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Bible Encyclopedias
Self - Determination
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or "SELF - DETERMINATION. - This phrase, defined in the Oxford New English Dictionary as " the determination of one's mind or will by itself towards an object," was used exclusively, from the 17th century to within quite recent years, as a synonym for " free will " in the individual person, as opposed to the determination of this will by God's predestination - the doctrine of Determinism. Thus John Scott, in his Christian Life (1683-6), speaks of " necessary agents, that have no Free-will or Principle of Self-determination," and Bishop Stillingfleet, in his Origines Sacrae (1662), of giving man " the freedom of his actions, and a self-determining power." The New English Dictionary fails to show any use of the phrase in earlier days in the sense in which it became widespread and familiar at the close of the World War, and it has been commonly assumed that it was a new word coined, or rather adapted from the Russian Samo-obrazhenie, to give convenient expression to the political principle for which the nations of the Entente were then supposed to be fighting, that is to say, the right of nations to determine their own allegiance and form of government. It had, however, been used in this sense even before the war. Thus in his article on Rome in the earlier volumes (Ilth edition) of this Encyclopaedia (a recension of the 9th edition article by Prof. H. F. Pelham) Prof.
H. Stuart Jones, writing of the Roman provincial government, says that " nothing could compensate for the lack of self-determination " (see 23.6J3).
It was after the Revolution of March 1917 in Russia that " self-determination " as a political catch-word came into sudden prominence. On April Io the Russian Government, then dominated by the Radical element under Kerensky, issued a statement which said, among other things, that " Free Russia does not aim at dominating other nations;. ... its object is to establish a durable peace on the basis of the rights of nations to decide their own destiny." The substance of this proclamation was at once condensed into the formula " selfdetermination, no annexations, no indemnities," which was to produce so profound, and in some ways so disastrous, an influence on the world-settlement which followed the war. The principle of self-determination had, indeed, already been laid down by President Wilson in his address to Congress of Jan. 22 1917. " No peace can last," he said, " or ought to last, which does not recognize and accept the principle that Governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed." The principle, and the words in which it is defined, are those of the American Declaration of Independence; it was not till a year later that President Wilson himself crystallized this principle in the word " self-determination " in the address to Congress of Feb. II 1918, in which he defined the Fourteen Points; and on this occasion the phrase is still marked as a neologism by being printed between inverted commas. " ` Self-determination ' is not a mere phrase," he said; " it is an imperative principle of action which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril." Two months later, in his speech of April 6, the phrase had become, as it were, naturalized; he speaks of " the free self-determination of nations upon which all the modern world insists." The inverted commas no longer appear.
President Wilson has been blamed in certain quarters for his failure at the Peace Conference in 1919 to make the principle of self-determination the only basis of the ultimate settlement, for allowing the old diplomatic Adam too much say in the adjustment of national boundaries. In this respect the blame is not deserved; for he had early pointed out that the application of the principle must be conditional; the fourth of the " Four Principles " laid down in his speech of Feb. I 191 was " that all well-defined national aspirations shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord and antagonism that would be likely to break the peace of Europe and consequently the world." This is, of course, a serious limitation of the principle of self-determination in its practical application, since it involves a check upon this determination by an outside authority, which authority President Wilson defined as " the organized force of mankind " - embodied in the League of Nations - but which in effect has been, and always must be, those nations that are in a position to make their will prevail, whether inside or outside the League. In practice, then, self-determination has proved largely illusory. The Treaty of Versailles made advances towards the application of the principle, but these advances were tentative and timid. No transferences of territory of the first importance - such as those of Alsace-Lorraine to France or of Posen and West Prussia to Poland - were made subject to plebiscites. In the treaty with Germany plebiscites were prescribed in the cases of the districts of Allenstein and Marienwerder, of Upper Silesia and of North Schleswig, and negative plebiscites in the case of Eupen and Malmedy. In the Austrian treaty plebiscites were prescribed in the cases of Klagenfurt and Teschen, but it was only in the former case that a popular vote was actually taken. A plebiscite was refused in the case of Western Hungary, transferred to the Republic of Austria under the name of Burgenland. The case of East Galicia was left open, and so remained in 1921. Experience in the case of Upper Silesia abundantly proved the wisdom of thus limiting the right of self-determination. Plebiscites had worked smoothly enough in the case of fairly homogeneous areas defined by ancient boundaries, as in Avignon in 1791 and Savoy and Nice in 1860; they are altogether another matter in districts inhabited by mixed populations divided by bitter national jealousies. The method proved in any case to be costly and dilatory. In large areas it involved an extensive military control which the victorious Allies were unable to provide, while it was impossible to set up provisional governments to supervise the partition of areas over which they exercised control.
The experience of the diplomatists at Versailles has then, if properly studied, great value as a corrective to the dreams of idealists who persist in building theories for an imaginary world. But, apart from this experience, it is certain that the principle of self-determination could not be universally applied without overthrowing all that remains of the world's order. Yet the principle remains, in spite of disillusionment, a powerful solvent of established bodies politic, and it is therefore still important to understand its implications. The phrase " the self-determination of nations " is widely accepted as the expression of a principle as clear as it is just. So far as the meaning of self-determination is concerned, it is indeed clear enough. What is not so clear is what is meant by a " nation." This is a subject round which interminable discussions have centred, and which must be examined if the full implications of the principle of selfdetermination are to be realized.
Definition of Nation and Nationality
Legally defined, a nation is the aggregate of the subjects or citizens of a particular sovereign state, and nationality is the quality of such subjection or citizenship. But the word " nation " has also a wider meaning, which the New English Dictionary embodies in the following inclusive definition: - "A nation is an extensive aggregate of persons closely associated with each other by common descent, language, or history, so as to form a distinct race or people, usually organized as a separate political State and occupying a definite territory." This definition is open to criticism, as involving some confusion of thought: and this confusion is not made less confounded by the definition of " nationality " as primarily synonymous with " nation " but " frequently a people potentially but not actually a nation," while a " people " is defined as " a body of persons composing a community, tribe, race, or nation." The truth is that the vagueness of our terms reflects the vagueness of our ideas about a problem the intricacies of which we have only recently been called upon to unravel. No satisfactory definition of the word " nation " is possible because, save in its legal sense, it conveys no definite idea; and the same is true of the word " nationality." Yet a clear definition is the essential preliminary to any fruitful discussion. It is proposed then, for the purposes of the present argument, to use the word " nation " in the sense of " the sum of people constituting a sovereign and independent body politic," the Latin populus as distinguished from natio. The word " nationality " it is proposed to deprive of its legal connotation, and to define a nationality as " an extensive aggregate of persons conscious of a community of sentiments, experiences, or qualities which make them feel themselves a distinct people." The various elements that produce this consciousness will be discussed later. They have an important bearing on the practical problem which was only very imperfectly solved by the Treaty of Versailles, namely, the problem raised by the claim of nationalities, thus defined, to become nations. The complexity and perils of the issues involved in this claim may be illuminated by the fact that, even now, in the actual polities of the world, nationalities and nations nowhere coincide. It remains, therefore, of great importance to determine what are the essential qualities of nationality and what are its necessary relations to the conception of the state.
Theories of Nationality
On few subjects has there been so great a difference of opinion as on the question of what con stitutes nationality. Fichte explained it, in terms of his transcendental philosophy, as a thing divine and spiritual, a manifestation of the mind of God revealing itself in the national soul. So, too, for Mazzini, the prophet of the Italian risorgimento, nationality was a thing sacred, not to be profaned by a cold analysis of its elements, but believed in and suffered for as a prime article of faith - the " faith in liberty "; for him the map of Europe would have to be redrawn on national lines as the necessary first step towards " the universal association of the human race." 1 No student of the history of the rise of nationalities during the last hundred years will underrate the part played by such prophets as these. Yet their enthusiasm by itself explains nothing and would have achieved nothing; it is like fire, itself a subtle and mysterious element, which yet needs very material fuel to feed its destructive and creative force. The explanation of the phenomena of nationality, as other thinkers have realized, must be sought, not in the region of metaphysics, but in that of observed facts.
If we analyze the composition of the several nationalities, we find these elements: race, language, religion, common habitat, common conditions, mode of life and manners, political association. These elements are, however, never all present at the same time, and none of them is essential. Community of race, even where this is put in the forefront of the claim of nationality, is mainly a politic fiction, at least in countries of European civilization, in which the races are inextricably mixed up. Language, again, is as little as race the criterion of nationality, It may be, as Bluntschli says, the expression of a common spirit and of intellectual intercourse, and as such it may be brought powerfully to the aid of nationality, as in the case of the Czech language in Bohemia, or, still more strikingly, of the English language in the United States. But nationality and inherited community of speech are not identical. The Swiss are a distinct nationality, though they speak four different languages. Community of language, on the other hand, has not prevented the British and the Americans from developing different nationalities. Religion, too, has clearly no necessary connexion with nationality, though it has played a great part in creating and stereotyping nationalities, notably in countries of backward civilization, as in the Balkan peninsula or in Ireland. A common habitat and common conditions are doubtless powerful influences at times in determining nationality; but people have thus lived together for centuries without developing a national consciousness, and in many cases - notably in the east of Europe - they have evolved separate national consciousnesses in spite of a common habitat and common conditions. As for manners and mode of life, these are apt to raise stronger barriers between classes than between nationalities. Lastly, political association, though - as in the case of the Swiss - it sometimes encourages the spirit of nationality, is more often its result than its cause.
All these elements, then, may or may not contribute towards the formation of a nationality, but when we have summed then up we are no nearer to a solution of the problem of its formation. Some theorists seek this solution in a psychological process.
" A nationality," says Bluntschli, " only comes into being slowly, by a psychological process which gradually produces in a mass of men a distinctive form of existence and community of life, and stereotypes these as the inheritance of the race." 2 For him time, and a tradition of many generations, are the essential conditions. This may be true of the evolution of new nationalities; it is not true of the creation of a new sentiment of nationality in even large masses of persons. It is, for instance, ' Scritti (18 vols., Milan-Rome, 1861-91), viii., 205; xi., 181, 243; xii., 245. Mazzini avoided the practical problem involved in the reconstruction of Europe on national lines by saying that it was sufficient to indicate the " large lines " and " to leave details to the future and to the votes of the peoples " (x., 237). His own plan of reconstruction included the restoration to Poland of the frontiers of 1772, and the setting up of a Bohemian-Moravian-Hungarian federation. As Signor Salvemini ( Mazzini, 1920) points out, " the ` design of God ' was not quite so clear as Mazzini believed." 2 Lehre vom modernen Staat (5th ed. of Allgemeines Staatsrecht, 2875), i., p. 92.
the boast of the United States that they have been able to absorb annually some million of alien immigrants, and that one generation has usually sufficed to give them not only the name but the full sense of American nationality. The " psychological " element, indeed, may be admitted, but it does not explain the whole of the phenomena nor the ultimate driving force, so to speak, of nationality.
The German historian Karl La,mprecht came nearer the truth when he added another element, the economic, as the creative force in the evolution of nationality. Like Bluntschli, he found a general law for this evolution in the development of the Volksgeist, but he explains this development by changes in economic conditions. Nationality, that is to say, is but a manifestation of the instinct of men to group themselves for the defence of their common interests, and it follows that the groups thus formed tend to shift and change with the ebb and flow of the economic struggle for existence. This view, which - if it be sound - obviously conflicts with the belief that the triumph of the principle of self-determination would bring permanent peace to the world, was elaborated by the Austrian Socialist Otto Bauer, in his Nationalitdtenfrage, with special reference to the nationality question in the former Habsburg Monarchy. " It is," he said, " the battles of the economic classes, everywhere active, the changes in the means and the conditions of work which determine the strength and weakness, the death and rebirth of nationalities." The determining factors of nationality in Austria-Hungary - which for the purpose of this study might be considered the laboratory of Europe - he declared to be not cultural but economic. The mass of men, the peasants and the labourers, are incapable of that consciousness of a widespread, common, inherited culture which is supposed to be the hallmark of nationality; but they are dissatisfied with their lot, resentful of the dominant powers whom they hold responsible, and ready therefore to group themselves against them.
This revolutionary tendency, which among the lower classes of the dominant races is anti-national and cosmopolitan, is apt among subject races to express itself in nationalism. The process was strikingly exemplified in Bohemia, where the flood of Czech nationality followed the channels opened up by industrial change, and German nationality succumbed not so much to cultural as to economic pressure. Before the World War the same process was taking place in all the eastern marches of Germany - in Silesia, in Posen, and in East and West Prussia, in which for years past the German element had been succumbing to the irresistible flood of Polish nationality, of which the unifying force was the economic opposition of the Slav proletariat and peasantry to the German capitalist and governing classes. The same phenomenon is apparent in the case of Ireland. The idealists of Sinn Fein never succeeded in inspiring the shrewd peasantry with their own enthusiasm for their " Milesian past "; the use of the renovated Gaelic language remained a conceit of the " intellectuals " of the cities; and the labourers and peasants were won to the Republican cause by a frank appeal to their economic interests - the promise of small holdings and of freedom from war taxation and the burden of the national debt.
It is then clear that there is an economic basis for nationality, and that, whatever other elements may enter into it, a sense of community of material interests is always present. It may be added that this sense is the strongest and most essential factor, and that without it nothing else will serve to maintain the common sentiment. Common origin, common language and a common tradition of culture and laws will not preserve the unity of a nationality when the material interests of its parts come into violent conflict. This truth received its most momentous illustration in the secession of the southern states of the American Union in 1860 - i and the bitter struggle that followed. The principle of state sovereignty and independence on the one side, and that of American national union on the other, did but disguise the true causes of the struggle, which were less political than economic; the agricultural south was determined to preserve its economic system, based on negro slavery; the industrial north was primarily inspired, not by any abstract love of coloured humanity, but by the economic objection of the labouring masses to the slave system.
Relation of Nationality to the Nation or State
In considering the relation between the idea of nationality and that of the state we are apt to be confused by the romantic and idealistic tinge given to the idea of nationality by the poets and philosophers of the struggles for freedom. A nationality, conceived. as something divinely inspired, is believed to have not only the capacity but the right to become a nation, and its legitimate growth to be necessarily stunted if it be prevented from doing so. Bluntschli, for instance, described a nationality as an incomplete organism which could only become completed as an effective " personality " by political organization as a nation or state, and some such idea underlay the Liberal enthusiasm for. that " principle of nationalities " which during the last hundred years has so profoundly changed the map of the world. But when we come to examine this principle, as stated by its most conspicuous champions, we find no clear conception of what it ultimately involves, while the main question - of what constitutes a nationality - is consistently begged. The late M. Emile 0111vier, for instance, defines the principle of nationality (and incidentally of self-determination) as follows: This principle is that every association of men called a people is an independent individuality; free, sovereign, enjoying the imprescriptible right of self-determination ( de disposer d'elle-meme ) both in internal and external affairs.' If the word " people " be taken in its usual non-political sense, this statement was, and remains, obviously untrue, or represents at most an aspiration; if_ it means a nation, then the principle as here defined is merely that of the sovereign independence of nations, i.e. states, which has always been a fundamental doctrine of international law; it is, that is to say, a conservative, not a revolutionary principle. But this is not what M. 0111vier meant by it. For him, as the apologist of the Liberal Empire, the principle of nationality was dynamic, not static; it involved a regrouping of the nations, not - as Alexander I. of Russia had once proposed - by the formation from above of homogeneous populations fenced off by their natural boundaries, but by the free vote of the people concerned - the Napoleonic plebiscite. This principle of nationalities, he says in his L'Empire liberal, is to be carefully distinguished from the theory of great agglomerations, the natural limits of the race, for race has nothing to do with it: In the politics of nationality there are no natural frontiers. The true frontiers are those fixed by the will of the populations. The idea of race is barbarous, exclusive, retrograde, having nothing in common with the large, holy, civilizing idea of country ( patrie). Renan, in his Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? comes to much the same conclusion. A Zollverein, he says, is not a patrie; a nation is a grand aggregation of men with a moral conscience which causes them to sacrifice their individual interests to those of the community; wherever the existence of such a moral conscience is proved a nation exists as of right. " If there is any doubt as to its frontiers, consult the populations in dispute." This solution of a difficult problem would be admirably easy were the rivalries of nationalities confined to the frontiers of states, which we have the best reason to know they are not, and were these frontiers themselves a mere question of marks on the map. But in any case, as Herr Bauer points out, this " psychological-voluntarist " theory begs the whole question of nationality, for it does not explain the factors that determine the will of populations to form a nation or to attach themselves to a nation already formed - supposing they are conscious of possessing a choice. It does not, that is to say, give us the real connecting link between nationality and the state, nor does it explain why in the 10th century, for the first time, nationality was erected into a Staatsprinzip. Historically it seems clear that the explanation is at least largely economic. It may be true that a Zollverein does not. constitute a patrie, but the experience of Germany proved that it may be a powerful element in the constitution of one. It was 1 L'Empire liberal, i., p. 164.
not enthusiasm for the abstract rights of man which bound together the old provinces of France in a sense of common nationality; it was the economic gains of the Revolution, the creation of a prosperous nation of bourgeois and of peasant proprietors, that made the Pattie. It needed the passion of Mazzini and Garibaldi for an ideal Italy to rouse the Italians to throw off the yoke of an oppressive and alien system, but it was the long prosaic labours of Cavour that laid firmly the economic basis of Italian unity. Instances, indeed, might be multiplied to show that, whatever may be the constituent elements of nationality, it is only a strong sense of common material interests that can create and maintain a nation. It is certainly no mere coincidence that the development of the principle of nationality during the 19th century kept pace with the vast economic changes produced by the industrial revolution.
The factor of sentiment is not, of course, excluded; but the sentiment of nationality is not a thing apart, or especially holy. It is, as Mr. A. J. Balfour has pointed out, but one of a group of such sentiments for which there is no common name. Man is a gregarious animal; he has the group instinct; and this implies also the instinct of self-sacrifice for the sake of the group - esprit de corps, the civic sense, local or national patriotism. All human associations are directed to some common good, and from the point of view of the group sentiment it matters little how this good is conceived - whether as material or spiritual. A trade union is an association for a purely economic purpose; but it demands self-sacrifice on the part of its members, and it certainly develops a strong sense of esprit de corps. To say, then, that the strongest and most permanent bond of a nation is the sense of common interests is not to belittle the value of loyalty to a national cause.
The modern world has become so accustomed to hearing of nationality as the basis, or the only sound basis, of the state that it is apt to forget how very recent is this conception, which for many people is rooted in the very nature and justice of things. The sentiment of nationality is of course very ancient; it is indeed (as the Latin word natio, from nasci, " to be born," implies) a natural development of the sentiment of the family and the tribe. But this sentiment was, until comparatively recently, not consciously associated with any conception of the state as we understand the term. The ancient Greeks were strongly conscious of their common Hellenism, but their political unit was the city state; there was a Greek people, but no Greek nation. The Roman Empire, which, as it were, flattened out national differences throughout the civilized world, was in essence the expansion of the city state; it was in no sense " national," even from the point of view of the Romans. The Middle Ages, which inherited the Roman tradition, recognized nationality, but not as the constituent principle of bodies politic. The voting in general councils of the Church was by " nations," but these had so little to do with the conception of states that it was not until the Council of Constance, in 1414, that a fourth nation was added to the Italians, the French and the Germans - the English, who had hitherto been included among the Germans. Yet so early as the 11th century the poet of the Chanson de Roland celebrates " French " valour and puts into the mouths of his warriors praises of " sweet France," and in the next century the German minnesingers are denouncing " welsh " arrogance and exalting German nationality. Yet there was so such thing as a national state, the root reason being that the material basis of society was feudal, that is to say, determined by the ownership of land - the only stable form of wealth then existing - and by an elaborate system of reciprocal services and obligations which took no account whatever of the frontiers of nationality. With the growth of the fenced cities, and of the commerce of which they were the centres, the feudal system gradually decayed. But the monarchies which rose upon its ruins had still for the most part a purely territorial basis, and so continued as long as landownership gave the strongest title to wealth and power, that is to say, until the beginning of the 19th century. The industrial revolution, with the vast impetus it gave to international commerce and the new self-conscious classes it created, sapped their foundations. Artificial boundaries became a nuisance, and the German Zollverein was the beginning on a large scale of a process of economic concentration, segregation and exclusion which has continued ever since, and is likely still to continue. To say that it is economic pressure which has largely determined the formation of nations is not to pretend that the economic vision of peoples is always clear. The group instinct sometimes defeats its own ends. The disappearance in 1918, for instance, of the last of the great purely territorial monarchies, Austria-Hungary, destroyed an economic unit of the greatest importance to all its constituent countries. It used to be said that if Austria did not exist, Austria would have to be created. This was from the political point of view. From the economic it was true still.
National Expansion
" If men had any strong sense of the community of nations," says Bertrand Russell, " nationalism would serve to define the boundaries of the various nations. But because men only feel community within their own nation, nothing but force is able to make them respect the rights of other nations, even when they are asserting similar rights on their own behalf " ( Principles of Social Reconstruction, p. 33). The truth of this is revealed in the whole history of the last hundred years. The Magyars, of ter securing their own liberty by a gallant struggle, proceeded to force their own national ideals on the races subject to them. The Germans, welded into a great nation by " blood and iron," embarked on a policy of conquest beyond their own borders. The Italians, when they had liberated themselves from the Germans, aimed at recapturing the " national frontiers " of Italy, though this involved the attempt to absorb alien populations, and even began to dream of reestablishing the Mediterranean empire of Rome. The Poles, reunited after a century and a half of agony, scarcely waited for the ink on the Treaty of Versailles to dry before starting on the great adventure of reconquering their frontiers of 1772. Even Bolshevist Russia, wicked fairy godmother of the bantling " self-determination," showed little disposition to allow her outlying provinces to determine themselves. The Sinn Feiners in Ireland passionately claimed self-determination for themselves, but equally passionately resented its application to the solid minority in Ireland concentrated in north-east Ulster when they too demanded it.
All this, though lamentable from the point of view of selfdetermination considered as an instrument of peace, is merely the natural outcome of this principle considered as the expression of group selfishness. If the national group is bound together by a vivid sense of common and exclusive interests, sooner or later it will seek to expand, if it is a healthy organism and thus subject to the ordinary laws of growth. German political theory before the World War conceived of the national group as such an organism, and as subject to the universal law of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. "A cessation of growth," said Paul Rohrbach in his Der Deutsche Gedanke, " would be for us a catastrophe both internal and external, for under our present conditions it could not possibly be natural or voluntary, but would only happen when another people or combination of peoples should hurl us to the ground in such a way as to make us infirm for a long while to come." " In every great nation," he says again, " the instinct of self-preservation reveals itself in the form of a natural pressure to expand, which only finds its frontiers where it meets other national-political counteracting forces strong enough to resist it." From the ideal point of view this " doctrine of conquest " is, of course, wholly evil and misguided. From the strictly scientific point of view, judged that is to say by the experience of the past and even of the last few years, it must at least be treated with respect. To this world-old doctrine of conquest, reinforced by the new spirit of national exclusiveness, the new doctrine of democratic selfdetermination, combined with a new organized spirit of international good-will, is prescribed as an antidote. How far is it likely to prove effective?
Self-determination and Peace
The advantage of the old unnational conception of the state was that it offered no rigid barriers to the economic expansion of the nationalities, in so far as these existed outside the political sphere, the overflow of a nationality in one state percolating, or occasionally flooding, into another without any sense of inconvenience to the state invaded, which merely received a very often welcome addition to the number of its subjects. In the days before the industrial revolution these transferences of population were, indeed, more often determined by other than economic causes. Thus in the 17th century some 30,000 Slav and Albanian families migrated into the Habsburg dominions, Slavonia and southern Hungary, in order to escape the fury of the Turks; Flemish and French Protestants fled in thousands to the British Islands; and the Electors of Brandenburg peopled their waste spaces with Huguenot refugees from France and Protestant refugees from southern Germany. In the industrial age the migrations took another form. German industrial expansion demanded a vast supply of cheap labour, and this was provided by a mass immigration of Sla s, which created misgiving even when the German Empire was supremely powerful.' Little misgiving was created, on the other hand, by the still vaster immigration of all the less developed nationalities of Europe into the United States and, later, into the British Dominions. The process, indeed, was in itself unobjectionable so long as the migrating masses carried with them no conscious sentiment of nationality in a political sense, and no claim to assert themselves as separate entities, i.e. so long as allegiance was conceived as due not to the nationality but to the state. It is quite another thing when, under the principle of self-determination, the balance of nationalities in any given state becomes a matter of vital importance to the state itself. The Emperor Leopold I. would hardly have given special privileges to the Sla s who sought refuge in his dominions had he foreseen that this migration would lead, some 200 years later, to the downfall of the Habsburg Empire and dynasty. The danger of similar consequences is increased when the constitution of the state itself is made dependent upon a popular vote, and all the signs point to the fact that self-contained nations will no longer permit promiscuous immigration - the United States has set the example by " tightening up " its immigration laws - and will be increasingly intolerant of national divergencies within their own borders. The effect of the principle of self-determination, logically applied, would therefore be to establish the nationalities as jealously segregated nations, probably surrounded by tariff walls, certainly defended against dangerous infiltration of alien elements from without by rigid rules as to naturalization, and earnestly bent on reducing all within their borders to the same national model. The danger to peace of attempting to confine the expansive forces of nationalism within such artificial limits is obvious, and the danger will not be avoided by the creation of an international force, such as the League of Nations, charged with the duty of preserving the status quo or of readjusting it according to the ebb and flow of the national life of the several communities; for the pressure of the forces of expansion of vigorous nationalities, artificially restrained, would blow the League to pieces.
It may be that the economic development of the world, by increasingly demonstrating the interdependence of nations, will reduce the sentiment of nationality to the position it occupied during the long ages when it was not the basis of the state, still less an intolerant crusading power. But the World War at least proved that the international movement associated with labour, disfigured as it was by its insistence on the necessity of a new form of war - that of class against class - was powerless against the passion of nationality. The true hope of peace for the future lies in the recovery by the world of the idea of the state, whatever form it may take, as a thing apart from and above the idea of nationality and infinitely tolerant of national divergencies. It is the ideal towards which the British Empire has been consistently tending. The ideal League of Nations will be some such loose confederation, embracing all the world, of which each constituent state, while guarding its own interests, will realize that these interests are bound up with those of the totality of ' See a remarkable series in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1911.
states. For such a universal union, however, the world is not ripe; for there are peoples who are not yet capable of selfgovernment, and will only become so, if ever, by a long process of education. To talk of self-determination for such peoples is a mockery. It is also a wrong; for, as Senator Elihu Root wisely said with reference to the Philippines, " the right to government is prior to the right to self-government." See W. Alison Phillips, " Europe and the Problem of Nationality," Edinburgh Rev. for Jan. 1915, of which parts are incorporated in the above article; J. W. Headlam-Morley, " Plebiscites," Quarterly Rev. for July 1921 (No. 468); Sarah Wambaugh, A Monograph on Plebiscites, with a collection of O f ficial Documents (1921); Plebiscites, vol. xxv. of the Peace Handbooks issued by the Historical Section of the Foreign Office (1920); A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, edited by H. W. V. Temperley (3 vols., 1920). Among more modern foreign works on the subject are Schallmeyer, Vererbung and Auslese im Lebenslaufe der Volker (1903); Kirchhoff, Zur Verstandigung Tiber die Begriffe " Nation " and " Nationalitat " (1905); Otto Bauer, Nationalitatenfrage and die Sozialdemokratie (5907). (W. A. P.)
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'Self - Determination'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/s/self---determination.html. 1910.
