David Ilmar Beecher (Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu)
The Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organizations (UNPO) was inaugurated in February 1991 in the throes of the collapse of the Soviet Union by Second and Third World activists suspicious of First World triumphalism at the “End of History”. In the words of the UNPO Yearbooks of 1995 and 1996, it was “born out of a feeling of frustration at the exclusion of nations, peoples and minorities which do not constitute independent states from access to international fora and organizations”, the fear that behind the smokescreen of a more just rule-bound Postwar politics inaugurated by the United Nations, the international system remained one of imperial domination of the weak by the strong.
This paper introduces the origins of the organization in the social vision and political struggles of its four founding fathers (Linnart Mäll, Lodi Gyari, Erkin Alptekin and Michael van Walt van Praag) who conceived and drafted the organization in a series of meetings in Tartu and Tallinn in 1990 and 1991, situating their vision in relation to the three main competing discourses of self-determination of the historical moment Francis Fukuyama dubbed “the end of history”: (1) decolonization, (2) human right and (3) the free market. Latvia and Estonia were among the original fifteen founding members of the UNPO. Lithuania was invited but did not join. The future Chechen president and Tartu acquaintance of Linnart Mäll, Dzhokhar Dudayev, joined the UNPO on behalf of Chechnya on the eve of his election to the Chechen presidency in 1991.
In addition to offering a specifically late-20th century origin story of a new global political solidarity, this paper proposes the UNPO as one logical end and possible solution to the long story of self-determination that goes back to the Enlightenment, putting at the center of its agitation the core problem of any world order imagined to be based on democratic politics: representing the unrepresented. Though it has ultimately failed to reorganize or re-prioritize the international system, the very existence of the UNPO should thus be understood as an important late 20th-century answer to a late 18th-century question about how a new world order of perpetual peace, justice and prosperity might be achieved by a better accommodation of the world’s peoples with its states.