Sir, - In his defence of President Woodrow Wilson's "noble ideal" of self-determination Dr Martin Mansergh (June 5th) glosses over the intrinsic contradiction contained in the formulation.
This concept, which owed much to the German romantic nationalist "blood and soil" reaction to the non-ethnic civic republicanism of the French revolution, conveniently assumes that the "people" left free to determine "its own development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid" is a homogeneous one occupying a unified territory. Alas, in most parts of the world, including Ireland and Britain (where more people of Irish extraction live than in Ireland), this is not the case.
As we have discovered at great cost in Ireland, and more recently in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, where peoples are mixed, freedom for one people invariably means restricting the freedom of another. "Ethnic cleansing" then becomes the logical outcome of blindly applying the doctrine of self-determination.
For Dr Mansergh to say that the principle of "self-determination is not unproblematic in many situations" is a gross understatement when set beside the hundreds of thousands that have been killed, maimed and displaced in Europe since the end of the Cold War - not forgetting the 3,600-plus killed in Ireland and the 800 or so in the Basque country.
And if consent is central to self-determination ("so brilliantly articulated by Eamon de Valera as President of Sinn Fein"), why did Sinn Fein/IRA resort to violence when, after 1914, self-determination ("a range of outcomes not always involving full sovereignty") was clearly on offer by the British government for Ireland? And why has it yet to decommission its arms? - Yours, etc.,
Simon Partridge,East Finchley, London.