The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland: The State and Self-Determination in the Era of Heightened Globalization

11. Conclusion

191 11 Conclusion GLOBAL AND LOCAL SELF-DETERMINATION The first part of this work tracked the evolution of the concept of self-determination by looking at its role in articulating a match between the notions of people, nation, state, territory, and sovereignty. The ultimate aim of struggles for self-determination is, of course, to exercise sovereignty over the state defined by clearly demarcated territory and inhabited by the people who have coalesced into a homogeneous cultural and speech community called the nation. Hence, there is great value in examining how the sources of sovereignty and legitimacy have been conceived at various historical junctures and to what extent reality has corresponded with these conceptions. Focusing on how Western European states and their overseas offshoots conceptualized the sources of sovereignty is also informative because of the dominant role these states have played in shaping the political and economic order of the contemporary world, as they indeed continue to do. We have seen how some of them have finally concluded that concentrating sovereignty in a single location is no longer tenable and are thus experimenting with sharing this feature of political order both upwards and downwards. They are thus forced to increasingly seek “effective political units” that would serve as the building blocks of regional economic and political associations to achieve such an aim. Let me briefly summarize the conceptual foundations of self-determination and their implications for the sources of sovereignty and legitimacy . First, the conviction that humans have the ability to determine their destiny constitutes the fundamental thinking on which self-determination is based. This novel thinking emanated from the growing rejection of the previous belief that power and legitimacy descend from Heaven. The contrary belief that humans individually and collectively determine their destiny necessitated the articulation of earthly principles that guide this process of self-determination. Second, the fundamental reason why humans were called upon to take control of their destiny was to create conditions that promote and sustain peace within states and between them. This was the prominent role that self-determination was tasked with at the end of the First World War when the concept entered the popular vocabulary.This is evidenced by Wilson’s anticipation that world peace would ultimately result from the convergence of the general wills of individual states to establish humanity’s General Will, which would thus reconcile humanity and nationality. For Lenin, on the other hand, the recognition of self-determination constituted a tactical step in the direction of humanity’s ultimate fusion into one cohesive conflict-free whole. These two avenues to global peace stood in competition during the many decades when the world was divided between adherents of one vision or the other. This was particularly the case during the Cold War period marked by the neat bipolarization of world politics. During this time, peace between the two antagonistic camps was maintained mostly because they were armed with nuclear weapons and the “mutual assured destruction” (mad) that the existence of these weapons made possible. Nuclear weapons were in effect the Leviathans of the time, under whose sovereignty the two camps lived in an uneasy peace while engaging each other through proxies in the other parts of the world. The Horn of Africa was one of the regions where these camps supported surrogates, thus fanning conflicts within and between states. With the end of the Cold War a new threshold appeared, one that afforded humans unprecedented control over world affairs and opportunities to thus realize peace within and between states to a degree never before thought possible. Tragically, what actually happened instead was the tacit acceptance of “the real world order,” in which some areas are “zones of peace, wealth, and democracy” and others “zones of turmoil, war, and development [read poverty]” (Singer and Wildavsky 1993: 3). The coincidence of wealth and democracy in one set of zones renders war among the concerned states imponderable, in the immediate, since democracies presumably do not fight each other. And the states of the “zones of turmoil” do not pose any direct military threat to these wealthy democracies because of the latter’s overwhelming military capability. So the wealthy states can afford to sit and watch as the vicious cycle of poverty and conflict wreaks havoc with the lives of those who live in the zones of turmoil. Meanwhile, the wealthy states can continue to get even wealthier as they are able to tap The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland 192...