Q.What do you understand by the right to national self-determination? How has this idea resulted in both formation of and challenges to nation-states?

National self-determination is the claim, made by a group that sees itself as a nation, to the right to govern itself and to determine its own political future — rather than being ruled by an outside power or absorbed into someone else's state. In making this claim, a nation seeks international recognition of its status as a distinct political entity or state. Such claims typically come from people who have lived together on a shared territory for a long time and who feel a genuine sense of common identity; in some cases the claim is also linked to a desire for a state that will specifically protect the group's own culture.

Historically, this idea gained real force in nineteenth-century Europe under the notion of "one culture, one state," and was applied again after the First World War when the Treaty of Versailles redrew Europe's map and created a number of small, newly independent states. Even so, not every group's demand for self-determination could be satisfied, and the attempt to match cultures to states caused mass migration, displacement and communal violence on a huge scale — while still failing to produce states with only a single ethnic community inside them. The same right has also been claimed by national liberation movements across Asia and Africa fighting colonial rule, who argued that political independence would restore dignity and protect the collective interests of colonised peoples; but here too, not every distinct cultural group within these newly independent states could achieve its own separate statehood, leading to continuing migration, border disputes and violence in many regions — sometimes with newly independent nation-states themselves resisting fresh self-determination claims from minorities within their own borders (the Basque region's long-running, historically sometimes violent demand for independence from Spain, despite already having recognised regional autonomy, is one well-known example).

Because granting full independent statehood to every group that considers itself a distinct nation is both practically almost impossible and probably undesirable — it risks creating many states too small to be economically or politically viable, and only multiplies the problem of minorities rather than solving it — the right to national self-determination has, in practice, come to be reinterpreted. Today it is usually understood not as an automatic right to a separate state, but as a right to certain democratic protections, freedoms and forms of self-government for a nationality living within an existing, larger state — with most thinkers now arguing that the real solution to competing self-determination claims lies in making existing states more genuinely democratic and equal for all their communities, rather than in constantly creating new ones.