Secession and Ineffective Law

By Madawc Williams

Between any two sovereign states, the only reality is Power Politics.

Also true when a region within a sovereign state has a local majority who’d like to secede.

And it’s common for both sides in secession struggles to claim that International Law is on their side.

To have this repeated with great vehemence by their power-political friends.

The USA is a particular offender. Secession was a right for Kosovo and forbidden for Crimea. And it was even forbidden for the majority-Serb regions in the north of Kosovo, where there is continuing trouble.

Note that Tito had defined the six constituent republics of Yugoslavia as sovereign entities, with a right of secession, even when they took with them unwilling Serb-majority regions. But Kosovo was different: one of two Socialist Autonomous Provinces with no such right. But Vojvodina never had more than a minority of ethnic-Hungarians, and has stayed peaceful.

Why the refusal to let Crimea upgrade its status to sovereign, and an insistence that Kosovo can do this and even take majority-Serb regions with it?

Is this some strange error in the system of International Law?

No, it is the system.

Superior Enforceable International Law was never a reality. Codes are set out and called laws, but often remain ‘dead letter’. And never enforceable unless someone powerful finds them a convenient pretext.

Almost always lacking a system of judgement free from power politics. And mostly heavily biased to Western power politics.

Some of the creators would have wished them to grow into an impartial and enforceable system. But it was and is immoral to pretend that such a system had actually been created.

The dominant powers of Europe have in the last two centuries floated three pretences of a superior power. First the 19^th century ‘Concert Of Europe’^[1] Then the League of Nations. And now the United Nations.

Each of these was meant to stabilise Europe and the wider world after a major war. The ‘Concert’ began with Europe re-ordered after the defeat of Napoleon. The other two came after the two World Wars.

And they were definitely the first genuine world wars. The Seven Years War was fought all over the globe, but most of the world’s population was not involved. For India, it was one part of a British-French struggle that often had their armies fighting on behalf of Indian rulers when the two countries were at peace. For China and most of the rest of Asia it was irrelevant, as it was for most of Africa. And while Napoleon hoped to expand a European war to British India with his invasion of Egypt, it remained a European struggle.

By the time of the League of Nations, most of the world was ruled either by Europe or by European settlement-colonies dominated by people who’d come originally from Europe. China was nominally independent, but always treated as an inferior. Chiang Kai-shek accepted that inferiority when his armies reached Shanghai but left foreign powers in charge.

And the League was a big failure. It endorsed the post-1918 peace, grossly unfair to Germany. The post-1815 peace restored France as what was hoped to be a friendly monarchy. The Cold War erased various plans to inflict further punishment on Germany.^[2]

Hitler’s folly lost the ethnic-German land of East Prussia, and resulted in ethnic-Germans being expelled from territories taken by Versailles and recovered by Hitler without warfare. That he remains so admired by the Far Right has always puzzled me.

But the basic offence in the processes leading up to both World Wars was what was done by the British ruling class.

Ordinary Britons including some of my family’s previous generations were among the victims, though not suffering as drastically as many other peoples.

The British Empire won World War One by starving Germany and Austria-Hungary, which before 1914 had foolishly become dependent on imported food.^[3] Detailed studies are available.^[4]

All of it was avoidable.

If there was German aggression – which is questionable – it was resolved during 1915, when Serbia collapsed. Their main motive had been to support Austria-Hungary’s wish to punish Serbia for probably organising the murder of the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne. And for their open wish to incorporate Bosnia, which the West suddenly defined as extreme wickedness when it became an issue after the Soviet collapse.

Became an issue when Yugoslavia ceased to be a convenient buffer against the Soviet bloc, while Germany resumed its long-term support for the Croats.

And when Bosnian Muslims became Muslims potentially useful for Western ends.

In World War One, what kept it going was the French desire to win back majority-German Alsace-Lorraine. Also Tsarist Russia’s ambition to take Istanbul, formerly Constantinople and particularly important for Orthodox Christian faith. To Russians it was Tsargrad, something that rightfully belonged to them, even if most of those born there felt otherwise.

This wish continued with the Tsars overthrown: Kerensky would not accept that the war was lost, and lost still more.^[5] Lost all prospects for a moderate liberal-capitalist Russia.

But what really kept the war going was that the rulers of the British Empire were keen to destroy Unified Germany, which had been overtaking Britain in global trade and manufacturing.

As incidentals, the victorious British and French empires helped themselves to chunks of the Ottoman Empire, which they had previously kept alive with the 1850s Crimean War and repeated diplomatic pressure. And British politicians, some of them believers in some nefarious international network of Jews as an independent force, promised a newly-created Mandate of Palestine to Zionists. They did this at a time when most Jews were not Zionists, and many feared that the existence of such a state would mean they’d be forced to go there and pushed out of lands where they had lived for centuries. Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British cabinet at the time of the Balfour Declaration, was anti-Zionist.^[6] ^[7]

In an historical essay called The 13th Chancellor: Hitler’s Organic Links with British & Wider European Culture, I give details of how the anti-Semitic lunacy of the Protocols of Zion was taken seriously even by the London Times.^[8]

As well as trying to please Zionist Jews, the British Empire was keen to secure dominance or control of oil-rich countries around a body of water variously known as the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf. Water that might sensibly be given back its Babylonian name, the Bitter Sea.

Woodrow Wilson added a new notion – a Right of Self-Determination. But even his famous Fourteen Points violated it, as I’ve detailed elsewhere.^[9] He did not try extending it to Ireland, nor to China, or to any of the directly-ruled subjects of colonial empires.

It was not an outbreak of morality. It was another round of fraud.

The United Nations Falsehoods

The aftermath of World War Two was also an outbreak of fraud. An appearance of International Law was created with the Munich Tribunal, but it was strictly punishment for just some of the defeated. Many guilty Germans and Ukrainians were punished – but others were smuggled to South America or Canada. Safer than the USA from efforts by Jews to secure justice. Klaus Barbie was one notorious case. And for Ukrainians, they and their offspring were returned to be the main pro-US force there when the Soviet Union was clumsily wound up by Yeltsin.

The pro-Nazi Ukrainian role gets confused, because they were then mostly called Cossacks. As such, they used to appear as stock villains in World War Two dramas set in Occupied France.

Poles also remember them as killers of Poles and Jews.^[10]

Most guilty Italians escaped, because the fascist government had dumped Mussolini and joined the allies.

All guilty Croats escaped, unless they opposed the new regime of Tito’s Yugoslavia.

For Japan, many suffered, but the obvious involvement of the Emperor was ignored, because most Japanese saw him as a sacred link to the Divine. And some of the very worst criminals got clean away: Unit 731 went free after passing on details of their germ-warfare experiments on humans to the USA. The victims had been Chinese and a few Russians.^[11] Probably White Russians who had found refuge in Manchuria, since Japan and Soviet Russia were not at war until almost the end.

No one on the winning sides was ever punished for committing war crimes against foreigners. This same principle was kept when one particular Vietnam atrocity got wide publicity, after a US officer was foolish enough to list the non-combatant dead as an improbably large number of enemy soldiers killed.^[12]

A few institutions were set up, in line with the fraud. The International Court of Justice sounds nice, but when Nicaragua won a case against the USA, they got nothing except good publicity.^[13]

The International Criminal Court also sounds nice. Established in 2002, it seemed hopeful because it could prosecute individual offenders. But 41 countries have never signed, including India, Indonesia, China, and the Vatican City.^[14] 30 more have never ratified it, including Egypt, Israel, Russia, and the United States.

There is much that is useful that happens through the United Nations, but it has never been a real authority. Pretending otherwise gets in the way of serious politics.

The UN does have moral authority. It boosts those causes that it backs.

It is excellent that the United Nations officially endorsed racial equality, which the League of Nations had not. But it did this under pressure from the Soviet Union. The British Empire had been run on strictly racist lines from the early 19^th century: reforms to the irregular government of the Indian Subcontinent were anti-corruption, but saw multiracialism as part of that corruption. It firmly established that all those recognised as members of the so-called White Race were superior to anyone viewed as outside it. It strongly discouraged Britons in India from marrying anyone non-white.

It left a mixed population produced by earlier marriages or irregular relationships in a bubble between the two worlds. These are sometimes called Anglo-Indians, but the term is confusing because it is commonly used for three different groups: “people of mixed-race origin with Indian and British ancestry, people of unmixed Indian descent born or living in the United Kingdom, and people of unmixed British descent born or living in India”^[15].

You get this mentioned in almost any serious history of the Empire, but some also mention that individual aristocrats from India had status in Britain. That they might be guests at places where very few officials of British India would ever enter. This confused me for a while, but I now realise that they just fitted the existing pattern of respect for rich and powerful visitors from foreign non-white states. They were never given authority over anyone white, unless individuals chose to be servants, or of course prostitutes.

All of this made the empire created by Upper London an anomaly amidst the various empires that have existed for thousands of years and all over the globe. Many had a racial bias: in China the non-native Mongol and Manchu dynasties gave an unfairly small number of the top jobs to the Han majority. But they got some, and likewise the Roman Empire as it developed would accept people from almost anywhere if they had assimilated Roman culture. But the British Empire held out, and transmitted the same prejudices to its various colonies. Broad tolerance reached its uneasy limits with the Irish and with various settlers from Mainland Europe: viewed as mostly-inferior breeds but with talented individuals given command over Britons of all sorts.

A few individuals within Upper London wanted to take it further, but very few.

I say ‘Upper London’, to emphasise that most Britons did not decide on this. Yet it is a sad fact that most ordinary people accepted ruling-class rules. When in foreign parts, most enforced the practical and violent racism that the elite could mostly keep a nice distance from. Kipling summed it up nicely in a poem imagining a realistic Cockney working-class soldier discontent to be back in Britain:

“Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
“Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst.”^[16]

Edmund Burke, protesting at British abuses in India, had insisted that Muslim countries were governed by laws, even if they were different from our laws. But that bit of Burke was never popular. Unsupervised plunder and violence and whatever sex you could pay for were seen as norms beyond Europe. That included homosexuality, though I assume Kipling would have disapproved. Drinking alcohol was not the issue: that was just as acceptable back home.

Charles Darwin, from a rich family, casually remarked that the native New Zealander (Maori) were likely to go the way of the native rat: to become conveniently extinct. His dedicated supporter Thomas Henry Huxley was from a literate middle-class family which had fallen on hard times: he was enthusiastic about the ongoing extermination of Australian Aboriginals.

The United Nations was formed with racist empires as major members. With the USA lukewarm about the anti-colonialism it officially believed in, and segregated in numerous ways in the north as well as the south.

‘East of Suez’ is now sovereign states which have been increasingly going their own way. Encouraged by prejudice and ignorance by the New Right. Even Turkiye, actually mostly west of Suez but usually lumped with it, was disrespected when it decided that the older name ‘Turkey’ was unacceptable. They had a clear right, since English is the functional global common language. But a lot of Anglos now seem to think that the truth is whatever they think it should be.

Non-Self-Governing States

The founding rules of the UN spoke of both Self-Determination and the Territorial Integrity of existing members. How these were to be reconciled was never addressed, and that was no oversight. It was always intended as a fraud: a nice spoof to convince ordinary people that they were living in a much better and more just world than actually existed.

As I started out by saying, sovereign states have never been honest or consistent about secessions from other sovereign states.

This was a particular problem when it came to dismantling colonial empires. Colonies of European powers wanted self-determination from the colonial power, but also territorial integrity for the resultant states.

This was also the feeling in the Soviet Union and in China, though Soviet pressure led both Chiang Kai-shek and then Mao to accept an independent Mongolian Republic. Chiang Kai-shek went back on the deal, and the West mostly backed him. The Mongolian People’s Republic established diplomatic relations with its first Western country, the United Kingdom, in 1961.^[17] That was also when it got UN membership, thanks to Soviet support. But the USA had no diplomatic relations until 1987.

Chapter XI of the United Nations Charter had defined a non-self-governing territory as a territory “whose people have not yet attained a full measure of self-government“. And since this could be argued about, there was an official United Nations list of non-self-governing territories.^[18] Initially administered by Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States: six European colonial powers and two settlement colonies where the original inhabitants were now a small minority.

It was a broad basis for decolonisation, though various mostly Communist-backed resistance movements played a crucial role.

Some small places chose to stay with the colonial power. Puerto Rico currently has a small majority for full integration into the USA.^[19]

Most European colonies became sovereign states; often small and cutting across ethnic lines. Wider unions were floated. A West Indies Federation survived only for cricket. A Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was tried; vanished names. A proposed East African Federation would have included Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and Zanzibar: only a separate union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar actually happened.

Since a Tory minister called Duncan Sandys was involved, there were jokes about ‘a house built upon sands’. But with hindsight, it seems a pity it failed.

Nigeria got independence as a single unit, though called a Federation with a North, West and East. It got subdivided into 12 smaller units, and an attempt at secession by Biafra was crushed.

The failure by Biafra led other Africans thinking about regional secession to decide that it was doomed. Which avoided a lot of bloodshed, but it was not particularly just.

Most of these states also want the minority to participate as full citizens. Not always: indeed Northern Ireland was run by Protestants for Protestants until Britain imposed a power-sharing agreement after failing to crush the IRA. But the rules speak just of whole territories, not of minorities within a state or regional majorities who are an overall minority.

In the USA, the IRA struggle to abolish Northern Ireland was widely seen as legitimate. You even had a 1990 program in the SF series Star Trek where a future secessionist mentions a United Ireland that supposedly happened in this year, 2024.^[20] This despite Unionists then still having a clear electoral majority.

The other big SF franchise, Star Wars, has it as wicked when planets seek to secede from the Galactic Republic. Virtuous for the Jedi to try to stop them, using forces that then transmute into the wicked Galactic Empire.

Always a moral muddle.

There’s a lot more in both series that reflected attitudes on race and sex that are now being abandoned.^[21]

For sovereign states and secession here on Earth: if one treats the norms as if they were binding laws, then the crushed Confederacy in the USA probably had the law on their side.

But so did George the Third. So did the British Parliament that insisted it could tax without giving any wider representation to their North American colonies.

Imagined supernational law might also endorse the fringe movements who claim that North America’s Articles of Confederation still hold. The British colonies fought and won their war under rules that required unanimity to amend them.^[22] Those who wrote the 1789 Constitution awarded themselves the right to impose it once ratified by a majority of states. This in itself was hard to get, but it became the power-political reality.

Law has never been the same as justice. But it is often best to stick with it, to avoid bloodshed and suffering.

Unreasonable to treat one interpretation of ambiguous rules as if it were an absolute. A moral and security issue that we are obliged to suffer for, and urge suffering on others.

So please ignore all the pompous Western media statements that Crimea’s secession was illegal. It was rejected by the UN, indeed, but I’ve not heard of any case where they found secession to be legal, whatever the morals. Referenda are sometimes recommended, but the Spanish government of the time was allowed to treat an attempted Catalan secession vote as criminal.

Successful acts of violence for a maybe-good cause are then accepted if the loser submits. This happened for Bangladesh. And no one plans to do anything about Northern Cyprus, which gives Turkish Cypriots their own state.

The USA had the chance to make a better world in the 1990s, with Russia briefly inclined to trust them and China unsure of itself. But the USA was both greedy and dishonest.

Not even intelligently dishonest, in the long run. Libertarian nonsense made them throw away a unique opportunity.

^[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_of_Europe

^[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan

^[3] Starving the Germans: The Evolution of Britain’s Strategy During The First World War, by Eamon Dyas.

^[4] https://www.atholbooks-sales.org/searches/author_search.php

^[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerensky_offensive

^[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Montagu#Anti-Zionism

^[7] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Edwin-Montagu-Jewish-Anti-Zionist-Warned-in-1917-Against-Plans-for-a-Modern-Israel

^[8] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/hitler-the-13th-chancellor/#_Toc515264101

^[9] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/woodrow-wilsons-deceptive-14-points/

^[10] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/West-Ukraine-The-Bitter-Past

^[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731