international perspective, they share a single national identity and, perhaps, a common
The presence – and perhaps conflation of the empirical and the normative is
evident.
Yet since the Second World War, heterodox claims have repeatedly intruded into the
debate, in recognition of the shortcomings of both the extant political-legal dispensation
in responding to collective expressions of identity in politics.
Even the supposedly settled meanings of self-determination have remained open to
change; rhetorical claims about collective polities – whether ethnic groups or the people
within a state – have always persisted, and beginning in the 1960s, UN documents began
to give self-determination meaning in a broader perspective. Developing these
opportunities, academic observers and international actors alike have been making more
progressive claims about a right to democratization and even, lately, ‘regime
change’ (whether styled as internal self-determination or not) that increasingly raise
questions about the legitimacy of existing governments and states.
And alongside this growing debate about internal self-determination, the claims of ethno-
national groupings to self-determination as they understand it, though seldom legitimated,
have persisted. Since the end of the Cold War, such claims have been increasingly
prominent and perhaps more frequent; they have also been more prominent in rights
discourse – appearing in such documents as the Council of Europe’s Framework
Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, the draft UN Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and more broadly in debates within political science and
policy about autonomy and federalism.
Yet these rising voices have not been matched by alteration in the limited canon of
agreed doctrines that largely persists in preserving, and thus marginalizing, external,
state-formative self-determination in a moribund category (decolonization) while
focusing on internal democratization as the frontier of development. In this vein, the
2
Yuval Shany, Redrawing Maps, Manipulating Demographics: On Exchange of Populated Territories and
Self-Determination, 2 L. & E
THICS
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UM
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. __ (2007, forthcoming).
Convention