This file is a single-author political essay from August 1990, written amid the collapse of Communist authority in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Rothbard treats that crisis as the return of a suppressed historical problem: the claims of peoples whose languages, names, borders, and political autonomy had been overridden by empires, centralized states, and postwar settlements.
The crack-up of central control has revealed the hidden but still vibrant "deep structures" of ethnicity and nationality.
The essay’s central thesis is that national self-determination is meaningful only if it includes a robust right of secession. Rothbard argues against four “hostile” responses to nationality politics: the average American faith in the melting pot, Marxist-Leninist universalism, liberal-neoconservative “global democracy,” and libertarian suspicion of collective identities. The American analogy fails, he says, because the United States was historically unusual; Europe, Asia, and Africa contain conquered peoples whose languages and names were deliberately suppressed.
His sharpest theoretical attack is on democratic centralism. Majority rule, he argues, cannot answer the prior question of the unit within which the majority is to rule.
But the crucial and always unanswered question is: democratic rule over what geographical area?
This move lets Rothbard connect the Baltic question, Lincoln’s suppression of Southern secession, Wilsonian foreign policy, and the United Nations’ defense of existing borders. He rejects the assumption that current state boundaries possess moral authority simply because they exist. Against “collective security” and status-quo territorialism, he insists that state borders cannot be treated like individual property rights.
National boundaries are only just insofar as they are based on voluntary consent and the property rights of their members or citizens.
Rothbard’s constructive argument follows from this: because perfectly just borders are impossible under states, justice requires making exit easier. Secession is not a marginal exception but the test of whether self-determination is real.
Only by boldly asserting the right of secession can the concept of national self-determination be anything more than a sham and a hoax.
He also distinguishes self-determination from outside intervention. Wilsonian redrawing of Europe failed, in Rothbard’s view, not because national self-determination was wrong, but because it was imposed by victorious powers and turned Poles, Czechs, Serbs, and Romanians into rulers over other peoples. The principle must remain anti-imperial and decentralizing.
In short, national self-determination must remain a moral principle and a beacon-light for all nations, and not be something to be imposed by outside governmental coercion.
The practical mechanism he favors is local partition by referendum, ideally down to villages or parishes, while admitting that mixed populations make perfect solutions impossible. The goal is not utopia but minimizing coerced rule and ethnic conflict.
One practical way of implementing self-determination and the right of secession is the concept of a partition referendum in which each village or parish votes to decide whether to remain inside the existing national entity or to secede or join another such nation.
The final section turns inward toward libertarians. Rothbard rejects “vulgar” individualism that treats nations as mere collectivist fictions. Individuals are real, but they live through inherited languages, religions, memories, and institutions. The state is coercive; the nation need not be.
The nation properly refers, not to the State, but to the entire web of culture, values, traditions, religion, and language in which the individuals of a society are raised.
The essay’s relevance lies in this conceptual distinction. Rothbard defends nationality against empire, but not nationalism as domination. His criterion is whether a movement liberates a people from rule by others or seeks to rule others itself.
There is, in short national liberation (good) versus national "imperialism" over other peoples (bad).
Rothbard’s core move is therefore to fuse libertarian property-rights theory with nationality politics: borders are derivative, secession is the political analogue of consent, and decentralization is the only way to make national self-determination more than rhetoric.
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