Human self-determination, self-determination as an individual act, is a specifically modern European concept. The expression did not exist before the seventeenth century, and only toward the end of the eighteenth century did it first obtain its current meaning. What makes it a modern concept is the self-referential nature of the individual, who is not dependent on others, who is not determined by others, but rather decides his or her own path and action. The self-determined individual is autonomous; he or she is self-legislating.

Self-determination is freedom, but a special kind of freedom. It is not compatible with domination and inequality. A person's freedom can deprive or at least restrict the freedom of others. Individual freedom in the sense of rights over persons increases to the degree that the freedom of others decreases. Self-determination, by contrast, is reflexive. It is freedom without domination. One who determines not oneself, but rather others, exercises alien determination. A society characterized by the comprehensive self-determination of its members – and only such a society – is domination-free.

While the division of a society into individuals is always given, collectives of any number and size, as well as overlapping collectives, can be formed from it and indeed from the whole of humanity. This book has focused on those collectives that by definition embody self-determination: groups that recognize no higher authority and are thus sovereign. Such groups thereby have the maximum amount of self-determination a collective can have at its disposal. In the modern view, states are sovereign. A state is defined not only by a certain territory, but also by a population. As long as this population, the people of the state, is identical with the inhabitants of the territory that the state encompasses, the state and the people are conterminous. The problem of the right of self-determination arises when the two are no longer conterminous, when a collective advances claims to its own, as yet inexistent, sovereignty over a certain territory. This turns the question of self-determination into one of the right of self-determination: Which collective has an exclusive right to a certain territory and with that, to the formation of an independent, sovereign, that is, a self-determined, state?