7 Conclusion

We have explored nations, national self-determination and secession as living political ideas. Perhaps the key points to emerge from the discussion are that:

• the nation-state is the basic political community in the contemporary world, despite regional and global challenges;

• subjective approaches to defining nations, prioritising awareness of belonging to a national group, have advantages over efforts to construct objective definitions;

• the symbolic, imagined, aspects of nations can be as important as historical or other cultural ‘facts’ about the nation;

• nationalism is a many-sided and potent political ideology, though we can pinpoint some general characteristics shared by all nationalist movements;

• political theorists have offered imaginative responses to dilemmas of secession and national self-determination, such as the democratic and remedial approaches;

• all theoretical ‘solutions’ to issues of secession are vulnerable to objections;

• our assessments of political theories can depend on (sometimes unspoken) assumptions that we make about political realities and specific cases.