An ethnic Poland

a failure of national self-determination

John J. Kulczycki

pp. 123-142

in: Stanislav J. Kirschbaum (ed), Central European history and the European union, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

The concept of national self-determination combines the ideas of democracy with those of nationalism. Both have a common source in the French Revolution of 1789, which first articulated the principles of a democratic national government. Whereas initially the democratic element predominated, that is "the right by people to choose their own type of governments",¹ in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in practice it came to mean the right of nations to have their own state.