Vital Interests: National self-determination and popular sovereignty - these are terms that we hear on a regular basis. Other than a vague notion that they are associated with Woodrow Wilson, I am not sure that people understand how these ideas developed and how they fit into today's context. Perhaps you can give us some background on the evolution of these ideas.

Sandy Levinson:  I want to start with the Declaration of Independence. I think that the Declaration, plus what we call the American Revolution (though I increasingly want to refer to it as American secession from the British Empire) was truly of world historical importance, for reasons that Americans tend to either ignore or simply avert their eyes from.

Most of the time, when we think of the Declaration, assuming we think of it at all, we think of its great enunciation of rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But as the great historian, David Armitage, pointed out in an important book, when it comes to the greatest impact of the Declaration of Independence around the world - it is not the statements on rights. 

It is because of, quite literally, the first and last sentences.  The Declaration, of course, begins by asserting that “in the course of human events it [has become] necessary for one people” basically to separate themselves and establish their own government. Then the last sentence announces that there is now a United States of America--though, interestingly enough, the word “united” is sometimes not capitalized--composed of  free and independent states. That is, we are leaving the British Empire.

What Armitage argues is that it is that part of the Declaration that took flight around the world because it put on the table the notion of identifying oneself as a people. We could spend the rest of our time together on whether or not there was plausibly one people in the colonies stretching from what is now Maine to Georgia, but that's beside the point because there was this dramatic assertion, pounding the table, that we were one people with a right to govern ourselves, whatever the Brits  thought of that, and we did declare ourselves to be a new country.

That revolutionary idea took off throughout the 19th century. I do emphasize the incredible importance of Woodrow Wilson whom I now believe to be, for better and for worse, the most significant political figure of the 20th century. Lenin, who might have been a good candidate for that title 40 years ago, has left the building. He really has become I think in his own way merely an historical figure of relatively little importance to understanding contemporary events.

Wilson took the United States into the catastrophe that was World War I on the basis not only that we were going to make the world safe for democracy, whatever that meant, but also, in his speeches to Congress and then at Versailles, under the premise that what democracy really meant was honoring the right of national self-determination.

What World War I turned out to be about was about was the breakup of the great empires - the Austro-Hungarian empire, certainly the Ottoman Empire, and the beginning of the end of the British Empire--that took the added carnage of World War II to complete. The quest for “national self-determination” inspired all sorts of movements for the rest of the 20th century. It's been both very inspiring and extraordinarily mischievous, for two reasons.

First of all, as we ought to be aware by now, there are real costs to a vigorous national identity, which often expresses itself in terms of superiority or simply the otherness of those who aren't part of the favored group. Secondly, how do you create self-governing political systems in a world where the land is pretty much already taken? You do it ultimately by secession and civil war, and this really isn't good news. 

Wilson is therefore crucial. Wilson is an American president who has streets named after him in many places, particularly in Europe. It ought to be noted, incidentally, that Wilson was responding to Lenin’s defense of national self-determination. It was thought necessary for the liberal or capitalist West, however you want to define it, to convey some of the sympathy for rising national sentiment that Lenin expressed.

We usually forget, assuming we ever knew, for example, that Norway seceded from Sweden, altogether peacefully, in 1905. The issue of nationalist movements is certainly on the table throughout the 19th century, but it is first Lenin and then Woodrow Wilson who gives these movements a huge ideological push to the center of the stage.

VI: Taking a look at that particular statement, did Wilson see this as a competition between the principles and values of America versus the Communist threat as it was developing in Russia at that time? Did Wilson see the United States as a world leader of free democracies of self-determined people?

Sandy Levinson: I certainly think that's part of it. Wilson was aware of Lenin and it was clear that the progressive West that Wilson viewed himself as playing a leading role in could no longer tie itself to classic imperialism, or classic empire building. Lenin was very critical of this. Part of it was a response, but part of it was also Wilson’s deeply felt commitment to modern democratic ideals. 

Part of the paradox with Wilson is that we today are engaged in a wholesale revision of his legacy because it has become very clear how deeply racist he was. It is also very clear that part of the reason for his racism is that he really was a Southerner who supported in large measure the lost-cause view of the Civil War. He didn't quite believe that secession was justified, he didn't support slavery and he ultimately ended up as an American patriot. That being said, he also was significantly sympathetic to the arguments for secession that were made by the Southerners.

VI: So you're talking about states' rights, the main argument the Southern states put forth for succession?

Sandy Levinson: That is exactly right. I live in Texas and I often take visitors to see the huge monument that is literally the first thing you see from the south entrance to the state Capitol. This is a monument honoring Jefferson Davis and the Confederate dead and on the side of the monument is the message which is pure lost-cause-ism. There is no mention of slavery; rather what people are told is that the South responded to the values of 1776, that is the Declaration of Independence and the idea that a people have a right to self-government if they are not happy within a larger empire or a larger union.

Whatever you want to call it, the monument goes on to assert that the people of the South, including Texas, exercised their right to self-determination, though they were defeated by superior physical force.  There’s no notion in this statue, which was put up in 1901, that the war was fundamentally unjust. Rather, the argument you get is that the people of the South were trying to vindicate their own rights to self-determination and they were beaten by the stronger physical North.

I think that Wilson believed a lot of that view and that you can't really understand the degree of his support for self-determination around the world without respect to the argument for self-determination that underlay Southern secession. We can also say that there's no evidence that Wilson deeply thought through the implications of his position with regard to either American interests or international stability.

Indeed there is a famous letter from Robert Lansing, who was Wilson’s Secretary of State, expressing Lansing's absolute dismay over what he thought was Wilson's facile endorsement of national self-determination.  Lansing said this is a recipe, basically, for endless instability. One of the things he mentioned was the implications for the Middle East and particularly of Zionism.

VI: Didn’t Lansing say that Wilson’s promotion of self-determination was political dynamite?

Sandy Levinson: That's exactly right. Lansing was perfectly correct - it is political dynamite.

VI:  The ideals of self-determination and national sovereignty were not really manifested after World War I. The countries that were cobbled together by the British and the French that we see in the Middle East today - Iraq, Syria, and Jordan - can’t be described as self-determined countries. Aren’t these states whose boundaries were arbitrarily drawn by the former imperial powers?

Sandy Levinson: Yes, some were, some weren't. Self-determination is a motif in the Southern Balkans. You do have the kingdom of Yugoslavia, but you also have the rise of a certain kind of ethnic or national self-determination that ultimately explodes in 1990 with the obliteration of what had been Yugoslavia. The early self-determination takes place largely in Europe but then, after World War II, it becomes translated into anti-colonialism where the primary venues to claim self-determination will become Asia and Africa.

You see this all over the world today expressed in different forms. You can talk about the Kurds and Kurdish nationalism; they have been, in many ways, the poor relatives who were left out of the will. The Kurds didn't get their state after World War I, they have not gotten their state yet, but certainly, their claim to national self-determination is at least as strong as any of the other groups, many now with their own countries, that have played that card since 1917.

VI: But there just isn't any place for them. Certainly Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey  seem unwilling to provide the Kurds the right to territory for a Kurdish homeland.

Sandy Levinson:  Another way of putting it: there is a very clear place for them. The problem is: the property is now owned by other states that are adamant about not losing it.

VI: When large self-identifying groups like the Kurds, and also recently the Catalonians, hold referendums seeking to express their desires for self-determination the results are overwhelmingly supportive. But in today’s political atmosphere it does not seem to lead to any real movement toward political autonomy.

Sandy Levinson: It all depends on your notion of a positive outcome. I think what is very clear is that these referenda are extraordinarily unlikely to be conducive to the maintenance of stability. One can imagine, in certain contexts, their leading to civil war, which certainly would be an unfortunate outcome. But one can also imagine more pacific outcomes, as with the dissolution of what had been Czechoslovakia into Slovakia and the Czech Republic, or for that matter the basically peaceful secession of Slovenia from Yugoslavia, which of course was then followed by the distinctly catastrophic civil wars involving Croatia and then Bosnia. 

It is very clear that Spain will not let Catalonia go peacefully into the good night of independence. One situation that is so fascinating, at least from the perspective of an outside observer, is the United Kingdom exiting from the European Union. We will soon see, when the U.K. leaves, if that will likely prompt a second referendum in Scotland to leave Great Britain. I don't think that civil war is expected to break out in the U.K. should the Scots vote to secede. I think what most people anticipate is that there would be some significant negotiations about the currency zone, about the fate of the British bases in Northern Scotland, but that it would be a basically peaceful secession.

There are all sorts of interesting articles being written these days about the future of Northern Ireland and whether it might also consider seceding from the UK and actually joining the Republic of Ireland. When you look around the world, what you find are lots of secessionist impulses, many of which don't seem to promise any sort of happy endings because the prediction would be for either repression or violent warfare.

In other contexts, one can imagine relatively peaceful outcomes and from the perspective of the Declaration of Independence, that would presumably be a happy outcome to let people who feel either aggrieved or simply want to be masters of their own fate, to let them give it a try.

The one thing I'm really quite confident of is that none of us supports every secessionist movement either today or over the last 200 years, but I think it's also true that none of us opposes every secessionist movement. The difficulty is how we pick and choose -  how much oppression do we want to see before we reluctantly agree that people should be entitled to break away and have their own country. Or on the other hand, would we say, well, you wouldn't have so much oppression at all, it's enough to want to be masters of your own national fate, and the Declaration of Independence does suggest that you have a right to do that.

VI: In the United Kingdom, the Brexit movement wasn’t against the European Union as an oppressor, rather it was the idea that the U.K. could be economically better off outside the EU. It wasn't so much an issue of sovereignty; the U.K. wasn’t doing particularly well and the EU was easy to blame. Can Brexit be validly compared with situations where people are seeking relief from political oppression?

Sandy Levinson: I'm fairly confident that there were lots of different motivations to vote to leave. I know at least one left-wing supporter of Brexit who really did believe that this was an important declaration of independence from European technocrats in Brussels. He's certainly not a nationalist in the sense of the virtues of little England and restoring the greatness that was Victorian England, but certainly there is a sense that the British should be much more in control of their own fate and that Europe wasn't allowing that.

With other people, it is more of a nostalgia for a lost English greatness. I say English advisedly because it's not even necessarily a broad notion of the U.K., which is one reason why a lot of supporters of Brexit are relatively complacent about the possibility of a Scottish breakaway because they view the Scots as a different group for whom they don't care all that much.

It is not unlike the discussions in this country about the Trump coalition, particularly with regard to the white working-class where there is a contentious debate about how much of it can be attributed to a latent, white Christian nationalism that has been successfully suppressed for the last 20 or 30 years but was brought to the surface by the election of Donald Trump. Or, on the other hand, it may be more of a response to neoliberalism and the rather dire fate of neoliberalism for many traditional middle- and working-class people.

Some of these are people who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, so the argument among political scientists goes, is that it is misleading to emphasize their white nationalism; they would use, frankly,  a more traditional class analysis. The only thing I am confident in saying is that what one sees across the world is a greater visibility of unapologetic nationalism. Whether one thinks of this country, England, Poland, Hungary, Israel, or wherever, there are people who are willing to make unabashedly nationalist arguments, led in this country by Donald Trump.

There are also people in all of these countries who quite frankly are pushing back against resurgent nationalism. I don’t know who's going to win these arguments over the coming years and even what the balance of opinion is today necessarily. All we can say with confidence is that nationalists are far more powerful in public and are winning some elections than was the case fifteen or twenty years ago.

What is a more striking observation is the collapse of the optimism that had been felt for new liberal democracies, particularly when it comes to Poland and Hungary. That's all gone quickly by the board; now the Central European countries are viewed by many of us, and I say “us” advisedly, as much more frightening specters of the revival of a kind of virulent 1930’s style nationalism. You see aspects of this, even in Germany with the rise of the right wing AfD party.

VI: Isn't one of the indicators of this rise of nationalism and failure of liberal democractic ideals in these countries their rejection of minority rights, of group rights? A turn to blaming their society's ills on the “others:” refugees, the Roma in Hungary, homosexuals, outside agitators?

Sandy Levinson: All this is true. A central theme of particularly the late work of Samuel Huntington, a great and very controversial political scientist at  Harvard University, was taking issue with a certain kind of liberalism that said: “You can organize a country around certain abstract liberal values, including values of maximum tolerance and  diversity.” What Huntington argued, for better and for worse, is that that is not really true. Countries are united, assuming they're united at all, by certain commonalities.

Take a very particular example that fascinates me a great deal, Federalist No. 2, which is almost never read, never discussed.  In Federalist No. 2 Publius, who was John Jay from New York, says, isn't it wonderful that providence basically settled the New World with people who are really alike in language, manners, religion and political values. Now, if you think about it, this notion was preposterous even in 1787, when Jay was writing, and Jay knew it. Jay was from New York. He had to know that the Constitution was translated from English into Dutch and German in November of 1787 because just 40 miles north of Manhattan, the predominant language among many people was Dutch and a third of Pennsylvanians then spoke German.

There were fissures within the Protestant community, as well as continuing conflict between Catholics and Protestants.  There were Jews, there were even Muslims living in the United States in 1787. Jay knew all of this, he was not a stupid man. He was also well aware that New York was still a slave state—it would not abolish slavery for another 40 years—with inhabitants who had in no way chosen to become part of the American experience.  What I find most fascinating about Federalist 2 is the fact that Jay thought it necessary to emphasize this notion of a common American nationality in order to make the argument that we should all agree to this new Constitution.

Not surprisingly, Huntington talks about Federalist 2. I think you can draw a line between Federalist 2 and what for lack of a better term might be called Trumpism. I'm not saying this because I'm a fan of Federalist 2. What I do want to argue is that Federalist 2 illustrates the belief that you really can't have a working country without binding commonalities, including, incidentally, a common historical past that, all things considered, can serve as a source of pride instead of dismay. One reason I am so interested in public monuments, about which I’ve written a book, Written in Stone:  Public Monuments in Changing Societies—is that they so often serve as occasions for pitched ideological battles over how exactly we will honor (or perhaps dishonor) our past.

The more diverse a country becomes then, by definition, the harder it is to find those commonalities, the harder it is to create a sense of genuine community. There is a real argument among political scientists about the degree to which welfare states are dependent on a belief that the members of the welfare state are part of a common community or national family, rather than a collection of strangers to which your money is going to be sent,  people with whom you basically don't identify because a state is taxing you for redistribution purposes.

This is very much an issue in the United States right now. It is captured very strongly in the argument about whether undocumented immigrants should receive any welfare benefits at all, and it extends even to resident aliens who have lived and worked here for 10 or 15 years. One of the issues driving Brexit in the U.K. was anger at the ability of people from the rest of Europe to come to the U.K. for education benefits, or the medical system and the like. But the Right in this country has been willing to attack what they term “anchor babies,” that is, children born in the United States, with birthright citizenship, to mothers who might in fact have come to this country, legally or otherwise, in order to provide that valuable benefit to their children.

I think this is a genuine, deep political problem. My own politics I would like to think are very generous in this regard. It is no coincidence that the single most repeated phrase in the Jewish Bible is, “Remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” I respond very strongly to the notion that we do have duties to be generous to strangers with, by definition, people we really don't identify with very strongly except insofar as they are needy and vulnerable.  But I can’t say that I support the notion of fully open borders at which the United States would simply set out a welcome mat saying “Come in and join us.” Where, and why, one draws lines is a terribly difficult problem that we wish, by and large, to avoid if at all possible.

But consider the reality, at least from an analytical and empirical perspective, that it's much easier to get donations to help people who share some more specific identity with you than earthquake victims in some distant land (unless, perhaps, one shares an ethnic identity with those victims). I think that is a fundamental reality of individual psychology that has very real political implications. 

VI: Thank you for this enlightening conversation. You have provided clarity regarding the meaning and evolution of self determination and popular sovereignty and how they impact today’s political realities. As candidates and the American public thinks about the 2020 election they should be mindful of the ideals that bring us together as a people and the obligations we owe to others.

Sandy Levinson: I certainly hope so.

Sandy Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School and is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. He is an American legal scholar, best known for his writings on constitutional law. Professor Levinson is notable for his criticism of the United States Constitution as well as excessive presidential power and has been widely quoted on such topics as the Second Amendment, nominations to the Supreme Court, and other legal issues. He has called for a Second Constitutional Convention of the United States.