It is a very common idea now, that a people can have their own nation and run it the way that they like. Well, that's simple enough, then, the consent of the governed mentioned in the American founding. What's not to like?
Perhaps it is the next step, which might seem automatic but is not, that is not to like. There is the idea that other nations, and most especially America, should help them do this, by separating from nations or tribes they feel do not represent their interests well. We have gone over to that pretty fully in the last hundred years, but it was considered a bit radical when it was a favorite idea of Woodrow Wilson's. His own Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, disagreed with its implementation on a broad scale. From Lansing's diary:
These phrases will certainly come home to roost and cause much vexation. The President is a phrase-maker par excellence. He admires trite sayings and revels in formulating them. But when he comes to their practical application he is so vague that their worth may well be doubted. He apparently never thought out in advance where they would lead or how they would be interpreted by others. In fact he do not seem to care, so that his words sound well. The gift of clever phrasing may be a curse unless the phrases are put to the test of sound, practical application before being uttered.
And ten days later
The phrase [self-determination] is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives...What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery will it cause! Think of the feelings of the author when he counts the dead who died because he coined a phrase! (Quoted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics, via Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures.)
The idea that all the peoples of the world would love to have American values, if only they could be given the chance by being rescued from The Baddies has taken rather a beating in the last century. While it is true that there are some people in each nation - and the ones that we know best and like best - who very much would like to live under American ideals and want for us to help them do that, it does not seem to be true that all peoples want these ideas enough that they are willing to give up some of their own traditional ideas. Loyalty to family often trumps loyalty to principles of indifferent law, for example.
If it was achievable at the cost of “thousands” of lives, it might have been well achieved. Of course one can always describe a greater number in terms of a lesser order, so that a million lives or a billion could be described as successive thousands, or sets of tens.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if technology was an issue, such that the fight over the idea was had with machine guns and tanks instead of spears? Probably not; the Marxists would say that the fight couldn’t have happened until the technology basis existed for it. Certainly one can imagine knights fighting for self-determination for themselves and their class, but hardly for people in general— though the war of Scottish independence of 1286-1330s was almost that, knights fighting for self-determination for Scots as a people that included themselves (and almost their 1320 Declaration of Arbroath gets there as a universal argument).