Politics & Power Quote by Michael Ignatieff

Nationhood is being treated here less like poetry and more like paperwork: a people exists, therefore a state should follow. Ignatieff’s phrasing is deliberately plain, almost bureaucratic, and that’s the point. By talking about “national peoples” who “don’t yet have states,” he frames separatism as an unfinished administrative project rather than a romantic uprising. The word “yet” quietly smuggles in inevitability: history hasn’t settled the account; it’s merely overdue.

The subtext is an attempt to normalize the core tension of modern politics: states claim sovereignty, but identities refuse to stay politely inside borders. “Inside someone else’s state” turns citizens into tenants. It hints at confinement without shouting oppression, a shrewd political move that invites sympathy while staying just short of endorsing any particular breakaway cause. “They want a state of their own” is equally calibrated. Want is softer than “demand” or “deserve,” but in the politics of self-determination, desire often becomes a casus belli once it’s framed as collective.

Contextually, Ignatieff is speaking from the late-20th/early-21st century landscape where empires dissolved, Yugoslavia imploded, the Soviet map shattered, and liberal democracies found themselves refereeing identity claims they preferred to call “cultural.” As a politician-intellectual, he’s also signaling a warning: the world isn’t organized around clean nation-states, and pretending it is invites conflict. The sentence reads like a neutral observation; it functions like a pressure gauge.