of Self-Determination and Sovereignty in Estonia in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

The objective of this article is to challenge the widespread interpretation of interwar East Central Europe as a hotbed of excessive nationalism, by establishing a longue durée of federalist thinking in Estonia in the first half of the twentieth century. By focusing on personal continuities from the founding years of the Estonian Republic into the 1940s, it is possible to detect a remarkable persistence of ‘idealist’ visions about intra and interstate federalism that had been internalized by Estonian statesmen before and during the First World War and earlier. Apart from establishing the continuity of federalist thought the article analyzes the political discourse in which the concept of national self-determination was picked up. The primary framework for Estonian thinkers on nationality was the debate that developed within the all-Russian socialist movement in the context of the nationality problems of the multinational Western provinces and Congress Poland. The discourse on territorial and cultural autonomy within a federative Russia, demands that came to the fore in 1905, developed only after the idea of self-determination entered the thinking of Estonian radicals. Until late 1917, asserting the right to self-determination by no means meant separation from Russia. Even after 1917 Estonian politicians imagined the future republic as part of a regional league or union relinquishing part of its sovereignty to a supranational authority, plans that foundered on the incompatibility of national interests by 1920. Although the experience had not been encouraging, Baltic politicians resuscitated federalist concepts in the early period of the Second World War, as they tried to envisage a new structure for a cooperative and autonomous East Central Europe, within a restored Europe.

The Blessing of Departure: Acceptable and Unacceptable State Support for Demographic Transformation: The Lieberman Plan to Exchange Populated Territories in Cisjordan

What limits ought there be on a state’s ability to create a homogeneous society, to increase or perpetuate non-diversity, or to create hierarchies within existing diversity? This article examines those questions with reference to the Lieberman Plan—which proposes to transfer populated territories from Israel to the Palestine in exchange for Jewish settlements on the West Bank— as an abstract exercise in demographic transformation by the state. First the article considers if the Lieberman plan would “work”: Would it create the alterations it proposes, and would those changes achieve a stable, peaceful, perhaps even just settlement? It finds that though there is debate about the range of effect, there is little doubt that transfer would alter the state’s demography. It then turns to the international standards that might govern the transfer of territory and the denaturalization of citizens, to see how they would characterize such a plan. It finds that comparisons to ethnic cleansing are inapposite, and that norms protecting citizenship are considerably more complex than they first appear—even allowing ethnically targeted denaturalization in some cases.The article then analyzes the loyalty provisions of the Lieberman Plan, and notes that, contrary to the usual normative assumption that citizenship is tied to the state, the foundations of citizenship are actually a habitual or formative link to a given territory, which in turn creates a right to citizenship not in any particular state, but in the one that incidentally is sovereign over that territory. This interaction of citizenship and territory, when considered together with norms requiring equal protection for all citizens, suggests that the polity has an interest in defining its own territorial scope, and thereby its membership. The legal regime is ambiguous, and therefore deliberations about this question are in the realm of politics. The article demonstrates how transfer’s assimilation to existing norms suggests a novel interpretation of selfdetermination with far-reaching consequences for both sides of the conflict.Finally, the article notes that international law, though it polices excesses, is largely silent on the principal determinant of demography: the fact of state control over territory.