The contemporary economic crisis has momentous proportions and has exacerbated even further the decline of political sovereignty understood as the complete and ultimate exercise of legitimate power by a national collective. In the face of this, many different political actors revive old grievances to demand national rights and self determination. Scotland is having a referendum on secession, the Spanish state in faces the grave risk of disintegration, and Kurdish emancipatory movements have renewed their old demands. These are just some among many. The model of the nation state is in deep trouble. But is territorial secession the answer? In the present conditions the new nation states will have little sovereignty and will face the same dilemmas as their predecessors. On the other hand, though the activism of indigenous peoples, through consociational arrangements of shared sovereignty and through the accommodation of cultural demands of national minorities, new innovative models emerge demanding national self determination without the need to form nation states. This paper will argue that the cumulative impact of these apparently disparate actions, result in Kuhnian style paradigm shift in which existing theories of nationhood and sovereign self determination require a significant revision
Keywords
National Self determination
Non Territorial Autonomy
Sovereignty
Paradim Shift
Thomas Kuhn
