Self Determination and Other Modern Liberal Myths: An Analysis of the Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh
In the spring of 2024, Araman Tatoyan, the former national human rights defender of Armenia, gave a presentation at Wesleyan University's campus concerning the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh. After watching his hour-long presentation, I recounted one line repeatedly: "human rights should neutralize politics, but in reality politics neutralizes human rights." Tatoyan's haunting words illuminate the failures of international politics despite his continued insistence during the talk that working within the system would yield results. However, Tatoyan's comments remove historical agency; they create the illusion that this unproductive international order is inevitable. In truth, much of our international failures can be traced to one phenomenon: the murder of self-determination.
Between September and October of 2023, 100,000 Armenians were forcibly removed from their homes in the region they call Artsakh and the international community calls Nagorno-Karabakh. The flight from Nagorno-Karabakh was a result of the calculated efforts of the government of Azerbaijan. The mass exodus represented an "end" to a century-long cycle of violence over the disputed territory. Despite the recognition of this as ethnic cleansing by a vast majority of human rights organizations, NGOs, and international organizations, state responses ranged from strong words of condemnation to total apathy (Transparency International 2023).
Briefly, the modern portion of the conflict began in the late 1980s when the Armenian majority population of Nagorno-Karabakh protested to separate from Azerbaijan and join the then-Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. War erupted in 1990, and four years later, when a permanent ceasefire was signed, Armenia was the decisive victor: Nagorno-Karabakh became, in effect, an independent state. Border clashes, murders, kidnappings, and general terror permeated the region for decades. In 2020, full-scale war erupted in Nagorno-Karabakh, resulting in a decisive Azerbaijani victory. In 2023, the Azerbaijani government completed its ethnic cleansing efforts, and by October 31st, 2023, around 90-100% of all ethnic Armenians left the semi-autonomous region forever (Diana Roy, 2023).
Although international apathy towards ethnic violence is not uncommon, Armenia's case, which was blatant, well documented, and nearly three decades long, does beg the question as to why Armenia was left alone? This question is further complicated by the Republic of Armenia's recent good-faith efforts to ensure fair elections, fund public programs, and drive out corruption, which should align it with American support. In stark juxtaposition, Azerbaijan's authoritarian president, Ilham Aliyev, has nurtured a culture of corruption and anti-democratic practices. On the Transparency International corruption index, Azerbaijan is now 92 places below Armenia and within the bottom twenty nations in the world.
Armenia's struggle for international support and its conflict with Azerbaijan is emblematic of a more significant global crisis: the crisis of self-determination. For many Americans, the term "self-determination" has been tossed around since we were children. As I have always understood, Self-determination is the ability to control one's destiny. Individual self-determination has been a core principle of Western ideology since the French Revolution and the re-invention of the "self." However, self-determination's political origins are more complex. Erez Manela, in his book The Wilsonian Moment, posits that self-determination became a globally disseminated idea when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson fervently articulated it during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919-20 (Manela, 2007). Manela theorizes that this moment was a global "genie in the bottle moment." Wilson had inadvertently unleashed a global phenomenon that led to the demise of the British, French, German, and Chinese Empires. The United States poised itself as the freer of the oppressed and the architect of global freedom. Manela supports this claim throughout his book, despite the stark racial contrasts which plagued the United States.
Self-determination as an idea reached a head in the anti-colonial post-World War II internationalist mindset. Empires were dismantled, and dozens of Western-style nation-states were added to the global landscape. The creation of the United Nations, The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, and The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade were radical departures in global history and worldmaking. For the first time, a chorus of liberal democratic nations could all coexist, solving conflict through diplomacy and peace, but a chorus has no leaders.
Despite our indoctrination to the universality of self-determination, I posit that self-determination has been a factual and rhetorical lie for fifty years. In the 1970s, a revolutionary piece of international legislation was proposed: The New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO's goals were to continue the dismantling of the colonial economic system, which inherently disadvantaged numerous nations and benefitted countless others. But just as soon as the candle of revolutionary change was lit, it was systematically snuffed out under the direction of the United States. Daniel Patrick Moynihan—United States diplomat, ambassador to India, advisor to Nixon, and democratic senator of New York—wrote in March of 1975 a scathing indictment of the NIEO's foundational ideas and principles. Moynihan argued the NIEO was an existential threat to the United States and its policies, even more so than the USSR during the height of the Cold War. Due to his position and status, Moynihan had an outsized ability to influence the United States' foreign policy. In a critical moment of change, he and others led the U.S. in a new direction: creating a new economic imperial system with the United States as its leader. Moynihan argued that young nation states were acting in "bad faith" by going against American interests. He credited the United States as the founder of the interdependent world society, but he feared that the NIEO would represent the "tyranny of a new majority" in the U.N. general assembly and throughout the international landscape.
Self-determination's grave was dug by Moynihan and U.S. foreign policymakers. Adom Getachew, a modern political theorist and professor at the University of Chicago, argues that Moynihan marked the end of the anti-colonial vision of radical sovereign equality and self-determination. Furthermore, if the thirty years after the Second World War were marked by a commitment to the empire's end, the thirty years after the Cold War were marked by the United States' relentless retrenchment of itself as a global hegemon. The United States would be free to act independently of the international structures and organizations it had initially created (Adam Getachew, 2019). In other words, the world must adhere to strict rules and guidelines, which the U.S. does not.
Getachew's framework of the collapse of self-determination gives a new dimension to understanding the Armenian-Azerbaijani Conflict. For decades, the people of Nagorno-Karabakh have expressed their "inherent" rights of self-determination and freedom. If you believe in self-determination and sovereign equality, then there is no denying the people of Artsakh their right as a state. And yet, the United States has systematically denied the people of Artsakh a commitment to sovereignty.
Getachew's framework reimagines liberal democratic internationalism as apparatuses of hierarchical command and control. This world order is directly responsible for the oppression of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. Even if the global community did want to act to help Artsakh, how could they? The gears of international order only turn when the United States greases the cogs. I ask you to expand Getachew's framework to all international conflicts. Palestine, Ukraine, Taiwan, Puerto Rico, and any other people who we all collectively, intuitively, intricately know should be free. The system is not and was not set to serve the disenfranchised people of the world. I say all this not to be pessimistic but to inspire you with the same radical framework that the NIEO promised decades ago. Think of how close we all were to an equitable and self-sovereign world. Is this not worth fighting for again?
Getachew, Adom. 2019. World Making After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self Determination. Princeton University Press.
Manela, Erez. 2007. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Roy, Diana and Sabine Baumgartner. “In Photos: The Nagorno-Karabakh Exodus.” Council on Foreign Relations, October 6, 2023. https://www.cfr.org/article/photos-nagorno-karabakh-exodus
Transparency International. 2023. “Corruption perception index 2023.” https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2023