ABSTRACT
From time to time new states arise in ways that appear to represent the expression of some coherent population of people. ‘The Palestinians’ would be recognized by the long overdue recognition of the state of Palestine, ‘the Kosovars’ by the recognition of Kosovo. Sooner or later a seat with the name of the new state on it is (at least metaphorically speaking) created in the General Assembly of the United Nations. States that already exist may on occasion be held to correspond with, or to stand in the place of, a population coherent enough to be referred to as ‘a people’. More commonly it is in the aspirational phase that the Palestinians, the Kosovars or the Kurds are identified in that way, in the context of a political argument for the legitimacy of future statehood. States, as usually understood, are kinds of individuals, legal persons (or ‘subjects’) at the international level. A state is an ‘it’, not a ‘they’ or a ‘we’. Grammatically, ‘a people’ is like a state. It is also singular. And this is not just a matter of pedantry. In some accounts of geopolitics or modern history, emphasis is placed on the so-called ‘nation state’ as an entity in which statehood and nationality – peoplehood – are fused. It sounds as if, in this formula, the polity is co-terminous with the tribe.
