A characteristic of political movements today is the appeal to selfdetermination. It has entered the political discourse of populist politics and has given a new impetus to nationalism. Populist politics, broadly defined as anti-establishment and nativistic, has become a new force in the world today and has changed the political context of Europeanisation. Populists are no longer outsiders; they are now part of the mainstream, though when they join the mainstream, they are no longer outsiders. While by no means entirely right-wing, in Europe populism has been predominantly associated with right-wing politics and has been successfully embraced by the extreme right for which it has become a convenient way of escaping the damaging label of fascism. The appeal to self-determination has always exerted a powerful hold over the popular imagination. It has a resonance that is not easily matched by the established politics of the centre and many despair at what appears to be a crisis of liberal democracy. Populist movements have advanced their cause and increased their popularity through appealing to self-determination. Minority groups of all kinds have also advanced their cause by appeal to self-determination (Hilpold, 2017). But what does it mean and what is it really capable of achieving? Is liberal democracy and European integration really in peril?

The idea of self-determination in nationalist movements generally rests on the idea of an external source of domination that had to be removed, often by violence and at any cost. In this chapter, which is concerned with secessionist expressions of self-determination, I argue that the idea of selfdetermination today has lost the meaning it once had, namely the voice of a dominated people. It has been forced to become democratised in a way that it was not before. In many of its expressions, it has undergone a shift in the direction of illiberal democracy, but it can also take a more pronounced call for more meaningful forms of democracy. Today in Europe the appeal to self-determination has many different meanings, depending on whether the examples are Catalonia, Scotland, Ireland, Corsica, Flanders or Brexit.