by John B
DK has managed to dig up an extremely wrong-headed article on the Georgia versus Russia conflict over South Ossetia. Marius Ostrowski tries to put the ‘Russia is terribly terribly bad; just because the people of South Ossetia are Russian, want to be part of Russia and the Georgians keep trying to kill them doesn’t mean it’s in the right’ argument into a UK context:
Let’s say the Channel Islands suddenly decide they dislike the UK government (not hard to see why, but unlikely even in theory) and rebel. Obviously the first thing that the government would do (if they’re not too busy writing books, that is) once they’d extracted their heads from their respective… newspapers… is send in a body of redcoats
Unlikely. On the grounds that we’re not a bunch of bloodthirsty mentalists, we’d most likely begin secession negotiations, as we would if the Scottish Government were to vote for secession.
Now all of a sudden, just as Jersey, Guernsey and all the rest have been restored to British rule, President Sarkozy announces at a press conference that the British invasion had compromised the sovereignty of the Channel Islands and pledged to protect the welfare of French citizens wherever they are (let’s assume for the purposes of this analogy that all, rather than just some, of the Channel Islanders hold French citizenship somewhere along the line). So without any further warning, the combined might of every army in the EU proceeds to swamp the Islands in European troops and opens a second and third front in the Scilly Isles and Dover respectively.
This makes the Channel Islands analogy fall down completely: while some Channel Islanders may have French names, they’re English-speaking and culturally British with no great ties to France. But let’s assume they do all have French passports and want to be French - at this point Sarkozy would be absolutely right to send French troops to Jersey; and anyone with an ounce of moral decency would have to support him.
It’s definitely a situation where the UK’s actions in preventing French people living on land they’ve owned for generations from the perfectly reasonable desire for self-determination would be so morally dubious that I’d be strongly opposed to our invasion - to the extent of going to jail for treason if necessary (and for Ostrowski’s analogy to work at all, we also need to assume that the Scilly Isles are similarly full of French passport holders who want to be French, which means that the same principle applies). Look at it this way - if you support the Irish Republic’s existence, you have to allow these imaginary Frogs the same rights…
So the only bit that I - or anyone with the slightest believe in self-determination, and generally not killing people for picking the government they’d prefer - would have a problem with is the invasion of Dover. And the only reason Mr Ostrowski mentions Dover is because he believes Russia will also annex Adjara, which is, err, nowhere near any of the fighting and full of Muslim ethnic Turks. Why does he believe this? Err, hard to say, as Russia’s showing no signs of doing so.
In other words, even someone deeply anti-Russian (a Pole? Anti-Russian? Say it ain’t so…), trying their hardest to come up with OMG WTF shocking metaphors for the UK market, fails to come up with anything beyond a demonstration that Russia’s actions are perfectly reasonable and that we ought to support them.
Update: Jamie’s piece on the Georgian army’s utterly insane behaviour is a better guide to what the hell’s going on than any OMG THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! narrative.
Just thought I should point out your link to DK actually points to the wikipedia article about Adjara.
I’d like to pretend that was a clever and witty joke, although it obviously wasn’t.
[...] a post on a ‘large-scale’ topic like South Ossetia straightaway, but a combination of a light degree of fisking in the blogosphere and the leading article on BBC News this morning (yes, mea culpa, it’s [...]
Your argument certainly* holds, if the population of the Channel Islands were unanimously in favour of French union, but, were the argument amended, say, to justifying French aggression against all the Channel Islands where only a majority of Islanders supported union, it seems to me to fall down. This more closely parallels the case in South Ossetia, and the somewhat reduced conclusion of such reasoning is that Russia would be legitimate in expelling Georgian troops from only that property falling under individuals who consented to be part of Russia.
Simply arguing that, by virtue of some democratic referendum, the entirety of South Ossetia ought to be Russian or Georgian, seems to rest on a rather cavalier premise - that the region denoted as South Ossetia should be a political unit, and that all the property enclosed therein is properly at the collective disposal of its inhabitants at a given instant. This requires justification - in the first instance, what criteria must be satisfied in order that some group of people (’majority rule’ can’t come into it at this stage, since majority implies total population which implies fixed borders/pre-existing statehood) can claim sovereignty within certain borders, and then in the particular Ossetian case, why this region satisfies the criteria.
(* actually, proper self-determination and secession means that the current French ought to be free to secede from France; if the French government is taxing individuals within its borders without their consent to pay for the troops to invade the Islands, then it is an equivalent violation of their right to autonomy)
Andrew - in the case of South Ossetia, it’s a fairly coherent ethnic bloc packed full of Ossetians who’ve lived there for countless generations, much like Georgia is packed full of Georgians. They were given limited self-governance while part of the USSR, and tried to gain independence (just like Georgia) on the USSR’s collapse, having previously been granted semi-autonomous status by Moscow. Only the Georgians wouldn’t let them - and went further by imposing Georgian as the only official state language in an effort to cement Georgian national identity over the Ossetians. Hence (combined with countless other reasons which a quick Google should provide) the violent conflict in 1991, 2004 and now.
If a concentrated ethnic regional and cultural integrity combined with centuries of settlement in a distinct and long-recognised geographic area and a history of persecution from the majority in the country you’ve unwillingly been made a part of for the last 17 years (and which didn’t itself exist before then) isn’t enough to justify self-determination, I don’t know what is.
(I haven’t bothered reading the France/Channel Islands analogy, by the by - it sounds far too stupid to waste time on. I’d say that a better one would be if South Ossetia is Calais, Britain unilaterally declares Calais part of the UK and invades, France is too busy to get involved so the people of Calais have to fight by themselves, lose, and then spend a decade and a half under British rule begging to be set free again while intermittently repressed and continually forced to speak English and do Morris Dancing against their will, until France finally gets off her arse and goes to help them after Britain sends in the tanks one too many times.)
Nosemonkey;
I’m not entirely convinced by your argument, which seems to rest on two faulty premises: firstly, that the concept of cultural or ethnic integrity is a meaningful one; and secondly, that it is a concept which can be properly used, regardless of one’s personal preference, to determine with what group one ought to be governed.
On the first point, if it is accepted that variance between two locations in ‘culture’ (however defined) is sufficient grounds for the inhabitants of those locations to be governed independently of one another, then the infinitude of subtle differences from household to household in every part of the world would justify each household’s being independent - and obviously any individual could easily fabricate such a difference, proclaiming it a relevant distinct cultural feature. That one chooses to isolate certain factors (language, ‘ethnic coherence’ or religion, for instance), and to proclaim these are the ‘relevant’ ones is nothing more than a statement of one’s personal inclinations as to with what group one would like to be governed. And, to the second point, being nothing more than a statement of one’s personal preferences, there is nothing which legitimates one to bind others to acceptance of these same criteria of determining the government to which they belong.
The fact that, beneath rhetorical flourishes of ‘a coherent ethnic bloc’ and ‘ethnic regional and cultural integrity’ there exist individuals being forced, contrary to their will, to accept the rule of others under threat of imprisonment and confiscation of their property cannot simply be brushed aside. Plainly, there are some people living in the region denoted by South Ossetia who would prefer to belong to the Russian Federation - they ought to be entitled to self-determination, without binding the other inhabitants of the region; similarly with Georgia, and, I assume, with individuals who want some third, fourth &c arrangement. Instead of deciding upon quite arbitrary categorisations of people into collectives, letting them decide to which group they want to belong in the first place (instead of assuming their consent, proclaiming sovereignty over their property, then ‘permitting’ them to leave if they are unhappy - which method, were it adopted by anybody other than a state, would be considered theft) is the only solution to these issues compatible with the principle of individual autonomy and self-ownership.
Sorry, I’m confused. Are you proposing that we dismantle the current system of nation states and allow a variable, non-geographic alternative?
If so I’m all for it. Never did like nation states. Of course, it would lead to anarchy, and you’re effectively rejecting the concept of democratic rule by majority as well, but still.
Otherwise I’m not sure what your point is. The South Ossetians held a referendum (albeit one not verified by any independent third parties) where there was a sizable majority that wanted to split from Georgia. If a good-sized majority in favour of independence/rejoining Russia (unlikely to be the 99% claimed, but probably still high nonetheless) isn’t good enough to justify the switch, what is? Isn’t the current situation, where apparently only a minority want to remain part of Georgia, worse? And what’s the alternative? Take a poll on a house-by-house basis and split the region along the lines of Baarle-Nassau?
Elle ne vise aucune cible, qu’il disait.
Si, le ” paradis “. Uniquement