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Woodrow Wilson's vision of a world ruled by popular consent in which aggression would be prevented or punished by the collective action of the international community continues to ignite the hopes of humanity for a more peaceful world. Wilson's dream is a perennial one that George Bush rebaptized in the New World Order. Yet Wilson himself came to see the limitations in the principle of self-determination. And, in our own time, we have seen the disastrous effects resulting from the dissolution of the Soviet system after the Cold War and its release of national and ethnic aspirations and antagonisms deeply rooted in history and in memory. We have seen how those antagonisms have resulted in the disintegration of the Soviet Union and now of Yugoslavia while effecting separatist movements all across Europe, on both sides of the old Iron Curtain and indeed throughout the world. Certainly this was a state of affairs which Woodrow Wilson never intended.
The Wilsonian concept of self-determination cannot be understood apart from its historic evolution in the American experience. Self-determination refers to the right of a people to determine their own political destiny; but beyond this broad definition, no legal criteria determine which group may legitimately claim this right in particular cases. No universally accepted standards mark the measure of freedom a group of people presumably must enjoy before they can exercise it. Nothing approaching a consensus exists regarding the feasibility of the principle itself. As a concept it cannot be stated in terms applicable to any given context. Consequently, it has been both a factor of cohesion and a source of disunity, depending on the circumstances in which the question has arisen. As one authority remarked, "Self-determination might mean incorporation into a state or some measure of autonomy within a state, or a somewhat larger degree of freedom in a federation or commonwealth or union, or it might mean completeindependence." 1
The word "self-determination" is derived from the German term selbstbestimmungsrecht and was frequently used by German radical philosophers in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was incorporated in a resolution of the London International Socialist Congress in 1896, which declared its support for "the full rights of the self-determination (selbstbestimmungsrecht) of all nations. . . "2 The...