one option, secession another. Whether other criteria than sovereignty
distinguish nationalities from nations remains an open question. The identity of
the collective self is often a point of contention, which is why the politics of
identity is a major source of conflict in our time.
Number of independent states, 1917: 59.
Number of independent states, 2017: 195.To mention just one recent example, strong forces in Catalonia seek
independence, while the government in Madrid insists that the Autonomous
Community of Catalonia is an inalienable part of the Kingdom of Spain. In the
regional election of 2017, the Catalans were nearly split down the middle
between advocates and opponents of an independent Catalonia, with a slight
majority of separatists. The opponents can imagine a multi-layered identity for
themselves, for example, as Barcelonan, Catalan, Spanish, and European; the
separatists do not want to live with that. Immediately after the election, an anti-
independence movement took shape in Catalonia’s southern province Tarragona,
offering a presentiment of what an independent Catalonia could expect: further
secessions of ever-smaller units.
This is not to say that there are no oppressed nationalities with genuine
grievances. The Palestinians come to mind, whose claim to self-determination
Israel denies in spite of repeated reconfirmations on the part of the Israeli
government that the Palestinians have this right. Kurdistan, Tibet, and Abkhazia
are other regions that form part of a state or states from which many of their
people wish to secede. Self-determination is a principle of international law
which the said communities invariably invoke; but its meaning and the definition
of the units to which it might apply remain imprecise.
What, then, is a nation? Two oft-cited positions are the romantic and the
republican definitions. The romantic position, associated with German
philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder (1747–1803) and Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762–1814), conceptualizes the nation as age-old heritage rooted in culture,
custom, and above all language, in short, in a quasi-natural continuous self-
sameness or identity. In contrast, representing the republican position, French
historian Ernest Renan (1823–92) characterized the nation as ‘a daily plebiscite’.
He opposed the notion of race or language as the basis of a nation and instead
emphasized the will of a people to live together and shape their future rather than