Emerging reports suggest that Scotland may be ready for a peaceful exit from more than 300 years of union with the remainder of the United Kingdom. At the same time, a bloody struggle for greater autonomy in Eastern Ukraine appears to be on hold after the start of a wobbly ceasefire and Libya, Syria and Iraq are torn apart by very active wars over their identity. Meanwhile, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians seethes on.
All of these examples highlight the difficulties underlying the question of 'self-determination'. While ethnic and national tensions have always existed, the term had a particular resonance as World War I drew to a close, when US president Woodrow Wilson's 14 points called for self-determination for peoples in the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.
Self-determination inevitably became linked with decolonisation and an end to peoples being ruled by foreign governments far away. As this process accelerated in the inter-war and post-World War II years, self-determination became entrenched in the major international instruments, being included in Article 1.2 of the UN Charter. Article 1 of both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic and Social Rights begins 'All peoples have the right to self-determination'. Indeed, in the decolonisation context, who could possibly object?
Nevertheless, superpower rivalry during the Cold War already pointed to some of the conceptual problems lurking beneath this deceptively simple concept. The Americans were reluctant to have anything to do with self-determination in South America (which, under the Monroe Doctrine, they saw as a fiefdom) while vigorously promoting it in the Eastern bloc. For the Soviets, the position was exactly reversed.
The problem of who qualifies as a 'people' and what the content of the right is becomes particularly acute when the right to self-determination bumps up against that bedrock of international law, national sovereignty. Article 2.4 of the UN Charter protects the 'territorial integrity of states' and bans the use of force against it, while Article 2.7 prohibits interference in a state's domestic affairs.
All of this reflects the fact that, since the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 (which ended the bloody Thirty Years War by effectively declaring that national boundaries trump religion), the nation state has been seen as the fundamental unit of international law for most purposes. Violation of national sovereignty is seen as the most basic crime a state can commit at international law.
In some cases, the problem