1 For recent surveys of the literature, see Hutchinson, John and Smith, Anthony D., eds., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994)Google Scholar, Balakrishnan, Gopal, ed., Mapping the Nation (New York: Verso 1996)Google Scholar, Dahbour, Omar and Ishay, Micheline R., eds., The Nationalism Reader (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press 1995)Google Scholar, and Delannoi, Gil and Taguieff, Pierre-André, eds., Théories du nationalisme (Paris: Éditions Kimé 1991)Google Scholar.

2 Renan, Ernest, Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? (Paris: Calmann-Levy 1882)Google Scholar

3 Johann, Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Phibsophy of the History of Man (London: 1800)Google Scholar

4 For a clear case of such an hybrid characterization, see Frans De Wachter's contribution to the present volume.

5 Karl, Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication, 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1966)Google Scholar

6 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (New York: Verso 1991)Google Scholar

7 Hobsbawm, E.J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992)Google Scholar

8 For an alternative approach in the Marxist tradition, see Nairn, Tom, The Breakup of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 2d ed. (London: New Left Books 1977)Google Scholar. See also Nielsen, Kai, ‘Cultural Nationalism, Neither Ethnic nor Civic,’ Philosophical Forum 28:1–2 (1996-97) 1-11Google Scholar; ‘Secession: The Case of Quebec,‘ Journal of Applied Philosophy 10:1 (1991) 29-43.

9 Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell 1983)Google Scholar

10 Kedourie, Elie, Nationalism, 4th ed. (Oxford:Blackwell 1994)Google Scholar

11 Breuilly, John, Nationalism and the State, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994)Google Scholar

12 For recent comprehensive historical surveys, see Santamaria, Yves and Waché, Brigitte, Du Printemps des peuples à la Société des nations. Nations, nationalités el nationalismes en Europe 1850-1920 (Paris: La Découverte 1996)Google Scholar, Cabanel, Patrick, ed., Nations, nationalités et nationalismes en Europe, 1850-1920 (Paris: Éditions Ophrys 1995)Google Scholar, Saly, Pierreet al., eds.; Nations et nationalismes en Europe 1848-1914 (Paris: Armand Colin 1996)Google Scholar, and Schulze, Hagen, States, Nations and Nationalism, from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell 1996)Google Scholar.

13 Greenfeld, Liah, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992)Google Scholar

14 Hugh, Seton-Watson, Nations and States (London: Methuen 1977)Google Scholar

15 Reynolds, Susan, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe (900-1300) (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984)Google Scholar

16 Armstrong, John, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1982)Google Scholar

17 Geertz, Clifford, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States’ in Geertz, Clifford, ed., Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (New York: Free Press 1963)Google Scholar

18 Smith, Anthony D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell 1986) and National Identity (London: Penguin 1991)Google Scholar

19 Van den Berghe, Pierre, ‘Race and Ethnicity: ASociobiological Perspective,‘ Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1:4 (1978) . See also The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier 1979).Google Scholar

20 Smith, Anthony D., Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Oxford: Polity Press, Blackwell 1995)Google Scholar

21 An important exception is perhaps Susan Reynolds, who tries to avoid as much as possible using words like ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity.’ See Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, 251-6.

22 Of course, the situation is not as simple as the one that we have just described. Almost all of the modernist authors mentioned above (except perhaps for Kedourie) tend to recognize the importance of national sentiments. When Benedict Anderson, for example, speaks of the nation as an imagined community, he is not entirely denouncing the phenomenon. He is not suggesting that all manifestations of nationalism are bad and that they must be overcome. The division between moderns and premoderns is not always sharp. In their anthology, Nationalism, Hutchinson and Smith classify Seton-Watson as a premodernist, while in the present volume, Allen Buchanan describes him as a modernist.

23 The distinction between historical and non-historical nations was designed for the case of Europe, and was especially in vogue among thinkers like Marx and Engels in the last century. Germany, Poland, and Hungary, for instance, were described as historical nations. They were nations which were thought to have been from the very beginning in the process of becoming states. The non-historical nations included Ukraine, Slovakia, and Slovenia, and were perceived as never being able to become states. For a discussion, see Pierre-Caps, Stephane, La multination (Paris: Odile Jacob 1995), 37–45Google Scholar.

24 Kohn, Hans, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan 1945)Google Scholar

25 Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, 30-35

26 Schnapper, Dominique, La communauté des citoyens (Paris: Gallimard 1994)Google Scholar

27 Taguieff, Pierre-André, ‘Nationalisme et anti-nationalisme. Le débat sur l'identité française,’ in Coll., Nations et nationalismes, Les dossiers de l'état du monde (Paris: La découverte 1995), 127-35Google Scholar

28 Finkielkraut, Alain, The Defeat of the Mind (New York: Columbia University Press 1995)Google Scholar

29 Habermas, Jürgen, ‘Historical consciousness and post-traditional identity: The Federal Republic's orientation to the West,’ in The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian's Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1989), 249-67Google Scholar

30 For the distinction between nationalism and patriotism, see also the contribution of Andrew Levine to the present volume.

31 Nussbaum, Martha, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,’ in Cohen, Joshua, ed., For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press 1996)Google Scholar. In the same volume, Michael Walzer's trenchant criticism of these views should be noted.

32 Connor, Walker, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 For recent philosophical contributions that are sensitive to the Quebec situation, see Seymour, Michel, ed., Une nation peut-elle se donner la constitution de son choix? (Montréal: Bellarmin 1995)Google Scholar.

34 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, Le fédéralisme et la société canadienne-française (Montreal: HMH1967)Google Scholar

35 Cook, Ramsay, Canada and the French Canadian Question (Toronto: Macmillan 1966)Google Scholar

36 The reaction of Canadians towards the remarks of the former Premier of Quebec, Jacques Parizeau, on the referendum night of 30 October 1995, are quite revealing in this respect. The Calgary Herald spoke about Quebec nationalism as involving a ‘tendency toward ethnic cleansing.’ The Vancouver Sun talked about ‘xenophobia,’ ‘ethnic superiority’ and ‘tribalism.’ The Hill Times of Ottawa accused Parizeau of ‘unleashed racism.’ The Edmonton Sun said that Parizeau has admirers among members of the Heritage Front and Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front. The Winnipeg Sun suggested that Parizeau should go to Bosnia and ask the Serbs for a job. The Vancouver Province spoke of racism and suggested that Quebec nationalism is an instance of an ethnic nationalism that leads to gas chambers and apartheid, to Bosnia and Rwanda. The Toronto Sun spoke of ‘ethnic cleansing.’ The Financial Post spoke of hatred, and the Ottawa Sun denounced the sickness of the minister of finance Bernard Landry. These extreme statements go far beyond anything that Parizeau said or wanted to say. Those who make them paradoxically create the violence that they are purportedly denouncing. These reactions are so outrageously exaggerated that they cannot be explained solely by what Parizeau said, but must rather be explained by invoking a general misperception of Quebec sovereignists as ethnic nationalists.

37 See Nielsen, ‘Secession: The Case of Quebec'

38 Tamir, Yael, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993)Google Scholar

39 Miller, David, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995)Google Scholar

40 There are many defenders of the cultural definition of the nation in Canada. We could mention, for instance, Taylor, Charles in Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1993)Google Scholar. Dumont, Fernand develops similar views in Raisons communes (Montréal: Boreal 1995)Google Scholar. Finally, we should also mention Kymlicka, Will in Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995).Google Scholar

41 See also Hutchinson, John, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism (London: Allen and Unwin 1987).Google Scholar

42 A similar point is made by Taylor, Charles in ‘The Politics of Recognition,’ in Gutman, Amy, ed., Multiculturalism and ‘the Politics of Recognition’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992), 40-1Google Scholar, footnote 16.

43 Miller, On Nationality, 193

44 Miller, On Nationality, 27

45 Miller, On Nationality, 98

46 For such a conception, see Seymour's, Michel ‘Une conception sociopolitique de la nation,’ Dialogue, 37:3 (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As conceptualized by Seymour, a nation or a people can be a political community which, on a (legally or conventionally) recognized territory, consists most of the time of a national majority (i.e., a majority on a given territory, which also happens to be in the world the majority of a group of people with a specific language and culture), along with national minorities (i.e., minority extensions of neighbouring nations) and citizens of other origins, if there are any such minorities and individuals on the same territory. (Of course, a majority within the political community must also share a certain national consciousness and a will to live together.) National majorities can be ‘majorities’ in two different senses of the word. They very often form a majority on a given territory, although this need not always be the case (e.g., the Catalans in Catalonia). But even when it is the case, it certainly is not sufficient, for if we were to include cities or districts among recognized territories, it would be possible to find an indefinite number of such majorities. More importantly, a national majority is a compound that forms a majority of the people having a certain language and culture when compared to all those who have the same language and culture but who live on other territories throughout the world. Of course, there can also be counterexamples to this. Indeed the ‘national majority’ could in principle be larger only in the sense that it is the largest sample of a group of people with a given language and culture, and thus not an absolute majority of such people. There could be more people outside the territory sharing the same language and culture. It could in some special circumstances even fail to be the largest sample, as long as it is the only one that forms a majority on its own territory. Even if there are larger compounds of people with the same language and culture on some other territories, these compounds will not become nations if they form minorities on their respective territories. In sum, in order to be a national majority, a group of people must either be the largest compound in the world of people with a specific language and culture or, alternatively, if it is not the largest, be the only compound of such a people that forms a majority on its territory.

There is another (trivial) case of a ‘national majority’ that fails to be a majority. It is when there are no national minorities and no individuals of different origins on its territory (e.g., Iceland). But most of the time, if not always, there are at least some individuals with a different national origin. It must also be noted that the national majority is composed of individuals who share the same language and culture, and the cultural component is perhaps more important. So even if there are more English-speaking Americans than there are English-speaking Canadians, English Canada could still form a national majority since it has a different culture. If such a conception were accepted, then Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, and Canada would offer clear cases of multination states. According to that conception, there is within Quebec's territory a Quebec nation which includes a national French-speaking majority, a national English-speaking minority, and Quebeckers of other national origins. Eleven Native nations also live within that same territory. Of course, this conception is just one among many. It could and should be introduced simultaneously with the conception of the nation as a diaspora. This last conception is as important as the first one, and it does not fit the model according to which the nation is identical with a certain kind of political community. We could roughly define a diaspora nation as a group of people sharing the same language and culture which does not have a national majority in any sense of the word ‘majority’ (e.g., the Kurds). For an even wider conception, indeed a deliberately extended conception of a nation, distinct from the ones articulated here, see Brian Walker's contribution to this volume.

47 Miller, On Nationality, 114. We agree with Miller that in such a case, our first choice should be to try resolutely to adopt reforms within the confines of the multination state. And, as a matter of fact, Quebeckers have precisely sought to do just that for more than 130 years. From the very beginning of the Canadian confederation, they thought they could maintain multiple identities by preserving their national identity within a multination state. But the question to be asked now is the following: what should be done if, after all that time, most Canadians still reject any kind of constitutional, political, and administrative reform that would entail a recognition of the Quebec nation within Canada?

48 Actually, we should be careful not to draw any such conclusions in the case of Belgium. In addition to the Fourron community, we should take into consideration the fact that Brussels is part of the Flemish Brabant, and that more than 80% of its population speaks French. There are also more than sixty thousand German-speaking individuals living in the Walloon region.

49 This is not to say that we endorse a territorial conception of the nation, for there could be many nations partly occupying the same territory. This is, for example, the case of Quebec in which there are eleven aboriginal nations in addition to the Quebec nation. Even if they constitute only a small proportion of the Quebec population (74 000 out of seven million), each of the eleven aboriginal nations have a right to self-determination. This could in principle create a problem in the context of Quebec's secession from Canada, but it is generally agreed from a political point of view, as well as from the point of view of international law, that aboriginal nations should have a somewhat limited moral right to self-determination which includes self-government, but does not include a (moral or legal) right to secede or any right to violate the territorial integrity of the encompassing state. There could, of course, be important exceptions to this rule, but it is generally agreed that the self-determination of aboriginal nations is compatible with the territorial integrity of the state.

50 However, it might be seen as a moral obstacle against a complete separation. When two sovereign nations have national minorities that are present on each other's territory, they should perhaps engage in some kind of political partnership with each other.

51 Pierré-Caps, La multination.

52 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship

53 For a discussion of the distinction between nations and national minorities, see Seymour, ‘Une conception sociopolitique de la nation.’ According to that view, the Russian populations in the Baltic states, the Hungarians in Romania or Slovakia, the Croats and Serbs in Bosnia, the Arabs in Israel, the French Belgians in Flemish Belgium, the Anglo-Quebeckers in Quebec, and the French Canadians in English Canada are all national minorities.

54 Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press 1993)Google Scholar

55 Indeed, Rawls does not seem to have Kymlicka's qualms about collective rights applied to peoples or nations. See “The Law of Peoples,’ in Shute, Stephen and Hurley, Susan, eds., On Human Rights, The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New York: Basic Books 1993)Google Scholar.

56 For a discussion of the notion of a national majority, see Seymour, ‘Une conception sociopolitique de la nation.’ See also footnote 46 above.

57 Very often, states are sovereign countries, but in federal systems, the federated entities may also be called ‘states.’ This is at least something that follows from an understanding of federalism which implies sharing the sovereignty between different levels of government. It may be correct to establish a strong connection between a ‘state’ and the possession of sovereignty. But, precisely because of that, since the federated entities share sovereignty with the federal state, they can also be understood as ‘states.'

58 In Canada, the champion defender of deep diversity has certainly been Charles Taylor, and there used to be a time when he was the only one to speak in favour of recognizing the multinational character of Canada. See, for instance, Taylor, Reconciling the Solitudes. Nowadays, there are a large number of intellectuals who share this idea. We could mention, for instance, Ken McRoberts, Phil Resnick, Don Lenihan, and Will Kymlicka. These are just a few among a long list of English Canadian authors that now recognize the multinational character of Canada. One could also mention Curtis Cook's collection of essays in which all the contributors acknowledge that Canada is a multination state. See Cook, , ed., Constitutional Predicament. Canada after the Referendum of 1992 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press 1994), 5Google Scholar. Unfortunately, this open-minded attitude is for the most part restricted to an élite of philosophers and social scientists, and it is not shared by the vast majority of Canadians.