13 - After 1989: The Quest for a New Equilibrium

Summary

THE END OF DECOLONIZATION AND THE THIRD WORLD

After 1945 the Third World, supported by the Soviet bloc, succeeded in broadly monopolizing the discourse of self-determination and the right of self-determination for itself. Self-determination was decolonization. While this was not a legal principle, the equating of the two applied virtually for all practical purposes. Colonial status, and this status alone, bestowed the right to decolonization and thereby to found an independent state in the borders of colonial territorial units. The formula of the right of self-determination of peoples proved to be exceptionally effective in this constellation. With it, it was possible to deem any and every instance of colonial rule as illegitimate and increasingly as illegal. Other demands for self-determination beyond the colonial context had no chance at gaining leverage internationally.

As decolonization, self-determination was the transition of a people or population of a colonial territorial entity from colonial dependency to independence, which counted at the same time as freedom. This meant, completely in line with the tradition of the first decolonization shaped by the events in the Americas, that self-determination became a specific unique process in the history of a territory, the act of becoming a state, or in place of that at least the voluntary renunciation of independent statehood through union with another state or part thereof. It was surely not the continual process of adaptation to the wishes of the population, which could lead over and over again to the dissolution of existing states and the formation of new ones. The point in time was foreseeable when self-determination thus understood, after the completion of decolonization, would become a phenomenon of the past. This prospect appeared at the latest in the 1980s, when the UN list of Non-Self-Governing Territories (and thus also the territories that had not yet exercised self-determination) became ever shorter. In the case of the few remaining Non-Self-Governing Territories, it was sometimes disputed whether they should be regarded as such. Thus, for example, the Falkland Islands or Gibraltar fulfilled the objective criterion of overseas location, but not the subjective criterion of the wishes of the inhabitants, who quite evidently wished to remain under the rule of the colonial power.