MARCH 9, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 9 75TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE
	The Chimera Of Self-Determination Ethnicity as a guiding principle of politics is both outdated and dangerous By MICHAEL BLISS uebec nationalists have been infuriated by Ottawa's Supreme Court reference and its argument that Quebec cannot secede unilaterally from Confederation. Quebeckers do not have a legal right of self-determination, the government of Canada is in effect saying. What an appalling slap in the face to elementary principles of democracy, responds a broad Quebec coalition led by separatist Premier Lucien Bouchard and including Liberal federalists Daniel Johnson and Claude Ryan. Whether or not Quebec stays in Canada, they all contend, the decision is solely up to the people of the province. No one believes that any other Canadian province could unilaterally secede. Why is Quebec different? Because, we are told, Quebeckers constitute a distinct "people" or "nation." As such, they must have a right to determine their own future by themselves, or they are not free. This concept has a long and checkered history in Western culture, worth re-examining. It began in the early 1800s, when it became fashionable among European intellectuals to portray ethnicity as a determining human characteristic. Common blood and culture created ethnic or racial groups. Each had a distinct identity. Each, it was argued, should have the right to choose its own future. This new ethnic-based nationalism provided a rationale for rebellions against the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, as well as for movements to unite various Slavs, the Italians, Greeks and, above all, the German volk. Eventually that disintegration grew into a global conflagration. As the old European order self-destructed in the Great War of 1914-18, self-determination was seen as the great instrument for liberating peoples from malign imperial rule. (It was not applied, for example, to the victorious British and French, while Lenin found his own way around the stricture.) U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the great articulator of postwar principles, equated self-determination with democracy. He did not live to see that prove hopelessly impractical in multiracial Central Europe and become a major cause of World War II. The self-determination of subject peoples remained a driving principle in the final dismantling of the remaining global empires in the 1960s and of the collapse of Russian imperialism in the 1980s. In Canada, aggressive French-Canadian nationalists, many of them inspired by Algerian and other Third World liberation movements, thereupon picked up the argument in the context of the ancient British victory on the Plains of Abraham, in which Quebec fell under "colonial" rule. Various Quebec governments have claimed special or distinct "national" status, symbolized by the renaming of the Quebec legislature as the National Assembly in 1968. A Supreme Court ruling that Quebec does not have a right of self-determination is bound to be seen as a frontal attack on the local form of nationalist theology. But not enough attention is being paid to the growing bankruptcy of all ideas of ethnic self-determination in the modern world. What makes a nation or a people? If common racial origin is the key, what distinguishes nationalism from racism? Not much, the bloody history of our century suggests. If instead of race a common culture or language is sufficient to define a people, do members of cultural and linguistic minorities then become second-class citizens? If merely living in a distinct territory is all that is needed to define a people or nation, is there also a right of self-determination for Manitoba, British Columbia, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island? For that matter, why should the citizens of cities not have a right to declare themselves a people with a right of self-determination? Call that the Athenian option. What about nations within nations, racial or cultural minorities that claim their own right of self-determination? The "first nations" of Quebec, its aboriginal peoples, control about two-thirds of the province. The fact is that debates over ethnic self-determination have almost always led downward, to the darkest events of our dark century. The more meager sense of 20th century hope has been fueled by the triumph of ideas of democratic pluralism and rights-based individualism in modern societies, where ethnicity is one of the least considerations. The partisans of ethnic self-determination who fight on in Bosnia, the heart of central Africa, Corsica, Chechnya and other agonized locations, seem increasingly anachronistic, yesterday's vicious romantics. At best, a clear Supreme Court ruling against the self-determination argument might weaken nationalism's atavistic appeal, though it might equally inspire a backlash. Self-constituted "nations" may have had a right to secede from antique empires. But in modern, functioning democracies--and Canada is one of the world's most envied--citizens rather than ethnic groups rule. And they are obliged to play by the rules they devised for themselves, starting in 1867. Michael Bliss is a professor of history at the University of Toronto.
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