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PARTISAN REVIEW
Quebec to secede from Canada subject to a popular referendum. There
has been virtually no Lincolnesque anti-secessionist assertion of the
indivisibility of the historic Canadian State and no manifestation of
rhetoric about Canadian national destiny. The absence of principled
objections to the right of a new national self-definition has not led to a
secession since the practical realities of economic viability and political
restructuring have raised barriers against such an accomplishment.
Historically, the Arab communities that inhabited the southern half
of the Ottoman
villayette
of Bayreuth, which later became the Western
half of the British mandate of Palestine, had rejected any attempt to sep–
arate them from Arab and Muslim communities in adjacent territories.
Politically, their solidarity with the Arab and Muslim world with which
they shared bonds of language, culture, and religion with the accompa–
nying rejection of any self-identification as Palestinians led to their
refusal to recognize a special status for the evolution of the British man–
date of Palestine. Since the I96os, however, this community has formu–
lated a self-identity as the Palestinian people. The significance of this
self-definition is recognized both by those who champion the new
nationalist claims that are implied by such self-identification as well as
by those who resist them. The widespread acceptance of their claims
represents in part an implicit recognition of the right of any community,
as in the third concept of liberty, to choose its own form of self-identi–
fication. The legitimation of that self-definition provides the basis for
the expression of national self-determination in a new sovereign state.
The absence of principled objections to the right of a new national self–
definition does not resolve the practical dangers and problems which
inhibit the successful emergence of new political arrangements in the
Middle East.
The complex case histories of Quebecois secessionism or Palestinian
nationalism are only two of a large number of nationalist movements
that seem to have proliferated in the recent past. There are, of course,
many diverse causes other than a change in the conceptual interpreta–
tion of freedom for the proliferation of these nationalist movements. No
single cause could explain the persistent regeneration of historic nation–
alist movements such as the Basques and Corsicans in Europe, the Polis–
ario and Ibo in Africa, the Timorese, the Tamil, the Sikhs, and the Uigur
in Asia. The new international disorder that followed upon the break–
down of the binary blocks of the postwar world may represent a more
significant causal factor. Yet the recognition that freedom involves a
right to the adoption of national self-identification is a relevant factor
in the growth of new, nationalist movements .
