AUTODECISIONE. – The faculty or right of peoples to dispose freely of themselves is designated by the term self-determination or autodisposizione. Unknown to international law until the eighteenth century, it was elevated to a principle by the French Revolution. Enlightenment humanitarianism placed man at the center of the political system, recognizing in him unlimited autonomy and the faculty of organizing himself according to his will. Popular sovereignty was erected upon this foundation. Contingent political motives (such as the annexation of Avignon requested by its inhabitants after they had expelled the papal legate in 1790) and ideological motives converged in suggesting the transfer of the concept of autonomy from the individual to peoples, to whom the right of unconditional freedom in deciding their own political destinies was attributed.
The principle was further elaborated by nationalist conceptions, especially in Italy. Mancini and the movement that followed him, grounding national claims on a naturalistic basis, in accordance with the orientation of contemporary thought, invoked it to uphold the right of nationalities to political independence and to violent secession in pursuit of their aspirations to unity. At least in its origins, therefore, the principle of nationality and that of self-determination were connected. This relationship is now debated among internationalists, some denying the connection, such as Fauchille, and others admitting II.
Be that as it may, the principle survived in the liberal conception. It was taken up by President Wilson in his declarations to Congress in 1918, proposed as a criterion for the settlement of peoples after the 1914–18 war, and adopted in the conclusion of the armistice with Germany and in the preparation of the peace treaties as an absolute dogma. It was invoked again in 1938 in connection with the conflict between Germany and Czechoslovakia, which ended with the Munich arbitration. At the end of the Second World War, the victorious powers took no account of it in concluding the peace treaties with the defeated nations. Only in Article 1 of the Charter of the United Nations was self-determination reaffirmed, together with the equality of rights, as a principle that nations undertake to bear in mind in developing friendly relations among peoples. Despite this vitality, it has not been recognized as having a juridical character. On 16 April 1921, on the occasion of the disagreements between Sweden and Finland concerning sovereignty over the Åland Islands, the Council of the League of Nations declared that “the principle of the right of peoples to dispose freely of themselves is not a rule of international law properly so called.”
Catholic doctrine likewise excludes it as an absolute principle, in the form in which it has historically been formulated, because, so understood, it rests upon a false concept of freedom that takes no account of the acquired rights of the State or of the natural duty of citizens to fidelity, obedience, and cooperation for the common good, in order to maintain political unity, which is required only insofar as this is necessarily demanded by the objective order and by the overriding ends of human life. Its rigid application, besides proving impossible in many cases for economic, strategic, and boundary-related reasons, could lead to the subversion of existing rights and would plunge nations into perpetual agitation, with the danger of breaking up international society into a dust of organisms possessing little vitality.
This does not exclude the existence of rights and legitimate aspirations among peoples, which international law must take into account. Benedict XV referred to them in his message of 28 July 1915 and in that of 1 August 1917, proposing to the belligerents that they “take into account, to the extent that is just and possible, the aspirations of peoples”; and Pius XII did so in his allocution of 24 December 1939, where he mentioned the need to meet the “true needs and just demands of nations and peoples, as well as of ethnic minorities,” adding, however, that these “do not always suffice to establish a strict right when recognized and sanctioned treaties, or other legal titles opposed to them, are in force.”