The Revolutionary Origins of the Principle of National Self-determination

By: Edward J. Kolla, Ph.D. candidate, The Johns Hopkins University

It is received wisdom among most international lawyers and lay people alike that the principle of national self-determination arose from the calamity of the First World War, when President Woodrow Wilson enunciated his famous 14 points. These points were then enshrined in law in the various treaties following the Paris Peace Conference, with the effect that a number of new, national republics were founded in Eastern Europe in place of the defunct German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires. However, the idea that national peoples ought to determine their own status and destiny in international relations first appeared and was applied at the same time as peoples first took control of domestic politics – in the late eighteenth century, during the American and particularly the French revolutions.

Some have interpreted the American “Declaration of Independence” as an affirmation of national self-determination, especially given the emphasis its author, Thomas Jefferson, placed on natural rights in that epochal document. However, recent research into the ideological origins of American independence suggests that the founding fathers’ claims to autonomy were less based on values they saw as universally applicable, and more contingent and predicated on the violation by the British Parliament of certain freedoms that ought to be accorded or maintained within the British Empire. 

Subsequently, during the French Revolution, both revolutionary officials and ordinary people were inspired by the advent of national sovereignty in French domestic governance to start to justify international territorial claims on that same basis. This position was encapsulated most notably in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,” which stated succinctly in Article Three that “all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation,” and found application in international law in three diplomatic crises during the early Revolution.

The first was when the island of Corsica was integrated as a full province of France. Corsica had been a possession of Genoa when, in 1768, the Genoese asked France for help to quash an independence rebellion. The treaty negotiated between the two powers stipulated that France would gain full administrative control of the island until Genoa could repay the costs of the military expedition, although Genoa would retain formal sovereignty over Corsica. In the early days of the French Revolution, following an altercation in November 1789 between the French military garrison in Bastia and a group of patriotes attempting to register for the new National Guard, Corsicans implored the National Assembly in Paris for “the adhesion of the Corsican people to the French constitution” and that assembly decreed Corsica an “integral part” of France that same month. When Genoa protested this move as a contravention of the treaty of 1768, France asserted its claim to Corsica on the basis of the sovereign choice of the Corsican people. Thus, France’s formal incorporation of Corsica, which triggered the first use of a national people’s choice to trump an existing obligation in international law, can likewise be seen as the first appearance of national self-determination in world history. 

But it certainly would not be the last, even during the French Revolution. When Alsace had been annexed by France after the Thirty Years War, stipulations included in the Peace of Westphalia had allowed lords in the Holy Roman Empire to retain their lands, rights, and privileges in the province. When France abolished feudalism in August 1789, and insisted that the law be fully applied in Alsace, these German princes protested vigorously against their losses. A diplomatic confrontation ensued between France and the lords, backed by their patron the Austrian Holy Roman Emperor, in which revolutionaries used precisely the same logic from the union of Corsica to defend their actions: they argued that Alsace had not legitimately become a part of France by the Peace of Westphalia, but rather when the Alsatian people had wished it. And since the choice of the Alsatian people to join France had not included special protection for the German princes’ feudal rights, those rights could be lawfully abolished by the National Assembly. This dispute over feudal rights, treaty law, and national sovereignty in was one of the leading sources of antagonism between revolutionaries and the rest of Europe, and helped precipitate the outbreak of war between France and Austria in April, 1792.

The union of Avignon with France provides the clearest example of national self-determination during the French Revolution. Unlike the cases of Corsica and Alsace, where France was already in control of the regions on the ground prior to the espousal of national sovereignty, in Avignon the tangible transfer of territory and political authority was transacted after and because of an expression of the will of the people. Avignon had come under the pope’s control in the Middle Ages, was famously the site of the papal court from 1309 to 1377, and remained a possession of His Holiness even after the removal of the Holy See back to Rome. At the end of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary changes afoot in France – which completely surrounded the enclave – could hardly have been expected not to influence the town and locals clamored for reforms and a constitution on the French model. When their sovereign Pope Puis VI refused, in June 1790, the municipal government declared independence and proclaimed a desire to join France. A civil war ensued in both Avignon and its adjacent but politically separate neighbor, also under papal rule, Comtat Venaissin – a war between partisans of the pope and those who advocated union with the French nation. Ultimately, the National Assembly in Paris decreed the union of Avignon and Comtat with France on 14 September 1791, based on a plebiscite conducted over the summer of 1791 that, according to French officials, showed union to be the choice of the people.

Although at the time of the Revolution national sovereignty was used to justify or legitimate these provinces’ unions with France, whereas in the twentieth century national self-determination has tended to lead to politically independent sovereign states, the principles involved in both eras are the same. The period of the French Revolution, therefore, should properly be viewed as the true genesis and crucible of the notion of national self-determination.