ABSTRACT
Within successive Russian-dominated states, there has been a century-long tradition of
turning self-determination norms inside out and utilizing the principle as a script and legit-
imation for acts of imperialism. It is a tradition that continues to this day-most graphi-
cally illustrated in the ways in which post-Soviet Russia has gone about expanding its
control in Transcaucasia, Crimea, Transnistria, and Eastern Ukraine. Neither the Soviet
Union nor post-Soviet Russia was the first state to utilize self-determination to justify
acts of imperialism. Not long after self-determination emerged as a political force on
the European continent, Napoleon widely invoked it to legitimate French imperial expan-
sion across Europe, and European powers throughout the nineteenth century utilized
various claims of self-determination among peoples controlled by rival empires as ways
of gaining advantage against them. As Ronald Robinson noted, the notion of empire as
trusteeship that was widely deployed in Britain in the nineteenth century legitimated
empire largely as a way of civilizing the conquered and preparing them self-government
(1979, p. 88). Nor was the USA immune from these practices. President McKinley pre-
sented the annexation of the Philippines as a benevolent enterprise: an ‘empire of love’
aimed at ‘preparation for republican self-government at some suitable future date’ (as
cited in Stephenson, 1995, p. 90). And in 1903, the USA manufactured the secession of
Panama from Colombia to gain control over the Panamanian isthmus, claiming that the
‘ancient land of Panama’ had exercised its ‘right of self-control’ in accordance with the
will of its people (Bunau-Varilla, 1914, pp. 365-366).
