02 December 1999
Text: Strobe Talbott Speech at Brown University December 2, 1999
("Self-Determination: From Versailles to Dayton and Beyond") (3690)
Democracy is "the best antidote to secessionism and civil war, since
in a truly democratic state, citizens seeking to run their own lives
have peaceful alternatives to taking up arms against their
government," says Strobe Talbott, Deputy Secretary of State.
Talbott discussed the tensions between states and their ethnic and
religious minorities during a speech at the Thomas J. Watson Institute
for International Studies at Brown University December 2.
He noted that the Clinton Administration, along with other world
leaders at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,
has reaffirmed the principle that international borders should not be
changed by force, either by wars of aggression or by wars of
secession.
Yet governments also have a responsibility, Talbott said, "not just to
defend the territorial integrity of the state but also to establish
and preserve the civic integrity of the population - that is, to
ensure that everyone who lives on the territory of the state feels
like a fully respected and enfranchised citizens of the state."
Talbott emphasized that the way a government treats its people is not
an "internal matter."
"It's the business of the international community," he said, "because
there are issues of both universal values and regional peace at stake.
By extension, this principle gives us a way of supporting
self-determination without necessarily encouraging secessionism."
Using Bosnia-Herzegovina of the former Yugoslavia as an example,
Talbott said the goal of the internationally backed peace accords is
"to give all citizens reason to feel that they belong to a single
state - not so much a nation-state as a multi-ethnic federal state."
"We're trying to define, and apply, the concept of self-determination
in a way that is conducive to integration and not to disintegration,
in a way that will lead to lasting peace rather than recurrent war,"
Talbott said.
He defended American foreign policy as equally championing both its
national interests and its national values. U.S. efforts to further
this dual approach will eventually help those minorities seeking
self-determination.
At the same time, the opening of borders, the opening of societies,
and trans-national cooperation will work to make a virtue out of
dependence of nations on one another, he said.
Following is the text, as prepared for delivery:
(begin text)
SELF-DETERMINATION: FROM VERSAILLES TO DAYTON -- AND BEYOND
By Strobe Talbott
Deputy Secretary Of State
December 2, 1999
Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island
As prepared for delivery
Thank you, Gordon. I have several personal reasons for welcoming the
chance to visit this campus. First, I'm the proud uncle of, Casey
Shearer, the Voice of Brown Sports -- which this week makes him, I
guess, the Voice of Champions -- or, as a Yalie, I can perhaps get
away with saying Co-Champions (never mind what happened on the opening
day of the season).
I've known Tom Gleason formerly 20 years. When I was a journalist for
Time and he was working in Washington, I benefited from his expertise
in Soviet studies. Also, like everyone connected with this institute,
I owe a lot to the late Tom Watson. He was a mentor of mine in the
'70s and '80s. I admired him as a director of Time Incorporated, as an
ambassador to the USSR and as an adventurous student of the world.
There are several remote parts of the former Soviet Union I would
never have seen if Tom had not asked me to accompany him as he piloted
his Lear jet across Siberia, retracing the route he'd flown in World
War II ferrying American bombers from Alaska to Poltava to help Stalin
defeat Hilter.
But there's another, more immediate reason why I wanted to participate
in this lecture series, and that's the topic you've chosen:
self-determination. This is a constant and sometimes difficult subject
for American foreign policy. All around the world there are minorities
that feel themselves to be second-class citizens; provinces that feel
abused and exploited by far-off capitals; and groups that are
determined to recover lost territory or historical glory.
Their grievances are often legitimate. So are their aspirations. But
the tactics they use (sometimes including terrorism) and
countermeasures they provoke (often including repression) can trigger
political instability and even armed conflict, not just within that
county but more broadly, throughout the entire region. That's why
demands for self-determination are frequently challenges not just to
the country involved but to American statesmanship as well.
There are examples on literally every continent -- here, in our own
hemisphere, in Africa, in the Middle East, and in Asia. One that has
been in the headlines a lot this year is Indonesia, the fourth most
populous country on earth -- and now, finally, with the election of
President Wahid, the third largest democracy. For years, Indonesia has
contended with various independence movements. The best known is in
East Timor, The former Portuguese colony that Indonesia occupied in
1975.
A brutal military occupation has made the local population there
determined to break free of Jakarta's rule. The people of East Timor
made that desire clear in a popular vote, and the Indonesian
government has renounced its claim on the territory. Now, the United
Nations, with the support of the United States, is supervising East
Timor's peaceful transition to becoming the first new nation of the
new millennium.
Nearly 2,000 miles away, in northwestern Sumatra, many of the people
of Aceh are demanding an independent state of their own. Aceh has been
a part of Indonesia since 1945, 30 years before the occupation of East
Timor. The secession of Aceh -- we're it to occur -- could send shock
waves throughout one of the most complex countries on earth -- an
archipelago of 17,000 islands, with eight major ethnic groups speaking
hundreds of languages.
In his attempt to keep Aceh from pulling out of Indonesia, President
Wahid has pledged to bring to justice those responsible for past
abuses; he's promised that the Acehnese people will have a greater
voice in local affairs, and he says he does not want to impose martial
law. With this approach, he may yet be able to reconcile the rights
and needs of the Acehnese with two important principles of
international law -- the inviolability of borders and the territorial
integrity of established states.
Another area of the world torn by the interplay of repression and
secessionism is the one that Tom Gleason knows so well: the former
Soviet Union. For the second time in this decade, Russia is seeking to
re-impose its rule over part of its own territory, the republic of
Chechnya in the north Caucasus.
This time around, it was Chechen-based insurgents who re-started the
war. But Russia is trying to end that war by means that have made it
harder, rather than easier, to earn the allegiance of the Chechen
people and that have put further strain on Moscow's relations with the
outside world.
Meanwhile, in Moldova to the west, and in Georgia and Azerbaijan to
the south, the central governments are contending with breakaway
regions of their own. So that's a quick tour of a troubled horizon. I
cite this array of cases in order to illustrate just how very distinct
they are. They're all examples of self-determination as a powerful
force in national and international politics, but they're all very
different, one from the other.
In some cases the "self" in question is ethnic, in some cases
religious; sometimes it's both; sometimes it's neither. Just as the
problems are different, so are the solutions. Nowhere, on the shelves
of the State Department, is there a ready-made, one-size-fits-all
recipe on how to deal with the competing demands of human rights and
self-determination on the one hand, and stability and territorial
integrity on the other. In each instance, we must consider carefully a
set of unique and complex historical and political circumstances; we
must strike a balance among various interests and values; we must
weigh the needs and concerns of our friends and Allies; and we must
include in our calculations a healthy dose of common sense.
Whenever possible, we try to work through international organizations,
like the United Nations, in the case of Indonesia, or -- in the case
of Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia and Azerbaijan -- the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe. In various forms, the OSCE has
been around for more than a quarter of a century. Its predecessor, the
CSCE, contributed substantially to ending the Cold War.
It did so by establishing an important principle, which President
Clinton and other world leaders reaffirmed at the OSCE Summit in
Istanbul two weeks ago. That principle is this: on the one hand,
international borders should not be changed by force -- either by wars
of aggression or by wars of secession; on the other hand, governments
have a responsibility not just to defend the territorial integrity of
the state, but also to establish and preserve the civic integrity of
the population -- that is, to ensure that everyone who lives on the
territory of the state feels like a fully respected and enfranchised
citizen of the state.
As a corollary to this principle, the way a government treats its own
people is not just an "internal matter;" it's the business of the
international community, because there are issues of both universal
values and regional peace at stake. By extension, this principle gives
us a way of supporting self-determination without necessarily
encouraging secessionism.
The best way for an ethnically diverse, geographically sprawling state
like Indonesia or Russia to protect itself against separatism is by
protecting the rights of minorities and far-flung communities.
Democracy, of course, is the political system most explicitly designed
to ensure self-determination. That makes democracy the best antidote
to secessionism and civil war, since in a truly democratic state,
citizens seeking to run their own lives have peaceful alternatives to
taking up arms against their government. Our own experience with civil
war and secessionism in the 1860s actually confirms this point, since
the casus beli was one of the ultimate affronts to democracy, which is
slavery. Even today, 223 years after gaining our independence, the
task of perfecting American democracy is still a work in progress.
Let me turn now to Europe, which has been a testing ground for the
evolution of self-determination over the centuries. In the mid-1600s,
the Treaty of Westphalia broke up the Holy Roman Empire and
established the modern nation-state -- a country called France for the
French, a country called Sweden for the Swedes, and so on.
There are two troubles with the very concept of the nation-state. The
first is that, carried to an extreme, it means that every one of the
literally thousands of nationalities on the face of the earth should
have its own state, which would make for a very large U.N. and a very
messy world. The other problem is that a pure nation-state simply
doesn't exist in nature. Ethnographic boundaries almost never coincide
with political ones.
That's one reason why, for the three hundred years after the peace of
Westphalia, Europeans kept going back to war and redrawing the map of
their Continent in blood. One of the bloodiest of those conflicts was
World War One. It ended with the breakup of the Hapsburg and Ottoman
empires and the birth of a new generation of nation-states at the
Versailles Peace Conference in 1919.
That's where Woodrow Wilson proclaimed his famous Fourteen Points, the
fifth of which was the principle that sovereignty should take full
account of the interests of the populations concerned. Even in
Wilson's own time -- for that matter, even in his own Administration
-- this prescription aroused controversy and criticism. Wilson's
Secretary of State, Robert Lansing confided to his diary at the time
that self-determination would, "breed discontent, disorder and
rebellion," and that the phrase itself was "simply loaded with
dynamite."
In the decades since, many scholars, statesmen and pundits have
depicted U.S. foreign policy in this century as a seesaw contest
between idealism -- or what is sometimes called "Wilsonianism" -- on
the one hand and realism on the other; between high principle and raw
power; between a big-hearted but starry-eyed America and a two-fisted,
hard-headed one.
Wilson in his long coat and top hat has become the cartoon
personification of the squishy-soft half of this stereotype. Teddy
Roosevelt, in his Rough Rider gear, was his supposed antipode. That's
shoddy history and a false dichotomy. It misses one of the most
important, distinctive and positive aspects of American foreign
policy: America has sought, as no nation before or elsewhere, to
combine realism and idealism in the role it plays in the world.
In public-opinion polls and elections alike, the American people have
made clear that they demand from the conduct of their government's
diplomacy and from the exertions of their armed forces something
nobler and more altruistic than the cold-blooded calculus of raison
d'etat or Realpolitik in which European statecraft has often taken
pride.
Particularly in this century, the United States has explicitly,
persistently sought to champion both its national interests and its
national values, without seeing the two goals to be in contradiction.
Yes, Woodrow Wilson gave that imperative a voice and put it into
action. But so did Teddy Roosevelt.
In fact, he preached that gospel of what might be called hard-headed
idealism, or big hearted-realism, before Wilson did. In 1916, when the
Kaiser's army was brutalizing Belgium, it was Roosevelt, then in
opposition, who cried out against, as he put it, a "breach of
international morality" and who called upon his own country to come to
the rescue. "We ought not," he said, "solely to consider our own
interests."
Roosevelt also called for, and I quote, "a great world agreement among
all the civilized military powers to back righteousness by force."
That was a full two years before Wilson himself got around to
endorsing the idea of a League of Nations. If TR were with us today, I
suspect he would be mightily offended to hear himself depicted as a
sort of Yankee Richelieu or Metternich.
As for Wilson, his role, too, has been subject to a 1ot of simplistic
exploitation and Monday-morning-quarterbacking. For example, it has
become almost a matter of conventional wisdom that Wilson's concept of
self-determination, as proclaimed in 1919, led straight to the mess in
the Balkans today. Nonsense.
Whatever the shortcomings of Versailles, Wilson and the other
peacemakers gathered there did try, where possible, to put multiple
nationalities together under the roof of single states. One result was
to be Czechoslovakia -- the land of the Czechs and Slovaks. Another
was to be Yugoslavia -- the land of the South Slavs: Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes. Those new countries did not survive the century in which
they were born -- but that was not so much because of the
shortsightedness of mapmakers of Versailles as it was because of the
rise of fascism in Central and Southern Europe and the consolidation
of Communism in the East.
The peoples of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were subject to the
double jeopardy of having to live under both those forms of
totalitarianism. They never stood a chance to make it as developed,
democratic civil societies and federal systems. Their failure extended
into the present decade. Czechoslovakia broke up in the so-called
Velvet Divorce seven years ago, while Yugoslavia shattered in a far
more protracted and violent fashion.
Now, in the wake of the seventh Balkan war of this century, here we
are again -- eighty years after Versailles -- trying one more time to
get it right; we're tying to work with our European friends and the
people of in Southeastern Europe to remake the politics of the region
without, this time, having to redraw the map -- without, in other
words, splitting up large, repressive or failed states into small,
fractious mini-states that are neither economically nor politically
viable.
We're trying to define, and apply, the concept of self-determination
in a way that is conducive to integration and not to disintegration;
in a way that will lead to lasting peace rather than recurrent war.
That was the task at the Dayton Peace Conference on Bosnia in 1995 --
a masterpiece of mediation on the part of my friend and colleague, and
your alumnus, Dick Holbrooke, a graduate of Brown in the Class of
1962. And it's still the task of U.S. policy toward the former
Yugoslavia today.
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, our goal is to give all citizens reason to feel
that they belong to a single state -- not so much a nation-state as a
multi-ethnic federal state. There's reason for cautious optimism on
this score, although the task is going to take a generation or more,
and like other post-communist transitions, will require strategic
patience on our part.
I say there's hope because the leaders of all the communities that
make up Bosnia have begun to put in place common institutions that
embrace both the Serb entity, Republica Srpska, and the Muslim-Croat
one, the Federation. The state of Bosnia-Herzegovina now has a flag, a
common currency, a common license plate -- all steps in the right
direction, although with a long way to go.
Kosovo is an even more complex case. More than a decade of Serbian
oppression, and over a year of ethnic cleansing, have made the
Albanian population of Kosovo want more than just self-determination:
they want total independence; they want to break free completely --
constitutionally, juridically and in every other respect -- from
Belgrade as the source of all their woes.
For the time being, under United Nations Security Council Resolution
1244, the question of final status is deferred. Kosovo is today, and
will continue to be for some time to come, run by the U.N. until that
status is resolved. Its people go about rebuilding their lives under
day-in, day-out protection and supervision from a consortium of global
and regional organizations. What ultimately happens there -- whether
the people of Kosovo will come to accept a high degree of autonomy
within a larger, democratic, federalized, multi-ethnic state that has
the boundaries of the current Yugoslavia -- will depend in part on
what happens elsewhere in the neighborhood -- in Serbia, in the
Balkans more generally, and in Europe as a whole.
But this much is clear: it is neither reasonable nor realistic to
expect a satisfactory and enduring resolution of Kosovo's status
within the territory of Yugoslavia as long as an indicted war
criminal, Slobodan Milosevic, remains the leader of Belgrade.
Milosevic, is not just a walking, talking anathema to both our
interests and our values -- he's also an anachronism. He's a throwback
to the bad old days of Europe, when the forces of liberal democracy
were fighting what sometimes seemed like an uphill battle against
those of pathological nationalism in the form of fascism and
pathological internationalism in the form of communism.
As a communist turned ultranationalist, who therefore combines the
worst of both phenomena, Milosevic was, and remains, on the losing
side, even as he hunkers down and tries to out wait or out fox the
international community. That won't succeed because the transatlantic
community has learned its lessons from the two world wars and the Cold
War; it has already demonstrated that it now has both the political
will and the military means to defeat Milosevic in the four Balkan
wars that he personally has unleashed over the past decade.
There is another important transformation that is underway in Europe
today and it, too, runs counter to everything that Milosevic stands
for. The old Westphalian system of nation-states -- each sovereign in
its exercise of supreme, absolute and permanent authority -- is giving
way to a new system in which nations feel secure enough in their
identities and in their neighborhoods to make a virtue out of their
dependence on one another.
That means pooling sovereignty in certain areas of governance, such as
monetary policy, while, in other areas, granting to regions greater
autonomy -- that is, a higher degree of self-determination. On
matters, where communal identities and sensitivities are at stake,
such as language and education, central governments are transferring
power to local authorities. Helping Europe succeed in this great
experiment is a big challenge for the United States. But it is not
just a challenge in Europe. It's global.
Remember the long list I ticked off at the outset -- conflicts in
Africa, Asia and the Western Hemisphere. I repeat the caveat I
stressed at the beginning: every case is sui generis; each has its own
history; each requires its own solution. But while the text -- that
is, the particular story -- varies from one situation to the other,
there is a general point to be made about the context.
All the cases I've mentioned -- on every continent -- would benefit
from some variant of what Western Europe has been able to accomplish
over the last half-century: the opening of borders, the opening of
societies, the protection of minorities, the empowerment of regions
and the pursuit of trans-national cooperation. Here's the bottom line
and the big picture and the long view on self-determination. If we can
keep American foreign policy focused on the objective of helping
others to move in the direction of those realistic ideals that are on
there way to becoming reality in Western Europe, then under our
influence and with our help, the world will, over time, become both a
better place for all those people in far-off lands who are seeking
self-determination -- Bosnians and Kosovars, Acehnese and Chechens --
and it will also become a safer place for Americans to live and visit,
to travel and trade, to learn and teach.
In short, we will, simultaneously, be advancing our values and
defending our interests. And that, as Woodrow Wilson and Teddy
Roosevelt would surely agree, is what American foreign policy is all
about.
(end text)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State)
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