Nationalism and communal identity

Here's more from Ronald Beiner's excellent collection of essays on Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship. To those who argue an automatic connection between national identity and political self-determination, Beiner answers as follows:

The question for a political philosopher here is not the relevance of identity, but how to assess the normative claims embodied in conflicting visions of identity. . . . The appeal to identity by itself gives us no reason to favour the distinctively nationalist way of conferring identity, as opposed to other possibilities, such as a determinedly non-nationalist civic identity (p. 109).

In other words, where communities of shared identity make conflicting claims, political deliberation must attempt to adjudicate these claims. However, where there is no common political framework to enable this to happen, and where one (or more than one) community simply asserts its right to self-determination as a non-negotiable, then warfare seems to be the only route left. Nationalism would privilege the claims of self-styled national communities at the expense of other legitimate communities, with justice being the principal casualty.