micro-nations’) were visible then as they are now.
From a historical point of view, these tensions are a legacy of the dissolution of
the great multiethnic empires—the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Czarist realms—and
the principle of self-determination espoused after World War I by the leader of
the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, and US President Woodrow Wilson. A
second wave of calls for self-determination came with decolonization where the
key issue was liberation from white rule.
The principle of self-determination was hailed as a victory over autocratic
domination and an important step in the direction of democratic government, but
it is based on a fiction, the fiction of a collectivity of human beings that by virtue
of being distinguishable from other such collectivities is able to auto-determine
its political fate. Collectivities of this sort are called ‘peoples’ or ‘nations’.
Unless you believe in their existence, unless you know that we can be
distinguished from them, you cannot reasonably invoke the principle of self-
determination. Imagined Communities, the title of an influential book by
Benedict Andersen (an Anglo/Irish, China-born, California- and Ireland-raised,
UK-USA educated specialist in Indonesian, Philippine, and Thai politics and
culture who had three nationalities, British, US, and Irish), therefore became a
standard expression in political science to capture the created and fluid as
opposed to the given and invariable nature of national communities.
Of course, imagination is not fact. In the world of politics it can help to create
facts, that is, communities and identities; which implies that these facts could
have been imagined differently. The birth defect of the principle of self-
determination is that it fails to say what the self might be that would or should
determine its own fate. The principle was proclaimed in the absence of any
guidelines for drawing a distinction between nation and nationality, sowing the
seeds of disputes. As the experience of the last century teaches, this distinction,
if it exists, is subject to fuzzy logic rather than the classical two-valued logic of
the excluded middle. How else could we explain the fact that in the course of the
20th century the number of independent states more than tripled? With regard to
creating new states in the context of decolonization, the principle of self-
determination seemed quite clear: freedom from external domination. However,
what it implies for dismembering existing states that look back on a long history,
which supposedly is the bedrock of national consciousness (identity), is less
obvious. Internal autonomy in terms of language, culture, and administration is