By Peter Kelly.
Revolution in Ukraine has seen the fall of a democratic President
This week Crimea declared independence from Ukraine and applied to join Russia, a move rejected by almost every western state and acknowledged only by Russia and the few nations still under its sphere of influence. Today Putin signed the treaty accepting Crimea as part of the Russian federation, deaf to the protests of the west.
The people of Crimea see their nation seized by an opposition they do not support, an opposition filled with right-wing “bandits” that violently tore down their democratically elected president and took hold of parliament. They see a state which is no longer their own and which cannot represent them any longer. With this in mind they have broken away to join a state which they feel cares for their interests. They have exercised their right to self-rule, they have exercised democratic choice, and yet they are condemned.
The number of separatist nations within the old boundaries of nation states is growing, and they are growing bolder. Scotland, a constituent nation of the United Kingdom, goes to the polls this year to decide on independence. Wales follows it and voices in Northern Ireland and Cornwall are becoming louder.
In France Brittany, Corsica, Basque Country and Catalan areas are increasingly vocal in opposition to a highly centralised French state which operates on an official policy of denial that any French citizen may not wish to be French. Spain faces separatists in Catalonia demanding the right to choose their future even as the Basque country turns to peaceful methods to drive for independence and Galicia and Valencia take their confidence from more strident neighbours. Belgium, the centre of the European Union, seems prepared to at any moment divide straight down the middle.
These nations join several decades of separatists which have succeeded in their mission, and many which have failed. South Sudan, the Yugoslav nations, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, East Timor, Namibia, Transnistria and Eritrea all have declared independence from larger nation states which sought to keep hold of them even as the Czech and Slovak republics divided peacefully. On the other side of the spectrum the brutal wars in Chechnya and Kurdistanwhere a people’s fight for self-rule has dissolved in the face of brutal suppression by the older nation states.
The fact is that almost all the nation states are hypocrites on the topic of both democracy and self-rule. The United Kingdom have defended the Falkland’s right to decide their rulers and legitimised the Scottish referendum but have denied the similar claims for self-rule of the Eastern European states falling under Russian influence. France campaigned the hardest of all of NATO to defend the rights of revolutionary Libyans but until very recently banned minority languages within their own borders and still refuse to acknowledge strong separatist groups invoking their democratic right to choose their future.
Russia has defended to the last the rights of the Georgian breakaway states but fought to prevent the secession of Bosnia and brutally suppressed the people of Chechnya. The United States, so proud of its own efforts to overthrow a colonial ruler (over essentially a tax dispute), will not step close to the recognition of any new state which claims Russia as a backer. Spain claims it has moved on from the dictatorship of Franco but seems set to deny the rights of a powerful region’s wishes to rule itself separate from the shockingly incompetent arm of Madrid.
Democracy is not a cherry-picking exercise. You cannot defend the people’s right to be free of dictatorial government on the one hand and then dictate that some of your own people must be ruled by you whether they like it or not with the other. You cannot promote human rights and freedoms abroad and yet refuse to let go of a nation of people which has had enough of your rule and permit them to enjoy their own freedoms.
A people’s right to choose their fate does not stop when it reaches the point of questioning old borders drawn out by forgotten empires interested only in lining their own pockets. Those empires may have fallen a century ago but they are responsible for the on-going conflicts in Iraq and Syria, in Libya and Ukraine, in the Pyrenees and Sudan. Their arbitrary lines drawn across continents based only on what their guns could defend are not fit for the purpose of defining the nations of today. Governments should not be permitted to dictate whether or not a nation remains under their rule based only on their capability to keep them suppressed by coercion. That is the forgotten politics of the dictatorships of empires and deserves to be resigned to the catacombs of history together with the institution of slavery and the failed attempts at National Communism.
Separatism is a choice, a choice which is as valid under a democratic system as voting for your head of state. Choosing who you are to be ruled by includes choosing who you are to be ruled with and who you wish to share this responsibility to choose with.
Rather than outright condemning the separatism of Crimea because it may damage the strength of a developing ally for the benefit of a competitor, the west ought to respect the democracy they claim to hold so dear by concentrating on ensuring the people’s choice in Crimea is fair. Send electoral observers, give advice on the next steps forward, and stop openly driving a people away from a democratic Europe with a startling but hidden hypocrisy which makes the openly oppressive ambitions of Russia look so tempting.
The west’s outright refusal to provide anything but condemnation of the country’s decision to separate from the Ukraine has prevented them from doing anything which could have helped the process and protected democracy – instead leaving Crimea to its own devices in a referendum which, though it may be popular and is very possibly a reflection of democratic opinion, was largely a sham. Russia has branded them hypocrites and the truth in those words leaves the West toothless in the face of upheaval. Their inability to do anything but misrepresent the conflict as “pro-EU is good, pro-Russia is bad” has significantly damaged their ability to have any positive impact on the post-revolution Ukraine.
Once upon a time the nation state was defined by how much territory a government could control using the point of bayonets and the flare of cannon fire. That time has passed, and it is about time the nation states of old stood aside and permitted peoples to choose their path with the free will that democracy assures them.
