scholarly journals The Influence of Political Economy on the “Self-Determination of Peoples”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yavuz Çilliler
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Field Research ◽  
State Level ◽  
Comparison Method ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Theoretical Development ◽  
Historical Comparison ◽  
The People ◽  
The Right

The right of peoples to "self-determination” is influenced by varying motives in different times and geographies in its implementation, and is rarely operated according to its foundational ethic and legal bases dating back to the Kantian concept of free will and the international laws codified after the World War II. Particularly, political economy has always played an important but usually covered role in the application of this principle to national or international disputes. This paper aims to explain the dominance of political economy in international decision making processes about the people making a claim for their own state, and to highlight the changing nature of political economy supporting sometimes the sovereign states and sometimes the sub-state level ethnic groups. In this context, the theoretical development and the application of “self-determination” principle is assessed relatively by historical comparison method. Field research for the study comprises archival research of primary and secondary resources. This paper concludes that the political economy has usually greater influence on the application of “self-determination” to the national and international disputes than its ethic and legal content, and that the paradoxical content of this principle contributes to the redistribution of lands usually in compliance with the interests of great powers.

The Sudanese Revolution of October 1964

1967 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yusuf Fadl Hasan
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Advisory Council ◽  
World War ◽  
The People ◽  
Western Democracy ◽  
Traditional Institutions ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right Of Self Determination ◽  
Legislative Assembly

About 70 years ago, the Mahdist or Ansār state, in many ways a traditional Muslim government, crumbled under the fire of the Anglotional Egyptian cannons. On the condominium government that followed fell the task of pacifying the country and introducing western concepts of administration. All Sudanese attempts to defy foreign domination had failed completely by 1924. The British, the stronger of the two partners, had the lion's share in shaping the destiny of the country. Towards the end of World War II, the influential and educated Sudanese, like other Africans and Asians, demanded the right of self-determination. In 1946, in preparation for this, a sample of western democracy was introduced in the form of an Advisory Council. This Council, which was restricted to the northern Sudan, was followed two years later by the Legislative Assembly, which had slightly more powers. Although these democratic innovations were quite alien to the country and were introduced at a relatively late date, they were in keeping with traditional institutions. Until recently, the Sudan consisted of a number of tribal units where no classes or social distinctions existed and the tribal chief was no more than the first among equals; the people were therefore not accustomed to autocratic rule.

Order and Justice: National Minorities and the Right to Secession

1999 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-416 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Law ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
National Minorities ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right

AbstractThe Versailles Treaty sought to protect minorities by giving them their own state. This practice, labelled 'self-determination' has changed guise considerably post World War II. Paramount to the emancipation of colonies, it came to be the concept that legitimated the 'rule of the people' over that of their colonial masters. However post-colonial 'self-determined' states are often manufactured entities forced into the strait-jacket of Westphalian statehood; and unlike the states that emanated from the Westphalian Treaty, were given no time to evolve by themselves. As a result these states often house disparate sets of minorities that go unrepresented within the Statist discourse. Further, these states have attempted to suppress their minorities through the various policies associated with nation-building. Today, with secession an increasingly attainable form of self-determination, the question arises as to whether these minorities have a right to form a separate state. The international law of self-determination suggests that this is a right of all peoples. It however leaves the parameters of this 'peoplehood' undefined. This paper seeks to examine the discourse of minority rights within that of the international right to self determination. It seeks to trace the history of minority rights protection, and to examine the way in which minority rights are protected within current international law. In addition, it examines the parameters of peoplehood and concludes by looking at two cases where disaffected minorities in a post-colonial state sought to form their own state.

The Right of Nations to Self-Determination in the Context of the Regaining of Independence by Poland — an International-Law Analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol Special Issue ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Andrzejczak-Świątek
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
International Law ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
Human Rights Protection ◽  
The People ◽  
The Right

This article aims to show the problem of self-determination of the people in the light of contemporary standards of international law, as well as to compare them with the factual and legal basis of regaining independence by Poland in 1918. The principle of the right of people to self-determination as one of the basic rules of international law was proclaimed only after World War II, however, concepts conferring on the population living in a given territory to decide about themselves appeared before the French Revolution. The issue of the right to self-determination of people is extremely complex — after World War II, there was in this respect the development of treaty guarantees concluded with international agreements for the system of human rights protection, which sanctioned this right as the only subjective collective right. On the other hand, the practice of contemporary states on this issue is not uniform and largely depends on the acceptance of the facts by the international community. From the point of view of developing the right to self-determination of people, and thus the right to independence, the case of Poland is extremely interesting not only because of the historical and political background, but also because it can be treated as a precedent in international law in the context of recognition and acceptance of independence by the state.

scholarly journals Independence, Sovereignty, Preponderance – The Prevalence and the Territorial Expansion of State Power

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Dardan Vuniqi
Keyword(s):  
International Organizations ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
The People ◽  
Independent States ◽  
The Right ◽  
Water Space ◽  
State Territory

State is society’s need for the existence of an organized power, equipped with the right equipments of coercion and able to run the society, by imposing the choices that seem reasonable to them, through legal norms. State is an organization of state power; it is an organized power which imposes its will to all the society and has a whole mechanism to execute this will. The state realizes its functions through power, which is a mechanism to accomplish its relevant functions. The power’s concept is a social concept, which can be understood only as a relation between two subjects, between two wills. Power is the ability to impose an order, a rule and other’s behavior in case that he doesn’t apply voluntary the relevant norm, respectively the right. Using state power is related to creation and application, respectively the implementation of law. To understand state power better, we have to start from its overall character. So, we notice that in practice we encounter different kinds of powers: the family’s one, the school’s one, the health’s one, the religion’s, culture’s etc. The notion of powers can be understood as a report between two subjects, two wills. Power is an order for other’s behavior. Every power is some kind of liability, dependence from others. In the legal aspect, supremacy of state presents the constitutive – legislative form upon the powers that follow after it. Supremacy, respectively the prevalence, is stronger upon other powers in its territory. For example we take the highest state body, the parliament as a legislative body, where all other powers that come after it, like the executive and court’s one, are dependable on state’s central power. We can’t avoid the carriage of state’s sovereignty in the competences of different international organizations. Republic, based on ratified agreements for certain cases can overstep state’s power on international organizations. The people legitimate power and its bodies, by giving their votes for a mandate of governance (people’s verdict). It is true that we understand people’s sovereignty only as a quality of people, where with the word people we understand the entirety of citizens that live in a state. The sovereignty’s case actualizes especially to prove people’s right for self-determination until the disconnection that can be seen as national – state sovereignty. National sovereignty is the right of a nation for self-determination. Sovereignty’s cease happens when the monopoly of physical strength ceases as well, and this monopoly is won by another organization. A state can be ceased with the voluntary union of two or more states in a mutual state, or a state can be ceased from a federative state, where federal units win their independence. In this context we have to do with former USSR’s units, separated in some independent states, like Czechoslovakia unit that was separated in two independent states: in Czech Republic and Slovakia. Former Yugoslavia was separated from eight federal units, today from these federal units seven of them have won their independence and their international recognition, and the Republic of Kosovo is one amongst them. Every state power’s activity has legal effect inside the borders of a certain territory and inside this territory the people come under the relevant state’s power. Territorial expansion of state power is three dimensional. The first dimension includes the land inside a state’s borders, the second dimension includes the airspace upon the land and the third dimension includes water space. The airspace upon inside territorial waters is also a power upon people and the power is not universal, meaning that it doesn’t include all mankind. State territory is the space that’s under state’s sovereignty. It is an essential element for its existence. According to the author Juaraj Andrassy, state territory lies in land and water space inside the borders, land and water under this space and the air upon it. Coastal waters and air are considered as parts that belong to land area, because in every case they share her destiny. Exceptionally, according to the international right or international treaties, it is possible that in one certain state’s territory another state’s power can be used. In this case we have to do with the extraterritoriality of state power. The state extraterritoriality’s institute is connected to the concept of another state’s territory, where we have to do with diplomatic representatives of a foreign country, where in the buildings of these diplomatic representatives, the power of the current state is not used. These buildings, according to the international right, the diplomatic right, have territorial immunity and the relevant host state bodies don’t have any power. Regarding to inviolability, respectively within this case, we have two groups to mention: the real immunity and the personal immunity, which are connected with the extraterritoriality’s institute. Key words: Independence, Sovereignty, Preponderance, Prevalence, Territorial Expansion.

The United States and Self-Determination: Perspectives on the Wilsonian Conception

1976 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michla Pomerance
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
The United States ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Autonomy ◽  
Conflicting Demands ◽  
The Right

Ever since the principle of self-determination entered the lexicon of international politics during World War I, American foreign policymakers have had to contend with problems revolving around that concept. The need to favor one or another claimant, each waving the banner of self-determination and invoking the “right to determine its own fate,” continues to present dilemmas, often extremely troubling ones, for U.S. decisionmakers. Examples from recent history come readily to mind. The entire post-World War II decolonization process entailed an endless series of such dilemmas, and even after formal decolonization was all but completed, such nagging issues as Katanga, Biafra, and Eritrea remained, not to mention the problems of South Africa, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, and Indochina. Indeed, even within America’s own imperial domain, the United States was faced with the conflicting demands of the Puerto Rican nationalists and the majority of the Puerto Rican electorate, the claims of the Marianas as against those of Micronesia as a whole, and demands for cultural autonomy on the part of diverse ethnic groups.

Decolonization in International Law

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mai Taha
Keyword(s):  
International Economic ◽  
International Law ◽  
Third World ◽  
International Economic Order ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Economic Order ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
The People ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Third World

In Gillo Pontecorvo’s evocative film The Battle of Algiers (1966), viewers reach the conclusion that the fight against colonialism would not be fought at the UN General Assembly. Decolonization would take place through the organized resistance of colonized people. Still, the 1945 United Nations Charter and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided some legal basis, albeit tenuous, for self-determination. When Third World leaders assembled in the 1955 Bandung Conference, it became clear that the UN needed to shift gears on the question of decolonization. By 1960, and through a show of Asian and African votes at the General Assembly, the Declaration for the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was adopted, effectively outlawing colonialism and affirming the right of all peoples to self-determination. Afro-Asian solidarity took a different form in the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, which founded the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The conference gathered leftist activists and leaders from across the Third World, who would later inspire radical movements and scholarship on decolonization and anticolonial socialism. This would also influence the adoption of the 1974 Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order and later lead to UNESCO’s series that starts with Mohammed Bedjaoui’s famous overture, Towards a New International Economic Order (1979; cited as Bedjaoui 1979 under the Decolonization “Moment”). This article situates this history within important international-law scholarship on decolonization. First, it introduces different approaches to decolonization and international law; namely, postcolonial, Marxist, feminist, and Indigenous approaches. Second, it highlights seminal texts on international law and the colonial encounter. Third, it focuses on scholarship that captures the spirit of the “decolonization moment” as a political and temporal rupture, but also as a continuity, addressing, fourth, decolonization and neocolonial practices. Finally, this article ends with some of the most important works on international law and settler colonialism in the 21st century.

Hegel's Critique of the Triumph of Verstand in Modernity

1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (01) ◽  
pp. 54-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Houlgate
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
The People ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
The World ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Revolution

In his lectures on the philosophy of history Hegel passes this famous judgement on the French Revolution. “Anaxagoras had been the first to say that nous governs the world; but only now did humanity come to recognize that thought should rule spiritual actuality. This was thus a magnificent dawn”. What first gave rise to discontent in France, in Hegel's view, were the heavy burdens that pressed upon the people and the government's inability to procure for the Court the means of supporting its luxury and extravagance. But soon the new spirit of freedom and enlightenment began to stir in men's minds and carry them forward to revolution. “One should not, therefore, declare oneself against the assertion”, Hegel concludes, “that the Revolution received its first impulse from Philosophy” (VPW, p 924). However, Hegel points out that the legacy of the revolution is actually an ambiguous one. For, although the principles which guided the revolution were those of reason and were indeed magnificent – namely, that humanity is born to freedom and self-determination – they were held fast in their abstraction and turned “polemically”, and at times terribly, against the existing order (VPW, p 925). What ultimately triumphed in the revolution was thus not concrete reason itself, but abstract reason or understanding (VPW, p 923). In Hegel's view, the enduring legacy of such revolutionary understanding was, not so much the Terror, but the principle that “the subjective wills of the many should hold sway” (VPW, p 932). This principle, which Hegel calls the principle of “liberalism” and which we would call the principle of majority rule, has since spread from France to become one of the governing principles of modern stat. It has been used to justify granting universal suffrage, to justify depriving corporations and the nobility of the right to sit in the legislature, and in some cases to justify abolishing the monarchy. What is of crucial importance for Hegel, however, is that such measures have not rendered the state more modern and rational, but have in fact distorted the modern state.

scholarly journals Vojvodina - a region based on the Serbian ethnicity and its denial

2012 ◽  
pp. 259-273
Author(s):  
Drago Njegovan
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Ethnic Composition ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
The Right

The issue of regionalism and the autonomy of certain areas is mainly related to the ethnic composition of the population. The idea of the autonomy of Vojvodina as a Serbian region in the Habsburg Monarchy was created back in 1690. It came into being 150 years later by the decision of the 1848 May Assembly. In a significantly different form, it lasted ten years as the Serbian Voivodship and Temisvar (Timisoara) Banat. In the next fifty years, a autonomous Serbian Vojvodina was just a dream. At the end of World War I the areas of Vojvodina, on the basis of the right to self-determination, entered the Kingdom of Serbia and thus became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, i.e. Yugoslavia. The idea of the autonomy of Vojvodina was then discarded. Some liberal politicians, supported by the Croats, tried to restore it in the interwar period but this option did not receive any support of voters at the elections. The illegal Communist Party politically promoted the idea of the autonomy of Vojvodina in a federalized Yugoslavia, which was achieved during World War II. At the end of the war, the autonomous Vojvodina remained part of Serbia, and according to the 1974 Constitution, it became a part of federal Yugoslavia. During the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the autonomy of Vojvodina within Serbia was preserved but recently, after the so-called democratic changes of 2000, domestic and foreign (EU and NATO) political engagement in Serbia has been more directed towards the greater autonomy of Vojvodina, and even its separation from Serbia, despite the two-thirds Serbian majority living in the Province.

scholarly journals Titoizem in konec Jugoslavije

2016 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-182
Author(s):  
Zdenko Čepič
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Other ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
World War ◽  
State Administration ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Right

Although the second Yugoslavia was often called Tito’s Yugoslavia in political parlance, the term Titoism was rarely used for its political regime and the structure of its government at the time. The term was closely connected to the person of Josip Broz Tito. The connection was based both on the name and on the fact that the term applied to events that happened during Tito’s rule. It is simply an eponym in the true sense of the word. On one hand, Titoism was the principle on which the second Yugoslavia was based, and on the other it was a method of governing. Titoism can also describe the Yugoslav type of socialism and its characteristic features, as well as the country in general. Titoism is not so much an ideology, but rather a practice. It is the government's means. Titoism is Yugoslavia as a country after World War II, it is the structure of the state administration, i.e. the federal government, and the principle on which it is based, i.e. the recognition of the nation’s right of self-determination, including the right to secede, as well as the country’s political system – the workers’ self-management. Everything that can be understood as Titoism was representative of the second Yugoslavia. On one hand, Titoism was the means for the country’s rise, its creation and development (progression), but on the other hand, Titoism already contained the seed of the country’s dissolution, its demise and the disintegration of the whole system known as Titoism. Of what was actually the end of the second Yugoslavia.

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