Self-Determination without Nationalism: A Theory of Postnational Sovereignty

Introduction

Introduction C onsider the following instances of contemporary political conflict. The people of Egypt mass by the thousands in the heart of Cairo, forcing the abdication of the virtual dictator of the country for the last generation. An unknown political movement in Mexico, named after a historical revolutionary, stages a series of spectacular media-oriented events to publicize its demands for local autonomy in the southern part of the country. Acts of sabotage begin against pipelines , drilling platforms, and other sites in the oilfields of southern Nigeria, close to where the local population has been losing farm- and forestlands to increasing pollution from drilling. A number of fastfood restaurants are attacked and some destroyed in the food- and wine-growing regions of France and Italy. Demonstrations by thousands of farmers in several states in India block and sometimes halt construction of hydroelectric dams that would devastate large amounts of farmland in the surrounding regions. Despite massive spending and endorsements by all leading political parties, the European Union Constitution is decisively defeated by democratic referenda in France and the Netherlands. Protests by native peoples in Amazonia publicize and partially stop destruction of rain forests by logging and farming corporations. The government in Bolivia is first prevented from selling public works (water and electricity) to private corporations and is then overthrown in subsequent elections by a large movement comprising mainly peasants and workers. 2 Introduction What do these recent events—and they can easily be multiplied—have in common? They are all political conflicts over matters that are unexplainable and, indeed, virtually incomprehensible according to any of the major concepts of political theory and international ethics on offer today. They did not arise because of disparities in global income. They did not occur because of discrimination against ethnic minorities. No violations of human rights precipitated their outbreaks, and no claims to statehood for oppressed nationalities were to be found in the protests. How do we understand such movements and occurrences in the absence of global inequities, minority discrimination , human rights violations, or national oppression? There is an older concept that is of use here, although it has been discarded or distorted by recent political thinking. All of these disruptions are struggles for selfdetermination , and these struggles ultimately seek to assert sovereignty over peoples’ lands, resources, governments, and countries against the agencies of “globalization”—whether transnational corporations or hegemonic states. It is the recovery of a political vocabulary equal to these peoples’ struggles that is the goal of this book. The method employed is partly critical—as in the critique of political theories that obscure understanding and justification of such struggles. But it is also constructive—in renovating concepts thought by many to have been surpassed. My argument here is twofold. First, I show that the eclipse of the principle of self-determination is a result of its problematic embrace by nationalist movements and theorists. The result—the transformation of political selfdetermination into national self-determination—is neither a necessary nor an inevitable entailment of the idea itself. Rather, it is a product of contingent historical circumstances—the appearance of European nationalist movements in the nineteenth century and the rise of colonial liberation movements in the twentieth. Because these circumstances no longer exist and a new set of political needs and issues has arisen, the concept needs reconsideration. Second, I argue that, if understood properly, self-determination has an important role to play in the self-understanding of contemporary movements for social justice and environmental sustainability (such as those mentioned previously). Moreover, I maintain that international ethics today is in the grip of illusions about “global” justice and “human” rights that prevent us from understanding the true dimensions and real nature of contemporary political conflicts. The sign that this is so is this very eclipse not only of the principle of self-determination but also of the correlative concept of political sovereignty. In reestablishing the necessity of these principles and concepts— eventuating in a notion of ecosovereignty that should supplement other notions of justice and rights—my argument finds its completion. Introduction 3 In this Introduction, I attend to some methodological preliminaries. First, I set the stage for my argument about self-determination by considering its recent neglect as a symptom of a deeper problem in international ethics: ignorance of the political dimension of global problems, which results from an obsession with the “moralization” of international conflict. Second, by providing a...