ABSTRACT
How do democratic states respond to minority claims for self-government and how should they respond? In recent years a number of comparative and normative analyses have addressed these questions. Most cases discussed in this literature are Western European countries. The most frequently analysed ones are the Spanish Estado de las autonomías, the Belgian transition from consociation within a unitary constitution to multilingual federation, and devolution in the UK. Switzerland is a more ambiguous case since it is not obvious that its language communities have developed distinct national identities characterised by a desire for self-government. What these cases have in common is that multinational and multilingual arrangements are a constitutional feature of the larger polity itself so that it may be regarded as a composite entity consisting of several autonomous and culturally distinct subunits. Outside Europe, Canada and India are the only two long-term stable democracies that can be described in this way.
