Sir, - President Woodrow Wilson has had a bad press here, more because of his unwillingness to apply his endorsement of the principle of national self-determination to Ireland, than because many people share the view that the principle itself was "heresy/poison" (Kevin Myers, May 30th). It provided immense encouragement to the struggle for Irish independence from 1917, and was brilliantly articulated by Eamon de Valera as President of Sinn Fein.
For all its faults, the nation state remains the basic building block of today's international order, shows no sign of failing, and has been projected, for example by French Prime Minister Jospin, and German Foreign Minister Fischer, as the basis of a European Union that would be "a federation of nation States".
Before dismissing it, it must be looked at in context. National self-determination replaced imperialism and the dominance of the Great Powers as a basis for political organisation. Imperialism usually looked civilised viewed from the centre, but too often permitted a freebooting thuggery vis-a-vis `'lesser breeds without the law", as Kipling so expressively put it (e.g. as shown by Casement's exposure of native conditions in King Leopold's Congo).
Wilson's ideals were noble ones: that every people should be left free to determine `'its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful". He linked self-determination to the principle of consent, which is central to the Irish situation: "national aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed by their own consent." It was a principle that worked to the benefit of small countries like Ireland against the hegemony exercised by larger ones, pursuing their own selfish strategic and economic interests.
It would historically be quite wrong to suggest that it was the small nations of Europe that nearly destroyed civilisation. It was not Poland, Czechoslovakia or the Baltic States that caused the second World War, and we should welcome the re-emergence of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, whom I once heard dismissed by a couple of British public servants at an Irish Association meeting nearly 20 years ago as "hopeless nationalities" (along with the Irish, of course). The two most destructive forces in the 20th century were a lethal combination of ideology and imperialism, the Nazi Third Reich and Soviet Communism (to which the term empire, both internally and externally, can reasonably be applied).
After the end of the Cold War, ethnic and national divisions are probably the main remaining source of conflict in the world today, and adapting the international order and devising through peace processes ways that these can be peacefully defused is the main challenge today. While the principle of self-determination is not unproblematic in many situations and does not provide the answer to everything and can be realised through a range of outcomes not always involving full sovereignty, attempting to ignore or deny it would be even worse.
Many valuable lessons have been learnt. The European Union provides a framework for the benign integration of, and co-operation between, nation states, and early enlargement facilitated by the Nice Treaty would be one of the ways of neutralising the harmful effects of ultra-nationalism in Europe. - Yours, etc.,
Dr Martin Mansergh, Special Adviser to the Taoiseach, Government Buildings, Dublin 2.