Self-determination: The Democratization Test

Self-determination is the process by which people, who are governed by a foreign power, gain self-government. Often the people first form a sense of community—a sense of a shared identity, destiny, and core values—and then seek to invest those in a state, forming a nation (defined as a community invested in a state). The term self-determination is also used to refer to the normative principle that is evoked to justify breaking away from the old regime to form a new one. Self-determination was first recognized as a principle of international law by Article 1 of the UN Charter, which calls for ‘friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples’ (United Nations, 1946). The 1966 UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights defines this principle as the right of peoples to ‘freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development’ (United Nations General Assembly, 1966). Selfdetermination was popularized by US President Woodrow Wilson in his wartime speeches, with six of his ‘Fourteen Points’ implicitly based on the concept (Pomerance, 1976; Raic, 2002, p. 181). Prior to the formation of the UN, self-determination failed to gain recognition in international forums such as the League of Nations, as it threatened the interests of existing colonial powers (Kirgis, 1994). Demands for national self-determination have served a large number of people in rising against colonial powers and in breaking up empires to form their own states and nations. The USA and Latin American wars of independence against the European colonial powers provided important precedents of self-determination. Following the French Revolution and the related rise of nationalism, minority demands for self-determination undermined the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires, which collapsed after the First World War. As nationalism spread outside Europe, aspirations towards self-determination inspired the liberation movements that ended the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Ethnopolitics, 2015 Vol. 14, No. 5, 470–478, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2015.1054620 Correspondence Address: Amitai Etzioni, School of International Affairs, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA. Email: [email protected] # 2015 The Editor of Ethnopolitics D ow nl oa de d by [ G eo rg e W as hi ng to n U ni ve rs ity ], [ A m ita i E tz io ni ] at 0 7: 32 1 2 A ug us t 2 01 5 and other empires in the mid-twentieth century, creating scores of new independent nations. Given that in each of these instances, native people (often of colour) were able to wrest control of their lives from foreign powers who had occupied or controlled their lands and exploited them (though sometimes helping them develop economically and sometimes politically), self-determination has been long associated with democratization and hence considered a major liberating force and principle. The last major wave of self-determination occurred when the USSR fell apart (One may add the disintegration of Yugoslavia). Since the end of the imperial period, and especially in the twenty-first century, the democratizing effects of self-determination—when actually effected or merely fought for—have been far less clear. Six brief case studies—three of actual secession and three of potential secession—will illustrate this point. In all of these cases, the situation is complicated by other factors including historical grievances and superpower conflicts. However, the question of concern here is narrow: whether self-determination has achieved, a more democratic representation of the affected people. After all, if people break away from a democratically governed society and then become oppressed by people of their ‘own kind’ no true self-determination is achieved. In evaluating democratization, I draw on widely used metrics such as those of ‘Freedom in the World’ and Economist Democracy Index. The Freedom of the World Index, which began in 1972, rates countries on a scale of 1 (most democratic) to 7 (least), averaging the two indexes of political rights and civil liberties. The Economist Democracy Index, which was first produced in 2006, rates countries from 0 (least democratic) to 100 (most), based on five indexes: (1) electoral process and pluralism, (2) civil liberties, (3) functioning of government, (4) political participation, and (5) political culture. While these metrics have been criticized (e.g. Campbell, 2008), they suffice for the purposes at hand. Czechoslovakia and Slovakia In January 1993, Slovakia separated from Czechoslovakia, which then became the Czech Republic. While providing self-determination to the Slovaks, this split was a setback for democracy. Where Czechoslovakia improved its rating on the Freedom House’s index from 6 to 2 following the end of communism in 1989, rapidly implementing free elections and freedoms of press and association, Slovakia fluctuated between 2.5 and 3.5 over the next half decade, failing to achieve pre-secession levels of democracy until 1989. Czechoslovakia was an Eastern European state with that existed in the years 1918–1938 and 1945–1993. Its two major national groups, the Czech majority and Slovak minority, had different but mutually intelligible languages. Having spent the Cold War as a Soviet client state, Czechoslovakia returned to democracy with the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Its peaceful division in 1993 was rooted in several factors. First, Czech and Slovak nationalism had been kept in check, but not erased, by the communist rule, and played a role in the breakup. Second, Slovaks felt that they lacked ‘equality and visibility’, both in the material sense that they were underrepresented in government institutions and lacked political leverage and in the symbolic sense that their identity was hyphenated as ‘Czechoslovak’ and often abbreviated by outsiders as ‘Czech’. A third factor was economic— the Czech leadership eagerly pushed for economic liberalization to accompany democratization, but the Slovak economy was more vulnerable to the disruptive impact that policy The Democratization Test 471 D ow nl oa de d by [ G eo rg e W as hi ng to n U ni ve rs ity ], [ A m ita i E tz io ni ] at 0 7: 32 1 2 A ug us t 2 01 5 would have entailed, leading Slovaks to prefer more gradual transition. Resisting Slovak political and economic demands, the Czech leadership instead presented the Slovaks with an ultimatum: ‘either a Czech-Slovak state with a strong central government and radical economic reforms, or no [unified] state at all’ (Hilde, 1999). The failure of both sides to compromise ultimately led to the breakup of Czechoslovakia in January 1993. As shown by the Freedom House index, self-determination in this case was a setback for democracy, at least in the short term, for several reasons. First, despite (or perhaps because of) widespread popular support for unity, independence-minded leaders on both sides blocked President Vaclav Havel’s call for a popular referendum, choosing to break up the state without a democratic mandate (Roxburgh, 2014). Second, the transition from a multi-ethnic state to a Slovak nation-state was problematic from a democratic standpoint. Almost 10% of Slovakia’s population is Hungarian, leading to tensions over language and ethnicity that affect relations with neighbouring Hungary, and an additional 5–8% of the population belongs to the Roma minority (Puhl, 2009). Third, newly independent Slovakia lacked the historical experience and institutions of statehood, leading political elites to fight over procedure rather than policy (Szomolányi, 2003). During Slovakia’s first decade of independence, the country was led by a ‘series of coalitions between nationalist and populist parties’ and witnessed an initial regression of democracy, including ‘violations of minority rights, misuse of the secret service, and corruption’ (Freedom House, 2012).