“As such so long as imperialistic world policies determine and regulate the inner and other outer life of the nation, there can be no ‘national self-determination’ either in war or peace. “(Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1915))

Rosa Luxembourg has always been portrayed at the critical juncture of different intersectional identities. Notoriously, her complex identity as a socialist, a woman, a Jew, and polish national, has been cast in terms of a marginalised thinker in mainstream Marxist theory and even more so in international legal thought. However, her radical reflections on imperialism, nationalism, and the right of self-determination of people and minorities bear relevance for critical and feminist approaches to international law. On the latter point, self-determination, Luxemburg’s work continues to divide. It has commonly been accepted that self-determination was in the interwar period anything but well defined. However, new studies have shown, following a new line of the history of women’s international thought, that alternative and rival interpretations of self-determination are also possible. By reading Luxemburg’s work on imperialism and capitalist expansion as bearing on international law and on theories of self-determination, I aim to link Luxemburg’s reflections on self-determination and current critical understandings of the rights of people and nation with a feminist legal perspective.

Feminist Critiques and Rosa Luxemburg’s Life

Feminist interventions have questioned the contradiction between women’s political status under the nation, and nationalism as the enlightened ideology of the state. They have challenged the in-built ambivalence and Janus-faced nature of self-determination of being internally a vehicle for emancipation and externally a challenge for constituted authority. In other words, they have criticised how self-determination has been interpreted within international scholarship as internally a peoples’ right to determine the way its government is organised, and externally the right to reject claims of authority by another state. For example, feminist analysis critiques the western liberal account of legal personality which does not consider the individual self-determination of its citizens: until certain basic civil rights are protected, there can be no ‘self’ in either an individual or communal sense. This has also been an historically-constant paradox for Indigenous or marginalised women. Their position between social and national determination in the anti-colonisation movement that arose internationally was often arguably a struggle for self-determination understood in an exclusivist, abstract and nationalistic sense. 

Coming from a bourgeois, Jewish, and Polish family, Rosa Luxemburg’s reflections on self-determination directly came from her experience as a minority in a country inflamed by national aspirations against Prussian militarism and colonial expansion. Due to her positionality, she had a privileged standpoint to reflect on the flourishing of self-determination by European minorities and colonised peoples. Deborah Whitehall elucidates the struggle of thinking of a future of self-determination coalesced in the nation-state as the standard unit of international governance.^[1] This prompts a possibility for contesting the mainstream idea of self-determination in a way which predicts the inability of the system put in place by the League of Nations to stabilise Europe during the interwar period. Luxemburg speaks for the rights of people from a ‘double margin’: first, as a socialist, agitating for international workers’ revolution as the alternative to liberal internationalism that dominated the post-war settlements; and second, as the principal antagonist of Lenin’s radical articulation of self-determination. In her radical position between male liberal and radical approaches, her idea speaks to the indeterminacy and potentialities entrenched in the malleability of concepts before their crystallisation in international legal texts.

Luxemburg’s Theory of Capitalist Accumulation and Self-Determination:

Luxemburg’s thoughts on self-determination are important for taking into account her economic theory of capitalist accumulation and exploitation. For her, imperialism was crucial to the accumulation of capital throughout capitalism’s history, because accumulation of capital was possible only through capitalist expansion i.e. through tapping into the resources of non-capitalist modes of production and exchange. Due to the centrality of class in her analysis, she persistently objected to the idea that national self-determination could be considered progressive. First, because it failed to grasp that the modern state was characterised by national multiplicity so that nationalism would always become a pretext for secession or irredentism. Secondly, because nationalism was the expression of the bourgeois class which would have run the state in its own interests. Moreover, in her work, she refers to the difference between internal and external self-determination: she criticises the normalisation of the split between internal and external self-determination, and the separation from claims of identity and claims of territory. The definition of external self-determination, or freedom from invasion, she argues, omits the more important internal understanding as the right of citizenship. Her war analysis is interestingly useful for the mandate territories and minorities treaties, explaining why the right to shape collective entitlements under conditions of imperialisms could not but have been a socialist failure. In this sense, the equal recognition of all peoples as citizens, or the internal dimension of a self-determining nation, was the premise and task of international socialism. 

Rosa Luxemburg’s relevance to self-determination for feminist legal thinking is multifaceted: it can be seen in her rejection of war and militarism, and in the recognition of their importance for capitalist accumulation; in her anti-exclusivist and anti-homogeneous conceptualisation of the ‘self’ within individual and collective self-determination; and, finally, in the relevance of her positionality at the intersections between different axes of identity. Her writings foster a critique of meta-ideas of international law as a system of interlocking domination and hierarchical oppressions that have substantiated a homogenous, bounded, and abstract construction of statehood and sovereignty in which women and minorities’ citizenship is denied. Her discomfort with an understanding of a limited, fixed and exclusivist notion of identify, coming from her experience as a woman, as a Jew, and as a Pole, allowed her to think of the relations between the sexes not exhausted in legal equality and in equal rights before the law, but as grounded on an analysis of (gender) oppression based on class. This, furthermore, can inspire the work of feminist international scholars to further explore how gendered relations inform and reproduce inequality and hierarchies of power in the international. 

Rosa Luxemburg, Feminist Approaches to International Law, and Today’s Struggles

To conclude, Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas and writings on self-determination and the centrality of capitalist modes of production are relevant today to unite and fight for decolonisation, and to end settler-colonial oppression of Indigenous peoples, in Israel/Palestine, in Kashmir, Western Sahara, Basque lands, Crimea, Cyprus, Kurdistan, Southern Sudan, and the Americas. Furthermore, Rosa Luxemburg’s thinking helps us to re-think human ‘emancipation’ and freedom, humanity, and its relationship with the rest of nature. Disrupting both the long-lasting core international legal concepts such as ‘self-determination’, ‘legal personality’ and ‘sovereignty’ and the hierarchies between humans such as gender, race and class, would allow us to develop and use Rosa Luxemburg’ critical feminist analysis to address international law’s pressing contemporary challenges that, nowhere as in Israel/Palestine, see technoscientific capitalist expansion, regulations of military technologies, and issues of self-determination so strictly entrenched. 

^[1] Whitehall D, A Rival History of Self-Determination, 27 European Journal of International Law 3, 2016, pp. 719–743, https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chw042.