Divided Nations and European Integration

INTRODUCTION

John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary

The subject of this book is the development of nations and national homelands divided by sovereign borders within and around the current and prospective frontier of the European Union (EU). No one should assume any inexorable march of the EU, though the short-run and longer-run incorporations of Iceland and Norway respectively are not difficult to foresee. We have avoided the EU’s North African hinterland because we see little likelihood that anywhere from Western Sahara to Egypt will join the EU in the next decades, but we include Balkan spaces and Eurasian borderlands to which the EU might expand in this horizon. It is well known that the final limits of the eastern border of the European Union may lie in the Ukraine, rather than Vladivostok. What is less well known is that upon the accession of Turkey the EU’s maximum feasible stretch of its southeastern border would extend into Kurdistan, a national homeland that is not now a state, though where it will eventually reach within Kurdistan is another matter, most likely not into the Kordestan province of Iran. The accession of Cyprus, with its special difficulties that are discussed here, may yet mark the EU’s final southeastern push in former Ottoman lands (see also Anderson 2008b).

Contemporary economic events and crises remind us all that the European Union is capable of institutional collapse, either through the ill-digested expansion of unready member states or through poor political management in and between existing member states. No one doubts that a broken euro will threaten a broken as well as a broke EU. The continuing pattern of extensive federalization and delegation of functions without more democratization at either the member state or the EU level is storing potential crises. The EU’s current difficulties were triggered by the conjunction of a major global financial and economic recession emanating from the centers of Anglophone capitalism with the teething difficulties of a premature and insufficiently planned monetary union, established without credible EU-wide fiscal powers, internal homogeneity of labor markets, or a credible debt management regime (see Krugman 1992). These crises are currently fully absorbing the major powers of continental Europe, not just the anxious smaller states, now rebranded as peripheral. There is speculation that Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and perhaps Spain will default on their public debts and leave the euro. Simultaneously continuing divisions over past and future definitions of external interests still threaten to render the EU’s new foreign and security institutions and policies either irrelevant or nugatory in their traces. Rather than hollowing out the nation-state, the European Union’s expansions since 1992 may yet serve to hollow out its own potential capacities as a polity. All of that, however, is in the realm of the known unknowns.

Whether the European Union expands, contracts, or stays the same, either in territory or in functions, the divided nations within and across its limits will remain of enduring importance. Our topic is the divided nations in and around the EU as it has expanded thus far, for example Hungarians in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia; and the Irish in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. We are also interested in those who may yet come into the EU, for example the Serbs in Serbia, Kosovo,¹ and Bosnia-Hercegovina (BiH), and other nations in similar geopolitical and geographic situations, such as the Kurds who would be profoundly affected by Turkey’s accession to membership. These divided nations live amid strikingly different political and demographic relations. Some are majorities in at least one state but are minorities elsewhere, as with the Hungarians, Irish, Slovaks, and Serbs. The Basques in France and Spain and the Kurds of Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, by contrast, are currently political minorities wherever they live.² Few nations have recently demographically dominated more than one European state, though the Germans did when they had two states between 1948 and 1989 (and three if we disturb some recent amnesia and count Austria). The German Democratic Republic was mostly made and controlled in Moscow rather than being an expression of authentic self-determination, and its past existence helps explain why German intellectuals rarely confuse nation with state. The Albanians in Albania and Kosovo now dominate two states, though the latter was still a state-in-waiting when we went to press. International organizations constrain the recognition of Kosovo’s independence; it is still recognized by no more than sixty-five of the member states of the United Nations, albeit by a majority of twenty-two of the twenty-seven member states of the European Union. Serbia stubbornly insists that Kosovo remains its Autonomous Region of Kosovo-Metohija thirteen years after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and flight removed most Serbs from its soil and after the International Court of Justice advised that Kosovo’s declaration of independence was not unlawful. Nearly all the European states that recognize Kosovo once feared the reformation of a greater Germany, but they could not block that vista. The powers of Europe are, however, all intent on blocking the formation of a greater Albania (which might encompass Albania, Kosovo, western Macedonia, and southeastern Serbia). States do not like other states, especially their neighbors, to get bigger, especially in the name of national unification, even if that unification is democratically endorsed. They also do not like small states unifying (or reunifying) under the banner of national integration, and that is because many states are not the nation-states they claim to be: divided nations often straddle their borders.

Map 1.1. Europe and the European Union.

All the nations examined by the contributors, regardless of their current political and demographic status, experienced the enforced partition of their homelands, usually in the aftermath of wars or the collapse of empires. This is the division of nations to which we refer. In this book all the authors define divided nations as German people do, and that may be fitting as the Germans are the largest nation in Europe, if the claims of Turks and Russians to that title are rejected.³ When an American speaks of a divided nation, she means what a German calls a divided state. The American usage covers all internal divisions, antagonisms, or cleavages within a polity. In German usage, a nation may seek or possess a state, and a state may encompass one nation or many. We follow German usage here; so for us, divided nations are nations separated by states.

The concept of a divided nation makes ontological assumptions that some question too much (see Brubaker 1996c, 2006). Nations may be social constructions, in the jargon of our peers, but they are no less real than language communities, social classes, or religious collectivities. We do not take the ontology of nationalists for granted, but we do assume the realities of nations and their consequences—that they are human constructions provides no special intellectual illumination or helpful moral guidance. Moreover no sane person has ever presumed that nations are utterly homogeneous: they always contain variation in culture, language, and degree of identification. A currently existing nation does, however, presuppose a recognizable politically mobilized people, who have a named collective identity. A divided nation for us is therefore one that contains leaders and organizations that minimally aspire to establish or reestablish closer linkages between the segments of their nation partitioned among states. These aspirations may include irredentism, that is, the redrawing of borders to make state and nation congruent with the consent of the relevant conationals.⁴ But they may encompass a range of less dramatic objectives, such as the establishment of cooperative linkages across borders, support for their kin in other jurisdictions, or simply ensuring freedom of movement of persons or organizations across the national territory.

There are several such divided national communities in European space. Divided nations are usually derived from, but are not necessarily coterminous with, divided ethnic communities. An ethnic community comprises members who share the belief that they are descended from similar people—in phenotypes, in actual ancestries, in ways of being, language, and customs, including religious customs. Ethnic communities have frequently been subjected to rival nation-building projects. Not all of those regarded as belonging to a divided nation because of their ethnicity, according to what are regarded as objective traits or historical associations, accept such claims. Some may identify with the divided nation, while others may possess, or come to possess, partitioned identities, in which they partly identify with the state in which they live, even if it is dominated by a different ethnic group (that is, they may adhere to a form of civic patriotism). Others may have nested national identities, that is, they believe they belong, rightly, to a nation within a nation; and yet others may not have any national identities. Thus some Russian speakers in Latvia identify with the state of Latvia, while others look to Mother Russia. Some Hungarians in Hungary identify with Hungary as it is now territorially defined in law, while others identify Hungary as the place and people divided by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.

A divided nation may not insist on ethnic closure and indeed may reject it; such a nation may insist it is open to those who accept its minimal cultural terms of membership, including immigrants from afar. Moreover, if the relevant nation has at least one regional or state-based territorial jurisdiction which it dominates, it may be able to prove its inclusionary words through deeds.⁵ A state dominated by an insecure nation, by contrast, may constantly seek to assimilate and integrate all those who might cast their eyes longingly at the conationals with whom they empathize beyond the border. They may sometimes succeed. The sustainers of divided nations have to work to maintain a sense of nationhood after territorial division occurs. Whether they succeed is uncertain. Histories of competitive nation-building projects, and their successes and failures, are explored throughout this volume.

One motivation behind this book, and of the conference that preceded it, was our contributors’ collective recognition that academic research usually ignores divided nations. That is partly because research tends to fall within the funding jurisdictions of sovereign boundaries. Where research does take place, however, it often assumes, without much argument, that the aspirations of divided nations are problematic, that is, destabilizing and subversive.

Much of the extant literature on the management of diversity and on international relations is dominated by the Westphalian tradition that sees the world both positively and normatively as composed of states. In this worldview the relevant political communities are internal to states. Integrationists, for example, typically see the state as a nation-state,, either an accomplished one or one that is being built to supersede a more diverse past (see Haas 1997, 1968; see also Guéhenno 2000 [1995]). For them, nations should be congruent with states and should not exist beyond the states’ territories or as regions or communities within them. More surprisingly accommodationists, that is, those prepared to accept that states may have more than one ethnic or national community and that each of these should be politically accommodated, usually restrict their analysis to accommodation within the state, although many of the minorities that accommodationists seek to protect are part of larger national communities that exist across state borders (see McGarry, O’Leary, and Simeon 2008; and O’Leary and McGarry 2012). Insofar as either integrationists or accommodationists consider divided nations, it is usually to point out that their claims jeopardize internal integration or accommodation. Scholars from international relations who are concerned with relations between states are more likely than integrationists or accommodationists to notice the claims of divided nations but generally treat them as political problems that need to be addressed through full respect for traditional state sovereignty and recognition of the territorial integrity of existing states. Even scholars who reject realist international relations, who notice communities that transcend or straddle the state, such as those cosmopolitans who are concerned with global justice, tend to ignore the claims of divided nations.

This volume challenges the prevalent perspective that national diversity can be wholly managed within the traditional (Westphalian) state system. The contributors examine the potential of the European postnational project, as it has been called, to manage the claims of divided nations in peaceful ways that fall short of the alteration of state boundaries (see Habermas 2000; also see critical discussions in Breen and O’Neill 2010). Whereas the international relations and global justice literatures ignore the possibility that divided nations have important normative claims, the European Union has been seen by some as having the potential to address the aspirations of divided nations through the promotion of new norms of sovereignty sharing, interstate cooperation, softer state borders, application of the subsidiarity principle, and the emergence of a European regime of minority rights protection (see Kearney 2003). The contributors were asked to evaluate such claims.

Divided Nations and the Existing Academic Literature

The existing literature on the management of ethnic and national diversity is focused on the state and on the idea that meaningful communities are internal to states. This literature, we suggest, either pays scant regard to the issue of divided nations or dismisses their claims. Two main approaches exist, each based respectively on integration or accommodation (see Haas 1997, 1968; Guéhenno 2000 [1995]). These two schools of thought are treated in turn. Then we explore two other important types of literature, based on international relations (security studies) and global justice, which respectively take an interstate and a trans-state perspective, and we show that these literatures also largely ignore divided nations or their claims.

Integrationism is the current globally dominant presumption among academics and policy-makers that states are or should be nation-states. In the French language the two words nation and state are seen as synonyms, while in the English language the compound noun nation-state refers to a singular entity. Competitions and borders between states are widely seen as "international in character, and so are the organizations that represent states. The historian (Communist and integrationist) Eric Hobsbawm once put it that the nation is a social entity only insofar as it relates to a certain kind of modern territorial state, the nation-state, and it is pointless to discuss nation and state except insofar as both relate to it (1990, 9–10). Nation-states in this perspective are seen as the products of modern historical evolution, either through the consolidation of territories and their forging into unities or through the breakup of multinational empires, to produce sovereign governments which have no critical regional or community cleavages (Deutsch 1966, 80). The former pattern is seen as dominant in the West, while the latter is usually associated with Eastern Europe. Integrationists believe not only that deep regional and community cleavages disappear under conditions of modernity but also that this is normatively desirable and essential for stability and justice. The nation-state, from this perspective, promises internal peace, civic equality, a participatory democracy, and a solidarity bolstered by the construction of welfare states in which people are encouraged to support redistribution across their national communities (see Miller 1995). This vision of a nation-state is not disposed to the accommodation of what are sometimes called substate nations," and possibly even less to nations that claim to be part of nations connected with other states.⁶

Integrationists attribute instability and injustice within states to the absence of an overarching public (national) identity, which in turn is usually blamed on a backward ethnonationalism (see for example Barry 2001; Brass 1991; Denitch 1994; Silber and Little 1996). Foremost, divisions are blamed on nationalizing states (Brubaker 1996a), captured by nationalist elites who claim to represent the state’s largest community. In nationalizing states, the state’s primary task is to serve the ethnonational needs of the Staatsvolk, rather than the citizenry or population as a whole. Nationalizing states practice policies of control or policies of coercive assimilation to enforce homogeneity (McGarry and O’Leary 2011). In the former policy the dominant community’s culture is privileged; in the latter it is imposed. In extreme circumstances, as in Serbia under Milosevic or Croatia in 1995, nationalizing states practice ethnic expulsions, or genocide. Nationalizing states are wrongly seen, at least in the West, as a preserve of the non-Western world, such as Eastern Europe. Western Europe’s own homogenization is often forgotten (see Marx 2003; Mazower 1998, 2008).

Divisions within modern or modernizing nations are typically blamed by integrationists on entrepreneurs who seek to mobilize ethnic communities for self-interested purposes (for an exemplary statement, see Brass 1991, 69–108; also Brass 1996). Such entrepreneurs seek to foster and maintain a separate public identity because that provides the basis for the entrepreneurs’ political or cultural status and access to resources, so they call for autonomy, including separate schools and universities, and for public protections for languages and cultures that might otherwise fade away (see Breton 1964).

Integrationists also often blame internal divisions on neighboring states, on their irredentism or annexationism. Kin-states mobilize discontent among those who would otherwise be integrated. Civic unionists in Northern Ireland attributed conflict there to irredentist politics sponsored by the Republic of Ireland (see McGarry and O’Leary 1995, chapter 3). Ireland’s claim to govern Northern Ireland, as expressed in its 1937 constitution, allegedly kept Irish nationalism alive in Northern Ireland; otherwise, so it was argued, Northern Irish Catholics would long ago have accepted a single British public identity and the union between Great Britain and Ireland. Similarly Slovakia and Romania routinely blame the refusal of their Hungarian minorities to integrate on the irredentist politics of Hungary. Turkish officials have sometimes blamed Kurdish nationalist mobilization within Turkey on irredentist politics emanating from the Kurdistan region in Iraq and have falsely suggested that the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq supports the Kurdish Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan or PKK) guerrillas.

These three fields of nationalizing states, entrepreneurs, and irredentist kin-states are sometimes seen by followers of Rogers Brubaker as a destructive, mutually reinforcing, relational nexus. Nationalizing states alienate minorities through discriminatory policies and facilitate nationalist countermobilization by minority entrepreneurs. The nationalizing agenda among the dominant community’s elites and public is then strengthened by perceptions of disloyalty and kin-state irredentism among the subordinate. Ethnic minorities are alienated by the state’s policies but are also whipped up by their own nationalist leaders and by kin-state interference. Irredentist politics in the kin-state is partly a response to the policies of the neighboring nationalizing state, and to the appeals of its nationally mobilized ethnic kin (see Brubaker 1996b). This potent nexus has been held responsible for a number of conflicts in Europe. The outbreak of war in Croatia in the early 1990s has been traced to the combustible mixing of the nationalizing policies of the Croatian state, minority secessionism among Serb leaders in Croatia, and irredentist politics by Milosevic’s Serbia (see Hayden 1992, 1999). The triadic nexus has also been seen as contributing to the outbreak of World War II, because Hitler used the treatment of German minorities in Poland and Czechoslovakia to justify the invasion, partition, and annexation of those countries (see Blanke 1993).⁷

Integrationists are resolutely opposed to accommodation either through public support for minority or subordinate cultures, or any form of group-based—corporate or territorial—autonomy, or through the fostering of links between conationals across neighboring states. Such policies are seen as incompatible with the idea of a nation-state and as boosting division and ethnic nationalism. Integrationists oppose autonomy and cross-border relations because they believe these will encourage irredentism and interference by neighboring states. The primary integrationist prescription is the neutral civic state, which treats its citizens as equal members within a single civic or national community, rather than as members of substate nations or parts of nations that spill over borders.⁸ Integrationists support the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states against irredentist claims but are also supportive of the international protection of integrationist (individual or human) rights to maintain peace and justice. This position is the currently dominant international normative regime, put in place under American leadership during the foundation of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 (Schlesinger 2003). The UN abandoned the efforts by the League of Nations to protect minority rights, because these were seen as encouraging destabilizing ethnic nationalism among minorities (Jackson Preece 1998). Since 1945 integrationists in the United Nations and elsewhere have strongly resisted the idea that there are legitimate national communities that exist either at a level smaller than the state or across state borders. They have instead sought to promote the territorial integrity of states combined with the international spread of difference-blind, nation-state politics through a range of legal instruments, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), though even this covenant had to concede some minority rights in Article 27.

Accommodationists generally share integrationists’ view that conflict results from partisan ethnocentric government but disagree with them on how diversity should be treated. Accommodationists believe that integration is biased toward the state’s dominant community and that justice and stability require the public accommodation of different communities. Accomodationists come in two main types: consociationalists and federal pluralists.

Classical consociational theory was developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a number of scholars, including Gerhard Lehmbruch, Jurg Steiner, Sid Noel, Eric Nordlinger, and Kenneth McRae, but it is rightly most closely associated with the innovative work of Arend Lijphart (see Lijphart 1969, 1975a, 1977, 1985, 2008). The key conflict regulating mechanism in a consociation is a cross-community power-sharing executive, but consociationalists also prescribe autonomy for different communities (territorial or corporate), minority vetoes, and the proportional representation of different communities throughout the state’s public sector, including the army and police.

Classical consociational theory, however, is focused on treating diversity within states. Moreover, although it is often overlooked, Lijphart and the other consociational pioneers did not focus on minorities as national minorities, never mind as parts of nations that exist across state borders. This outlook was likely a result of their focus on cases such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, or Belgium, which were not nationally divided, at least not when they were the objects of consociational research. The communities in question, at least for Lijphart, were not national communities but ethnic, religious, linguistic, or class communities. They were seen as segments of a pie, where the pie in question was the state or divided society. The focus on ethnic, religious, or linguistic, rather than national, communities is suggested by their primary preferred conflict-regulating device, namely power sharing within a state’s central government. Greater attention to minority national communities would have shifted the prescriptive emphasis toward territorial autonomy, and more attention to minorities that were part of divided nations would have shifted it further, to include interstate and transborder arrangements.

Lijphart’s otherwise masterly analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict illustrates these difficulties (see Lijphart 1975b). With his background in the Netherlands, he initially underappreciated the fact that Northern Ireland’s conflict was based squarely on rival national movements, one of which wanted to unite with another state. He saw the groups in conflict in Northern Ireland as Catholics and Protestants, and the basis of the cleavage as religious, even though the groups gave virtually all of their support to Irish nationalist and British unionist parties respectively. Lijphart argued that the key difficulty was the absence of support for power sharing among Protestants because they were capable of exercising hegemonic power alone and were disposed to Westminster majoritarian practices. This analysis was accurate but limited. Northern Ireland’s Catholics, part of the divided Irish nation, were also opposed to power sharing solely within the United Kingdom. Radical Irish nationalists (republicans) wanted a complete withdrawal of the British state from Ireland, whereas moderates wanted political linkages with Ireland and a role for the Irish government. In 1998 Irish nationalists achieved not just internal consociational institutions within the United Kingdom but also a number of all-island and British-Irish political institutions, as well as language that expressed the people of Ireland’s right to self-determination. Unionists, by contrast, achieved the abolition of the Republic of Ireland’s constitutional claim to Northern Ireland and a commitment from nationalists that Northern Ireland could not join the Irish republic without the consent of a majority of its citizens.⁹ A purely internal solution, within the bounds of the UK, as associated with classical consociational prescriptions, would not have worked.

Pluralist federalism is associated with a number of prominent academics (see Gagnon 2009; Kymlicka 1996, 2007; Requejo 2005; Taylor 1992; Tierney 2004). These authors differ from classical consociationalists because they have considered at least some states as multinational. Kymlicka’s Multicultural Citizenship, a title that shares the classical consociational view that states are culturally divided, actually suggests a division between polyethnic states and multination states. A polyethnic state is formed as a result of the immigration of different cultural or ethnic communities, with ethnic used in the sense prevalent in North America. Such communities typically seek to integrate into the larger society and a variety of rights that ease their path, including rights of nondiscrimination, exemption from laws and practices that disadvantage them (such as bans on religious dress in schools), and public funding for their cultural practices (such as community festivals). A multination state, by contrast, is composed of different national communities, where a nation is a historical community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and culture. On this understanding, multination states are formed, according to Kymlicka, either when a nation’s homeland is involuntarily incorporated in a state by military conquest or coercively overrun by settlers or when nations agree to federate their homelands. Minority nations, unlike ethnic communities, are said to seek autonomy or self-government to ensure their survival as distinct societies, and they also frequently seek language rights.¹⁰ Kymlicka criticizes political theorists for their surprising neglect of the distinction between minority nations and ethnic communities.¹¹

Pluralist federalists also differ from consociationalists in their emphasis on the need for territorially based forms of autonomy, including multinational federations, federacies, and devolution within unitary states (see McGarry and O’Leary 2011). They think that territorial autonomy will ensure political stability in multinational states and undercut demands for secession. Normative philosophers emphasize the justice of minority claims for territorial autonomy; for example, Kymlicka claims that they have a moral claim to self-government in their homeland. The claim is based on a fundamental principle of equal treatment of individuals combined with the view that individuals have legitimate collective identities and that minority forms of collective identity are harder to reproduce and harder to support than majority forms, and that additional (group-differentiated) rights are necessary, among them rights to autonomy. He argues that members of minority nations typically aspire to self-government, and he suggests that they have often been forced into the state against their will or agreed to join a federal compact. Some pluralist federalists have focused not just on territorial autonomy but also on questions of constitutional recognition and status, that is, on the importance of express legal language that depicts the state as composed of equal nationalities.

The focus of pluralist federalists on the claims of national communities suggests that they would be sympathetic to the aspirations of divided nations and more likely to discuss them than consociationalists would. However, they are generally just as focused on the state as the forum in which diversity should be managed as are integrationists and accommodationists. Thus Kymlicka is concerned with the accommodation of what he calls minority nations, that is, communities that exist within states (Kymlicka 2007, 177, 203, 211). His definition of a multination state implies that a nation is a historical community "more or less institutionally complete" (1996, 11, our italics), a formulation that forgets the fact that many multination states actually comprise a nation and a part of another nation, where the latter community is incomplete. Kymlicka’s prescriptive inventory is generous but exclusively internal in character, limited to substantive language rights, consociation, and autonomy within the state’s borders.¹² Nowhere does he recommend interstate or cross-border arrangements that link segments of divided nations, though many, if not most, of the multination states that Kymlicka is concerned with contain communities that are parts of divided nations. Indeed Kymlicka cites ten cases where claims relating to residence in a historic homeland are at the heart of violent conflict, and yet most of these cases involve divided nations.¹³ In all ten cases the communities’ historic homelands are not restricted to the state they are living in but include territory in neighboring states. Autonomy for these nations within their existing states will certainly meet some of their aspirations, but it does not address aspirations for collective or properly national self-organization and government.

Why should prescriptive, empirical, or normative analysis stop at the state’s borders? If a substate nation poses a threat to stability because its desire for some form of self-determination in its national homeland is frustrated, it is not clear why the same logic should not apply also to nations that are territorially dissected. If a substate nation has a moral claim to self-determination because its national territory has been involuntarily incorporated, it is not clear why a nation that has had its territory involuntarily partitioned does not have some similar moral claim. Pluralist federalists have rightly criticized others for being generic in their prescriptions and for failing to distinguish between the claims of individuals who are from majority nations and those who are from minority nations, or between the claims of minority nations, indigenous peoples, and ethnic minorities (immigrants), but they themselves fail to address the distinction between encapsulated sub-state minorities and divided nations.¹⁴

Kymlicka’s early work focused on states’ responses to internal national and ethnic diversity. He has since shifted focus to the role that international and regional (interstate) organizations, such as the United Nations or the European Union, should play in the accommodation of diversity.¹⁵ This recent work in the interstate arena presented an opportunity for him to address the claims of trans-state national communities, but Kymlicka appears as focused as ever on accommodating minorities within particular states. He is not concerned with how the specific claims of national communities that exist across state borders can be assessed or accommodated but rather with how the international community can be brought to bear on how states deal with their internal minorities. His clearly expressed view that claims relating to residence in a historic homeland are at the core of minority aspirations should perhaps be taken as implicit support for cross-border arrangements, and the autonomy he prescribes is an institutional prerequisite for different segments of divided nations to cooperate with each other. But Kymlicka often gives the impression that drawing attention to cross-border ties by minority communities is counterproductive and inimical to internal accommodation. States often assume, he argues, that minorities with ethnic kin in neighboring states are irredentist and that these minorities would side with their kin-states if the latter sought to recapture the territory on which the minority lives, as indeed some have done at various points in the twentieth century. In consequence, no state is likely to voluntarily accord self-governing powers to a minority under these circumstances (Kymlicka 2007, 184).¹⁶

Kymlicka believes that the important reason why Eastern European states are reluctant to accommodate minorities is that they have more communities with cross-border ties than has Western Europe. While triadic relationships between states, minorities, and kin-states are central to Eastern Europe, he argues, many of the paradigmatic examples of national minorities in the West do not have a kin-state (e.g., Catalans and Basques, Scots and Welsh, Quebecois, Puerto Ricans). Even the French and Italians in Switzerland are not, strictly speaking, appropriately viewed as kin-state minorities. This empirical stress on the role that irredentism plays in blocking the claims of divided nations is accurate but is much more closely related to the security concerns of realpolitik than of justice (Kymlicka 2007, 184n8).¹⁷ Even if one concedes that a political claim has adverse consequences from a stability perspective, one might still argue that the claim has some basis in justice. An accommodationist might observe, for example, that it would likely be counterproductive to intervene militarily in China on behalf of the Muslims of Xinjiang but at the same time that it should be emphasized that Xinjiang’s Muslims have a just claim to self-government.

The classical consociationalists, notably Lijphart and Nordlinger, anticipated Kymlicka’s stress on the dangers posed by kin-state ties. While Lijphart believed that external threats may facilitate power sharing, he argued that the threat had to be seen as such by all the relevant communities. One-sided engagements, such as those posed by irredentist neighbors, would, he believed, antagonize interethnic relations and reduce the prospects for power sharing (Lijphart 1977, 66–68). The late Eric Nordlinger acknowledged that external threats could bring divided societies together, but only if the external threat was common to the internal parties. When one community sought incorporation into another state or when the differences between conflict groups [were] more salient than the differences between one conflict group and the external state, we would not expect external pressures to give rise to conflict regulating motives (Nordlinger 1972, 44). Such perspectives support the state’s territorial integrity more than the idea of national self-determination.

The two main schools of accommodation therefore have little or nothing to say about the claims of divided nations, as opposed to substate nations or ethnic communities, and what they do say suggests that such claims are believed to pose credible threats to regional and global order and therefore should remain marginalized. Integrationists and accommodationists neglect divided nations partly because they are focused primarily on the insides of states. However, the claims of divided nations are also neglected in two other important bodies of literature, namely global justice theory and international relations (security) theory, which are based, respectively, on normative commitments that transcend states and on empirical relations between states.

Global justice theory represents an important part of a larger body of literature that focuses on globalization and argues that its effects cannot be understood or managed appropriately within the narrow confines of the state and the methodological statism of modernist social science (see Archibugi and Held 1995; Goodin 2002a, 2002b).¹⁸ Global justice theory is deeply critical of the statist perspective of conventional liberal justice theory (see Beitz 1999; Caney 2005; Pogge 1997; Rawls 2001; Tan 2004). It has criticized the most famous modern liberal theory, John Rawls’s Theory of Justice, the best-known philosophical basis for integrationist thinking, for being preoccupied with justice within the state and for ignoring the claims of communities that exist beyond it. Global justice theorists criticize conventional liberal accounts for beginning with the assumption of the equal moral worth of persons but ending up with a conception of justice that affirms the equal moral worth of citizens. State borders, global justice theorists claim, represent a significant embarrassment to the universality and moral worth of persons that underpins most liberal theory, because people’s life chances, opportunities, well-being, and exercise of autonomy—and indeed the protection of their rights—currently depend on where they are born (Kymlicka 2001).

One might therefore expect global justice theorists to contribute to the question of divided nations. In principle one might have a conception of a globally just world based on an idealization of Woodrow Wilson’s speeches, in which the equality of all nations would become a fundamental tenet of international decision-making bodies. In fact, however, global justice theorists have nothing to say about the claims of divided nations, or about how they are disadvantaged by current state borders. Rather they are cosmopolitan, focused on the injustice of state borders in principle, not just current borders, and their focus is on global distributive justice, which should, they think, lead to resource transfers from the wealthy countries of the world to the less developed. There is no room here for particularistic attachments, whether of the citizens of integrationist theory, the ethnic and national communities that are emphasized by accommodationists, or—the focus of this volume—divided nations. In short, the dominant conception of global justice accepts the fundamental assumptions of statist justice but extends them across the globe: the world is conceived of as a state writ large. The relevant shortcomings of global justice theory are set out more fully in this volume by Margaret Moore (Chapter 1).

International relations theory (especially security studies) has generally had a squarely exogenous focus on relations between states.¹⁹ It is focused on stability, power, and order. It takes the state, seen as a nation-state, as the fundamental unit of analysis and the building block of the international order. It flows out of the Westphalian system that sees peace as requiring respect for state sovereignty and existing state borders. In this conception the internationally acknowledged right of peoples to self-determination relates only to states and the administrative units of colonial empires, and not to communities that are subsets of these units or that exist across their frontiers (see Mayall 1990; Weller, Metzger, and Johnson 2008). Most international relations theorists who have examined the subject of divided nations have seen their claims in an entirely negative light—as contributing to irredentism, understood to mean an annexationist ambition by one state to take some of the territory of another. One recent book on irredentism, written by two international relations scholars, sees it as responsible for virtually every major conflict in the twentieth century, including both world wars as well as the Balkan wars of the 1990s (Saideman and Ayres 2008). Irredentism is seen as contributing to the intractability of current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; as continuing to destabilize the Balkans, Caucasus, and Horn of Africa; and as threatening a nuclear confrontation between India and Pakistan (over Kashmir). The Cyprus problem is identified as a result of Turkish irredentism, while the Northern Ireland conflict, we are confidently informed, was essentially an irredentist problem, which flowed from the demand … to unify the island—to bring Northern Ireland under Ireland’s sovereignty (Saideman and Ayres 2008, 4). As with the literature on integration, accommodation, and global justice, there is therefore no sign in mainstream international relations literature to suggest that the claims of divided nations have any legitimacy, or that the denial of these claims might contribute to instability, or any examination of how these claims might be treated, including in ways that might avoid the redrawing of state boundaries.

The realist international relations perspective defends the Westphalian system, where the stability and hardness of borders are fundamental to the system’s overall stability and states are the relevant order-maintaining political communities. This approach differs from the global justice literature in having a (moral) argument for boundaries, based on the peace-preserving merits of order, but it has no argument for where borders should be drawn or any deeper argument that entitles people or authorities to dismiss the moral value of ties of membership and community that transcend the state.

All four bodies of literature briefly examined here therefore share a common failure to take seriously the claims of divided nations, or they base their negative dismissal of such claims on what we would regard as selective evidence. There is one other body of literature, which we have not addressed here, that might seem pertinent: namely territorial regionalism (see Hooghe, Marks, and Schakel 2010; Jeffery and Wincott 2010). It shares some of our criticism of the integrationist and globalization schools and indeed empirically observes a globalization-induced move to regional and local politics, focused on progressive local democracy and the protection of the (local) welfare state (see also Colomer 2007). These thinkers condemn the methodological nationalism of integrationist social science and find inadequate the methodological cosmopolitanism of the globalization literature, arguing instead for a methodological regionalism. They have something in common with the pluralist federalism writers, but most of these scholars are interested in local or regional politics that have little to do with ethnicity and nationalism, and they still remain focused within the state and not on nations that cross state borders.

The Contribution of This Book

The current volume is therefore significantly different from the existing literature in the political and social sciences. Most obviously it is focused on divided nations. Moreover the authors do not assume that divided nations are necessarily negative phenomena that threaten domestic or international stability, or that should be treated as irrelevant in considerations of justice. They understand, of course, that kin-state politics can often be manipulative and deeply problematic, and Bahcheli and Noel take the view in their chapter that kin-state relations are necessarily poisonous (Chapter 10). But the general theme across the volume is the recognition, both empirical and normative, that divided nations may be durable (intergenerational) political communities with legitimate claims, and that diplomatic and political failures to address these legitimate claims often contribute to instability and injustice. Even though what is required to accommodate the claims of divided nations may sometimes suggest the danger of disorder, it is not clear that this risk automatically negates their claims for justice. Rather, as a small number of realists recognize, the current statist order is achieved only through perpetuating some forms of injustice against certain nations, by denying their just or legitimate claims to collective self-determination, to control over their internal life, and to self-government across state borders. We and our coauthors here are not committed, however, to the reverse normative bias of accepting all the claims made on behalf of all divided nations, but neither are we automatically hostile to them in advance. We treat the claims of states with equal skepticism.

It is a striking feature of divided nations that they generally make their claims in the language of justice rather than of status assertion. They typically argue that their ties to conationals and to their homeland are legitimate and should be recognized, rather than ignored, denied, or explained away. We do not here directly elaborate these normative arguments, but we do insist that if such arguments can be made in defense of the accommodation of nationals within the state—namely that they are communities with shared identities and interests, that they need some common jurisdictional authority to govern themselves, and that they have important ties to place and to homeland—then such arguments must also have some plausible muster among divided nations. Moreover there are forms of accommodation that can address these claims without altering state borders and that can soften rather than abolish states’ sovereignty.

The other distinctive focus of this volume is on how global and international organizations may be affecting the fate and opportunities of divided nations. Specifically we are interested in whether the organizations associated with European integration, including the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and particularly the European Union, might allow the claims of divided nations to be accommodated. There are arguably several ways in which European integration has affected or may come to affect the claims of divided nations.

European integration was a response to World War II (see inter alia Haas 1968; Hoffmann 1995; Judt 1996; Milward 1992, 2005). It is typically seen as having championed respect for existing state borders and as having delegitimized irredentism and aggressive kin-state nationalism.²⁰ The fact that borders are questioned less than they were in Europe, suggest some, may have facilitated the more recent sanctioning of greater cross-border linkages between different segments of divided nations. As Michael Keating has suggested, "Wider experience shows that one condition for transcending and penetrating borders is … that they should not be under political challenge, so that