COUNT CZERNIN ON SELF-DETERMINATION
“The words ‘Right of Self-Determination cropped up fairly late in this war in the discussion of war aims. It is impossible to give a general definition of it, since almost every statesman who has employed it has given it a different sense. If we search for this catch-word’s origin, we find that it tacks on to the war aim put forward by the Entente since the beginning, ‘the protection of small nations.’ These were the small nations whom the Central Powers were alleged to have outraged—Serbia, Montenegro, &c., for whose defence the Entente claimed to have taken up arms. In his Note of 18 December, 1916, to the belligerents, President Wilson defined it as one of his noblest peace aims, ‘to guarantee the rights and privileges of the small States.’ In their answer of 10 January, 1917, the Entente supplemented this sentence by the brutal formula that they are waging war ‘for the liberation of the Italians, Slavs, Roumanians and Czecho-Slovaks from foreign rule.’ The protection of the small States fell into the background, the forcible detachment of single nationalities from the Monarchy took the first place, and, indeed, their forcible detachment without according a right of self-determination to the nationalities or their mother State.
“In his message of 22 January to the Senate, President Wilson took a certain step towards the Entente standpoint by calling for internal reforms in the various States, and thus making their internal political affairs a subject of international discussion. At the same time, however, he declared that there was no right by which peoples could be transferred from ruler to ruler as though they were their property.’ This message of the President, then, expresses the idea that the cession of portions of the territory of one State to another must be enforced, and also demands the consent of the governed to the government.’ Here the right of self-determination is already a fairly complicated mixtum compositum—territorially the right of the State to determinate its territorial existence, but at the same time also a joint right of the nationalities, under international protection, to decide their internal relations. On 11 April, 1917, the Russian Government declared that it repudiated the intention of ruling other peoples and robbing them of their national heritage: it claimed for the belligerent States themselves the right to decide the fate of their peoples at the conclusion of peace. This is the self-determination of States over their nations.
“Thus, now States, now nationalities are the subjects, and then again the objects, of this right of self-determination, which follows aims that fluctuate between autonomy won by constitutional means and State independence conferred by a European conference. Through the exploitation of this confusion of terms self-determination has in the speeches of Entente statesmen slowly assumed a definite form. It has become a mantle for the brutal Entente demand for a forcible detachment of portions of Austria-Hungary. Behind this word is concealed the demand that the Monarchy should renounce its right to control its territorial existence, its right to regulate of itself the relation of the nationalities to each other and to the State. It is the denial of all State sovereignty, the demand that Austria-Hungary’s internal
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