DSP English Hub · UK Strand

Who Gets
to Leave?

These quotations come from political movements arguing about who should govern whom.

Stage 1 — Sort
Who said this?
For each quotation, decide which political movement most likely produced it. Use only the language of the quotations. Do not research the movements.
# Quotation This sounds like...
Stage 2 — Before the Reveal
What are you missing?
Before you see where these quotations actually come from, think about this: when you were sorting, what information were you using? And what information did you wish you had?

Two questions — take a few minutes on each

1. Look back at the ten quotations. Which three were hardest to place? What made them difficult?

2. If you could ask one question about each movement — something not in the language of the quotation — what would it be? What would actually help you evaluate the claim?

Stage 3 — The Reveal
The task was designed to be impossible.
What the sorting task was actually testing

Every quotation in this instrument has been used — in the same words, or words so similar they cannot be distinguished — by more than one of the movements you were sorting between. In some cases, all four.

This is not a trick. It is the point. The language of self-determination, democratic legitimacy, and the will of the people is designed to be universal. It travels between movements with very different histories, very different relationships to power, and very different structural situations.

Political language tells you what people want. It does not tell you whether the claim is justified. To evaluate a sovereignty claim, you need something the language alone cannot give you.

Where the quotations actually come from
# Quotation Origin Also appears in
Named sources — read after the discussion
Stage 4 — What the Language Couldn't Tell You
Four cases. Five questions each.
This is the information you would need to evaluate these claims. Read each case carefully. Notice where the cases are similar and where they differ.

Before you continue

Having read the structural details of all four cases: do they still seem equivalent to you, or has what you just read changed how you think about any of them?

Which case do you find hardest to classify now? Why?

Stage 5 — The Question That Remains
Apply your criteria. Apply them consistently.
These questions have no single correct answer. But your answers need to be consistent with each other. If you use a principle in one case, it must hold in the others.

What this instrument was really about

Each of the four cases was chosen because it destroys a different rule you might use to evaluate sovereignty claims.

Ireland breaks the assumption that existing political unions are necessarily legitimate — conquest is a foundation, but not a stable one.

Scotland breaks the assumption that only colonial subjects can claim self-determination — a nation can make the claim even within a union it partly chose.

Brexit breaks the assumption that self-determination is always the claim of weaker actors against stronger ones — the world's fifth largest economy made the same argument.

Catalonia breaks the assumption that democracy resolves the question — the dispute persists even when both sides claim democratic legitimacy.

You are now in the same position as international lawyers, historians, and political theorists: in possession of more structural information than Stage 1 provided, and still without a clean answer. That discomfort is not a failure. It is where careful thinking about political legitimacy begins.