Nations Splitting Up? U.S. Prefers Stability of Current Borders : Policy: Despite Bush’s democratic tone, Washington is cool to breakaway moves in sometimes shaky countries.

From Yugoslavia to Kurdistan, ethnic groups yearning for independence have appealed to the United States for support--only to find that the Bush Administration prefers the stability of existing states to the uncertainty of redrawing borders.

In Yugoslavia, the rebellious republics of Slovenia and Croatia asked for recognition as independent states earlier this month and were turned down flat. In Iraq, the Kurdish separatists who revolted against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein asked the United States for help and were rebuffed even more bluntly.

In China, democratic opponents of the Communist regime have been disappointed by the Administration’s focus on maintaining good relations with Beijing. Even in the Soviet Union’s Baltic states, where the United States backs independence, Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis complains, “The United States is not fighting for freedom.”

Despite the democratic rhetoric of President Bush’s call for a “new world order,” the Administration’s main interest has been in stability--in preserving existing borders and the sometimes shaky nations they contain.

But the most frequent challenges to the new post-Cold War order have come not from countries waging war on each other but from insurgent groups within existing states.

The resulting dilemma has been a persistent political sore spot for an Administration that points with pride to an otherwise successful foreign policy.

Amid the pomp of victory in the Gulf War and progress in creating a new Europe, Bush and his aides have found themselves repeatedly on the defensive--explaining their desire to maintain warm relations with China’s authoritarian rulers, their decision not to help the Kurds and their initial support for Yugoslavia’s federal authorities against separatist Slovenia.

Underlying these widely differing cases is a dilemma that goes back at least as far as President Woodrow Wilson, who promoted “self-determination” as “a sacred right” for the nations of Europe: Should the foreign policy of the United States be founded on idealism--the promotion of American ideals of democracy around the world--or realism, the maintenance of good relations with the sometimes-distasteful governments that are in place?

“This is the central problem in foreign policy now,” says John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Ohio University. “We’re pulled two different ways on this. Are we in favor of fragmentation, of old states splitting up, or of integration, of people coming together in larger units? We just don’t have a policy yet.”

Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), a leading member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, agrees, saying: “It’s an issue of enormous importance that is going to loom larger. In the post-Cold War world, we’re going to face a host of problems like this, and I don’t think the Administration has put in the effort to come up with any coherent, credible, consistent criteria for determining when we support self-determination.”

Bush and his aides have been unapologetic about their view that the United States should not support secessionist movements in most cases.

“By and large we, and I think our NATO friends and allies, are opposed to the disintegration of states or the breakup of states,” says Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser.

“We support the unity of Yugoslavia,” Scowcroft says. “We support the unity of Iraq. But there’s a very practical reason--not that we think Saddam Hussein should repress the Kurds and the Shiites. . . . But there is a political balance of power in the region among states that historically have been at least not friends, or they’ve been antagonistic. . . . If you change the balance significantly, you could induce enormous instabilities.

“It is not possible to set down a hard and fast rule on self-determination,” he adds. “Why? Because you can get down to a single village, a tribe. It has to stop at some point. . . . Small units like that are not very practical in a modern world.”

What the Administration does favor for ethnic groups within larger countries, he says, is “the right to self-expression.” That may mean some form of autonomy within the larger state--”It does not necessarily have to take the form of political independence,” he says.

The Administration’s position has drawn criticism from several sides. Some “idealists”--liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans--complain that Bush has abandoned the historically American goal of actively promoting democracy and self-determination.

On the Democratic side, Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has gently (and ineffectively) urged the Administration to do more for both the Kurds and Yugoslavia’s ethnic groups. “The Administration ought to state unequivocally that it will support independence for Slovenia and Croatia if Yugoslavia’s renegade army does not cease its wanton aggression,” Pell said early this month.

In the GOP, hot-blooded Reaganites such as California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach) agree. Rohrabacher has written a bill to give foreign aid to the individual republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, instead of the central governments. “I think it’s time for our leaders to reread the Declaration of Independence,” he says. “If the ‘new world order’ means that we are going to stand beside tyrants, I want nothing to do with it.”

Relative moderates such as Solarz fault the Administration for failing to come up with clear guidelines--but freely admit that they don’t have any easy answers.

“We’re moving into an age of assertive ethnic nationalism, and we need to find our philosophical footings,” Solarz says.

The debate is already creating strange political bedfellows: The conservative Rohrabacher said he has found himself applauding House speeches by such liberals as Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco).

Some of these issues have been argued before. Woodrow Wilson campaigned for a League of Nations that would grant independence to new national states by a three-quarters vote among League members; realists derided the idea as impractical. President Franklin D. Roosevelt made the self-determination of European colonies a plank of U.S. foreign policy during World War II, over the objection of his colony-holding British and French allies.

More recently, in 1976, both the Republican and Democratic parties rejected the “realism” of then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and pledged to pursue American ideals through U.S. foreign policy. The results were the administrations of President Jimmy Carter, who made global human rights a major priority, and President Ronald Reagan, who actively supported democratic insurgents against Communist regimes.

Now, some critics contend, Bush has inched away from Reagan’s idealism and back toward the realism of Kissinger--who, after all, once gave orders to both Bush (when he was U.S. envoy to China) and Scowcroft (when he was Kissinger’s deputy at the National Security Council).