Self-determination and "the clash of norms"

Putting aside the specific circumstances surrounding the Crimea referendum -- circumstances that make it impossible to say that the vote was conducted under fair conditions -- the fact remains that it seems reasonably clear that most Crimeans want to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Thus this is a case, and not the first by any means, in which the principle of self-determination comes into conflict with that of preserving the territorial integrity of extant, recognized sovereign states.

In this case the U.S. and EU have plumped for territorial integrity over self-determination, and the particular circumstances, i.e. the Russian invasion that preceded the referendum, have allowed them to claim the legal and moral high ground in doing so. But in the past the U.S. and many of its allies have occasionally made the opposite choice, recognizing states that have resulted from the breakup of existing ones (e.g., Eritrea, Bosnia, Kosovo), and while it is possible to paint some of this as simple acquiescence to faits accomplis it would be difficult to maintain that a wholly consistent, high-minded, and principled stance has guided all such past decisions.

Indeed, it would be surprising to find complete consistency in anything having to do with state behavior, since it is a truism that the world is complicated and that states navigate it by a messy mixture of interest, calculation, and principle, a mixture that is unlikely to yield completely consistent results. Scholars may try to discern a consistent thread that determines, for example, when the U.S. recognizes secessionist movements and when it does not (see, e.g., Jonathan Paquin, A Stability-Seeking Power, 2010; link), but without casting aspersions on the particular book just mentioned I think it would be wise to retain some skepticism about whether these often tangled situations can be tamed by a nice theory.

The problem is not only that states are guided by a mixture of considerations but that principles themselves, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, come into conflict. In an article published almost twenty years ago ("The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism," Foreign Policy, Spring 1995; link to pdf), Stanley Hoffmann put the point this way:

It is precisely in the realm of chaos I described above -- the realm of disintegrating states -- that the clash of norms is the most evident and paralyzing: Sovereignty (as a principle of order and, still, a barrier against aggressive or imperial designs), self-government or democracy, national self-determination (with all its ambiguities and flaws), and human rights (which are not devoid of ambiguities of their own...) are four norms in conflict.... Human rights...often cannot be protected without infringing upon another state's sovereignty, or without circumscribing the potential for a "tyranny of the majority" entailed by national self-determination and by Jacobin versions of democracy. The trouble-making potential of self-determination, both for interstate order and for human rights, is not so obvious that many liberals want to curb it or even get rid of it, yet the demand for it simply cannot be ignored, and denying its legitimacy would rarely be a recipe for order or democracy. Inconsistency is the result of this confusion: the international "community" has recognized Croatia, Bosnia, and Eritrea, but not Biafra, Chechnya, or the right of the Kurds and Tibetans to states of their own.

Scholars emerging from graduate school with PhDs in political science or international relations are unlikely, I would guess, to find jobs these days if their work prominently features words like "inconsistency" and "confusion." The field tends to value work that purports to bring theoretical order out of apparent chaos. But confusion and inconsistency are often pervasive in the real world of international relations, and although "it's confusing" will not cut it if one is writing a dissertation, for those whose priority is understanding the real world "it's confusing" is not a bad place to start -- and, sometimes, it's also not a bad place to end up.

The debate about boundaries

John Quiggin recently touched off a long discussion at Crooked Timber with the assertion, contained in a re-cycled post on "the traditionality of modernity," that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time, not less."

I won't repeat my comments in that discussion here, but want to follow up with a couple of reflections (one or two of which will be set out here, others perhaps in a subsequent post).

In questioning the assertion that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time," several CT commenters argued that not enough time has passed since the end of decolonization, or even since the end of WW2, to draw inferences about a trend.

For example, Peter T writes in a comment at the end of the thread:

John Quiggin would, I imagine, be fairly hard on those who repeat the “19 years of flat temperatures proves global warming is a myth” idiocy. But there’s a similar issue here. We should not expect national boundaries or state break-up/formation to proceed at a steady pace. They are affairs of decades at the least. Definite national boundaries, as opposed to zones of influence (sometimes broad, sometimes quite sharply defined), are a fairly recent thing over much of the earth anyway. The last wave – the decolonisation movement – only subsided around 40 years ago. There have been a number of minor shifts since then, plus the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. So it hasn’t really been all that stable, and it may be simply too early to go looking for explanations. If we get through another 30 or so years without major changes in state boundaries, then I’ll be impressed (if I live that long).

There are several issues here. One is that a strong argument can be made that decolonization itself, as it played out, contributed to boundary stability rather than the reverse (I dealt with that at CT, so won't elaborate here). Another is that Peter T (like others who made a similar point) assumes that the statement "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time" contains an implicit prediction that stability noticed at time T will persist until some future time T + X, or will persist indefinitely. Although the context of JQ's post might have encouraged this interpretation, the statement that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time" need not be read as anything other than a descriptive statement of what has been happening in recent years: the words "are becoming" do not necessarily mean "will continue to become" or "will continue to become, indefinitely." If someone looks in the mirror and says "my hair is becoming grayer," that does not necessarily mean "my hair will continue to become grayer." All it means is that the person has noticed that his or her hair is grayer now than it was two weeks ago, or two years ago. There is no guarantee that the process of graying will continue: the color of the hair could simply remain as it is, or it is even possible (if not perhaps likely) that the process of graying could reverse itself (without the application of hair dye or anything like that). 

The point, and sorry for the repetition, is that "national boundaries are becoming more stable over time" does not necessarily have to mean "national boundaries will continue to become ever more stable" or that "stability will persist indefinitely." It can simply mean that in a given span of time -- the last half-century, say -- national boundaries have become more stable. The notion that this, even if empirically accurate, is a meaningless observation because it probably just represents another phase in an endless up-and-down cycle, and the related notion that 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 years is too short a time span from which to infer anything of consequence, both suffer from the same weakness.

The weakness is that these dismissals ignore the normative context of international politics, the normative environment in which, in this case, fluctuations in boundaries do or don't occur. Actors have ideas and these ideas influence how they behave, at least to some extent. One idea that the corporate actors known as states now firmly have in their heads is that national (i.e., state) boundaries should be messed with as little as possible and as seldom as possible. We know this because they say it in authoritative contexts. Of course actions do not always match words. The question is how often actions diverge from words. Krasner in his book on sovereignty argued that states' actions diverge from their words quite often; he called this, borrowing from other writers, 'organized hypocrisy,' i.e., a situation "in which institutional norms are enduring but frequently ignored." Is the current norm about boundaries -- i.e., 'don't mess with them' in my colloquial rendering -- "frequently ignored"? Are we dealing here with organized hypocrisy? It depends partly on what one means by "frequently," but my sense is -- and some research, to which I referred at CT, backs up this intuition -- that the boundary norm (or 'the territorial integrity norm' as it has been called) is observed much or most of the time. Not all the time, but enough of the time so that one can say that the match between words and deeds in this particular context is reasonably (not perfectly, but reasonably) good. The norm could change, and/or the degree of conformity to it could change, but to write comments on this subject as if the norm did not exist is peculiar, to say the least. 

Commenters who made points like the one quoted above don't even ask the question about the match between words and deeds because they implicitly assume that words don't matter. It's as if the stability/instability of boundaries, for them, is a question in Newtonian physics, completely divorced from what humans in their collective capacity think or say. But that's not how politics, or almost any other aspect of human life for that matter, works.

Note (added 3/3): Peter T has replied in the comment thread attached to this post; those interested may read the ensuing conversation there. 

ETA: Another example of the same sort of thing, this time from a CT commenter who annoys me a lot more than Peter T ever has, namely bob mcmanus. Here's mcmanus (from another CT thread):

Just finished Daniel Alpert’s Age of Oversupply. It’s a readable middle-brow summation ... with affinities to DeLong and Krugman, with the usual laundry list of Keynesian technocratic prescriptions that are politically implausible.  I think the resource or supply constraints are still a long ways off. What we have is a typical glut, overcapacity, overproduction, oversupply crisis, a typical Marxist (too much capital) crisis of astronomical proportions. Combined with an equally terrifying failure of distribution and global and local imbalances of power and resources. Combined with perhaps social technological advances (US hegemon, nukes, smarter Central Banks, int’l technocrats) that prevent the old mechanisms of creative destruction and rebalancing, war/revolution and/or depression/capitals destruction => reterritorialization and reconstruction.

I've added the italics, because that's the part I want to focus on. What is preventing a global war, which mcmanus seems to think might in some way be beneficial, at least to the powers that be? Why, it's "social technological" factors: "US hegemon, nukes, smarter Central Banks, int’l technocrats." God forbid it should ever enter his mind that what statespeople say and believe actually makes a difference in how they conduct themselves. Or that the experiences of their predecessors might influence them. No, that's all superstructural rubbish.

Note on norm enforcement

In the conclusion of their article "The Political Economy of Imperialism, Decolonization and Development" (British Journal of Political Science, July 2011), E. Gartzke and D. Rohner refer to "American enforcement of a norm of territorial integrity,...[which] could decay if the United States weakens or developing states become more capable of conquest."

I don't think this statement, especially the first part of it, is very convincing. The territorial integrity norm is quite deeply internalized by most states, making its enforcement largely unnecessary. In other words, its effectiveness is not generally dependent on enforcement by a powerful state. That situation conceivably could change but there are few indications that it's going to change any time soon.

From linkage at DofM I see that Richard Price (who wrote a book on the chemical weapons taboo) is making a rather similar point about the norm against chemical weapons use: it will continue to be generally observed, even if the U.S. does not enforce it by taking military action against Assad. (I haven't read Price's piece yet, however.) It might be interesting to compare the number of times these two different norms (territorial integrity and chemical weapons) have been violated in recent decades, by whom, and with what consequences.

[Note: post edited slightly after initial posting]