Self-Determination: Right or Demon?

Abstract

Self-determination has been receiving a great deal of bad press lately. A lead article in the winter 1993 issue of Foreign Policy denounces the “Evils of Self-Determination” (Etzioni, 1993). One New York Times columnist complains ominously that in Africa “warring tribes are ripping apart the once-secure borders of nationhood” and “ancient savagery” has broken up Yugoslavia (Safire, 1993). Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who helped some years ago to make the term “ethnicity” intellectually fashionable, now cautions that the unlearned lesson about self-determination is that “minorities not infrequently seek self-determination for themselves in order to deny it to others” (Moynihan, 1993:70). It would seem that for some people self-determination is somewhat akin to an exclusive club: you fight hard to gain access yourself, but once you’re in, you’d rather not see any new upstarts come along.

Revised version of the opening address at the Martin Ennals Symposium on Self-Determination, Saskatoon, 3–6 March 1993, organized by the College of Law, University of Saskatchewan and International Alert.