[Zoran Oklopcic is an Associate Professor of International Law at Carleton University in Canada. He focuses on self-determination, popular sovereignty in theory of constitutional law and on the theories of secession and territorial rights]
I am grateful to Professor Brad Roth for engaging with my article, “
Beyond Empty, Conservative, and Ethereal: Pluralist Self-Determination and a Peripheral Political Imaginary”. In his response, Roth embraces my understanding of his account of self-determination as “emptied” of normative content, and, in fact, insists on rejecting projects that would seek to give it a more precise normative meaning.
In other words, it is less so that my argument misses the target, than that his ‘emptied’ understanding of self-determination is robust enough to sustain a political critique. I say ‘political’, because the norm of self-determination is not just an object of legal exegesis; its understanding, perhaps more than any other norm of international law, betrays a particular political vision, not only of state-formation, but of the political ordering of the world as well.
My project was not to offer a new jurisprudential reading of self-determination, nor to insist that the accommodation of nationalist pluralism must be reintroduced as part of “external” self-determination’s promise. In reading Roth’s, Cohen’s and Krisch’s recent contributions primarily as
political theories of pluralism with an emancipatory promise, I was more interested to argue that global pluralist commitments have, in the past, been accompanied by global or regional political visions that have sustained them, and which have provided space for the recognition and accommodation of ethnocultural pluralism. For example, demands for the accommodation of national or racial diversity in some cases, such as in French West Africa in the 1950s, initially took the form not of external self-determination, but rather of the wholesale constitutional transformation of transcontinental empires, in a way in which it would have increased, if successful, the political stake of the imperial ‘periphery’ in the constitutional affairs of the metropole.
I hasten to add that from a doctrinal point of view, there is little to disagree with Roth.
