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21 - Self-Determination and National Sovereignty

from Part III - Intersections: National(ist) Synergies and Tensions with Other Social, Economic, Political, and Cultural Categories, Identities, and Practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2023

By
Alain Dieckhoff
Edited by
Cathie Carmichael ,
Matthew D'Auria  and
Aviel Roshwald
Cathie Carmichael
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Matthew D'Auria
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Aviel Roshwald
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

Developing “friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” is one of the purposes of the United Nations Organization, as stated in the founding charter of 1945. The principle of self-determination has even become a right through the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (December 1960). The Declaration states that: “All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” Self-determination has thus entered international law. Strangely enough, however, nowhere are the bearers of this right defined: who are the peoples entitled to claim self-determination? This omission is not there by chance. Indeed, the definition of peoplehood is far from evident. Should a people be defined on a territorial basis, i.e. include all the population living within a given territory delimited by given boundaries?

Keywords

NationSovereigntyBoundariesself-determinationFranceGermanyEastern EuropeWoodrow Wilson
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism , pp. 467 - 484
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Breuilly, John, The State of Germany: The National Idea in the Making, Unmaking and Remaking of a Modern Nation-State (London: Longman, 1992).Google Scholar
Dieckhoff, Alain, Nationalism and the Multination State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
Greenfeld, Liah, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origin of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, David, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Nipperdey, Thomas, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Schulze, Hagen, States, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).Google Scholar
Smith, L. V., Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tamir, Yael, “The Right to National Self-Determination,” Social Research, 58/3 (Fall 1991), 565–590.Google Scholar
Weber, Max, Economy and Society (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968).Google Scholar

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