Self-Determination
The principle that peoples should choose their own sovereignty, proclaimed in 1918 and never once applied consistently since.
Woodrow Wilson did not use the phrase in the Fourteen Points he announced on 8 January 1918, but the idea was in every clause of them, and within a year it was the most powerful political slogan on earth. Peoples, not dynasties or conquerors, should decide who governs them. It sounded like simple justice. Wilson's own secretary of state, Robert Lansing, saw the problem immediately and wrote in his diary at the end of 1918 that the phrase was loaded with dynamite, would raise hopes that could never be realized, and would cost thousands of lives. What a calamity, he added, that the phrase was ever uttered.
The question nobody could answer
The doctrine contains a hole at its center: who counts as a people? Self-determination tells you that a group should choose its own state. It does not tell you which groups qualify, and it cannot, because the answer is political rather than factual. Should Bohemia's Germans be Czechoslovak because they live inside a historic kingdom, or German because they speak German? Both answers were available in 1919 and both had armed advocates.
Nor could the map cooperate. Central and eastern Europe were not arranged in tidy ethnic blocks; they were interleaved, with German towns inside Polish countryside and Hungarian districts stranded across new Romanian borders. Every line drawn to liberate one nation trapped a minority of another. The successor states of 1919 contained proportions of unhappy minorities not much better than the empires they replaced, with the crucial difference that the empires had never claimed to be nation-states and so had never made minority status a permanent humiliation.
Applied selectively
Then there was the double standard, which was not subtle. Self-determination was extended to the peoples of the defeated empires, the Poles, Czechs, and Yugoslavs, and withheld from the colonial subjects of the victors. Ho Chi Minh, working in Paris, submitted a petition asking that the principle be applied to French Indochina and was not received. Egyptian, Korean, and Chinese nationalists made comparable appeals with comparable results, and the Ottoman Arab provinces were assigned to Britain and France as mandates on the reasoning that their inhabitants were not yet able to stand alone. The disappointment radicalized a generation of anticolonial leaders and pushed a number of them toward Moscow, which was making the same promise without the racial asterisk.
The second life
The principle came back stronger after 1945. It is written into the UN Charter and into both 1966 human rights covenants, and the General Assembly's 1960 declaration on colonial independence made it the legal engine of decolonization. But it was applied with a firm limit: it meant independence for colonies within their existing colonial borders, and it did not license secession from an existing state. African leaders formalized this in 1964 by agreeing to keep the boundaries the Europeans had drawn, on the reasoning that any other rule meant permanent war.
Where it stands
That limit is why the doctrine remains explosive. Kosovo, Catalonia, Kurdistan, Taiwan, Somaliland, and Crimea are all arguments about the same unresolved question, and every state answers it according to interest rather than principle. Russia invoked self-determination to justify annexing Crimea in 2014 while denying it to Chechnya by force fifteen years earlier. The West reversed the pairing. Lansing was right about the dynamite. He was wrong only in thinking it could have been left unlit.