The Political Economy of Separatism and Territorial Disputes
The political economy of aspiring states forces them to engage in realpolitik. Independence struggles are caught up in the power balancing that occurs between established nation states.
News headlines you will never see:
“Taiwan recognizes the Republics of Lugansk and Donetsk, pledging support of Russia’s commitment to defend the newly independent republics.”
“Lithuania supports the Crimean majority’s desire to join Russia.”
SECTION 1
1.1 The missing solidarity
The imaginary headlines above are preposterous for anyone who has followed news platforms of NATO countries since 2022. Since then, Taiwan—for decades an important part of the global high-tech supply chain and a purchaser of US weapons—has received more support than ever from the United States for protection against a perceived threat from China. Lithuania, whose independence was recognized by the USSR in 1991, has expressed no support for the majority of people in Crimea who chose to separate from Ukraine. Although Taiwan and Lithuania, because of their commitment to US-NATO interests, would never align with Russia’s support of Crimea and the Republics of Lugansk and Donetsk, such support would seem to be a natural expression of solidarity from the perspective of universal justice.
Because of the difficulty in distinguishing them, herein I refer to various types of national struggle interchangeably, whether they refer to themselves as independence movements, civil wars, separatism, claims for lost territory, self-determination, liberation, de-occupation, or nationalist. In the case of Taiwan, for example, the problem there has been variously framed as an independence movement, an unresolved civil war over which side is the rightful ruler of all of China, or an evolving self-determination of a new state made up of the aboriginal peoples and ethnic Chinese who came from elsewhere long ago.
In any case, solidarity with other struggles is utterly lacking and impossible for Taiwan, Lithuania, and many other historical or ongoing independence movements. They focus on realism and the pursuit of their own interests, and that means building alliances and networks of support with states that are powerful enough to help them. Just as “no man is an island,” neither is any state an island. A state does not exist if its existence is not recognized by others. Thus, independence struggles usually ignore any separatist cause that is unsupported by their chosen allies. There is a political economy of independence struggles in which the aspiring states and their allies and enemies engage in realpolitik. They are integral parts of the power balancing that occurs between established nation states.[1] (See also Note 20, John Mearsheimer’s remarks on realism).
The contradictions of this political economy can be seen in Japan, for example, which wants Russia to return the Kuril Islands (what Japan calls its Northern Territories). They are recognized as Russian territory according to treaties Japan signed after WWII, but since then Japan has insisted on a reinterpretation of how this territory was lost. In its own capture of those islands, Japan paid no attention to the sovereignty the aboriginal people already living there. Furthermore, Japan has a different attitude about the democratic will of the people of the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa (annexed by Japan in 1879) to have US military bases removed from their land.[2]
In negotiations with Russia over the issue of the Kuril Islands, Vladimir Putin has stressed that because of its alliance obligations, Japan cannot really make sovereign decisions. His comments to Japanese journalists in December 2016 implied, in veiled diplomatic language, that Russia could not cede the islands if Japan, constrained by its Status of Forces Agreement with the US, would then have to allow the US to build military bases on them.[3] The strategic location of the islands would make the US keenly interested in doing so.
This example, like many others I could cite, illustrates that there is seldom any solidarity or commitment to principles of justice among separatist movements or nations’ claims for territory. There is in most cases only political realism—the desire to put aside ideals and justice and focus on whatever relations can help the separatist or national cause.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The negative side of the realists’ emphasis on power and self-interest is often their skepticism regarding the relevance of ethical norms to relations among states.”[4] This is abundantly clear in many cases, and it is often what drains away sympathy for separatism and nationalism.
For example, eventually, “world opinion” (which refers often to opinion within US-allied nations) will change as people begin to understand Ukrainian history and the sordid reasons that its nationalist aspirations (fomented for decades by NATO) were used by NATO in recent years to exploit its resources and to provoke Russia. The Ukrainian nationalist mythology, created during the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of Bolshevism, and after a history of Polish domination in some areas, is taken seriously only in the western region of Ukraine. The mythology glorifies Nazi collaborators and mass murderers as heroes, and as a result it is not, to say the least, enough to inspire the hearts and minds of the world for very long.[5] There is just no romance in the story arc of soccer hooligans who joined the Azov Battalion. There is no uplift, no utopian vision—in the best sense of the word that just means the opposite of cynical realism—to build something better that has not existed before. Nation-building has to be based on more than worship of Thanatos and Eris and warriors driven by resentment and hatred of “the other.”
Even when a people achieve the status of a sovereign recognized nation with a seat at the United Nations, their sovereignty can be undermined by economic and military alliances they have had to join—the acceptance of US military bases (Status of Forces Agreements), IMF-imposed economic restructuring, foreign debt, the sale of national assets to foreign corporations, participation in free trade agreements and military alliances, the loss of their right to set standards for labor and environmental protection. This happened to all the Warsaw Bloc countries and former republics of the USSR and Yugoslavia. After their initial high hopes of gaining “Western democracy, affluence and freedom,” actual experience forced the victims to ask what the point was of pursuing sovereignty and democracy if diminished material conditions made freedom no more than an abstract slogan.[6]
It is well known that struggles for self-determination and independence are messy, sordid affairs that are rife with violence, contradictions, and hypocrisies that carry within them the potential for destabilization, war, and genocide. The former minority group becomes the new oppressor of smaller minorities within the new nation. Ukraine wanted independence from the USSR; Donbass wants independence from Ukraine. People may realize that the new nation has no real sovereignty and their living standards have declined. Nonetheless, those who govern the world and lead discussion of such matters as Taiwan independence, for example, still present the issue of independence as if it were a simple matter of advancing “freedom and democracy” and countering “tyranny” or “authoritarianism.” None of the complexity of history or the potential for worsening material conditions is acknowledged.
The right to self-determination is upheld by the UN Charter, but very few nations have been able to determine themselves unless they were allowed to by the US and unless they agreed to take up a subordinate role in the US “the rules-based order” dictating military alliances and economic control. Independence struggles that are not recognized or needed by the US make no progress. At best they might achieve the status of “unrecognized breakaway state,” as South Ossetia did with Russian support when it resisted Georgian aggression in 2008. The “international community” could not admit Russia’s influence there by recognizing South Ossetia, so it remains as an “unrecognized breakaway state” because it has simply not been recognized by the right people. In other instances, recalcitrant states such as Venezuela and Cuba become perpetual irritants to the empire, forced to live under economic warfare (sanctions) and the threat of internal interference and overthrow.
1.2 The USSR and Yugoslavia
In contrast to the “unrecognized” states, consider the newly independent states that have been recognized instantly, with very little consideration of the chaos, economic decline, human rights abuses, and civil wars that would come from the disappearance of the larger state that held them together peacefully in a federation. In spite of the Helsinki Agreements of 1975, which committed Europe and the Soviet Union to maintain borders as they were, the US, the UK, France, and Germany acted quickly in the 1980s to accelerate the breakup the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Germany was eager to resuscitate an independent Croatia, its WWII fascist ally, welcoming leaders who were ideologically aligned with, descended from, and proud of Croatia’s fascist past.[7]
It is “common wisdom” that the USSR and Yugoslavia broke up because of their own inevitable weaknesses and historical ethnic rivalries, but few ever ask the question of what might have been, and what bloodshed might have been avoided, if the “responsible” nations of the West had upheld the principles of the Helsinki Accords, refrained from internal interference, and refused to so quickly support or to recognize Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, and many others: no recognition, no state, no foreign aid, no loans, no seat at the UN. Leave well enough alone and go back and work something out with the federation that you belong to. Economic and political reform still could have occurred within those federations, but the bloodshed and economic hardship that occurred during disintegration of the federation could have been avoided.
Regardless of whatever yearnings there were for independence in various regions of the USSR, the international community could have given them the same neglect they give to Catalonia in Spain. Perhaps some Europeans sympathize with Catalonians, but no separatist longings in the heart of Europe will be tolerated by the NATO-EU bloc. What would Catalonia gain in any case when all the nations of Europe have lost so much sovereignty to the Euro, the European Union and NATO? What is the point when national sovereignty is in decline everywhere because of obligations to supranational collectives?
In the case of the USSR, the major powers at the UN could have declared that the only agreement that mattered was the referendum of March 1991 that endorsed the proposed New Union Treaty organized by Gorbachev, head of state of the USSR at the time. Boris Yeltsin could have been told by the international community that his secret deal with Ukraine and Belarus that would effectively terminate the USSR—the Belovezh Accords—was a dangerous, undemocratic, and illegal conspiracy to undermine the New Union Treaty and its popular endorsement by referendum.
Gorbachev, in addition to resenting Yeltsin as loathsome betrayer, wrote the following about Yeltsin’s treachery in Belovezh:
The fate of the multinational state cannot be determined by the will of the leaders of three republics [Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia]. The question should be decided only by constitutional means with the participation of all sovereign states [the fifteen republics of the USSR] and taking into account the will of all their citizens. The statement that Unionwide legal norms would cease to be in effect is also illegal and dangerous; it can only worsen the chaos and anarchy in society. The hastiness with which the document appeared is also of serious concern. It was not discussed by the populations nor by the Supreme Soviets of the republics in whose name it was signed. Even worse, it appeared at the moment when the draft treaty for a Union of Sovereign States, drafted by the USSR State Council, was being discussed by the parliaments of the republics.[8]
Gorbachev, however, must also be held to account for the reckless economic policies he implemented, which form a neglected aspect of the destruction of the Soviet Union. Historians have tended to focus on the supposed inherent flaws of command economies, and on the democratic reforms and the disarmament treaties achieved by Gorbachev, but not on the details of the plundering of the nation’s wealth by state bureaucrats. It is difficult to find good research on this topic in English, but one excellent brief article on it was written by Alexander Dudchak in 2022 and translated into English by Lena Bloch.[9]
Gorbachev’s assessment of Belovezh reveals why Russians today are justified in saying that Ukrainian independence was recognized too quickly in 1991, without careful consideration or referenda accounting for the wishes of ethnic minorities. Unlike France or Germany, for example, in 1991 Ukraine had no history as sovereign state with fixed borders and a cohesive national identity. It had been put together in the 1950s as a part of the Soviet Union, with no expectation at the time that it would ever have to function as a sovereign nation with the given geographical boundaries and ethnic composition. The ethnic identities and loyalties of the people in various regions should have been dealt with before the borders were finalized. The likely outcome of that process would have been Odessa, Crimea, and the eastern regions voting to join Russia, and this is exactly the transformation that started to take place in 2014 through much less favorable means. If the Ukrainian state had been reduced in size according to its ethnic fault lines, the loss of natural resources and strategic access to the Black Sea would have been hard to accept for people in Ukraine who wanted the whole former Soviet republic to stay intact.
The Donetsk and Lugansk republics (also known as the Donbass region) declared their independence from Ukraine in early 2022 and received recognition by Russia. Russia then invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter which allowed it to enter an alliance in order to resolve an ongoing state of war near its borders. Thus, Russia perceives the war not as an invasion but as a special military operation in a conflict that had already existed for eight years.[10] In late 2022, these republics voted in a referendum to join Russia. Russia is not likely to ever abandon these new territories inhabited by ethnic Russians who decided to join Russia. Anyone who is hoping that Russia will lose and leave these regions should know that within Ukraine there are elements that would engage in acts of expulsion and violent retribution against the populations that welcomed the arrival of Russian forces. The “international community” seems to be woefully unaware of the need to prepare some way to stop atrocities against civilians from occurring—if they have a plan to assist with an eventual Ukrainian victory against the wishes of the inhabitants of the region, and if they are interested in applying cherished humanitarian principles in this case to protect ethnic Russians—a people who are allied with NATO’s declared enemy.
1.3 Balkanization reloaded
There was obvious hypocrisy on display in 2022 in NATO’s non-support of the separatist aspirations of Lugansk and Donetsk after the nations of the alliance had lent support to Ukraine’s separatist aspirations in 1991. At present they also support Taiwan, Hong Kong, and any separatist movement that weakens China or Russia.
What should be at issue, if we care about principles and international law, is Ukraine’s failure to uphold the Minsk Agreements, the unconstitutional overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 (supported by various US agencies, less than a year before the next federal election), and that illegitimate government’s declared genocidal policies toward ethnic Russians. The failure of a state to protect its minority populations, or a stated intent to commit crimes against them, is supposed to be enough to de-legitimize that government and provoke an intervention by the United Nations. Genocidal policy is exactly what President Poroshenko announced in 2014,[11] but the “international community” was silent, even though the rationale of the “right to protect” and humanitarian intervention were used to justify aggression against Serbia and other nations attacked by the US in recent decades. There was also the supposed “never again” promise after Rwanda in 1994, even though atrocities continued in Congo for many years while the “international community” stopped paying attention.[12] Congo is another large nation where the US has attempted to implement a balkanization strategy, in the early 1960s and in recent years when conflicts were ongoing in the eastern region.[13]
It is curious that NATO countries exerted no pressure on Ukraine to protect its ethnic minorities. Instead, they continued to support Ukraine when in July 2021 it passed its unusual “Indigenous Peoples Act.” Despite its apparently progressive name, the act stripped the Russian minority of language rights it had had previously. It was a discriminatory law that would have been an intolerable outrage in NATO countries such as Belgium and Canada, where large French-speaking populations are protected. Passage of the law made it more difficult for Ukraine to enter NATO or the EU as a nation that respects a high “European standard” of human rights protection. The law also gave Russia a legitimate reason to take protective military action under Article 51 of the UN Charter. One might conclude that Europe and Ukraine actually wanted to give Russia the motive to act as it did. Ukraine was more useful to NATO as a non-NATO member because it could be at war with Russia without NATO being obliged to join the war, and as long as a conflict exists, Ukraine cannot join NATO. It is notable that the Ukrainian leadership was not aware that they were being played and that the promise of NATO membership was a false one.
The name “Indigenous Peoples Act” makes the law seem like something it is not. It sounds progressive to the outside world, but in fact it offers protection only to three small “indigenous” groups living in Crimea (Tatars, Krymchaks, and Karaites), a territory which Ukraine has had no control over since 2014. The law adopts a definition of “indigenous” that is completely original. It states that it need not offer protection to minorities that are already represented by an existing state, so it excludes the largest minority groups made up of ethnic Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, and Russians. An analyst of the situation, Valery Engel, wrote:
… by taking this step, [Ukraine] has denied the rights of indigenous peoples to a number of ethnic groups, such as Poles, Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians and Moldovans, Jews and, of course, Russians, who accounted for 17.3% of the country’s population according to the last census (2001)… Kiev obviously underestimates the possible negative reaction of other national minorities, which, unlike the three Crimean peoples, have indeed been living in mainland Ukraine for centuries, all of whom have not been granted the status of Indigenous Peoples and therefore also the grandiose rights that flow from it. Is such a game worth playing? And is it good for Democracy?[14]
Valery Engel is understated in his conclusion, but I will add that the law is obviously a cynical, deceptive, and amateurish ploy. Russian complaints about it, however, have been dismissed in NATO countries as “Russian propaganda.”
If this discussion of separatism and nationalism is too brief, the contradictions and complexities of most separatist causes become evident upon consideration of a list of many struggles that exist and how they intersect with a large glossary of terms one must contend with to discuss war, international relations, or any separatist or nationalist movements which are, in most cases, magnified by the US empire’s plans to balkanize large nations and bring new small nations into its fold. It becomes a monumental task to sort out which causes might be worthy of sympathy and support, and which others are destabilization projects, provocations, opportunism, or outright aggression and resource theft under cover of a nominally patriotic puppet government. The declared motive of helping independence struggles is, ironically, project chaos—a project of divide and conquer to undermine the sovereignty of long-established nations, borders, and national identities.
A list of case studies (not exhaustive) and terminology appear in Section 2, after which this essay continues in Section 3. I have placed this section in the middle of this essay so that it will serve to activate in the reader’s mind a lexicon of inter-related terms. It is the equivalent of a cinematic montage of the numerous concepts and terms that come into play in discussions of independence and sovereignty.
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SECTION 2
A list of some historical cases of independence struggles and associated terminology
2.1 Places with a history of independence struggles, some resolved, most ongoing
Aceh, Armenia, Catalonia, Chechnya, Crimea, Cuba and The Philippines in the 1898-1913 war of independence from Spain, followed by a war with the US, its “liberator” in that war, Cyprus/Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Donbass (Lugansk and Donetsk), East Timor, every decolonized nation, every First Nation and aboriginal group in the Americas and Australia, French Polynesia (semi-autonomous French overseas nation—“pays d’outre-mer”), Ireland, Islamic separatists in Thailand, Jammu and Kashmir, Kosovo, Kurdish minorities in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria, the Maori in New Zealand, Marshall Islands, Nuevomexicanos (in the southwest US), Palestine, Quebec, Rohingya in Myanmar, Scotland, South Ossetia, Taiwan, The Hawaiian Kingdom, The Ryukyu Kingdom (Okinawa), Tibet, Transnistria, United States (from Britain), Xinjiang, West Papua…
2.2 Terminology
Independence, self-determination, sovereignty, occupation, splittism, revanchism, irredentism, balkanization, paying of tribute, de facto, de jure, recognition, sovereignty, nationalism, tribalism, ethnic states, religious states, rump states, reservations, enclaves, exclaves, semi-exclaves, “unrecognized” breakaway states, provisional governments (acting governments in exile or in states under occupation), client states, vassal states, indigenous people, international law, “rules-based” order, alliances, non-aggression pacts, status of forces agreements, protectorates, blocs, empires, federations, confederations, annexations, occupations, terrorist separatist groups, partisans, insurgents, counter-insurgents, reactionaries, humanitarian interventions, sanctions and economic warfare (“make the economy scream”), activist refugee groups (“weaponized immigrants”—activist diasporas such as White Russians, Zionists, Tutsis, Banderites, “rightful” rulers waiting in exile to return to power), fascism—the merger of state and corporate power in an infantile masquerade that imitates authentic struggles for national liberation.
2.3 Supra-national economic and political collectives
Economic blocs, common currency zones, autonomous regions, semi-autonomous regions, defensive and offensive alliances, spheres of influence, empires, commonwealths, first nations and aboriginal peoples uniting in common cause
2.4 Examples of supra-national economic and political collectives
United Nations, NATO, Nation of Islam (Black nationalism within the US), Eurozone (shared currency), Bretton Woods Agreement (1944), European Union, ASEAN, G7, G20, Organization of American States, African Union, the First, the Second and the Third World, Mercado Común del Sur (MERCOSUR), Non-Aligned Movement, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the global trading system based on the Petro-Dollar (US dollar as the global reserve currency).
2.5 Political actions, concepts, movements, and organizations that interact with separatist and nationalist causes
Realpolitik, geopolitics, nationalism, ultra-nationalism, demagoguery, foreign interference, soft coups, hard coups, legislative coups, revolution, insurgency, counter-insurgency, civil war, secession, internationalism, globalization, colonialism, decolonization, neocolonialism, Third World solidarity, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Jakarta Method (the global anti-communist witch-hunt)—the 20th century iteration of The Inquisition (1184-1808), the War on Terror, the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, Voice of America, the CIA.
2.6 Global organizations of influence, state and non-state actors
National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, Voice of America, CIA, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Economic Forum (WEF), World Health Organization (WHO), George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Atlantic Council, the annual Bilderberg Meeting, Rockefeller Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation…
2.6 Treaties and Laws that Created the World Order
Doctrine of Discovery (15th century), Treaty of Westphalia (1648), Congress of Vienna (1814-15), the Berlin Conference (1884), League of Nations (1919), Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928),[15] the conferences at which the USSR, the US and the UK decided the borders and spheres of influence of the post-war world—Casablanca (January 1943), Cairo (November 1943), Tehran (December 1943), Quebec (September 1944), Yalta (February 1945), Potsdam (July 1945)—United Nations Charter (1945), Helsinki Accords (1975, commitment to principles, not ratified), Nuremberg Code and international laws defining crimes against humanity and genocide (post 1945), International Court of Arbitration, international courts in the Hague, Netherlands—International Court of Justice (ICJ), International Criminal Court (ICC), International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT).
2.7 Natural endowment
Unequal natural endowment of resources and geographical size—agricultural land, potential for food and energy self-sufficiency, climate advantages, access to the sea, freshwater resources, underground mineral and energy resources. What is the legitimacy of separation sought by a region that has a large proportion of a nation’s natural resources?
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SECTION 3
3.1 Separatism, nationalism, and resentment
In many separatist and nationalist struggles, there is a dangerous neglect of the fact that the proverbial cup is half full. The status quo is rejected too readily, with little thought given to how much worse things could become during a civil war. There is instead often an adolescent rejection of authority, a refusal to accept that it is always oppressive, to some degree, to be governed, no matter who is in charge. Just as a teenager resents his parents’ rules, or the middle-aged man with Peter Pan syndrome wants to walk away from commitments, separatist longings can be immature, unjustified, uncompromising, and oblivious to the obvious negative consequences that will arise from a struggle.
In fact, separatist sentiment arises in times of chaos when material conditions are deteriorating, when there is increasingly a feeling of “nothing to lose” and something to gain in the “glory of conquest.” This is indeed the goal of destabilization projects and internal interference. In the 1980s, the US spent hundreds of millions of dollars on soft-power projects within the Soviet Union, and the dividends were enormous.[16] In such circumstances, separatist causes become fascistic, led by demagogues voicing grievances which, if acted upon, only worsen the situation. Nationalism can be constructive or destructive. When it is destructive, the forces that destabilized the federation in the first place do not care about this radicalization. In fact, they encourage it because it furthers their goals. The dissolution of the USSR and Yugoslavia, discussed above, make this point obvious. The historical record shows that the empire never supports a separatist cause on principle. It lends support only in the pursuit of its own goals. This has never been plainer to see than now when we can look at the split between who supports Taiwan and who supports Lugansk and Donetsk.
A full discussion of the terms and case studies listed in Section 2 would require this essay to become a heavy textbook on separatism and nationalism. I wrote Section 2 primarily to provoke awareness of the unspoken motivations and complexities that lie behind simplistic reporting and facile expressions of support for Ukraine or Taiwan, or, equally, condemnations of Russia or Syria. One more important issue remains to cover, and that is the question of size.
The World Economic Forum describes itself as “globalism,” and “globalism” is their word for “colonialism.” It used to be called “imperialism.” Every imperial European country—Britain, Holland, France—were all globalists… President Biden used a different vocabulary when he said it’s … between “democracy” and “autocracy” … Aristotle described how all democracies tend to evolve into oligarchies… ever since ancient Greece, that’s been the case… the World Economic Forum is sort of the board of directors of the Western economy… The Greek [oligarchs] used to get together on one of the sacred islands, either Delos or Delphi, and that’s the role that Switzerland has today. Now …what you have is autocracy. Autocracy means a country with a strong enough government to prevent an oligarchy from taking over.
- Michael Hudson, “The Big Context,” Michael-Hudson.com, August 8, 2022
https://michael-hudson.com/2022/08/the-big-context/
3.2 Size Matters
In a lecture given in 2011, American historian Gal Alperovitz asked an audience of progressive reformers, “If you don’t like capitalism or state socialism, what do you want?” Along with this question, he brought up a topic that is rarely addressed when people talk about perfecting nations and democratic governance: What is the ideal size of a democratic state, in terms of geographical size and population? If you think the nation state is an anachronism, do you have an alternative for preventing violent anarchy as nation states collapse? In nations the size of continents, with populations over 100 million, is democracy even possible? He described the problem this way:
Germany in scale could be tucked into Montana. We live in a continent. If you want democracy in a continent, you’ve got a big problem because [in contrast] those countries are little. I sometimes say to my students “like those dinky little countries France and Germany,” meaning that the polity is organizable in smaller scale than in a continent (from 14:10 in the video) … If you take the high estimate of the Census Bureau, [the US] population will be over a billion by the end of the century. Now, hopefully, we’re not going to have that high estimate, but the numbers get very large no matter what. To those of you who believe in participatory democracy, [I ask] if you can have any form of meaningful participatory democracy in a continent of five or six hundred million people. The answer is probably no, and if most states are too small for economic management or too large for democracy, we are already stalemated in this archaic political system. The intermediate unit is called the region. There was a huge debate amongst liberals, conservatives, and radicals in the 1930s about how you begin to regionalize and decentralize the economic system, and I think that’s inevitable under almost any regime. People don’t like to think about regionalizing. It’s a hard one, but some of the most interesting work on this was done by thoughtful conservatives, by the way, as well as thoughtful radicals … so I think that’s on our agenda. (from 44:30 in the video)[17]
Perhaps it would be better if states were limited in size to being no larger than Germany, and no alliances like NATO were allowed. There would be more equality in possession of natural resources, no superpowers, no states that could assemble massive military power and massive nuclear arsenals, and there would be better interaction between the government and the governed. However, this topic is never on the agenda in mainstream US political discourse. Instead, the political and economic forces within the empire deal with this issue in its only permissible form—as psychological projection aimed at Russia and China. It is seldom stated explicitly, but the goal is not the war in Ukraine, or Putin, or Taiwan. These are short-term projects within a larger long-term project to foment and support separatist and nationalist movements to balkanize Russia and China and gain control of their resources. The United States and the NATO bloc are never said to be too big and too unwieldy to allow for freedom and democracy, but size is considered a problem for “our great power adversaries.”
The Free Nations of Russia Forum is an example of one organization that is working with a low profile but stating explicitly that its goal is the fracturing of Russia into a number of smaller states. The idea is that if it worked in the 1980s and 1990s for the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, why not keep the show going? There are similar projects to break Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan away from China.
The goals of the Free Nations of Russia Forum are “de-imperialization and decolonization,” “de-Putinization and de-Nazification,” “de-militarization and de-nuclearization,” and “economic and social changes.”[18]
It is difficult not to laugh at the immaturity, hypocrisy and ignorance expressed by this forum, not to mention its disregard for international law. Russia is not, by any stretch of semantics, an imperial or colonial power.[19] The forum seems to be saying that Russia is, paradoxically, imperialistic within its own territory, over regions that are, supposedly, actually oppressed independent nations. The people living there just don’t know it yet.
It is absurd to believe that one could destroy a sovereign nation by removing one leader and his influence. It is outrageous that these non-Russian citizens think they have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of Russia. They declare it shamelessly, oblivious to their flouting of the UN Charter and the Helsinki Accords as they actively call for interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation and promote the destruction of it. They are oblivious to the reality that there is a lack support for this project among Russian people, and they express no concern for the likelihood that their plan, if it began to succeed, would lead to mass violence, instability, civil war, and nuclear war against the countries sponsoring internal interference.
They are oblivious to the military budget of the US which is more than ten times larger than Russia’s. They are oblivious to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which obliges all nuclear powers to reduce and eventually eliminate their nuclear arsenals. The treaty does not stipulate in any way that the United States is to remain intact with its nuclear arsenal while “de-nuclearization” is set as a goal to be achieved only after the nation called Russia and its nuclear arsenal cease to exist.
Finally, there is something grandly insulting and ironic in calling for the destruction and “de-Nazification” of the country that made the greatest contribution to defeating Nazi Germany. In fact, the goal of Nazi Germany was exactly the same as the goal of the Free Nations of Russia Forum—to turn Russia into a group of German-controlled weak colonies led by local comprador classes. The forum is clearly a sign of the return of fascism and imperialism—the Fourth Reich, one could say, picking up a project that suffered a setback at Stalingrad in 1942. The forum expresses pure projection of its hidden motives—to colonize Russia by turning it into a group of client states, like Ukraine, that will be open for exploitation by the Trans-Atlantic power formation that is 21st century imperialism. The forum does all this at a moment in history when the US empire has entered a period of steep decline. The only realistic statement in the forum’s platform is the final item in the list. There would indeed be “economic and social changes” if, in their wildest dreams, they succeeded.
3.3 Realism and idealism
The obvious question to ask at this point is about which independence struggles are worth supporting and which will lead to positive outcomes if they are supported. In the present era, many struggles have sought help from the hegemonic power, which condemns them in advance from ever having any true form of sovereignty. The struggles that are worth supporting are precisely the ones that the hegemon has ignored and disdained.
The present era is one in which the US has used realism to prevail while pretending to be motivated by high ideals, cynically following realist doctrine while hiding under the idealistic banner of promoting liberal trade (i.e., the promise of prosperity), democracy, and human rights.[20] The tension between realism and idealism is as old as the study of history and international relations, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us:
Thucydides shows that power, if it is unrestrained by moderation and a sense of justice, brings about the uncontrolled desire for more power... Drunk with the prospect of glory and gain, after conquering Melos, the Athenians engage in a war against Sicily. They pay no attention to the Melian argument that considerations of justice are useful to all in the longer run. And, as the Athenians overestimate their strength and, in the end, lose the war, their self-interested logic proves to be very shortsighted indeed.
It is utopian to ignore the reality of power in international relations, but it is equally blind to rely on power alone. Thucydides appears to support neither the naive idealism of the Melians nor the cynicism of their Athenian opponents. He teaches us to be on guard “against naïve-dreaming on international politics,” on the one hand, and “against the other pernicious extreme: unrestrained cynicism,” on the other. If he can be regarded as a political realist, his realism nonetheless prefigures neither realpolitik, in which traditional ethics is denied, nor today’s scientific neorealism, in which moral questions are largely ignored. Thucydides’ realism, neither immoral nor amoral, can rather be compared to that of Hans Morgenthau, Raymond Aron, and other twentieth-century classical realists, who, although sensible to the demands of national interest, would not deny that political actors on the international scene are subject to moral judgment.[21]
Like Athenians of the past, the modern empire is drunk on its prospects for glory and gain, as are those who seek to gain from cooperation with it. While deluded that they are motivated by ideals, they are realists who have forgotten that “considerations of justice are useful in the long run”—not the justice they claim to deliver but the justice that their enemies claim to be defending.
There are many just causes that are worthy of having the support of the global family of nations. Palestine is the most obvious example of a cause worth supporting. In addition, the long occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom should end. That would be a good way for the United States to begin to wrap up its imperial project and join the family of nations as an equal.
We should support the independence of West Papua, a region that never received fair treatment during the post-war period of de-colonization.[22] As they were leaving their colonies in Southeast Asia, the Dutch argued that West Papua was culturally, racially, and linguistically unrelated to Indonesia and that the United Nations should help it go through a process of self-determination. However, in the early 1960s, realist thinking dictated that Indonesia was too strategically important. The US and the USSR, (members of the UN Security Council), and China were all courting President Sukarno, hoping that Indonesia could be a buffer against the influence of opposing great power adversaries. President Kennedy crafted the “New York Agreement” that was signed between Indonesia and the Netherlands, thus ensuring that the United Nations would recognize West Papua as part of Indonesia.[23]
The New York Agreement called for a plebiscite in 1969 to allow West Papuans to accept or reject Indonesian control. This Act of Free Choice has been described as follows by Thomas Musgrave in his book chapter “An analysis of the 1969 Act of Free Choice in West Papua”:
There is no doubt whatsoever that the process of self-determination in West Papua was nothing more than a sham and amounted to a gross travesty. From whatever angle the situation is considered, be it the requirements of Resolutions 1514(XV) and 1541(XV), or the terms of the New York Agreement, or basic principles of general international law, Indonesia not only failed to fulfil its international obligations but in fact consistently acted in a manner which traduced those obligations. As a result, the people of West Papua were never given any real opportunity to exercise their right of self-determination and West Papua was incorporated into Indonesia without the true consent of its people.[24]
Through a coup d’état in 1965, followed by the US-backed “Jakarta Method” of killing at least half a million unarmed members of the Indonesian Communist Party, Sukarno was overthrown in any case, and Indonesia, including West Papua, became a dictatorship in which foreign corporations exploited the tremendous gold and oil reserves of West Papua, as well as the resources of Indonesia.[25] The violence against the indigenous population of West Papua reached genocidal levels. UN rapporteurs and the “diplomatic community” know all about it, but it remains completely beyond the awareness of the masses of people who can be so quickly manipulated to voice sympathy for Ukraine and Taiwan.
The final example most worthy of respect is a nation that didn’t separate from anything geographically or redraw its borders in any way. It separated from its past and built a new nation, and it has been punished for that success ever since. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 was motivated by idealism, not realism. Its goals aligned with the quote attributed to Einstein that “the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development.”[26]
Many independence and nationalist movements, focused only on territorial control, express no concern for the higher concepts of social evolution and liberation, but Cuba did, and it achieved much. It was a “separation movement” that took the entire country from one era to the next. Revolution is also a kind of separation movement. The Cuban Revolution eliminated the nefarious presence of casinos, brothels, and organized crime. It liberated itself from foreign ownership of its economy. It gave citizens literacy, health care, employment, and housing, and established a military force and alliances that could defend these achievements and values. Over twenty-five years, Cuba sent 500,000 soldiers to Africa to help with liberation struggles there. For that effort Cuba gained no ownership of African resources and imposed no onerous debt. It asked for nothing in return. In 1975, Fidel Castro stated emphatically:
Some imperialists ask why we’re helping the Angolans, what our interest is. They assume that countries only act out of a desire for petrol, copper, diamonds, or some other resource. No. We have no material interest. Of course, the imperialists don’t understand this. They would only do it for jingoistic, selfish reasons. We are fulfilling an elementary internationalist duty in helping the people of Angola.[27]
The Cuban government did some cruel things to people who wanted to prevent its progress, and as a result, ever since then, Cuba been subjected to economic warfare and internal interference, and condemned as a tyrannical dictatorship.
Castro also always expressed an interest in democratizing the revolution. In a review of Arnold August’s Cuba and Its Neighbors: Democracy in Motion, Max Forte described the evolution of democracy in Cuba since 1959:
August substantiates his point that much of US scholarship on Cuba suffers from a blind spot when it comes to participatory democracy in the country. If multi-party elections were rejected it was because they symbolized the old order when a minority ruled in the interests of a minority—such a system not only coexists happily with oligarchy (as we ought to know), it serves it. Even the US State Department had to admit in 1960 that “the majority of Cubans support Castro”. In building up the participatory feature of the new Cuban political system, Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) were established at the neighborhood level. Just one year after their founding in 1960, more than 800,000 Cubans voluntarily participated in these associations. A counterpart of the CDR is the National Revolutionary Militias (MNR), that were first established in the autumn of 1959. The Literacy Campaign was also built on grass-roots participation, and one of the key organizations behind it was the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC). Local government was also redeveloped from 1961 onwards, with elections for municipal delegates organized in neighborhoods and places of work from 1966. This was known then as “Local Power,” and as August explains, was the first systematic attempt to create government institutions that were directly accountable to the public. At the party level, multiple leftist organizations and movements developed a new Cuban Communist Party (PCC) by 1965, the passage of years reflecting the critical degree of work required to bring together multiple factions. By 1970, the PCC launched an effort to further democratize the revolution by suggesting the creation of Organs of Popular Power (OPP). A new Constitution was also drafted. This was not some party dictate—the draft was taken to the public, and discussed in schools, workplaces, in rural areas, and by the end of the months of discussions there had been 70,812 neighborhood meetings with 2,064,755 participants (p. 114). In 1976, by universal, secret ballot, the Constitution was approved by 97.7% of voters, with a voter turnout of 98%. After that, municipal, provincial, and national elections took place that resulted in the formation of the National Assembly of Popular Power (ANPP). The PCC, meanwhile, never functioned as an electoral party... [28]
This description should at least be humbling for, or even the envy of, every citizen living in liberal democracies. For most people in classic multi-party liberal democracies, there is little opportunity to participate in such nation-building projects. Their democracy is run by oligarchs. Cuba’s success is, to steal a phrase from an American election campaign, the sort of “change we can believe in,” and it stands as an inspiring example of the sort of independence struggle that deserves to be supported globally. It stands in sharp contrast with Taiwan and Ukraine where there is no plan to go beyond “the predatory phase of human development.” Ukraine has proven a willingness to become a client state and sell off its national treasure to transnational corporations, and Taiwan would let itself become a second Okinawa—an unsinkable US battleship—if China were not committed to stopping that from happening by any means necessary.
3.4 Conclusion
This essay has demonstrated that when people of various parts of the world are being asked to show solidarity with Ukraine or Taiwan, or whatever “the next thing” is going to be, we need to ask whom these nations are aligned with and why, and we have to ask why they express no solidarity with other independence and nationalist causes. The answer is that they support no one but themselves and the powerful entities that are eager to exploit their cause. The Ukrainian government will not ask for the end of sanctions against Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The Taiwanese government will not antagonize Indonesia and the US by speaking up for West Papua.
I doubt that more than a handful of people in Taiwan know anything about the plight of their neighbor in the Southwest Pacific. If they learned about it, they would see the main difference between Taiwan and West Papua. Taiwan is peaceful and prosperous. China has refrained from the use of force and waited patiently for a peaceful settlement of the issue, in spite of the US and the UN long ago recognizing Taiwan as a part of China. In contrast, as soon as the UN recognized West Papua as part of Indonesia, Indonesia occupied the territory, repressed the indigenous independence movement, engaged in settler colonialism, and carried out environmentally destructive resource extraction. In 1975, Indonesia did the same to the newly independent East Timor (formerly a Portuguese colony). The aggression against the people of West Papua has been ongoing since the 1960s, but Indonesia has never been subjected to sanctions or condemnation by “the international community.”
The nationalist causes of Ukraine and Taiwan are compromised from the start by the alliances they have joined. Why should the rest of the world give them billions of dollars in foreign aid, deprive themselves of resources, pay more for food and energy, and risk nuclear war to support these causes? Ukraine and Taiwan were at peace and doing well enough before the US decided to meddle in their affairs and turn them into causes célèbres for the world to suddenly be concerned with. The fact is that these causes could not even exist if they were not useful as the empire’s proxy wars against what it refers to as its “great power rivals.” Without the massive amounts of weapons and money coming from a nation on the opposite side of the globe, they would have long ago arrived at a modus vivendi with their closest neighbors. They are the case studies that illustrate the political economy of independence struggles and disputes over territory.
With or without war, the end result is often the same. Defeated Japan became an industrial powerhouse within US hegemony. The US could have avoided war in Vietnam, and Vietnam would have become exactly the sort of nation it became after its enemy left—a socialist country open to foreign investment and development aid from the US and other nations. Carl von Clausewitz famously said, “War is the continuation of policy with other means,” and we could say in a variation of this aphorism, “Wise policy can be the achievement of, with means other than war, precisely what the outcome of war would be.” Ukraine and Taiwan are destined by geography to settle eventually into a stable co-existence with their neighbors. The question raised by recent events is whether they want to realize this destiny peacefully, or arrive at it through the tragic path of war. Another question is whether the rest of the world will allow that to happen.
Notes that include further discussion follow the appendix
Appendix
The Helsinki Accords, notes compiled from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_Accords
All then-existing European countries (except Andorra and pro-Chinese Albania) as well as the United States and Canada and the USSR, altogether 35 participating states, signed the Final Act in an attempt to improve the détente between the East and the West. The Helsinki Accords, however, were not binding as they did not have treaty status that would have to be ratified by parliaments. Sometimes the term “Helsinki pact(s)” was also used unofficially. US President Ford said at the time if the accord failed to be ratified, it wouldn’t matter because everything pledged in the accords is already enshrined in the UN Charter and other official endorsements of human rights.
The first basket, the “Declaration on Principles Guiding Relations between Participating States” (also known as “The Decalogue”) enumerated the following 10 points:
1. Sovereign equality. 2. Respect for the rights inherent in sovereignty. 3. Refraining from the threat or use of force 4. Inviolability of frontiers. 5. Territorial integrity of states. 6. Peaceful settlement of disputes. 7. Non-intervention in internal affairs. 8. Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, equal rights, and self-determination of peoples. 9. Co-operation among States. 10. Fulfillment in good faith of obligations under international law.
In July 1975, US President Gerald Ford told the delegation of Americans from East European backgrounds:
The Helsinki documents involve political and moral commitments aimed at lessening tensions and opening further the lines of communication between peoples of East and West ... We are not committing ourselves to anything beyond what we are already committed to by our own moral and legal standards and by more formal treaty agreements such as the United Nations Charter and Declaration of Human Rights ... If it all fails, Europe will be no worse off than it is now. If even a part of it succeeds, the lot the people in Eastern Europe will be that much better, and the cause of freedom will advance at least that far.[29]
NOTES
[1] A related term is the “political economy of genocide.” This refers to the notion that the international community does not consistently apply the UN definition of genocide to all mass atrocities. The term genocide has also been applied prematurely in many cases before there has been any process of jurisprudence that could determine if a government is guilty of planning and executing the elimination of a specific population. The term has come to be a useful label to apply readily to enemies but not to allies. The political economy concept could also be applied to many cases in which separatist movements are described as “terrorist” or “heroic,” depending on the interests of their enemies and allies.
[2] Gavan McCormack and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, “Ryukyu/Okinawa, From Disposal to Resistance,” Asia Pacific Journal, September 9, 2012, 10, no. 38.1 (September 2012) https://apjjf.org/2012/10/38/Gavan-McCormack/3828/article.html.
[3] “Interview by Vladimir Putin to Nippon TV and Yomiuri newspaper.” The Kremlin, Moscow, December 16, 2016. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53455. Vladimir Putin: “Japan has some alliance obligations. We treat them with respect, but we need to understand the degree of Japan’s freedom and what steps it is ready to take. We should look into this, as these are not minor issues. Our foundation for signing a peace agreement will depend on them. This is the difference between current Russian-Japanese and, for instance, Russian-Chinese relations.”
[4] “Political Realism in International Relations,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 24, 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-intl-relations/.
[5] Robin Delobel (Interviewer), « Annie Lacroix-Riz : Il y a un contexte historique qui explique que la Russie était acculée » (“There is a Historical Context that Shows that Russia was Backed into a Corner”), Investig’Action, March 28, 2022. https://www.investigaction.net/fr/annie-lacroix-riz-il-y-a-un-contexte-historique-qui-explique-que-la-russie-etait-acculee/. Excerpt from the interview (author’s translation): Ukrainian nationalism was first German, then American (or rather both), because it had no real capacity for independence: the Reich financed it before 1941, and has never stopped since. In fact, those people who claimed to want Ukraine to be “independent” (Bandera more than some of his own, who didn’t even pretend to want it “immediately”) all belonged to Uniatism, which in the interwar period, and throughout the Second World War, was confused with Nazism. The Azov Battalion, Pravy Sektor and others are direct heirs to the Ukrainian autonomist movement of the interwar period, which saw the creation of the Banderite movement in 1929. Called the “Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” (OUN), it was entirely financed by the Weimar and then Hitler Reichs ... Some of the Banderites remained in Germany [after WWII], in the western zones, mainly in the American zone, with a large grouping in Munich. Another was welcomed with open arms in the USA, via the CIA, in defiance of immigration laws, and yet another remained in Western Ukraine. The latter group, several tens of thousands strong, waged an inexpiable war against the Soviet Union. Between the summer of 1944 and the early 1950s, they murdered 35,000 civilian and military officials, with German and US financial support, particularly in the 1947-1948 period. An excellent German-Polish historian, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, has demonstrated that Banderism remains today as an inextinguishable pro-Nazi breeding ground: Bandera’s many heirs have an equal hatred of Poles, Russians, Jews, and Ukrainians who are not fascists. Needless to say, this researcher has had major censorship problems since the Orange Revolution of 2004, and even more so in the Maidan era, especially since his thesis studied how, since 1943, the Banderites have created a legend that they were the “resistance to the Nazis” as much as to the Reds and the Jews—a legend that came in handy when it came to being listed among the “democratic” groups supported by Washington.
[6] Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights Publishers, 1997). This book provides a thorough description of the true cost of “liberation” for the citizens of the former socialist countries in the 1980s and 1990s.
[7] “The Yugoslavia Counter-Narrative in 1993: Sean Gervasi, a neglected expert, spoke out in the early years of the catastrophe.” https://dennisriches.wordpress.com/2018/11/18/the-yugoslavia-counter-narrative-in-1993-sean-gervasi-a-neglected-expert-spoke-out-in-the-early-years-of-the-catastrophe/. Transcript of an interview recorded in 1993 for “Conversations with Harold Hudson Channer,” a public access cable television series in New York. Sean Gervasi: “I would say that Mr. Kohl’s [German chancellor] recognition of the seceding republics is without any doubt what precipitated the wars in Yugoslavia. It didn’t start them, but it turned them into major international conflicts… it is an important element here in understanding what’s happened in Yugoslavia because the Germans really helped to precipitate that. They helped to precipitate the war between Croatia and Yugoslavia, the secession of Croatia, and they have armed, assisted, advised etc., guided the new version of the independent Croatian state under Mr. Tudjman… This is a very serious question because of the historical background which I mentioned—the independent Croatian state and the genocide conducted against various populations, the Serbs in particular between 1941 and 1945. At the time that Croatia declared its independence in June of 1991, there were 750,000 Serbs living in parts of the Krajina, as they’re called, which by the way is the geopolitical heart of Croatia. There were 1,300,000 or 1,400,000 Serbs living in Bosnia at the time that Bosnian independence was declared in April of last year. These secessions took place in a manner which raised the historic fears, historically justified fears, of the Serbian populations of these areas that they would be the target of genocidal persecutions again.”
[8] Mikhail Gorbachev, On My Country and the World (Columbia University Press, 2000), 151-152.
[9] Alexander Dudchak, “Gorbachev’s rule that prepared the coup of 1991 and the destruction of the USSR,” Medium, Aug, 15, 2023. https://lenabloch.medium.com/gorbachevs-rule-that-prepared-the-coup-of-1991-and-the-destruction-of-the-ussr-c7f47e0b73ab. English translation by Lena Bloch. Original article in Russian at: https://www.fondsk.ru/news/2022/08/31/gorbachev.-vmesto-nekrologa.html.
Excerpt: “Pretending to address the issue of long-overdue reforms of the USSR economy under Gorbachev’s leadership, a new law on state enterprise was adopted in January 1988. According to it, the state was exempted from liability for the obligations of the enterprise. The enterprise was also not liable for the obligations of the state. This law brought chaos and disorganization to the economic activities of enterprises. At the same time, the centralized distribution of funds was preserved under the conditions of the planned economy. Ministries still had to supply enterprises with everything they needed, and enterprises, according to the new law, could dispose of this property at their discretion. The country’s economy turned into a one-way street. Enterprises were given the opportunity to gradually move away from state orders and develop according to their own plan, independently deciding on staffing issues, as well as on ways to sell goods and pricing. But the absence of market infrastructure and intermediary organizations made this way very difficult. Despite a clause in the bankruptcy law, state subsidies prevented the organizations from being finally liquidated, thus reinforcing a vicious circle: misallocation of funds, laundering of the state budget, and mismanagement of the country.
[10] Irina Dubois (Interviewer), « Jacques Baud : La manière de minimiser l’efficacité de la Russie a servi la Russie » (Russia benefited from the attempt to minimize the effectiveness of Russia), Dialogue Franco-Russe, May 31, 2023.
[11] Anne Laure Bonnel (director), Donbass, (Les Films de Sacha, 2016).
. Ukrainian President Poroshenko, speaking in December 2014, is quoted at the beginning of the film speaking about how he planned to treat a Russian-speaking minority group within Ukraine: “We will have jobs and they won’t. We will have retirement benefits and they won’t. We will have benefits for seniors and children, and they won’t. Our children will go to school and kindergarten, but theirs won’t. Their children will stay in basements because they won’t know how to do anything. And like this, precisely like this, we will win this war.” The international community, is, supposedly, obliged to intervene in cases in which there is a declared genocidal policy.
[12] “UN Mapping Report,” Friends of the Congo. https://friendsofthecongo.org/un-mapping-report/. Accessed August 16, 2023. Friends of the Congo describes the Mapping Report that was published in August 2010: “[the report covers] the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed with the territory of the DRC between March 1993 and June 2003… The claim that the victims of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda may be culpable of committing a genocide in the Congo has generated a great deal of interest… The authors of the report indicated that they were concerned that the language of ‘genocide’ may be watered down before the official publishing of the document… The discovery of three mass graves in North Kivu in 2005 was a stark reminder to the United Nations that the past human rights violations in the Congo had remained largely uninvestigated.”
[13] Boniface Musavuli, Les Génocides des Congolais: De Leopold II a Paul Kagame (The Genocides of the Congolese: From Léopold II to Paul Kagame) (Independently published, 2017), 89. “In 1996, the Americans were convinced that the Congo was too big a country for its leaders to govern. The Pentagon did not believe in the durability of the Zairian [Congolese] state. It no longer even believed the Zairian state would exist beyond the next three years. According to the Americans, no Zairian politician could guarantee the unity of Zaire [the former name of Congo] and ensure the country’s economic recovery. This premise has remained unchanged to this day, and is the key to understanding the ambiguities that continue to plague US policy towards the Congo.” This assertion is upheld by the think tank that Boniface Musavuli belongs to, DESC-WONDO (https://afridesk.org/), the NPO SIMA-KIVU, and other experts on the Congo-Great Lakes region of Africa.
[14] Valery Engel, “The Law on the Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine. What does it bring to national minorities?” Culturico, December 20, 2021. https://culturico.com/2021/12/20/the-law-on-the-indigenous-peoples-of-ukraine-what-does-it-bring-to-national-minorities/.
[15] Christopher Black, “The Legality of War,” New Eastern Outlook, March 8, 2022. https://journal-neo.org/2022/03/08/the-legality-of-war/. This article provides an excellent brief explanation of how war came to be illegal under international law but permitted in some instances to authorize wars in defense of a nation that is under attack. The author points out that the veto power of members of the UN Security Council “has effectively led to the paralysis of the United Nations in a number of international conflicts, where national interests are in conflict, and has resulted in reality in a state of the world where might makes right.”
[16] Sean Gervasi, “Western Intervention in the USSR,” Covert Action Information Bulletin No.39, January 1, 1991. https://dennisriches.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/trump-era-russophobia-vs-western-intervention-in-the-u-s-s-r-1970-1991/. “The minimal conclusion that can be deduced… even taking into account the complex channeling and re-channeling of funds and projects through intermediaries, is that during the 1980s, Western governments, businesses and private organizations were devoting something on the order of $100 million per year to intervention in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union.”
[17] “Gar Alperovitz: If you don’t like capitalism or state socialism, what do you want?” Democracy Collective/New Economics Institute, New York, November 5, 2011.
.
[18] Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum.
https://www.freenationsrf.org/#Home_Targets
.
[19] “The Leninist Theory of Imperialism,” ML Today, September 2, 2016. https://mltoday.com/the-leninist-theory-of-imperialism/. Lenin defined imperialism as having four economic features. His definition endures as the most useful because it went beyond looking at imperialism as merely territorial expansion and a will to obtain vassal states. Lenin looked instead at the nature of financial capital in the world. He described imperialism thus: “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which (1) the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; (2) in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; (3) in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, (4) in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.” By this definition, the economic systems of both Russia and China have not advanced to this end-stage, nor are their goals comparable to the hegemony, debt-bondage (imposed by the World Bank and the IMF), and privatization established by US economic policies since 1945. China and Russia, together with the BRICS coalition, claim to be offering the Global South an alternative based on mutually beneficial development assistance.
[20] John J. Mearsheimer, “Great Power Rivalries: The Case for Realism,” Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2023. https://mondediplo.com/2023/08/02great-powers. “Some critics maintain that realism is dismissive of international institutions, which are the key building blocks of a rules-based international order. This view is incorrect: realists recognize that institutions are essential for waging security competition in an interdependent world … They emphasize, however, that the great powers write the institutions’ rules to suit their own interests, and under no circumstances can institutions coerce a great power to act in ways that threaten its security. In such cases, a great power will simply violate the rules or rewrite them in its favor. That logic flies in the face of the widely held belief in the West that liberal democracies behave differently from authoritarian states. Authoritarian states, so the argument goes, are the real threat to the rules-based order and more generally the chief obstacle to creating a peaceful world. But this is not how international politics works. Regime type matters little in a self-help world where states constantly worry about their survival. The US is the quintessential liberal state, for example, but its leaders illegally attacked Yugoslavia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003, and waged a covert proxy war against Nicaragua during the 1980s. Great powers of all types act ruthlessly when they think their vital interests are threatened.”
[21] “Political Realism in International Relations,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 24, 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-intl-relations/.
https://www.freewestpapua.org/
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[23] Yamin Kogoya, “West Papua’s Colonial Fate—the UN ‘New York Agreement,’” Greenleft, August 17, 2022. https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/west-papuas-colonial-fate-un-new-york-agreement.
[24] Thomas D. Musgrave, “An analysis of the 1969 Act of Free Choice in West Papua,” Chapter 12 in Sovereignty, Statehood and State Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2015). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/sovereignty-statehood-and-state-responsibility/an-analysis-of-the-1969-act-of-free-choice-in-west-papua/6DB756FCBC96D81B76B663846A8BDE53.
[25] Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World (Hachette Book Group, 2020).
[26] Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism,” Monthly Review, May 1949. https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/.
[27] Jihan Al-Tahri (director), “Cuba: An African Odyssey (Part 2),” Temps-noir-Big Sister, 19:25~.
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[28] Maximilian Forte, “Part 1: ‘Democracy in Cuba and at Home,’” Zero Anthropology, December 30, 2014. https://zeroanthropology.net/2014/12/30/democracy-in-cuba-and-at-home/. See also “Part 2: ‘The Real World of Democracy (and Anthropology).’” https://zeroanthropology.net/2014/12/30/the-real-world-of-democracy-and-anthropology/.
[29] Gerald R. Ford, “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Gerald R. Ford,” 1975, 1030–31. https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=SILVAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA1031&hl=ja&pg=PA1031#v=onepage&q&f=false.