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Having argued in Chs 3 and 4 that there are cosmopolitan principles of civil and political justice and cosmopolitan principles of distributive justice, one is logically led to the question, ‘if one affirms cosmopolitan principles of justice, what kind of political framework (political structures) should one accept— a system of states, or of global political institutions, of autonomous nations (including even statehood)? This chapter seeks to answer these questions. It is arranged in 17 sections: Section I provides a conceptual analysis of some possible political frameworks; the following six sections (II–VI) consider cosmopolitan approaches to the question of how political power should be institutionalized (II), present three possible approaches—intrinsic, right-based, and instrumental (III–V), and examine the nature of the political framework offered by these three approaches (VI); Sections VII–XI analyse five challenges to the cosmopolitan political proposals, first, those voiced by statists (including both realists and those who affirm the ‘society of states’) (VIII–X) and, second, those voiced by those sympathetic to the idea of a global civil society (XI); Sections XII–XVI evaluate four nationalist claims that any defensible account of political institutions should grant autonomy to nations (provide national self-determination), and they aim to defend a cosmopolitan political programme—one in which there are democratic supra-state institutions charged with protecting people’s civil, political, and economic rights—and to rebut the challenges of statists and nationalists or to show that they can be accommodated by cosmopolitans. Section XVII summarizes and concludes that, overall, a cosmopolitan political order should grant a very heavily qualified role to national self-determination.

Both Josef Redlich and Lewis Namier were caught up in the hysteria of World War I. It would seem that the two men started from diametrically opposed viewpoints, yet underneath the obvious differences was a greater commonality in views. Both shared a burning desire for a new Europe: a fairer and more moral order, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Both, despite accepting the principle of national self-determination, gradually became alienated from nationalism in the course of the war, and promoted multinational, supranational ideals. Redlich strove to actualise the liberal internationalist interpretation of the Austrian state idea, whilst Namier fought to win British support for the cause of socialism (tinged with Pan-Slavism) in Central and Eastern Europe. In an age of nationalist fervour in Central and Eastern Europe, and of widespread liberal optimism in the West that national self-determination would result in new liberal nation-states, both Redlich and Namier were inevitably isolated.

One of the central issues raised by Jonathan Glover's study of atrocities in the twentieth century is when it can be permissible, or indeed obligatory, to use military force to stop or to prevent such atrocities. This chapter argues that some of the traditional objections to humanitarian intervention are misguided — particularly those that treat national self‐determination or state sovereignty as a decisive barrier to the permissibility of intervention. It does, however, defend a “requirement of consent,” according to which the ostensible beneficiaries of humanitarian intervention should have a veto authority with respect to intervention on their behalf. It also argues for the surprising and perhaps paradoxical claim that the proportionality constraint on causing unintended but foreseen harm may be weaker in its application to harms inflicted on the intended beneficiaries of humanitarian intervention than it is in it application to harms inflicted on other innocent people in war.

This chapter examines the post-1989 discourse on national minority and co-nation rights. It suggests that the foundation of the problem of national minorities in international law is found not in the issue of a definition but in the relation between national minorities and state nationalism. The chapter argues that in order to elucidate the problematic relationship between protection and national self-determination, one must problematise the discourse of national minority rights not solely in terms of international law, but also in terms of social idealism.

This chapter examines the problem of co-nation inclusion in national self-determination in the context of liberalism and nationalism. It argues that the tension in national self-determination in relation to national minority rights is better explained in terms of its focus and scope. The chapter suggests that the national notion of national self-determination may be just an impression based on an illusion, and that national identity may be an impossibility based on a false consciousness.

This chapter explores why national minorities should be a subject of international relations when this field is primarily concerned with states and not groups or individuals within a state’s domestic jurisdiction. If statesmen and stateswomen demonstrated no concern for such groups in their foreign policies, then national minorities certainly would not be an appropriate subject for a book on international politics, though they would still be suitable for studies of domestic governance or constitutional law or political sociology, among others. However, such international indifference towards minorities does not exist: in practice, the foreign relations of many countries both today and in the past have been concerned with national minorities. This is because although the modern theory of state sovereignty postulates a neat fit between international boundaries and politically significant identities, in reality the two rarely coincide.

This chapter places the United States in the 1970s in the context of world history. Because of the diversity of the Earth's societies in political and social development, all nations and peoples in this era did not march in lockstep with each other; as the Cold War and other conflicts revealed, trends around the globe at the time seemed to be heading in very different directions. But in retrospect, the chapter reveals the 1970s American story of moving simultaneously toward greater egalitarianism and toward greater faith in the free market fit with a similar pattern taking shape around the world, one emphasizing human rights and national self-determination, on the one hand, and the declining legitimacy of socialism and government management of economies, on the other.

The collapse of communism in the former Soviet bloc between 1989 and 1991 caused multinational Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union to come apart along ethnic lines and be replaced by new nation-states whose boundaries were those of the previous federal divisions. This book examines the international status of national minorities in the European nation-states system with emphasis on the period from 1919 to 1995. While there have been many studies of the evolution and expansion of the nation-states system in Europe, none has explicitly illuminated this historical process from the more narrowly focused lens of national minority concerns. European developments since the end of the Cold War would seem to suggest that such an investigation could make a valuable contribution to both theoretical and policy-making debates on sovereignty, national self-determination, and ethnic conflict. This book explores the relationship between minority rights and national security within states and between minority rights and stability within the society of states.

This chapter narrates the systematic efforts of nationalist leaders in the diaspora to establish a national Korean state in the aftermath of the large-scale 1919 March First uprising. Japan’s brutal suppression of the national uprising in Korea made it necessary for national liberation activities to be carried out from abroad, ushering in a new phase in the nationalist movement as the locus of political activities occurred largely outside the Korean peninsula. These activities resulted in the formation of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) in Shanghai, which developed out of multiple ideological and strategic strands within the diaspora. The globalization of American power following World War I empowered the U.S. component of the Korean diaspora to play significant roles, ideologically and organizationally, in defining the vision of a new Korean nation-state that was embodied in the KPG. For the next several years, the activities of the KPG would remain at the center of the national liberation movement.