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Liberal defences of nationalism have become prevalent, almost redundant, in modern political thought. The idea that there is, or can be, such a thing as ‘liberal nationalism’, has been pursued extensively (if not excessively) since the mid 1980s. Many arguments have been put forward concerning national cultures and their importance to individuals, cultural rights, the rights of disadvantaged indigenous minorities and those of immigrant groups, and so forth. Nationalism, however, involves land; Anthony Smith goes so far as to claim that it is primarily about land, and he points to ‘a curious neglect of the territorial aspects of the nation and nationalism. Forwhat ever else itmay be, nationalism always involves a struggle for land, or an assertion about rights to land; and the nation, almost by definition, requires a territorial base in which to take root and fulfill the needs of its members.’ Similarly, Hillel Steiner has recently pointed out, ‘it’s fair to say that territorial claims, though not the objects of nationalist preoccupation, have probably excited more of its passion than any other type of issue‘.

In order to proceed with the evaluation of territorial rights it is first necessary to address one further prefatory theoretical matter: the classification of such rights as either individual or collective. As will soon become apparent in Chapters 3 and 4, this issue is particularly relevant to those nationalist claims which rely on historical arguments of various kinds, and most notably to the issue of the possible transmission of territorial rights from one generation of nationals to the next.

One argument commonly made by groups or their representatives laying claim to a particular territory is that the group (usually a national one) possesses an Șhistorical rightș to the piece of land in question. Recent events in Kosovo supply a perfect contemporary example. At the height of these events, London Serbian expert, Tim Judah, appeared on British television explaining that the relationship between the Serbs and Kosovo is analogous to the Jewish connection to Jerusalem. As a Jew would say Șnext year in Jerusalemș, says Judah, one could attribute a similar sentiment to a Serb as regards Kosovo, i.e. Șnext year in Kosovoș. Indeed, the Serbs, though forming less than 10 per cent of the population of Kosovo, believe they are entitled to it by historical right, in just the same way as many Jews believe that Israel is entitled to Jerusalem.

Historical entitlement arguments appear in a variety of forms. A second version of such arguments invokes the concept of corrective justice: the claim to a particular piece of land is based on prior possession and subsequent wrongful dispossession. Typically, group representatives will argue that they were the original owners of the land in question which was unjustly acquired from them, and are therefore entitled to reclaim it from its present possessors.

In Chapter 4 on corrective justice, I argued, among other things, that JeremyWaldron’s argument for the so-called supersession of historical injustices was inadequate. However, deeply embedded in Waldron’s text is a further argument opposing restitution of aboriginal lands that might be more plausible and which is, in any event, worth considering separately.

As an Israeli writing at the turn of the twenty-first century, I have become accustomed to hearing theword ‘settlement’ used by liberals almost invariably as a derogatory term. The Jewish settlements to the west of the Jordan river, now populated by close to a quarter of a million Jews, are often said to be a central obstacle to peace in the Middle East, as well as being immoral in and of themselves. Consistent liberals realise that this attitude poses a problem for the endorsement of the Zionist effort as such, since settlement has always been a central tenet of this doctrine and the main practical tool for achieving its goals within contested territories. It was also the primary apparatus for achieving Western control over North America, Australia and New Zealand, at the total expense of the aboriginal inhabitants of those places. This too is the source of a great deal of contemporary liberal breast-beating.

It is often assumed, especially by egalitarian liberals, that questions concerning territorial rights ought to be settled solely on the basis of principles of equal distribution. Strict egalitarians understand international justice as requiring the equal distribution of the earth’s natural resources among all the world’s inhabitants. Recently, it has been suggested that egalitarian distribution should apply not only to detachable natural resources (e.g. minerals, oil, coal, wild fruit), but also to the earth’s surface itself, i.e. to land.

Years of sympathetic interest in the liberal-nationalist enterprise led me to pursue the territorial issue as the final unexplored realm into which liberal nationalists have (at least for the most part) so far feared to tread. Due to the centrality of land to all nationalist movements, not least my own, I believed the territorial front to be an absolutely essential last stop for this theory if it was to be taken seriously as any kind of account of nationalism at all. As Anthony Smith restates in his most recent work on nationalism, ‘Whatever else it may be, nationalism always involves an assertion of, or struggle for, control of land.’ This point struck me, as an Israeli national, as patently obvious, but it appeared to have been somewhat overlooked by much of the literature on , including that strand of it which originated in my own country. As Allen Buchanan has recently observed ‘ … at present, systematic liberal thinking about the making and unmaking of boundaries is in its infancy (or perhaps gestation). Hence, there is no characteristic liberal view on the topic.’ Consequently, placing this topic on the liberal-nationalist agenda was in itself a worthwhile task. I hope, however, to have achieved much more than this.