Letter From America

Written By: Ian Williams
Published: October 13, 2017 Last modified: October 13, 2017
Between Darth Vader imitators brutalizing Catalans and Donald Trump at the UN, sovereignty is in the air, and not just in Catalonia. Donald Trump made “sovereignty” a theme of his speech to the UN for the opening of the General Assembly.
There was a lot of adverse comment since it was discordant with the spirit of the world body, and indeed it is – now. But it does hew to the original letter of the UN Charter, which makes it plain that the main purpose of the organization was to preserve and defend the sovereignty of the nation states who were its members.
The preamble of the Charter does start with “We the Peoples of the world,” but within a few paragraphs and months it was clear that the founders were only kidding. The sovereignty of the nation state is the bedrock principle of the organization, as one would expect for a body that had Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union, not to mention the segregationist USA, as original signatories and which was set up in response to predatory annexations by the Axis.
National sovereignty took shape in the Treaty of Westphalia, which, apart from a lot of sordid horse-trading to end the Thirty Years War, encapsulated the concept that what a ruler did inside a sovereign state was nobody else’s business. But of course, once again they were only kidding: it only applied to West Europeans and it was fine to go to the rescue of Christians in Muslim countries and to liberate little brown brothers across the world from uncivilized rule.
Back in 2003, China kept trying to add “and separatist activities” to resolutions on terrorism, until put down by Jeremy Greenstock, one of the better British Ambassadors to the UN, who pointed out that nothing in international law, nor even British law, prohibited people supporting or wanting self determination.
Hence the chill with Trump’s enthusiasm for invoking sovereignty… Russia, China, Burma Venezuela, Burundi, Serbia… you could almost draw up a Human Rights Watch list from the speakers who echoed his invocation of sovereignty from the podium of the General Assembly.
They are not talking about the sovereignty of the peoples, but about the untrammeled powers they claim as rulers of nations. In a similar way, the fans of Lenin’s ghost across the left are now much quicker to invoke national sovereignty than workers’ unity. And it seems that Madrid shares Beijing’s views on advocating self-determination. Indeed, May’s government supports it by proxy: if you make it illegal to vote on self determination then it is fine to violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to stop them in order to “uphold the law”.
I suspect Madrid’s lawyers would be hard put to cite a Spanish custom, let alone small print, that allows black clad storm troopers to concuss peaceful Catalan grannies trying to vote.
To put it mildly, this is counterproductive. Those who are firmly attached to the metaphysical idea of a nation state usually have difficulty learning from reality, and one surefire lesson from history is that telling people they do not have the right even to consider reaping that metaphysical image is thoroughly counterproductive.
But self-determination plus sovereignty are explosive concepts when mixed. “Why should I be a minority in your country, when you can be a minority in mine?” as the old Balkan adage had it. Self-determination can be negotiated to allow all concerned their rights. “Sovereignty” almost always implies a claimed right to abuse people’s rights in the name of a notional nation.
The refusal of Madrid and Buenos Aires to even consider that the Falklanders or Gibraltarians have rights or a voice in their future has guaranteed predictable near unanimity in referenda. It would have taken a tremendous amount of making nice by Belgrade to win over the Kosovars, but the Serbian refusal even to apologize to the victims of years of apartheid that culminated in attempted ethnic cleansing, shifted the referendum odds on independence from high probability to complete certainty.
With Gibraltar as the best example of Rajoy’s tact, sadly his actions in Catalonia have now switched a not very probable victory for independence closer to near certainty. There are degrees of separation and co-habitation. Wooing works better than whipping, but sending in thousands of Darth Vader imitations from outside Catalonia to beat up locals wanting a say in their future is epochal idiocy calculated to change the minds of any Catalans who might have wanted to stay part of a larger Iberian polity.
If Rajoy keeps it up, he may lose the Basques next.

About Ian Williams
Ian Williams is Tribune's UN correspondent