Showing how different theoretical assumptions structure political de-
bate makes it possible to demonstrate how each country's public policy
toward peoples asserting a right to self-determination interacts with these
different macropolitical claims, thus producing distinctive patterns of
micropolitical change within countries. In sum, I construct a theoretically
informed and empirically verifiable framework for understanding how
ethnonational groups pursue self-determination goals across the whole
spectrum of ethnonationalisms in Western Europe, North America, and
Australia. A contribution of this study is that it presents an analytical
framework that can account for patterns in, and success rates of, self-deter-
mination movements across the range of First World ethnonationalist
assumptions.

This framework becomes possible, first, because analysis begins from
a different perspective: Rather than defining group membership according
to ascriptive criteria such as uniform language, culture, ethnicity, occupa-
tion, location, or history, people are allowed to define who they are; that
is, the focus is on the structure and content of the political claims made by
people acting in groups rather than on externally defined criteria that are
imposed on people by analysts. Within this framework, politics flow from
the actual claims of people, not from the imposed conceptual boxes into
which people are placed because of certain characteristics they may share.

Second, in this framework, rather than assuming the relevance of one
or another brand of political theory (usually liberalism or Marxism) as the
conceptual grounding from which claims must be understood, the content
and referents of political claims actually made by people acting in groups
are examined. Thus, it is possible to escape the twin Procrustean tendencies
whereby some scholars seek to make people fit where they "ought" and
behave as they "ought" in relation to some theoretically imposed "reality."
The tendency to lump people asserting a claim to aboriginal status with
those not doing so has been the major stumbling block to building a
framework for analysis that is valid across the whole range of ethnona-
tional movements in the First World. As it happens, aboriginal status
claims to self-determination usually have little or nothing to do with the
assertion of individual human rights within countries (the usual liberal
assumption) or with class relations in society (the usual Marxist frame-
work). These are a unique type of claim having a unique theoretical
grounding.

Finally, by focusing in this framework on what governments actually
do through their public policy rather than what they say they do in formal
law, legislation, or in principle, it is possible to explain differences and
similarities in how macropolitical claims of a right to self-determination

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