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The thought that self-determination might be the wave of the future makes leaders of the established powers shudder. To them, it threatens instability on a horrendous scale. Secessions often have touched off savage neighbor-vs.- neighbor wars, like those in Moldova; in Georgia, where South Ossetians have been fighting to break away and join ethnic brethren across the border in Russia; and of course in Yugoslavia and in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, caught in a violent tug-of-war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Even peaceful secessions could spawn a slew of mininations, unable to support themselves economically and dependent on aid from richer nations for survival. At a recent international conference French President Francois Mitterrand worried out loud "whether in the future every tribal group will dispose of its own laws to the exclusion of any common law?" and immediately answered himself, "You can sense how impossible that would be."
Less impossible than irresistible, comes the reply from some political scientists. They view the turmoil as the necessary pain attending the birth of a genuinely new world order no longer dominated by large nation-states but composed mainly of regional associations of smaller countries. It is possible too to see the move toward self-determination as a net gain for liberty. In any case, the day seems to be past when rebellious people can be forced to remain in a state they want no part of. Since resistance to a breakup is usually futile, say many experts, the task for international bodies such as the U.N. is to guide the upheavals into peaceful channels.
That, however, is a mammoth job that would begin very late if it started today. The idea that every group with a common ancestry, language, history and culture should have its own state and write its own laws goes back more than a century. The principle of self-determination got a big boost from Woodrow Wilson at the end of World War I, and in 1945 was written into the Charter of the U.N.
In the Third World the dissolution of Western empires gave birth to many new states whose borders had been drawn for the convenience of colonial administrators and enclosed peoples who had never got along with each other. Jockeying among varied ethnic-religious groups for pieces of the old imperial turf has been igniting secessionist wars ever since. Possibly the deadliest one within the past decade has been the insurrection of Hindu Tamil groups against the Buddhist Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. The Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace counts, among many others, six separate conflicts in India and three each in Burma and Indonesia in which guerrilla groups are seeking independence.
The biggest impulse to the recent explosion, however, has been the end of the cold war. "The reason why the ethnic rivalries and aspirations surfaced so suddenly in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is that till recently communism kept them in a time warp," says Oxford history professor Robert O'Neill. Tensions burst forth with explosive fury as soon as the lid of dictatorship was lifted.