Self-determination as a political principle has long evoked visions of dignity and freedom. But in practice, more often than not, it has resulted in bitterness, violence, genocide and murder, as evidenced by the recent assassination of Israel's Prime Minister and ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia. PNS editor Walter Truett Anderson is a fellow of the Meridian Institute, a U.S.-Canadian organization concerned with global government. His next book is entitled "Evolution Isn't What it Used To Be: The Augmented Animal and the Whole Wired World."

Self determination -- one of the most durably inspiring political slogans of the 20th century -- is rapidly losing its allure. The core idea, that every people is entitled to choose its own form of government, still evokes visions of freedom and dignity. But the quest for self-determination all too often leads to violence, genocide and murder. Among the most recent examples -- Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated for supporting the self-determination of Palestinians at the perceived cost of self determination for Jews; ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia; bitter divisions in Quebec.

What went wrong? How could such a benign concept -- meant to mark the end of colonialism and the birth of a new era of global democracy -- lead to so many problems?

The bottom line is that self determination is hideously difficult to achieve in practice. It assumes, for one thing, that it's easy to identify a "people" -- which it never has been. It assumes some undisputed piece of land on which a people, once identified, can choose its form of government. And perhaps most troublesome of all, it has inflated over the years from the idea that an identified group of people could choose which country they would be part of -- say, France or Germany -- to the idea that they could form a country of their own. It feeds the dream of national sovereignty with all its trappings -- flags, membership in the United Nations, diplomatic posts abroad for the elites.

National sovereignty, however, is one of the many things in the world that isn't equitably distributed. It still eludes Basques and Tamils and French Quebecois, but it falls almost effortlessly into the laps of the people of Nauru, a small sovereign nation in the Pacific most people have never heard of.

I recently met the president of Nauru at a reception in Berkeley. An amiable man, his head not noticeably swollen by the honor of being a head of state, he noted with evident delight that his whole country was smaller than the Berkeley campus of the University of California. I was reminded of a friend's remark about the day when six billion flags would fly in front of the United Nations building.

The reality of self-determination never did live up to the rhetoric, even when it was a relatively new idea, an expression of the hopes that blossomed at the end of World War I. It was an important part of Woodrow Wilson's famous "Fourteen Points" that outlined American goals for the postwar order, but the principle was not applied to various German-speaking peoples -- such as the Austrians, who were forbidden to unite with Germany, or the German minorities in the Sudetenland -- and those oversights led straight to another world war. At the end of World War II the principle was proclaimed again, then severely compromised by the agreements that in effect subjugated all of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.

It is easy to criticize people for not applying the principle fairly, but the uncomfortable truth is that it cannot be applied fairly because there are always confusions about what constitutes a "people" or a "nation" and there are always political concerns about the creation of a new sovereign entity. The weaknesses and contradictions were glaringly apparent in the recent referendum for Quebec, where the self-determination aspirations of French Quebecois looked like some new form of subjugation for the Native American peoples in the Northern part of the province -- and raised the obvious question of why they should not have the right to secede from the newly-sovereign Quebec and form a nation of their own.

As more and more people migrate about the world these difficulties are bound to grow. There is scarcely a state in the world now that does not contain a significant minority population, and no major nation that does not have some separatist movement -- often an armed and violent one -- within its boundaries.

Although there will never be an easy solution to these situations, there are other principles that can be applied -- such as pluralism. The hard fact is that the only kind of societies that are going to work in today's world are pluralistic ones. The dream of being able to live in a sovereign nation populated by people of the same color and culture and language is bound to be defeated again and again, to keep turning into a nightmare until we all learn to live with people who are not like ourselves.