Self-Determination Cannot Stop at the Nation

Yesterday in Cardiff, the leaders of the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Féin signed a joint declaration asserting that Scotland, Wales and Ireland have the right to determine their own futures. They spoke of inalienable rights, self-determination, and the principle that no higher authority should permanently block a people from deciding how they are governed.

The language is powerful. It is also incomplete if it stops at the level of nations and representatives.

If a people has the right to self-determination, that right does not originate in the representatives who claim to speak for them. It originates in the individuals who make up that people. The same principles — the right to shape the conditions of one’s life, the right not to have one’s future permanently decided by remote authority, the right to genuine consent — apply downward as well as upward.

Representative systems repeatedly concentrate the power of self-determination in the hands of those who win office. They then speak of “the people’s right to decide” while the people themselves remain limited to periodic selection of which representatives will decide on their behalf. The Cardiff declaration challenges Westminster’s monopoly on constitutional decisions. It does not yet challenge the deeper monopoly that representatives hold over almost every significant decision that shapes daily life.

True self-determination would not stop at the border of a nation. It would extend to the capacity of individuals and communities to deliberate and decide on the matters that most directly affect them — how they are governed, how resources are used, how security and care are organised — rather than remaining permanent spectators of decisions made in their name.

The right the leaders claimed today is real. The question is whether it will be kept only as a tool for nations against the centre, or whether it will also be returned to the people who are said to hold it in the first place.