Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Spring 2006
Sorting out Self-Determination
One outstanding issue that has plagued the League of Nations and later
the United Nations is self-determination—the territorial integrity
and autonomy of states, or the desire by groups within states to govern
themselves. Within this context, the question has been how to assist
without violating state sovereignty or lending assistance to separatists.
The concept of sovereignty as inviolable, expressed in the United Nations
Charter as “noninterference in the domestic jurisdiction of states”
has not been universally supported by UN member nations. The right of
the UN and others to intercede, as stated in UN Charter Chapter VII,
“as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace
and security,” is seen to be a major stumbling block between first-
and third-world countries.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan drew attention to this issue in 2000, in his We the Peoples report, stating, “If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica—to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity? …Armed intervention must always remain the option of last resort, but in the face of mass murder, it is an option that cannot be relinquished.” Again, at the request of the United Nations, to further review these issues, in 2000 the Corporation made a $500,000 grant to support the work of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Made up of twelve independent experts who sought to address the controversial question of humanitarian intervention, the commission’s chief goal was to foster a global political consensus on conditions under which such intervention is possible.
The commission was directed by Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and member of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, and Mohamed Sahnoun of Algeria, special advisor and representative to the UN secretary-general. Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy chaired the project’s advisory board. The commission produced a landmark report called The Responsibility to Protect, which concluded it was the right of external powers to intervene within a sovereign state in extreme situations of human rights abuse, and specified two critical issues: first, that there are times when humanitarian emergencies must be considered above state sovereignty, which justifies international action; second, that the issues surrounding such situations involve not only the right but indeed the responsibility to act. This concept was endorsed by the United Nation 2005 World Summit, the largest ever gathering of heads of government.
The UN embarked upon other important projects during the millennium year, and the Corporation was called upon to support a cluster of endeavors targeting issues of intervention and sovereignty. A joint project of the United Nations, the International Peace Academy and the University of Denver received a $125,000 grant to identify differences in viewpoint on this subject among member countries of the UN and to organize multinational dialogues on cases such as Kosovo, Kashmir and the Democratic Republic of Congo in order to promote international agreement. This project stood out for its awareness that existing research on sovereignty typically approached the subject from the intervening states’ perspectives. To redress this imbalance, an effort was made to elicit the views of non-Americans, in particular the Chinese, to air disparate perspectives and produce tangible products for widespread dissemination.
At the project’s conclusion, well over 1,000 copies of the policy brief, “Competing Claims: Self-Determination at the United Nations,” were distributed to UN and national governmental policy makers, journalists, scholars and research institutes worldwide. According to Stephen Del Rosso, beyond the meetings and publications, the project established an informal network of international experts who continue to exchange ideas and viewpoints between formal sessions. Project grantees planned for next steps to focus on “the most pivotal relationship on which international peace and security may rest in the coming years, that between the current dominant power, the U.S., and the up-and-coming global power, China…in particular the processes of political reform, nationalism and the self-determination issues within China.”
During the same period, several U.S. universities initiated projects exploring issues of national self-determination. Princeton hosted an interdisciplinary investigation of the causes of internal crises—among them, struggles for secession, emergence of ethnic identity as a political force, and easy access to sophisticated weaponry—in order to produce a menu of policy options for the international community faced with managing the consequences of violent domestic conflicts. The Corporation’s support enabled this project to evolve from pure research to a solution-focused undertaking targeting governance and security in the South Asian region, including Afghanistan. Several productive conferences were held over the grant’s three-year period. One outstanding example was a colloquium on security with a direct videoconference link to Kabul to facilitate in-depth discussion with Afghan governmental leaders. Findings from this meeting were summarized in an action plan widely circulated among policymakers in North America, Europe and Afghanistan.