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3) Develop a set of principles to govern when new states should be given diplomatic recognition, and what they must do to qualify for admission into international bodies. Robert Badinter, president of the French Constitutional Council and head of the E.C. Arbitration Commission on Yugoslavia, suggests that new states must establish democratic institutions, accept international covenants on human rights, pledge to respect existing frontiers and guarantee respectful treatment of their own ethnic and/or religious minorities.
4) Work out rules for determining when international intervention is necessary to prevent ethnic bloodshed, and develop mechanisms to carry it out. The old idea was that outsiders had no business interfering with anything a government might do within its borders to its own people. That principle has been shattered within the past 13 months by two events: the dispatch of a U.N. force to northern Iraq to protect Kurds from massacre by Saddam Hussein's forces (the Kurds have since set up what amounts to an autonomous zone there); and the arrival, however tardy, of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Croatia while the Croats were still fighting to break free from Belgrade.
But since the U.N. neither can nor should butt into every secessionist dispute around the world, some standard is needed to judge when intervention is justified. One often heard suggestion is that intervention is defensible whenever a civil war threatens to send floods of refugees across international frontiers. Established powers also need to work out in advance how to organize and finance an intervention force, rather than repeatedly reinventing the wheel. NATO foreign ministers, meeting in Norway last month, approved for the first time the formation of a force that could be used outside the territory of the alliance states, and U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali has called for the creation of a standing U.N. force.
None of this can happen too soon. Demands for ethnic self-determination could soon cause fearsome violence in many more parts of the world. China gives the outside world the impression of being a monolith, yet it contains 55 ethnic minorities numbering perhaps 80 million people, many of whom are bitterly discontented. New violence already has broken out in Tibet, according to reports reaching London. In Europe there are feelings of repression and aspirations toward autonomy, if not independence, among Hungarians in Romania, Turks in Bulgaria and Poles in Lithuania, among others. In Afghanistan civil war could yet pit southern Pashtun against northern Uzbek and Tajik in a conflict that could spill over into neighboring Pakistan and the formerly Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
All this adds up to a crazy quilt of ethnic ambition. The task ahead is to ensure that the quilt is not forced into service as a shroud.