National Self-determination Ideological History And Current Status

National self-determination is the product of anti-colonial revolution. The concept of national self-determination expresses the idea of democracy, according to which, the best qualified governors of people are people themselves.The concept of National self-determination had spread widely in Europe from the middle of 19th century. It was particularly elaborated by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. International law also recognizes the right of national self-determination unreservedly. Today, most of the sovereignties recognize the right of national self-determination.The core of the contemporary problems of national self-determination is that the political world is still organized by the principle that its primary agents are states and its primary purpose is peace. This principle is problematic precisely because most of the world's states are multinational, and some nations demand new states of their own. This demand threatens the integrity, power and wealth of existing members of the states club.State sovereignty is the highest form of national self-determination. But with the ending of the colony, especially the disintegration of Soviet and the change of East-Europe, the suppressed thoughts of nationalism sprung out and swept across the world quickly. As was predicted, "The national conflict probably becomes the political problem in the 21th century. The content of national self-determination, as the typical national demand in the 20th century, will meet its doom in the 21th century." While this sounds pessimistic as a prediction, national self-determination greatly challenges the present state sovereignty indeed. This tendency directs the attention of many scholars in politics and international law to the issues of national self-determination.The essence of the principle of national self-determination is decolonization of the nations that had been dependence countries before the colonial rule. The principle is closely linked to that of state sovereignty and noninterference in other countries' internal affairs, and it does not mean that people can unrestrictedly extend the framework of the national self-determination to wherever they want, regardless of national as well as international history and present situations. Both the proposition of "one nation-state of one ethnic group" and the proposal of "one ethnic group in one nation-state" are not only biased and absurd theoretically, but also bound to help those who want to split the nation or those who want to separate the people of a nation under the nationalist banners.The purpose of the present thesis is to discuss the concepts of national self-determination, with a particular focus on the issues involving the principles of practices of national self-determination after the Cold War. To satisfy this purpose, this thesis systematically analyzes the thoughts of national self-determination, and builds a theoretical framework which can be used to analyze issues of contemporary national self-determination practices. This is probably a creative point of this research project...