Three
A stable feature of human nature, over and above a normal physical constitution, is the need to possess a distinct history, which is one’s own and not that of all mankind, and also to cultivate that which is particular and that is believed to be the best of this time and of that place, alongside and within the universal and moral claims that are common to all people as such. —Stuart Hampshire
Although the right to national self-determination has often been at the heart of modern political discourse, theoretical analyses of this right are rather rare. Mainly the work of international lawyers, these analyses are heavily influenced by legal and political precedent. Political philosophers have also tended to infer the contents of the right from past and present political arrangements, and have thus suggested that the core of national self-determination is the right to determine whether “a certain territory shall become, or remain, a separate state.”1 The thrust of this right, in the interpretation that has become prevalent in the postcolonial era, is that “a people—if it so wills—is entitled to independence from foreign domination, i.e., it may establish a sovereign state in the territory in which it lives and where it constitutes a majority.”2 The right to national self-determination, however, stakes a cultural rather than a political claim, namely, it is the right to preserve the existence of a nation as a distinct cultural entity. This right differs from the right of individuals to govern their lives and to participate in a free and democratic political process. The present discussion of the right to national self-determination should therefore be seen as continuing and expanding the argument developed earlier. This chapter takes the argument one step forward and advances a claim that is central to the theory of liberal nationalism, namely, that national claims are not synonymous with demands for political sovereignty.
There are two main advantages to a cultural interpretation of the right to national self-determination. First, it places this right in the general context of rights granted to different cultural groups, such as ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples. Second, it seems better suited to the present world, which is experiencing a tension between the clear advantages of transnational economic, strategic, and ecological cooperation on the one hand, and the increasing concern with the preservation of national and cultural uniqueness, leading to demands for partition and the establishment of autonomous national entities, on the other.
The second issue is more extensively discussed in the final chapter, but it is important to indicate at this point that this book suggests a significant modification in the traditional argument for national self-determination. Given the present state of affairs, it shall argue that it is the cultural rather than the political version of nationalism that best accords with a liberal viewpoint.
The view that the right to national self-determination is first and foremost a cultural claim is heavily dependent on the perception of nations as particular types of cultural communities. The first step will therefore be to substantiate this perception.
Nations, States, and Cultural Communities
The concept of “nation” is rather elusive, and it may therefore be advisable to begin by establishing what a nation is not. A nation is not a state. It may seem obvious that a state and a nation are not one and the same, but the fact is that these terms are often used interchangeably. A report on nationalism written by a study group at the Royal Institute of International Affairs defines “nation” as “used synonymously with ‘state’ or ‘country’ to mean a society united under one government.” This sense of the term does not merely reflect a prevalent speech usage, but is found in such official expressions as “the laws of nations” or “League of Nations.”3
This identification between state and nation is endorsed by Weil, who claims that “there is no other way of defining the word nation than as a territorial aggregate whose various parts recognise the authority of the same State.”4 Complementary claims are made by Deutsch, who defines a nation as “a people who have hold of a state,”5 as well as by Hertz, who asserts that the identification of a nation with a people constituted as a state is very widespread and that, accordingly, “every state forms a nation and every citizen is a member of the nation.”6 The term “national” is usually employed for designating “anything run or controlled by the state, such as the national debt or national health insurance.”7
These definitions might lead to the conclusion that “state” and “nation” are identical concepts, or at least two aspects of the same concept—one relating to the institutional sphere, the other to the individuals who participate in the formation and the activities of these institutions. It could thus be expected that, reciprocally, the definition of “state” would include parameters found in the definition of nation. Yet this is not the case: The concept “nation,” if at all mentioned when defining a state, appears only in the combination “nation-state” as one of its various possible forms. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines “state” as the political organisation of society. There are two accepted meanings of the word “state,”—one more general, referring to a body of people that has organised politically, and the other more specific, implying the institutions of government. The state is distinguished from other associations by its goals, by the methods it employs in accomplishing these goals, by the marking of territorial limits, and by its sovereignty. Sovereignty distinguishes the state from other kinds of human associations: It entails the monopoly of power as well as the creation and control of law.
According to Dyson, the main characteristics of the state are the specific quality of its authority (its sovereignty), its extraordinary and growing resources of physical power, and its well-defined territory.8 None of these features is considered an essential characteristic of the concept “nation.”9
In his concluding remarks on the development of the concept “state” in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, D’Entreves predicts that the nation-state will be replaced by “a new supra-national state.” He follows this hypothesis with an interesting question:
But will this [the disappearance of the nation-state] mean the disappearance of the state, its ‘withering away’—to use the familiar Marxist phrase? So long as there will be an organization capable of controlling force, regulating power and securing allegiances, one thing seems certain . . . that organization will still be a state.10
For D’Entreves, then, the link between states and nations is a historical coincidence, but this should not blur the conceptual distinction between them. As Seton-Watson rightly emphasises, a state is “a legal and political organization with the power to require obedience and loyalty from its citizens,” while the nation is “a community of people, whose members are bound together by a sense of solidarity, a common culture, a national consciousness.”11
What is the origin of this conceptual confusion between nation and state? It could be claimed that it is part of a deliberate attempt to obscure the difference between the claim that every nation ought to have a state—or rather, that every state ought to derive its legitimacy from a nation—and the claim that a nation is a state. The attempt to present the nationalist slogan “one people, one country, one language” as descriptive rather than normative, illustrates this tendency to suggest a complete identification between state and nation.12 It seems, however, that the wide prevalence of this false identification cannot simply be attributed to a deliberate nationalist effort, but rather reflects the historical processes that accompanied the emergence of the modern nation-state.
Let us look back at this formative period, at the end of the eighteenth century. In line with Rousseau’s philosophy, and revealing its influence on contemporary political developments, the state was identified with its subjects rather than with its rulers. The belief that the state should be the “institutional representation of the people’s will”13 formed the basis of the American and French revolutions, marking a substantial shift in the type of legitimacy sought by political institutions, from justifications based on divine or dynastic right to justifications grounded in popular voluntary consent. The underlying assumption of this view is that citizens have a right to rule themselves, and that the authority of the government is grounded in the people’s will. This shift has placed the political democratic interpretation of the right to self-rule at the center of modern political thought. Self-determination came to be seen as “a democratic ideal valid for all mankind.”14
This fit between democratic universalist ideals and the emerging national ideology reflected the sociopolitical realities of the time. The American Revolution created a new nation, comprising those politically empowered before the Declaration of Independence, and excluding non-property holders, women, blacks, and native Indians.15 The right to self-determination was understood as equivalent to the taxpayers’ right to political representation. A complete overlap was thereby created between the citizens of the state and the members of the nation. So strong was this identification between state and nation that it still holds today, and in the United States the term “nation” refers to the federal state.
A different process, although with similar results, unfolded in France. Whereas in America the new state had created a nation, the French Third Estate, in its search for an autonomous source of political legitimation independent from that of the old royalist regime, “invented” a nation, presented itself as its true representative, and demanded the right to self-rule. The state then became the official embodiment of the nation, the one true fatherland. As Abbe Volfius put it in 1790, “The true fatherland is the political community where all citizens protected by the same laws, united by the same interests, enjoy the natural rights of man and participate in the common cause.”16
Consequently, at this particular historical stage, the question of who constitutes the people—the members of the state or the members of the nation—seemed irrelevant. The nation, now equated with the body of citizens, came to be understood as the “body of persons who could claim to represent, or to elect representatives for, a particular territory at councils, diets or estates.” It became widely accepted that “the principle of sovereignty resides essentially in the nation; no body of men, no individual, can exercise authority that does not emanate from it.”17 The nation became the unique symbol of fellowship among all members of the political framework, as well as the tie between the rulers and the ruled. A new political norm ensued, fostering the belief that “the legitimating principle of politics and state-making is nationalism; no other principle commands mankind’s allegiance.”18 The shift from a justification relying on democratic principles to one based on national ones, from a belief in the right of citizens to self-rule to one claiming support for the right of nations to self-determination, was thereby completed. New terms of discourse had been established, masking the possible internal contradictions between the democratic and the national approach.
In modern political discourse, the right of individuals to determine their government remains a basic tenet of both liberal and nationalist doctrines. But the course of history since the end of the eighteenth century has been marked by a series of social, economic, and political upheavals—migrations, the establishment of new states inhabited by more than one nation, and the inclusion of groups that had previously been excluded from the political process. All these undermine the identification between the citizens of the state and the members of the nation, and it is no longer plausible to equate the right of citizens to self-rule with the right of members of the nation to self-determination. But although there are hardly any nationally homogeneous states left, the political discourse has not adapted itself to these developments. As late as 1960, when the Covenant on Human Rights was drafted, it was clear that the terms “people” and “nation” had never been adequately defined, and a disturbing confusion reigned between these two and the concept of majorities.
Since the nation had become the only valid source of state legitimacy, every group of individuals who saw themselves as a nation yearned to establish an independent state, and members of every state hoped to transform themselves from a population into a nation. Governments were pressured to prove that they represented a nation rather than a mere gathering of individuals. As a result, they developed an interest in homogenizing their populations—they began to intervene in the language, the interpretation of history, the myths and symbols or, to put it more broadly, in the culture of their citizens. The modern nation-state thus became the agent for cultural, linguistic, and sometimes religious unification—it attempted to build a nation.
The holistic character of the nation-state found support in Rousseau’s concept of the general will, in Burke’s organic view of the state, and in Hegel’s perception of the state as “the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom.”19 Burke ends his Reflections on the Revolution in France by suggesting an idealistic, holistic description of the state, emphasising the metaphysical link between state and nation, in contrast with the civic link discussed earlier. The state, says Burke, is not
a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.20
The state is thus seen as the sphere in which individuals are moulded socially, culturally, and ethically. It is the arena where morality and spirituality are created, transmitted, and perfected.
Two very distinct lines of thought emerge from the political interpretation of the right to national self-determination: the idealist one, best represented by Hegel, and the individualist-civic one, exemplified by Mill. As Burke insightfully suggests, the identification between individual and national liberties typical of the civic version was natural for a nation like England, which had developed a “pedigree of liberties” based on the Magna Carta. But in Germany and Russia, which had none of these traditions, identifying with the history and the “spirit” of the nation was likely to lead to a relinquishment of liberal-democratic values, and to the emergence of romantic, organic perceptions. These fears were actualised in Hegel’s philosophy of the nation-state. The nation-state, argues Hegel, “is mind in its substantive rationality and immediate actuality and is therefore the absolute power on earth.” At every moment in the history of the world, there is a nation “to which is ascribed a moment of the Idea in the form of a natural principle entrusted with giving complete effect to it in the advance of the self-development self-conciousness of the world mind. This nation is dominant in world history during this one epoch, and it is only once that it can make its hour strike.”21 In this spirit, Hegel strongly opposed the individualism embodied in the civic version, which he viewed as a glorification of egoism and individual capriciousness, as leading to a plutocracy. He criticised the German nation of his times for its internal schisms, its particularism and provincialism, and was moved to think that it could only be saved by subordinating the parts—be they individuals or local political units—to the whole. His views gave metaphysical justification to the union between the nation and the state, promoting the view that political independence was a precondition for a nation’s ability to fulfill its historical mission and be “a vehicle” of a certain stage “in the world’s mind.”22
These two traditions dominated the modern understanding of the nation-state, and supported the identification between “state” and “nation.” This identification has not stood the test of history, however, and there are almost no nationally homogeneous states today. Irrespective of the fact that nations may attempt to establish states, and states may prefer to present themselves as representing nations, the two no longer overlap.
So what is a nation? The discussion so far has been concerned with what a nation is not. We now approach the much more difficult task of clarifying what it is.
What Is a Nation?
In order to answer this question, we could begin with the modern concept of nation-building. The concern with the deliberate creation of a nation is guided by a certain idea of what a nation is supposed to be.
The inherent contradiction between the claim that nations are natural communities shaped by history and fate and the concept of nation-building is immediately apparent. In order to mask this tension, nation-builders compulsively search for “ancestral origins” to which the new nation might “return,” cling to even the faintest testimony of historical continuity, and advance patently false claims locating the nation’s roots in a distant past. By emphasising the “link to the past,” nation-builders try to play down the fact that their nation is the outcome of a bureaucratic decision or an international agreement and its national consciousness is only beginning to take shape. They focus their attempts on projecting an image of “a real nation,” a group sharing a common denominator based on history, culture, language, tradition, and rituals. “Nationalism itself teaches that all nations have a past by definition.”23 Hence,
those movements which could not fall back upon a community with long and rich cultural heritage sought to imitate those which could do so by, if necessary, “inventing” or rather “rediscovering” and “annexing” histories and cultures for their communities, in order to provide that cultural base without which no nationalism can attain widespread legitimation.24
The history of all nations is therefore saturated with invented traditions.25 Invented tradition is defined by Hobsbawm as “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.”26 The national emphasis on a shared culture plays a similar role. By definition, culture has a past, a history; “the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values.”27 Through this alleged connection with the past, culture supports the nation’s pretension to be natural, genuine, and unique. The importance that nation-builders ascribe to the invention of tradition and to the notion of a shared history and culture hints at the role these ideas are meant to play in national life. They respond to the urge for continuity, the desire to see at least some parts of social life as unchanging and invariant, and to the need for a locus of identification.
Osterud’s definition of nation-building as the sum of policies designed to promote national integration illuminates another aspect of the nationalist concept of the nation. Nation-building, Osterud argues, “is an architectural metaphor for the process induced within a state to integrate the country and tie the inhabitants together in a national fellowship.”28 The ideal of national fellowship symbolises a belief in the existence of special ties and obligations binding the members of a nation. Nationalists view this ideal as the natural outcome of a collective destiny, a shared culture, and a faith in a common future, emphasising the perception of the nation as “a caring community,” where individuals are able to overcome their egoistic inclinations and cooperate for the sake of mutual prosperity.
The concept of nation-building also illuminates the tension between the subjective and the objective definitions of a nation. Although largely human creations, nations seek to validate their existence by reference to ostensibly objective features. Nevertheless, all attempts to single out a particular set of objective features—be it a common history, collective destiny, language, religion, territory, climate, race, ethnicity—as necessary and sufficient for the definition of a nation have ended in failure. Although all these features have been mentioned as characteristic of some nations, no nation will have all of them. A nation could thus be understood as a cluster concept, that is, in order to count as a nation a group has to have a “sufficient number” of certain characteristics. Although they do not necessarily share the same set of identifying features, all members within the category “nation” will, therefore, show some family resemblance. Only one factor is necessary, although not sufficient, for a group to be defined as a nation—the existence of national consciousness. The best we can say, according to Cobban, is that “any territorial community, the members of which are conscious of themselves as members of a community, and wish to maintain the identity of their community, is a nation.”29 Seton-Watson makes a similar claim when he argues that it is impossible to arrive at a scientifically precise definition of a nation. At best, a nation can be said to exist when “a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.”30
At this point, it is important to distinguish between two closely related terms: nation and people. Although in the literature they often appear interchangeably, a nation is a community conscious of its particularistic existence, whereas the concept of “people” belongs to the same social category as “family” or “tribe,” that is, a people is one of those social units whose existence is independent of their members’ consciousness. It follows then that there must be some objective fact, such as relations of blood, race, a defined territory, or the like, which will allow an outsider to define a people without reference to the awareness of its members. The endurance of peoples, unlike that of nations, does not depend on the presence of a national consciousness or on the will of individuals to determine themselves as members.
In the present work, a group is defined as a nation if it exhibits both a sufficient number of shared, objective characteristics—such as language, history, or territory—and self-awareness of its distinctiveness. An occasional group of individuals lacking any shared characteristics cannot, merely by the power of its will, turn into a nation, and hence the importance of the first part of the definition. An answer to the question of what constitutes a sufficient number of distinct characteristics whereby a group becomes a nation, however, cannot rely on objective features only. Drawing the boundaries of a nation involves a conscious and deliberate effort to lessen the importance of objective differences within the group while reinforcing the group’s uniqueness vis-à-vis outsiders.
The Jewish nation provides an interesting example. Jews from Israel, Russia, Ethiopia, and the United States share few objective characteristics, including race or skin colour, although they claim to share a religion and a history. My Judaism is very different from that of an Ethiopian Jew, or that of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, or that of a newcomer from Latvia who never practiced her Judaism and was not even conscious of it until recently. It is in fact doubtful whether an outsider could ever define the Jews as one nation on the basis of objective features. The Palestinian nation offers a diametrically opposed example. Palestinians share many objective features with other Arabs, and it might well be the case that from a historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious point of view, Palestinians have more in common with Jordanians or Syrians than a native Israeli has with an Ethiopian Jew. Yet, Palestinians feel that they belong to a distinct nation, while Ethiopian Jews and native Israelis feel that they belong to the same national group. These feelings can of course change and bring about the destruction of nations or result in the emergence of new ones. Nations exist only as long as their members share a feeling of communal membership, and in this sense, Renan’s metaphor of a nationhood as “an everyday plebiscite”31 accurately captures the important role of “the will to belong” in the definition of a nation.
Hampshire points to the importance of a willed emphasis on similarities as well as of a conscious downplay of divergence in the construction of a nation:
The self-conscious and willed reinforcement of differences in behaviour and in interests between groups of human beings is the effect of a shared habit of thinking of these differences historically and under descriptions that identify the differences. This source of continual reinforcement of differences is, as far as we know, unique to human beings. . . . There are many thousands of languages in the different regions of the world, and they are used to preserve the distinct history and habits of a particular population; and this remembered history will in turn reinforce the consciousness of difference.32
Hence, as Renan claims, the emergence of a nation is dependent on both the “possession in common of a rich legacy of remembrances” and “a shared amnesia, a collective forgetfulness.”33 The French nation tends to emphasise its oneness rather than the specific history and traditions of Bretons, Provencaux, Burgundians, Germans, Basques, and Catalans, just as the English nation tends to disregard the differences among Britons, Anglos, Saxons, Jutes, and Danes in order to promote a feeling of unity.
Nations, old or new, tend to reshape their past, reinterpret their culture, forget differentiating features, and embrace common characteristics in order to create the illusion of a “natural” unit with a long, mostly glorious history and a promising future. This process takes place within a context and does not imply that “anything goes.” Invention depends on the existence of some shared features that may be highlighted to reinforce feelings of unity and allow members to recognise each other, a major element in the building of a nation. The belief that “nation marketh man,” the illusion that we can rely on the notion of a national character in order to set the borders of national groups, is essential to the understanding of modern nationality:
A mere category of persons (say, occupants of a given territory, or speakers of a given language, for example) becomes a nation if and when the members of the category firmly recognize certain mutual rights and duties to each other in virtue of their shared membership of it. It is their recognition of each other as fellows of this kind which turns them into a nation, and not the other shared attributes, whatever they might be, which separate that category from non-members.34
The set of specific features that enable members of a nation to distinguish between themselves and others is culture. Culture, says Williams, is the ordinary:
Every human society has its own shape, its own purpose, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these in institutions and in arts and leanings. The making of society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment, under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land. The growing society is there, yet it is also made and remade in every individual mind.35
Culture is seen here as embodying patterns of behaviour, language, norms, myths, and symbols that enable mutual recognition. Consequently, two people are of the same nation if, and only if, they share the same culture.36
Communities, Anderson argues, are to be distinguished not by their falsity or genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. Nations are communities imagined through culture, and are therefore “cultural artifacts of a particular kind.”37 Modern nations are too large to allow all their members to encounter each other personally. Recognition of fellow members, the drawing of boundaries between members and nonmembers, thus becomes a product of human imagination, contingent on the belief that there are similarities among members.
This definition of nations as cultural communities demarcated by the imaginative power of their members raises many difficulties. There are many kinds of cultural groups, some as large as Western civilisation and others as small as the Amish community. Intuitively, we would not tend to classify such groups as nations, although they might be seen as falling within the parameters of our definition. How, then, can we distinguish between nations and other cultural groups? There is no satisfactory answer to this question, nor can we draw more rigorous boundaries. Greater precision, if at all possible, would force us to overlook the immense variety of social phenomena laying claim to the title “nation.” Established nations often set criteria concerning numbers, territory, or language, aimed at preventing others from attaining recognition as nations, a status they themselves already enjoy. There is no objective way to determine when two cultures are too close to be separated, and when the differences between them are significant enough to justify the emergence of a new group. Hence, when members of a particular group sharing some identifying national characteristics define themselves as a nation, they ought to be seen as one, lest they become victims of a needless injustice.
This definition is valid even if it creates problems regarding a small number of borderline cases. It is a fact that most claims for national self-determination are advanced by groups to whom the term “nation” applies without great difficulty. The analysis of the right to national self-determination, developed in the next section demonstrates that fears about the possible fragmentation of the political system resulting from the adoption of too loose a definition of the term “nation” have been highly overrated. These fears have been nurtured by the suspicion that behind every demand for national recognition lurks a separatist claim for the establishment of an independent nation-state. This, however, need not be the case.
Justifying the Right to National Self-Determination
The right to national self-determination was contested at three turning points in the twentieth century: after World War I, during the days of Wilson’s Fourteen Points; after World War II, throughout the process of decolonization; and at the end of the 1980s, following the social and political revolution in Eastern and Central Europe. At each of these points, the justification of this right was couched in different terms.
Historically, the interpretation of the right to national self-determination followed two distinct courses, each relying on a different definition of the term “nation,” and deriving its justification from the protection of a different individual interest.
According to the cultural version, “nation” is defined as a community sharing a set of objective characteristics grouped under the rubric of culture and national consciousness. Consequently, the right to national self-determination is understood as the right of a nation or, more precisely, the members of a nation, to preserve their distinct existence, and to manage communal life in accordance with their particular way of life. The democratic version defines “nation” as synonymous with “the governed,” that is, the group of individuals living under the same rule. Hence, self-determination is understood as the right of individuals to participate in the governing of their lives. This right relies on the principle explicitly affirmed in the 1947 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country directly or through freely chosen representatives.”
These interpretations offer two independent approaches to fundamental principles concerning the formation and development of states. Whereas the first version suitably reflects the national essence of the right to self-determination, the second does not derive its justification from national thinking but rather from liberal, democratic ideals.
Although most discussions of the right to national self-determination reflect a confusion between these two versions, self-rule and national self-determination are two distinct concepts. They differ in their individualistic and communal aspects, represent two distinct human goods, and derive their value from two separate human interests.
The individualistic aspect of both these rights celebrates personal autonomy and the right of individuals to make constitutive choices. Whereas in the right to self-rule this aspect points to the right of individuals to govern their lives without being subject to external dictates, in the case of self-determination, it concerns the way in which individuals define their personal and national identity.
In its communal aspect, national self-determination entails a process whereby individuals seek to give public expression to their national identity. Hence, it is often described as the right of individuals to a public sphere, thus implying that individuals are entitled to establish institutions and manage their communal life in ways that reflect their communal values, traditions, and history—in short, their culture. The communal aspect of self-rule refers to the right of individuals to participate in the determination of the aims and the policies adopted by the political group they belong to, that is, their right to have a say in the fundamental decisions affecting the political process. It thus places at its center the right of individuals to participate in their country’s government.
Accordingly, if individuals have an opportunity to participate in a fair political process—where all members are given an equal chance to take part as well as to present their views and persuade others to join them—they can be said to enjoy self-rule. But enjoying self-rule does not mean having one’s views accepted. In pluralistic and heterogeneous communities, as most modern states indeed are, one will inevitably be outvoted on a variety of issues. At the conclusion of a fair process, individuals may find themselves in a minority position, unable to influence, let alone imprint the political sphere with their culture, preferences, and norms of behaviour, yet they could hardly claim that their right to self-rule has been violated. Hence, when given a fair opportunity to participate in the political process that structures their lives, individuals can be said to enjoy self-rule, irrespective of the results of this process.
By contrast, the right to national self-determination is not only measured by the ability to participate in determining the cultural nature of the social and political system one belongs to, but also by the results of this process. National self-determination is said to be attained only when certain features, unique to the nation, find expression in the political sphere.
Some examples might shed light on the distinction between self-rule and national self-determination. The process of European unification may eventually lead to the creation of one European state in which all European citizens will probably enjoy a full range of civil rights. A European state would thus allow all Europeans to fulfill their right to self-rule, but would not necessarily provide opportunities for members of different nations to realise their right to national self-determination.38 Conversely, an undemocratic nation-state would deprive members of the nation of their right to self-rule, but not of their right to national self-determination. The yearning for national self-determination is different from, and may even contradict, the liberal democratic struggle for civil rights and political participation. Indeed, history shows that individuals often desire to secure status and recognition for their nation, even at the cost of relinquishing their civil rights and liberties. The Human Rights Committee was therefore wrong to view the realisation of the right to national self-determination as an essential condition for the effective guarantee and observance of individual human rights.”39 Members of nations granted national self-determination can, and indeed have, set up regimes that restrict the human rights of their fellow nationals, while individuals can enjoy a full range of civil rights even when not governed by their fellow nationals. As is evident from the above examples, national self-determination has little to do with civil rights and political participation. It is a search, as Berlin defines it, not for Millian freedoms and civil liberties, but for status. This is neither a struggle for the “equality of legal rights” nor for the “liberty to do as one wishes,” although one may want these too, but for recognition. It expresses the desire to live in a meaningful environment, where one can feel a sense of familiarity or even identification with the rulers, irrespective of whether this is indeed true or merely a comfortable illusion:
It is this desire for reciprocal recognition that leads the most authoritarian democracies to be, at times, consciously preferred by its members to the most enlightened oligarchies, or sometimes causes a member of some newly liberated Asian or African state to complain less today, when he is rudely treated by members of his own race or nation, than when he was governed by some cautious, just, gentle, well-meaning administrator from outside. I may feel unfree in the sense of not being recognized as a self-governing individual human being; but I may feel it also as a member of an unrecognized or insufficiently respected group: I wish for the emancipation of my entire class, or community, or nation, or race, or profession. So much can I desire this, that I may, in my bitter longing for status, prefer to be bullied and misgoverned by some member of my own race or social class, by whom I am nevertheless, recognized as a man and a rival—that is as an equal—to being well and tolerantly treated by someone from some higher and remoter group, who does not recognize me for what I wish myself to be. This is the heart of the great cry for recognition on the part of both individuals and groups, and in our own day, of professions and classes, nations and races.40
Individuals wish to be ruled by institutions informed by a culture they find understandable and meaningful, and which allows a certain degree of transparency that facilitates their participation in public affairs. When they are able to identify their own culture in the political framework, when the political institutions reflect familiar traditions, historical interpretations, and norms of behaviour, individuals come to perceive themselves as the creators, or at least the carriers, of a valuable set of beliefs.
The right to national self-determination cannot be reduced to other human rights, and more particularly, is not synonymous with rights to political participation or with freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and association. It is thus mistaken to claim that when civic rights are fully respected, “it is difficult to see how the right to self-determination could be denied.”41 Members of national minorities who live in liberal democracies, like the Quebecois and the Indians in Canada, the Aborigines in Australia, or the Basques in France, are not deprived of their freedoms and civil liberties, yet feel marginalised and dispossessed because they are governed by a political culture and political institutions imprinted by a culture not their own.
If the right to national self-determination cannot be reduced to the right to self-rule or to a range of civil rights and liberties, what is its essence?
The Essence of Cultural Self-Determination
The cultural interpretation of the right to national self-determination developed so far views it as the right of individuals to express their national identity, to protect, preserve, and cultivate the existence of their nation as a distinct entity. The emphasis on the cultural aspect links this discussion to issues concerning the right to culture raised in the previous chapter. It now seems obvious that the right to national self-determination is merely a particular case of the right to culture. In this light, the right to national self-determination should be seen as an individual right, contingent on a willed decision of individuals to affiliate themselves with a particular national group and to give public expression to this affiliation. The discussion in the previous chapter suggested that isolated individuals can enjoy the right to national self-determination but are restricted in their ability to give it full expression in the absence of a shared public space. But does the claim that individuals have the right to a national public sphere entail a right to establish their own nation-state?
The full scope of the argument must be unfolded in order to answer this question. The justification of the right to national self-determination rests on six counts:
Unquestionably, a nation-state can ensure the widest possible degree of national autonomy and the maximum range of possibilities for the enjoyment of national life. Yet, it is commonly assumed that the implementation of rights is to be restricted so as to assure all individuals an equal sphere of freedom. Rawls’ first principle of justice illustrates this constraint well. Each person “is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for all.”43 On this basis, it could be argued that the freedom of members of each nation to enjoy the right to national self-determination is to be restricted in order to allow members of other nations to enjoy this right. This is the rationale that motivates Walzer to argue that “the goal is a world of states within relatively secure borders, from which no sizable group of people is excluded.”44 The gains some people have made by acquiring states of their own, he argues, “must become gains for every one.”45 Since not all nations can attain this degree of national autonomy, and since restricting the implementation of this right only to nations able to establish one would lead to grave inequalities, other solutions must be sought.
The right to national-self determination can be satisfied through a variety of political arrangements—the establishment of national institutions, the formation of autonomous communities, or the establishment of federal or confederal states—able to ensure individuals the opportunity to participate in the national life of their community. It is pointless to search for an overall guiding principle to determine when the right to national self-determination justifies a certain political solution. The particular conditions of each case will determine the best solution under the specific circumstances.
The costs of each solution should, in each case, be weighed against its benefits. This implies that luck plays an important role in the ability of nations to enjoy the right to self-determination in its most comprehensive sense. Nations living in large, isolated territories are more likely to gain autonomy than nations living in densely populated areas, and factors such as natural resources, arable lands, access to the sea, a temperate climate, or topographical advantages, are also influential. Another important consideration in this context is the size of the communities involved: the larger the numbers who would benefit from a certain policy, the heavier the burdens it would be justified to impose on others. As Raz suggests, although national self-determination is justified on the basis of the interests of individual members of the community, “the interest of any one of them is an inadequate ground for holding others to be duty-bound to satisfy that interest. The right [of self-determination] rests on the cumulative interests of many individuals.”46 Although it is hard to say how many is many, the argument does imply that the larger the community, the more extensive the range of rights its members will enjoy. The claim that size matters, however, is meaningful only if the right to national self-determination is perceived as a cumulative individual right. If approached as a collective right, it is hard to see on what grounds larger groups are entitled to a more extensive enjoyment of it. In this sense, the ability to enjoy the right to national self-determination is subject to the external and internal limitations discussed in the previous chapter.
It is therefore assumed that different nations will be able to implement their right to self-determination in varying degrees. As long as this variance only reflects the unequal distribution of the chance factors mentioned above, it is hard to claim that a wrong was done. We can then conclude that all nations are equally entitled to enjoy the widest possible degree of national self-determination allowed by their specific circumstances.
Adopting a cultural, individualistic view of the right to national self-determination enables us to place along one continuum the justification of the rights of nations—whether they are minorities or constitute the majority within a particular state—and the justification of rights granted to ethnic groups and indigenous peoples. Members of these groups share a vital interest in the preservation of their distinct cultural identity.
Members of national minorities are entitled to national rights because they have an interest in preserving their unique cultural essence. In this sense, the term “minorities” should not be understood as merely pointing to the group’s proportional size but rather to the extent to which its culture is reflected in the public space. Dinstein indeed argues that “minority” should not be understood in numerical terms, and defines a minority as a group playing a “minor role in the affairs of the country.”47 But this definition might be misleading, as it could very well apply to the American Communist party, to stamp collectors, or to many other groups that, although likely to play a minor political role, are not entitled to the same rights as national minorities.
The cultural interpretation of the right to national self-determination highlights the importance of provisions aimed at protecting the cultural, religious, and linguistic identity of minorities and assuring them an opportunity to live alongside the majority, “co-operating amicably with it, while at the same time preserving the characteristics which distinguish them from the majority, and satisfying the ensuing special needs.”48 The following premise in the United Nations’ charter, which uses a civil rights rather than a cultural rights terminology to formulate the rights of minorities to national self-determination, is thus particularly alarming: “In a world where individual rights are fully protected, minority groups will disappear with time and the ‘nationality problem’ would cease to pose a threat to world stability.” In the guise of protecting the right of a minority to national self-determination, this statement could be used to justify assimilationalist policies.49
The demand for special rights put forward by indigenous peoples lends further support to the cultural interpretation of the right to national self-determination. Their claim is not merely a call for justice and for redressing past wrongs, but reflects their wish to ensure full expression of their distinct cultural identity. It is clear that translating the struggle of indigenous peoples into civic rather than cultural terms obscures the issue.
A cultural, individualistic interpretation of the right, based on the distinction between the right to self-rule and the right to national self-determination, seems better suited to meet the challenges of the next century. The final chapter of this book elaborates on these ideas, casting doubts on the viability of independent nation-states and suggesting that state powers should devolve both to smaller, autonomous national entities on the one hand, and to larger, regional frameworks on the other.