A Right to Self-Definition

Abstract

States are not only sovereign entities. They are also political communities that exercise power in the name of the people that constitute them. These constituted communities claim legitimacy on the grounds that their members authorise them to exercise political power on their behalf. As legitimate political communities, states claim to have a moral right to se If-definition, which entitles them to maintain control over membership policies. In this chapter I analyse claims to self-definition advanced by political communities and by ethno-cultural communities and test the compatibility between these claims and the practice of ethno-cultural citizenship. Obviously, in the real world we cannot distinguish between pure political communities and pure ethno-cultural communities and arguments about self-definition often refer to both types of communities. I, nevertheless, think that it is useful to start the examination of various claims to self-definition by posing the question of what kind of “self” these claims are intended to serve.