The great question at the heart of nineteenth-century European politics was who should govern- the princes or the people? The question was settled by World War I, which swept away the Continent's dynastic monarchs and their empires, only to give rise to another: Just how are the people to govern-through elected representatives whose powers are limited, or through self-appointed political elites exercising total control over those they rule? In the wake of World War II and the Cold War, totalitarianism in Europe has been vanquished, leaving, however, yet a third question, one that underlies the large-scale violence that has followed the collapse of communism and the end of the East-West rivalry on the Continent: Who, for the purposes of self-government, are the people?
This is a matter of maps. Government requires a state. A state must have borders. A method for determining them is therefore needed.
The issue is not a new one. The nineteenth century knew it as the national question. It stemmed, then as now, from the quest of self-identified nations for their own states. To the question "who are the people?", the answer then seemed obvious: a few great nations- the German, the Italian, the Hungarian and the Polish- imprisoned in autocratic multinational empires. Once the empires were destroyed, they would take their places in the company of the British, the French and the Russians as the peoples entitled to govern themselves in sovereign states. In the twentieth century, however, Europe discovered that the matter was not so simple. The empires were indeed destroyed, but in their wake came not few but many claims to sovereignty, claims that were both overlapping and conflicting. How were they to be adjudicated?
