Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Independence Daze

Scusate, non riguarda Israele, quindi forse è OT, ma ci sarebbe questo
articolo del New York Times che indica una delle questioni di cui
dovrà occuparsi il prossimo presidente USA. L'ultima volta che se ne è
occupato è successo qualcosa anche in Italia.
Comunque, auguri al governo che sarà in carica
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06wwln-idealab-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Independence Daze
At some point early in this new year, President Bush and major
European Union leaders are likely to recognize the independence of
Kosovo over the furious objections of Serbia and its traditional
protector, Russia. Such a decision may have unintended consequences.
If Kosovo successfully achieves statehood, Republika Srpska, the Serb
entity in Bosnia, will be tempted to follow suit in reprisal, slicing
Bosnia almost in half. Meanwhile, Belgium has been gripped by talk
about repeating Czechoslovakia's 1993 "velvet divorce," with Flemings
and Walloons possibly splitting and forming their own little states.
What about the claims for the independence of Kurdistan from Iraq or
Chechnya from Russia or Transdniestria from Moldova? Referring to two
regions of Georgia, President Vladimir Putin of Russia remarked, "If
someone believes that Kosovo should be granted full independence as a
state, then why should we deny it to the Abkhaz and the South
Ossetians?" It's not a bad question -- and it's sure to bedevil Bush's
successor in the White House.
Who deserves statehood? In the early 21st century, it seems a number
of the most time-honored answers to that question are unworkable.
Woodrow Wilson famously maintained that nations have a right to self-
determination. This corrosive principle was applied to the defeated
Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires at the end of World War I
(although not the victorious British and French ones). But what
defines a nation? Ernest Renan, a 19th-century French philosopher,
asked, "Why is Holland a nation, while Hanover and the Grand Duchy of
Parma are not?" Is it language, ethnicity, religion, a common
political system, territory, size (19th-century liberals thought that
some nations, like Sicilians or Bretons, were too small for statehood)
or what? Language can't be the answer: there are perhaps 6,900
languages in the world today, but only 192 states in the United
Nations.
Another Wilsonian determinant would be democratic choice: if a group
of people votes fairly for self-rule, outsiders should honor their
decision. In 1999, the East Timorese voted for independence from
Indonesia; in 2011, South Sudan is set to hold a referendum on
secession. But honoring plebiscites alone could be setting the bar too
low. There are a great many potential "splittists" out there (to use
the Chinese government's derogatory term), from Aceh to Xinjiang; the
prospect of achieving independence at the ballot booth could ignite
chaos and civil wars if it was dangled in front of all of them. And
majority votes for secession could invite the persecution of
minorities who remain loyal to the old parent country. +++A better
approach, as some political philosophers suggest, would rest on
individual rights and not on collective prerogatives. A group can
properly ask for international recognition when it is being oppressed
so harshly that self-rule becomes the best method to save lives and
liberties. As Allen Buchanan, a Duke University philosopher, has
argued, the right to secede is a "remedial right only" -- a way of
rectifying a wrong. This rule should be taken together with the late
John Rawls's reminder that there is no right to secede when secession
entails subjugating another people. Rawls thus denied a Southern right
to split off from the United States in 1861, since that course of
action perpetuated slavery. These two guidelines would help insulate
international political debate from the endless claims and
counterclaims of nationalist rhetoric.
A human rights standard means that Scots, Québécois and Basques don't
have much of a claim to break away from stable, prosperous, liberal
democracies. Guarantees of individual rights or local self-government
should suffice. Conversely, the Kurds -- divided and abused in Syria,
Turkey, Iran and Iraq -- have a more urgent case for statehood. As for
Kosovo, Slobodan Milosevic relinquished Serbia's claim to authority by
having the province stripped of its autonomy and later crushing its
civilians. Even so, to earn international recognition, the Kosovar
Albanians must stop menacing their Serb minority.
Whatever the proper standard for secession might be, the next
president cannot simply improvise. Following the Paris peace
conference in 1919, Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy adviser, Col.
Edward M. House, reflected: "It was the gladdest and yet, in some
ways, the maddest movement in history. In the endeavor to be free
everything else was overlooked." Without clear standards of
justification, Western approval for Kosovo's statehood could make it
even harder to persuade the recalcitrant Sudanese government to allow
joint U.N.-African Union peacekeepers to deploy effectively in Darfur,
lest a protected Darfur one day seek independence, too. The costs of
fogginess are too high, and we aren't the ones who pay them.
Gary J. Bass is a Princeton professor and the author of "Freedom's
Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention," which will be
published next summer by Knopf.

 Scusate, non riguarda Israele, quindi forse è OT
ma forse no... ci sarà pure un sionista in Kosovo....:D