Nations and States have long been accepted as congruent by common wisdom and the ethnic particularities were confided to the private space. Both in classical liberal theory and practice, the common wisdom was that the "cultural membership cannot be the basis for determining membership in the polity. Our political responsibilities to each other must be based on a concept of justice as fairness that transcends all cultures, as opposed to one that is mediated by culture". However this practice became problematic for stateless 'nations' whose demands for cultural recognition had constantly been oppressed by their host states. The last couple of decades, however, witnessed a change in the sense that the increasing power of political actors likes supranational institutions, diasporas and ethnic groups made it inevitable to ignore the democratic deficit in the system of nation-states. Recently, self-government rights for national minorities, affirmative action and poly-ethnic rights for aboriginal people have been proposed as alternative models to eliminate the democratic deficit in nation states system. This paper will focus on alternative models of non-territorial autonomy as opposed to the system of nation states. More importantly the paper will question if the models of non-territorial autonomy can really be seen as recourse to cultural nationalism that extinguishes itself from political claims to statehood. All in all the presentation touching upon these points will ultimately try to answer this crucial question: what does NTA really has to offer to rectify the flaws of nation-state?
