1. Most sources seem to agree that there are about 5,000 to 6,000 extant languages in the world. Jean Laponce, Langage et territoire (Quebec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 1984); Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices (New York: Oxford University Press 2000); Joshua A. Fishman, “The New Linguistic Order,” Foreign Policy, Vol. 113, 1998/1999, pp. 26–40. It has been suggested that half of these languages will be lost in the course of the twenty-first century. John Terborgh, “Vanishing Points,” New York Review of Books, 19 December 2002, p. 78. This would still leave about 3,000 languages. Some may be mutually intelligible but few would allow themselves to be considered dialects of another language.Google Scholar

2. Indigenous peoples who represent 4% of the world's population speak 60% of the world's languages (Nettle and Romaine, op. cit.). However, there is no correlation between size, economic viability and political survival. Robert A. Dahl and Edward R. Tufte, Size and Democracy (Stanford: Sanford University Press, 1974), p. 122. The smallest member states of the U.N. have a population of 9,700 (Tuvalu, 9 square miles), 10,000 (Nauru, 8.5 square miles), and 16,000 (Palau, 191 square miles). At least seven others have populations below 100,000.Google Scholar

3. “Shared style of expression” is Ernest Gellner's phrase; Nationalism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), p. 1. One could argue, however, that not only the great number of weak languages but also the small number of strong languages suggests that the proliferation of states may continue. If almost half of humanity speaks some 15 languages (Fishman, op. cit.) and 80% speaks 20 languages (Laponce, op. cit.) but there are close to 200 states, claims to nationhood based on factors other than language are being invoked on behalf of state formation.Google Scholar

4. Gidon Gottlieb, Nation against State: A New Approach to Ethnic Conflicts and the Decline of Sovereignty (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), p. 1, expresses concern over “nations trying to break loose from states that rule over them” and seeks alternatives. Some scholars take an agnostic position, considering that international law neither allows nor forbids secession. Hurst Hannum, “The Specter of Secession,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 2, 1998, pp. 13–18. Others look beyond international law to suggest that the doctrine of self-determination sometimes performs a (useful) counter-hegemonic function; “operating not just as a norm to be applied but as an opportunity to expose the exclusions and inequalities of international law.” Karen Knop, Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) p. 14.Google Scholar

5. A good example is the fine article by Harry Beran “A Liberal Theory of Secession,” Political Studies, Vol. 32, 1984, pp. 21–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. The now classic reference that makes this point most fully is Walker Connor, “A Nation Is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group …” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1978, p. 377–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. This point is made by, among others, Yael Tamir, “The Right to National Self-Determination,” Social Research, Vol. 58, No. 3, 1991, p. 566.Google Scholar

8. To take but one example, the first essay, by Edward Shils, in the flagship publication of the Carnegie Endowment's Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations was entitled “On the Comparative Study of the New States [sic],” in Clifford Geertz, ed., Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (New York: Free Press, 1963).Google Scholar

9. As a common-sense study of nationalism puts it in its opening lines, “A state is a legal and political organisation, with the power to require obedience and loyalty from its citizens. A nation is a community of people, whose members are bound together by a sense of solidarity, a common culture, a national consciousness.” Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977), p. 1.Google Scholar

10. The nineteenth-century Swiss legal philosopher J. C. Bluntschli launched the (un-Swiss?) slogan “To each state a nation, to each nation a state,” but as a prescriptive rather than a descriptive statement. Bluntschli cited by Michael Lind, “In Defense of Liberal Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 3, 1994, p. 87. The English political theorist Ernest Barker, who made the same case in the early twentieth century, undermined his argument that “in some form a nation must be a State, and a State a nation” by smugly adding that this did not apply to “our island.” National Character and the Factors in Its Formation, 3rd edn (London: Methuen, 1939), p. 17.Google Scholar

11. Michael Walzer defines a nation as “aiming at political or cultural self determination,” cited in Omar Dahbour, “The Nation-State as a Political Community: A Critique of the Communitarian Argument for National Self-Determination,” in Jocelyne Couture, ed., Rethinking Nationalism (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1996), p. 320. David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 19, writes “a ‘nation’ must refer to a community of people with an aspiration [italics in original] to be politically self- determining.”Google Scholar

12. “In ordinary language ‘nation’ is, first of all, not identical with the ‘people of a state, that is, with membership in a given polity … [it is] not identical with a community speaking the same language.” And then Weber goes on to say, “In so far as there is a common object lying behind the obviously ambiguous term ‘nation’ it is apparently located in the field of politics. One might well define the concept of nation in the following way: a nation is a community of sentiment which would adequately manifest itself in a state of its own; hence, a nation is a community which normally tends to produce a state of its own.” Max Weber, “The Nation,” in H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, trans and eds, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 172–176. I would interpret “normally” here as meaning both “in most cases” and “in conformity to a norm.” For a critique of Weber on this point, see Paul Gilbert, The Philosophy of Nationalism (Boulder: Westview, 1978), p. 40ff.Google Scholar

13. Andrew Vincent, Nationalism and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 19, refers to this as a ritual and cites examples.Google Scholar

14. An exception to the first part of this statement is Walker Connor, who attributes such terminological confusion to Karl Deutsch by name; “A Nation is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group …” p. 379.Google Scholar

15. Even the particular case of Switzerland is assimilated into Deutsch's schema: though the Swiss speak several different languages, they “share a community of semantic meanings.” Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Its Alternatives (New York: Knopf, 1966), p. 13.Google Scholar

16. Deutsch, op. cit., p. 19. Deutsch also defines a country, “provisionally,” as “an area of markedly high interdependence” (p. 6) and a people as a “community of shared meanings” (p. 14). In the same spirit, a country is “a multiple market for goods and services” (p. 96) and a boundary is a “sharp drop in the frequency of some relevant transaction flow” (p. 97).Google Scholar

17. This term seems to me kinder than the pleonastic expression “communities of communication,” which corresponds more literally to Deutsch's theory. For a brief overview of “Communications Theories of Nationalism” dealing with both Deutsch and Gellner, see the article by Philip Schlesinger under that title in Athena S. Leoussi, ed., Encyclopaedia of Nationalism (London: Transaction, 2000), pp. 26–31. See also “Deutsch Formula” in Louis L. Snyder, Encyclopedia of Nationalism (New York: Paragon, 1990), pp. 72–73.Google Scholar

18. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 51. In fairness to Gellner it should be noted that this apparently sexist remark is a take-off on a penny novel, No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Google Scholar

19. Somewhat arbitrarily, at least with regard to his own theory, Gellner declares that “the modern world has only space for something in the order of 200 or 300 national states.” “Reply [to Anthony D. Smith] Do Nations Have Navels?” Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1996, p. 369. The number appears to be dictated by the figure of 250,000 inhabitants as the threshold size for a state.Google Scholar

20. One may perhaps speak of a distinct school of Prague nationalism which might include not only Gellner and Deutsch but also Hans Kohn, Hans Lemberg, and Miroslav Hroch. The patterns of nationalism in late Habsburg Prague which provided this school's historical experience are masterfully described in Gary Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague 1867–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

21. It has been suggested that Gellner revised his own views, as witness his belated enthusiasm for the non-Gellnerian, culturally pluralistic Austria-Hungary and his disdain for the very Gellnerian homogeneous new Czech Republic. John A. Hall, “Introduction,” in John A. Hall, ed., The State of the Nation: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 2–3. The conflict would seem to lie between Gellner's subjective, pluralistic inclinations and his belief in (self-proclaimed) objective laws of history.Google Scholar

22. According to Fishman one-third of the world may well speak English but that does not make English what he calls a “language of authenticity.” Joshua A. Fishman, ot. cit., p. 26. Laponce, op. cit., does not believe that bilingualism is natural but I am more persuaded by David Laitin, “The Cultural identities of a European State,” Politics & Society, Vol. 25, No. 3, 1997, p. 279, who argues that in twentieth-century state building, a shared language constellation rather than a particular language is the marker of a successful national project; he also points (p. 283) to the Indian experience (3 +/– 1 language).Google Scholar

23. For an early reflection on this subject see Charles Taylor, “Why Do Nations Have to Become States?” in Stanley French, ed., Philosophers Look at Canadian Confederation (Montreal: Canadian Philosophical Association, 1979), pp. 19–36. Taylor's response to the question is framed in terms of self-government, welfare, and rights. It also adumbrates his later arguments centered on recognition.Google Scholar

24. Brendan O'Leary, “Ernest Gellner's Diagnoses of Nationalism: A Critical Overview, or, What Is Living and What Is Dead in Ernest Gellner's Philosophy of Nationalism,” in The State of the Nation, p. 69.Google Scholar

25. On anthropomorphism, see Vincent, op. cit., p. 34, who cites Paul Valéry on the “curious point” that nations are characterized as persons “and by an immemorial habit of oversimplifying we attribute to them feelings, rights and duties, virtues and faults, will and responsibility.”Google Scholar

26. Margaret Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996), p. 2, makes a powerful case that political theorists tacitly assume nation states can be taken as given and that “the question of how this body politics is constituted is regularly passed over.”Google Scholar

27. Rudolfo Stavenhagen suggests that self-determination must be treated as a myth, in Levy-Strauss’ sense, that is, as a blueprint for living, or, like the concept of emancipation, as an idée force, rather than a “right” in any strict sense of the term. “Self-Determination: Right or Demon?” in Donald Clark and Robert Williamson, eds, Self-Determination: International Perspectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), p. 2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Canovan, op. cit., p. 20 makes this point (invoking the Scottish rather than Ruritanian example). Whatever decisions are made in the name of the Ruritanian nation engage those Ruritanians who do not agree to them and collective political personhood is attributed to nations before they are constituted as political institutions As Margaret Moore puts it in the introduction to her edited book, National Self-Determination and Secession (New York: Oxford University Press 1998), p. 2, letting the people decide makes no sense unless someone decides who the people are. Or, as Rudolf Stavenhagen, asks, “Who is the self in self determination?” op. cit., p. 6.Google Scholar

29. Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz, “National Self Determination,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 87, No. 9, 1990, pp. 439–461, and Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 70. Democracy deals with arrangements within a given political unit but does not answer the question of the determination of these units. Dahbour, op. cit., distinguishes national self-determination from political self-determination.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. The usual distinction is between “internal” and “external” self-determination. Scholars are rarely indifferent to these variants, referring to them in normatively charged terms as “weak” or “strong” self-determination. It is also hard to find a consensus on whether national self-determination means national (e.g. French) government or democratic (elected) government. On these issues see Benjamin Neuberger, “National Self Determination: Dilemmas of a Concept,” Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1995, pp. 297–326.Google Scholar

31. Even a leading defender of nationalism, David Miller, is hard pressed to argue against the proposition that people are entitled to the expectation that their life conditions will not be significantly worsened by conscious decisions, especially of their fellow citizens; “Secession and the Principle of Nationality,” in Rethinking Nationalism, pp. 261–282. The point is also made by Tamir, “The Right to National Self-Determination,” p. 583. Further reservations are expressed by Ronald S. Beiner, “National Self-Determination: Some Cautionary Remarks Concerning the Rhetoric of Rights,” in National Self-Determination and Secession, pp. 158–180.Google Scholar

32. My concern in this paper is with what may be termed “secession on demand” or “vanity secessions,” a term coined by Wayne Norman, “The Ethics of Secession as the Regulation of Secessionist Politics,” in National Self-Determination and Secession, p. 54. I hasten to add, though I am tucking it away in a footnote in order not to break my argument, that my condemnation of secession does not extend to cases when there is no social contract (e.g. colonial situations) or outright oppression (e.g. occupation). Even in many of these cases, however, secession may well be a second-best solution. And if there is a case in these circumstances for secession, it is not ipso facto a case for national secession, though, as Brendan O'Leary points out, empire and occupiers tend to make nations out of those whom they colonise or occupy. Allen Buchanan, “What's So Special about Nations?” in Rethinking Nationalism, pp. 283–310, draws a useful distinction between self-determination as a basic right, a derivative right, and a remedial right. Gilbert, The Philosophy of Nationalism, p. 21, makes a relevant distinction between the right to statehood by virtue of circumstance and the right to statehood by virtue of the kind of group one is. On the application of self determination to colonial peoples, see Freeman, Michael “Democracy and Dynamite: The Peoples’ Right to Self-Determination?” Political Studies, Vol. 44, 1996, pp. 746–761. For good measure, let us add that, according to Eric Hobsbawm, On the Edge of the New Century (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 23, no case of secession has ever been decided by genuinely democratic referendum. “There has been a lot of talk about self-determination, it has never happened in reality.” This is an exaggeration but most referenda are dubious affairs.Google Scholar

33. Beiner, op. cit., p. 159, cites, approvingly, Isaiah Berlin: “men prefer to be ordered about, even if this entails ill-treatment, by members of their own faith or nation or class, to tutelage, however benevolent, on the part of ultimately patronising superiors from a foreign land or alien class or milieu.”Google Scholar

34. Dahbour, op. cit., p. 337, quotes Brian Barry, who puts it drily: “there is no necessary connection between descent, which is a matter of biology, and interest, which is a matter of fulfilment of human needs and purposes.”Google Scholar

35. Tamir, “The Right of Self-Determination,” writes that self-determination understood as statehood is not about rights but about status resulting from the identification of ruler and ruled. Miller, On Nationality, argues for congruence between nationality and statehood because only nationality can unearth resources of solidarity among democratic citizenry. To which Brian Barry replies that we may have special obligations to other members of our state (for example, through insurance schemes) but not because we are of the same nationality, “Nationalism versus Liberalism?” Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1996, p. 431.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36. A number of authors invoke both arguments indiscriminately. For example, Allen Buchanan, “The Morality of Secession,” in Will Kymlicka, ed., The Rights of Minority Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 350–374.Google Scholar

37. Alfred Cobban, National Self-Determination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 53, referring to C. A. Macartney's National States and National Minorities (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 100.Google Scholar

38. This would not be an excessively loose interpretation of Walzer's and Miller's positions referred to above.Google Scholar

39. This question is put, pointedly, by Dhabour, op. cit. Google Scholar

40. As Beiner puts it, op. cit., p. 171, the right to self-determination answers the question “who is to decide?” not “what is the best decision?” i.e. it only specifies the morally relevant community that gets to decide this question.Google Scholar

41. It is not an accident that nationalist movements have, characteristically, been engendered by exiles, confronted with an all-encompassing denial of their identity in their alien surroundings.Google Scholar

42. Sudpta Kaviraj, “Crisis of the Nation State in India,” Political Studies, Vol. 42 (1994), p. 129, cited in Canovan, op. cit., p. 112. Further on this in my “Nationalizing the Globe, Globalizing the Nation,” in Henryk Kierzkowski, ed., Europe and Globalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 104–113.Google Scholar

43. To take but two classic statements: Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1945), p. 3, and Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1986), p. 12.Google Scholar

44. John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, “Nationality,” in Essays on Freedom and Power (Glencoe, IL: Free Press), p. 171.Google Scholar

45. Walker Connor, Nationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 60; though Connor also cites an even earlier but non-specific use by Marx, in 1860, of the “principle of free self-determination,” evoked by Stefan Possony, “Nationalism and the Ethnic Factor,” Orbis, Vol. 10, 1967, p. 1218.Google Scholar

46. Engels wrote, “Wherever the working classes have taken a part of their own in political movements, there, from the very beginning their foreign policy was expressed in the few words—Restoration of Poland,” “What have the Working Classes to Do with Poland? (1866)” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, ed. Paul W. Blackstock and Bert F. Hoselitz (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953), p. 95. To be sure, Engels stressed in this same article that those who demanded the restoration of Poland in the name of the principle of nationalities did not know what they were talking about, but this qualification was lost on most advocates of the Polish cause.Google Scholar

47. Antony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism, 2nd edn (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983), p. 160, sees the Greek war of independence as “the moment of bifurcation” between the idea of war against foreign unbelievers and the idea of war on behalf of a secular nation-state. It is not at all clear, however, that the war expressed a national rather than a traditional uprising against authority defined in religious terms (see William St. Clair, That Greece Might Still Be Free: The Philhellenes in the War of Independence [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972]) or that international support came for national rather than liberal reasons. See F. Rosen, Bentham, Byron, and Greece: Constitutionalism, Nationalism and Early Liberal Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). And one can ask whether the underlying “great idea” of recreating the Byzantine Empire corresponds to any modern conception of nationhood.Google Scholar

48. Historians may well speculate on the role of contingencies in the Irish case, notably the outbreak of the First World War, but I am not convinced that in other circumstances Ireland would have settled into a Scottish- or Welsh-like relation with Britain. On this issue, see Seamus Dunn and Thomas W. Hennessey, “Ireland,” in Seamus Dunn and T. G. Fraser, eds, Europe and Ethnicity: The First World War and Contemporary Ethnic Conflict (London: Routlege, 1996), pp. 197–208.Google Scholar

49. Roman Szporluk, “Poland and the Rise of the Theory and Practice of Modern Nationality 1770–1870,” Dialectics and Humanism, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1990, p. 46.Google Scholar

50. Cobban, National Self Determination, p. 65. This was also true for the British. “English people when they invoke the principle of Nationality mean the principle of democracy,” wrote Alfred Zimmern in 1918, quoted in Cobban, op. cit., p. 53. And when the British spoke of the rights of smaller nations or nationalities they meant existing smaller states, such as Belgium and Serbia. Alan Sharp, “Britain and the Protection of Minorities at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919,” in A. C. Hepburn, ed., Minorities in History (London: Arnold, 1977), p. 170.Google Scholar

51. Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine 1945–1993 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), p. 29, cites Wilson in January 1917: “I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people but that every people should be free to determine its own polity, its own way of development.”Google Scholar

52. Earlier, in the chapter on Austria-Hungary in his book on The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1898), p. 336. Wilson had written, “No lapse of time seems sufficient to reconcile the Czechs of Bohemia to incorporation with Austria.” And the conclusion he drew from this was “they desire at least the same degree of autonomy as accorded to Hungary.” Cited in Betty Miller Unterberger, The United States, Revolutionary Russia and the Rise of Czechoslovakia (Chapel Hill: University of California Press, 1989), p. 16. On the overall limitations of Wilson's commitment to national self-determination, see Allen C. Lynch, “Woodrow Wilson and the Principle of ‘National Self-Determination,’ as Applied to Habsburg Empire,” in Henry Huttenbach and Francesco Privitera, eds, Self-Determination: From Versailles to Dayton: Its Historical Legacy (Ravenna: A Longo editore, 1999), pp. 15–30.Google Scholar

53. There is a rich primary and secondary literature on this subject. See, in particular, Thomas Masaryk, Making of a State. Memories and Observations 1914–1918 (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1927); Hugh and Christopher Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe: R.W. Seton Watson and the Last Years of Austria-Hungary (London: Methuen, 1981); Harry Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary during the First World War: A Study in the Formation of Public Opinion (London: Oxford University Press, 1962). Hanak also refers to Masaryk and Benes as “confidence tricksters,” in his review of F. Hadlee, ed., Weg von Osterreich, Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 76, 1998, p. 749.Google Scholar

54. Masaryk, op. cit., p. 28.Google Scholar

55. Interestingly, one of the key cultural arguments invoked by Masaryk on behalf of Czech statehood was their Protestant heritage. As Masaryk's leading British mainstay, Henry Wickham Steed, foreign editor of The Times, put it, “after three centuries of servitude, this people might be reborn to freedom, to spiritual and democratic unity as Hus and the Bohemian Brotherhood had conceived them.” Introduction to Masaryk, op. cit., p. 14.Google Scholar

56. The Allies were also spurred by developments in Russia, as Arno J. Mayer has shown in his Political Origins of the New Diplomacy 1917–1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959) with its epilogue, “Wilson vs. Lenin.”Google Scholar

57. How else should one interpret Lloyd George's telling statement, “we should not push the principle of self-determination so far as unduly to strengthen any state which is likely to be a cause of danger to European peace.” Cited in Benjamin Neuberger, “National Self-Determination: A Theoretical Discussion,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2001, p. 412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

58. Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (New York: Houghton & Mifflin, 1921), p. 87, though I would take my distance from some of his examples: the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalists among the Boers, the “Mohammedans of Syria and Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli? How can it be harmonized with Zionism to which the President is practically committed?”Google Scholar