Stateless nation

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A stateless nation is an ethnic group or nation that does not possess its own sovereign state. [1] Use of the term implies that the nation has the right to self-determination, to establish an independent nation-state with its own government. [2] [3] Members of stateless nations may be citizens of the country in which they live, or they may be denied citizenship by that country. Stateless nations are usually not represented in international sports or in international organisations such as the United Nations. Nations without a state are classified as fourth-world nations. [4] [5] [6] Some stateless nations have a history of statehood, while some were always stateless.

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The term was coined in 1983 by political scientist Jacques Leruez in his book L'Écosse, une nation sans État about the peculiar position of Scotland within the British state. It was later adopted and popularized by Scottish scholars such as David McCrone, Michael Keating and T. M. Devine. [7]

Ethnicities described as stateless nations can be dispersed across a number of states (for example, the Yoruba people found in the African states of Nigeria, Benin and Togo) or form the native population of a province within a larger state (such as the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region within the People's Republic of China). Some stateless nations historically had a state, which was absorbed by another; for example, Tibet's declaration of independence in 1913 was not recognized, and it was reunited in 1951 by the People's Republic of China - which claims that Tibet is an integral part of China, while the Tibetan government-in-exile maintains that Tibet is an independent state under an unlawful occupation. [8] [9] Some ethnic groups were once a stateless nation that later became a nation state (for example, the nations of the Balkans such as the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians that were once part of the multinational state of Yugoslavia and gained independence during the breakup of Yugoslavia).

Stateless nations can have large populations; for example, the Kurds have an estimated population of over 30 million people, which makes them one of the largest stateless nations. [10]

Nation-states and nations without states

The symbiotic relationship between nations and states arose in Western Europe during the 18th century, and it was exported to the rest of the world through colonial rule. Whereas the Western European nation-states are at present relinquishing some of their powers to the European Union, many of the former colonies are now the zealous defenders of the concept of national statehood. [3] However, not all peoples within multi-cultural states consider themselves stateless nations. As not all states are nation states, there are ethnic groups who live in multinational states that are not considered "stateless nations".

Only a small fraction of the world's national groups have associated nation states; the rest are distributed in one or more states. While there are over 3000 estimated nations in the world, there were only 193 member states of the United Nations as of 2011, of which fewer than 20 are considered to be ethnically homogeneous nation states. Thus nation states are not as common as often assumed, and stateless nations are the overwhelming majority of nations in the world. [3]

Consequences of colonialism and imperialism

During the imperial and colonial era, powerful nations extended their influence outside their homeland; resulting in many colonized nations ceasing to be self-governing and being described as stateless nations thereafter. [11] Some nations have been victims of "carve-outs" that left their homeland divided among several countries. Even today, the colonial boundaries form modern national boundaries. These boundaries often differ from cultural boundaries which results in situations wherein people who speak the same language or have the same culture are divided by national borders; for example, New Guinea is split into the regions of West Papua (a former Dutch colony) and Papua New Guinea (a former Australian colony). [12] During decolonization, the colonial powers imposed a unified state structure irrespective of the ethnic differences and granted independence to their colonies as a multinational state. This led to successor states with many minority ethnic groups in them, which increased the potential for ethnic conflicts. [13] [14] [15] [16] Some of these minority groups campaigned for self-determination. Stateless nations were not protected in all countries and as a result, they became victims of atrocities such as discrimination, ethnic cleansing, genocide, forced assimilation, and the exploitation of labor and natural resources. [17] [18]

Nationalism and stateless nations

People with a common origin, history, language, culture, customs, or religion can turn into a nation through the awakening of national consciousness. [19] A nation can exist without a state, as is exemplified by the stateless nations. Citizenship is not always the nationality of a person. [20] In a multinational state different national identities can coexist or compete: for example, in Britain English nationalism, Scottish nationalism, and Welsh nationalism exist and are held together by British nationalism. [21] Nationalism is often connected to separatism because a nation is considered to achieve completeness through its independence. [22]

Throughout history, numerous nations declared their independence, but not all succeeded in establishing a state. Even today, there are active autonomy and independence movements around the world. The claim of the stateless nations to self-determination is often denied due to geopolitical interests and increasing globalization of the world. [23] [24] [25] [26] Stateless nations sometimes show solidarity with other stateless nations and maintain diplomatic relations. [27] [28]

Unionism vs separatism

Not all ethnic groups claim to be a nation or aspire to be a separate state. Some of them see themselves as part of the multinational state they are located in and believe that their interests are well represented in it. The favoring of a united single state is associated with unionism (such as Pakistani nationalism, Indian nationalism, and Belgian nationalism) [ citation needed ]). In many countries, unionism is also encouraged by governments and separatism is considered illegal.

See also

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irredentism</span> Territorial claim

Irredentism is one state's desire to annex the territory of another state. This desire can be motivated by ethnic reasons because the population of the territory is ethnically similar to the population of the parent state. Historical reasons may also be responsible, i.e., that the territory previously formed part of the parent state. However, difficulties in applying the concept to concrete cases have given rise to academic debates about its precise definition. Disagreements concern whether either or both ethnic and historical reasons have to be present and whether non-state actors can also engage in irredentism. A further dispute is whether attempts to absorb a full neighboring state are also included. There are various types of irredentism. For typical forms of irredentism, the parent state already exists before the territorial conflict with a neighboring state arises. However, there are also forms of irredentism in which the parent state is newly created by uniting an ethnic group spread across several countries. Another distinction concerns whether the country to which the disputed territory currently belongs is a regular state, a former colony, or a collapsed state.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nation state</span> Political term for a state that is based around a nation

A nation-state is a political unit where the state, a centralized political organization ruling over a population within a territory, and the nation, a community based on a common identity, are congruent. It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant national or ethnic group.

Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the Nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, it presupposes the existence and tends to promote the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining its sovereignty (self-governance) over its perceived homeland to create a nation-state. It holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power. It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity, based on a combination of shared social characteristics such as culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics, religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history, and to promote national unity or solidarity. Nationalism, therefore, seeks to preserve and foster a nation's traditional culture. There are various definitions of a "nation", which leads to different types of nationalism. The two main divergent forms identified by scholars are ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Romantic nationalism</span> Type of nationalism

Romantic nationalism is the form of nationalism in which the state claims its political legitimacy as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs. This includes such factors as language, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and customs of the nation in its primal sense of those who were born within its culture. It can be applied to ethnic nationalism as well as civic nationalism. Romantic nationalism arose in reaction to dynastic or imperial hegemony, which assessed the legitimacy of the state from the top down, emanating from a monarch or other authority, which justified its existence. Such downward-radiating power might ultimately derive from a god or gods (see the divine right of kings and the Mandate of Heaven).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Self-determination</span> The right of all people to freely participate in the political procedures of their government

Self-determination refers to a people's right to form its own political entity, and internal self-determination is the right to representative government with full suffrage.

An ethnicity or ethnic group is a group of people who identify with each other on the basis of perceived shared attributes that distinguish them from other groups. Those attributes can include a common nation of origin, or common sets of ancestry, traditions, language, history, society, religion, or social treatment. The term ethnicity is often used interchangeably with the term nation, particularly in cases of ethnic nationalism.

Secession is the formal withdrawal of a group from a political entity. The process begins once a group proclaims an act of secession. A secession attempt might be violent or peaceful, but the goal is the creation of a new state or entity independent of the group or territory from which it seceded. Threats of secession can be a strategy for achieving more limited goals.

Separatism is the advocacy of cultural, ethnic, tribal, religious, racial, governmental, or gender separation from the larger group. As with secession, separatism conventionally refers to full political separation. Groups simply seeking greater autonomy are usually not considered separatists. Some discourse settings equate separatism with religious segregation, racial segregation, or sex segregation, while other discourse settings take the broader view that separation by choice may serve useful purposes and is not the same as government-enforced segregation. There is some academic debate about this definition, and in particular how it relates to secessionism, as has been discussed online.

Presented below is a list of the lists of active separatist movements by continent:

The term "minority group" has different usages, depending on the context. According to its common usage, the term minority group can simply be understood in terms of demographic sizes within a population: i.e. a group in society with the least number of individuals, or less than half, is a "minority". Usually a minority group is disempowered relative to the majority, and that characteristic lends itself to different applications of the term minority.

Regionalism is a political ideology that seeks to increase the political power, influence and self-determination of the people of one or more subnational regions. It focuses on the "development of a political or social system based on one or more" regions, and/or the national, normative, or economic interests of a specific region, group of regions or another subnational entity, gaining strength from or aiming to strengthen the "consciousness of and loyalty to a distinct region with a homogeneous population", similarly to nationalism. More specifically, "regionalism refers to three distinct elements: movements demanding territorial autonomy within unitary states; the organization of the central state on a regional basis for the delivery of its policies including regional development policies; political decentralization and regional autonomy".

A multinational state or a multinational union is a sovereign entity that comprises two or more nations or states. This contrasts with a nation state, where a single nation accounts for the bulk of the population. Depending on the definition of "nation", a multinational state is usually multicultural or multilingual, and is geographically composed of more than one country, such as the countries of the United Kingdom.

Internal colonialism is the uneven effects of economic development on a regional basis, otherwise known as "uneven development" as a result of the exploitation of minority groups within a wider society which leads to political and economic inequalities between regions within a state. This is held to be similar to the relationship between a metropole and a colony, in colonialism proper. The phenomenon leads to the distinct separation of the dominant core from the periphery in an empire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National identity</span> Identity or sense of belonging to one state or one nation

National identity is a person's identity or sense of belonging to one or more states or one or more nations. It is the sense of "a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language". National identity may refer to the subjective feeling one shares with a group of people about a nation, regardless of one's legal citizenship status. National identity is viewed in psychological terms as "an awareness of difference", a "feeling and recognition of 'we' and 'they'". National identity also includes the general population and diaspora of multi-ethnic states and societies that have a shared sense of common identity identical to that of a nation while being made up of several component ethnic groups. Hyphenated ethnicities are examples of the confluence of multiple ethnic and national identities within a single person or entity.

Civic nationalism, otherwise known as democratic nationalism, is a form of nationalism that adheres to traditional liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and individual rights, and is not based on ethnocentrism. Civic nationalists often defend the value of national identity by saying that individuals need it as a partial shared aspect of their identity in order to lead meaningful, autonomous lives and that democratic polities need a national identity to function properly. Liberal nationalism is used in the same sense as 'civic nationalism', but liberal ethnic nationalism also exists, and "state nationalism" is a branch of civic nationalism, but it can also be illiberal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rise of nationalism in Europe</span> Part of the history of Europe

The rise of nationalism in Europe was stimulated by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. American political science professor Leon Baradat has argued that “nationalism calls on people to identify with the interests of their national group and to support the creation of a state – a nation-state – to support those interests.” Nationalism was the ideological impetus that, in a few decades, transformed Europe. Rule by monarchies and foreign control of territory was replaced by self-determination and newly formed national governments. Some countries, such as Germany and Italy were formed by uniting various regional states with a common "national identity". Others, such as Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Poland were formed by uprisings against the Ottoman or Russian Empires. Romania is a special case, formed by the unification of the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859 and later gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878.

Post-colonial anarchism is a term used to describe anarchism in an anti-imperialist framework. Whereas traditional anarchism arose from industrialized Western nations—and thus sees history from their perspective—post-colonial anarchism approaches the same principles of anarchism from the perspective of colonized peoples. It is highly critical of the contributions of the established anarchist movement, and seeks to add what it sees as a unique and important perspective. The tendency is strongly influenced by indigenism, anti-state forms of nationalism, and anarchism among ethnic minorities, among other sources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kurdish nationalism</span> Political movement

Kurdish nationalism is a nationalist political movement which asserts that Kurds are a nation and espouses the creation of an independent Kurdistan from Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.

Among scholars of nationalism, a number of types of nationalism have been presented. Nationalism may manifest itself as part of official state ideology or as a popular non-state movement and may be expressed along civic, ethnic, language, religious or ideological lines. These self-definitions of the nation are used to classify types of nationalism, but such categories are not mutually exclusive and many nationalist movements combine some or all of these elements to varying degrees. Nationalist movements can also be classified by other criteria, such as scale and location.

Ethnic nationalism, also known as ethnonationalism, is a form of nationalism wherein the nation and nationality are defined in terms of ethnicity, with emphasis on an ethnocentric approach to various political issues related to national affirmation of a particular ethnic group.

References

  1. ↑ Dictionary Of Public Administration, U.C. Mandal, Sarup & Sons 2007, 505 p.
  2. ↑ Osborne, Louise; Russell, Ruby (27 December 2015). "Stateless in Europe: 'We are no people with no nation'". TheGuardian.com . Archived from the original on 5 October 2019. Retrieved 28 December 2018.
  3. 1 2 3 Chouinard, Stéphanie (2016), "Stateless nations", in Karl Cordell; Stefan Wolff (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Ethnic Conflict, Routledge, pp. 54–66, ISBN   9781317518921
  4. ↑ David Newman, Boundaries, Territory and Postmodernity
  5. ↑ Ethnic Minority Media: An International Perspective, Stephen Harold Riggins, 217p.
  6. ↑ Language in Geographic Context, Colin H. Williams, 39p.
  7. ↑ Verdugo, Richard R.; Milne, Andrew (1 June 2016). National Identity: Theory and Research. IAP. p. 85. ISBN   9781681235257. Archived from the original on 4 April 2023. Retrieved 1 January 2022– via Google Books.
  8. ↑ Clark, Gregory, In fear of China, 1969, saying: "Tibet, although enjoying independence at certain periods of its history, had never been recognised by any single foreign power as an independent state. The closest it has ever come to such recognition was the British formula of 1943: suzerainty, combined with autonomy and the right to enter into diplomatic relations."
  9. ↑ "The Legal Status of Tibet". Cultural Survival. 22 February 2010. Archived from the original on 30 March 2014. Retrieved 17 May 2014.
  10. ↑ "Who are the Kurds?". TRT World. Archived from the original on 8 July 2019. Retrieved 23 June 2018.
  11. ↑ Redie Bereketeab, Self-Determination and Secession in Africa: The Post-Colonial State
  12. ↑ Richard Devetak, Christopher W. Hughes, Routledge, 2007-12-18, The Globalization of Political Violence: Globalization's Shadow
  13. ↑ Cultural Analysis: Towards Cross-cultural Understanding (2006), Hans Gullestrup, 130p.
  14. ↑ Ethnicity and Christian leadership in west African sub-region: proceedings of the conference of the fifteenth CIWA Theology Week held at the Catholic Institute of West Africa (2004), Port Harcourt, p.272
  15. ↑ Mussolini Warlord: Failed Dreams of Empire, 1940–1943 (2013), H. James Burgwyn, Chapter V
  16. ↑ Ethnic Groups in Conflict (2009), Karl Cordell, Stefan Wolff
  17. ↑ Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict
  18. ↑ Bruce E. Johansen, Resource Exploitation in Native North America: A Plague upon the Peoples
  19. ↑ George W. White, Nationalism and Territory: Constructing Group Identity in Southeastern Europe
  20. ↑ Understanding National Identity by David McCrone, Frank Bechhofer, p.22
  21. ↑ Unionist-Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland, 1830–1860 by Graeme Morton, 1999
  22. ↑ James Minahan, Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations: A-C
  23. ↑ Nationalism and Globalisation (2015), Stephen Tierney
  24. ↑ The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka: The Global Failure to Protect Tamil Rights Under International Law, Francis Boyle, chapter self determination.
  25. ↑ Turmoil in the Middle East: Imperialism, War, and Political Instability (1999), Berch Berberoglu, 69p.
  26. ↑ "Europe's Stateless Nations in the Era of Globalization, The Case for Catalonia's Secession by Josep Desquens". saisjournal.org. Archived from the original on 25 August 2016. Retrieved 3 February 2017.
  27. ↑ The delegates were linked with the Scottish group 'SNP Friends of Catalonia', which itself had members recently visit the Catalan parliament in Barcelona in a show of solidarity to the country's hopes of self-determination. "Catalan delegates in solidarity visit to Scotland's independence movement". commonspace.scot. Archived from the original on 5 November 2016. Retrieved 5 November 2016.
  28. ↑ The Catalan President and the Head of the Corsican government meet in Barcelona. The meeting lasted more than two hours and focused on enhancing the cooperation between the two nations in a regional and European level. "EFA brings stateless nations even closer". European Free Alliance. Archived from the original on 23 December 2017. Retrieved 23 December 2017.

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