"In its Wilsonian heyday self-determination seemed
to many a simple and straightforward proposition
consolidating under one rubric a number of
nineteenth-century liberalism's most cherished
propositions as to freedom and democracy and the rights
of individuals and peoples. Its subsequent history has
been a checkered one, both in its practical application
and in the theorizing concerning it. It has tempted the
sophisticate to display his wit and learning by
demonstrating its inadequacies and contradictions and
forced many statesmen to shake their heads in dismay at
its uncouth proportions. Neither the skeptical
sophisticate nor the perturbed statesman, it should
immediately be added, has had any significant bearing
on the revolutionary drive of peoples to achieve their
independent destiny in their own fashion.
A summary glance at the experience of the world with
self-determination since World War I will indicate its
curious career. Brought to explicit formulation by
Woodrow Wilson and the Bolsheviks in the course of the
war, it became one of the fundamental principles of
international society, and yet it found no place in the
League Covenant. It served as a guideline for much of
the reshaping of states in the peacemaking that
followed close on the heels of the war, but after that
process was completed the only new states to emerge on
the international stage in the interwar decades were
Eire in Europe and Iraq and Saudi Arabia in Asia. (The
short-lived Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo may
properly be ignored in this context, as may Hitler's
creations in Central Europe.)
The experience of the Second World War and its
aftermath is in many respects the reverse of the first.
Although the Atlantic Charter paid appropriate homage
to self-determination in a somewhat indirect fashion,
the Allies, leaving aside the restoration of peoples
overrun by the Axis, were not only divided as to the
application of self-determination but had also largely
lost their enthusiasm for it as anything approaching a
panacea.
For the Soviet Union the aim in relation to its
Western neighbors had become one of absorption or
domination, and for the colonial powers
self-determination meant self-destruction of empire.
Hence, although the principle of self-determination
of peoples now figured among the purposes of the United
Nations Charter, it played only a scanty role in such
peacemaking as took place. As a sorry substitute for a
peace settlement, the cold war indeed worked to produce
national partitions at some of the key points on the
new-style international frontier.
In Germany, Korea, and Vietnam the pleas of
nations for unity were subordinated to the high
strategy of international politics with the result
that each had a jealously guarded barricade erected
across it to demarcate the spheres of the two great
opposing blocs; and China underwent a division
between the mainland and Formosa. In each instance
there were two bitterly opposed regimes, one
Communist and the other non-Communist, each claiming
to represent the national will under its own
symbols.
Self-determination was still very much alive but its
locus had shifted from Europe to Asia, the Middle East,
and Africa, with the anti-colonial powers tending to
insist that it was for practical purposes an issue
which had relevance only in the colonial realm.
In 1919, even though the Versailles peacemakers
could frequently do little more than ratify states of
fact already accomplished by the peoples directly
concerned, the reordering of Central and Eastern Europe
was carried on under the auspices of the victorious
Allies essentially at the cost of their enemies and
Russia. In 1945 and thereafter self-determination was a
weapon aimed primarily at the victorious imperial
powers themselves, and was under their control only in
the sense that they could either fight it outright, as
in Indochina and Indonesia, or yield to it with greater
or less grace, as in the Philippines, India, Burma, and
Ceylon.
In contrast to Iraq's lonely eminence in the
interwar decades, a host of new Asian and African
states were added to the international family in the
years following the Second World War; and more are in
process of being created out of the dwindling colonial
empires.
The principle of self-determination derives from a
familiar set of doctrines, whose apparent simplicity
conceals a multitude of complications. The prime
starting point is presumably the eighteenth-century
proposition that governments must rest upon the
consent of the governed, to which the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries added the assumption that, since
man is a national animal, the government to which he
will give his consent is one representing his own
nation. For full-blown self-determination to emerge
it was only necessary to secure recognition of a new
principle of natural law which entitles nations to
possess their own states and, as the other side of
the coin, renders illegitimate states with a
non-national base. As Woodrow Wilson put it, the
Central Empires had been forced into political
bankruptcy because they dominated "alien peoples over
whom they had no natural right to rule." With the
aid of a little sleight of hand the original claim
that individuals must consent to or contractually
establish the governments ruling them is thus
transmuted into the natural right of nations to
determine their own statehood.
The difficulties of self-determination become most
serious when the doctrine is brought down from
abstraction to working reality and when an effort is
made, as in the United Nations' covenants on human
rights, to translate it from ethical and political
precepts to binding legal norms. In the current temper
of world opinion no one can in principle oppose what
has come to be the almost self-evident right of peoples
to dispose of their own destinies, but it is
unfortunately equally impossible to formulate this
right in such terms as to make it meaningfully
applicable to reality. Who can say the nations nay, and
yet who can say what nations are and when and how they
may assert themselves?
A Right of Revolution
If the issue is put in its most drastic terms, to
accept the right of self-determination in blanket
fashion is to endow social entities which cannot be
identified in advance with a right of revolution
against the constituted authority of the state, and
even to obligate the state to yield to the demands of
the revolutionaries.
As for the first part of this proposition, little
need be added to what has already been said about the
vagrant character of our knowledge concerning what are
and what are not nations. The matter becomes even more
tangled when the Charter of the United Nations endorses
the self-determination of peoples.
Any number of questions come immediately to mind, and
virtually none of them have answers which can be relied
upon.
 How
are the people to whom the principle applies to
be defined?
Is
it applicable only to people constituting a
majority in a certain territory, or has a
minority people an equal right?
And if a majority decides one way
today, may the whole or a segment of it decide
differently tomorrow?
Who speaks for the people in
order to set the process in motion, and under
what circumstances and by what methods may they
press their case?
What degree of maturity and
political experience is needed to qualify a
people to make an informed and responsible choice
and to maintain the independence for which it may
opt? |
That these are not idle academic questions can be
illustrated by a host of examples. In addition to the
whole troubled experience of the effort to sort out the
European peoples on national lines there may now be
added such Asian and African examples as Palestine, the
partition of India, claims to Kashmir and Pushtunistan,
the Karens in Burma, separatist movements in Indonesia
and the West Irian issue, the divided peoples of
Nigeria and the Sudan, the claims and counterclaims of
China, Formosa, and the Formosans, the racial
complexities of Malaya, tribal peoples in many areas
not yet brought within any national fold, and the
uncertain allegiance of the Arabs.
This is one key facet of the question - that peoples
and even nations are uncertain quantities which from
time to time assert themselves with irresistible force
but which cannot be known in advance with any
assurance. Even if nations are taken for granted as
given - a not unreasonable assumption since nations
will at all events make themselves heard in their own
good time - when they come to self-determination they
are inevitably exercising a revolutionary right.
In its most extreme version the right of
self-determination could mean the right of any group of
disaffected people to break away at their pleasure from
the state to which they presently belong and establish
a new state closer to their heart's desire. As far back
as 1793 in the setting of the French Revolution Carnot
reported to the National Assembly that:
If . . . any community whatever had the right to
proclaim its will and separate from the main body
under the influence of rebels, etc., every country,
every town, every village, every farmstead might
declare itself independent.
Even though it is obvious that this reductio ad
absurdumcould not find acceptance, the problem
still remains as to whether and how the right can be
incorporated in any reasonably orderly and predictable
scheme of things, within an acceptable framework of
law.
Self-determination constitutes formal recognition of
the principle that nation and state should coincide,
but the plain fact is that the state structure derived
from the past only occasionally and accidentally
coincided with the national make-up of the world. That
is, indeed, what all the furor was about. To bring the
states into line with man's new-found national
aspirations required a major act of political
reconstruction.
No question of sympathy with the desire of states
to continue in existence in their present form need be
involved in the contention that the exercise of
self-determination is ordinarily an exercise of the
right of revolution.
The overturn and reconstitution of states to bring
them into harmony with the demands of "the changing
content of natural law" may be a highly praiseworthy
achievement, but this necessitates appeal to a higher
law which supersedes and seeks to nullify the
established legality of states and governments. The
states are the creators and maintainers of law in the
ordinary sense, and a challenge to their own existence
must have some other basic point of reference.
At this stage there emerges a clash of rights
derived from different sources: the state has an
indisputable prerogative and duty to defend its own
existence, and the nation comes likewise to be
endowed with a right to overthrow the state.
It is, of course, conceivable that the right of
self-determination should be explicitly embodied in the
constitutional structure of individual states or of the
international community as a whole.
There is a ring of fundamental improbability to the
notion that states will in advance concede their own
potential dissolution.
It may be that the Jeffersonian defense of
occasional revolution is an admirable thing, but it
defies constitutional formulation. The only examples of
a preordained acceptance of self-determination which I
have been able to find are contained in the
constitutions of Burma and the Soviet Union, and for
the French dependencies in the constitution of the
Fifth Republic. The grant of a right of secession to
the constituent republics of the U.S.S.R. can be
dismissed as a piece of window dressing which lacks all
political reality save its propaganda value. From Lenin
on, it has been made clear that the needs of socialism
override the claims of nations. Already embraced within
the Communist fatherland, the peoples have achieved
their summum bonum, and, by the easy
logic of Communist dialectics, any recalculation of
their destiny is to be undertaken by the hierarchy of
the single and monolithic Party.
As W. K. Hancock adroitly put it in a dictum which
has wider applicability than merely to the Soviet
Union: "The apostles of secession have unfettered
freedom as nationalists, but they will be shot as
revolutionaries."
The case of Burma is a slightly more realistic one.
Under the constitution of 1947 the states representing
the minority peoples within the Union of Burma, with
the exception of the Kachins and by later
constitutional amendment the Karens, were given the
right to secede after an interval of ten years from the
time the constitution came into force, and, in contrast
to the Soviet model, the processes by which this might
be accomplished were spelled out in some detail.
Although it is unlikely to be put to the test, this is
a unique model of a constitutional provision
establishing self-determination as an operative
constitutional right.
On the international stage the most significant
earlier effort to institutionalize self-determination
was that of Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson in
preliminary drafts of the League Covenant. What was
essentially involved in their proposal was an effort to
square a continuing right of self-determination with
the Covenant s guarantee of the territorial integrity
and political independence of the League's members. In
brief, it provided that, subject to League approval,
territorial readjustments might be undertaken to meet
"changes in present racial conditions and aspirations,
pursuant to the principle of self-determination."
After going through several drafting stages the
proposal was dropped under a variety of understandable
pressures, and the guarantees of the famous Article X
were allowed to stand without impairment by what the
President had earlier called "the sacred right of
self-determination." As might easily have been
expected, this meant simply that the territorial
integrity of states took priority over the potential
aspirations of nations.
The United Nations
Considering its intrinsic importance, it is
surprising how little attention the framers of the
United Nations appear to have devoted to the loose
language in which self-determination was incorporated
in the Charter. The earlier Dumbarton Oaks version of
the Charter made no mention of it, but at San Francisco
the four sponsoring governments introduced it as
amendments to existing articles, at the suggestion, it
has been stated, of the Soviet Union. This clause moved
tranquilly on its way and ultimately made its
appearance in both Articles 1(1) and 55 as "respect for
the principle of equal rights and self-determination of
peoples."
That at least one of the basic problems involved was
not wholly ignored is evident from a Committee report
which affirmed that the principle of self-determination
was desired by peoples everywhere and should be clearly
enunciated in the Charter, but held that "the principle
conformed to the purposes of the Charter only insofar
as it implied the right of self-government of peoples
and not the right of secession."
To those who had their doubts it must have been
consoling to have secession thus ruled out (even though
it was not specified whether the break-away of a colony
constituted secession) as it was also consoling to have
self-determination recognized only as a principle to be
respected and not as a right. The harsh reality
remained that self-determination very often involved
secession and that what was labeled as a principle was
sure to be asserted as a right. Nor could much reliance
be placed on the denial in Article 7 of the right of
the United Nations to intervene in matters of domestic
jurisdiction. Put to the working test of UN practice,
this supposed bulwark of state's rights was soon found
to have as many holes in it as the majority in the
organ concerned was prepared to open up.
Since San Francisco the concern of the United
Nations with problems of self-determination has been
continuous and many-faceted. In very considerable part
it has focused on one or another aspect of colonialism,
including involvement in specific cases such as that of
Indonesia, Algeria, or Cyprus, but the debates swirling
around the effort to draft Covenants on Human Rights
have also provoked much searching discussion of more
general considerations. Even when the latter has been
the actual or nominal intent, however, the problems of
colonialism are so evidently the central issue that
they habitually intrude themselves.
This was apparent when the General Assembly in 1952
decided to include in the Covenant on Human Rights an
article which should read, "All peoples shall have the
right of self-determination," and stipulated that, in
particular, states having responsibility for
non-self-governing territories should promote the
realization of the right in relation to such
territories. A little later in the year the Commission
on Human Rights obeyed by elaborating the proposed
article in the following fashion:
"All peoples and all nations shall have the right
of self-determination, namely, the right freely to
determine their political, economic, social and
cultural status."
To this the Commission added both a special
injunction in relation to non-self-governing and trust
territories, and a Chilean proposal which broadened
self-determination to include permanent sovereignty
over natural wealth and resources. Not satisfied with
these actions, the Commission recommended a further
resolution, to the profound pain of the colonial
powers, which not only specified that the demand for
colonial self-government should be ascertained through
a plebiscite held under UN auspices, but also roundly
declared that "slavery exists where an alien people
hold power over the destiny of a people."
There is no occasion to pursue in detail here all
the ramifications of the ensuing battles over
self-determination, colonialism, and the proposed
Covenants. Generally the Western powers and their
friends, normally including the United States, took an
increasingly dim view of the entire matter, while the
Asian-African and Soviet blocs, aided by some of the
Latin Americans, pressed their case as vigorously as
possible. The charge of slavery was eliminated and
other terms were softened, as, for example, in the
decision of the Assembly in December 1952, that the
administering powers should facilitate the exercise of
the right of self-determination by colonial peoples,
"the wishes of the people being ascertained through
plebiscites or other recognized democratic means,
preferably under the auspices of the United Nations."
The majority, however, continued to back the main
lines which had been worked out. As the debate wore on,
it became increasingly clear that Covenants including
the disputed self-determination provisions were
exceedingly unlikely to secure the adherence of the
Western powers. To add to the already ample array of
problems, from the Human Rights Commission and other
sources came proposals to establish some type of organ
which would be empowered to look into, and perhaps act
upon, allegations of a denial of the right of
self-determination.
One of the difficulties in the situation is that,
although the United Nations might help to make it so,
self-determination is not a right which finds any place
in international law. The leading case on the subject,
a singularly clear-cut one, has not lost its validity.
Immediately after World War I Sweden laid claim to the
Aaland Islands which, together with Finland, it had
lost to Russia early in the nineteenth century. When
Finland achieved independence in the course of the
Russian Revolution the islands continued to form a part
of Finnish territory.
It was not seriously disputed that over 95 per cent
of their inhabitants were "altogether Swedish in
origin, in habits, in language, and in culture," and
informal plebiscites as well as other evidence
confirmed their desire for incorporation in Sweden. The
Swedish claim was considered by the League of Nations
in its earliest days, just after the adoption of
self-determination by the peacemakers as a major
principle in the reshaping of Europe.
Despite the unassailable case that had been
presented as far as self-determination for the
islanders was concerned, the claims of peoples to
disrupt states were flatly rejected.
Two key passages may be cited from the League's
documents dealing with the matter. In 1920 a Committee
of Jurists, appointed by the Council, reported that
national self-determination was not recognized by
positive international law; "In the absence of express
provisions in international treaties, the right of
disposing of national territory is essentially an
attribute of the sovereignty of every State."
A Commission of Rapporteurs gave a similar verdict
to the Council in 1921, even though it conceded that
the islanders feared Finnish even more than Russian
domination. Asking whether it were possible to have a
general rule that a minority can separate to join
another state or become independent, it stated:
"The answer can only be in the negative. To
concede to minorities either of language or religion,
or to any fractions of a population, the right of
withdrawing from the community to which they belong,
because it is their wish or their good pleasure,
would be to destroy order and stability within States
and to inaugurate anarchy in international life; it
would be to uphold a theory incompatible with the
very idea of the State as a territorial and political
entity."
These are not novel considerations - nor are they in
the least persuasive to those who deliberately seek to
overturn the stability of the present order in the name
of what they assert as a higher principle. It is the
normal and expected procedure that the state
authorities should proclaim their right to maintain
things as they are whenever a segment of the people
seeks to secede or to overturn the existing state. As
the Pope protested French incorporation of Avignon in
the Revolution, so Metternich held that for the powers
to recognize the inclinations and repugnances of
provinces within states would be to introduce a new and
limitless confusion, bringing the social body to the
point of an overpowering anarchy.
In similar language Abraham Lincoln, confronted with
the threatened secession of the South, laid it down in
his first Inaugural: "Plainly, the central idea of
secession is the essence of anarchy." Stressing the
rightness of the principle of majority rule, he warned
that government must cease if the minority refuses to
acquiesce, and that the new confederacy would itself be
threatened by arbitrary secessions.
To make it clear that the hesitations as to
self-determination are not confined solely to the
Western world, let me add a single example from India.
The Indian nation had successfully asserted its right
of self-determination as against British rule, but at
the cost of a further secession in Pakistan which
pointed to dangers like those of which Lincoln had
warned. The demand in India for a redrawing of the map
of the country on the basis of linguistic states has,
since independence, had to yield priority to the prime
need of maintaining unbroken national unity.
The 1955 report of the States Re-organization
Commission stated firmly that, so far as the component
parts of the Indian Union were concerned, there could
be no question of a right of self-determination
regardless of other factors and circumstances. The
Commission held that if self-determination were the
governing principle, the possible demand for separate
States would be unlimited. "Every linguistic or other
minority group might demand a State for itself, and the
wishes of the people could be swayed by purely
temporary considerations."
An outspoken champion of self-determination on the
international stage, India's devotion to it breaks
down, and very sensibly so, when it comes to its
application within India itself. Nehru's handling of
the question of Kashmir has been equivocal, and to the
untutored eye India's suppression of the risings of the
Naga tribesmen was not easy to distinguish from the
colonial method of dealing with such problems. That
other Asian and African states would in the normal
course of events act in the same fashion seems not open
to question, even though the Bandung Conference of 1955
gave its full support to the principle of
self-determination as basic to all fundamental human
rights.
In his memoirs former President Truman, referring
to the nationalist movements in Asia and Africa,
affirmed that the American people have always accepted
without "ifs" the right of a people to determine its
own destiny. This was an admirably forthright position,
but it has the fatal defect of not coinciding with the
facts for either President Truman or his predecessors
who have hedged in the right with considerable
care.
The United States has moved beyond the days when
President Coolidge could defend his veto of a bill
calling for a Philippine plebiscite with the contention
that it would be trifling with the sacred feelings
innate in humankind to ask the Filipinos with which
state they wished to be associated, but the American
position is still a cautious one.
The standard form has come to be something
approximating the Pacific Charter appended to the SEATO
agreement: self-determination is to be promoted for
countries "whose people desire it and are able to
undertake its responsibilities"; or the joint
Eisenhower-Eden declaration of February 1, 1956, that
they had dedicated themselves "to the goal of
self-government and independence of all countries whose
people desire and are capable of sustaining an
independent existence."
Not, in other words, self-determination for all who
may seek it, but for those who are regarded as
qualified for it. Even in the latter category it would
not be difficult to demonstrate that the United States,
like all other states, has inserted "ifs" where other
political considerations appeared to make them
desirable. The wishes of the people of Okinawa will be
given less than full credence where they run counter to
the American estimate of military needs.
All too often self-determination is a right to be
defended in lofty terms when it is politically
advantageous and to be rejected when it is not. Despite
occasional surface appearances to the contrary, the
issue is not one which divides East and West in any of
the meanings of that geographical expression. Pakistan
is as enthusiastic for free self-determination for
Kashmir as is Afghanistan for Pushtunistan; and neither
Nationalist nor Communist Chinese give evidence of
profound concern over the self-determination of the
Formosans, nor is the United States prepared to
acquiesce in the choice of the form of government made
by the mainland Chinese. The Soviet Union finds it an
excellent right for use against the West and its
colonies as the West holds it eminently applicable to
the peoples of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites.
The Communists are, however, more frankly selective
in their use of self-determination than is the rest of
the world. Lenin and Stalin made it clear that
self-determination was good where it involved a breach
in the imperialist structure and intolerable where it
involved separation from the Communist fatherland. In
the days before he was read out of the brotherhood
Trotsky defended the Soviet take-over of Georgia with
the active participation of the Red Army and went on to
state the general principle under which he and his
colleagues acted:
We do not only recognize but we give full support
to the principle of self-determination, wherever it
is directed against feudal, capitalist and
imperialist states. But wherever the fiction of
self-determination, in the hands of the bourgeoisie,
becomes a weapon directed against the proletarian
revolution, we have no occasion to treat this fiction
differently from the other "principles" of democracy
perverted by capitalism.
In brief, the Soviet Union gives all-out backing to
the right of self-determination except where it
threatens to impair Communist interests. No right of
self-determination was invoked on behalf of the people
of the Kuriles and southern Sakhalin, taken over from
Japan after World War II, although it is to be applied
to everyone else's "salt-water" dependencies.
It is no accident that self-determination, as a new
tenet of natural law attacking the existing state
structure, should be associated in its practical
manifestations with wars and the aftermath of wars. In
rare instances it has been accepted in wholly peaceful
fashion, as in the separation of Norway and Sweden, the
attainment of independence by the Philippines, or
Britain's readiness to speed some of her colonies to
independence after 1945, but the great run of cases are
linked to violence or to such fundamental changes in
power relationships as occur most notably as a result
of wars.
The wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon
started it on its way in Europe; the unification of
Germany and Italy required war; Central and Eastern
Europe were reconstructed as a consequence of the first
World War; and the Second World War opened the door to
self-determination for Asia and Africa. It has often
been argued, though with dubious validity, that the
full-scale application of self-determination will bring
peace, but it would be impossible to argue that
self-determination itself has normally been achieved by
peaceful means or in generally peaceful situations. An
added threat to peace and friendly relations among
nations appears wherever third parties intervene to
back the claim of a people to break away from the state
to which they are presently attached.
The right of self-determination has as yet found no
stable place in the international legal structure nor
has it been accepted by states as a policy to be
applied consistently and across the board.
Indeed, I would suggest that it is essentially
miscast in the role of a legal right which can be made
an operative part of either domestic or international
systems. It is a force of incalculable importance which
has already brought immense changes and will presumably
continue its triumphant sweep as long as nations born
and unborn feel their destiny incomplete.
To recognize it as one of the basic forces shaping
the modern world is, however, by no means to say that
it can be tamed and brought within the limits of a
constitution, treaty, or covenant. It is distantly
conceivable that under the United Nations or otherwise
the states of the world might give it working legal and
political status, but it is much more probable that its
revolutionary implications will keep it outside the
constitutional framework.
It must be regarded as a clear gain for mankind
whenever legal and orderly procedures of peaceful
change are substituted for the violence of war and
revolution, but it is folly to think that any such gain
has been achieved by the mere issuance of loose
pronouncements of the "all peoples" variety. If the
right of self-determination is to be made meaningful,
it must be sharply delimited. The more strictly the
peoples to whom it is to be applied are defined, the
more possible it becomes to make something of it as a
right which can be stated with reasonable precision and
given institutional expression.
Non Self Governing Territories
For present purposes, in the light of the actual
concerns of the United Nations, the most significant
illustration of this possibility involves the
non-self-governing territories which have so largely
monopolized UN attention. Although there may be
arguments at the fringes, as in relation to the
incorporated overseas territories of France or
Portugal, the colonies constitute relatively fixed and
identifiable bodies of people. Here certainly it would
be possible, although still politically difficult
enough, not only to legislate into existence a formal
declaration of the right of colonial peoples to
self-determination under specified conditions but also
to establish procedures through which the international
community would decide by whom and when and how the
right would be exercised, and the rights and
obligations of third parties.
There has in fact already been a substantial
movement in this direction in the United Nations,
building on the two basic principles that
non-self-governing territories are an international
responsibility for which the administering authorities
are to be held accountable and that their proper goal
is self-government or independence, even though the
Charter mentions independence only for the Trust
territories. The Mandates System constituted
recognition that the extension of colonialism on the
old terms was no longer acceptable, and the United
Nations, in addition to tightening up some of the
provisions of that system, took the bolder step of
bringing all non-self-governing territories within the
sphere of international concern. Under the pressure of
the anti-colonialists in the General Assembly the
Trusteeship System has come to be seen increasingly as
a vehicle for the realization of self-determination by
the peoples embraced in it, who should in the interval
be given ever greater responsibility in democratically
constituted governments.
Reaching well beyond the limited language of Chapter
XI of the Charter, the Assembly has attempted to apply
essentially the same principles to all the dependencies
as have been applied to the Trusteeships. Even though
the Assembly's formal powers to act in this broader
sphere are scanty and uncertain, it has among other
things affirmed the right of non-self-governing
territories to self-determination, recommended the
setting of target dates as in the model of the ten year
trusteeship established for Italian Somaliland,
asserted a claim to decide whether self-government has
been achieved, and explored in detail the factors to be
taken into account in reaching such a decision.
Secretary-General Trygve Lie said of the Trusteeship
System that its success would afford "a reassuring
demonstration that there is a peaceful and orderly
means of achieving the difficult transition from
backward and subject status to self-government or
independence." Such peaceful and orderly means,
however, have not yet been devised for the colonial
peoples in general. Their drive to achieve
self-determination has reached a stage beyond that of
merely having the sympathetic approval of the world at
large, but it has not reached the status of
international acceptance of a right fortified by
established procedures, nor do the conditions attached
to the amendment of the Charter make it likely that
that desirable goal will be achieved in any foreseeable
future.
The steps which the United Nations has taken have
met with the vehement objection of several of the
colonial powers. Among the counterclaims is that of the
Belgians who have attempted to meet the attack of the
anti-colonialists by undertaking an offensive of their
own.
The so-called Belgian thesis, repudiating the notion
that all colonial regimes automatically deserve
condemnation as evil, claims to find non-self-governing
peoples scattered widely over the earth's surface, and
by no means only in what are customarily accepted as
colonies. It attacks the "salt-water fallacy" according
to which rule over an alien people separated from the
mother country by open sea is intolerable and subject
to international control whereas similar rule over an
alien people on an unbroken stretch of dry land is
neither suspect nor a matter for international
concern.
It is further contended that colonialism, far from
being inherently bad, is in fact frequently freer, more
enlightened, and more progressive than some of the
regimes imposed on peoples embraced within the
territory of sovereign states. In illustration of this
theme a number of familiar cases are cited, such as the
position of the Indians in several Latin American
countries, of the Africans in the Liberian hinterland,
and, on a grand scale, of the non-Russian peoples
within the Soviet Union. For all of these and others
like them, it is argued, international attention is at
least as pressing a need as it is for any colonial
people. On this basis the Belgians have protested their
full loyalty to the principle of self-determination,
but have been insistent that they cannot go along with
resolutions which single out colonialism as the only
enemy worthy of attack.
To all of this ingeniously worked-out line of
argument there is perhaps no wholly satisfactory
answer, but it carries scant conviction to those who
have set out to do battle on the colonial front.
Without a shadow of a doubt the conditions in many
non-colonial countries are worse than in many colonies
and as deserving of international attention, including
the application of self-determination, but it is idle
to think that the well-established category of
colonies, or, in UN terms, of non-self-governing
territories, can be merged with the other comparable
evils of mankind.
The argument almost wholly fails to meet political
realities. The anti colonialists rightly fear that the
net effect of an acceptance of the Belgian thesis would
be to divert public interest from the colonial
question, and to introduce so many additional
confusions and obstacles as to make it virtually
certain that nothing would be done about any of them.
The United Nations has good reason to attempt to deal
with the problems of oppressed and underprivileged
peoples in independent states through programs of
minority protection and other devices. The issues of
colonialism, however, deserve consideration separately
and in their own right.
A few illustrative cases
Some of the major ways in which the path to
self-determination is blocked or obscured may be
illustrated by a glance at a few recent examples of the
application or non application of the principle in
relation to Asia and Africa.
In the Arab world self-determination got off to a
singularly bad start after World War I. Here the Allies
demonstrated how great was the contradiction between
their professed adherence to the principle and their
actual readiness to ignore it when it interfered with
their imperial interest. From the Arab standpoint the
three principal issues involved were the partition of
the Arab peoples, the subordination of some of them to
British and French control, and the acceptance of
Zionist ambitions in Palestine. To these actions,
regarded by the Arabs as a shocking failure of the West
to act in accord with its promises and its own
proclaimed principles, must be attributed much of the
anti-Westernism which has recently characterized the
Arab world.
However one may choose to interpret the tangled
record of the negotiations, documents, and
conversations of the war years, every word and
implication of which have been examined with
microscopic care and passionate partisanship, there is
an immense gap between what the Arab leaders wanted and
thought they were being promised and what the Allied
statesmen thought they were promising and were in fact
prepared to do when it came time to pay the bill.
As far as the Arabs are concerned, all the
subtleties of interpretation which have been invoked
lose their significance in face of the bare fact that
Arab leaders believed, not without reason, that they
had been promised an independent Arab state in Asia,
with only minor geographic limitations. Instead of such
a state they were presented with the carving up of
vital parts of the Arab territories in accord with
secret wartime agreements and the imposition of French
or British colonial rule upon some of the resulting
entities. It was cold comfort to the Arabs that the
colonialism which was substituted for the independence
they had expected was dressed in the guise of the
new-style Mandates System.
At no point in the proceedings were even the minimum
decencies of self-determination observed. Whether the
Arabs could have overcome fhe divisions in their own
ranks to the extent of setting up and maintaining a
single Arab state is highly debatable, but certainly
they were given no chance at it nor, alternatively, to
shape their own multiple state system. What actually
happened was as clear a process of imperial dividing
and ruling as has been seen. The mandatories who, with
the League's blessing, appointed themselves to guide
the Arabs to a surer footing in the modern world were
by no means those the peoples would have chosen for
themselves, and, in the case of the French in Syria and
Lebanon, were rejected with vehemence.
Furthermore, the Arabs promptly claimed that they
were quite as well fitted to govern themselves
independently as were the Balkan peoples when the
latter achieved their independence from Ottoman rule:
if full independence in one case, why not in the other?
To this contention there was added the reverse
peculiarity that a status of tutelage was imposed upon
precisely those Arabs who had the most intimate and
long-continued contact with the West and hence might be
regarded as best able to stand by themselves, while the
less "advanced" Arabs of the peninsula, still largely
nomadic and unacquainted with the modern world, were
acknowledged to possess sovereign independence. At a
later date, after World War II, exactly the same kind
of question was being asked in connection with other
Arab territories; if the former Mandates could have
independence, and, particularly, if Libya could be made
an independent state by formal international action,
what excuse could there be for holding Morocco,
Tunisia, and Algeria?
These were unanswerable questions which the Arabs in
due course answered in their own fashion by rising
against alien domination. Here as elsewhere Western
imperialism worked to produce its own antibodies.
Zionism
The acceptance of Zionist aspirations in Palestine
was, however, a very different matter. Instead of
working to correct itself, it grew always worse and
more threatening from the standpoint of the Arabs who
had from the outset lacked faith in the solemn
assurance that their rights and position would not
suffer. The conception of creating a Jewish national
home in Palestine could not possibly be squared with
the principle of self-determination, or, for that
matter, of democracy, on the basis of any of the
generally accepted criteria.
Aside from the fact that many Jews wanted to
establish themselves there, the only claim which had
any conceivable status was that Palestine had been the
ancient Jewish homeland many centuries ago; but to
accept the legitimacy of claims to self-determination
whose basis is possession broken off two thousand years
earlier would be to stir up such a host of conflicting
and unrealizable demands as totally to discredit the
principle. It is, of course, true that some small
number of Jews had continued to live in Palestine or
had at some point returned there, but at the time of
the Balfour Declaration and the introduction of the
Mandate the Jewish community in Palestine was vastly
outnumbered by the Arabs whose occupancy dated back to
the remote past.
If self-determination were to be applied in the
customary fashion of seeking out what the people of the
country wanted, there could be no doubt where the
overwhelming majority lay nor of the rejection by that
majority of both Balfour Declaration and Mandate. The
Zionist program could be carried through as a decision
of policy only if someone were prepared to enforce it
in the face of bitter opposition.
The Arabs were neither slow nor bashful in bringing
these and similar points to the world's attention, and
as early as August 1919, they received neutral support
from the King-Crane Commission sent by President Wilson
to ascertain the state of affairs in Syria and
Palestine. Asserting that the Zionists looked to
practically complete dispossession of the non-Jewish
inhabitants of Palestine, this Commission found nearly
nine-tenths of the population to be non-Jewish and
emphatically opposed to the entire Zionist program.
With specific reference to the Wilsonian principle of
self-determination, the Commission held:
To subject,a people so minded to unlimited Jewish
immigration, and to steady financial and social
pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross
violation of the principle just quoted, and of the
people's rights, though it be kept within the forms
of law.
As the Jews saw it, what now happened was not only
the opening to them of a haven of refuge, but also
their rightful return to an ancient homeland to which
they had never surrendered title. To the Arabs it was a
prolonged and tragically successful invasion of an Arab
country by an alien people under Western imperialist
auspices, ending in the expulsion of most of the people
whose country it was. No suggestion of a plebiscite
accompanied the General Assembly's proposal that
Palestine be partitioned. Since the establishment of
Israel and the reduction of the Arab population to some
10 per cent of the whole, the Arab states have insisted
that Israel is a totally illegitimate creation,
overriding the natural right of the Palestinian Arabs
to their own country, and that it has no existence
which they are prepared to tolerate and recognize.
Cyprus
In the same part of the world another imperial
denial of self-determination which has attracted global
attention in recent years concerns the island of
Cyprus. Here the basic circumstances were not unlike
those of the Aaland Islands, at least in the sense that
the great bulk of the population was of one ethnic
stock and sought union with its national country.
Four-fifths of the half million Inhabitants of the
island were Greek and were claimed as devoted adherents
of union with Greece, which country with increasing
insistence demanded the island's cession; but the
remaining fifth was Turkish and hostile to such a
merger.
On the basis of a count of heads the verdict of
self-determination was clear, but geography, history,
and high strategy all combined to confuse the issue.
Geographically, the island lay only some forty miles
off the Turkish coast, and ten or more times that
distance from Greece. On the score of history it was
Britain's pleasure to insist that Cyprus had been
Egyptian, Persian, Roman, Genoese, and Turkish, but
never Greek except for a short period in the fourth
century B.C. It fell into British hands as the result
of an Anglo-Turkish treaty of 1878 whose avowed purpose
was the defense of Turkish possessions against Russian
aggression, and this cession was reconfirmed by the
1923 treaty of Lausanne to which Greece was also a
party.
Strategically, the loss of Palestine and the Suez
base left Cyprus as the only base from which the
British could defend their still considerable Middle
Eastern interests and commitments. To counter the
argument as to the precariousness of a base located in
the midst of a hostile population, and the consequent
moral that the demand for self-determination should be
granted, the British pointed unhappily to what
self-determination had done to their holdings in Egypt
and elsewhere. The Turks, who also had an obvious
strategic and political concern, protested that history
and geography made it clear that, if the island were to
change hands again, its prior owner had claims which
could not be ignored.
The issue was one of relatively old standing. In
1931 the Cypriot demand for union with Greece took a
sufficiently violent form to lead the British
authorities to suspend the legislature and govern from
that time forward through the Governor aided by an
Executive Council. Later British efforts to secure
acceptance of more liberal constitutions were rebuffed
by leaders who would take no substitute for union.20
When Greece raised the issue in the United Nations in i
954 Britain promptly pleaded domestic jurisdiction in
an effort to keep it off the Assembly's agenda, with
the lack of success which has customarily attended such
efforts.
Although it presumably carried little conviction
save to those already converted, there was more
substance to Britain's protest that the endorsement of
the Greek attempt to interest the United Nations in its
claims would undermine international stability by
encouraging states to seek the incorporation of related
peoples beyond their frontiers even though those
frontiers had been accepted by treaty.
This was an authentic echo of the classic objection
to self-determination, but it was harder to take
seriously the British contention, backed by the Turks,
that self-determination was not really involved because
what the Cypriots wanted was a merger with Greece and
not independence. On the basis of this contention,
however, several states shifted their support from
enosisto independence for Cyprus. The final
solution of the controversy which the British, Greek,
and Turkish governments agreed upon in 1959,
ruled out both partition and union with Greece, called
for the establishment of a Republic of Cyprus organized
about the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities, and
safeguarded British control of military bases and
installations.
The Cypriot claims, backed by terrorism as well as
by political action, raised a complex series of
questions not lightly to be brushed aside. Do history,
geography, and economics play a role, or is the popular
majority the sole determinant? What are the rights and
duties of minorities and of the third states which are
the national states of those minorities? One further
issue may be mentioned which never came quite clearly
to the fore in the Cyprus case although the British
tried to put it there in claiming the base as necessary
for the fulfillment of Britain's free world commitments
against Communism: At what point, if any, does a
genuine international interest supersede the right of a
nation to determine itself and its territory in any
fashion that it may choose? This was an issue which was
also laid squarely on the table in Colonel Nasser's
nationalization of the Suez Canal Company in 1956.
British Guiana
In British Guiana in 1953 there appeared another
aspect of the impairment of self-determination in a
colonial setting, and one whose shadows reached far
afield. The essential question at stake was: how large
is the freedom of an advanced colonial people to choose
for itself the kind of institutions which it wants?
What if such a people selects a political and economic
system which the administering power regards as a
betrayal of the real interests of the people for whom
it still has responsibility?
When the crisis erupted, British Guiana, despite
poverty, illiteracy, economic imbalance and racial
diversity, appeared to be moving successfully ahead
through the stages on the road to self-government which
were becoming standard for British colonial policy. On
the basis of the Waddington Commission report of 1951
and to meet growing political agitation, a new
constitution had been granted which created a bicameral
legislature composed of an appointive second chamber
and a House of Assembly of twenty-four members elected
by universal adult suffrage plus three official members
- the Chief Secretary, the Attorney-General, and the
Financial Secretary. In the Executive Council, presided
over by the Governor, sat the three official members of
the Assembly, six ministers elected by the Assembly and
placed in charge of departments of government, and one
minister without portfolio elected by the second
chamber.
The political effect of this reform was to place a
very large measure of control in the hands of the
elected majority. In April 1953, the first elections
were held under this new instrument, resulting in a
substantial sweep by the People's Progressive Party,
headed by Cheddi Jagan, which won eighteen of the
twenty-four elective seats in the Assembly. With this
victory, which incidentally gave the party a larger
hold in the Assembly than its share in the popular
vote, the P.P.P. could count on dominating both
legislature and executive.
In a few months the British authorities came to the
conviction that the colony was being taken over by the
Communists as represented by the P.P.P. leadership in
general and Jagan in particular, and was threatened by
violence and revolutionary overturn. The Governor was
equipped with the reserve powers which had been so very
charily exercised where elected majorities had come
into power elsewhere under similar constitutions; but
to draw upon them meant not only to reverse the stream
of political advance but also to challenge the recently
expressed will of the people. Confronted by this
dilemma, the Governor took the drastic step of
suspending the constitution and reintroducing
authoritarian colonial rule, thus precipitating a
clear-cut issue.
As Jagan presented it, that issue was not one of
Communism: "It is really whether any people - colonial
people - have a right to rule themselves." 22 To
bolster his case he threw into the scales the Atlantic
Charter's pledge to respect the right of all people to
choose the form of government under which they will
live and the assertion in the UN Declaration of Human
Rights that "the will of the people shall be the basis
of the authority of government."
It was beyond dispute that the expressed will of the
people had been flouted, but the Commission appointed
by the British government to investigate the
constitutional controversy in effect came to the
conclusion that the people of Guiana were not yet in a
position to make political choices in a responsible
fashion. Lacking the prerequisites for democracy and
having neither an effective two party system nor an
understanding of economic realities, the people were
exposed to the likelihood of one-party rule. Because of
its broader bearing as well as its specific reference
to Guiana, the Commission's estimate of the political
prospects might usefully be cited.
In these circumstances the alternatives seem
either that rival parties of comparable strength will
compete for the homogeneous popular vote by simply
vying with each other in the design of programmes
which will promise the voter what he wants rather
than attempt a serious treatment of the country's
problems; or, as events have shown, that a single
party will command such support among the immature
and undiscriminating electorate that having no
immediate and effective rivals for office it may
safely ignore the rights of minorities and, by abuse
of its powers, so consolidate its position that the
risk of eventual defeat by the democratic process is
eliminated.
Should democracy be allowed to destroy democracy?
What right has any people to determine the life of
another, and if such a right exists, at what point does
it cease? Where the exercise of self-determination
remains for the moment in the control of the colonial
power, or of organs of the international community,
should it be conceded if there is good evidence that
human rights and fundamental freedoms will be impaired
rather than protected and advanced? These are
speculative questions of great moment for
self-determination, and it must be evident that they
have no easy answers. The democrat may find himself
torn between his acceptance of self-determination and
his devotion to democracy itself.
One concrete issue with which the British were
embarrassingly faced in Guiana concerned the next steps
to be taken. The tight colonial control which had been
re-imposed could not be maintained indefinitely, while
the restoration to power of a popularly elected
majority would run head on into the danger that the
prior official attack on the victorious party had
worked to enhance its prestige as the champion of the
people against the imperialists.
With due deliberation giving time for a cooling-off
period, the British introduced a new constitution which
abolished the post of Chief Minister and gave the
Governor power to appoint enough members of the
Legislative Council to balance the elected members if
this should prove necessary. Again Jagan and the P.P.P.
came out on top, winning nine of the fourteen elective
seats, three more of which went to a rival offshoot of
the P.P.P. The Governor was presented with the choice
of overriding the popular mandate or of recalling to
power the man who had been the center of the earlier
storm. Jagan was asked to form a government and, as
leader of the majority party, assumed the position of
virtual Chief Minister although his official post was
that of Minister of Trade and Industry. His wife,
Detroit-born Janet Rosenburg, whom he met while
studying dentistry at Northwestern University, became
Minister of Labor, Health, and Housing. With the
Governor's substantial reserve powers in the
background, Jagan promised moderation and respect for
the existing constitution although he reserved the
right to agitate against it through the normal
democratic processes. To all outward appearance peace
has reigned in this second and modified venture in
constitutional progress for Guiana.
The lessons of British Guiana were widely studied
elsewhere. As might be expected, they were generally
taken by the anti colonialists as justification of
their fear that imperial promises of self-government
were not to be taken at face value: self-government
would be tolerated only where it worked within patterns
acceptable to the imperialists. In a different setting
this fear was further substantiated in the year
following the Guiana crisis when the government of
Guatemala, accused of being part of the international
Communist conspiracy, was overthrown by invading forces
which gave every evidence of outside support while the
United Nations and the Organization of American States
stood amicably by in a state of some confusion. On the
other side of the fence, the imperial authorities saw
the events in Guiana as justifying their fear
that the end of colonialism might mean a taking over by
Communism. The Guiana experience was cited by the
British as furnishing grounds for moving slowly in
Cyprus, and it no doubt forced second thoughts about
self-government for Singapore where it was an obvious
risk that the main beneficiaries would be the
Communists.
The two Togolands
The complexities of self-determination in a colonial
setting even where the desire to maintain empire plays
only an incidental role is well illustrated by the
recent history of the two Togolands, later paralleled
in the case of the Cameroons. The problems of the
Togolands were brought to a head not by imperial
intransigence but by the British decision to grant
independence to the neighboring Gold Coast. Spared only
the extra hazards presented by European or Asian
settlers, these two Trust Territories encompassed
approximately every other type of division and inner
differentiation which Africa and colonialism could
provide. A survey of some of the highlights of Togoland
history will lend concreteness to the contention that
the principle of self-determination offers no
self-evident answers to the problem it is supposed to
deal with.
Togoland was wholly a German colonial creation,
brought into being in the last years of the nineteenth
century and existing as a single political entity only
until 1914. Even such scanty unity as German rule
brought to the disparate peoples lumped together in a
colony arbitrarily carved out from the African
landscape was lost in the equally arbitrary partition
between Britain and France after World War I. From that
time forward the people on the two sides of the line
were subject to very different influences, including
education in two different European languages.
Since the two Togolands shared the typical ethnic
make-up of their West African neighbors in the sense of
a sharp distinction between the peoples of the northern
hinterland and those of the coastal regions, both
Britain and France undertook an administrative
separation between the northern and the southern
portions of their territories. The political
consequences of this division are reflected in the
comment of James S. Coleman that "until the last five
years the overwhelming majority of the peoples of
northern Togoland were unaware of the existence of
Togoland."
A further point of differentiation arose from the
fact that while French Togoland was administered as a
politically distinct unit, not merged with next-door
Dahomey, British Togoland was treated as an integral
part of the adjoining Gold Coast, north Togoland being
joined to the Gold Coast's Northern Territories and the
south to the Colony. In consequence, British Togoland
had virtually no independent existence of its own.
French Togoland, despite its political separateness,
was for all practical purposes run on the standard
French colonial lines, involving the usual processes of
assimilation.
In addition to these political and administrative
separations and linkages, tribal groups overflowed all
the European4mposed boundaries and maintained some
sense of communal identity even though they had been
cut off from each other by imperial surgery. The most
significant and vocal group were the Ewe people of the
south, numbering some 700,000, who covered an area
reaching from the Gold Coast across British Togoland
into the French territory.
As early as 1919 a number of the Ewe chiefs
protested to Lord Milner, Secretary of State for the
Colonies, against handing over part of Togoland to the
French on the ground that it meant separating members
of the tribe from their brethren in the Gold Coast.
"The feeling of your Lordship's petitioners," they
concluded, "will be more clearly understood when they
are considered side by side with those of the
inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine at the time of their
annexation to Germany in 1871." 26 But this early
effort to oppose self-determination to imperial
bargains proved of no avail.
In its long and tangled United Nations career the
Togoland problem was subject to drastic swings of
sentiment and interpretation, due in part, no doubt, to
lack of knowledge as to the realities of the situation
but in part also to the fact that the Togolanders were
divided among themselves and changed their minds from
time to time. The widening out of the circle of those
who had an awareness of social, economic, and political
issues led to a heightened consciousness of the
distinctions which separated the Togolese from each
other.
Three major types of proposals successively
dominated the deliberations of the United Nations. The
first was based on the assumption that the most urgent
matter was Ewe unification, but the Trusteeship Council
and the Assembly in the exercise of its jurisdiction
over the Trusteeship System had no proper concern with
the Gold Coast where a substantial portion of the Ewe
lived and of which British Togoland was an integral
part.
Nonetheless, in 1950 the Assembly in Resolution 441
(V) recognized "the great importance of the Ewe
problem" and urged that an adequate solution be
speedily found for it in full accord with the real
wishes and interests of the people concerned. In the
next round the Assembly moved on to a clearer linking
together of the inescapably related questions of Ewe
unification and of the unification of the two
Togolands. By 1952, the latter issue had come to
predominance, with the result that the Assembly in
Resolution 652 (VII) concluded that "the unification of
the two Togolands is the manifest aspiration of the
majority of the population of both Trust Territories,"
and urged Britain and France to work toward as large a
unification as possible.
Very shortly, however, it became apparent that with
the approach of independence for the Gold Coast a new
star was rising whose magnetic attraction could not be
ignored in any future deliberations about Togoland. The
matter came to a head with the British announcement in
'954 that when the Gold Coast achieved independence it
would be impossible for Togoland to be administered as
in the past. Almost everyone could join in rejoicing
that an African state was coming to independence, but
this new state of affairs raised an array of problems
concerning both Trusteeship and self-determination.
A strong case could obviously be made for the
proposition that small and unviable Togoland, already
factually integrated with the Gold Coast, should now be
formally merged with the latter when it became
independent. The Trusteeship purists, however,
protested that such a move was in violation of the
basic precepts of the System since they viewed the
Trust Territories as permanently separate units whose
only proper goal was full independence. Furthermore,
the evidence indicated that while the northern section
of British Togoland wanted to become part of the Gold
Coast, the people of the south had serious
reservations. In particular, the adherents of Ewe
unification feared that integration would mean
permanent separation from the Ewe people of French
Togoland. Those who had become convinced of the
desirability of the unification of the two Togolands
were necessarily disaffected; and it was evident that
any far-reaching move in British Togoland must have
serious consequences for its French neighbor.27
Despite these varied doubts and objections the
Assembly in 1955 adopted Resolution 944 (X) which
provided for a plebiscite to be held in British
Togoland under United Nations supervision, in which the
people would be consulted as to their wishes in regard
to
(a) the union of their Territory with an
independent Gold Coast; or
(b) Separation of Togoland under British
administration from the Gold Coast and its
continuance under Trusteeship pending the ultimate
determination of its future.
In May 1956, this plebiscite was held,
setting a precedent for the future evolution of other
Trust Territoties. From a technical standpoint it
appears to have been an outstanding success, but as to
its substantive bearing and interpretation there is
room for some measure of skepticism. The verdict was
for integration with the Gold Coast, 93,095 votes being
cast for the first alternative on the ballot as against
67,492 for the much more vaguely defined proposition
that British Togoland should continue under Trusteeship
until some other unspecified decision should be reached
by somebody.
The vote in the two major sections of the Territory
diverged markedly: while 79 per cent of the northerners
endorsed integration with the Gold Coast, only 45 per
cent of the voters of the more populous south were for
it. In a number of instances the votes in nearby wards
differed so greatly as to leave little doubt that the
determining influences were rather purely local
considerations or the pressure of local chiefs or other
leaders than a weighing of the larger issues. A further
complicating factor was that some among the Ewe voted
against integration in the hope that at a later stage
they might be able to join with their fellow
"nationals" in French Togoland and perhaps bring the
entire Ewe people into Ghana. A number of others, it
was asserted, would have been ready to join the Gold
Coast on a federal basis but rejected submergence in
the unitary state on which Nkrumah insisted, fearing
Ashanti separatism.
In the earlier United Nations deliberations on the
plebiscite the inescapable question had been raised as
to whether the Territory should be treated as one
consolidated block or should be divided in accordance
with the popular vote in its different parts. Despite
the disparities in opinion which the voting disclosed,
both the Trusteeship Council and the Assembly came to
the conclusion that the whole of British Togoland
should be merged with the Gold Coast.
The principal arguments for this sensible decision
were that any further partition would produce even less
viable entities and that everything possible should be
done to bolster the fortunes of the first sub-Saharan
African colony to win independence. These arguments
were unpersuasive for the southerners in general and
the Ewe in particular since they claimed that the unity
of British Togoland was a fiction, that they were quite
distinct from and more advanced than the northerners,
and that their ethnic allegiance tied them to the
French territory as well as to the Gold Coast. Their
plea to the Assembly later in 1956 to divide British
Togoland in two along the lines which had been
administratively accepted from the start made no
headway, however.
As for French Togoland, the effect of these
developments was to spur France on to similar actions.
In the resolution which sanctioned the British
plebiscite the Assembly noted the French intention to
introduce political reforms and to consult the Togolese
as to their wishes for the future. The Assembly hoped
that this consultation might also be conducted under UN
supervision. In July 1956 the French representative in
the Trusteeship Council presented the outline of a new
statute intended to establish an autonomous Togoland
Republic within the framework of the French Union and
requested the appointment of UN observers for the
forthcoming referendum on the territory's status.
The Council, however, refused to associate itself
with the referendum on the two major counts of
uncertainty as to the statute's final form and doubts
as to the adequacy of the self-government it provided.
Furthermore, the voters were to be given no chance to
opt for independence since they could only accept the
new statute, which would involve termination of
trusteeship, or continue the existing trusteeship
arrangements.28 The proposal that the package to be
offered the Togolese should embrace their later right
to choose full independence was rejected by the French,
presumably with a wary eye to the effect on Algeria and
other French colonies.
Despite this rebuff by the Trusteeship Council and
strong protests from some political groups in Togoland,
France put its plan into effect. In September the
Autonomous Republic of Togoland was officially brought
into existence, equipped not only with a Premier and a
Cabinet drawn from the legislature but also with an
anthem and a national flag.29 A month later the
promised referendum was held, but without UN
supervision and in face of a boycott by some opposition
elements.
Although more than 70 per cent of those who voted
approved the new status, the circumstances leading up
to and surrounding the referendum could leave neither
the Togolese nor the United Nations wholly content with
the result. Behind the infant republic lurked the same
kind of difficulties as those which had come more
openly to the surface in British Togoland: the
unresolved problems of the Ewe and other tribal groups,
the question of Togoland unification and independence,
and the attractive force of a Gold Coast about to
secure independence.
Fortified by the report of a Commission which
visited the Territory early in the year, the General
Assembly in November 1957, decided to elect a
Commissioner to supervise Legislative Assembly
elections in French Togoland which would, for the first
time, be based on universal adult suffrage. The French
announced their intention of enhancing Togoland's
autonomy by transferring to local control all powers
save defense, foreign affairs, and currency.
To the surprised dismay of France the voting in
April 1958, went heavily in favor of the
opposition parties and particularly in favor of the
Cornite' de 1' Unite' Togolaise, headed
by Sylvanus Olympio who had been a frequent spokesman
before UN for the All-Ewe Conference. This swing toward
independence and away from the pro-French party which
had controlled the Togoland government from the time of
the adoption of the new statute was to be attributed
primarily to such factors as universal suffrage and the
unprecedented readiness of French administrators,
supervised by a corps of UN observers, to refrain from
manipulating the electoral machinery. The outcome may
also have been influenced by the action of the Accra
conference of independent African states, held just
before the election, in criticizing French policy in
Togoland and claiming the right of self-determination
for the territory.
Conclusion
The intricate affairs of the two Togolands throw
light on a number of facets of the problems which
self-determination brings with it, but still others
deserve mention. Among them is the minor but
potentially troublesome question of the disposition of
tiny dependencies, such as the American Virgin Islands,
miscellaneous Pacific islands, and the smaller African
colonial holdings, which have a real measure of
separate identity but for which sovereign independence
seems no sensible answer.
Here a doctrinaire application of
self-determination is far less in order than the use of
inventive ingenuity to devise solutions fitted to the
wide variety of particular circumstances.
A number of models now exist to which it is possible
to turn for inspiration, not only for the smaller
territories but for larger ones as well. Several former
French dependencies have come to self-government as at
least formally indistinguishable and integral parts of
France; a new type of integration with Britain has been
proposed for Malta; Puerto Rico's commonwealth status
establishes a unique association with the United
States; and the Dutch Antilles are similarly linked
with the Netherlands. In all such cases the obvious
danger must be faced that the fate of the smaller unit
will in fact be determined at the pleasure of the
larger, but this is a danger against which it should be
possible to erect safeguards, as the General Assembly
has sought to do in its deliberations on the factors
involved in self-government.
Of broader importance is the fact that the
application of self-determination in the colonial
sphere inevitably comes to be tangled with the
continuing backwardness of some of the non-self-govern
mg peoples whose political inexperience makes it highly
doubtful that the issues involved in self-determination
can be presented to them in meaningful terms.
It is one thing for President Sukarno to assert on
behalf of the Indonesian nation that it is "the law of
nature . . . that West Irian will return to us, return
to the fold of our Motherland," but it is quite
another thing for the inhabitants of West Irian, still
living in primitive isolation, to decide between the
Indonesians, the Dutch, and independence, not to
mention some form of trusteeship.
Can it be seriously contended that the people of
Southwest Africa are in a position to make an informed
and responsible choice between annexation by the Union
of South Africa, the maintenance of the Mandate or the
creation of a Trusteeship, or some other solution to be
devised, perhaps, in the chambers of the United
Nations? Despite assurances by South African leaders
that the chiefs in Southwest Africa applauded the idea
of merger with the Union, the UN General Assembly in
its first brush with what has become a perennial
problem held in Resolution 65 (I) adopted in 1946
that:
the African inhabitants of South West Africa have
not yet secured political autonomy or reached a stage
of political development enabling them to express a
considered opinion which the Assembly could recognize
on such an important question as incorporation of
their territory.
Even if this were not the case and the chiefs knew
what they were approving--which might be taken in
substance as almost a denial of self-determination,
placing them and their people within the jaws of
apartheid-- a further question would immediately
arise. How much credence should be given to the claim
of a small dominant minority, be it the old-style
chiefs or the new-style Western-trained middle class,
to speak in the name of the people as a whole?
The burden of proof should certainly rest upon
those who deny the capacity of a people to decide its
destiny for itself - a capacity which in some cases is
clearly still lacking or woefully inadequate.
It stretches a good point too far to accept the
contention of a Venezuelan delegate to the United
Nations that "The mere fact that a people had expressed
a desire for self-government should be recognized as
sufficient evidence that they were ready for it."
Where the capacity to make an effective choice is
lacking it is plausible to assume also a lack of
ability to maintain independence effectively without
extensive outside support. The political validity of
this argument is, however, seriously impaired by the
fact that the anti-colonialists and nationalists
backing independence for almost any people can point to
others whose independence has been accepted, but whose
maturity and experience are not demonstrably ahead of
those whose right to self-determination is being
questioned.
No survey of the states and peoples of the world
could sustain the contention that independent statehood
has necessarily been reserved for those who are most
advanced and capable of sustaining it while colonialism
has been the lot only of the most backward. It must
also be asked whether the good of the world is promoted
by the multiplication of weak and perhaps irresponsible
states.
Whatever answer the statesman or the philosopher
may give to this question, the working answer is
presumably the same: if other peoples, no better
qualified for it than we, have been allowed to clutter
up the international stage, why should a new set of
rules now suddenly be invoked to deny us our equal
right?"
