ABSTRACT
What justifies an international system of formally equal and sovereign nation-states? The
opening words of the preamble to the UN charter suggest the answer: ‘We the peoples of
the United Nations determined . . . ’ Indeed, ‘if state sovereignty has provided the basic
institutional framework of the society of states, it was national self-determination that
came ever more to provide the political power and the moral meaning to the idea of an
international society’ (Hurrell, 2007, p. 121). But this moral rationale of the international
society has turned out to be a confused, and confusing, compass. At the heart of this con-
fusion, I argue, lies the tacit submersion of self-determination in state-determination. I
expound this claim in both theory and practice. Theoretically, self-determination signifies
positive liberty. It answers Isaiah Berlin’s (2002, p. 36) question of ‘who is the master?’
stipulating the peoples-turned-nations as the source of political legitimacy (Connor, 1978;
Gellner, 2006; Gilbert, 1998; Greenfeld, 1992; Hall, 1999; Smith, 1987). Ideal self-deter-
mination entails the ‘moral double helix’ of duality and mutuality: the right belongs to
both the individual, to determine his/her identity, and to the collect, to determine its
polity; and the right is as much the other’s as the self’s. Practically, state actors have
regarded self-determination’s positive power simultaneously as an opportunity to be
seized and a peril to be averted, inducing a century-long effort to tame self-determination:
to control and contain this perilous principle by yielding the will of ‘the people’ to the
interests of powerful states, which have repeatedly impaired its moral DNA.
