Ostensibly, the world has been made safe for nationalism, the hierarchy of the traditional dynastic world giving way everywhere before the permissive and popular principle of national self-determination. The reality is considerably more complex. Much as the early Christian church was once captured and tamed by an institutionalised clerisy, so in the twentieth century the new civil religion of the nation has been, captured and modified by the institutional order of the already existing society of states. Indeed, the analogy might usefully be extended further: just as religious enthusiasm, the subversive appeal of a return to the true faith, has always lain beneath the orthodoxies of the Christian churches, and has from time to time broken out in open challenge to established religion, so, as we shall see, the ideal of ‘true’ popular national sovereignty has never been wholly domesticated. Before attempting to assess the challenge which it poses for the established international order it is worth considering in more detail why this process of domestication occurred and the particular form that it took.

THE DOMESTICATION OF NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION

The process began almost as soon as national self-determination was advanced as the new principle of international legitimacy after 1918. It involved, first, equating the popular principle of sovereignty with the attack on the remaining dynastic empires in Europe, and later with anti-colonialism generally. Secondly, it involved abandoning the constitutional mode of settling disputed claims in favour of political settlements.