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• Ryan McMaken

What is not in dispute, however, is that a right to self-determination via secession exists and that the current borders of the world’s sovereign states are neither sacrosanct nor perpetual. The more radical liberals like Jefferson and Mises have historically interpreted the right of self-determination far more expansively than modern mainstream social democratic theorists.

https://mises.org/wire/short-history-right-self-determination

In his 1927 book Liberalism, the radical classical liberal and economist Ludwig von Mises took a strict and expansive view in favor of secession. Specifically, he noted that respect for the right of self-determination required extant states to allow the separation of new polities seeking secession. He writes:

The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with.

Where does Mises get this idea of self-determination? He did not invent the idea, of course, but at the time was likely drawing upon currents of thought alive and well in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Origins in the American Revolution

The concept of self-determination—albeit not the phrase—was already well-known as the driving force behind the American revolutionaries when the colonies seceded from the British Empire in the 1770s. Historian David Armitage describes the United States’ war for independence as essentially the practical and political starting point for modern ideas of self-determination. While the philosophical roots of self-determination are often attributed to Immanuel Kant, the prototype for a real-life secession movement was found primarily in the American war for independence. Armitage writes: “The notion that “one People” might find it “necessary” to dissolve its links with a larger polity—that is, that it might legitimately attempt to secede . . . was almost entirely unprecedented and barely accepted at the time of the American Revolution.”

The success of the United States in asserting a right of self-determination provoked similar movements in Europe and Latin America in the decades following American independence. For instance, Armitage notes that “language for self-determination” found in the Declaration of Independence would show up repeatedly Latin American, European, and Asian movements seeking political independence.

The Idea Spreads to Europe

In Europe, the concept was well worn by Mises’s time. For example, self-determination was a central theme in Poland’s fight in 1794 to fully separate from the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian states. Poland’s leading separatist was Tadeusz Kościuszko, who had been an officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution and who was quite familiar with the Declaration of Independence. As Victor Kattan notes, Kościuszko was pushing for self-determination well before the concept entered the common lexicon in Europe and “was inadvertently prescribing and prefiguring national self-determination as it would come to be known over a century later.”1

Mises, who was well-versed in Polish history, was likely aware of this. Mises would have been even more familiar with the battles over self-determination that raged across Habsburg lands a generation before his birth. Chief among these was Hungary’s attempt to secede from the Austrian empire in 1848. The Austrian crown ultimately defeated the Hungarian separatists (and instituted a military dictatorship until 1867), but calls for self-determination in pockets across Europe hardly disappeared.

By the 1870s, the phrase “self-determination” appears to have been increasingly common—especially in the German language.

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