Up until that point, much of what lawyers understood to be ‘international law’ had been the treaties that states (and, most often, the states’ dynastic rulers) negotiated between themselves. In 1789, Corsicans asked to become formally part of France – and the new National Assembly in Paris agreed. For example, prior to the Revolution, the French king had acquired the Mediterranean island of Corsica in a typically old-regime manner – through a treaty, which essentially represented a sale, in 1768 with the city-state of Genoa. Premodern claims to territory were thus repudiated.Īt first, these claims became practical problems only through diplomatic imbroglios. In May 1790, the French therefore issued a declaration of peace to the world and a renunciation of aggressive warfare and conquests.
#AEON TIMELINE CHOOSE ERA FREE#
Moreover, revolutionaries postulated that only dynastic rulers ever aspired to offensive war or territorial aggrandizement, and that free peoples were naturally pacific. Just as the people were becoming the final arbiter of political decisions within France, so too, this new logic implied, the people ought to determine the title and status of the territory where they lived.
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No longer should a country be passed down as property, within a family, much less won or lost in war. If French revolutionaries questioned the sovereign authority of their king within their borders, they also implicitly undermined the claim of any monarch to the territory within theirs.
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“No longer should a country be passed down as property, within a family, much less won or lost in war.” The previous bearer of this authority, Louis XVI, would soon go on to lose his head as well. In it, the French people asserted that, henceforth, ‘all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation’. This position is encapsulated in Article 3 of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’, the French Revolution’s foundational document.
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They argued that the French people, not the king, ought to be the source of political authority. Then, in 1789, women and men in France started to make an incendiary claim. In the 18th century’s most important book on international law, the bestselling The Law of Nations (1758), Emmerich de Vattel argued that ‘just title’ to territory derived from either ‘ancient and original possessions’ or from ‘concessions, purchases, conquests made in the regular war’. These hereditary and military entitlements reflected the legal reality of the time. Success in battle also determined who controlled lands, aside from birthright. A major difference existed, nonetheless, between premodern Europe and the real-estate transactions of today – war. Title existed, and could change hands, according to dynastic principles: lands were inherited by descendants, came together when royal houses married, and could even be sold. Throughout medieval and early modern Europe, rulers possessed their realms much like people now might own their house. And yet, the true history of national self-determination, as well as the controversy it can engender, stretches back to the French Revolution. Since then, it was enshrined in the United Nations Charter, where one of that organisation’s defining purposes is described as ‘to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples’.
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By these accounts, Woodrow Wilson, then president of the United States, pressed for various peoples to establish new states in eastern Europe. Historians and legal scholars alike often describe this principle as triumphantly emerging from the calamity and destruction of the First World War. Edward Kolla, associate professor of history at Georgetown University in Qatar, explains how the true history of national self-determination, as well as the controversy it can engender, stretches back to the French Revolution.īy the 20th century, the idea that local peoples ought to have a say in the status of their territory came to be called national self-determination.