National Self-Determination

NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION
by Murray N. Rothbard

Lew Rockwell, CA
Jan 9 2007

This article first appeared in the August 1990 issue of The
Rothbard-Rockwell Report under the title "The Nationalities Question."

Upon the collapse of centralizing totalitarian Communism in Eastern
Europe and even the Soviet Union, long suppressed ethnic and
nationality questions and conflicts have come rapidly to the fore.

The crack-up of central control has revealed the hidden but still
vibrant "deep structures" of ethnicity and nationality.

To those of us who glory in ethnic diversity and yearn for national
justice, all this is a wondrous development of what has previously
lived only in fantasy or longing: it is a chance in Europe at long
last, to begin to reverse the monstrous twin injustices of Sarajevo
and Versailles. It is like being back in 1914 or 1919 again, with a
chance for the map of Europe and near Asia to be righted and redrawn.

For the first time since the end of World War II, or arguably since
Versailles, the world is in a "revolutionary situation." There are
many problems and costs to such a revolutionary situation, costs that
are well-known and need not be repeated here; but there are also many
benefits: currently, not only the collapse of Socialism-Communism,
but the sense that all things are possible, and that justice may come
at last to a long-suffering area of the world.

Most Americans, however, are puzzled and disturbed rather than
delighted at the re-emergence of the nationalities question. We
can separate the worried or hostile reactions into four groups: (a)
the average American; (b) Marxist-Leninists; (c) global democrats,
which include the liberal and neoconservative wing of the ruling
American Establishment; and (d) modal libertarians.

HOSTILES: THE AVERAGE AMERICAN

First, the average American is uncomprehending of the very problem.

Why can’t all these groups live-and-let-live, and join peacefully
together as has the United States in its "melting pot" of varied
immigrant groups? In the first place, this Pollyanna view of America
overlooks the black question, which has scarcely settled into any
melting pot, and is more mired in deep conflict now than at any
time since the late nineteenth century. But even setting that aside
no peaceful "melting pot" existed in the nineteenth century. From
the 1830s until after World War I, northern, "Yankee," mainstream
Protestants (with the exception of old-style Calvinists and high-church
Lutherans) were captured by an aggressive and militant post-millennial
pietism whose objective was to use government to stamp out "sin"
(especially liquor and the Catholic Church), and who made the lives
of Catholic and German Lutheran immigrants miserable and put them
under constant attack for nearly a century. Finally, the pietists
succeeded in imposing immigration restrictions and national origin
quotas after World War I.

But even setting all that aside, the United States of America was a
unique development in the modern world: a roughly "empty" land (with
the notable exception of American Indians), peopled by a large number
of mainly European religious, ethnic, and national immigrant groups,
within the framework of a mainly free, constitutional Republic under
the rubric of English as the common, public language.

Other nations in Europe and Asia developed very differently, often
with native nationalities conquered and dominated by "imperial"
nations. Instead of one public language, the oppressor nationalities
invariably tried to obliterate the languages and even the names of
conquered nationalities. One of the most moving cries during last
year’s implosion of Communism came from the suppressed Turkish minority
in Bulgaria and the conquered "Moldavians" (i.e., Romanians) in Soviet
Moldavia, grabbed from Romania after World War II: "give us our names
back!" The Moldavians want to shed the hated Russian names imposed by
the Soviet state, as well as the even more hated Cyrillic forced upon
them in place of their Latin alphabet. And this national obliteration
is not just a product of Communism. It is an age-old practice:
"imperial" France still forbids the Celts of Brittany to name their
children according to Celtic nomenclature; and the Turks, still not
admitting their genocidal massacre of the Armenian minority during
World War I, also refuse to acknowledge the very existence of their
Kurdish minority, referring to them contemptuously as "mountain Turks."

HOSTILES: THE MARXIST-LENINISTS

The Marxist-Leninists are a dying breed, but it is fascinating to
consider their now vanishing role on this issue. Their reputation as
"anti-imperialists" has nothing to do with classical Marxism. In fact,
Marx and Engels, consistent with their pro-modernizing approach,
aggressively favored Western imperialism (especially that of the
Prussians as against the hated Slavs). This stance accorded with
their view that the faster capitalism and "modernization" advance,
the sooner the "inevitable final stage" of history, the proletarian
communist revolution, will take place.

Lenin, however, pragmatically junked Marxism to side with the Third
World and other peasantry, which he saw perceptively as far riper
for revolution than the advanced capitalist nations. In practice,
however, Leninism, while giving lip-service to the right of national
self-determination (enshrined on paper in the Soviet Constitution but
always ignored in practice), was a centralizing universalist creed
transcending nationalities. More important, the actual Leninist cadre
in every country were deracinated intellectuals (often colonials
educated by Marxist-Leninist professors in the imperial centers
of London, Paris, and Lisbon), who were generally ignorant of, and
contemptuous or hostile toward, ethnicity, religion, and culture. The
official compulsory atheism of Marxist-Leninists was only the most
overt example of this hostility.

This riding roughshod over national cultures in the name of
universalist Leninist ideology is most starkly evident in the
regimes of Africa. The Marxist centralizing governments of Africa are
descendants of the regimes of Western imperialism established in the
late nineteenth century.

Britain, France, and Portugal marched into Africa and carved it up into
provinces totally heedless and uncaring of the realities of the varied
and highly diverse tribes which constituted the African polity. Many
tribes, most of which hated each other’s guts, and had nothing –
neither culture, language, customs, nor tradition – in common, were
coercively incorporated into "colonies" with arbitrary borders imposed
by the imperial Western powers. In addition to this forced marriage,
many of the artificial borders split tribal regions into two or more
parts, so that tribesmen seasonally migrating into age-old occupied
regions, found themselves stopped at the border and accused of being
"illegal immigrants" or "aggressors."

The tragedy of modern Africa is that the imperial powers did not
simply withdraw and allow the natural tribal formation to resume
their original occupation of the continent. Instead, the coercive
centralizing regimes of these so-called "nations" were turned over
to the deracinated Marxist intellectuals educated in the imperial
capitals, who soon became a parasitic bureaucratic class taxing and
oppressing the peaceful peasantry who constitute the bulk of the
actual producers in Africa.

HOSTILES: THE GLOBAL DEMOCRATS

The most significant negative reaction to the recent eruption
of the nationalities question is that of our "global democracy"
Establishment. Theirs is the most significant because they constitute
the dominant opinion-molding force in American life. Essentially theirs
is a far more sophisticated version of the reaction of the average
American. The concerns and demands of nationalities are dismissed as
narrow, selfish, parochial, and even dangerously hostile per se and
aggressive toward other nationalities. Above all, they interfere
with the most sanctified value in the global-democratic canon:
"the democratic process," which inherently means "majority rule,"
albeit sometimes limited by the restraints of "human" or "minority"
rights. Therefore, the ultimate curse leveled against nationalities
and their demands is that they are perforce "undemocratic" and hence
not suitable for the modern world.

Thus, there is a deeper reason than realpolitik for the seemingly
strange coolness of the Bush administration toward the heroic
national independence movement of the Lithuanians and the other Baltic
nations. It’s not just that the United States is supposed to sacrifice
them on the altar of "saving Gorby." For there was unalloyed joy at
the liberating of Officially "Acredited Nations, such as Poland,
Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, from Soviet and Communist yokes. But
the Baltic nations, after all, are different: they are "part" of the
Soviet Union, and therefore their unilateral secession, against the
will of the majority of the USSR, becomes an affront to "democracy,"
to "majority rule," and, last but far from least, to the unitary,
centralizing nation-state that allegedly embodies the democratic ideal.

The fact that the United States had never recognized the forcible
incorporation of the Baltic nations into the USSR in 1940, is now
demonstrated to be a Cold War sham to win the votes of East European
ethnics living in the United States. For when push comes to shove,
how can little parts of a great nation be permitted to secede in
opposition to the "democratic will" of the larger nation? Not only the
Bush and Establishment coolness toward the Baltics, but also their
palpable relief when Gorby sent troops in to Azerbaijan, allegedly
to stop Azeris and Armenians from killing each other, shows that far
more is at stake here than helping Gorby against the Stalinists.

For the U.S. global democrats had gotten worried that Gorby might
fail to carry out the alleged fundamental responsibility of a great
modernizing nation: to use force and violence to settle disputes
among its various regions and nationalities. That is, in fact, to
maintain the unitary force of the central "imperial" power against
the nationalities within its periphery.

The clinching argument of the global democrats in all this may be
summed up as "after all, didn’t Lincoln?" The most sanctified figure
in American historiography is, by no accident, the Great Saint of
centralizing "democracy" and the strong unitary nation-state: Abraham
Lincoln. It is fascinating and no accident, and reveals the vital
importance of history and of historical myth even in as amnesiac a
nation as the United States, that a major reason that the neocons and
their stooges have tried to read such paleocons as Mel Bradford and
Tom Fleming out of the conservative movement is that they are highly
critical of "honest Abe."

And so didn’t Lincoln use force and violence, and on a massive scale,
on behalf of the mystique of the sacred "Union," to prevent the South
from seceding? Indeed he did, and on the foundation of mass murder and
oppression, Lincoln crushed the South and outlawed the very notion of
secession (based on the highly plausible ground that since the separate
states voluntarily entered the Union they should be allowed to leave).

But not only that: for Lincoln created the monstrous unitary
nation-state from which individual and local liberties have never
recovered: e.g., the triumph of an all-powerful federal judiciary,
Supreme Court, and national army; the overriding of the ancient
Anglo-Saxon and libertarian right of habeas corpus by jailing
dissidents against the war without trial; the establishment of
martial rule; the suppression of freedom of the press; and the largely
permanent establishment of conscription, the income tax, the pietist
"sin" taxes against liquor and tobacco, the corrupt and cartelizing
"partnership of government and industry" constituting massive
subsidies to transcontinental railroads, and the protective tariff;
the establishment of fiat money inflation through the greenbacks and
getting off the gold standard; and the nationalization of the banking
system through the national Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864.

It is particularly fascinating that many conservative defenders of
Lithuania and the other Baltic nations, try themselves to preserve
the Lincoln myth and the general U.S. hostility to secession. They
argue that since the Baltic states were forcibly incorporated by
Stalin in 1940, they at least should be allowed to secede without
the punishment of Lincoln-style repression!

Let us set aside the fact that most of the other incorporations
of nations into the Soviet Union were just as compulsory albeit
more venerable: e.g., the Ukraine, Armenia, or Georgia in the
early days of the Bolshevik Revolution. Let us instead cut to the
heart of the democratic political theory that is involved in the
pervasive hostility to secession. For democratic theory, including
the theory of most "minarchist" laissez-faire libertarians, holds that
government, whether broadly social-democratic or confined to police,
defense and the judiciary, should be chosen by majority rule in free
elections. Minority secession movements are accused of violating
democratic majority rule. But the crucial and always unanswered
question is: democratic rule over what geographical area?

Let us put the problem another way: minarchist or democratic
theory says that the State should have a monopoly of force in its
territorial area. Let us agree for the sake of argument. But then
the big unasked, and unanswered, question arises: what should be
the territorial area? To paraphrase a favorite gambit of Ayn Rand’s,
the near-universal response is: Blankout!

Nationalities secessionists are implicitly challenging this
pervasive blankout as a serious response to their concerns. So far,
whether under Lincoln or, to a much lesser extent under Gorby, their
crucial question has been met only by violence and force majeure:
by the unquestioned mystique of might-makes-right and the coercive
unitary nation-state. But the inner logic of that mystique, and the
basic logic of minarchist political theory, is at once simple and
terrifying: unitary world "democratic" government. The minarchist
argument against anarcho-capitalist libertarians is that there must
be a single, overriding government agency with a monopoly force to
settle disputes by coercion. OK, but in that case and by the very
same logic shouldn’t nation-states be replaced by a one-world monopoly
government? Shouldn’t unitary world government replace what has been
properly termed our existing "international anarchy?"

Minarchist libertarians and conservatives balk at the inner logic of
world government for obvious reasons: for they fear correctly that
world taxation and world socialization would totally and irreversibly
suppress the liberty and property of Americans. But they remain
trapped in the logic of their own position. Left-liberals, on the
other hand, are happy to embrace this logic precisely because of
this expected outcome. Even the democratic Establishment, however,
hesitates at embracing the ultimate logical end of a single world
democratic state, at least until they can be assured of controlling
that monstrous entity.

Short of the world State of their dreams, how does our global
democratic Establishment deal with the crucial problem of where State
boundaries should be? By sanctifying whatever State boundaries happen
to exist at the time. Sanctifying status quo boundaries has been
the axiom of the foreign policy of every U.S. administration since
Woodrow Wilson, and of the League of Nations and its successor the
United Nations, all based on the incoherent and disastrous concept of
"collective security against aggression." It was that concept that
underlay U.S. intervention in World Wars I and II, and in the Korean
War: first we determine (often incorrectly) which is the "aggressor
state," and then all nation-states are supposed to band together to
combat, repel, and punish that aggression.

The theoretical analogue of such a concert against "aggression"
is held to be combating criminal action against individuals. A robs
or murders B; the local police, appointed defenders of the right of
person and property, leap to the defense of B and act to apprehend
and punish A. In the same way, "peace-loving" nations are supposed
to band together against "aggressor" nations or states. Hence, Harry
Truman’s otherwise mystifying insistence that the U.S. war against
North Korea was not a war at all but a "police action."

The deep flaw in all this is that when A robs or murders B, there is
a general agreement that A is in the wrong, and that he has indeed
aggressed against the person and just property rights of B. But when
State A aggresses against the border of State B, often claiming that
the border is unjust and the result of a previous aggression against
country A decades before, how can we say a priori that State A is
the aggressor and that we must dismiss its defense out of hand? Who
says, and on what principle, that State B has the same moral right
to all of its existing territory as individual B has to his life and
property? And how can the two aggressions be equated when our global
democrats refuse to come up with any principles or criteria whatsoever:
except the unsatisfactory and absurd call for a world State or blind
reliance upon the boundary status quo at any given moment?

JUST BOUNDARIES AND NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION

What, then, is the answer? What national boundaries can be considered
as just? In the first place, it must be recognized that there are
no just national boundaries per se; that real justice can only
be founded on the property rights of individuals. If fifty people
decided voluntarily to set up an organization for common services or
self-defense of their persons and properties in a certain geographical
area, then the boundaries of that association, based on the just
property rights of the members, will also be just.

National boundaries are only just insofar as they are based on
voluntary consent and the property rights of their members or
citizens. Just national boundaries are, then, at best derivative and
not primary. How much more is this true of existing State boundaries
which are, in greater or lesser degree, based on coercive expropriation
of private property, or on a mixture of that with voluntary consent! In
practice, the way to have such national boundaries as just as possible
is to preserve and cherish the right of secession, the right of
different regions, groups, or ethnic nationalities to get the blazes
out of the larger entity, to set up their own independent nation. Only
by boldly asserting the right of secession can the concept of national
self-determination be anything more than a sham and a hoax.

But wasn’t the Wilsonian attempt to impose national self-determination
and draw the map of Europe a disaster? And how!

But the disaster was inevitable even assuming (incorrectly) good
will on the part of Wilson and the Allies and ignoring the fact that
national self-determination was a mask for their imperial ambitions.

For by its nature, national self-determination cannot be imposed from
without, by a foreign government entity, be it the United States or
some world League.

The whole point of national self-determination is to get top-down
coercive power out of the picture and, for the use of force to devolve
from the larger entity to more genuine natural and voluntary national
entities. In short, to devolve power from the top downward.

Imposing national self-determination from the outside makes matters
worse and more coercive than ever. Moreover, getting the U.S. or other
governments involved in every ethnic conflict throughout the globe
maximizes, rather than minimizes, coercion, conflict, war, and mass
murder. It drags the United States, as the great isolationist scholar
Charles A. Beard once put it, into "perpetual war for perpetual peace."

Referring back to political theory, since the nation-state has a
monopoly of force in its territorial area, the one thing it must
not do is ever try to exercise its force beyond its area, where it
has no monopoly, because then a relatively peaceful "international
anarchy" (where each State confines its power to its own geographical
boundary) is replaced by an international Hobbesian chaos of war
of all (governments) against all. In short, given the existence of
nation-states, they should (a) never exercise their power beyond
their territorial area (a foreign policy of "isolationism"), and (b)
maintain the right of secession of groups or entities within their
territorial area.

The right of secession, if fearlessly upheld, implies also the right
of one or more villages to secede even from its own ethnic nation, or,
even, as Ludwig von Mises affirmed in his Nation, State, and Economy,
the right of secession by each individual.

If one deep flaw in the Wilsonian enterprise was its imposition of
national self-determination from the outside, another was his total
botch of redrawing the European map. It is difficult to believe
that they could have done a worse job if the Versailles rulers had
blindfolded themselves and put pins arbitrarily in a map of Europe
to create new nations.

Instead of self-determination for each nation, three officially
designated Good Guy peoples (Poles, Czechs, and Serbs) were made
masters over other nationalities who had hated their guts for
centuries, often with good reason. That is, these three favored
nationalities were not simply given ethnic national independence;
instead, their boundaries were arbitrarily swollen so as to dominate
other peoples officially designated as Bad Guys (or at best Who Cares
Guys): the Poles ruling over Germans, Lithuanians (in the Lithuanian
city of Vilnius/Vilna), Byelorussians, and Ukrainians; the Czechs
ruling over Slovaks and Ukrainians (called "Carpatho-Ruthenians"); and
the Serbs tyrannizing over Croats, Slovenes, Albanians, Hungarians,
and Macedonians, in a geographical abortion called "Yugoslavia"
(now at least in the process of falling apart).

In addition, the Romanians were aggrandized at the expense of the
Hungarians and Bulgarians. These three (or four if we include Romania)
lopsided countries were also given the absurd and impossible task
by the U.S. and the Western allies of keeping down permanently the
two neighboring great "revisionist" powers and losers at Versailles:
Germany and Russia. This imposed task led straight to World War II.

In short, national self-determination must remain a moral principle
and a beacon-light for all nations, and not be something to be imposed
by outside governmental coercion.

PARTITION AND REFERENDUM

One practical way of implementing self-determination and the right
of secession is the concept of a partition referendum in which each
village or parish votes to decide whether to remain inside the existing
national entity or to secede or join another such nation.

The much-disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh, for example, would
undoubtedly vote overwhelmingly to leave the hated Azerbaijan Republic
and join Armenia. But what of the fact that Nagorno-Karabakh is not
contiguous with greater Armenia, that there is a sliver of ethnically
Azeri land in-between? But surely good will on both sides (which of
course is obviously non-existent at this point) could permit a free
zone or free entry across that zone. Not only an airpath, but also
a road corridor proved to be viable for decades after the explosive
Berlin crisis.

Partition referenda were used fitfully after World War I; the most
renowned case was the separation of Northern Ireland from the rest
of the country. Unfortunately, the British deliberately promised
referendum for a second partition was never carried out by the British
government. As a result, a large amount of Catholic territory in the
north was forcibly incorporated into the Protestant state, and the
existence of that Catholic minority, which undoubtedly would vote
to join the South, has been responsible for the tragic and unending
violence and bloodshed ever since. In short, a genuine partition
based on referenda, would probably lop off from Northern Ireland the
territories of counties Tyrone and Fermanagh (including the city of
Derry) and South Down. Essentially, Northern Ireland would be much
reduced in land area, and left with a belt around Belfast and county
Antrim. The only substantial Catholic minority would then be in the
Catholic section of Belfast.

One criticism of partition by referendum is that parishes and villages
are often mixed, so that there could not be a precise separation
of the nationalities. In the vexed region of Transylvania, for
example, Hungarian and Romanian villages are intermixed in the same
region. No doubt; no one ever said that such referenda would provide
a panacea. But the point is that at least the degree of voluntary
choice would be enlarged and the amount of social and ethnic conflict
minimized, and not much more can be achieved.

(Transylvania, by the way, is largely Hungarian, especially the
northern part, and the wrong done to Hungary after World War I should
be rectified.)

There is one criticism of the referendum approach that is far more
cogent and troublesome. The Azeri claim to Nagorno-Karabakh rests
on the thesis that, while the Armenians are now admittedly in the
overwhelming majority, the region was, centuries ago, a center of
Azeri culture. This claim from history may properly be dismissed as
the dead hand of the past ruling the living, perhaps with the proviso
that ancient Azeri shrines be protected under Azeri care.

But more troubling is, say, the current situation in Estonia and
Latvia, where the Soviets deliberately tried to swamp and destroy
native culture and ethnic nationalism by shipping in a large number
of Russians after World War II to work in the factories. In Latvia,
the Russian minority is only slightly under 50 percent. Here, I believe
the recency of this migration and its political nature tip the scales
in favor of maintaining native nationalism. In fact, libertarians
believe that everyone has the natural right to self-ownership and
ownership of property, but that there is no such thing as a natural
"right" to vote. Here, it would make sense not to allow Russians to
vote in Latvia and Estonia, to treat them as guests or immigrants of
indefinite duration, but not with the voting privileges of citizenship.

THE HOSTILES: THE LIBERTARIANS

Libertarians are, by and large, as fiercely opposed to ethnic
nationalism as the global democrats, but for very different reasons.

Libertarians are generally what might be called simplistic and
"vulgar" individualists. A typical critique would run as follows:
"There is no nation; there are only individuals. The nation is a
collectivist and therefore pernicious concept. The concept of ‘national
self-determination’ is fallacious, since only the individual has a
‘self.’ Since the nation and the State are both collective concepts,
both are pernicious and should be combated."

The linguistic complaint may be dismissed quickly. Yes, of course,
there is no national "self," we are using "self-determination" as a
metaphor, and no one really thinks of a nation as an actual living
entity with its own "self."

More seriously, we must not fall into a nihilist trap. While
only individuals exist, individuals do not exist as isolated and
hermetically sealed atoms. Statists traditionally charge libertarians
and individualists with being "atomistic individualists," and the
charge, one hopes, has always been incorrect and misconceived.

Individuals may be the only reality, but they influence each other,
past and present, and all individuals grow up in a common culture
and language. (This does not imply that they may not, as adults,
rebel and challenge and exchange that culture for another.)

While the State is a pernicious and coercive collectivist concept,
the "nation" may be and generally is voluntary. The nation properly
refers, not to the State, but to the entire web of culture, values,
traditions, religion, and language in which the individuals of a
society are raised. It is almost embarrassingly banal to emphasize
that point, but apparently many libertarians aggressively overlook
the obvious. Let us never forget the great libertarian Randolph
Bourne’s analysis of the crucial distinction between "the nation"
(the land, the culture, the terrain, the people) and "the State"
(the coercive apparatus of bureaucrats and politicians), and of his
important conclusion that one may be a true patriot of one’s nation
or country while – and even for that very reason – opposing the State
that rules over it.

In addition, the libertarian, especially of the anarcho-capitalist
wing, asserts that it makes no difference where the boundaries are,
since in a perfect world all institutions and land areas would be
private and there would be no national boundaries. Fine, but in the
meantime, in the real world, in which language should the government
courts hold their proceedings? What should be the language of signs
on the government streets? Or the language of the government schools?

In the real world, then, national self-determination is a vitally
important matter in which libertarians should properly take sides.

Finally, nationalism has its disadvantages for liberty, but also
has its strengths, and libertarians should try to help tip it in the
latter direction. If we were residents of Yugoslavia, for example,
we should be agitating in favor of the right to secede from that
swollen and misbegotten State of Croatia and Slovenia (that is,
favoring their current nationalist movements), while opposing the
desire of the Serb demagogue Slobodan Milosevic to cling to Serb
domination over the Albanians in Kosovo or over the Hungarians in the
Vojvodina (that is, opposing Great Serbian nationalism). There is,
in short national liberation (good) versus national "imperialism"
over other peoples (bad). Once we get over simplistic individualism,
and this distinction should not be difficult to grasp.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was the author of Man, Economy, and
State, Conceived in Liberty, What Has Government Done to Our Money,
For a New Liberty, The Case Against the Fed, and many other books
and articles. He was also the editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The
Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

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