Zlatko Hadžidedić, Center for Nationalism Studies

Nationalism and Liberalism: The Paradoxes of Self-Determination

The liberal doctrine of self-determination of peoples has deeply been involved in the creation of the vast majority of modern nation-states (including those based on ethnic, religious or racial exclusion). In this essay I will try to resolve the paradox that lies in the gap between the liberal ideals proclaimed and the illiberal practices produced.

The doctrine of self-determination, projected onto the level of international relations and imposed as an international standard, was made central in the geopolitical reshaping of the non-Western parts of Europe two times. First time it happened as a result of the Allied Western powers’ total victory over the Central European axis in the First World War. At the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, the position of the victors was so superior as to allow them not only to dictate the terms of peace but to impose an entirely new international standard, defined in accordance with the doctrine of self-determination of peoples. As President Wilson put it while concluding the introduction to his famous Fourteen Points: “On the one hand stand the peoples of the world – not only the peoples actually engaged, but many others who suffer under mastery, but cannot act; peoples of many races and in every part of the world. … Opposed to them, masters of many armies, stand in isolated, friendless group of governments who speak no common purpose but only selfish ambitions of their own which can profit but themselves…; governments clothed with the strange trappings and the primitive authority of an age that is altogether alien and hostile to our own. (…) There can be but one issue. The settlement must be final. There can be no compromise. No halfway decision would be tolerable. No halfway decision is conceivable.” [1]

Thus new states were established in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans as a result of the forced break-up of the Central European empires and their South European allies. And this settlement was meant to be final. The modern doctrine of self-determination, as elaborated by President Wilson, being altogether alien and hostile to the pre-modern concept of empire, simply dissolved what was considered to be the remnants of the past. As a by-product of both the Great War and the Wilsonian doctrine of self-determination, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia launched its own, Leninist counter-doctrine of self-determination. As a consequence of this, most of the numerous ethnic groups of the former Russian empire were granted a limited right to self-governance within the hitherto undemarcated territories they inhabited. This right was meant to be exercised in the form of autonomous regions, autonomous republics and quasi-states of the nascent Soviet Union.[2]

For the second time, the doctrine of self-determination came to determine the future of the non-Western parts of Europe as a result of the total victory of the allied Western liberal democracies over the communist Soviet Union in the Cold War. Again, the position of the victors was so strong as to allow them to fully impose their own version of the doctrine of self-determination onto the defeated side. As a result, the Soviet Union broke up along the lines defined by the Leninist version of self-determination. A similar fate befell Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia which were basically constituted along these Leninist principles.[3] However, the immediate consequences of these break-ups were not as bloody as the ultimate consequences of the order imposed in 1919 at the Versailles Peace Conference.

Probably the only theory of nationalism which is clearly focused on the concept of self-determination is that by Elie Kedourie. In his famous book “Nationalism”, Kedourie presents nationalism as stemming from the philosophical principle of individual self-determination. For Kedourie, the principle of self-determination, albeit in its mutated, collectivist form, is to be placed at the very core of the doctrine of nationalism. This transformation, according to Kedourie, was the result of the activity of the post-Kantian German philosophers (namely Fichte) who translated Kant’s individualistic categories into the collectivist, national ones. Surprisingly, the significance of such a transformation and, more generally, of the link between the discourses of nationalism and liberalism, in the form of their common doctrine of self-determination, has been ignored by most theorists of nationalism. Without a doubt, Kedourie’s thesis establishes this link and points to the philosophical sources of nationalism, as an eminently modern political discourse. Yet, Kedourie remained blind to the link between the core principle of the nationalist discourse and its ultimate political-instrumental application (by both Wilsonians and Leninists). Moreover, he remained blind to the obvious geopolitical instrumentalisation of the doctrine of self-determination carried out by Wilson himself at the Versailles Peace Conference. For Kedourie,

What happened in 1919 was then, in a sense, a misunderstanding. Liberal Englishmen and Americans, thinking in terms of their own traditions of civil and religious freedom, started with a prejudice in favour of the idea that if people determine the governments they wish to have, then, ipso facto, civil and religious freedom would be established. Possessing, for a moment, the power to bind and loose for the whole world, they were confronted by the claimants and suppliants who seemed to believe in much the same things in which liberal Englishmen and Americans believed. But, in fact, they did not. The Englishmen and Americans were saying, People who are self-governing are likely to be governed well, therefore we are in favour of self-determination; whereas their interlocutors were saying, People who live in their own national states are the only free people, therefore we claim self-determination. The distinction is a fine one, but its implications are far-reaching. International conferences are, however, not the place for fine distinctions, and in the confusion of the Peace Conference liberty was mistaken for the twin of nationality.[4]

The argument proposed by Kedourie is obviously self-defeating in its colossal naiveté. Those who had the power to bind and loose for the whole world (even if that lasted, as Kedourie claims, just for a moment) were not likely to be manipulated by the stateless and powerless claimants who were otherwise entirely dependent on the will of the former. Of course, Kedourie only accepted the view which had already become a commonplace in the 20^th-century historical discourse: according to it, the liberty-loving, idealistic leaders of the victorious Allies, with no particular interests in those parts of Europe for which they had previously fought so many bloody battles, selflessly granted freedom to the peoples which were either too backward to actually understand the very concept of liberty or too immature to resist the sinister manipulations of their ill-intended ethno-nationalist leaders (the latter, in fact, mostly having been promoted as relevant political players exactly by the Allied powers at the Versailles Peace Conference). Yet, in order to stick to this commonplace-view and still remain relatively consistent, Kedourie had to establish a clear-cut distinction between “liberal Englishmen and Americans” and the Central European (namely, German) nationalists: for Kedourie, “nationalism as a doctrine was articulated in German-speaking lands” whereas “Great Britain and the United States of America are precisely those areas where nationalism is unknown”.[5] Thus Kedourie failed to explain the relationship between nationalism and the emergence of the first nation-states (i.e. England, the US and France), as well as the relationship between nationalism and liberalism, both being the nation-creating discourses.

The basic theoretical problem, arising from the juxtaposition of Kedourie’s theory and the fact that the first nations emerged in the Anglo-Saxon and French political contexts as a product of the nascent liberal philosophical-political discourse, is the question whether there had been nations before nationalism (Armstrong), perhaps even nations without nationalism (Kristeva); or the first nations could not happen (Brubaker) without prior existence of nationalism (Gellner) that actually made them possible.

Another important theoretical problem, logically stemming from the first one, is the question of the formal definition of nationalism. This question is posed by Kedourie’s definition of nationalism as “a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century” which “holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government”.[6] Such a definition implies that if nationalism were to be treated as a coherent, self-contained philosophical-political doctrine, it should be regarded as distinct from liberalism which was the first to promote the concepts of self-determination, self-government, emancipation, liberty, equality, fraternity, unity, sovereignty and citizenship joined under the umbrella-concept of the nation. And then, nationalism could indeed be regarded as unrelated to the supposedly spontaneous emergence of the first nations, particularly England and the US. Contrariwise, if all the concepts historically promoted by liberalism under the common umbrella-concept of the nation were to be taken into account, the implication would be that nationalism could not be regarded as a separate doctrine, independent from that of liberalism. And then, the question would logically arise: is nationalism rather to be seen as a part, or perhaps a by-product, of the coherent, self-contained umbrella-doctrine of liberalism? Or, is the doctrine of self-determination the umbrella under which the discourses of nationalism and liberalism co-exist as mutually pervasive phenomena?

The existence of nations whose creation was clearly inspired by the doctrine of liberalism logically poses the question of their nature in juxtaposition to the nations promoted by what Kedourie termed “the doctrine articulated in the German-speaking lands at the beginning of the 19th century”. Most theorists have offered their answers in the form of a Manichean picture of the international order, according to which the old, Western civic nations defined in terms of liberal individualism are fundamentally opposed to the new, Eastern, ethnic nations defined in terms of nationalist collectivism. Perhaps the most conspicuous exception to this dualist scheme is Kedourie’s monism which claims that “in nationalist doctrine, language, race, culture, and sometimes even religion, constitute different aspects of the same primordial entity, the nation. The theory admits here of no great precision, and it is misplaced ingenuity to try and classify nationalisms according to the particular aspect which they choose to emphasise.”[7] Of course, this monism was possible due to Kedourie’s selective perception according to which nationalism – defined in terms chosen by Kedourie, such as those of language, race or religion – is “practically unknown” in liberal, constitutionalist democracies.[8] However, it provokes yet another important question: whether nationalism – regardless of the particular aspect it chooses to emphasise – is to be perceived in monistic terms, as a single discourse, or there are different types of nations and nationalism?

The question of the transformation of the Kantian concept of individual self-determination into the collectivist concept of national self-determination, according to Kedourie, arose due to Fichte’s misinterpretation of Kant’s individualism. Yet, in both Anglo-Saxon and French philosophical-political traditions (rooted in Locke’s and Rousseau’s theories of social contract), nations are also regarded as collective individuals, and therefore as potential agents of the international order: the ultimate expression of such a view, supposedly conceived as the model for (self)regulation of the international order, is the Wilsonian doctrine of self-determination of peoples. If we reject the naiveté of the misinterpretation-misunderstanding approach advocated by Kedourie, this poses the problem of the inherently paradoxical relationship between the individual and the nation as a collective individual. This problem requires a closer look at the paradoxical logic of self-determination, as well as at its product, the paradoxical relationship between nationalism and liberalism.

A possible answer to the question of nations’ existence prior to the emergence of nationalism, or of nations’ existence without nationalism (as Kedourie depicts the nations based on the liberal-constitutionalist principles), is that neither can we speak of nations before/without nationalism, nor does nationalism precede the emergence of nations. For, nations do exist only as nationalism. More precisely, a nation principally exists through the discourse of nation, that is, a nation basically takes the form of a discourse. At the societal level, the discourse of nation, once set into motion, influences actions of those who are exposed to it, thus making them think (Anderson) and behave (Beissinger) the nation. Yet, the nation as a mass-behavioural phenomenon (Beissinger), though created by the discourse of nation which attempts to be permanently present in a given society, is by no means a permanent state of society’s “collective” mind: it rather occasionally/randomly happens (Brubaker) as a manifestation of the discourse, i.e. as a mass-behavioural projection of the discourse onto the societal level.

While principally accepting Brubaker’s anti-substantialist approach which sees the nation as a contingent event rather than a substantial, enduring collectivity, I do not find it necessary to abandon the nation as a unit of analysis, dividing it, as Brubaker did, into the manifestations of nationness and their crystallisation i.e. institutionalisation in the form of nationhood. Rather than being a mere category of practice (Brubaker), the nation is, first and foremost, a discourse that is, indeed, potentially omnipresent in the reality of modern societies. However, its manifestations, i.e. its actual projections onto the societal level in the form of mass-behavioural phenomena happen as events that are contingent upon many circumstances that greatly differ from society to society.

Indeed, while borrowing Fredrik Barth’s approach to identity as a symbolic boundary, it is possible to generalise so as to say that the nation occasionally/randomly but powerfully happens as a single, all-embracing, mass-scale boundary whenever other multiple symbolic boundaries – through which the individual’s multiple identities are normally being lived out, affirmed and recreated through time[9] – gradually dissolve (as was the case with many pre-modern identities) or fail to establish their internal balance and thus fail to respond to external challenges that modern society permanently poses to the individual’s integrity. The boundary which provides absolute protection for the individual’s integrity, as suggested by the potentially omnipresent (and therefore almost permanently available) discourse of nation, is that of national identity. The attractiveness of such an all-embracing boundary – through which  the nation as a single, all-embracing identity is assumed to be  lived out, affirmed and recreated through time – is mainly to be found in this boundary’s actual or potential congruence with the institutionalised, materialised borders of the state. This principle of congruence (Gellner) of the nation as a symbolic boundary and the state with its physical borders is, of course, the central part of the discourse of nation: the power of its appeal is to be found in its simple claim that all the uncertain multiple identities, which the individual lives out, affirms and recreates through time, can be replaced by one, single, certain identity which will henceforth be fortified by the state, its physical borders and its institutions.

Yet, although the discourse of nation attempts to permanently press individuals to abandon their multiple identities and opt for the single, national one, these individuals massively behave the nation, thus making it happen, only in times of social crises. In these turbulent times, the multiple symbolic boundaries – through which these individuals’ identities are normally lived out, affirmed and recreated – tend to become so permeable as to allow otherwise alien symbolic contents to penetrate.[10] However, the discourse of nation is here to propose a seemingly universal, long-lasting and yet paradoxical solution: the boundary of the nation (potentially or actually fortified by the state and its borders), assuming the abandonment of one’s multiple identities and the adoption of the single, national one, offers an institutionalised safeguard against the penetration of alien contents. Within the discourse of nation, the danger of those alien symbolic contents is usually presented as the danger of these contents’ assumed physical bearers, i.e. alien persons, that is, foreigners. Thus, as a part of the discourse of nation, the penetration of crisis-generated alien symbolic contents (regardless of whether they are of foreign origin or not) is translated into the penetration of physical aliens, i.e. foreigners. Hence, the only efficient protection is erection of a single institutionalised symbolic boundary – the nation. And, within the discourse of nation, it is clearly presupposed that this institutionalised symbolic boundary i.e. the nation must be congruent with institutionalised, monitored and administered physical borders of the state. If this congruence is materialised in social and political reality, the nation-state comes into existence.

Yet, although physical existence of the nation-state can significantly contribute to the further institutional strengthening of the nation as a symbolic boundary, this crystallisation of nationness into nationhood does not happen irreversibly, as implied by Brubaker. For, although the single and all-embracing national identity is perpetually strengthened by institutions of the state, it nevertheless tends to perpetually dissolve into a multitude of individual identities. This paradoxical process is what makes the phenomenon of the nation so difficult to grasp at the societal level. Individuals massively behave the nation as their single symbolic boundary only occasionally, when their other multiple symbolic boundaries do not efficiently resist the penetration of alien symbolic contents which perpetually challenge their integrity. At the same time, these individuals are permanently being suggested by the omnipresent discourse of nation that the nation is the only proper unit within which they are to calculate their interests (Brubaker); hence, the nation is the only proper symbolic boundary with which they are to identify if they are ever to reach the level of full self-realisation. Thus the nation occasionally happens as a mass-behavioural response to the crises of individuals’ multiple identities caused by social turbulences and then dissolves into a similar – and yet inevitably altered – set of multiple identities when these crises pass. Therefore, the nation’s main enemy, contrary to the popular image suggested by the discourse of nation, is not an alien symbolic content nor its assumed physical bearer, the foreigner: the nation’s main enemy, which dissolves the singleness of the nation into the multiplicity of other identities, is political and social stability. Conversely, in times of political and social unrest, when individuals’ multiple identities are challenged by new, alien symbolic contents, the nation is offered – and, indeed, may seem to arise – as the key to salvation (to paraphrase Kedourie). Therefore, the nation is to be regarded as an essentially oscillatory – that is, randomly re-appearing – social phenomenon, caused by occasional mass-behavioural projections of the discourse of nation onto the societal level.

Modernity is an epoch in which political change not only ceased to be inconceivable but became regarded as desirable. As Liah Greenfeld observes, the beginning of the epoch was marked by the emergence of first nations. This emergence was, in turn, signalled by the semantic change that the word “nation” underwent – the concept of nation was born when this word came to be equated with the concept of sovereign people. For Greenfeld, that was the point when the entire people came to be regarded as the political elite.

In my view, the modern concept of popular sovereignty emerged precisely at the point when the pre-modern political elites – hitherto overtly declared as elites whose political accountability was defined by the (supposedly divine) source of their legitimacy – came to be challenged and replaced by the essentially invisible counter-elites, consisting of the remnants of the previous elites and newly empowered middle classes. The invisibility of these counter-elites was rooted in an entirely new concept of political legitimacy, that of arbitrary self-appointment; hence the doctrine of individual self-determination, as a doctrinal legitimation of such self-appointment; hence the concept of popular sovereignty, as a necessary precondition for the arbitrariness of the counter-elites’ self-appointment to remain invisible, i.e. unchallenged by any attempt to delegitimise their claims to political power. Thus, by remaining invisible, the modern counter-elites have never promoted themselves into declared, politically accountable elites: they have preserved their position of invisible counter-elites by declaring the people the only modern political elite. In other words, they declared the people’s sovereignty over itself and therefore the people’s political accountability, supposedly rooted in the source of the people’s legitimacy – the people’s sovereign will. This complex of multiple paradoxes has since become promoted under the umbrella-concept called the nation.

Both aspects of this new concept of political legitimacy – the publicly promoted principle of popular sovereignty and the invisible principle of the counter-elites’ arbitrary self-appointment – required introduction of the doctrine of self-determination.[11] Within this doctrine, free will of the individual to determine his own future, present and even past became the central source of legitimacy. The same principle of “free will” was applied to the people; according to the principle of the people’s sovereignty over itself, the people came to be regarded as a collective individual in possession of its own sovereign and therefore free will. Thus the actions of both the individual and the people as a collective individual became self-referentially legitimised by their own free will. Moreover, according to the discourse that promoted the nation as a sovereign people whose sovereign free will consisted of sovereign individual wills, free will of the individual and free will of the people were to be regarded as one. The main source of legitimacy of the individual’s and the people’s actions was thus to be found in the presupposed oneness of will. This concept left a significant room for manoeuvre to the invisible, self-appointed counter-elites to act under the assumption that their own sovereign free will can not but be identical with the sovereign free will of the people and therefore with the sovereign free will of the individual. At the same time, the paradoxical logic of such a discourse suggested that the individual’s will could only be free through the presupposed oneness with the people’s sovereign free will. Hence, freedom resided in oneness, that is, in identity. And this identity, by the very logic of the discourse, could be only one. Thus the nation – as the single point through which the individual’s will and the people’s will came to be identical with each other and with themselves – was to be perceived as the sole identity.

Yet, the doctrine of self-determination had to include the concepts which were to make its inherently paradoxical logic cognitively sustainable. Therefore, hitherto alien and otherwise divergent concepts – of political change, of elevation of the people onto the level of political elite, of freedom through oneness – had to be promoted through a single discourse that included seemingly convergent concepts of liberty (i.e. freedom of will, both individual and collective), progress, emancipation, equality, fraternity and unity. The point of their convergence was to be conceived of as the nation, that is, as an umbrella-discourse under which all of these concepts were to be joined or seen as joined together. However,  inherent flexibility of the discourse of nation – based on a wide range of semantic properties of the very word “nation” – has made it so adaptable to various situations and given circumstances as to remain consistent while emphasising some and neglecting others among the concepts it consists of. It is exactly this ability of emphasis-shifting that has created the illusion that, say, a strong emphasis on the concepts of emancipation and liberty (and, within these, on individual rather than on collective free will), as well as on the concept of progress, constitutes a separate political doctrine of liberalism; or, that a strong emphasis on the concepts of emancipation and liberty (and, within these, on the collective rather than individual free will), and – consequently – on the concepts of unity and fraternity, constitutes a separate political doctrine of nationalism; or, that a strong emphasis on the concepts of emancipation and liberty (and, within them, on the collective rather than individual free will), as well as on the concepts of equality and progress, constitutes a separate political doctrine of socialism. In fact, all these concepts constitute the single doctrine of self-determination, whose presence in social reality has to be realised through the discourse of nation.[12]

The inherent flexibility of the single discourse of nation – due to a wide range of semantic properties of the word “nation” – has made its concrete manifestations at the societal level highly dependent upon given circumstances. However, all these varying manifestations are essentially to be seen as a result of the counter-elites’ efforts to adapt the givens of their own societies to fit the projected discourse of nation. In these efforts, these counter-elites have usually followed each other’s examples while – quite in accordance with the paradoxical logic of the doctrine of self-determination – depicting the adopted discourse as their own original creation. Thus this paradoxical imitation of originality has become one of the most conspicuous features of the discourse itself: as such, it has repeatedly generated the self-image of uniqueness that the counter-elites attempting to re-define their societies as nations have used in order to legitimise their claims.

Yet, various societies’ givens inevitably varied to the greatest extent. Some of these societies were already in the possession of states that were – for various reasons – susceptible to the discourse of nation and, consequently, ready to promote the nation as a unit within which both society and the state could calculate their – supposedly common – interests. Others, however, were included into large, bureaucracy-governed empires or smaller aristocracy-led states which were altogether resistant to adoption of the emerging counter-elite’s discourse of nation: both bureaucracy and aristocracy considered themselves the only legitimate political elite and found no reason to defer to the self-appointed counter-elites. Consequently, in the former case, the counter-elites found it possible to define the existing state – susceptible to the counter-elite’s discourse of nation – as a unit within which they were to calculate their own interests; in the latter case, the counter-elites found it impossible to define the existing state – entirely hostile to the counter-elite’s discourse of nation – as a unit within which they were to actually calculate their own interests.

Thus, depending on these givens, the very same counter-elite’s discourse of nation was taking seemingly divergent forms of either pro-state or counter-state discourse. In the discourse’s pro-state form, the nation – as a unit within which the counter-elite’s interests were to be calculated – came to be identified with the existing state; in the discourse’s counter-state form, the nation was yet to be arbitrarily defined and identified by the self-appointed counter-elite as opposed to the existing state. This arbitrary identification was, however, usually based on the available distinctive traits, such as language, race, religion etc. Within the discourse of nation, these already-existing symbolic boundaries were to be perceived as imaginary borders of a future nation-state. As such, being practically available, they were logically chosen to support mobilisation and homogenisation of the targeted population which was yet to be identified as the nation. Identification of the nation as an assumed interest-bearing unit (Brubaker) of and for the targeted population, of course, mainly served to promote and legitimise the counter-elite’s claim to political power: within the discourse of nation, the population mobilised and homogenised into the nation was to be regarded as a collective individual possessing its own sovereign free will; hence, its own free will legitimately sought its own sovereign state. And, just as in the former context, it was the single discourse of nation that conflated the people’s will and the individual’s will with the counter-elite’s will to possess its own state.

Depending on particular givens of particular societies, the counter-elites were shifting the emphasis onto the concepts of which the discourse of nation was composed. Thus, for instance, within the pro-state form of the discourse of nation (which by itself assumed an emphasis on loyalty to the existing state), they would choose to emphasise the concept of liberty-in-unity; or, within the counter-state form of the discourse of nation (which by itself assumed emphasis on loyalty to an imagined counter-state), they would choose to emphasise the concept of unity-in-fraternity. Within the former form, mobilisation and homogenisation of the targeted population around the projected ideal of liberty would be conceptualised in rather individualistic terms: those loyal to the existing state would be conceptualised as citizens, that is, as isolated, atomised units whose individual existence and freedom were to be realised only through their unity-in-the-nation. Within the latter form of the discourse, mobilisation and homogenisation of the targeted population around the projected ideal of unity would be conceptualised in rather collectivist terms: the loyal to an imagined counter-state would be conceptualised as ethnic kin, that is, as a priori united by presumed fraternity, whose collective existence and freedom were to be realised through their fraternity-in-the-nation. Such shifts have created the illusion of two fundamentally opposed – civic-individualistic and ethnic-collectivist – concepts of the nation. In fact, these are only minor modifications in the counter-elites’ adaptation of particular societal givens to the projected discourse of nation.  

To answer the question of the inherently paradoxical relationship between the individual and the nation as a collective individual, it is necessary to closely examine the paradoxical logic of the doctrine of self-determination, whose expression at the societal level takes the form of the discourse of nation. In both liberal-individualistic and national-collectivist aspects of the discourse of nation, the absorption of the individual’s free will into the nation as a presumed collective free will, paradoxically, brings both the former and the latter into being: only by voluntary establishment of the nation as a collective free will does the individual’s will itself become free; conversely, only by the voluntary absorption of the individual’s will into the collective will of the nation does the latter become constituted as free.[13] The central point of the discourse, through which the individual actually exists within the nation, is the concept of citizenship: only as a citizen can the individual be a member of the nation and therefore be free through the nation as the presumed collective free will; conversely, only through citizenship can the nation absorb the individual’s free will and therefore constitute itself as free. Thus, according to the paradoxical logic of the discourse, not only can the individual not be free without being a citizen: the nation can not be free without the individual’s being a citizen and thus constituting the nation. Hence, for the sake of its own freedom, the nation can not tolerate individuals who refuse to be free as citizens.[14]

As the ultimate paradox, there can be no free will within the nation: the will of the individual to be free through voluntary participation in the nation, and the nation as a presumed collective free will (i.e. collective free individual) created through such participation, both come into existence as involuntary creations: ultimately, they are both created by the conditioned perception of the notion of nation. This, inherently paradoxical, conditioned perception, i.e. pre-conception, presupposes that the nation is one (or identical) with both itself and all its individual members; conversely, every individual member is presumed to be one (or identical) with both itself and the greater whole of the nation. This presumed all-embracing identity is conditioned, at the least, by the presupposed oneness that “the nation” suggests. Of course, all these assumptions can remain logically valid only within the paradoxical logic of the discourse of nation. Thus paradox arises as the main logical device for thinking the doctrine of self-determination that, paradoxically, takes two supposedly opposed – liberal-individualistic and national-collectivist – forms.

[1] Italics mine. Cited in Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, p. 126.

[2] On the significance of this geopolitical re-arrangement for the future break-up of the Soviet Union, see Rogers Brubaker: Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism, in John A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation, Cambridge 1998.

[3] Of course, it is possible to argue that the break-up of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia was entirely caused by their internal contradictions and the long-lasting ethnic tensions (the latter mostly not corresponding to recorded historical facts). The same arguments were also commonly used at the end of the World War I to justify the break-up of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires and the territorial reduction of the German and Russian ones. As such, these arguments follow the line of the common liberal-nationalist discourse which publicly promotes self-determination as an end in itself, while being mainly concerned with geopolitical re-arrangements as self-determination’s ultimate political-instrumental implications.

[4] Kedourie, Nationalism, Fourth Edition, p. 128-9. Italics mine.

[5] Ibid.,  p. 143.

[6] Ibid., p. 1.

[7] Ibid., p. 67.

[8]  Kedouries argues that “A British or an American nationalist would have to define the British or the American nation in terms of language, race, or religion, to require that all those who conform to the definition should belong to the British or American state, that all those who do not, should cease so to belong, and to demand that all British and American citizens should merge their will in the will of the community.” (Ibid.: 68) However, that the ethno-linguistic nationalism was not alien to “the most liberal”, first Americans can be seen in a statement by Benjamin Franklin: “This (Pennsylvania) will in a few years become a German Colony; Instead of their learning our language, we must learn theirs or live as in a foreign country.” (In Kohn, H. 1966, American Nationalism. New York: Collier Books, p. 146; cited in Tamir, Y. 1993, Liberal Nationalism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p. xxiii) Another Pennsylvanian, Benjamin Rush stated in 1798: “The education of our youth in the country is particularly necessary in Pennsylvania, while our citizens are composed of natives of so many different kingdoms in Europe. Our school of learning, by producing one general uniform system of education, will render the mass of the people more homogenous, and therefore fit more easily for uniform and peaceful government.” (Kohn 1966: p. 174, cited in Tamir 1993: p. xxiii-xxiv. Italics mine)

[9] James, Simon 1999, The Atlantic Celts. London: British Museum Press, p. 76.

[10] Here I deliberately conflate Barth’s boundary-theory with Smith’s theory of ethnic survival. According to the latter, the survival of the group is not a matter of preserved physical continuity but rather of the preserved continuity of the complex of myths, symbols, shared memories, values etc. Thus I emphasise that the group’s myth-symbol complex is, actually, the same phenomenon which Barth termed as the group’s symbolic boundaries; hence, Barth’s boundary-maintenance is to be regarded as the preservation of the group’s myth-symbol complex. I believe that both approaches can be applied not only to national identity but to all multiple identities one can possibly behave (Beissinger). For instance, survival of individual identity also depends on maintenance of the individual’s symbolic boundaries i.e. of the individual’s own complex of personal myths, symbols, memories and, last but not least, values.

[11] It is not difficult to agree with Kedourie that Kant’s doctrine of self-determination represents the most comprehensive and far-reaching theory of freedom, morality and individual self-determination. According to it, “man is free when he obeys the laws of morality which he finds within himself, and not in the external world”. Thus, as Kedourie puts it, Kant made the individual “the very centre, the arbiter, the sovereign of the universe”, “who, with the help of self-discovered, self-imposed norms, determines himself as a free and moral-being”. Yet, the doctrine of self-determination, though perfected by Kant, is a sum of many philosophical efforts to promote man’s reason and determination of his will as supreme and independent arbiters in worldly affairs. As such, it is not the product of post-Kantian German romanticists but rather of Kant’s rationalist contemporaries – both Anglo-Saxon and French – who jointly advocated the rule of enlightened reason.

[12] This could be a theoretical explanation of the regular political practice of – supposedly internationalist – socialist parties to gather under national flags. This could also offer a theoretical explanation for the existence of the Bolshevik doctrine of national self-determination: while criticising Austro-Marxists for their pro-nationalist biases, Lenin himself introduced the doctrine of national self-determination which significantly overcame the non-compromise approach that Wilson had proclaimed.

[13] See Rousseau, The Social Contract.

[14] Ibid.