Introduction

This book engages with a range of interconnected and highly topical issues of identity, self-determination and secession. It examines the import and implications of ‘identity claims’, and looks into ‘identity politics’ motivated by such claims, which are becoming ever more salient in democratic and culturally and ethnically heterogeneous states. It discusses nationalism as an important component of identity of individuals and groups, and a position that generates claims of self-determination and secession on the part of ethnic and cultural groups. It also examines patriotism, which had been on the wane before the terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 and the start of the global ‘war on terrorism’, but has undergone a dramatic revival since. The book offers a typology of patriotism, an assessment of its moral standing, and a critique of the beliefs about the patria it characteristically involves. Also discussed are topics such as the ways a liberal society should treat nonliberal communities within it, the role of heritage and remembrance in national identity, the status of national minorities as an issue of equality, the legality of secession, and arrangements concerning indigenous peoples and intrastate autonomy as an alternative to secession. These are some of the issues to do with identity, individual and collective, in the focus of current debates at the intersection of philosophy and political theory.