Autonomy, Free Association and Self-governance

Abstract

The different characteristics exhibited by different types of society have, correspondingly, different types of claims to autonomy or variants in regulatory mechanisms, ranging from cultural autonomy, through regional self-governance, to de facto sovereignty. Protection of ethnic and national minorities by means of autonomy arrangements (of all kinds) did not begun until the twentieth century. The challenge of ethno-nationalism and the so-called ‘minorities problem’, which had been sparked off by revolutions and by the regroupings that have occurred in the wake of the two world wars, began to grow more acute. The progressive nationalities policy, including the right to secession, that had been adopted by the Socialist International in London in 1896 and taken over by Lenin in 1914 (‘On the Right of Nations to Self-determination’) was applied only in a formalized way in the Soviet Union. At that time, the federal structure of the USSR, with what was initially four republics, contrasted with developments in Western Europe, which had led both to ethnically more unified or homogenized states. Following World War I the imperial multinational states, such as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, collapsed and fragmented into a host of smaller states.