The Intersection of Self-determination and Nationalism: Historical Context and Challenges

Why do some communities fight for decades to govern themselves, while others live peacefully within larger states? The answer often lies in two powerful ideas that have shaped the modern world: self-determination and nationalism. These concepts redrew the map of Europe after World War I, dismantled vast empires, and continue to drive conflicts today. Understanding how they connect, and where they clash, is essential for anyone studying international relations. This post breaks down what these ideas mean, traces their historical roots, and examines why they remain so contested in the 21st century.

What is self-determination? 🔗

At its core, self-determination is the principle that a people has the right to decide its own political destiny. This can mean choosing full sovereignty and independence (external self-determination) or selecting one’s own form of government within an existing state (internal self-determination). The idea is simple to state but difficult to apply: who counts as a “people,” and who gets to decide?

The principle has deep historical roots. Its emphasis on freedom from authoritarian rule traces back to the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century. However, it found its most prominent expression in the twentieth century, first after World War I and then after World War II.

From principle to legal right 🔗

Self-determination moved from being a political ideal to a recognised legal norm gradually. It is now considered a core principle of international law, arising from customary law and enshrined in major treaties. The United Nations Charter affirmed the right in 1945, and the principle was strengthened by later instruments. The UN General Assembly’s 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, followed by the 1970 Friendly Relations Declaration, expanded the concept well beyond decolonisation.

One important point often missed by students: the principle’s scope has always been ambiguous. The UN framework largely restricts the legal right of secession to colonial contexts, which means ethnic groups inside established states generally cannot use self-determination as a straightforward legal route to independence. This gap between the broad moral appeal of the idea and its narrow legal application explains much of the conflict that follows.

What is nationalism? 🔗

If self-determination is about the right to self-rule, nationalism is the feeling that makes a community want that right in the first place. Nationalism is an ideology that emphasises loyalty and devotion to a nation, holding that such obligations outweigh other individual or group interests. It is the subjective sense that “we” are a distinct people who belong together and should govern ourselves.

This sense of belonging is usually built on shared characteristics. Nationalism aims to build and maintain a single national identity based on a combination of shared traits such as culture, ethnicity, homeland, language, religion, traditions, or belief in a common history. Crucially, the components matter differently in different places. For some communities, language is the binding thread; for others, religion or a shared historical experience carries the most weight.

Nation versus state 🔗

A common point of confusion is the difference between a nation and a state. A nation is a group of people with a common language, history, culture, and usually a geographic territory, while a state is an association characterised by formal institutions of government, permanent boundaries, and sovereignty. The two do not always overlap. A single state can contain many nations, as Austria-Hungary once did, and a single nation can be spread across several states.

When a nation and a state line up neatly, you get a nation-state. Nationalism, in essence, demands exactly this alignment: it holds that the nation should be congruent with the state and that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference. This is precisely where nationalism and self-determination meet. Nationalism supplies the identity and the desire; self-determination supplies the principle that justifies turning that desire into a state.

Two faces of nationalism 🔗

Scholars distinguish between two broad types of national belonging, and the distinction is worth knowing. National identities built solely around characteristics like ethnicity, language, or religion exclude those who do not meet these narrow criteria, whereas an identity based on shared ideas, history, and common experience tends to be more accepting.

Civic nationalism defines membership through shared political values and citizenship, so anyone who accepts those values can belong. Ethnic nationalism defines belonging through ancestry, language, and culture, and can become exclusionary or even hostile toward minorities. This tension between inclusive and exclusive visions of the nation runs through almost every self-determination struggle.

Self-determination and the collapse of empires 🔗

The most dramatic demonstration of these ideas came in early twentieth-century Europe. The great multi-ethnic empires of the era were essentially states that ruled over many nations, and the rising tide of nationalism made them increasingly unstable.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire 🔗

Austria-Hungary was a patchwork of peoples, each with its own identity and aspirations. As the strains of war mounted, nationalist sentiment turned into open separatism. The Wilsonian peace pronouncements from January 1918 onward, alongside the food crisis and military exhaustion, encouraged nationalism among the peoples of the Habsburg monarchy and led to uncontrollable civil unrest and nationalist secessionism. By 1918 the empire had dissolved, and its territories formed new states such as Czechoslovakia and the union that became Yugoslavia.

The Ottoman Empire 🔗

The Ottoman Empire faced a similar fate, but its decline had begun earlier. The nineteenth-century rise of nationalism under Ottoman rule had already produced an independent Greece in 1821, Serbia, and Bulgaria. Defeat in World War I sealed the empire’s collapse, and its dissolution led to the creation of new states in the Middle East and the emergence of modern Turkey.

World War I and the redrawing of borders 🔗

The principle that justified all this upheaval was given its most famous articulation by US President Woodrow Wilson. His Fourteen Points, presented to Congress in January 1918, called for a redrawing of the map of Europe based on national self-determination, along with open diplomacy, free trade, and an international assembly of nations. Wilson identified the repression of minority groups within empires as a key cause of war that he wanted never to repeat.

The peacemakers at Versailles set out to act on this vision. With the collapse of the Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires, the delegates expected to draw new borders that created nations with ethnic homogeneity, believing this would reduce violence between different nationalities. The intention was idealistic: give each people its own state, and the old causes of war would fade.

Why the settlement created new problems 🔗

The reality proved far messier. Central Europe was such a dense mix of languages, religions, and cultures that drawing clean ethnic borders was impossible. As historian Margaret MacMillan has observed, about half the people living in the region could be counted as members of one national minority or another, and the dividing lines between nations were rarely clear.

The result was that almost every new state contained sizeable minorities who did not identify with the dominant nation. New borders created new problems: several countries felt aggrieved at their territorial losses, and large minority groups were created as frontiers were redrawn. Czechoslovakia, for example, contained Germans, Hungarians, and others who felt no loyalty to the new state. These unresolved grievances festered between the wars and contributed to the instability that helped produce a second, even larger conflict.

The unresolved tension: self-determination versus territorial integrity 🔗

The deepest problem with self-determination is that it sits in permanent tension with another foundational principle of international order: territorial integrity. States want their borders respected and protected, but self-determination claims by minority groups directly challenge those borders.

International law tries to reconcile the two. Legal doctrine generally manages the conflict by emphasising internal self-determination within existing states and by limiting the circumstances under which secession may occur. In practice, the principle is paired with a territorial integrity safeguard, which is why self-determination is not treated as a general licence to break up existing countries.

A right that depends on politics 🔗

Here is the uncomfortable truth that students of international relations must grapple with: whether a self-determination claim succeeds often has less to do with law than with power. Whether secession succeeds frequently depends not on legal principles but on political factors, particularly recognition by powerful states, and the international community’s response to such movements has been inconsistent.

This is why the same major powers can support independence in one case while insisting on territorial integrity in another. States are able to embrace the self-determination of some groups to support separatist claims that suit their interests, while proclaiming that territorial integrity prevails when their own or their allies’ territory is at stake. The selective support for various secessionist causes around the world illustrates this double standard clearly.

Conflict into the present 🔗

The disputes set in motion a century ago have not faded. Recent events, such as referendums over contested territories and the controversies surrounding their legitimacy, highlight the ongoing complexity of applying self-determination in modern geopolitics. From the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s to disputes over enclaves and breakaway regions today, the same fundamental question recurs: when does a community’s desire for self-rule outweigh an established state’s claim to its territory?

For multi-ethnic states everywhere, including large and diverse democracies, these are live questions rather than historical curiosities. Managing the demands of distinct linguistic, religious, and regional groups while preserving a unified state remains one of the central challenges of modern governance.

What do you think? If a clearly defined community wants to govern itself but its departure would destabilise an entire region, which principle should prevail: the people’s right to self-determination or the state’s right to territorial integrity? And can a national identity built on shared ideas and citizenship hold a diverse country together more durably than one built on language, religion, or ethnicity?

References

1. https://pesd.princeton.edu/node/656
2. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/self_determination_(international_law)
3. https://www.e-ir.info/2020/02/18/the-precarious-history-of-the-un-towards-self-determination/
4. https://www.britannica.com/topic/nationalism
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalism
6. https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/understanding-constructive-and-destructive-natures-nationalism
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_Austria-Hungary
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Ottoman_Empire
9. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2801/woodrow-wilsons-fourteen-points/
10. https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/self-determination
11. https://www.diplomacyandlaw.com/post/principle-of-territorial-integrity-in-international-law
12. https://thelaw.institute/human-rights-evolution-concepts-and-concerns/self-determination-definition-rights-debates-implications/
13. https://www.zaoerv.de/75_2015/75_2015_1_a_75_100.pdf
14. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/self-determination-political-principle