My Self-Determination, Your Extinction : Balkans: If the world can’t prevent the breakup of states, it must ensure the rights of their overnight minorities.

Self-determination is a basic human right, and it’s great if you belong to the right self. If you don’t, you’re in trouble. When one group decides to self-determine, other folks in the neighborhood, folks with the wrong skin or religion or dialect, discover they’ve just been “unselved.” For them, self-determination means “get out.” Of course, people don’t leave their homes voluntarily. They have to be persuaded. That means killing them until everybody gets the idea.

Naturally, the survivors want revenge. More people die hideous and gruesome deaths. A lot more, because the technology of killing and taking revenge has become quite user-friendly. Self-determination killing doesn’t require skill. It doesn’t have to be accurate. Most anybody who wants to can get into this aspect of self-determination.

Fortunately, traveling has also become easier. So millions of folks who don’t want to be self- or unself-determined can pack up and scamper to peaceful countries where the good people are all for the idea of self-determination. But there’s a catch. The good people in those peaceful countries don’t want too many refugees.

After a while, the selved and the unselved and their ammunition are exhausted. Their new little states have gotten about as self-determined as they can. That doesn’t mean that peace is at hand. Across the new borders, memories of self-determination sustain the old hatreds. If there’s one thing everyone has learned from the experience, it’s that your old neighbors who seemed so nice were really “them.” Everyone knows you can never trust “them.” So now you need a large army and a big, big, arsenal to protect your self-determination. Self-determination doesn’t create peaceful relations. Look how cordial India and Pakistan are, 45 years after their self-determinations.

A lot of recent history confirms all this, so when Slovenians and Croatians began to agitate for secession, the United States and a number of West European states took the position that Yugoslavia as an entity must continue to be the framework; if the component republics wished, they could increase their autonomy by transforming into a confederation. Germany shattered that allied position by unilaterally recognizing Slovenia and Croatia. Bonn may have wanted to purge its image of fecklessness in the Gulf War or to demonstrate the power of the new Germany. It may have been responding to a single-issue Croat lobby at home. Or perhaps, as one German official lectured me at the time, Bonn actually believed that a world of ethnically homogenous states was more stable.

Poor Woodrow Wilson must be spinning in his grave. He introduced self-determination out of concern for human beings and their rights. The result in the territory that was Yugoslavia is a travesty of the principles that animated Wilson and a mockery of human rights. It’s far from over, yet now that it has started, there’s little that we can do. Except to learn an important lesson. If we continue to think about self-determination the way we did in Yugoslavia, what happened there will happen in many other places.

There’s nothing obsolete about the idea behind self-determination. People should be able to choose their own governors. Governments should be politically responsive to the people, should not discriminate and should meet minimum human-rights standards. Other governments and international organizations should insist on all of this and use the means at their disposal to see that it’s achieved.

This modern conception of human rights cannot mean knee-jerk support for demagogues who beat tom-toms in regions where many ethnic groups live cheek by jowl, just because they weave the words self-determination into their chants. If self-determination for “their” people means the violation of others’ human rights (or, for that matter, the imposition of a despotism on their own people), then old-fashioned political self-determination is not the solution. U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali put it about as bluntly as could be: “If every ethnic, religious or linguistic group claimed statehood, there would be no limit to fragmentation, and peace, security and economic well-being for all would become ever more difficult to achieve.”

When composite states like Yugoslavia begin to fragment and the consequences are likely to be grim, the world community should press them to stay together. This does not mean that injustice can be ignored. We should insist on and promote new internal political arrangements that provide stability, economic realism and, above all, effective human rights. In ethnically mixed areas, secessions that would produce tribal mini-states should be discouraged by making clear to ambitious would-be leaders that they will not get international recognition or any of the indispensable political and economic goodies that go along with it.

This may not work across the board, and it may not always be peaceful. Even internalized struggles may require international supervision. And there may be occasions when the goal of a stable system of human rights for all will be better served by an internationally endorsed and supervised secession. But go slow, and remember that when one self determines, another is unselved.

Given the mix of peoples in the neighborhoods of our planet, automatic self-determination for whomever shouts loudest for it is a prescription for tragedies like Yugoslavia.