Forty-three years ago this month, in 1967, the island of Anguilla voted in a referendum in which its leaders sought to confirm their secession two years before, from the then British colony of St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, re-baptised as an Associated State of the United Kingdom. The positive answer which the Anguillan population gave to its then leader Ronald Webster, allowed him to believe that he could virtually expel the British from the island; a belief that was quickly reversed by the sending in of a small contingent of British paratroops. Through a series of negotiations with the British over the following years, which various Caribbean governments sought to influence, the island was allowed to practically end the relationship with St Kitts and Nevis in 1971, a situation formally finalized in 1981.
The Anguillans’ moves were not about attaining sovereign independence, which the Federation did not have and only attained in 1983. They simply wanted to conduct their business themselves without hindrance from the neighbours to which they had been attached. And today St Kitts-Nevis is independent, but Anguilla remains under the British crown.
The Anguillan attempt at secession occurred in a decade in which the United Nations General Assembly, in its declaration of 1960, had decisively pronounced that colonies, irrespective of size of population or economy, were entitled to pursue expression and actualization of their right to sovereignty and independence. And seeing the consequences, an apparently concerned United States State Department official was moved to say afterwards that after that General Assembly Declaration, the grant of independence became an “industry of the metropoles”.
In latter years the issue of secession or attempted secession came to be predominantly associated with the continent of Africa. There the British had conceded full sovereignty to geographic entities concocted for their own rulership’s convenience, rather than in accordance with any notions of common ethnicity or culture. The British were wont to intimate that their own country included groupings of people who might not have claimed to be particularly homogenous in relation to each other, a point which the Scottish have brought to the fore in recent times as they have persistently pursued devolution, with a hint of independence, for themselves. The French did not make such fine points about the agglomerations they were granting sovereignty. They were more concerned to come to agreement with whomsoever they gave formal responsibility, on the basis that they could retain a substantial number of troops in various locations, a signal, for them, of their retention of great power status within the existing international framework. For in those days, the Cold War was expected to last forever.
But in the same year of the General Assembly Resolution, one of the colonial fabrications cracked, with the attempted secession of the province of Katanga from the newly-created Congo. That attempt, leaving the Congo at the mercy of the Cold warriors and mineral gatherers, was, in retrospect the prelude to a large number of secessionist efforts on the continent, most prominent in the 1960’s being the attempt by Biafra to break away from the Federation of Nigeria, and going on to this day with the secessionist war in the Sudan. Interestingly, the large new states in Africa mainly retained their territorial integrity, only with Nyerere’s Tanganyika seeking to reverse the trend midway, by unifying his state with the island state of Zanzibar. In 1974, however, Turkey brought the trend nearer to Europe, with its support for the breakaway of the Turkish-dominated section of Cyprus, a situation which to this day has resisted all attempts at a negotiated resolution, including a major effort by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the last decade. The tendency has been, in this as in other similar situations, to work against the use of force, using rather, diplomatic tools.
For a while, it was probably thought in the West that secession was largely a function of the end of colonialism, and therefore a phenomenon limited to the new states. Europe of the West and Europe of the East certainly seemed to have consolidated their geopolitical situations, with the USSR firmly insisting that the socialist order made such events impossible because its institutional arrangement solved the problem of peoples defining themselves as “nationalities” on the basis of ethnicity, culture or religion. For the West, the British faced with the case of Northern Ireland, insisted that the integrity of states must be maintained.
But with the end of the Cold War, and the release of the East and Central European states from the hold of the socialist order, the suggestion that secession was a disease of the colonial order, had to be relegated to the dustbin. Almost with a certain embarrassment, the West saw Czechoslovakia. The very delegitimizing of socialism as an effective force for socioeconomic progress quietly saw it split itself to create the Czech and Slovak republics. Cultural and ethnic cohesion liberated from socialist suppression, brought the nationalities issue, a burning topic in pre-and post-World War One Europe and its fringe areas towards Asia, into prominence again.
It also immediately resurrected the issue of the break up of states by force through secession, or by agreement as a global one. Today, China resists any attempt to pressure the Sudanese regime not simply because it has investments there, but, in our view, largely because it is conscious of the rise of the nationalities question within its own country, and has no desire to see secessionist attempts rewarded.
It is in this wider global context, that the Kosovo attempt at independence needs to be situated. The Yugoslav of Marshal Tito, held together not simply by the force of his personality, but by the socialist order instituted after the Second World War tied to the establishment of a quasi-military regime which began to creak soon after his death. The fear that those small entities which he had brought together to form Yugoslavia – a Yugoslavia dominated by Serbia, quickly gave rise to the fear that that area would revert to its reputation as a source of constant internecine warfare among the various nationalities – a phenomenon that was thought to be contributory to the onset of the Second World War.
The deliberate, though somewhat delayed intervention by NATO, led by American forces, after President Clinton put aside his hesitations about military intervention, was based on a basic premise. This was that there must be no return, in Europe, to the settlement of nationalities questions by force among the contending parties. The Dayton Accords, the result of NATO intervention, and substantial pressure of US diplomacy, set the pattern. And the decision that Kosovo’s demand for sovereignty should be settled by diplomacy within the framework of international law has been a logical follow-up from that premise.
The judgment of the International Court of Justice, looked at from our distance, can therefore be seen as an effort to use law to ratify the principles and practices which the leading powers sought to establish, in this case for settling an issue of the range of autonomy of competing nationalities within a particular geopolitical space. Legal observers are now indicating that the judgment represents a compromise: it does not say that Kosovo is a state, but that it is permissible for the entity to declare that it has a right to self-determination (the normal outcome of which, in our times, is the creation of a sovereign state); and that the states of the international community, are in turn, the ones to make up their own minds as to whether or not they wish to recognize Kosovo’s assertion.
This judgment does not please Serbia, nor does it please a Russia faced with a variety of secessionist demands on its eastern and Asian fronts. And of course, it does not please China. But that is not the concern of the Western countries – the North Atlantic states. They are simply making sure that diplomacy takes the lead in putting the lid on incipient warfare in NATO’s arena, with the recourse to international legal judgment being a part of that process. Serbia, in that arena today, will have to accept a judgment that it can do nothing about, and simply, in turn, seek to use diplomacy to persuade other countries to withhold recognition of Kosovo as a separate state. And it is up to Kosovo to use diplomacy to consolidate the opening which the ICJ has given it.
In the meantime, Anguilla, remains a non-sovereign entity, satisfied to not be a part of a sovereign St Kitts and Nevis, but cognizant of the fact that the United Kingdom, for its own reasons, now seems to wish to impose greater constraints on its Caribbean territories, taking away some of the sense and reality of autonomous action, that they thought they had garnered for themselves in the last thirty years or so.
