Of Self Determination and Carving Up the World

Woodrow Wilson unleashed some nasty asps of public policy on the world, the venom of which continues to work its misery on mankind.  Professor Wilson as President pushed into practice the idea that American governance should be shifted from the people who elect Senators and representatives and entrusted instead to a cadre of wise men in the executive branch.  Experts like himself, elite college professors and their best students, would know better how to manage the affairs of others than would the teaming masses of the nation left to make their own decisions. 

Today, thousands of regulations, uncounted yards of red tape, and millions of bureaucrats later, we all live within a shrinking sphere of personal liberty, with diminishing control of our lives, permitted to make few decisions without someone we do not know having a major say in so much of what we have and do.  Increasing numbers of our neighbors have effectively been rendered wards of the state, unable to manage their own lives without dependence upon a myriad of government programs that punish individual initiative and grind up families.  Today, the most reliable predictor of poverty in America is being a single mother.  Lured into the web of sweet-sounding sticky federal, state, and even local programs that promise help, these government victims are rarely delivered from poverty, and neither are their children or their grandchildren.  This is surely not what Woodrow Wilson intended, but it is surely what his model of governance by experts has delivered.  Obamacare is one of the most recent and obvious examples of this machinery of misery.

Yet it can be argued that nothing that Woodrow Wilson bequeathed has worked more harm than the destructive principle of “self determination,” imposed by Wilson and his international experimenters at the negotiations to rearrange the world after World War I.  Of course, he did not act alone, but Wilson did much to make the world safe for World War II.  Self determination worked its evil by institutionalizing perpetual turmoil in eastern Europe and the Balkans, as bickering and unstable micro-states created a power vacuum tempting for fuehrers and commissars to fill.

The concept of self determination can seem appealing as long as you do not pause long enough to consider how it might actually play out in practice and over time.  The basic idea—and it does not go very far past this basic idea—is that every group of people has the right to find its own place in the sun, either with its own government or subject to another, whichever the group might wish. 

It was this idea that Russian boss Vladimir Putin invoked to cloak his grab of Crimea.  The people of Crimea had a vote (carefully monitored by Russian troops) in which over 95% said that they wanted to break away from Ukraine.  And then they decided, almost the next day, that they wanted to become a part of Russia.  According to the Russian Government, this was all very legal and in keeping with international law.  It was self determination.  Who could object?  It was more than faintly reminiscent of the nearly unanimous votes in the nations of eastern Europe a generation ago—when occupied by the Red Army—in favor of communist regimes closely allied with the old Soviet Union.  More self determination.

I wonder whether Professor/President Woodrow Wilson thought of how his principle of self determination would have worked in American history?  What if Wilson instead of Lincoln had been President in 1861?  Did self determination apply to the people of the southern states who wished to leave the Union?

I also wonder how dedicated Vladimir Putin really is to the principle of self determination?  If it applies to Crimea, does it also apply to the people of Chechnya, who seem to be eager to be out of Russia?  Are there other minority populations in Russia yearning to breathe free? 

How about elsewhere in the world?  Is self determination a universal principle worthy of universal application?  Are Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran ready to let the Kurdish minorities carve up their countries and realize their dream of a new Kurdistan?  How about Muslim minorities in southern islands of the Philippines?  The Tamil populated northern Sri Lanka?  The Sunni-majority communities in Shiite majority Iraq?  The multitude of tribal groupings in virtually every country of sub-Saharan Africa?  Are all of the many minorities of China content with being governed by Beijing?

When would the bloodletting of self determination ever end?  It has not ended yet, whether used as a justification for aggression or as a means of sustaining discontent.  It is a ponderous legacy.