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This study critically examines Woodrow Wilson's acceptance of the principle of national self-determination and his role in implementing it at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The assessment includes judgements by his contemporaries and historians of Wilson and the peace settlement. A survey of the manner in which national self-determination shaped the settlement leads to a discussion of the subsequent effects of the idea on the states and territories subject to the Versailles Treaty and related treaties.
The principle of self-determination has at heart the achievement of true representation and democracy based on the idea that the consent of the governed alone can give government legitimacy. The principle was primarily responsible for the decolonisation process that shaped our current international community. `Self-determination' has been used in equal rhetorical brilliance by a number of leaders - some meritorious, with a genuine concern for human emancipation, others dubious, with ascendancy to power at the heart of their project. In any case, `self-determination' has come to mean different things in different contexts. Being a vital principle, especially in the post-colonial state, it is ...
Addresses the pitfalls of border drawing in post-WWI Europe, arguing that at international and local levels, the 'temptation of violence' made national self-determination problematic, as local elites, administrations, and paramilitary leaders used ethnic notions of identity to mobilise popular support under a guise of international legitimacy.
In recent years, numerous multi-national states have disintegrated along national lines, and today, many more, in both the first and the third worlds, continue to witness bitter secessionist struggles. The proliferation of national conflicts and secessionist movements has given rise to many important questions which urgently need to be addressed. When is seccession justified? What is a people and what gives them a right to secede? Is national determination consistent with liberal and democratic principles? Or is it a dangerous doctrine? In the years following 1991, when Allen Buchanan published Secession, a number of competing theories of the ethics of secession have been put forward. This pathbreaking study, by a host of leading figures in the field, brings together for the first time a series of original essays on these theories. Offering fresh insight into debates about contested territory, the problem of minorities, and the place of secession in resolving national conflicts, this volume provides a much-needed philosophical discussion of the normative implications of nationalism.
This book examines the conceptual and political history of the right of self-determination of peoples.
In National Identities and the Right to Self-Determination of Peoples, Hilly Moodrick-Even Khen revisits the legal right to self-determination of peoples and suggests an integrative model for securing the cohesion of the various nationalities within multinational states. The model, set on both legal and political science theories, departs from civic nationalism but calls to strengthen it with more immediate and emotional means, such as shared national symbols and multicultural education. Moodrick-Even Khen explores the political history of Canada, Belgium, and Spain and touches upon other divided societies such as South Africa, Northern Ireland and Cyprus. Drawing upon these cases, she suggests a future model for a cohesive society in Israel, which is currently nationally divided between Arabs and Jews.
The Western Sahara Case
In this book, leading scholars re-examine the principle of national self-determination from diverse theoretical perspectives.
This book explores secession from three normative disciplines: political philosophy, international law and constitutional law. The author first develops a moral theory of secession based on a hypothetical multinational contract. Under this contract theory, injustices do not determine the existence of a right to secede, but the requirements to exercise it. The book’s second part then argues that international law is more inclined to accept and advance a remedial right approach to secession. Therefore, justice as multinational fairness is to be fully institutionalized under the constitutional law of liberal democracies. The final part proposes constitutionalizing a qualified right to secede with the aim of fostering recognition and accommodation of national pluralism as well as cooperation and compromise between majority and minority nations.
The self-determination of peoples is a major issue in the world community: both radical and subversive, it serves to grant statehood to oppressed peoples, but also to disrupt existing State structures. This book, the first comprehensive legal account, sets out to trace how this political ideal has turned into an international legal standard. Scrutinising State practice through national digests and UN proceedings the author pinpoints the limits within which this political postulate has gained a foothold in the body of international law and assesses the extent to which it has had an impact on existing legal norms. This is primarily a legal inquiry which, however, looks at law within its historical and political context and, given its judicial underpinning, makes an important contribution to the study of the interplay of law, history, and politics in international relations.