It is the right of peoples to take their future in their own hands, and to determine the path and political options they deem appropriate, including the formation of their governments without external influence, determining the form of government, and merging with or separating from a neighboring political unit.
In 1969, declared by the United Nations the year of independence, the organization issued its resolution No. 1514, which stipulated granting independence to colonial peoples, but the mechanisms for implementing the resolution and other relevant decisions of the international organization remained ambiguous.
In this regard, it is necessary to recall the chronic failure of the United Nations to do justice to the Palestinian people and enable them to have the right to self-determination and the establishment of their independent state.
The concept of self-determination gained great legal force by its inclusion in the Charter of the United Nations in 1951, which made it part of international law almost entirely based on liberation movements in third world countries in their struggle against colonialism during the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century.
Emergence and development
The concept of self-determination was associated with the emergence of the concept of national identity in the 19th century, which sanctified the existence of national states, and contributed greatly to the establishment of European nations - as they are known today - during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as it was the first nucleus for the emergence of the state / nation that prevails As a form of government almost unified in the world since the beginning of the twentieth century, and is based on linguistic and ethnic homogeneity sometimes or both.
The concept of the state / nation or the national state is based on merging the two concepts of the nation and the state and taking them as a larger framework and founding reference for a political entity based on the similarity between its citizens at the linguistic, cultural and ethnic levels, while giving the concept of equality a central place as the most important criterion and the major limiting value in the political and moral system that governs the state .
It must be pointed out that the transformations that Western societies have experienced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (mixing with other races through colonialism, immigration, etc.) will reinforce the centrality of equality in the legal and political system of the state / nation in Europe by virtue of the increasing diversity of the components of the social fabric, which has led to a growing tendency Towards the marginalization of the feature of homogeneity that was originally the base of the state in Europe.
The concept of self-determination received a strong impetus in the twentieth century with the emergence of liberation movements in European colonies across the world, especially in Africa and Asia. These movements were calling for the right of linguistically, racially or culturally homogeneous groups to self-determination, and to establish independent political entities similar to those in Europe and the Americas.
These aspirations formed the first nucleus of the national state in the Third World, whose stability was negatively affected in many cases - especially in Africa - by colonial maps according to which borders were drawn without taking into account the manifold extensions of ethnic and linguistic groups.
The premature colonial divisions had devastating consequences for the stability of the emerging countries, as they fueled separatist tendencies in more than one region fueled by the chronic absence of development and the prevalence of authoritarian patterns of rule, as well as the central place of the tribe in governance and the conduct of public affairs in most regions of Africa.
Self-determination and liberation movements
The principle of “the right of peoples to self-determination” gave liberation movements a strong legal support for their struggle for liberation from the grip of Western colonialism, especially European, especially with the provision of this right in the Charter of the United Nations to become one of the essential requirements of international law.
With the flourishing of liberation movements - especially in the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century - self-determination became linked to political liberation, although the concept came in its origin in a context in which there was no mention of liberation as it prevailed in that era.
In the name of self-determination, many peoples in the third world were able to establish their own states, and at the same time, the right to self-determination constituted a way out for some colonial powers in their quest to liquidate the colonial legacy, and in this section it is possible to mention the popular referendum conducted by France on the independence of Algeria in 1962 was the culmination of the Evian Accords that ended the Algerian crisis and enabled France to get out of it.
Self-determination and separatist movements
Despite the nobility of the concept of the right to self-determination in its origin, it has been subject to interpretation and political exploitation to the extent that it has become difficult to distinguish the cases in which it is possible to talk about the right of a people to self-determination from the fabricated crises within the framework of political hostility between two or more states.
Just as the liberation movements in the Third World relied on the right to self-determination in their struggle, these same movements were subjected, after independence, to fierce rebellion movements that also raised the right to self-determination, driven by the absence of development and the rule of tyranny and political injustice.
Although the rebel movements were valid in their presentation and demands, at other times they expressed a foreign political agenda motivated by hostility to the existing political system rather than the aspirations of crushed ethnic or linguistic groups.
The Cold War marked the identity of many separatist and rebel movements. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), for example, the 1963 Katanga rebellion was part of a Western (Belgian-French in particular) agenda targeting the national regime led by Patrice Lumumba.
In Nigeria, Western powers, especially France, were behind the attempted secession of the oil-rich Biafra region between 1967 and 1970.