The Kosovo (non-)precedent

I tend to think that Kosovo comes dangerously closely to violating another principle Buchanan puts forward, namely that the state in question, to deserve recognitional legitimacy must not have been formed by (deeply) unjust acts, and that because of this the situation makes me rather unhappy. But, given that Serbia has offered no plausible other course over the last several years I’m more than willing to agree that in this case there are no other plausible options, at least in the short run, and that this doesn’t apply to the other cases mentioned by Chris.

Are you telling us that Scotland has not suffered injustice at English hands?

Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled;
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led;
Welcome to your Glory Bed,
Or to Glorious Victorie.
Now’s the day, and now’s the hour;
See the front o’ battle lour;
See approach proud Edward’s pow’r.
Chains and slavery!

Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward’s grave?
Wha sae base as be a slave?
Let him turn and flee!
Wha for Scotland’s King and Law
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand or freeman fa’
Caledonian! Let him on we’ me!

By Opression’s woes and pains!
By your sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!
Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty’s in every blow!
Forward! Let us do or dee!

I think that one problem with this principle is that injustice is partly endogenous to the policy of the secessionist groups (or groups within it). In the Kosovar case, the KLA’s actions no doubt influenced Serb policy 1997-9. That’s not to excuse the violence against civilians on the Serb side, but simply to observe that had the KLA not pursued violent policies themselves (often in defiance of Rugova’s ‘government’) then it’s difficult to see how the Serb forces would have acted as they did. This relies, of course, on a questionable counterfactual. The point is that with any normative criteria for just secessionism, there will be potentially unexpected incentive effects on the part of the aggrieved people.

I don’t see how the Buchanan principle would resolve the situation of the ethnic Serbs within Kosovo. They have suffered ground-level injustice at the hands of goons within the majority since the abortive Slobo clampdown. Do they get slotted in as one of Slobo’s sins and left to deal with being unwilling citizens of the new state? The NATO/EU security forces can’t be everywhere.

“Holding out the prospect of “self-determination” to bigots, provided only they can get a majority,is an incentive to them to make life unbearable (or worse) for others.”

It’s not the ‘bigots’ who should be offered self-determination. Nor is it about ‘self-defining “nations” complete with normalizing ideologies’. Nor is it about international law.

Let us say the people of Scotland, for example, overwhelmingly vote to elect a majority of the SNP (hardly a party of bigots) to the Scottish parliament; the SNP majority votes to hold a referendum on independence; the overwhelming majority of the Scottish electorate votes for independence; and the Scottish parliament then declares Scotland an independent state on that basis. Well, it seems to me that supporting Scotland’s secession would be the only democratic option.

“what ought we to do if the British Muslims decided that they wanted to vote overwhelmingly to secede? Particularly as they might then decide to impose a legal framework that we wouldn’t necessarily like?”

Perhaps we could cross such a bridge when we come to it ? It’s always possible to think up hypothetical worse-case scenarios. I can’t think of any case where an immigrant community in an established democratic nation-state has actually attempted to set itself up as an independent state.

_”So, when shall we draw the line then in terms of timing of injustices? How long ago must they’ve happened?”_

That’s a hard question and one that I’ve not seen a very good non ad-hoc answer to. Buchanan basically says that if it was long enough ago and things are okay now then past injustice doesn’t count any more (as otherwise no state would be legitimate). The reson to not grant recognition to states formed by recent injustice is to limit bad incentives, among other things, a worry that doesn’t really apply to very old injustices. But it doesn’t much tell us about what to think of cases that are, say, 30 or 40 or 50 years old.

There is another Kosovo problem. The NY Times compared it the other day to the hypothetical situation in Texas if immigrants managed to get recognition for a state in South Texas and took San Antonio and the Alamo with them. Or maybe better, if the Canadians were suddenly to get possession of Washington DC, the White House, the Capitol building, etc. There’s lots of symbolism in Kosovo for the Serbs, the site of their most ancient monuments.

Before recognizing Kosovo, I would have hoped that other countries would seek assurances that the UNESCO World Heritage Centers in Kosovo — the wonderful monasteries at Studenica and Decani, the Patriarchate of Pec, and other Serb monuments — would be protected and safe passage assured to them. So far as I am aware, there has been no attention to Serb sensitivity on these points, and it might perhaps have been arranged. It is perhaps less important than the Serb minority problem, but it seems that the Russians were resigned to an independent Kosovo if it could be done smoothly over time, and dealing with matters like this could make it work better, with less conflict, than otherwise.

If Kosovo gets independence, they worry, then the Scots, the Welsh, the Basques and the Catalans won’t be far behind.

Please, please don’t forget the mighty Quebecois nation, one of the Nine Nations of North America.

On British [Immigrant Group number x] seceding – where would you draw the borders? There’s plenty of gerrymandered electorates – wouldn’t secession result in gerrymandered nation states?

I would imagine the real issue here is how Russia would react to the precedent this would set. Whilst Russia’s recognition of the self-determination claims of the numerous ethnic Russians in the Caucauses might be primarily geopolitical, these (large) minorities probably have about as much claim to independence as the Kosovars did (indeed perhaps moreso).

Chris @ 6: In the second place, what’s this unexamined notion of a “nation” with a collective intention doing here? Where a group has been picked out by others and subjected to all kinds of nastiness, then I can see why we ought to let them go off and govern themselves, unbothered by the bullies.

what is with this unexamined notion of “we” doing here? free societies, global or otherwise, are built on the supposition that you need a justification for restricting individuals and groups from doing things they want to; the burden of proof is “yours” not “ours.”

the same is true for discrepancies between what “might be the best thing to do”–pragmatically or dare i say morally–and the principles that underwrite international law. it’s not as if the status quo of state sovereignty was handed down by god. maybe (as Buchanan is fond of pointing out) international law needs some serious revision. maybe even more than Buchanan himself would endorse.

finally, although the worry about incentives is well-taken, no one, not even unilateral secession folks, advocates allowing potentially genocidal or even extremely unjust groups to secede from minimally decent states.

I think they’re probably more worried that the declaration of independence creates a dangerous precedent for Serbian enclaves in Croatia and Serbian and Croatian areas in Bosnia, rather than the Scots and the Basques. I’m not sure Buchanan’s remedial right draws a sharp line there.

I’m waiting for someone to answer laleh’s question. #21

At least one person has mentioned this–the Serbs aren’t the only group in Kosovo that has practiced ethnic cleansing, from what little I know. (Which really isn’t very much–figuring out who’s doing the largest amount of bullshitting on the Balkans has never been high on my priority list, but my vague impression is that the stuff gets flung in all directions.)

“I don’t hate the English. They’re wankers. We, on the other hand, were colonized by wankers. We Scots are the lowest of the low….”

Mel Gibson making a movie staring William Wallace is indulging in anti-british bigotry?

That and The Patriot makes it a trend. Plus, Americans seem to adore Braveheart, even though it’s a heap of bollocks.

The obvious point not yet made here, I think, is that the EU has, at least post-Maastricht, been very good to regions with distinctive cultural identities, and money can be a decent salve. The interesting question, for me, is whether regional disputes that offer barriers to EU membership might also be ones helped by it.

No. It doesn’t.

Think very carefully about how a movie about the glorious struggle for independence of the Scots can be anti-British.

(And, yeah, Braveheart is bollocks. But isn’t anti-British bollocks, unless you mean anti-Union by anti-British, which wouldn’t make much sense in the rest of the argument.)

I’ve been screaming hoarse on this for more than a decade. Time to play Cato. And my “Carthago delenda est!” is?

mons montis quod flumen!

Chris,
The Buchanan principle is attractive and applicable to Kosova, but it is surely over-simple. Debates about self-determination – in principle and in practice – have a long history. The attempts at codification made by e.g. the Austro-marxists, Wilson or Lenin at the beginning of the last century(to go no further back)all invoked a multiplicity of criteria. And multiple criteria were certainly brought into play e.g. in the negotiations and dispositions following the two world wars.
So far as Kosova itself is concerned, valid historical, constitutional, national (‘ethnic’), political, security, moral, etc. arguments may all be advanced in support of the independence it proclaimed on 17 February 2008. Some of these can, of course, be contested, but the case is nevertheless over-whelming.
Quintin Hoare

PS
And you are absolutely right, of course, about ‘non-geographically bounded groups’. Established borders constitute an important criterion.
Quintin

There’s a comment above somewhere above about non-geographically bounded groups. Giving such groups a right to s-d, even where they’ve suffered severe injustice, really is a recipe for decades of pain and violence.

Lurking in the background of this whole discussion is one of the core problems with the modern conception of the nation state, namely that for at least most of history people have not lived in the neat, contiguous regions containing only other members of their ethnic group that the nation-state model assumes.

The creation of nation states has usually taken not only imagining traditions and communities, but also forcibly moving minority populations (both into and out of the territory) and culturally converting those populations that refuse to leave. For example, an enormous amount of blood has been spilled across central and eastern Europe to produce a German nation state that contains almost entirely German-speakers and in which live almost all Germans who don’t owe their allegiance to another German (or partially German) nation state (i.e. Austria or Switzerland).

Any principle that assumes that candidate new nation states will arise among perfectly contiguous and ethnically homogeneous peoples avoids the actual histories of nation-state formation.

The Serbs of Bosnia are not the victims of severe injustice perpetrated by the Republic of B-H and that they therefore don’t meet the Buchanan standard for secession from B-H. […] If X is to secede from Y then this should be on the grounds that people with X-identity are the (continuing) victims of (in practice unremediable) injustice on the part of Y.

I am not entirely sure that settles convincingly the case of Bosnian Serbs. I think someone could make the argument that Serbs violently displaced from Krajina to the Serb Republic of Bosnia are the continuing victims of injustice perpetrated by Bosnia in the sense that they are prevented from their own states from returning to their former homes and in the sense that Bosnia does nothing to compensate them (and in fact actively resist compensations, for perfectly understandable reasons of course) from the (very recent) injustice they have been the victims of.

Of course, the long list of human rights violations that have accompanied the formation of the state of Bosnia (a fair share of them perpetrated by the Serb Republic of Bosnia) renders practically impossible to compensate anyone, but I am not sure that one could really distinguish between the grievances of an Albanian Kosovar displaced before or during the NATO operation who then returned to Kosovo and who now supports independence and a Serb displaced during Operation Storm who ended up in the Serb Republic of Bosnia and now supports independence. If you want a near perfect parallelism, note that the Bosnian Army participated in Operation Storm alongside the Croatian Army so you can imagine that this (now Bosnian) Serb has been exiled by the Army of the very state she now wishes to leave.

In the end, all of this seems to me to reinforce my belief that recent history is so fraught with crimes that the legitimacy of states is quite weak.

Chris, I took Neil to be arguing that nation states are, in fact, what arose. That they were (and are) better than what preceded them. And that one must play the hand that one is dealt.

Chris @54, fair enough. But I think it’s possible to argue that the process of nation-state creation was deeply unjust while also believing that nation states, once established, are better than what preceded them. To be honest, I’m not sure whether or not I’d agree with that conclusion.

At any rate, what I was (very provisionally) suggesting @51 was that, beyond a commitment to basic human rights, perhaps one shouldn’t insist on general answers at all (and before anyone says it, yes, I realize that a commitment to basic human rights is itself a general answer, though for better or for worse it often fails to be dispositive).

“I am not sure that one could really distinguish between… an Albanian Kosovar displaced before or during the NATO operation who then returned to Kosovo and who now supports independence and a Serb displaced during Operation Storm who ended up in the Serb Republic of Bosnia and now supports independence.”

Well, for starters, a Serb displaced during Operation Storm wouldn’t be native to Bosnia. He’d be native to Croatia.

It would be like an Albanian pushed out of Kosovo moving to some other country (Macedonia, say) and then demanding independence for Albanians /there/.

Doug M.

For example, an enormous amount of blood has been spilled across central and eastern Europe to produce a German nation state that contains almost entirely German-speakers and in which live almost all Germans who don’t owe their allegiance to another German (or partially German) nation state (i.e. Austria or Switzerland).

Sorry, but I’m not quite sure what you’re referring to. The Austro-Prussian war of 1866? If so, I don’t think it serves as a very good example for your thesis.

The argument is not very relevant to Kosovo however since the Scots and the Welsh have both had votes on independence. As with Quebec the people didn’t fancy the proposition.

Um, no. The 1979 and 1997 referenda in Wales and Scotland had nothing to do with independence from the United Kingdom; they were about the creation of devolved legislatures for the two constituent nations. Secession from the United Kingdom was never on the cards at either time.

To post 29 (andrew): Unlike the Welsh and Scottish in Britain, the Basques and Catalans are not considered to be a nation by the Spanish State. Hence no sport national team, no self-determination rights, ban of any hypothetical referendum to decide on independence, no autonomy in health policy, education, transport, etc.

As far as politics of this thing is concerned, it’s quite obvious what happened there: the Serbian state was attacked by NATO and weakened – and that’s the the short and the long of it; just like the Iraqi state is likely to lose Kurdistan.

But it’s still interesting to try to figure out under what circumstances a nationalist separatist claim can be deemed legitimate. If any. I doubt it.

#59: I’m not repeating an old canard, I’m stating while not a fact, but the prevailing position in the slavic world which in and of itself has to be dealt with if you’re gonna interfere in internal affairs of another state (which is what the EU & US did).

As a person close to linguistics, let me state upfront that language censuses mean absolutely nothing. They are as unreliable nowadays as they were when they were invented. The notion of a native language is so vague, and completely detached from the notion of nationality. Also are you saying that Serbs cannot be muslim, or Albanians christian? Nationality is best quantified by asking the Serb/Albanian question directly, but I’m sure it wasn’t in the data you refer to… This is causing an amazing amount of confusion in the Ukraine right now – nobody can agree on how many people speak Russian vs Ukrainian and whether that would be grounds for a second government language…

As to why the view exists in the slavic world – Kosovo is hallow ground for Serbs, not Albanians. Why is that? Why do they have (correction – had before they were destroyed by we all know who…) an enourmous number of churches, religious and historic sites on that land while it doesn’t have such significance to the Albanian population? And if that’s the case, whose land is it? Remember, this is no Jerusalem where everything is so intertwined…

#66:
This is fantastic…
#4 – clearly, integration is not a plausible alternative, because they haven’t lived together for hundreds of years… and if you bring up the thesis about “ethnic cleansing”, look at the history of the region during WWII and which side the Albanians were on and what they did to the Serbian population…
#5 – again, clearly, it’s already not starting anything of the like. What do you think the whole Balkan’s war was about?
#6 – no comment other than I’d be curious as to the method of estimating this curious parameter and from whose point of view?… :)

“look at the history of the region during WWII and which side the Albanians were on”

Albania was attacked and colonised by Fascist Italy in 1939. The Albanians then produced one of the most successful anti-fascist resistance movements in occupied Europe.

It’s a record that compares rather well with that of the Soviet Union, which signed an alliance with Hitler in 1939 and joined with him in destroying Poland.

There would have been a lot less bloodshed had Germany been united earlier and it is also widely acknowledged among historians that the disastrous turn the German nation took in the first half of the 20th century wasn’t due to it having finally unified in 1871, but rather the opposite, i.e. the fact that nationhood was achieved comparatively late.

Novakant,

You seem to acknowledge here that the actual process of the creation of the modern German nation state (“late” though it may have been) resulted in the death and displacement of tens of millions of people. This was the principal point I was making.

However progressive the forces for German national unification might have been in 1848 (and before), it’s not clear to me how the greatly dispersed population of Germans in eighteenth or nineteenth-century Europe could have been brought together into a unified nation state without significant bloodshed, especially if one proposes also ridding the German-speaking lands of the reactionary forces of the Prussian and Austrian monarchies.

secession even.

# 73:
notwithstanding the Albanian anti-fascist, there were numerous Albanian fascist as well, and they murdered Serbians. (It belongs to history, I mentioned it only as a historical fact.)

Nobdoy has mentioned the possibly relevant fact that led by Ibrahim Rugova the Kosovars took to non-violent separatism, in response to Serb oppression, as early as 1989. The violent KLA only came to dominate the resistance movement after a decade of this. The “what about the KLA?” debating point doesn’t affect the Buchanan scorecard.

Your downgrading of “consciousness of national identity” (#55) as a legitimate factor in demands for recognition is, I think, in fact a downgrading of what historically has been a fairly consistent precondition for democratization.

The English example may be anomalous here, but the 1689 Bill Of Rights came a year after the 1688 Import A Dutch Bloke. Admittedly, there were nationalistic underpinnings in the perceived threat of a Papist king, but the demos was defined, in many ways, to fit its democracy. Likewise, as Chris suggested, the primacy of the state in France has its historical basis in a set of reforms that challenged old regional identities.

I’m much more sympathetic to ben alpers here, given the persistence of regional tensions in central and eastern Europe, often in those areas where Germans were driven out. That’s not to say I’m nostalgic for the Habsburgs, but I do think that the short history of the nation state doesn’t offer a great model for political stability.

(My wife did wonder how long it would take for Kosovo to receive high marks from the Serbian voters in Eurovision. That may take a bit longer than the other former Yugoslav states.)

#80 “One could argue it was a delaying tactic on the part of Russians?…”

“It’s one thing to talk about population on home soil resisting an aggressor. And another to consider what happens when there is an opportunity to repay old debts or grievanes to your neighbour…”

When Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov said, after the Soviet and Nazi armies had crushed Poland together, that they had destroyed “the ugly offspring of the Versailles treaty”, this clearly had much more to do with “repaying old debts or grievances to a neighbour” than with any delaying tactic…

#88
Oh, come on! Poland was totally and clearly setting up a buffer zone. Yes, it occupied the country, but again, it was clear at that stage that a conflict between Russia and Germany was imminent and as such setting up buffers between yourself and the enemy is just good sense! And when it comes to protecting your own country vs preserving interests of someone else, the answer is always clear to any nation… I disagree that this had anything to do with repaying old debts. True, Russians aren’t particularly fond of the Poles, but there is an enmity like there is between Serbs and Albanians for example.

Chris (#82),

But there also seems to me to be a lot of room for being slippery here. There can be a sense of shared membership and citizenship that isn’t dependent on some notion of ethnic and cultural normalization, and I’m fine with that.

Unless you’re loading something into “normalization” that I’m missing, then what you’re getting at here seems to be the well-worn distinction between ethnic and civic nationalisms, or liberal and “illiberal” nationalisms. I’m sure you’re familiar with the literature on this. Suffice to say, I’m unpersuaded (despite the best efforts of Liah Greenfeld, et al) that the sort of affectivity that both builds national units and plays a not-insignificant role in engendering popular demands for sovereignty and democracy can be clearly categorized into American/British/French camps on the one hand, and German/Volk camps on the other. Language, religion, shared history and all the rest of the elements of “identity” always seem to inevitably creep in, no matter how one defines citizenship. I’m not saying all national units are made equal, of course; just saying that nationality and sovereignty and democratic citizenship are, I think, a bit more of a package deal than some would like them to be.

ben, I am not unsympathetic to some of your points, but I still am having a hard time figuring out what exactly you are referring to with regard to the creation of the German nation state.

Since you are mentioning the “death and displacement of tens of millions of people“, you must be referring to the Third Reich, but when Hitler took power, Germany had already been a nation state for 60 years and after Hitler’s downfall Germany was divided again.

The creation of the German Reich was preceded by two wars, that can be directly linked to its inception, namely the Austro-Prussian and the Franco-Prussian war. While these were certainly bloody, they were also not exceptional in their extent. Also, while they certainly were material in the creation of a unified Germany, they weren’t wars fought exclusively with the intent of creating such a political structure, but were also fought to simply defend Prussia’s position in the European balance of power. Similarly the creation of a unified Germany was as much nationalistic wish-fulfillment, as it was a pragmatic act of realpolitik designed to establish a central European power that wouldn’t be threatened by its rivals.

#93

“As far as I can see this is an argument for reasonable limits on free speech (such as banning incitement to racial hatred) and so I don’t see how this would be an argument against a criterion for putting reasonable limits on the kind of national self-determination we’re going to allow.”

Yes, I agree. Democratic rights are not absolutes. But the default position should be to permit them rather than to restrict them.

I agree with novakant in #96. I don’t understand what ben alpers is talking about.

The unification of the German state in 1871 was precisely based on not bringing together all the German peoples of Europe into one state. That’s why the German-speaking people of Austria-Hungary were left out and the “Kleindeutschland” option was created. At the time the Kleindeutschland was created, it was overwhelmingly German and far more of a nation-state than France or the UK or Russia or Austria-Hungary or Turkey (essentially any of the great powers of Europe except, arguably Italy). The only significant minority was a Polish one in the east that did create problems later on.

It was only after World War I and the creation of nation-states designed to punish Germany and including large numbers of Germans outside of at least partially German-speaking states that German minorities became a significant issue. That isn’t related to the creation of the “Kleindeutschland”.

@79 “Democracy and human rights first, borders and ethnicity second. Sorry, but that is much too quick, and much too simple.”

Pardon me, but the hell…

Nationalism is political cancer, we ought to be getting past it, not encouraging ever-proliferating forms of it. No good can EVER come of it – no lasting good, that is not illusory, or merely a relief from a situation that comes from another, equally heinous, force such as imperialism. How many times has this pattern repeated in history: step one, demand ethnic autonomy from larger unit, step two, gain autonomy, step three, assert ethnic superiority over neighbours/minorities, step four – we all know step four…

Whatever argument you might make about the specific and historically-contingent role of ethnic nationalism in the emergence of European and early post-colonial public spheres and whatever the correct plural of demos is, I cannot see how an ethical approach to such questions can now, post-g*d-knows-how-many episodes of ethnic genocide, be anything other than trans-ethnic in aspiration.

about 80% of discussion on this thread so far just proves the point, it’s been about “who can find an example of the benefits of nationalism that doesn’t turn to cr*p in their hands”, followed by “actually your example does turn to cr*p, if you look at it right…”

“Soviet collaboration with the Nazis” … ;-)))

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-pact.htm

I’m sure the Polish people in 1939 found it equally funny, Mikhail…

#107
I’m not going to argue this point any further aside from making these comments.
The link is not the greatest resource on WWII history, of course, but we’ll make do with what we have. Reading through that summary of events:
– the Western allies essentialy pushed Stalin to negotiate with Germany as the only means of trying to prevent or postpone a conflict
– Poland did the same as Russia – obtaining a portion of Chechoslovakiya under collaboration with Germany just a year before (1938)
– Poland refused to sign a military agreement with Russia, thus sealing its own fate…
– Stalin’s gain from the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement was exactly what I’d said – a buffer zone between Russia and Germany
– finally, I hope you can understand a difference between a non-agression treaty and a collaboration…

#96 and #102: I suppose I just don’t think it’s possible to stop the clock in 1871 and say, right then, we have a Kleindeutschland that resolves the “German question.” It simply didn’t…at least not for very long.

#108

“I hope you can understand a difference between a non-agression treaty and a collaboration…”

See Wikipedia:

“Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was supporting Germany in its war effort against Western Europe through the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement, with supplies of raw materials (including phosphates, chromium, iron ore, mineral oil, grain, cotton, and rubber). These and other supplies were being transported through Soviet and occupied Polish territories, and this allowed Nazi Germany to circumvent the British naval blockade.”

Furthermore:

“On September 1, barely a week after the pact had been signed, the partition of Poland commenced with the German invasion. The Soviet Union invaded from the east on September 17, practically concluding a fourth partition of Poland and violating the Soviet-Polish Non-Aggression Pact signed in 1932. Polish troops were already fighting much stronger German forces on the Western front, desperately trying to delay the capture of Warsaw in the hope that France and Britain would stand by their agreements and start military activity against Nazi Germany, and consequently were not able to significantly resist the Soviets. The Soviet Union marshalled 466,516 soldiers, 3739 tanks, 380 armored cars, and approximately 1,200 fighters, 600 bombers, and 200 other aircraft against Poland.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact

Sounds like Nazi-Soviet collaboration to me.

I should state the point more forcefully.

There is not a straight line from the unification of Germany in 1871 to WWI to the Holocaust to the post-war expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe to the current borders of Germany.

Since one can view the founding of Germany as a clear reaction to the depredations of France in German-speaking areas, are you seriously suggesting that the French Revolution and Napoleon made the Holocaust unavoidable?

Erp…that’s “What I am suggesting…”

What’s unreasonable is the practice that used to be the case in Germany …

Yes, that was unreasonable and the whole mindset behind it was often reactionary and revisionist – you’ll certainly get no argument from me in this regard and I am in favour of a civic approach to citizenship.

But could we please acknowledge a bit more that there were German minorities in the Eastern bloc who weren’t treated very well and thus preferred to emigrate, that Germany for ten years now has had governments which have taken a different approach and that the laws have been changed.

Also, do you really know the citizenship laws of all the countries mentioned on the page I linked to? I certainly don’t, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were similar to those German laws being criticized.

Yet whenever this topic comes up it is only, somewhat ironically, Germany and Israel that are mentioned.

Even from the short description in wiki it seem relatively clear that most (tho notably not all) of these states are trying to make a connection between the applicant and his/her ancestors’ citizenship. Citizenship is a real, legal characteristic, unlike the metaphysical ‘identity’ thing.

“Yet whenever this topic comes up it is only, somewhat ironically, Germany and Israel that are mentioned.”

Israel was founded by Germans.

As easy as Kosovo

Pratap Bhanu Mehta

Posted online: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 2330 hrs IST

It is difficult to shake off the feeling that the birth of Kosovo is really the culmination of a series of old and unhealthy trends in global politics. Major powers of Europe seem to relish the fact that for the first time a small Muslim majority state has been carved out in Europe, thus testifying to Europe’s progress. But the truth is that the birth of Kosovo is also a profound testament of the failure of the nation state form in Europe to accommodate ethnic diversity. As Michael Mann, in an important article on the “Dark Side of Democracy” had noted, modern European history has built in an irrevocable drive towards ethnic homogenisation within the nation state.

In the 19th century, there was a memorable debate between John Stuart Mill and Lord Acton. John Stuart Mill had argued, in a text that was to become the bible for separatists all over, including Jinnah and Savarkar, that democracy functions best in a mono-ethnic societies. Lord Acton had replied that a consequence of this belief would be bloodletting and migration on an unprecedented scale; it was more important to secure liberal protections than link ethnicity to democracy. It was this link that Woodrow Wilson elevated to a simple-minded defence of self-determination. The result, as Mann demonstrated with great empirical rigour, was that European nation states, 150 years later, were far more ethnically homogenous than they were in the 19th century; most EU countries were more than 85 per cent mono-ethnic.

Most of this homogeneity was produced by horrendous violence, of which Milosevic’s marauding henchmen were only the latest incarnation. This homogeneity was complicated somewhat by migration from some former colonies. But very few nation states in Europe remained zones where indigenous multi-ethnicity could be accommodated. It is not an accident that states in Europe that still face the challenge of accommodating territorially concentrated multi-ethnicity are most worried about the Kosovo precedent. The EU is an extraordinary experiment in creating a new form of governance; but Europe’s failures with multi-ethnicity may yet be a harbinger of things to come. Kosovo acts as a profound reminder of the failure of the nation state in Europe.

Kosovo also sets a dangerous precedent in international law. A unilateral declaration of independence has been recognised without an appropriate form of institutional mediation; every unsavoury separatist is gloating. Milosevic represented barbarism of the highest order and that history has a profound bearing on Kosovo’s claims. But it should be a matter of some regret that a democratic post-Milosevic government was not given opportunity to find a workable and just solution. Indeed, there is more than ample evidence that the way in which the major powers like the US framed the issue, there was little prospect of any accommodation between the Serbs and Kosovars. For it appears that any solution short of independence was ruled out right from the start. The assurance that the US and major European powers would back independence surely would have altered the structure of internal negotiations.

Europe may think it is expiating guilt over its mishandling of Bosnia. Some even suggest that it might win brownie points by being seen to facilitate the creation of a small Muslim majority state. How this turns out remains to be seen. But the truth is that US and European support for Kosovo’s independence in this form is nothing but unprincipled and opportunistic. It is unprincipled because there is no way of distinguishing the Kosovo case from dozens other cases that could be subject to similar treatment. When Europe and the US try and assure countries struggling with the challenge of accommodating multi-ethnicity that this is simply a one-off case, what do they mean? Since when has a “one-off” instance become a principle of international law? All that it can possibly mean is that we, the US and three powers in Europe, decide what case is fitting for recognition — world opinion, international law or a prudent analysis of consequences be damned. In some ways the Kosovo crisis is yet another reminder of how the major powers have broken the back of the global governance system, and ad hoc power is filling the vacuum.

Vladimir Putin is, by no stretch of the imagination, a savoury character. But there is something extraordinary about the extent to which the West is going all out to humiliate Russia and marginalising it from the world system. It is true that if genocide is an imminent possibility, the sensitivities of one or other great power will have to be ignored. And the Russians, it could be argued, have no locus standi in the matter. But the same could be argued for the US in most parts of the world. With what locus standi does the US counsel restraint to Taiwanese who want to declare independence? (It may not be a wise move, but Taiwan’s case is probably stronger than Kosovo’s.) But under current arrangements, with Kosovo already under European protection, that was hardly the case. Yet the blatant disregard for Russian sensitivities has become part of an unhealthy Western engagement with Russia. Indeed, as commentators have pointed out, there is marked asymmetry between the way in which the West treats Russia and China. On this view Russia is to be contained and restrained at all costs; while China is to be accommodated as far as possible. The truth is that Russia is a sulking great power, and if the West, in its profound arrogance, does not give Russia its due space, it is setting the world up for a great deal of mischief. Nothing is more dangerous to the world system than a former great power being humiliated. Even after 1999, the West took some steps to placate Russia on Kosovo; it will need to do the same.

And India has been again caught in a familiar foreign policy stance: pusillanimous napping. It is not in India’s interest, for peace in the subcontinent, that the Kosovo precedent be recognised in the form it has. Make no mistake: this precedent has all kinds of unsavoury implications for the subcontinent. It is absolutely extraordinary that India has taken so long to respond to an event of such importance. Whether this is sheer indecision, or yet another instance where we dare not openly come out against the Americans, remains to be determined. But even if we resign ourselves to the birth of a new nation, we ought to worry about the manner in which it has been engineered.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research

pratapbmehta@gmail.com

“jus sanguinis need not imply volkish views in any offensive way. In fact, it’s probably a requirement of a just naturalization/citizenship policy that it be included in some form. (For example, without it the children of Turks living in Germany when they had no option to naturalize would have been stateless, not just not German citizens.)”

So Jus sanguinis protected people from the effects of Jus sanguinis. True enough.

Marko @89:

Unless I’m mistaken, the secession of the Southern states that led to the American Civil War was about attempting to preserve the system of slavery, not about a Southern American desire for national self-determination.

But try saying that in rural north Georgia.

Russell @95: Point taken on the perceived national legacy of political rights, but that’s complicated post-1707 (and especially post-1714) by the cultivation of a British identity to accommodate two yoked nations with a Hanoverian.

It might also lead to the Burkean conclusion, stated very broadly, that the American secessionists had the benefit of drawing upon a political heritage from Locke to Magna Carta, while the Frenchies didn’t. (The relationship between universal rights and ones drawn from national tradition in the late 1700s is a complex one.)

In any case, I’m in agreement with dan kervick.

I’d like to return to Dan’s comment above (#107), because I think he used the key word in this comments discussion: “intuitive”. That intuitive nature of deciding the rules for sovereign self determination, combined with laleh’s comment (#21) about who’s supporting secession and why, goes a long way towards explaining why this whole mess is, indeed, a mess. Buchanan ostensibly provides a prescriptive set of criteria, but are they really any more or less intuitively developed than the others?

In other words, is the discussion of any secession and self-determination an inevitable invitation to this kind of tortuous debate, because the circumstances naturally invite it?

Mel Gibson downplayed the torture of William Wallace in Braveheart. In the film, there was no emasculation.

That is an oversight that can (and should) be remedied. Would give a whole new meaning to “Director ‘s Cut”

A serious point to bear in mind however is the fact that the memory and political repercussions of torture can last for centuries. A fact that is forgotten in the Jack Bauer fables presented on Faux Network.

I thought this was funny

Hamas and Israelis Trade Attacks, Killing Several
JERUSALEM — In a sudden surge of violence, an Israeli civilian was killed Wednesday in a rocket attack by Hamas militants from Gaza, the first such fatality in nine months, and at least eight Palestinians, militants and civilians, were killed in Israeli airstrikes before and after the rocket attack.

I think this has something to do with the language of this post. Variations on a theme:

Not too long ago a British Under-secretary of “something” (I don’t remember what) in the Foreign
Office commented that the main obstacle to any kind of settled “peaceful arrangement” in the Balkans is the fact that all sides (a minimum of three, often up to seven when Russia, Greece, Albania, et al, are involved) always bring their own set of history books and maps to the table. The discussion here only seems to underscore that observation.

My personal point of view is that both the Balkans
“problem” and the Palestinian “problem” are due to
all parties involved ignoring a basic law of Physics, i.e., two bodies cannot simultaneously
occupy the same point in time and space. But of course, they intuitatively full well realize
such things without a PhD in particle physics–hence all plans A-Z inevitably fall back on the “God is on the side of the bigger battalions” theorem. A theorem that has stood the test of time at least as well as anything Newton or Einstein managed to conger up.

134 This whole, patently ridiculous attempt at white washing Stalin…

To avoid the whitewashing altogether, one could note that everybody collaborated with the Nazis: the UK, the US, France, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, Zionists, probably Poland too. They all were trying to manipulate the Nazis to their advantage: get them to move East, to move West, to get their money, to expel Jews to Palestine, etc. If there was some political entity in Europe that didn’t collaborate with the Nazis, that’s only because they couldn’t find a way.

That’s called ‘politics’.

And just to put the whole “SU needed a buffer” argument to rest: before Sept 1939 Poland would’ve made a perfectly good buffer for the SU against Germany. All Stalin had to do was offer an alliance to Poland on non-ridiculous terms (like not demanding that Soviet troops be allowed to occupy Polish territory). An independent Ukraine would’ve made a good buffer against Germany for the SU. Of course neither of these was in the cards because, in 1939, Stalin wasn’t thinking “buffer” (granted, maybe that was Stalin’s thinking in say 1943 and afterwards), he was thinking “territory”. If anything the Ribbentrop-Molotov in this way brought the Werchmacht closer to Soviet borders.

And the whole “buffer” argument is pretty much admitting that the whole thing was bunk. Suppose for a crazy second that the Guatemalans got crazy and US started to worry about them and said “ok, look Mexico, we’re worried about the Guatemalans so we’ll just take half your country as a “buffer””. Now maybe the US fears of the crazy Guatemalans would be justified. But why should they get a buffer at Mexico’s expense?

Yeah, it was sorta despicable of him.

What nonsense, Ajay. Everybody is a great strategist 60 years after. What about the Maginot Line?

Everything is a gamble, maybe (probably) Stalin expected Germany to invade the British Isles and planned to attack Germany himself at that time. If that had happened, would it then validate his strategy as brilliant? Nobody knows the future.

What nonsense, Ajay.

Not nonsense at all. Almost everybody agrees that Stalin was caught with his pants down and that the SU military was in a terrible state.

because it wasn’t worthy of an answer.

Why? I thought he made a perfectly reasonable point.

Rather late, but here’s some nationalist trolling:
Dan Kerwick in 107 writes of “an unjustified prejudice for the political communities of the past rather than the political communities of the present”.
Quite often there is no political community at present – what community do the Serbs and the Albanians have in common? You can’t create by fiat communities out of people who do not want any such community, that leads to lunacies like the suggested one-state solution to Israel/Palestine – a state that only foreign liberals who do not have to live there want. People have to want the community to work or it won’t, and that means mainly the people who’d be a part of the hypothetical community, not well meaning liberal imperialist outsiders.
Anti-nationalist Liberals seem to give a free pass to the nationalists who got their nationalism in first and already have national states. They put the burden of proof on e.g. the Tibetans to prove that the Chinese central government will always screw them if it serves Chinese interests rather than vice versa. One commenter here (post 83) apparently thinks that the Irish Civil war (2-3000 dead) should count for more in assessing the desirability of an independent Ireland than the way the government of the United Kingdom twiddled its thumbs as millions starved to death. Marginal, no-account people have every reason in the world to want a government of their own and to distrust any government dominated by others.