The boundaries of the possible. How war in Ukraine destroys modern world order and what to do with the right of peoples to self -determination

The war in Ukraine proves that the world order, which developed after the Second World War and is based on the inviolability of existing state borders, does not work anymore. Aggression unleashed by Vladimir Putin under false slogans will only speed up his fall. Meanwhile, it is necessary and possible to change the boundaries peacefully, in his column for the magazine Atlantic, professor of the law of the University of Indian University Timothy William Waters. "Mediazona" publishes its translation.

Three months after the start of the war in Ukraine, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken made a program statement about the need to protect the “world order based on the rules” . He has in mind the liberal, internationalist, based on a market economy, the system that arose after the Second World War, and reached its peak by the end of the Cold War. Among other things, she relied on the protection of human rights, and one of the basic principles of this system was a rejection of war as a way to change the boundaries.

The states took the obligations not to fight, and in exchange received guarantees of territorial inviolability. And at first glance it worked. The number of wars between countries decreased, although rather thanks to the parity of nuclear superpowers, and not the UN Charter. Protection from the intervention gave the states something else: the freedom of action is with regard to internal threats. Considering the attempt of separation as an internal political problem, international law creates all conditions for territorial conservatism. Many states prohibit any revision of their borders or demand that the entire population of the country agree to this. Some - such as China - declare any kind of law, even the peaceful defending of autonomy and independence.

Such a deal has never been particularly profitable, but so far the rules worked, perhaps it was worth it. However, now the terms of the transaction are clearly violated.

After the Cold War, world powers began to use military power increasingly: in the Balkans, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, and now in Ukraine. To justify his aggression, Vladimir Putin appeals to the numerous wars, which in the recent past waged the United States (historian Samuel Moin notes that more than three quarters of American military interventions occurred after the Cold War). In international law, the minus per minus gives a plus: Russia is waging an illegal war - and it accelerates the fall of the world order, which has already begun to rot.

From the transaction, we get only half the benefits - the boundaries are indestructible, but there is no peace. Most peoples of the world, in fact, have no choice, they have to be content with the state in which they already live. Exactly, therefore, if the situation becomes acute enough, violence seems to be the only way out.

Riding to a more aggressive world order is difficult to stop, but we can still think about another part of the transaction. Of course, it is impossible to force the states to surrender the territories, but the revision of the borders peacefully can give a positive result, which will better reflect the wishes of different communities living in the state. The assistance of governments in organizing these peaceful mechanisms can even make them more stable, because it will contribute to resolving some conflicts that provoke violence.

What exactly will not hold world balance (and history of this proof) is a bet on inert, not changing rules.

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In 1939, the influential British historian Eduard Hallett Carr made criticizing the League of Nations - the first in the XX century, the international community attempt to establish a world order based on the rules. It was an “interwar era”, and its name speaks for itself. The experiment failed. Carr of stone on stone did not leave the idea of ​​applying the legal system to regulating world politics: the courts and conventions inevitably reflect the positions of their creators to the detriment of the rest of the forces. In the case of the League of Nations, the creators were the winning countries in the First World War, and in the impaired position were the USSR and Germany, which-and this is not by chance-as a result of the next war.

Carr was a supporter of the world and completely did not advocate for the war. And what he was talking about is fair for our post -war experiment with a world order built on the rules. If we do not come up with peaceful ways to change the situation, then others will probably be found - not peaceful.

The “peaceful revision of borders” sounds like something unthinkable, but it has already happened. After the Second World War, a consensus was reached in relation to the colonies: they have the right to self -determination and independence within the boundaries of existing territories. Sometimes the colonial rulers were not ready for this-this happened in Algeria, the Dutch East Indies, Mozambique and Kenya, but in most cases, independence was achieved without serious military conflicts. Britain, France and others peacefully transferred the management of local elites. The UN General Assembly adopted a number of resolutions that defined independence as the norm and thereby facilitated the transition - preventively, before the start of the war or the crisis.

Decolonization is rarely considered as a secession, but it was it - a break between the ruler and subjects. From the point of view of morality, there are no issues to self-determination and self-government, but the new legal order was built on three monstrous simplifications: self-determination implied independence exactly in the borders that the colonies had at the time of the exit from the metropolis; Self -determination was applied to the entire population of the territory, but not to minorities living there; The right to form new states concerned only the peoples inhabiting colonies, that is, geographically distant territories where the groups of groups belonging to another ethnic group lived.

As a result, the powerful potential of self -determination as a basis for changing borders was significantly limited. Independence was offered exclusively to the colonies - and no one else. In combination with the new rule on territorial immunity, this meant that the states, including the independence of the colony, will have indestructible boundaries, regardless of whether the population liked it. It was a game of musical chairs, and the music fell silent in 1945: if your people have already controlled the state, it could preserve it, and if a colony, then it became a state and got this people. And here the Kurds, Kosovars, Tibetans and the rest of the communities, which were in the minority in the country that received the right to protect its territorial inviolability from internal rivals, were very unlucky.

Unlike the population of the colonies, national minorities are built into the state, but often suffer from discrimination. The Uyghurs, who are planted in the camps of re -education and forbid them to confess their religion and speak their native language, of course, not the inhabitants of the colony, but it is unlikely that this detail is so worried. Even in countries observing human rights, minorities can constantly lose at the political level.

But international law and world order give minorities not many ways to fight against oppression with peaceful means. Without the right to withdraw from the state, what transaction can they conclude? Such “internal colonies” can have a difficult demography (Han live next to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the Serbs with Albanians in Kosovo), so that the department will mean that some people in any case will be on the wrong side of the border. Another thing is that without the establishment of a new border, purely mathematically more people are stuck in a state, part of which they do not feel.

It seemed to the creators of the new world order that tough restrictions were needed with regard to self -determination (both in former colonies and in the independence of the states). If there are no such restrictions, more and more new groups will strive for self -determination, dispute the current boundaries - and you will not achieve any stability in this case. But, as history shows, this is a clear exaggeration.

The elites of many countries are afraid that the right to separation will lead to endless decay. But this is not necessary. When a group of people is given a choice, the reasons for remaining integrated can turn out to be more weighty than the arguments in favor of the department, and that is why Quebec, Scotland and New Caledonia voted to remain in Canada, Great Britain and France. When states agree to launch a political process that can lead to the section of the territory, violence rarely happens. Much more often, violence associated with the problems of separatism comes from the state that resists the separation.

One modern way of solving territorial problems has grown from violence associated with separatism, but if you are looking for peaceful ways, you are unlikely to like it. The “Department in the Name of Salvation” allows you to leave the state in order to avoid large -scale discrimination and infringement of rights. And here even an external armed intervention can be justified, as happened in Kosovo in 1999, when NATO bombed Serbia to protect Kosovar. But this humane principle can be abused, which we see the example of Vladimir Putin's obviously false statements about Ukraine. At the same time, he gives rise to a terrible well -twisted logic: it is beneficial to the separatists that the persecution of their people would be as cruel as possible.

Moreover, the “separation in the name of salvation” is not a peaceful path. Kosovo is a sobering example of how sharply the peace process is necessary: ​​the Kosovars deserved the right to their state, and they deserved it before the war, a million refugees and thousands of corpses, and not because of them. Kosovars believed in this, otherwise why did they start fighting? If you agree with this, then it cannot but cause anxiety, how narrow the neck is, through which people should go through to be heard by the world community, not to mention the right to get the separation. How narrow and how bloody.

Separatism, of course, provokes unrest, if only because the elite and the majority do not want to see how their state is separated, and many are ready to fight against even the most peaceful version of the separation. If the main goal is to maintain stability, then to suppress people's desire for greater independence and even support the states that oppress them, may be sad, but necessary. This is the essence of the transaction that the existing global world order proposes. But if this deal ceases to work and a world order based on the rules can no longer offer stability, then what's the point? Violence often happens between people who want to control themselves, and the states who are trying to prevent them from doing this; The creation of peaceful methods of resolving these processes can ultimately reduce the level of violence and give greater stability.

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One example of such a peaceful approach is plebiscite. Communities within the state may declare a referendum on the topic of separation of a certain part of the territory. If they win a majority of votes (or even a qualified majority of two -thirds of the vote), then the state is obliged to begin negotiations on independence. This model resembles the plebiscites that were carried out after the First World War, and the process that the Supreme Court of Canada proposed to the Quebec separatists in the 1990s. It is also applicable to the fact that in Catalonia they call "the right to decide."

The model of self -determination with a plebiscite has obvious advantages. The results will depend not on the ethnic or religious affiliation of the participants, but on democratic consent - activists must persuade their neighbors. And if you give those who want a plebiscite, the right to determine what territory they want to get according to the results of the vote, this will allow to leave the territorial division existing in the state. And it is often directly related to the possibility of minorities to apply for the department, simply because many states strive the internal borders so that the regions do not turn out where these minorities prevail. (For example, Kurds in Turkey prevail in the southeast, but Türkiye does not divide into states and provinces.)

But a model, which does not rely on existing boundaries, needs other ways to establish borders. One of the options is the requirement for the minimum population so that there are no microdents. For example, you can install the minimum threshold per million people in the territory, but we also discuss this threshold: if it is reduced, it will be beneficial to a larger number of communities, if you increase, a positive solution will have a greater political weight. Finally, the plebiscite, which leads to a agreed exit from the state, should be decorated as a person’s right, based on a democratic desire, and not what a group of people can achieve only by escaping from brutal persecution.

There are other examples. The department can also be based on existing territorial units, as, for example, took place in the UK, where this process went in different ways in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Governments can choose their own approach in which the right to separate is determined in accordance with their constitutional traditions. But first, it is worth aboling the laws that criminalize separatism or proclaim the indivisibility of the country's territory. All working models proceed from the fact that you need to take into account the aspirations of the local population. And not to do this - and therefore, making minorities dependent on the population of the whole country is the same as re -confirm existing boundaries.

Whatever the model is chosen, other states should be free in their right to recognize communities that have reached the peace department, or support them in their struggle against their government. But this is not equivalent to the right to military intervention: the protection of states from external threats is the main function of the world law and order. Wars based on false claims for liberation - as the one that Russia unleashed in Ukraine - should always be repulsed. “The right to solve” is a requirement in the framework of the protection of human rights, and not a request for military interference from the outside.

The idea is not to give the impetus an endless series of departments. The real value of the “right to exit” is that minorities receive a pressure lever, the ability to discuss on what conditions they come out or, conversely, remain as part of a particular state. The creation of such levers can serve as a much more reliable guarantee of the world and stability than today's mowing, decaying world order.

The most unfortunate victims of this world order - millions of refugees who are forced not to escape from the external invader, but from their own rulers - may indicate what this vaunted stability really means. Just like hundreds of millions of those who did not run away, but it remains that we call the world, but cannot call justice: in our homes, but in a foreign country.

The world is a dangerous and unfair place, and there is no certainty that indestructible and unchanging boundaries make it safer and fair. The fact that we are observing daily in Ukraine, Syria, Cameroon, Myanmar, Ethiopia and in a dozen other countries where blood is pouring, once again proves: no matter how the changes are scared, Carr was right - we will either come to this peacefully or through the war.

Author: Timothy William Waters

Original: How to Move Borders Without a War , The Atlantic, October 20, 2022

Translation: Vera Nifler