All this boils down to an application of economies of scale to nation states as organizations, but with the unexplained twist that if someone wants to start a new one that looks non-viable or annoying to someone else, they feel entitled to prevent it.
A doctor's office, law firm, or other owner/operator enterprise can succeed at the smallest scale. Other sorts of enterprises, e.g. huge widget factories, are only viable at large scale. Presumably, at least with current technology, states are only viable at large scale. But rather than allowing upstarts to try and fail, bystanders feel justified in stifling startups. We could imagine some interested parties opposing competition for cynical self-serving reasons, by why would people with no dog in the fight go along with this?
Maybe part of the reason is that states are constructed almost entirely of myth. No other organization gets its legitimacy so strictly from what people wish it would do, rather than what it actually does. Religious institutions have a similar feature, and used to be similarly opposed to competition and innovation. Somehow, people decided to tone down going to war over religion and persecution of heretics, at least in many places. But when it comes to providing shared goods, there still can be only one in a particular place - even though that isn’t strictly true.
Peaceful secession is 12th page news, when it happens no one notices. Even if it had been neglected in practice, that would not justify prohibiting it.
Secession does not threaten the monopoly on violence, it just redefines the members of the cartel. Are you saying this is why it won’t happen or why we should want it not to happen? Are we taking the point of view of an oligarch or an ordinary person?
"The history of human migration is the history of peaceful succession" ... it is my understanding that the genetic record does not support this hypothesis.
I don't know exactly what you mean. Out of Africa shorthand clearly shows migration which is a form of succession.
That there are also internecine conflicts reflected in genetic record only shows that it's a small world and that sometimes walking away means walking out of pot into s as frying pan.
But it would also be a mistake to call what was happening "religious" wars. Sometimes religion is the cover story for something else.
Ostensibly p vs C battles were a cover story for pre-existing pagan barbarian battles that had been going on before Rome and before Christianity.
For example, Northern Ireland was/is not really Catholics v Protestants that is the "cover" short hand for Irish vs British.
So we are back to "granfalloons". Place and language and culture (which might include religion) and food/drink are used to create shared identity/consciousness which is a salve to the problem of alienation.
We are autonomous individuals but also social creatures.
So the "who am I?" is always bound with to whom am I connected (who are we?)
We don't answer these questions just noetically (as a rationalist program), but we have the poetic and pneumatic functions of consciousness.
How many of those states have a population on the order of magnitude of 10? How many of them have a population in order of magnitude 100? How many of them have a population on the order of magnitude of 1000? Obviously there is an economy of scale. You are objecting to the fact that there are some countries that far exceed The minimum or probably the optimum scale.
I would be very happy to learn that there actually was no correlation between size and success. But even framing “success “ in the most optimistic terms, where we consider states to be producers of public goods and stewards of shared resources, there seems to be a minimum plausible scale. Maybe the age of the Internet will change that but so far, no observable change.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Should we consider Bill Gates to be a state? We could think of him as contracting out most of his state-like functions to existing states, with the exception of Personal security/national defense.
I can think of tons of positive outliers among small countries (singapore, luxembourg, Liechtenstein , south korea, taiwan, monaco, vatican, norway, ireland, qatar, macau, switzerland). But I can't think of any non-communist non-civil-war small countries doing much worse than their neighbors.
Only half of those are primarily financial hubs. I would hypothesize that small territory makes government more efficient by improving their information (people are usually better informed about things close to home) and improving their incentives (adverse effects of their policies will be more visible and more likely to directly affect the people who decided).
There's a profound survivorship bias working here. One would think that any tiny little country that ran itself poorly would have an exceedingly short lifespan -- it could not survive by being merely too big to digest for a more effective country. Hence kind of ipso facto any small countries that last long enough to be observed across a nontrivial span of history are outstandingly effective. That need not have anything to do with their size per se -- or rather, their size just functions as a brutal natural selection mechanism that promptly filters out the incompetent.
I think there's *some* survivorship bias but it can't explain away the entire thing. Several of these countries were extremely poor at the end of WWII when great powers stopped absorbing their weaker neighbors (except Stalin's USSR but that made it a pariah) Notably Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Ireland. Maybe Ireland's inherent awesomeness helped it gain independence from the UK, but I doubt that. The UK was indiscriminately decolonizing places with much lower levels of human capital than Ireland. Also it seems like most of the weak countries that ceased to exist in the first half of the 20th century were resurrected by peace treaties when the world wars ended or when the USSR broke up. Russia's former vassals aren't generally doing much worse than Russia itself. They're worse off than the never-communist countries of western europe, but that can be explained by communism and perhaps a small disadvantage in IQ that antedates communism and got amplified by the communist/post-communist era brain drain.
South Korea and Taiwan are not that small, but they show what seems to be an issue in Asia: how long has it been since these countries established a market economy? Laos and Cambodia are on the poorer end, and it was more recently that socialism was relaxed there.
Many small countries are accused of being rich by virtue of being tax havens, but maybe that's just an insult for countries more neoliberal than the norm. Ireland has been happy to rake in money with a system like this.
To have autarky is to fall behind in tech, and small countries seem more aware that they are not self-reliant and must be plugged into international trade. And of course, many of them are essentially protectorates, which is usually good, but Russia's 6 de facto protectorates are not on the road to economic success, which might say something about their policies.
It could be that sports is a peaceful outlet, for secessionist desires. As long as we can root for our team, we will forgo formal demands for succession.
The fact that many times in history one power has been overwhelmingly bigger than its rivals but didn't succeed in world domination suggests diseconomies of scale in running a government.
Your statement is a bit too general. By similar logic, we could conclude that business firms have diseconomies of scale because there seems to be no strong tendency for a single firm to grow large enough to produce everything. The existence of economies of scale does not require that larger is always more efficient than smaller, just that this is true in a relevant range of sizes. So the evidence suggests that there are both sizes that are too small and too large, with a Goldilocks range in between. And this range might change depending on what criteria we use to determine what is too big, too small, or just right.
Many here seem to be using stability or continuity as their criteria. Stability is tricky because a very static state seems unlikely to be stable. In a dynamic environment, stability requires adaptation.
I don't really see any good evidence that a 50k population city-state is too small for any purpose other than not getting invaded and even then they can just align with one of the superpowers for protection.
It might work. Startups tend to be massively more efficient and more innovative than their big corporation rivals. "Administrative overhead" doesn't hold them back.
One possible reason for objecting to the creation of non-viable countries is that a common failure mode for a country is to get absorbed by an evil warmongering country, and this failure mode has negative externalities for the rest of the world (i.e. it provides more resources to evil warmongers).
Similarly, one might object to a tiny startup with no experience trying to build and operate a nuclear reactor, on the grounds that a nuclear meltdown will cause serious problems for people who weren't nominally involved in the startup.
If that's a good reason for preventing new countries from forming, it is an even better argument for abolishing all countries, since being a country is a prerequisite for being a country absorbed by evil warmongers. The warmongers will absorb the population, territory, and resources, whether we call it a state or not. If anything, preventing peaceful secession might make all parties more vulnerable to third party warmongers, who can just encourage the “internal” conflict and wait for their victims to weaken themselves.
An unarticulated assumption of most of the arguments presented in these comments is an extreme consequentialist idea that if you think x might improve the world, that is a good argument for x, without needing first to establish that x would actually improve the world or to justify treating fellow citizens like hostages or infants even if it would. Yes, if I get to play benevolent dictator, I don’t need to consult the people my decisions affect (though I might not last long if I don’t). But no one is in that position. There are roughly two approaches, one where the assumption is that the citizens of a state are gaining from mutual cooperation, the other that a ruling class is herding around an exploited class. Can we have it both ways? I guess we could argue in favor of what we would like the ruling class to choose, but if that is really the frame, it's not clear why they would listen.
Sorry, do I understand correctly that you are arguing that conquering a small failed state is *harder* than conquering the same territory when it is part of a large successful state?
I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, and it doesn’t seem relevant. But let's go with it. Who had it easier, Hitler contemplating the conquest of France, the Allies contemplating the invasion of Nazi Germany, or Britain, USSR, USA, or whoever you name other than Alexander the Great contemplating the conquest of Afghanistan? Successful states can fail at defense, and failed states can be a nightmare. If there is a correlation, it is too weak for your argument to rest on it.
I am assuming that in an environment less hostile to secession, there are fewer reasons to tolerate a failed state or weaken an otherwise successful one. Nearby successful states can absorb population and territory peacefully, if the population involved actually agrees that the successful states are more successful and the failed state has failed.
If they are so successful, will they be warmongers? I’m not sure. Was it France's success that made Napoleon want to conquer Europe? Was Hitler inspired by Germany's success? WWI started because of suppression of separatism that boiled over into terrorism and rebellion among rigid empires with rigid and secret treaties.
Vis-a-vis building a nuke, it is not clear what sort of size you mean, or would be relevant. Certainly they would need some liability insurance and a lot of capital. But what is the analogy with secession? Whatever negative consequence of separation you are imaging could almost certainly occur (or something worse) as a result of suppressing it.
Well, if there were areas of the planet that were currently claimed by no existing country there might be more willingness to let upstart start-up nations give it a go. But there aren't. So the comparison is as if every new Silicon Valley firm consisted of a bunch of engineers at Apple fortifying a collection of cubicles and declaring themselves a new firm. You can see Apple might resent this.
Sure. But Apple claims that it is owned by shareholders, and not employees. States either claim to be cooperatives of citizens, or cooperatives of oligarchs dominating non-oligarchs. I don’t think many will explicitly admit to being an organization of oligarchs. If they did, then preventing secession would fit your analogy perfectly. But then they should stop bragging about democracy or consent of the governed and maybe start selling shares.
And please note that Apple itself was founded by former employees of other firms. (didn’t Woz work at HP?) But they mostly funded it by saving their money and seeking venture capital, not by hijacking Hp assets.
Well, parenthetically the idea that The People are sovereign is a fairly late development in history. For most of human history it's been a fairly modest number of people who have owned the state. At a minimum you'll want to consider that prior to the 19th Amendment the "shareholders" in the United States were all male, and prior to the 14th Amendment all white. Nevertheless, however small or large the set of shareholders, they would very reasonably resent someone alienating their property and proposing to own it themselves. At the time of the American Revolution there was only one shareholder who owned most of America, King George III, and he resented the alienation very much -- and he sent a whole lot of employees of England, Inc., to dispute it. We don't find that surprising.
In any event, this doesn't really change the fact that *all* the resources -- land, water, navigable rivers, airspace -- on the entire planet are owned by somebody, and have been for a long time. The same cannot be said about the idea space occupied by new corporations. You can have a brand new idea for a way to make money which no one has ever seen before, and acting on that idea, developing that business, doesn't take away from any other business.
Not the case if you're starting up a new country. For resources, it's a zero-sum game. Any land your new country has must be taken from an existing country. Any water or coal or iron ore or good location on a river or ocean for a port has to come from some existing country.
That is a very appropriate analysis from the Viewpoint an oligarch. So, are you an oligarch? Do you advocate oligarchy?
From the viewpoint of an ordinary person, or according to the supposed principles of the enlightenment, it is BS. Legitimate government is based on consent. That probably means we have yet to witness any actual legitimate government, but hey, we are evaluating an idea, not betting our lives that it will ever be tried.
Unlike starting a business, all the things you need to start a country -- land, water, natural resources -- are already owned by somebody[1], and so to start a new country you need to take them all from an existing countries. In only a few cases are the existing countries going to be cool with this.
By contrast, when you start a business, you don't need to take *anything* from existing businesses. You can get your own space, you can hire people who don't already work for an existing business, you can borrow money from a bank, not take it from an existing business in your field.
I’m still not sure what your point is. I don’t disagree. I am just pointing out that using consent as a justification and then not “being cool with it” if someone stops consenting seems contradictory. Actions ought to speak louder than words, but people seem to think the fairy tale matters.
We can approach it from the direction of “what should Machiavellian oligarchs want, and how can they get it?” Or “what should supporters of liberal democracy seek, and how can they get it?” But the two answers are unlikely to resemble each other. When people mix the two together, confusion may result.
If you think this is merely an economic question you are missing the reality of the human condition.
This is the biggest error of Marx: the materialist economic reductionism.
We are not just material rational individual beings.
We are not rational economic machines.
We are also social and moral creatures, so in addition to the rationalist noetic program of consciousness, we have the poetic (the stories we tell each other) and the pneumatic functions of consciousness.
Who am I is always coupled with with whom do I belong?
Even the cosmopolitan decides which pack of dogs (see diogenes) do i run with?
Wine or beer?
Pasta or potatoes?
Calcio or basketball?
Impressionists or cubists?
These are all choices that create granfalloons. The granfallooning process affects the size optimization process (even if it is soluble - it could be a three body problem or it could have many solutions)
1. All the physical resources a startup company needs are likewise owned by someone else until traded for. The only resource-acquisition difference between the startup company and the startup government is with whom they need to trade for land. The startup company only needs to trade with the owner of the land. The startup government needs to trade with both the owner of the land and his government.
2. Needing to "take" the resources from an existing government presupposes you can't just trade for them, but you can just trade for them. Some governments may be irrationally opposed to selling land, but others are willing to make deals at a reasonable prices e.g. Honduras.
When you are starting a tech startup, any land you might want for office space is already owned by someone else. So you rent/buy it from whoever's willing to make a deal. Likewise startup governments can make deals. Prospera made a deal to get some territory in Honduras. It's not an insurmountable problem.
The link lists two currently, one of which has people who would like to start a country there, but keep getting harassed by a country that doesn't claim it.
Yeah, the other one is in a desert. It is inhabited, so maybe it counts as a country after all?. I imagine the nomads who wander through have a name for it, and no other country claims it. What else do they need?
By the way, I didn't have to write this up (or to finish the book review I was planning) but you might want to look into Ian Shapiro's work on the theoretical/practical application of the duty of care standard. The international one, not the one that applies to products. It underlies a lot of western liberal (as in, international institutional) thought on these kinds of issues.
The idea, very basically, is that governments legitimate themselves through providing care to their citizens. Invasions or secessions are seen as losses of sovereignty that are created through the government's refusal or inability to care for the democratically/institutionally expressed needs and desires of their citizens. It's also explicitly anti-nationalist and critiques the idea that uniting nationalities in one state is a good idea. Basically because you can invent or switch nationalities so it's a recipe for conflict.
I think the model has problems. (And I like the African Union's critique of it particularly. They issued one as a block.) But it's an important school of thought to understand how western institutions think about these things.
I was under the impression that “western institutions” at least officially respect the 1918/1945 Versailles/Wilson idea of “self-determination of peoples”. This might be how liberalism *should* view the role of government, but I thought the formal declarations were still of the older type.
The issue is that standard doesn't allow for things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If every state or peoples has a right to self-determine then you can't do things like humanitarian intervention. And that's in those documents too.
This contradiction has had a lot of ink spilled over it. The whole DoC theory is meant to reconcile them. Basically, you get sovereignty derived from the duty of care. This recasts governments as having a purpose in the international order and deriving legitimacy from it. And it certainly had some teeth in the third world where many grants of independence were premised not on ethnic independence but how colonization inherently suppresses the rights of the colonized. On the other hand, strong sovereigntists obviously disagree.
Who gets the house? Who gets the car? Where do the kids spend their time? Do we try to split things exactly down the middle? If not, what kinds of reasons would make one side "deserve" a bigger share? You can ask similar questions about any two people who live on the same territory, in the same economy, using the same infrastructure, shaped by the same culture, and so forth. And maybe if you have good enough rule of law with respect to _property rights_ in those things, enforced for the most part by _states_-- i.e. "you can't just secede and take all your stuff, you owe me for X"-- then you don't need any explicit rules for the free-association part that forms and constitutes those states in the first place.
That makes sense except for the geographic monopoly aspect. The transactions costs of moving, and the cartelized nature of the state “industry” give one side huge advantages in the negotiation.
This exactly. If you can and are willing to pay the costs - the transaction costs, the value (to the parent?) of the parent's property you wish to take with you, the new costs to the parent for building and maintaining new border infrastructure, etc. - then you are justified (in some philosophical sense) in seceding.
Some oppressed minority will have a very high willingness to pay to secede, and may be better off than in the status quo even if they can afford only a tiny sliver of land for their state.
Confederacy wants to secede from the Union? Sure - but if the Union doesn't want to give you the island of Fort Sumter for any price, you can't just take it. All the slaves want to secede from the confederacy? Great!
A strong norm that arbitrary polities are allowed to secede, along with norms about what costs they need to pay in order to do so, would be a wonderful thing.
Would the slaves seceding have to pay the slaveowners for the loss of their slaves? For that matter, would anyone wanting to secede have to compensate the parent country for loss of tax revenue?
You're still depriving the owners from future value, which is a cost of the slaves leaving. I can't take your stuff just because you've already gotten your money's worth out of it.
The point is that the parent body can demand almost arbitrary compensation for people leaving to the point where they have effectively no sovereignty, so if you say that the seceding country has to pay costs, you have to specify what exactly is fair to count.
Yes, that's the "norms about what costs they need to pay in order to do so" part. I do not claim to have developed a framework to account for all such costs.
Thankfully in the present day, a reasonably strong international norm against slavery exists. But in a purely hypothetical bizarro world that somehow recognized both the legitimacy of slavery and also people's right to secede while paying to do so (and also the personhood of slaves!?), I suppose the slaves would be expected to pay their market price. Would a loan to finance this payment be a profitable investment, given the productivity advantages of free labor over slave labor? (In contrast, I wouldn't think South Carolina would be any more justified in seizing Fort Sumter for a "market price" than they would in claiming parts of North Carolina - they had already ceded the land to the federal government and while it was certainly inconvenient not to own it, it was a distinct island, and its occupants certainly weren't on board with secession.)
It would be interesting to observe the counterfactual world in which some Confederate states were permitted to secede. Would the rest of the Union manage to abolish its own slavery without the war? Would the fugitive slave laws be abolished, and would this increase economic pressure that would gradually result in slavery ending in the Confederacy as well? Would sympathetic northerners start covertly arming slaves to encourage slave revolts?
Fair enough on wanting to establish norms. It seems like a tricky business and easily subject to abuse, but it's not like we have a better system in place anyway.
> but if the Union doesn't want to give you the island of Fort Sumter for any price, you can't just take it.
Under your rules, could a country set up their legal standards so that the government technically owns all of the land (maybe it's "leased" to the people living there, in exchange for taxes), and then refuse to sell it at any price, and thereby make secession de facto impossible without the government's consent?
If not, why not?
If yes, isn't this just forcing governments to jump through some formal hoops to get back to the status quo ante?
If the Confederates secede, they should get Fort Sumter. Governments aren't people; it's not like the fort was owned by a homeowner. The Confederacy should get the fort for the same reason they should get sovereignty--it's the government's and they're now the government.
Alternatively, they should allow Fort Sumter to be owned by the Union, but the residents would have to comply with tax laws, firearms laws, and immigration laws. If they fail to do so, confiscating the land is within their remit as a government to deal with lawbreakers.
In most cases, there will be both shared assets and shared liabilities that will need to be divided. There is lots of room for negotiation, and it’s not clear what a priori principles an unbiased arbitrator should use to prevent the negotiation from stalling. An abusive spouse seems unlikely to be able to justify demanding all the assets and none of the liabilities. Or perhaps the seceding spouse gets to declare bankruptcy. If one party feels the relationship has become exploitative, there has to be an exit clause that doesn’t make them into a debt slave of the abusive spouse or the abusive spouse's creditors.
I wouldn't call "ethnic cleansing" a highlight ...
Seriously, it would take an entire blog post to discuss the history of the Crimean Tatars. And, presumably, most of the ACX readers already know that history.
not the ethnic cleansing in itself but the fact that it wasn't touched upon on the original post might've earned a line of "by the way the region whose self determination we're discussing would've been a different region with a nation in it had the Crimean Tatars weren't you know ethnically cleansed". I'm being overly sensitive being a (half) Tatar myself but still. Also, average ACX reader is quite knowledgeable but I can never be sure USA/Western audiences knowing details about Turkic geography and history.
Prior to WW2 most population centers were Tatar majority, and it's not like the cleansing began in 1944. It's been a constant thing since 1800s and 1944 was the last nail in the coffin.
It does it just means that they've been a minority for a lot longer than is let on. Anyway, the Tatars got the land through ethnic cleansing just like the Russians, that's the way of the world.
By the way I want to repeat that in my personal opinion the best approach is the one Martin Sustrik describes in his EA posts about Swiss canton border changes, start at the canton level and go until the village level though not until the street level. That seems the best balance compatible to human nature.
The problem with the case-by-case approach as advocated by Alex Mennen is: Kosovar Albanians moved to Kosovo as refugees, became a majority population and started forcibly removing Serbians from Kosovo, destroying churches, killing policemen, and in general making a place a horrible place to live, for the now Serbian minority. I personally know Serbian people from Kosovo who, while students in a student bus, were fired upon by Albanians, and the two UN peace keeping forces soldiers Read about the Kosovo "Yellow House" to find out well recorded grim details of forced organ harvesting from Serbians in Kosovo done by Albanians over Serbians. Now, was it "right" for Kosovo to gain independence? Your decision will depend on whose side of the story you hear - you now heard the Serbian version (Kosovo was historically Serbian, with UNESCO protected monasteries being burned by Albanians which we accepted as refugees but that after becoming a majority turned violent), but I am certain your decision would be different if you heard the Albanian version.
Knowing how Gell-Mann works, I assume every world conflict is at least equally complex, and what is fair is not nearly as clear cut as we would like to think, and your ability to know the truth depends on who you're listening to. Kosovo war, as it was used as an excuse to keep NATO existing, and get US a military base in Balkans, got very one-sided reporting in the west, which makes for poor decision making.
Sorry, for clarity, in which year was the Albanian take over initiated? And when did the Serbs have a majority in Kosovo? Assume we're talking 1870s-ish here?
I'd be inclined to say that 100 years is long enough that stuff changes. It is a classic case of inter-ethnic tit for that and disagreement that culminated in some extremely nasty stuff happening from mostly one side.
Albanians moving in was a gradual process from 1900 to present, with peaks when Albania was under communist regime. Does just having time pass make things fine? Will Israel be able to claim Gaza strip because "it has been ours basically for a couple of decades"? Albanians are moving to Macedonia and their % of population rises. If it crosses 51% and stays like that for X years, they can vote to join Albania, solve for X?
To clarify: I do not have answers. I understand there is some value of the precedent - a land has belonged to a people, so it should remain theirs. But what defines "a people" without coming down to racism or something like that. Kosovo separated because it was majorly Albanian, but that has caused suffering to the local Serbian population (133 crimes against Serbians publicly acknowledged in 2021, few punished, ditto with crimes of the Kosovo Liberation Army). Should that be allowed? Then what if the US South did the same with a (let's imagine) minority slave population. Burma Muslims might have the right to ask to be independent in their part of the country, as Buddhists are literally committing atrocities against them, but what calculation do we run to make sure further atrocities are worth the atrocities prevented? I am unsure. Solutions, such as formation of Bosnia & Herzegovina have failed - you end up with a forced multi-cultural state in which everyone sabotages everyone else, and the Serbian part is waiting to separate, meanwhile vetoing whatever they can to others. China including Xinjiang seems unfair to the local Muslim population, as they are being systematically exterminated, but would an independent Xinjiang be fair to Han Chinese there? A lot of problems in Africa stem from the borders being drawn by outsiders with little regard for local people and customs.
What I am saying is "I'll decide what is fair and smart on a case to case basis" demands that you are really smart indeed, and the information you will get in the moment is highly likely to be vastly distorted by the media, based on what suits the global elite at the time (or what Moloch decides). This makes for a poor law. If we are keeping borders as they were when UN was founded: why is Kosovo free? If we are not, why is Spain, China, Russia, or Ukraine allowed to insist that their borders not be changed?
The interesting thing about Xinjiang is that the Chinese government seems to be intentionally moving Han Chinese there, possibly to make that exact argument in 50 years.
Moving of the Han Chinese is the least of the problems, much bigger issue is the forced sterilization of Uighur women, incarceration of the men, and forced family pairing of Uighur women with Han men by giving financial incentives at best and using coercion at worst.
Kosovo war indeed gets very one sided-reporting in the West, but in somewhat different way than you think.
Only context when I ever see a discussion about Kosovan war is when someone who is pro-Serbian or pro-Russian uses it as proof for why US/NATO is bad. No one else in the West except those people seem to care about Kosovan war at all.
Personally I know very little about it, but the fact that pro-Serbian arguments are usually voiced by the same people who excuse Russian invasion of Ukraine makes me kind of suspicious of them (edit: I should emphasize that I am aware of the fact that my bias here might be unfair).
That is very interesting - and makes sense now that you pointed it out.
I meant that the reporting was one-sided during the conflict, in the 90s. Looking back from this perspective, Vietnam was in the right to fight Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, but at the time, the whole West reported only from Cambodian and Thai side. 30 years later, truth is revealed (like 30 years later Kosovo president was found guilty for crimes committed during serving in Kosovo Liberation Army) but by then, it's a bit too late.
I do not excuse Russian invasion - it is illegal, immoral and unjustified. The added spotlight to NATO war crimes in '99 is welcome, although as you say, comes from a discredited side, so it is also mostly useless.
Yeah, this makes sense, and I do think that coverage of current war in Ukraine is somewhat slanted toward pro-Ukrainian side. I can totally see that in 1999 it might have been similar or worse. Its just it is obvious to me that invasion is unjustifiable even if you take account of pro-Russian facts that Western media are not eager to mention (here I think, perhaps wrongly, that I am sufficiently familiar with the situation, including pro-Russian arguments).
Americans give little thought to Serbia but when we do I think it's still typically remembered as a basically bad place that we bombed because it was committing atrocities. Kosovo and Bosnia blend together in the collective memory.
I will say though that the Internet was a smaller place back then and as a teenager with an interest in geopolitics, I never encountered a pro-Serbian or anti-Kosovar view in those days. I do recall my history teacher, who couldn't find Germany on a map, being quite convinced that Serbia needed to be stopped now or else Hitler.
Pacifica Radio here in the US was vehemently against the Kosovo involvement. Amy Goodman had one of Democracy Now's famous "debates" on the question "Are the NATO bombings war crimes?" One side was "yes, and Clinton should be tried in the Hague." The other side was "yes, but Clinton should be tried by the people of Kosovo."
Unfortunately, I commented very late on the original thread, and it probably went unseen.
The most relevant and important document here is Lincoln's first inaugural address. If the Declaration of Independence lays out the case for when secession is justified, Lincoln's address lays out the case for when it isn't. Reading this in college changed my perspective; I always knew the Confederacy was evil, but I used to have a hard time understanding why its *secession* was bad, on principle. But of course, the Civil War was fundamentally a war against secession. Slavery was the *cause*--slaveowners wanted to live in a country run by fellow slaveowners--but secession is what really, REALLY angered Northerners, to a degree that even slavery never did. Lincoln wasn't alone when he said he'd rather allow slavery to continue than let the Union fall apart. The North saw the South's secession as fundamentally anarchic--as no different from an individual declaring themselves independent, or a neighborhood, or a city. It was seen as a snub to the government's very ability to govern.
Jason Greene-Lowe posted an excerpt from Lincoln, and summarized it: "But if you forsake the basic principle that your and your neighbors should resolve your differences of opinion through some kind of formal decision-making procedure that takes all of your opinions into account, then, really, what else *is* left other than anarchy or dictatorship? There aren't as many options as we might think."
To this argument, you replied: "I guess I fail to see the problem with "then some states secede from the Confederacy, and then some states secede from those states"."
To which I responded (my old comment starts here):
"I guess I fail to see the problem with..."
And yet this is the view held by every single country on Earth. There is not a single major political party, either democratic or autocratic, which believes in the principle of "any large territory can secede from any country at any time, and everyone else has to go with it." The views stated by Lincoln are universally held. Even the Declaration of Independence does not assert this principle; the entire tone of the Declaration is "We've tried everything, but you're still bullying us, so we're going to take this continent for ourselves." Lincoln calls this the "Right to Revolution" in his first inaugural address; he understood it to be an extreme solution not to be taken lightly. (Most Southerners probably agreed; Confederate Virginia never accepted West Virginia's secession, for example. But the South's argument was that *states* were the *real* countries, and so had more sovereignty than the United States.)
A universal belief is not necessarily a true one. But it is one that deserves to be considered and engaged with on a higher level than "Well, that seems wrong to me." Why does it seem wrong? Why does it seem right to everyone else? How did we get here? Your blog post didn't satisfactorily answer any of this. To say nothing of how oddly it conflated conquering an existing nation with stifling a secession - two very different questions, even if they both relate to whether a country exists or not.
(My old comment ends here.)
Addendum: if you think the Civil War was justified, but also secession is totally cool and fine, you're basically saying that Lincoln was completely and totally wrong, that he committed an act of aggression against a sovereign state, that his goal to reunify the U.S. was a bad goal... but somehow, by some miraculous coincidence, he was the good guy for all the wrong reasons. You should be extremely suspicious of this; it's entirely too convenient. You clearly see that the Confederacy was evil, and want to believe its destruction was justified--but you don't believe in any single rationale for the war itself.
I remember Megan McArdle trying to walk this strange, dubious tightrope back in 2017. Jacob T. Levy's reply: "But "state uses armed force to put down secessionist uprising" is a dog bites man story." https://twitter.com/jtlevy/status/859091336770793474 (The whole thread might be worth reading.)
Final addendum: I want to stress, once again, that this abstract discussion of when secession is justified and when it isn't--a complex question--has very little to do with Russia's very straightforwardly evil war of conquest in Ukraine. Whether Ukraine "should" exist or not is an irrelevant question. Ukraine exists because it declared independence in 1991, and Russia did not object, for various reasons. If they had objected, things would have gotten very complicated, and it's hard to say where the dust would've settled. But they missed their chance, and "No takesy backsies" is a valid moral and geopolitical principle.
Your overwrought comment literally boils down to "Lincoln claimed that secession is bad, and used this position as casus belli. Lincoln, who never lied, can't possibly be wrong! Secession is therefore metaphysically bad, QED."
You're mad that people aren't engaging with this terrible take? LOL.
That's not what I said, and I'm not the one being overwrought. I think Lincoln artfully summarized a view that's more or less universally held. Maybe other people have summarized this view more eloquently, but I don't know who they are, so I didn't cite them.
Again, a universally held belief isn't necessarily correct, but it's one that can't just be ignored if someone's trying to make a case against it. I think Scott failed to make his case; he simply stated his view of secession-is-always-allowed without giving much thought to *why* this view has basically never been adopted anywhere by anyone.
I suspect the answer to *why* for many rationalists, sadly, boils down to the rationalist failure-mode of (to wax poetic) "We are the first truly moral people to ever walk the earth, all previous generations were wicked and mad, but our philosophy has made us a pure and new race of people who are the first to SERIOUSLY address this issue and provide the final solutions."
Remember, also, that a sovereign Confederacy would be an independent nation with its own goals, its own foreign policy, etc. It was already planning westward expansion, and trying to form ties with France and Britain. Allowing it to exist would be allowing a hostile nation to exist on the southern border, one whose entire purpose for existing was to expand slavery and to protect slaveowners' interests.
What if the Southern states had never joined the US, had instead formed the Confederacy in the 1780s, and the CSA had existed as an internationally recognized country for almost 100 years? Would Lincoln be justified in conquering it to halt slavery?
Of course not, that's absurd. Wars of expansion aren't undertaken for charitable reasons. Sometimes the conqueror claims to have a just goal (e.g. Japan's "co-prosperity sphere"), but this is always very obvious bullshit.
Catalonia declared independence. Spain said "No" and arrested Catalonian leaders. The international reaction to this was: well, duh, what did they expect? The US sided with Spain; China sided with Spain; Russia sided with Spain.
Catalonia's secession would have reverberations throughout Spain that would be felt by ordinary Spaniards. It's entirely within Spain's interest to maintain its territorial integrity. This is true regardless of whether it *should* be the norm to charitably give up territory.
If Catalonia had always been independent, then any attempt to conquer it by Spain would be morally atrocious, and internationally condemned. Yet I don't think contradicts the above. Is this just status quo bias? Are we saying "Now that every country's finished conquering, it's time to halt at the current borders and tally up the points. Sorry, landlocked Bolivia! Should've conquered that coastline while you had the chance!"
It's an interesting question, I'll admit. It would probably take much more space than a comment, or even an essay, to explore all the complexities here. But I think it's okay for a question to be so complex that it's hard to apply a single consistent rule. One pitfall of rationalism is a failure to accept this, and a desire to consistently apply simple rules to every scenario.
But I still think "Right to Revolution" is the right framework. Unilateral secession is an extreme act, and has always been treated as such. Though, I'm willing to entertain the notion that we should be more secession-friendly, in general, than we have been in the past, especially if the vast majority in the region supports it.
I don't think there's anything wrong with status quo bias when it comes to the question of the position of national borders. Border disputes have caused far too many wars in the past; at some point it makes sense to look at the borders that currently exist on the map and declare them good enough. I don't give a shit if someone reckons Strasbourg should be German, it's not, deal with it.
"There is not a single major political party, either democratic or autocratic, which believes in the principle of "any large territory can secede from any country at any time, and everyone else has to go with it.""
That's not entirely true, often breakaway countries are acknowledged by other countries - Germany recognised Croatia and Slovenia fairly quickly, and self determination is a pillar of the UN..
I would, perhaps unfairly, summarise your large comment here as breaking away from the US = bad, breaking away from the British Empire and forming the US = good. ( Breaking away from Mexico if you are Texas is probably good as well. )
Anyway I don't think that self determination as the UN sees it applies to the US at all, except perhaps to the native Americans.
The fact that breakaway countries are often recognized doesn't contradict what I said in that quote. They're often *not* recognized as well. Sometimes they're recognized by some countries but not others. The reasons behind this depend on the individual case at hand. Germany did not recognize Croatia and Slovenia because they believe all breakaway states should always be recognized. That wasn't the argument they made, or that any country has ever made.
The article you link to is about decolonization, i.e. imperial nations granting autonomy to lands they previously invaded by force. This also is doesn't contradict what I said, although it can get complicated at the margins (e.g. with Scott's hypothetical of the Navajo Nation declaring independence).
I did say not entirely true. That said if you position your sentence like this "any large territory can secede from any country at any time, and *everyone else* has to go with it." then it is designed to be impossible to falsify because of course there's never a 100% agreement on anything. Nevertheless plenty of countries do recognise the right to self determination, as does the UN.
The article from the UN is about decolonisation but that is *mostly* what self determination is about, and why the UN is pro self determination. We can't actually discuss self determination of nations, without discussing colonialism. It is precisely anti-colonialism that has driven the ideology of self determination.
Can you explain the argument for how the secession of the USA from Britain could be justified, but the secession of the Confederacy from the USA would not?
Again, read Lincoln's first inaugural address; he makes this very case. The Declaration itself makes the case on the US's side, laying out a very long list of reasons why such an extreme act was necessary. This was known and acknowledged to be extraordinary: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes..."
The Confederacy, for their part, believed this as well. Their position was that states were sovereign countries, and that the US was more of an EU-like agreement than a country itself. If they advocated a unilateral right to secession, they'd have recognized West Virginia's secession from Virginia, which they never did.
One point worth noting is that the US had a lot more to lose than Britain did. The Atlantic Ocean separated the US and Britain; the CSA would've been a hostile nation on the USA's border. The US was an overseas territory of Britain; the South was an integral part of the US. The US had no vote in Britain, and had a long list of grievances against their government; Southern whites were *over*-represented in the US Senate, and had no actual grievances beyond the US electing an abolitionist President.
I am not sure I agree with the hostile nation part being a consideration, insofar as the North was worried about a British ally on their southern border. The reason being Canada, which was a wholly owned part of the British Empire at the time. Maybe they didn't want another British state on their border, but that isn't usually what is claimed. In other words, I think the claim only makes sense if the claimant is forgetting Canada, as the worry about a British ally is that the Brits would have a foothold on the continent vs not. When you remember Canada, and the fact fighting in Canada had been part of the war of 1812, the difference becomes a lot less exciting.
You might also adduce that the American colonies were in a very different situation than the Southern states. The American colonies were *not* a regular part of England, e.g. they had no separate representation in Parlaiment, no traditional rights to self-determination. They were governed directly by the King and had much more limited means of having their grievances addressed than any other part of England.
Indeed, this was a pretty serious aspect of American dissatisfaction, and a reasonable case can be made that *had* England been willing to incorporate the colonies as a regular part of England -- including normal representation in Parlaiment -- it's possible the Revolution might not have happened. Jefferson argued pretty passionately in the Declaration that the colonists' beef was *with the King personally* and not necessarily with England, or being English, per se.
The South was in no such position. They weren't territories governed directly by the President, they were members in full and equal standing with the Northern states. They had ample representation in Congress, they supplied more than their fair share of Presidents, they had all the usual deference to state sovereignty granted by the Constitution, et cetera.
So the argument that they were in similar extremity as the colonists, in getting their voice heard, is pretty dubious. The real problem was that their voice (particularly around slavery) was starting to become a minority voice. It would be heard -- but wouldn't end up being determinative. That is, they were objecting to participating as a minority in a republic. The colonists arguably would've been OK with it.
I think you hit a nerve. You are quite right that most people seem to have a strange block in their head thinking of this sort of thing, where some secessions are good, others bad, but no obvious way to figure out which is which. We humans seem to want countries to be always the same countries, except when those countries are evil then we want them to break up or be taken over by good countries, without any process of determining or agreeing upon what defines good/evil in this case. I expect this is related to the problem of the little space in our heads where "kings... what a good idea!" is written (as Pratchett put it).
We like stability, and we dislike the loss of status that occurs when a bunch of people want to leave our group, and likewise we like it when groups we don't like become less stable and lose status. So when we think (because we were told) that the king was good, people wanting to leave his kingdom are seen as bad instead of as evidence that his kingdom wasn't so good, and when we think the king is bad we cheer for people wanting to leave because it supports our believe that he is bad. We never stop to think "Might it be that there were too many people for the government to govern, whether or not the king was good?" let alone "Maybe they agree the king was good in some ways, but bad in others that don't apply to me and so escape my notice?"
There's an additional aspect of no-take-backs that underlies some of the philosophical differences between North and South over secession. The Southern point of view was that the Union was an agreement between states, and so the states had the right to change their mind. One of the more important Northern points of view was that the Union was a decision undertaken *by the people* -- all of them -- of the country, with the states carried along for the ride, and that only *the people* could change that, not state governments.
Id est, from this point of view, what would've been needed for secession to be "legal" would be another Constitutional Convention, in which the governing rules were reformed, e.g. the country was split in two. And at that convention all the *Northern* states would get votes, just like the Southern states, because the decision would need to be one "by the people" and that includes everyone.
The same principle underlies the existence of the Fourteenth Amendment, too, I would say, since it is designed to constrain the states fundamentally. Indeed, the fact that Constitutional Amendments constrain even states that do not ratify them would seem to partake of this same philosophy -- and deny the Southern point of view that the Union was any kind of free association of the states.
There is a big step being made there that doesn't necessarily follow. The distinction between the Union being between states and being by the people seems entirely separate from whether the decision for a state to remove itself from the Union could be made unilaterally or only with permission of the other states. In other words, the level of the decision (state or people within state) and the nature of the decision (unilateral or bilateral) are two very different things. One doesn't seem to imply the other at all. (Not to mention the fact that States ratified the Constitution, not peoples, so arguing that the people are the ones who undertook the agreement is strange.)
What is stranger, although not surprising, is that they didn't bother to write in what to do if a state wants to leave the union. They seemed to miss a lot of "what happens when X bad thing happens" when it came to writing the Constitution. Just that when you are trying to write something describing an agreement that people (or states) are leery of joining, you would think there would be a clear exit clause in case they change their mind.
I don't quite think so. The point was that the original decision to form a Union was made by The People -- all of them -- and so any decision to reform, or dissolve, the Union must also be made by The People -- all of them.
I agree it's not about the level of the decision, but about the agents empowered to make it, so perhaps I phrased that badly. The Southern point of view was that we all by ourselves get to make this decision. The Nothern was, no, you don't, we *all* decided to start this business, so we *all* have to make any decision breaking it up.
Arguably there *is* a section in the Constitution on what to do about secession, it's called Article V. In principle, if South Carolina wanted to secede "legally" its only choice would be to persuade 2/3 of Congress, or 2/3 of the states, to call a Constitutional Convention to let them out, or agree on a mechanism to let them out.
There is actually a "land back" movement within the USA and Canada to try to give political and economic control over territories back to native Americans to various degrees. There are certainly people who believe that the United States should not exist and that its land should be given over to Indigenous stewardship, although for now, the more relevant goals are things like getting back the area where Mount Rushmore stands. It's different from a normal secessionist movement because of how it leads with the idea of needing to protect and nurture natural resources and the environment rather than wanting governance by or territory for a particular people. Nevermind people; should nature have a right to self-determination? What about the interests of the land itself? In the eyes of nature, are there any legitimate countries?
In my professional circles I've had some interactions with the "land back" movement. It has an inherent problem which, I've learned, is actually privately clear amongst leaders of today's recognized Native American tribal governments but has no identifiable solution. That issue is: give the land back to _which_ native Americans? And how to choose? (And who gets to do the choosing?)
The peoples residing in what is today North and South America were no more stable or set in their self-organization than were the contemporaneous peoples of say Europe during the same age. There was not, as of the 15th and 16th centuries when Europeans started showing up in numbers, a single overriding continental-scale American entity a la the Ottoman Empire. Rather there was and had been, for centuries at least, a fluid and ever-changing and mutually-hostile cast of tribal nations at varying scales of geography.
Some, such as the Aztecs, had become fairly large and successful through what we would today call genocidal conquest of their neighbors who then became the ground floor of a slave-based economy. When the French voyageurs first arrived in the Great Lakes region they found that the Algonquin and Iroquois confederations of tribes had been engaging in a multi-generational war of genocidal intent if not accomplishment for something like a century. What exactly suddenly happened to the Anazasi Puebloans circa 13th/14th century is a rolling controversy amongst archeologists and historians and today's native groups; a climate shift is one candidate but so is war and conquest ("anasazi" being originally a Navajo word meaning "enemy ancestors"). The Maya waxed and waned for centuries often via means which we today would view as truly horrifying. Etc etc. It's at least as big and messy a rabbit hole as say European history between the Romans and the rise of Westphalian nation-states.
So if we want to apply self-determination retroactively to the Americas, or really to the Americans as existed before 1492...._which_ Americans? And on which moral/logical/factual basis?
The focus I have seen from land back movements in Canada is 1. actually enforcing the various treaties and contracts that should theoretically be legally binding, and 2. resolving ambiguities or politically untenable committments through negotiation and/or jurisprudence. I don't see why this would be considered not to be an identifiable solution, although maybe there is a defference between our countries that I'm not aware of.
It is not a potential solution because the land back movement presents and identifies as a moral one not a practical one. ("This is an overdue reckoning not some sort of political thing; this is about justice!" as an activist firmly explained at a meeting I attended a few years ago.)
The issues/questions that I crudely summarized call into question the basis of those treaties (many of the tribes which got to sign treaties were simply the ones who happened to have won the most recent genocidal tribal war); and negotiation now has the same inherent moral rabbit hole as do the treaties.
And in Central and South America there weren't very many treaties anyway, that wasn't how the Spanish rolled.
Of course this is all absurd levels of retconning. The Native Americans were no more actually conservative of nature than the European colonists, cute mythology notwithstanding. And last I checked, they're still quite willing to fill in a marshland to build a casino, or rent land to a giant coal-fired power plant, if it will make the tribe good money.
Worryingly common retconning though. The idea of "indigenous knowledge" - especially as something special separate from and superior to Western science - is dangerously common in the conservation field.
a) it would seem to me that deferring to "traditional knowledge" over the scientific method would need to prove itself positive rather than the burden being to prove doing has negative effects
That article's punchline is about laboratory testing of a specific indigenous technique for stopping the specific invasive pest that the conservationists are fighting....deployment of the scientific method is hardly retconning.
"how it leads with the idea of needing to protect and nurture natural resources and the environment"
It doesn't though. You try getting far in the land back movement by saying that native americans only deserve the land if they're better at protecting it environmentally than non-native americans. You will get shouted out of the room.
Native american activists, in my experience, talk a big game about being environmentally friendly but if they actually have to follow environmental restrictions they complain.
Re Chipsie's 1st para: "Groups don't have subjective experiences besides the subjective experiences of the individuals, and they can't decide to exercise their rights in the same way that individuals can because they can't want things or make decisions."
Granting for now your framing of SD as a 'weird right', I don't think the above para is a good way to understand it. Isn't it true that one's subjective experience can dramatically change and grow to a different size and shape when one is part of a large group dynamic? It's not as though groups of people are simply the arithmetic sum of each individual's thoughts and feelings.
"...and they can't decide to exercise their rights in the same way...because they can't want things or make decisions." Groups absolutely can want and decide things that the individuals don't - the wisdom of crowds turns to madness all the time. I agree that groups can't exercise their rights in the same way as indivs - I don't know how they possibly could, and in any case why should this ability have bearing on SD?
SD as a right is not "independent of the individuals", it is wholly contingent on there being a bunch of individuals with rights, from which the right to SD is an extension. Let me try a hypothetical that may or may not help my case:
Imagine an ethnic subpopulation of serfs living in their motherland under a state that has robbed them of their individual sovereignty. The serfs want to form their own nation-state within their existing territory. Political practicalities aside, in order for this idea to make sense, they have to first ascend out of serfdom and gain recognition of their indiv. human rights, *then* make a case for SD as an extension thereof. Don't let this example be the focus of a rebuttal, but I think it's helpful to think of "rights pertaining to groups" as dependent on the underlying indiv. rights.
It feels strange to group Scotland with some of the other examples in this and the previous post. In the UK, there is no question that *if* the majority of Scots want Scotland to be an independent country, it will be. The debate is about the conditions under which this collective choice can be made, and the effects of such a choice. I mention this because international (often US) commenters sometimes seem to believe that Scotland is being kept in the Union against its will and is fighting the UK govt for independence, when in reality the Nationalists are fighting to convince their own population that leaving is a good idea. They were unsuccessful in the last referendum; they may be successful in the next. The situation is much closer to Brexit than anything else mentioned in your posts: no one seriously doubted whether the UK had the legal right to leave the EU - only whether they *should*.
Yeah, Brexit is in many ways a close parallel (and in both referendum campaigns, the No side was called "Project Fear" by its opponents). The outcome of the Brexit referendum hardened my opinions on Scottish independence in both directions - both "wow, leaving the UK would be much harder and more destructive than I'd realised", but also "my God, we need to get out of a country that would do something so stupid". In the 2014 independence referendum, "you'll lose your EU membership if you leave" was a major campaigning point for the No side - funny how history works out...
In defence of my younger self, Brexit has also *made* Scottish independence more difficult - the economic pain would have been much reduced if Scotland and rUK had both been EU members, able to trade without customs checks across their shared border.
Explanation for non-Brits: these are the current terms of the debate. Not "should Scotland be allowed independence if it votes for it?" but "should Scotland be allowed to vote for independence (at all/so soon after voting against it)?" The Scottish Tories campaign on a message of "stop IndyRef 2". At the time of IndyRef 1, it was described as a "once in a generation referendum": the argument now is that Brexit has changed the situation sufficiently (recall that "you'll keep EU membership" was an argument for the *No* side...) that it's justified to ask the question again.
So the loser wants a do-over on a one-shot game? No surprise there.
The winner might have an incentive to agree to the do-over - on the condition that the second loss is more punitive than the first one was.
Maybe the unionists could be rewarded with ranked choice voting, instead of first-past-the-post, if independence is rejected again. That would allow unionist parties to stop splitting votes in a way that benefits the dominant nationalist party.
The Scottish parliament has elections once every 5 years. The unionist parties (Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats) might benefit from ranked choice voting. By contrast, the Nationalists (the dominant nationalist party) are further ahead of their small nationalist competitors. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Scotland#Scottish_Parliament
It wouldn't necessarily work out so neatly, however. Some Labour supporters might prefer to rank the Nationalists second, on grounds of social class sympathies / redistributive policies.
Well, the "once in a generation" thing was from a non-binding white paper, but yeah, IndyRef was certainly *sold* as a one-off thing. That said, I think "should we leave the UK and potentially lose access to the world's largest trading bloc?" is a very different question to "should we leave the UK, which has just voted to leave the world's largest trading bloc against Scotland's wishes, and potentially regain access to said bloc?"
I wonder if they consistently believe that. Would they still believe it if they won?
That is, if Scotland had left the UK, and then the UK had left Europe, would the SNP be saying "oh well now that Brexit has changed the question, we'd better have a second referendum to see if we should re-join the UK".
In fairness, it seems unlikely that a second referendum in that situation would lead to Scotland making a different decision because Scotland voted to Remain. Why would people vote to leave the UK and remain a member of the EU, and then decide to actually leave the EU and rejoin the country they just voted to leave now that it is less attractive?
An interesting point at the time - which I can't remember if there was a conclusive answer to - was whether Scotland would automatically join the EU if the independence campaign had won. Some EU countries with separatist movements of their own weren't hot on the idea.
You are of course right that the SNP would not accept do-overs, just as the brexiters weren't interested in repeats after winning the first one, even though e. g. Farage had openly said that a narrow win for remain would
not settle the question. It's hard to have consistent principles in politics.
> An interesting point at the time - which I can't remember if there was a conclusive answer to - was whether Scotland would automatically join the EU if the independence campaign had won.
My understanding is that many Brits thought it was stupid that Cameron let Scotland have a referendum and it would have been unacceptable if Scotland had actually left.
Perhaps, but I think that's a different point at issue. Maybe some people thought the referendum was stupid, but everyone expected the result to be honoured. (Edit: for 'everyone', read 'everyone within the Overton window').
And many Scots think that the way said people phrased the issue - "Cameron let Scotland have a referendum" - shows why Scotland needs self-determination rather than relying on whatever a Tory-dominated rUK lets us have.
(I'm coming off like a hardcore Scottish nationalist, which I'm not, but it really is remarkable the extent to which Scottish and UK politics differs. The Tories are a tiny minority party in Scotland, but regularly win UK-wide general elections. That's largely because of the brokenness of the First Past The Post electoral system, but as we saw with the Brexit referendum, even on a one-man-one-vote basis things are different North and South of the border.)
Who gets to decide what “makes the world better”? Whoever is currently the most powerful, so you're not getting rid of "might makes right" so easily. Of course, they probably hadn't become the most powerful completely arbitrarily, some objective features correlated with our innate ethical senses probably played some part in that, if you subscribe to the idea that the world gradually gets better on average.
I really didn't like most of those comments. There's the lack of understanding of what self determination means in Law. Sure in practice it does mean that you have to have the ability and power to secede but the right of self determination, according to the UN, belongs to Peoples. An oil rich region that considers itself the same nation as the rest of the State isn't going to secede in reality, and has no right to do so under international law. A region that is its own People has the right to secede.
The UN says (via Wiki)
"The right of a *people* to self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law (commonly regarded as a jus cogens rule), binding, as such, on the United Nations as authoritative interpretation of the Charter's norms. It states that peoples, based on respect for the principle of equal rights and fair equality of opportunity, have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no interference.[3]"
What's a people? Good question. Luckily wiki has a link.
"Used in politics and law it is a term to refer to the collective or community of an ethnic group, a nation, to the public or common mass of people of a polity"
And yet there was very little of that being discussed in the last post, or highlighted here. Obviously there may be ambiguity about what constitutes a People, but the acceptance that there are separate nations of Peoples, is the reason under International law why self determination is a right. Admittedly this all originated in the era of Imperialism ( as a counter to the idea of imperialism) but it remains the law now.
As to the confederacy, they were clearly not a separate People. I think a lot of Americans see succession through the prism of the civil war where succession was a bad thing. However Texas seceded from Mexico and the United States from the British Empire, and most Americans think that a good thing indeed.
Those laws are, as the article says, a jus cogens rule - which is "is the technical term given to those norms of general international law that are argued to be hierarchically superior. ". Therefore it is a law that isn't changing soon. In any case the law also explains what self determination is. Which answers the question asked.
The problem is that "Nations" and "Peoples" are fuzzy concepts. It's easy to say that e.g. Kurds are a separate People from Turks and Arabs, and thus are entitled to their own state, especially given the oppression they've faced within Turkish and Arab states. But it's not always that clear-cut. Do Basques and Catalonians count as distinct Peoples separate from Spaniards? Do the descendants of Chinese exiles living in Taiwan count as a separate People from the Chinese living on the mainland? If they continue to remain politically, culturally, and geographically separate for another 200 years, will they count as a separate People then? And I have no doubt that some Southerners here in the U.S. do indeed view themselves as a distinct People separate from Northerners, and they probably did even more so back in 1860, does that mean the CSA had a right to secede after all? What about places like Nigeria where there are several distinct Peoples, but dispersed throughout the country in a way that would make secession logistically impractical (since they don't really have their own distinct geographical territories and trying to figure out who originally lived where would be a nightmare)?
I am aware that nations and peoples are hard to define (although rarely for the nations or peoples themselves). However the question in the last post was who has the right to Self Determination. The answer is in general - ethnic groups and nations.
As for Nigeria, it isn't and can't be a nation state. That said rule from Nigeria trumps rule from elsewhere.
Well they weren't Scott's comments, for one. That said I don't think I get that we can ignore International law on what constitutes self determination either, since a country cannot be independent in reality unless it is legally recognised to be so.
You apparently missed the section of the Wikipedia article that says "There is not yet a recognized legal definition of "peoples" in international law".
This comment section gets mighty aggressive as it threads. Before I report you for an ad hominem, if that’s possible, can you point out where I lied? Work into your answer that I said “there may be ambiguity about what constitutes a people” in my post.
That is significantly minimising the true nature of things. The UN may call self-determination a right, but it's a right where noone's sure who gets it.
I have a pro-open borders argument against self-determination. If we encourage secessions, we would get more borders, thus more barriers to the movement of people and goods. Even when seceding polity agrees to keep their borders with their original country open, next government might change it. This is bad.
I agree with the take that being sufficiently oppressed by an imperial power should count as a valid reason to declare independence. No, I do not have a ready answer on what counts as "sufficient" oppression; that would be determined on case by case basis.
Also there are situations when imperial power is willing to grant independence to its subjects on a given territory, but not to have them vote in an elections that would determine policy for the whole entity, including (former) metropolis. E.g. dissolution of the British Empire. In such cases, letting them secede is preferable option to continuing with authoritarian regime.
Other possibility is when poorer part of the country wants an independence that would result in the other part getting even richer since they would stop doing fiscal transfers to would be independent polity. In such a case there are clear utilitarian grounds to support splitting up - poorer part gets to fulfil its preferences and richer part is better off as a result. E.g. dissolution of Czechoslovakia.
In practice, I consider a lot of a real world independence movements as justified, but this is not based on a philosophical commitment to self-determination.
I cover it in post. In fact, it was Slovakia that seceded - Czechia is bigger than Slovakia and it has been Slovaks who mostly wanted independence, while many Czechs were opposed to letting them go.
I am however personally very glad that dissolution happened, since I do not know of any Slovak person who would now say that it was a bad thing, and for Czechia it is rather obviously very good economicaly that we do not have to fund them via fiscal transfers. Slovakia is poorer than Czechia and their political system, at least from here, looks like dysfunctional freakshow.
Yeah, but, like, in this case, Czechs are clearly better off, and Slovaks are, as far as I know, overwhelmingly happy with the outcome. It would be absurd to be against that.
I should admit that some Czechs are unhappy with the dissolution, for reasons that I find incomprehensible/stupid and am thus unable to present them here without strawmaning
I know about the EU, living in it. However the fact is that the country did break up and the poster was in favour of open borders, and creating borders. Anyway the breakup was way before the EU allowed either in.
I do not remember all details, but I think that the relations between Czechia and Slovakia after 1993 were quite similar to what EU countries have now.
From the average person's perspective, the dissolution meant that when you are crossing the border, you need a new currency, and (pre-EU) someone looks at your ID card. You heard much less of the other language on TV. You voted for different parties in different parliaments, so you gradually stopped understanding the political nuances of the other country. Ten years later, you were surprised to realize that the youngest generation no longer understands the other language fluently.
It was more complicated if you worked or studied on the other side of the border, but there were mutual agreements to make this easier. For example, Slovak students could study for free at Czech universities.
So, having to show your ID card at the border was annoying, but from the perspective of someone growing up in a communist regime, we associated "borders" with something much worse (having the police check your baggage, asking questions about the purpose of your trip, etc.), and none of that happened.
Speaking from the other side... agree completely about the freakshow... but economically, yes, Slovakia is poorer then Czechia, but that was already true during Czechoslovakia, so it's not like things got *worse* after independence, I think.
Given that we had only three years between the fall of communism and the dissolution of federation, it's hard to say what would have happened economically otherwise, in a free-market Czechoslovakia.
From my perspective, I am happy that no big disaster happened, and both countries safely made it into EU and NATO.
"Might makes right" is one of the axiomic statements that I feel is so reductive that it's wrong in the real world. It's like having a leaver long enough is enough to move the world, no one can dispute the truth of that statement but in reality there are no such leavers. Might making right exists in the same space, with a theoretically infinite amount of martial force you can dictate all political outcomes but no one has infinite martial force. Every country has to make cost benefit analyses of what they want, how much power it will consume to achieve this, and whether there are better alternatives.
In a practical world, you can almost write the opposite, "Right dictates might" because the actions that are considered 'right' by your geopolitical adversaries are almost unilaterally going to be the actions that require the least amount of blood and treasure to accomplish. To use a historical example, Napoleon undoubtedly had the finest military force in the world during his reign. He did not get to dictate history, however, because so many of his rivals disagreed so strongly with his vision of the future of Europe that they were happy to ally with their worst enemies to prevent it. The British then spent the next century conquering a quarter of the known world with a far inferior military because no one with sufficient force cared enough to stop them.
The geopolitical 'right' (and I use quotes because it is mostly shorthand for how nations perceive international relations rather than any allusion to morality) of a country's actions dictates the amount of might arrayed against them in many circumstances.
There are recordings of captured nazi scientists, who were informed that the allies had successfully deployed an atomic bomb. The interesting thing is that they were in agreement that Germany could never have done such a thing, because of infighting. "You'd need to have a hundred thousand people all cooperating together, nobody trying to backstab each other."
Large scale cooperation is a superpower. So yes, i think it's reasonable to believe that right makes might as well.
FWIW I believe the actual conclusion from the Farm Hall transcripts is that Heisenberg and his colleagues initially disbelieved in the atomic bomb because they had already made an estimate of the amount of U-235 needed for a critical mass and gotten an answer that was too high by a factor of 10 or so. Supposedly that's a major reason *why* Germany didn't pursue the bomb, because they (mistakenly) thought the amount of 235 needed was far too high to be realistic.
It's said on the American side that Fermi initially made the same mistake, but then for some reason felt skeptical of the easy answer, and went back to do the calculation more carefully and thereby realized it was, just, barely possible to get enough 235.
I think in this context people mostly define "might" to be (number of people) x (how passionate those people feel). I don't think people are generally thinking that if Superman arrives on Earth, with infinite awareness and infinite Kryptonian weaponry to back him up, he's entitled to do whatever the heck he wants because he's more "mighty." We're talking about the ordinary sort of human "might" -- which is, as I said, roughly (number of fighters) x (how eager they are to fight). So it's more of a short-hand way of saying something like voting, only we weight votes differently according to how strongly people feel about the issue.
It's not really a very different point of view than an ordinary fetish for democracy. The main distinction is in saying that one man = one vote might not be followed, because some people are more concerned about it than others.
If you're going to consider the transaction costs of leaving states as being a problem that justifies making secession a questionable right, why shouldn't states do everything they can to _raise_ the cost of exit? Incentives clearly matter, and it looks like the incentive for states, presently, is to continue to grab increasing amounts of power for themselves, because ... why not?
Norms are great and all, but i think we all know what happens when norms and incentives collide: people pay lip service to the norms while following the incentives.
If each state has the right to secede, then the central state has to actually _work_ to ensure that the smaller states it comprises are getting something net positive out of the deal.
But if secession _isn't_ a right, then literally every other right can be held hostage by the central state, due to the extremely high transaction costs being a thing. You might have a situation where _everyone_ is better off with the 'parent state' being disbanded, because it's pissing off _all_ of its constituent members in some way or another, but the thing lumbers on because the parent state is sufficiently democratic that its members fight each other for control of the parent state, rather than doing the sensible thing and just splitting.
An idea I'd love to see explored more is some notion of 'transnational state-interoperability and recogonfiguration' agreements. Basically something like the EU or the WTO - but for redrawing state boundaries.
The deal would have to be one where member nations adopt a set of rules that lay peaceful processes through which nations can split, combine, and regonfigure themselves - crucially that every member nation makes itself vulnerable to sub-regions seceding, but also gives itself a pathway to peacefully annexing subregions of other nations.
It would have to define things like minimum size, population, demographics, and geographic traits a region would need to have to be able to explore seceding - and whether it only has the right to join another nation (and if so, which ones), OR whether it is large enough to form its own nation. It would require also a set of rules laying out arbitration and division of shared assets (infrastructure, military, currency, regulatory etc.) between subregions and parent regions.
I think if such a thing existed it would do very interesting things to aligning the incentives of states with the needs of all their various constituent peoples and geographies - and generally lead to a more healthy (and peaceful) competitive process whereby states try to grow by being higher functioning and achieving better results for their peoples - rather than by conquest or threat of force.
Tokelau seems to illustrate an important point: that secession often works out great for the local elites, but not so much for everyone else.
If you were the mayor (or whatever, actual title Ulu-o) of Tokelau then you'd much rather be the President of an independent Tokelau; there's definite benefits to being President of a sovereign nation with a seat at the UN, there must be all sorts of nice bribes you can collect.
On the other hand if you're a random schmo on Tokelau you're much better off remaining part of New Zealand. Partially because New Zealand heavily subsidises the whole island, and partially because as a New Zealand citizen you have the right to live and work in New Zealand (or Australia) if you feel like it.
Having said that, I think it makes sense to support secession as long as:
1. The territory seceded is sufficiently large to make sense as a country (no, your street can't secede, sorry)
2. The borders of the territory seceding make some sort of sense in terms of history and/or geography. So if Texas votes for secession then that's fine, but if only 10% of Texas votes for secession then you can't draw some fractally complex border around the houses of all the pro-secession people's houses and declare that your squiggly-looking subset of Texas is now an independent country.
3. There needs to have been a properly carried out referendum which has won with some sort of supermajority. (The supermajority gives a reasonable bias towards stability, so that you don't get territories that secede with a 50.1% majority one year and then want back in with a 50.1% majority the next.)
Before, we were treating "secede and join another country" as a special case of "secede and then as a sovereign country you have the right to join another country if both countries agree".
But if we forbid tiny territories for seceding, should we then make a special case for seceding and joining another country? What if a tiny town in Texas on the border with Mexico wants to be part of Mexico?
Couldn't an independent Tokelau get heavily subsidized by the international community as it plays China and the US or whoever off against each other? New Zealand aid is nice but far from the only option, bribes can be development projects and such and not just go into the ruler's pocket.
I don't know how relevant this is but I think it might have been better to let the Confederacy go without a war. While the Confederate defeat meant that slavery was ended sooner than it otherwise would have I'm not sure that was worth all the bloodshed and destruction.
There's also one alternative history scenario that came to my mind. What if the Confederacy became independent but then later faced a mass slave rebellion? Would the Union then be justified in going in to topple the government and possibly re-annex the Confederacy? Does this depend on whether they have legally recognized the Confederate independence or merely tolerated it without a war while formally objecting to it?
Well, but once the principle is established it's hard to put a limit on it. Would you doubt that Texas, say, would secede from the Union today if it was merely a question of a majority vote in the Texas Legislature?
The Confederacy secedes, falls to a successful slave revolt (in the 1880s or 1960s; either would be interesting in different ways), and the US has to deal with a new (hostile?) power on its southern border as against its old enemy, with factions wanting to intervene on both sides (in the 1880s due to radical republicans vs. fear of something Haiti-like and/or foreign entanglements, in the 1960s because it starts to go Communist vs. racism being a lot further beyond the pale).
A lot of interesting comments, and I agree with the defend the status quo (better the devil you know) arguments because from that perspective, you are defending the property rights schema within which you work that gives you money and power that you'd lose if you let the status quo change no matter how bad the status quo is for the individual voter/person in your society. This is just human nature not to seek martyrdom on behalf of amorphous groups of which one isn't a member of (and a HUGE reason why all this get to your ethnic corner and represent runnygazoo going on in the U.S. is so bad for all of us).
But a lot of the examples relied upon forget some things:
1. The standard that you were a baddie if you just invaded and took land is relatively recent - I would argues since 1948, ever since Israel was established as a state, the western nations began to shift on the idea of using invasion because I want it as an acceptable standard. All US imbroglios since then were on behalf of "rescuing" someone/something, not trying to take territory; other nations invade to take actions since have been roundly condemned and whatever resistance there was had outside support (the level determined by how important strategically the invadee was).
2. Self-determination implies voting as if all these invaders were direct democracies where each person got a say, but that's not how representative democracy works at all. The voters only get a say by proxy (assuming legitimate elections as opposed to fake ones), and only influence representatives' votes if somehow they have another avenue to get heard. This narrows the impact of self-determination significantly and why a nation can be at war but it appears the majority of the people wish it weren't or vice versa. Representatives waffle between doing what their constituents want, and posing as smarter than their constituents.
3. Public opinion measurement is almost worthless because how you frame the question affects the answer you get; direct democracies fall prey to preference cycling and Arrow's impossibility theorem. Meaning on any one specific issue, you've actually no idea what people want because their answer will change if affected by context, the other options, time, what those around them are saying.
4. For the record, states cannot secede from the U.S. or break up into two states without state/federal legislative consent and overcoming U.S. Supreme Court precedent, and the organization to make such a thing happen is a collective action problem that is almost insurmountable - see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3130497
5. Scott, you dismissed the Confederacy/Civil War stuff way too easily because the legacy of areas in seceded states that didn't want to still look significantly different in culture, political orientation, and habit **regardless of the ethnicity** of the resident (e.g. East Tennessee or West Virginia).
6. Self-determination gets you nowhere when you have a large bureaucracy staffed with civil servants who aren't elected. Sure they are supposed to be apolitical, sure they are supposed to serve "the state" regardless of who is running it, but in practical application, that's not how it works. The bureaucracy as employment attracts people who like the idea of government and believe government should be involved/choose what's permissible; and the bureaucracy affects what leadership hears and thinks and does significantly. Rare is the civil servant who will recommend, this isn't a government problem and we shouldn't do anything. It's also a roadblock to any one voter being heard because 9 times out of 10, if they are interacting with government, it's with an agency/civil servant and rarely with an elected official. This effect is moreso when it comes to military action - in every nation that has some form of democracy and in many that don't, the military as a constituency with an influential voice through its leadership is significant.
7. There's something about belief contagion at work in nation/states, the COVID response often seemed as much about reacting to alarmism from other nations first, than what was really happening locally - so there's something about how elites drive policy and then nations (the ruling elites) are reacting to their peers, not the voters/people (see https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/bern12036/html). If true, this makes a mockery of self-determination.
8. For nations that have elected leaders, their legitimacy is driven mostly by true elections with orderly regime change where the stability comes from the fact that you know there will be an election, and that the winner will take office no matter who they are, and then they will leave office if termed out/lose to a challenger in an election. The stability is what the people react to when they say their government is legitimate or not. This is why in the US people acted with such alarm when Stacy Abrams refused to concede the GA governor's race, and when Trump can't shut up about his defeat; it's why people accepted the outcome of Bush v. Gore instead of debating it ad infinitum; in a stable, legitimate democracy, this isn't how it's done and the fact that it's happened twice now says something about the gap between voters and those in government that makes a mockery of self-determination.
Since the invasion, a book that I came across frequently being recommended is "The Internationalists" by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro. I have only recently started reading it, so don't intend to sell it too much, but so far it has been worth it.
The writers are both experts in international law. They take the "might makes right" arguments seriously, explain it as something that was true and legal in the old world order, and argue that the Kellogg-Briand Pact gave rise to a new world order where it is not legal anymore. They do acknowledge that this order is weakened and challenged by events like the current invasion as well as the US invasions early this century, though they distinguish the legality of these in some way.
Regarding jumpingjacksplash's list, and Scott's acknowledgment of Israeli settlements as a troubling exception, I think this problem is much more prevalent than Scott realizes, and also much more tricky for Scott's theory.
The piece that I was surprised Scott didn't get into was the awkward connection between nation states as an assemblage of people, and physical land. We sort of take for granted that Catalonia has Catalonians and Wales has Welsh people and Ireland has Irish people. But as Scott recognizes, Palestine has both Palestinian Arabs and ethnic Jews, and there are tremendous disputes about who is allowed to be in what place in the first place, which make self-determination tricky to evaluate.
I spent some time in former Soviet Georgia in the 2000s, and they had three different separatist regions that claimed some form of independence from Georgia: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Adjaria. Each had distinct dynamics: Adjara's leader (named Aslan, which I will always think is a badass name) was eventually run out of the country, and there wasn't a strong ethnic identity behind the separatism, so it's officially over now.
South Ossetia used to have many ethnic Georgians, and really wants to be united with North Ossetia which is inside Russia. It was the justification for Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia, which was fairly bloodless because Georgia's military folded so quickly, and because Russia was satisfied with a quasi-democratic transfer of power to a Russia-friendly oligarch and his mildly Russia-friendly allies.
Abkhazia is be far the largest of the three, used to have a large majority of ethnic Georgians, and expelled (or ethnically cleansed?) them violently after the Georgian army invaded to reestablish control in the tumultuous '90s.
In Abkhazia and South Ossetia, who would be allowed to vote in an independence referendum? Only those currently physically there? Only those born there, wherever else they might be now? What about those whose families owned homes there? What if those homes were built with their own hands? What if their whole family tree is buried in cemeteries there?
All of this, in just a country of 4 million people! My point is that this sort of incongruity between control of land and national identity is commonplace around the world.
You see this issue in Western Sahara, where Morocco has been steadily sending people year by year, so that there will be an ethnic Moroccan majority to block Independence.
I think there are 5 ways to decide who gets a say, and they all have drawbacks:
1) Current occupation. This limits the decision to whomever’s most immediately affected, and let’s everyone in that category get a say. It also incentivise occupier-settlement and/or genocide. I’d 100% support it in nice liberal democracies, but any country which left its “nice liberal democracy” card at home shouldn’t be recognised doing this.
2) Rolling cut-off. Anyone who has been there for 50/100/whatever years (either personally, or a direct, unbroken chain of ancestry) gets a say. Avoids laughable instances of abuse, but still incentivises occupation and demography-rigging.
3) Static cut-off. Anyone who has been there since 1945 or whenever gets a vote. This can’t be waited out for obvious reasons, but will eventually get ridiculous (imagine the cut-off was 1491), unless the year gets reset eventually in which case it’s just option 2.
4) “Legitimate” inhabitants can vote. People who are present (usual “you are your ancestors” caveat) legitimately can vote, and only them. This fits all our norms nicely, but operationalises to just supporting whomever you like because “legitimately” can’t be defined that easily. Does gel easily with whether people who’ve been forced out/left get the vote - they do if they were forced out “illegitimately.”
5) People who were born there get the vote. Operationalises easily, slows the advantage of occupier-settlement by 25 years or so (doesn’t stop it), and makes it easy to decide which expellees/emigrants get the vote. In nice liberal democracies, will lead to misty-eyes ex-pats having a massive sway in something that doesn’t affect them much. Would probably recommend as a Schelling point for other countries.
The static cutoff isn't as ludicrous as it seems. I wouldn't pick a static cutoff just to have a number, I'd pick it because past a certain time period, international norms about self-determination and the legitimacy of conquest have changed and there's a difference between "Neither the US nor any Native Americans would have existed if it wasn't for conquest" and Northern Cyprus or Ukraine going to the conquerors.
The principled discussions all seem to be about whether some *group of people* should get to secede. But in practice, the question is about some *region of land*. There’s a lot of reasons that it makes sense to have governments tied to regions of land, but it really complicates the principled stuff here. If governments could govern *people* without having sovereignty over *land* then that would make some of the principled stuff simpler.
In *Confederate Reckoning*, it's claimed that if there'd been an honest vote of even just the white men in the south, the majority would have been in favor of letting the legality of slavery drift. It took a lot of politicking and maybe some vote fraud to make session happen.
It's an interesting question what would have happened. For what it's worth, I looked up the number of people who voted for Breckenridge in the election of 1860, which is a decent proxy for a vote for secession, and the answer is that across all 11 states of the core Confederacy Breckenridge received 51% of the vote. Bearing in mind that the franchise did not really extend to all white men over the age of 21, it doesn't seem implausible that had secession been put to a plebiscite across all 11 states, in which every white man got to vote (but nobody else), it would've narrowly lost.
Edit: forgot to note that in South Carolina the electors for President were chosen by the Legislature, not by popular vote, so there are no results for SC in that calculation.
Something I got from _Confederate Reckoning_ was that each of the states had its own geography, agriculture, and politics. You probably shouldn't choose one to be a surrogate for all of them.
Well, that's why I took the time to add up the votes for Breckenridge in all 11 states, to see what can be said across the entire region.
But yes there are significant state-level differences. For example, Breckenridge did not achieve a majority in 4 states (GA 49%, LA 45%, VA 45%, and TN 45%), and achieved what might be considered the size of majority needed for as big a decision as secession in only 3 states (MS 59%, FL 62%, and TX 75%). It is of course well known that TN was sharply divided on the question, and VA's reluctance is well-known in the context of Lee's decisions, but I did not know TX felt that strongly. I guess in fairness they were pretty comfortable with the notion, having "seceded" from Mexico a mere 25 years earlier.
Can get around this by reworking what we mean by a nation-state?
Would a federation of free city states be free from this problem? If I'm Hanza 2.0 and some of my members want to secede, it seems like an extreme overreach to immediately sink their ships and blockade them until they join.
In fact, city states seem like the lowest limit you can go to - it's hard to consider a "state" something that cannot field or pay for an army, and a lone guy can't really do so, neither can a street (no data on Scott's group house, though Zero HP is not optimistic on that one https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1276138147521400833.html ).
Consider the European Union. If the EU was more powerful and integrated, would it be an appropriate response to invade UK when they try to brexit?
Why is this suddenly appropriate for monolithic states?
Every city (or town/village?) either going it alone or joining/leaving larger confederations at will would probably be a good way of leading to market-type improvements in government without going full Moldbug/Ancap.
I'll point out that the conclusion likely leads to fragmentation of 'countries lead by ethical people' while leaving 'countries led by unethical people' larger and more powerful. Probably a bad result.
> we firebombed Dresden and killed them until they gave up
It might seem a nitpick, but I would argue (as ACOUP does) that "morale bombings" were not instrumental in defeating the Nazis. Neither did the blitz subdue the British.
Regarding @obormot's link, I don't see how the analysis would apply to e.g. the Russia--Ukraine situation. The whole question is whether Ukraine is part of Russia, so saying "countries can do whatever they want within their own territories" doesn't answer the question of whether the West can use force to stop Russia from trying to control Ukraine.
Incidentally, I'm convinced by the main argument of the link: the goal of world peace is incompatible with the goal of government "for the people, by the people, and of the people". The question is then how much to choose of each. Keeping in mind that world peace is compatible with totalitarian governments, I tend to favor democracy (not sure what that means in practice though).
With only one exception, the most war-mongering countries in the world are autocracies: Russia and Saudi Arabia being two prime examples. The biggest sable rattlers are also autocracies: North Korea (w.r.t South Korea) and China (w.r.t. Taiwan).
And in the age of Kings, they were constantly going to war at a whim.
We are seeing in real-time that democracy must be suppressed in Russia for the war to continue.
The one exception, of course, is the U.S., which is the world's policeman, but is at least temporarily exhausted an is not currently fighting a large-scale hot war or even managing an insurgency. (luckily, ISIS got exhausted at roughly the same time).
So sure: if one wants to make the case that the U.S. should be "less like those autocracies" then I agree. That one country makes all of the other democracies look bad.
Most of the other democracies are sufficiently US-dependent that they’d face a Suez crisis if they tried to do their own interventionist wars without Washington’s approval. The only exception is India, which liberated Bangladesh but doesn’t obviously want anywhere else.
I think there's a game theory perspective that might be useful on secession.
We want cooperation. The foundation of a civil society is willingness to give up some of our freedoms (arguably "rights") to gain the benefits of cooperation and structure of law. I lose the right to pick fruits from your trees without permission, but others are also forbidden from entering my house and stealing my TV.
So what about secession? If secession is an easy thing, downstream from a "right to self determination", then we are enshrining a right to defect. We are also incentivizing coercion among parties via threats to secede. It's counterproductive to the goal of cooperation.
So, shift the question: when is it moral to defect? I think an intuitive answer is "if the other party has already defected against you." So the world will be on your side if you're already an oppressed minority, but they probably won't be on your side if you just struck oil and want to keep it for yourself.
The obvious flaw in this is that we DO want to keep some rights special, and keep them even if it's suboptimal for society. I do not want people to harvest my healthy organs to save five sick people. But why? Ignoring the moral perspective, the practical reason is that I am willing to fight/defect for that, and a lot of other people are, too. So it's necessary to disallow things like "harvesting my organs for the greater good" so that we can maintain social cooperation.
And that seems to be the story of rights, in general. Ignoring any appeal to the divine ("natural" or "God-given" rights), we have whatever rights we've either 1. collectively enshrined via law, or 2. are willing to fight for. Maybe it's not secession, maybe it's marching and protesting enough to get the law changed, but sometimes we do "fight for our rights." And if we win, we get to keep them!
That sounds a lot like the "might makes right" statement that you're unsatisfied with, but I think there's more nuance than "big stick makes rules." I think it's the observation that cooperation can be fragile, and unless we enforce it, we lose a lot of other rights to anarchy. So instead, we do proxy shows of might (e.g., marches and votes) instead, and we protect exactly our ability to do those things (speech, assembly, and representation) so that we can shift norms without resorting to civil war.
Your opening premise is false. You don't have the right to pick fruit from someone else's tree, nor do they have the right to steal your tv. Governments are instituted to protect those rights you already had, not take away rights to steal from each other.
Without a form of government, you don't have a fruit tree. At best, you have a fruit tree you prevent other people from harvesting, but that's a practicality rather than a right.
Either way, the specific example doesn't really matter to their argument so much as the point "there are some freedoms the law forbids".
Not at all. The notion of "mine and thine" exists before government. Animals display notions of ownership that are predictable and change over time, allowing for coexistence without constant conflict, all without government enforcement. Humans have and respect ownership when governments break down, and even when governments directly say you do not have the right to own something.
Animals also violate property rights all the time (damn squirrels won't keep off my lawn!), but honestly I don't think animals are really relevant. I also thing we may be using the term differently.
To maybe not use the word "rights" - governments constrain behavior by having a list of things you aren't allowed to do - some of which may be things like "steal from your neighbor". Having an entity that enforces such rules is generally thought to be a good thing [citation needed].
You can take these rules to have an end goal, like maintain social cohesion, and then extrapolate to how this applies to secession, which is what Jon does.
Squirrels don't care about YOUR property rights (although they are careful not to get too close) but they are pretty good at respecting other squirrels' rights. They are a little more crazy than most other animals, however*.
Even if we don't use the words rights, governments constrain behavior by having a list of things that they will punish you for doing. That list does not get created ex nihilo by governments, rather the list is based on the stuff that people all agree you should get punished for doing. Typically the rules have an end goal of roughly "Allow us to live together without fighting all the time." and the government's involvement is to make sure those rules are applied reasonably fairly and when the individuals or their immediate friends and family can't. That is the defense of rights part, essentially a mutual defense contract tied to a third party adjudication contract to avoid feuds and the like.
The fact that there are things people pretty universally accept as wrong (murder, theft) and are happy to see people punished for is an evolved trait. The governments are created as part of a group attempt to lower the cost of prevention of those wrongs, the protection of rights, but the rights exist prior. You have a lawn because you have a lawn, not because you bought a giant screen dome to keep the squirrels off of it; the dome screen does not provide you with the lawn, but you got the dome to protect the lawn you had.
* I have literally seen a squirrel sitting on the still warm corpse of another squirrel shot while eating from a bird feeder, nibbling away at bird seed and presumably enjoying not having to stand in the cold snow. There is something wrong with squirrels.
They also only find something like 5-10% of the nuts they bury. Squirrels are dumb, and I for one am sick and tired of them being held out as some kind of moral example for the rest of us.
I see now that you already tabooed the word "rights" in a paragraph in this comment and basically are saying the same thing about social norms. I'm not sure where the disagreement lies.
In the default condition there is no concept of property - there is no such thing as "someone else's tree", there's just a tree from which it is technically possible to pick fruit.
Establishing a system where someone has an exclusive right to pick fruit from that particular tree, artificially creating a right and stating that violating this right will be shunned as theft - that requires a social consensus system i.e. government, without which there literally are no "rights that you already had".
That is entirely untrue I am afraid. Animals have notions of property and territory, remarkably well developed considering the relevant species' cognitive abilities, and avoid infringing on each other. Governments come after the fact.
They certainly have strong ideas of territory, but do any animals really have any functional notions of property, meaning moveable chattels, i.e. not including real property? Would one crow fully respect the rights of another crow to a shiny thing, and not steal it the first time Crow #2 has his back turned?
Well, yes and no. Most animals do not have things they carry around, usually it is territory and food they are going to eat now. Many types of animals respect the ownership there, not challenging a current owner generally. It gets a little more complicated with food stored for later. Lots of animals do that, but often in e.g. their burrows or dens, so is that chattel or territory? Off the top of my head I can think of Butcher birds that store dead things on thorn trees and a type of American wood pecker that stores acorns in trees, either of which might share the trees with other non-family members and thus be a good example of respecting ownership of movable goods without the first party being there, but I have not seen anything written about them. (Haven't looked too hard either, admittedly.) There are lots of studies of how long birds will fight over created property like nests, however, and those point towards a sense of ownership, one that changes with the amount of time spent away from the nest.
To the crow point though. You have actually already nailed the relevant part to understanding property in your example. Crow 1 (Heckle) sees something interesting, decides he wants it, but waits till Crow 2 (Jeckle) leaves to take it. Why? Because Heckle recognizes the thing is special to Jeckle, and Jeckle will be very angry if Heckle tries to take it and strike out. That is actually huge when it comes to understanding property. The recognition that an object is special to another individual, and that individual will fight you over it, and deciding not to fight over the object based on that understanding gets you 95% of the way. That is what pushes to developing norms of who owns what and when, such that everyone agrees on what is special about some objects relative to other people but not all objects. The last 5% is realizing that if Jeckle comes back and finds his coin missing and you have it he is going to come after you, and deciding not to steal it then. Humans don't always get that last 5% right, so let's not hold it against crows. I can't stress enough though how important the recognition that a thing is important to another being in a way other things are not is such that an animal will expect a different behavior if they take it. That is literally all you need to generate group behavior that minimizes violence through a norm of "possessors get to keep it." (Or the opposite, but anti-property rights are very rare in nature, <10% of observed species/things combinations.)
A more concise way of putting it is that "stealing" presumes ownership. If an animal recognizes that it has to wait till another animal's back is turned before it takes something, it is recognizing that the other animal has claimed the object as his own.
(I honestly don't know if crows do respect ownership of little shiny bits like that, but I am inclined to think they do since they spend a lot of time away from their nests, they know where each others' nests are, and are very clever about recognizing things over long periods of time. Those three things together should lead to norms of "once it is in the nest, it is his", but I don't know. Crows are super good at hiding their nests; so far as I know no one has managed to located and study their home lives.)
Hmm, well, I appreciate the careful elucidation of the issues here, but I think I'm still not convinced of this. I would rule out immediately any case where territory is an explanation, since we definitely know most animals have a finely developed sense of that.
I think we can also rule out the case of avoiding taking things for fear of the present owner's reaction -- again, we can agree that I would not try to take a piece of meat from a lion simply out of fear of the lion's reaction to being deprived of his current thing he wants, and not necessarily because he or it has a sense of "property."
What I would say is that among humans "property" consists not just of an extension of territory -- I can own things even if I leave them on your property, for example, and leaving them does not transfer ownership to you even a little bit. It also doesn't consist of simple fear of the present owner's reaction, since we also imagine there is some "right" to be secure in your belongings that does not depend on fear of the owner -- most people feel bad taking candy from a baby.
We even think there's something wrong with taking things from someone who doesn't object that much -- we get mad at people who exploit the gullibility or generosity of others.
That is, in humans there seems to be this special category of thing: it's not territory, and it's not squabbling over resources, it seems to be some kind of extension of self, like my property is some kind of extra finger or toe.
The reason I wonder about animals is because I would wonder this is a natural extension of our unusual ability to use tools. A tool-using species would quite naturally attach a lot of importance to tools, and if the tools can represent a significant investment of personal resources to make, it's easy to see how they could become seen as an extension of self, so that a hominid would resent theft of its chipping flint as much as a lion might resent theft of its teeth or claws.
But there are other tool-using species, although none like us, and I wonder if there are some traces of this chattel ownership behaviour there.
I wrote a paper with Bryan Caplan a bit before that regarding the existence of property rights in black markets, i.e. when governments explicitly say you don't have rights yet ownership is understood and functions normally and how the endowment effect and first party enforcement goes a long way towards maintaining those norms, but I can't find a handy online source (didn't get published.) The above paper covers some of the same ground, although it focuses on modeling and simulation of things a lot more.
I agree that it's immoral to take someone else's property. I agree that there's some instinct in lower animals on ownership and fairness, albeit one that is often ignored when the bigger dog wants what the smaller dog has.
But it seems like the word "right" is acting as a semantic stop sign, i.e., something that's a sacred idea so the conversation has an immediate full stop. So if we taboo the word "rights", what am I actually talking about here?
I am talking about social norms and either cooperating or defecting from them, regardless on if that norm existed before the society was formally established.
My claim is that we have social norms that limit our actions. This is cooperation, and is done to prevent anarchy. Most of us aren't the big dog, and would prefer to live in a world where the bigger dog can't take our stuff. That's a near-universal instinct, and so can exist before a formal society. Other norms are developed slowly via the decision making process of the society.
If someone ignores a social norm, then they are "defecting" from society, and should expect consequences (being "defected" to in return). Secession is a special case of group defection, and so the larger community may want a norm against that to 1. prevent coercion via threats of secession, and 2. maintain the strength of the norms. However, if the smaller group is already being mistreated, it's natural for them to say "screw this society" and fight to either exit or create a new norm.
That's just it though, the bigger dog very rarely ignores prior possession when it wants what the smaller dog has. The sort of behavior described by "the bigger animal takes what it wants, when it wants, by force over the objections of the other" happens extremely rarely. We humans like to think it is the natural way, but it really isn't.
Social norms (rights) are not extant to prevent anarchy, but to minimize conflict. The two things are not the same.
A social norm that requires staying in the group is likely to cause violence, not prevent it. That makes me rather skeptical of it as a true social norm as opposed to an imposed desire of a ruler. Letting people who are unhappy leave and do their own thing is a de-escalation move, and often is forced via exile for just that reason. Letting people leave the group allows you to avoid having to agree on norms but still trade or interact, or just shun them and no longer interact. Not letting them leave is likely to make them fight to exit as you say. Considering that in nature we typically see animal groups split as they get to a large enough size, and very rarely does the group fight over whether it happens* it seems a lot more likely that secession is a way to avoid conflict, not a cause.
* I can only think of one example in one species of this split being contested and turning bloody. That was with chimpanzees, where there was some issue with the leadership, apparently the two potential alphas being evenly matched, but one was a nut and the other more popular. The more popular one took his group and left, and importantly most of the females went with him. The less popular one, against all precedent we had seen, waged war on the new group and kidnapped the females and killed the males. I don't remember it super well, but that's the gist. If I remember it was Jane Goodall who documented it, and everyone else in the primate community said she made it up, but it seemed she was in the right. It's been a while though, so I might be conflating different chimp war stories. Chimps are horrifying little monsters, humans without the moral compass, so I don't really read much about them.
EDIT: here's the link to the war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War I had it wrong perhaps, the splinter group was the crazy chimp, not the popular one. The description I had read was rather longer than the wiki article, so maybe there was more detail, or erroneous detail *shrug*.
Police sometimes get away with killing people, but they don't ALWAYS (there have been some high-profile recent convictions). The United States ALWAYS gets away with whatever it wants to do.
Mencius Moldbug relied on few people being willing to read up on history and argue with him, but I think it's worth noting that his perspective is not so simple as saying the pre-WW1 norm was satisfactory. He would also include the Greek War of Independence against the Ottomans as an example of the thing he's complaining about where it was supported by "the international community".
Revisiting your argument with Caplan on arbitrary deploring, he seems even more right now. The "Current Thing" is Ukraine, and people are just ignoring what Saudi Arabia is doing to Yemen (with US support!), and your own example of China's treatment of Uighurs. What people pay attention to is much more arbitrary than the enforcement priorities of a police department. As Robin Hanson would put it, we consume news to have common conversation-fodder around the water cooler, and none of us have an individual incentive to focus on the things that are actually most important from a utilitarian perspective.
I think you misunderstand the extent to which what is happening in Ukraine is a large-scale re-alignment of the global system and not just "another local war".
1. It involves two nuclear states with opposing interests.
2. It involves a country that has a large empire-building faction and mentality. There is no chance whatsoever that Saudi Arabia wants to annex Yemen and then Qatar and then Iraq etc. Saddam tried that and it didn't work, due to the international norms that Russia is violating right now.
Russia is essentially proposing a RETURN to the 19th century and early-20th century norm of empires literally annexing their neighbours and of every country needing to become an empire if it wants to feel safe.
There are so many commentaries out there that lay out the rational reason that "Ukraine is different than Yemem" that I'm surprised this meme still persists among educated people.
Russia is one nuclear state. Does Ukraine qualify as the other because it has nuclear power?
Not just early 20th century. Israel has been mentioned already, but India seized smaller territories like Goa, Hyderabad & Junagarh and Indonesia seized East Timor & part of New Guinea (they were less successful when it came to Malaysia). North Vietnam successfully invaded and took over South Vietnam. You could argue that the US opposed this, but everyone accepted that once the Saigon government fell that was the end of things.
Saudi Arabia certainly doesn't have the means to take over Iraq. Yemen is another story.
Saudi Arabia also blockaded Qatar when it tried to have an independent foreign policy, it enthusiastically backed its proxies in Syria, it funds mosques promoting a very particular and frankly intolerant vision of Islam all around the world. It's at least as enthusiastic an empire builder as Russia and shouldn't be dismissed in that regard.
One issue with the "let unhappy groups in democracies secede" is that large states will inevitable get smaller and smaller as the exit option becomes a norm for unhappy groups. So in the US, we might see CA, NY, MA split to form a left country. TX might go, and so on. The more small states we begin to see this means we also see more borders and more potential for wars over borders. One reason there has been so little war in N America post US Civil War is the consolidation of what might be 30-50 countries into a single sovereign entity with strong norms and processes hindering violent or non-violent secession. In Europe the trend is the opposite and we have yet to see the end of interstate war.
I don't mind that issue. Democracies hardly ever fight each other and as long as the small countries are democracies, they probably won't fight. Central and South America has tons of small countries and very few wars. My bigger concern is if democracies get smaller and smaller and autocracies get bigger and bigger, RealPolitik will favor the autocracies.
I think Scott stating that because he believes that sometime around 2014 54% of Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia the world should redraw its maps and give territory over is, well, kind of weird.
That's it? A simple majority on a poll?
You don't even have any super majority rule on this topic?
The international community deciding that SSRs can secede freely but ASSRs can only leave with the permission of the SSR they were (often quite nominally, in the Soviet period) under has caused an awful lot of trouble in the former Soviet Union. We'd have a far more peaceful '90s and a lot fewer people stuck in limbo if we had just let Crimea and other post-Soviet regions in their position just leave.
That might be the case, I'm just saying his logic in the post doesn't make much sense to me.
We can't redraw international borders every time 51% of people in [a community] decide they want to be somewhere else. 51% is a weak threshold. I think there is a lot of sense to requiring super majorities for major decisions that affect a community, and secession is in that I think undoubtedly.
>Is there any reason not to go with the greatest good for the greatest number here (and allow the secession)? Maybe (counterfactual) India is very liberal and both Hindus and Muslims in that subregion have lots of rights, but if the region were allowed to secede it would become a Muslim fundamentalist state that oppressed its minorities.
The partition of India was actually a thing that happened, and it led to something like 20 million people being displaced and a million people dying? I think this an example of what you might mean by "transaction costs", but that description makes me think of like, "annoying inconvenience" as opposed to "mass displacement of individuals and families being torn apart".
To be fair the partition happened in the 1940s when racial tensions were running really high and we had worse norms around like, not just straight up killing your neighbors because they don't share your religion, and I don't really know enough about south asian dynamics to really speak to whether it might be "better" if the partition happened today instead of 70 years ago.
I did look up India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh on the Human Development Index. There's probably a bunch of confounding effects wrt access to natural resources, internal politics, etc, but it is in fact the case that India has the highest index score (0.647), with Bangladesh only slightly behind (0.614) and Pakistan trailing at 0.56. It's definitely very possible that India would have a worse HDI score if Bangladesh and Pakistan remained part of it though.
"The one that bothers me the most is Israeli settlements - there ought to be some rule against sneaking in under cover of night, setting up a town on someone else’s land, and then seceding and saying it’s yours."
This totally fabricates the reality of the "settlements" in the West Bank. They are what we in the US would call condominium developments or housing subdivisions. They were constructed legally on lawfully acquired land. The Palestinians continue to insist that if they are granted sovereign rights over the West Bank, it must be Judenrein.
Attempts by Israelis to create fly by night settlements have been aborted by the Israeli government which has shut them down and removed the settlers promptly.
Most of the people who make your argument are simply Jew haters whose real problem with Jew in the West Bank is that they are Jews. it is depressing to see a Jew echo their propaganda.
Well the perspective Walter is sharing here, which I have not heard before (admittedly I have not followed developments in Israel closely in many years), is that these settlements are not being built on territory currently under the control of the PA, just territory the PA *wants* to be in a future 2 state solution.
IF, big IF, that's the case, then the points your making about no existing housing no roads etc are kind of pointless. In the US we build in territory with no roads all the time. We don't need to justify it.
The whole situation in Israel is so sad. I wish half the energy spent so far was spent on forcing changes to the Israeli state to be more inclusive rather than in separatists. There is no state in the region that offers its citizens a life anywhere near what Israel can offer its citizens. There is no rational argument that says Palestinians would be better off in their own state than as equal citizens of Israel.
It is the Palestinian political movement that has nurtured separatism. Their claims are ethno-religious. Basically that Jews should not be in any land in Dar al Islam except as dihimmi. They have never wanted to be citizens of a liberal state. Nor have they agreed to live in a separate state at peace with Israel. It is beyond the power of Israel to appease them other than by ceasing to exist. It will not happen.
To provide a bit of context here: a large majority of Israeli settlements were established in the 1970s and 80s. In the last twenty years, there have been only two new settlements - Rehelim and Brukhin - with a combined population around 2000, or 0.4% of the total settlement population. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_settlements
The housing developments are not in areas that have been granted to the PA (The PLO is a terrorist organization not part of the PA). The PA wants them in a future settlement.
In the case of the Confederacy, I think you missed Evan P's argument. The Slave owners were not a majority of whites across the South. Where they were decisively out numbered by non slave owning small holders, such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, those states did not join the Confederacy. Even in the Confederacy, succession would probably have been defeated by a combination of blacks and non-slaveowning whites.
It would be convenient if things were that way, but is that the real solution? If it turns out that a true vote did go in favor of secession, would that really change anything?
The issue is that liberal* political theory has no way of specifying the boundary conditions of a political body. It is a method for assessing the justness of an existing political order. But, its fundamental base case is a political order that comes into being on an island with no history inhabited only by free, rational, and informed adults.
I have been reading, "The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999" by Timothy Snyder (2004) https://www.amazon.com/dp/030010586X in order to get some historical perspective on the current crisis. It is instructive. The boundaries, constitutions, and ethnic compositions of the states of Eastern Europe were created by acts of policy and events of war and chaos which happened since World War I. No political theory I know of, liberal or non-liberal, can explain or justify the situation we are in.
None of that excuses or justifies the behavior of the Russian State which is simply criminal terrorism. They must be defeated and cut off from civilized society until such time, if ever, as they have abjured and punished the criminal thugs who are their autocrats.
*liberal theories are those of the types first laid out by thinkers such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Grotius, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, and Mill. Compare and contrast Royalism, Communism, Fascism, and Islamism. It is not to be confused with the dog's breakfast of ideas propounded by contemporary "liberals" or "progressives".
If we define the "slave-owning class" as those that owned 50 or more slaves, i.e. big plantation owners, who we see in popular media, then I've read scholarly estimates that there were fewer than 8,000 of these across the entire Confederacy (which had a population at that time of ~9 million).
IIRC a slave represented a capital value of ~$1,000 in then current money anywhere from $20K to $100K in 2021 money. A 50 slave owner would have been a millionaire in modern money and were 1% of the white population.
Sure, my point is that however you look at it, the slave-owning class that we imagine was thick on the ground in the Confederacy, and the attitudes of with which we tend to paint the entire South, were actually very few.
It's as if China assumed all of the United States were well represented by the attitudes and nature of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. We would pretty naturally object.
> If you want to make the case that democracy necessarily returns non-abhorrent results, I’d be very interested to hear that argument.
Only the not-very-helpful argument that something done with majority support clearly must not have been considered abhorrent by the majority at that time, and that this is independent of whether we today think that it should have been.
> I think “makes the world better” is always your ultimate criterion, but in real life you try to have simple rules to address disagreements. In some sense I want whether some guy goes to jail to depend on whether it “makes the world better” for him to be there, but in an actual society it’s easier to have some laws where you go to jail if you break them.
I have a few responses to this.
First, judges do in fact have some discretion over what sentences to hand out, so to some extent they can take into account the specifics of the case in ways that the law couldn't anticipate.
Second, the law does not consist of simple rules. People go to law school for several years to prepare themselves to be able to figure out what the law says about any given situation, and then they end up in arguments about it in court. So it actually has some things in common with how I was proposing international agreements regarding when a territory has the right to self-determination would have to work. As a relatively tame example of complexity in law, criminal law builds in an exception to the usual rules when the perpetrator is insane. You may object that this is principled, but I think that insofar as making special cases to the rules for individuals to take into account how different individuals will react to rules seems principled and making special cases to the rules for communities to take into account how different communities will react does not, this is at least partially because our moral intuitions are trained primarily on interactions between individuals rather than on interactions between communities.
Third, predictability is part of the point of criminal law, so it can function as deterrence. This is relatively less important in the case of resolving territorial disputes than it is in criminal justice, so I think having more well-specified rules for the latter is justified.
"As for the second paragraph, I’m imagining some situation like - India is mostly Hindu. But some subregion of India is mostly Muslim. But some guy in that subregion is a Hindu. Perhaps the subregion is sad being ruled by Hindus, but that guy is happy. If we let the subregion get independence, the majority will be happy, but that one Hindu will be sad. Is there any reason not to go with the greatest good for the greatest number here (and allow the secession)?"
If the Muslims of the subregion can demand that the one Hindu submit to Muslim rule, based solely on the principle of "majority rules", why can't the collective Hindu population of India demand that the Muslims should submit to Hindu rule based on the same principle?
Because it's not based solely on majority rules. This whole discussion has been about trying to find principles to determine which subgroups have valid claims and by what criteria to enforce self determination, e.g. majority rules.
In the next paragraph, Scott talks about letting them secede based on the greatest good for the greatest number, not the principle of majority rules. He talks more about his stance in the last paragraphs of the post, which again, can't really be simplified down to "majority rules".
It's clear from the examples used, both in this post and the preceding one, that Scott is treating "greatest good for the greatest number" as interchangeable with "majority rules" in this context. Otherwise, how is Putin taking over Crimea supposed to promote the greatest good for the greatest number?
The penultimate paragraph acknowledges that this might not be enforceable in practice, but still endorses it as a philosophical principle.
If the vast majority of Crimeans wanted to join Russia (determined with free elections etc etc), then you could say it should be allowed by utilitarianism. And as you noted, while that's majority rule for Crimea, it's not majority rule for Ukraine. It seems weird to simplify Scott's stance to "majority rules" when his hypotheticals illustrate the exact issue you're pointing out?
But that just gets back to the same question I originally asked -- why does utilitarianism = majority rule when it's a majority of Crimeans, but not if it's a majority of Ukrainians? I don't get the sense that Scott has a complex reasoning for this which I'm simplifying; it seems more like he's advocating a very simple stance and then avoiding the logical implications of it.
Furthermore there is no evidence that the "Vast majority" of Crimeans wanted to join Russia, except for a poll with < 40% turnout that occurred at gun point one time.
Every other poll has shown that it's pretty 50/50 split. Something Scott acknowledged, while still claiming that that's enough to justify secession.
So yeah, he is making several arguments for a simple majority on secession which is ludicrous for a number of reasons, stability chief among them.
"I think if ethical people happen to be in charge of a country, they have a (weak, potentially balanced by other things) obligation to let people leave, even if they’re not especially oppressed."
That's also the conclusion that Canada's Supreme Court came to:
"Under the Canadian Constitution (and with Quebec being a party to it since its inception), unilateral secession was not legal. However, should a referendum decide in favour of independence, the rest of Canada "would have no basis to deny the right of the government of Quebec to pursue secession." Negotiations would have to follow to define the terms under which Quebec would gain independence, should it maintain that goal."
Also: "The court stated in its opinion that, under international law, the right to secede was meant for peoples under a colonial rule or foreign occupation. Otherwise, so long as a people has the meaningful exercise of its right to self-determination within an existing nation state, there is no right to secede unilaterally."
According to Wikipedia: "The decision has been regarded as a model discussion in international law for questions of separation between national political entities, particularly in relation to the results of a referendum."
Both the separatists and the federalists were happy with the decision, for different reasons.
Putin's whole justification for going into Ukraine is his story that "Ukrainization" is equivalent to ethnic violence against ethnically Russian citizens of Ukraine. In other words, his argument is that he's invoking the exception "when they've been persecuted by their country. In that exceptional case, they have the right to secede."
(not that I believe he's arguing in good faith, or that I agree with it)
If you establish the norm that people who are internally repressed get an exception to the 'current borders doctrine', then you also have to answer the question of who gets to enforce the exception. In this case, Putin said, "I see an exemption from the rule. I'm going ahead with enforcing it." And the rest of the international community said, "Nope. We're arming the opposition."
... and we're back to realpolitik.
This has been a consistent gripe Putin has leveled at the US. The Americans establish a 'doctrine' of some kind that fits a situation where intervention is what they want. Sometimes it feels VERY ad hoc. They then say, "... and of course we'll be the ones leading the enforcement action, with some contributions from a multi-national coalition to add the veneer of legitimacy". (And if France doesn't support us, we'll rename them 'Freedom Fries'.)
Russia does the same thing and even gets their US-hating buddies to sign onto the action to give it the veneer of legitimacy. The US & Friends reject that as naked aggression, ignoring the veneer of international support as illegitimate. Putin responds with a Goose/Gander argument, but West says "it's different when we do it". In the end, the argument isn't about what the norms should be. The real question is: Who gets to enforce international norms?
I've not heard a good justification for that, since many countries that want self-determinization don't support the US-led coalition - and often BECAUSE they want a sovereignty or form of government the US refuses to support. There's just this default assumption that some coalitions (mostly those led by the US) are Just and others (anything led by Russia or China) are Evil. Where's the rule here?
It is "whataboutism" at a global scale literally justifying tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of displacements.
Let's talk about several major differences:
1. When Russia said "we believe we have reasons to enforce peace in the Donbas due to violations", where was the international presentation? Where were the international inspectors or peacekeepers sent in to see what's going on?
Did they organize and present at the UN, like the US did with the WMDs?
No, they did not. As far as I can tell they have not prepared any evidence for outside scrutiny.
2. The US went into Iraq and decapitated the government. The actual invasion of Iraq faced little civilian resistance. Yes, the collateral damage and the decade of civil wars after was a disaster. No we should not have gone in the first place. WMD intelligence was bad. All this is true.
We DID NOT LEVEL ENTIRE CITIES AND BOMB CIVILIANS INDISCRIMINATELY.
Civilians did not rise up in the streets and stand in front of our weapons.
George Bush didn't write essays on how Iraqis aren't people and are really just "Little Americans".
George Bush Senior, in the first Iraq War, didn't illegally occupy provinces in Iraq to later use to launch assaults on it.
ALL THESE THINGS MATTER A LOT.
I get it. The US did a bad thing in Iraq II. Really bad.
What the flying f*** does that have to do with the right to slaughter Ukrainians today?
NOTHING.
If there was a real case in the Donbas I'm still waiting for my goddamn power point showing me the case and the stupid UN observers to go in and investigate and everyone to sound all uncertain.
At least make an effort.
You can't just wave your hands and kill people and blame it on Bush Jr 20 years ago.
I sympathize with your position, but I'm still struggling to make it work. Nothing you said changes that for me. Say five years from now the US government falls to a Putin-style dictator, totally willing to use the last 50 years of US rhetorical justifications for whatever they want to do. Meanwhile, the Russians have ousted Putin and taken a strong turn to democracy. The two countries are still opposed to each other, making the same arguments, but the role of Justice is reverse. How should we know it?
I think many of your points are great, so long as you're assuming the US perspective represents the Good Guys and the Russian is the Bad Guys. And I sympathize with where you end up - I don't see Putin as a good-faith actor either. But this is EXACTLY my point! You complain about whataboutism? That's what Putin is leaning on. It's what he uses to justify his invasions, and not just in Ukraine. The US says, "This is okay to do because of [Rationale #4]" but that's not a consistent principle, because bad actors can absolutely use that to oppress their neighbors. Unless you're willing to admit that multiple past US interventions were examples of the US doing exactly what Russia is doing now - and that the US deserves the exact same censure for past actions as Russia deserves, you haven't enumerated a consistent principle.
Look at Georgia, where the Russians needled that internal conflict for years, then when they realized it was finally coming to a head they amassed troops on the border. They sent in 'peacekeeping' forces, marched all the way to Tbilisi, and marched through Abkhazia while they were at it. Was it justified in Western eyes? No. Was it supported by nearly EVERY corollary Putin had learned from Iraq and Afghanistan? Absolutely. Indeed, it was cleaner, quicker, and had fewer civilian casualties, so in Putin's mind he made a BETTER case for intervention in that country. Same with Crimea, and maybe call it a wash in the Donbass. And THAT's the problem.
Let's take a closer look at those 'major differences' you pointed to. Do they work, or is this just more post-hoc justification?
Must effect regime change: Like the CIA did with Mosaddegh in Iran back in the 50's, or like they did in Iraq in the 2000's? This seems like an arbitrary rule (post-hoc rationalization), and not one that will necessarily produce the best outcomes. If we can avoid outright regime change, isn't that ideal? For example, the Russian action in Georgia was much more short-lived, probably because they had a more limited scope of operations than the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush Sr.'s operation in Iraq back in the 90's seems a better template to model policy around, where he specifically avoided regime change and escalating the conflict. Even so, ousting the Taliban (who controlled large swaths of Afghanistan before the invasion and who are now the de jure government) didn't exactly happen in Afghanistan, so this is in no way a consistent principle to establish as the Rule of a Just Enforcer.
No indiscriminate bombing: The US did bomb hospitals, homes, and a lot of other 'collateral' sites. There were a lot of 'mistakes' made, where a target was thought to be an insurgent base at the time. Minimal reconnaissance would have avoided these accidents, but it's war and there's not always time to be that careful. You have to hit the terrorists before they catch wise and scurry away. Sure, the people inside died and the intent behind the ordinance does little to assuage their anger and grief. But it wasn't 'indiscriminate' so much as 'accidental'.
Russians may claim mistakes were made too, but we should only trust when the US makes that claim, not when the Russians do. After all, losing generals left and right is no excuse for making mistakes. The US gets a pass, though, because ... war is tough to get it right every time? If we're only willing to call what is clearly an immoral bombing 'accidental' when the side we agree with is doing the bombing, we can't say we've established a consistent principle. Accidents happen, yes, but if you're Wrong you should be held to account, whereas if you're in the Right you get a pass. If we can admit that some US bombings were unjustified, we can't use that as the Principle we use to identify the Just Enforcer without rejecting entire invasions of coalition forces over the past two decades. (Which spanned more than just Bush Jr's administration.)
We didn't level cities to the ground: Sure, 200k people died, large swaths of the country were bombed and destroyed in the fighting. Iraq it wasn't exactly a CLEAN operation, but what do you expect? We had a job to do and we did it (then we changed the mission and continued the occupation, but it's okay because we were in the Right). You can't expect war to be clean and easy or free of mistakes, and if your initial objectives have to change because you meet more than anticipated resistance from the locals you can't lay the blame at the feet of the coalition forces. They went in for the right reasons, and then they couldn't just leave things as-is. You break it, you bought it. And part of buying it means pacifying the resistance. People on the ground sometimes make the wrong decisions. It's war and atrocities like My Lai happen despite our best efforts to Do Better next time. The important thing is we're trying to be good, in spite of our mistakes, and that's what matters. You know we're trying to be good, too, because we make official statements telling the world as much.
Meanwhile, every atrocity committed by Russian troops is directly attributable to control by Putin himself. Sure, the man can't keep a general alive for more than a week, and his military are almost certainly frustrated having to fight an insurgency and therefore reacting in anger against the locals - exactly like Other armies who've fought insurgents - but every unjustified death should be laid at Putin's feet. Not Bush, or Obama, or Trump, or many past US presidents. There were extenuating circumstances in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and a dozen other places around the world. But Putin can't claim extenuating circumstances he is in the Wrong.
Civilians didn't rise up in the streets: Somehow, after 20 years of eliminating 'terrorists' in Afghanistan we still had 20 year old terrorists to fight in Afghanistan right up until the end. We shouldn't think of these people as 'freedom fighters', despite what many of them claimed about reclaiming their stolen sovereignty. Because the US should get to label their opponents, and the US should get to label Russia's opponents as well? If the people object to your occupation of their country and you're in the Wrong, we'll call those people civilians rising up in the streets. If you're in the Right and ordinary people arm themselves with the express purpose of ejecting your invading force from their homeland we'll call them terrorists and justify another decade or two to 'root them out', even into the next generation of civilians rising up in the streets.
UN justification: This is probably your most consistent point, because it's something the US clearly did and the Russians clearly didn't do. It's still not very convincing. In this case, I think you could say your doctrine is "unless you present your case to the UN you don't get to be the enforcer".
You admit that the US's WMD argument was bad, and that the justification was wrong, but you're not willing to go so far as to put the action on par with what Russia is doing right now in Ukraine - an illegal and immoral invasion that should be condemned outright by the international community and that should have lasting consequences to the offending regime.
"Going in for the wrong reasons" is okay, so long as you at least tried to make your case to the right forum in the international community. Not that the case has to be accepted by the nations with permanent veto power on the Security Council (US, China, and Russia aren't ever going to agree on many cases like these), but if you don't prepare the PPT, you forfeit the right to be the enforcer. Sure, Russia made a pro forma and totally illegitimate argument for intervention. It didn't need to be correct, any more than the US's illegitimate arguments for intervention in the past. It's not that their argument was bad. The problem is they failed to submit the proper forms.
Several of the comments above set conditions for legitimate secession that had not been satisfied in the 1993 split of Czechoslovakia. As a Czech, I'm curious: Will anyone here bite the bullet and actually argue that the no-drama separation of the Czechs and Slovaks was somehow wrong or illegitimate? And if you won't bite that bullet, what counterfactual would the Czech and Slovak situation have had to satisfy before you start seeing it as wrong?
Yeah, we are a weird case. Above I had to made up separate category justifiyng secession just for us. At least I don't know about any other real world example of it
Maybe someone has mentioned this already, but this is a pretty interesting framework for thinking about pandemic restrictions - take mask mandates as a proxy. You don't even need full self-determination - you only need the right to require others to wear masks, with also perhaps the right to deny others the right to decide if others have to wear masks.
Many red states have fought vigorously against nation-wide masking rules. In my own state, the legislature was very active about saying that many things ought to be decided at the state level - like masking, where unique circumstances should allow for unique state-level solutions.
But then there are blue counties in my state that enacted county-wide mask mandates. The state stepped in, saying, no - you don't have that authority. This caused the blue county officials to call the red state officials hypocrites. If the counties had the right of self-determination in this question, then perhaps they should have been able to enact their own measures. But if the right of self determination ends at the state, then that is that. But if counties have the right of self-determination regarding mask mandates, what about smaller groups?
What if there is a town within that county that does not want a mask mandate? Do they have the right to reject the county-wide rule? Could they also set up a rule that no one in their town could require mask mandates?
But what if there is a school district within that town that wants to have a mask mandate? Can they enact a mask-mandate? Does a school district have the right to self-determination on its own turf? There are, after all, many district rules/policies that do not apply to the cities in which those districts are located.
But what if a school within that district disagrees and does not want to follow the district masking rule? Do they have the right to so choose?
But what if a teacher within that school wants a mandate? Can they enforce it for their class only?
But what if an individual within that class does not want to wear a mask? Can they not do so? Do they have the right of self-determination in this instance?
It seems I saw arguments going both ways at any of these levels. It makes me conclude, as others have stated, there there are no universal principles of self-determination. But it is still interesting to see when certain rights are granted and when they are not, and what sort of groups/governments feel they have the 'right' to determine this for others.
> Otherwise as soon as oil gets discovered, the oil-rich province decides it would rather secede than share the loot. This was, of course, a large part of the background in Biafra and the Second Sudanese Civil War, and versions of this seem (as far as I can tell) to be relevant to other places, from East Timor
In all 3 of these cases the seceding entity could cite cultural, linguistic and religious differences that made them in effect a separate people with a separate national identity.
I think that it's worth making a difference between secession and transfer of territory, since many of the examples used are the latter and those are conceptually different things in my opinion.
To avoid the emotions of current events, let's look at history (but of course there are modern analogies). If you're living in 1938 Sudatenland and desperately want to be part of "Germany for Germans" and not be limited by Czechoslovakian government, there is always an option for you to just go across the border to Germany. If you're living in 1916 Ireland and desperately want to be part of "Ireland for Irish" and not be limited by UK government, then your only option is a bloody revolt because otherwise there is no place for Irish people to have self-determination.
Those two situations are not the same, and so whatever justifications or criteria are considered appropriate for people who actually want self-determination do not necessarily apply for countries wanting to carve out parts of their neighbors just because some of their people live there.
The rule is that both secession and accession are fine but all parties involved get veto power. The only exception is that you lose your veto if you are violating human rights - this grants the right to annex/invade Nazi Germany and the confederacy, and grants the right for persecuted minorities to secede, and also means that when countries like the USSR want to break up amicably, they can, as can countries who want to unify (like west and east Germany).
'Saying "might makes right" is ignoring this valuable and powerful system.'
No, it isn't. It exemplifies it. Norms are created and enforced by groups of states who are powerful and persuasive enough to do so. Last I checked Haiti didn't have a seat on the UN Security Council. How is that not simply another version of "might makes right."
Also it's pretty ironic to say "might makes right ignores this...mighty system." I guess it works if you are really talking about two different kinds of "might."
I would respond that there's only one kind of might. Everything is downstream, ultimately, of economic productivity. Even morality. The reason the US won the cold war is that we out-economied the USSR. That's why the current international norm is "self determination through democracy." If the Soviets had won then the norm would have been "property is theft" or whatever.
Military might derives from economic capacity, so to first order I'm kinda ok with countries duking it out because I think the world should be maximally productive (as Tyler Cowen argued in Stubborn Attachments, economic development aliases for pretty much everything people think of as good). The catch there is you can have some strongman sacrifice long-term economic development for short-term military power and wind up with more-productive people governed by less-productive dictators. Plus you don't want too much of your economic growth tied up in costly military buildup. Of course a similar risk exists with norms too (got Woke?), so I think it's probably optimal to have an occasional military conflict act as a safety-valve on nonsensical ideological lock-in. Probably right the equilibrium is some sort of seesaw between force-driven and norm-driven modes that swaps every few decades.
There's probably some evolutionary model for this that relates to fitness signalling. A buck having large antlers is alluring to females because it signals health and strength. But you don't want to let males game that system by over-allocating calories to antler growth at the expense of, say, muscles. So it's important that bucks still fight each other for dominance to validate that their fitness signal actually maps to physical vitality.
Yes, I actually agree with you. I was trying to be charitable, as some people do try to distinguish between direct force and...well, sort of indirect force, the kind that you are saying won the Cold War without firing a shot. But I agree ultimately the distinction is less sharp than one might hope. People definitely suffer and sometimes die as a result of economic warfare, so to speak -- at least, all those who angrily lay the deaths by starvation or easily preventable disease of Third World children at the feet of First World economic selfishness would say so.
And, as you say, behind actual warfare often lies economic might, and (like the deer) we have methods of signaling to each other our might and intentions, so that many conflicts do get resolved by the mere threat of force -- something that comes from economic might.
I'd still like to think it's possible to settle things by force, as necessary, but without people actually being killed in large numbers in terrible ways, which is what war is like. More realistic war games, in which would-be enemies both participate?
For a while in the 80s and 90s it almost seemed like that was possible, that there would never again be a real shooting war in the First World, because the consequences had just become too awful. Not so much anymore. I'm very impressed with how thinkable it has become to a lot of people.
I wrote up a very long reply to two arguments people brought up here, that states have self determination when individuals (or small groups) do not, and efficiency is what we should be using to determine the size of states and whether secession makes sense. The short version is:
1: States do not control people, they control land, and that reality of how they behave does not line up with how we think about people having self determination.
2: If you are arguing against secession on the basis of small states not being efficient enough, right after you describe how you are determining efficiency and what is enough you need to start arguing for states breaking up because they are too big to be efficient and lay out when that happens.
James Scott wrote that conceiving of governments as being based on control of land is a Eurocentric view, and that in southeast Asia (the focus of his study) states have instead focused on controlling people.
Do you have a link or a citation there? That seems like a very incorrect claim, given what I know of the history of China, Japan and India. It would be interesting to see if some of the smaller areas had a different standard.
(Although I admit, saying something so stupid as control of land is a Eurocentric view makes me think he doesn't know his ass from his elbow.)
Ahh THAT James Scott, that makes a bit more sense. I will give him a bit more credit than I was first disposed to, although that "Eurocentric" claim is patently ridiculous. There definitely are tribal groups that worry less about land and more about who is in the group and who is out, but they are vastly different from conceptions of modern states. The distinction is more between entirely different ways of life, more nomadic vs vaguely settled (whether farming or hunting based). Everywhere people are vaguely settled and form groups larger than a tribe or clan the focus is on controlling land, not what people are in the group.
I will have to check out the book, I really enjoyed Seeing Like a State. Thanks for the heads up!
He's not just referring to tribal groups. He's saying that the states in that area would go to war in order to capture people, but would not really try to control mountainous terrain.
Hmmm that is a strange claim. The states have pretty clear ideas about what states have control over what mountainous terrain. If the story he is telling is similar to the stories he was telling in Seeing Like a State, the states that considered themselves to have control over the terrain didn't like that the people were hard to find and evading normal participation in the state, which usually meant paying taxes and conscription. It might be a completely different story, however. I will have to get the book and see!
I would note though that claiming China (or whomever was chasing down the mountain people, sounds like China) had no interest in controlling land because that was a European idea is silly. China was very serious about what areas of land it controlled, who was in charge of them, etc. It might not have cared much about the mountain land in question because it was largely worthless except as a place for people to hide, but the notion of controlling land was certainly not foreign to them. No one should make that sort of claim; the best you could say is "This particular region has people with very unusual ideas about controlling land that are different from pretty much everyone else in the world." Controlling land is an old and very wide spread human behavior, older than the kingdoms that we would begin to see as modern states and governments.
This is off-topic, but Scott, would you be able to confirm that you have received the Book Review Contest submissions? Just a quick email that says "I got a Book Review Contest entry with your email address, and I can open and view the Google Doc"? Thanks so much!
The UK has a history of holding independence referenda to give people the option of seceding. Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Gibraltar (twice) ... they just keep voting "no".
The most striking example, however, is the 1958 series of independence referenda in various French colonial territories. Of 19 territories, 18 chose to remain part of the French Union ... then, if I understand correctly, their governments chose nonetheless to distance themselves from France and become de facto independent. I guess there's a conflict between the interests of the electorate, who wanted stronger ties with France, and of the government, who would prefer to have more political power even if their country is poorer for it.
There were two coups in between the referenda and independence and it was as much a case of France expelling their colonies (or at least downgrading their status, in practice much of their independence is still nominal) as local leaders seeking independence.
>Saying "might makes right" is ignoring this valuable and powerful system.
This is not sufficiently steel-manning "might makes right". Relationships between countries don't exist in a vacuum, so even if state A is mighty enough to invade state B, if state C doesn't like this it may try to prevent such invasions.
> This seems to be the way the UK is treating Scotland, and I give them a lot of credit for it.
There were some moderately shady things in that. For example, the UK government made a big deal of "the Vow". A promise the moon, and then forget the promise after the referendum strategy. And they kept the discovery of a big new oil field quiet until after the referendum.
But at least there wasn't police violently attacking people or locking up prominent pro independence people, like in Catalonia.
There's a certain amount of ex post facto rationalization going on here about why the American south's secession was bad purely on organic principle when the real reason we all find is repellent is just because they did it to uphold slavery. There are pretty clearly politico-moral paradigms that surpass a certain threshold of badness to where the net negative of letting them get implemented outweighs the net positive of the maintenance of an overall net positive abstract normative principle. Maybe that kind of calculation is really fuzzy and prone to error on the margins, but I don't think things like "slavery" or "ethnic cleansing" are anywhere near those kinds of margins. Everything is a slippery slope if you galactic brain it hard enough.
But here are the rules I would draw up. The cutoffs are arbitrary-sounding, but that's what happens when you translate these incredibly complicated and nuanced calls into threshold talk (to be clear, I'm not denying the usefulness of discussions like this, but I do think that it's important to acknowledge that broad framework-derivation discussions like this are going to operate with reduced mental models).
1. The nation must have the ability to be self-sustinent as a state. This means being able to self-build infrastructure, protect borders with a military, and have an economy that is not entirely dependent on the cooperation of one singular external country to function, among other things.
2. Either 75% of the citizens must desire secession, or at least 50% must and also be actively willing and able to go to war for it. Being willing to go to war is a useful heuristic for a lot of granular important criteria here (it signals subgroup cohesiveness, an increased likelihood of a uniquely distinguishable ethnic heritage that the subgroup defines independently of the external country, and signals an increased likelihood that repression, oppression, or other bad happenings are being imposed on the area by the external country), and war is also a distinct net negative for human well-being. Which means that having a natural disposition/lean towards the outcome that doesn't involve secessionist violence isn't a terrible principle to operate by.
3. The primary motivator for secession cannot be an ideology that virulently and viscerally decreases liberty/increases oppression. No slavery and no ethnic cleansing.
"The primary motivator for secession cannot be an ideology that virulently and viscerally decreases liberty/increases oppression. No slavery and no ethnic cleansing. "
I don't accept this, because pretty much any substantial political disagreement can be couched in terms of liberty or oppression. This rule in practice would just mean that any country can delegitimize any secession movement they want. If they don't have any slaves, you could say that they're not giving enough rights to the (member of large country) minority in the smaller area, or you could claim that their politics oppresses some group like gays or fetuses or immigrants. Or maybe they have 1% of Nazis, so they're an illegitimate government because they tolerate Nazis.
Sovereignty is not binary. It's a spectrum. You can be part of some larger organization that solves important coordination problems like healthcare, free trade, defense, or climate change, while devolving everything else to the local level so that every locality can get what it wants on the non-coordinatey issues. Instead of an all-or-nothing secession referendum, provinces could have the ability to line-item self-determine using referenda in cases where they're not relevant to coordination problems and not super oppressing anyone. So for example Texas could just "secede" from FDA jurisdiction and say any drug that has been approved in Europe or Asia is legal in Texas. Another example that already happened is California legalizing weed and creating legal dispensaries even while it was still totally illegal at the federal level. The feds could have shut it all down but they let it slide. If they did shut it all down in 2017 I think a lot of people would be mad at the feds that wouldn't have been mad if the same happened in 1990 and I hope this is an example of norms moving in the direction of self-determination, and not ONLY the object-level change of opinions about weed.
(relatedly I think the fear of secession's transaction costs is a self-fulfilling prophecy where people fight hard to maintain the status quo and punish/stonewall any place that tries to secede, so of course secession looks like a clusterfuck and justifies the fear, but in the the counterfactual where secession referenda are totally normal and respected the transaction costs are way lower so secession looks better and justifies the lack of fear. But given that americans are extremely anti-secession because of the confederacy, it's probably better to use a foot in the door strategy where provinces just piecemeal take back control of the non-coordinatey issues. I think there's no chance of a scotland/quebec style independence referendum being allowed to happen in the US but there's a lot of desire for the same sorts of things that would accomplish so long as you don't call it "secession" and don't do it all at once.
A question on Scotland and the UK. Lets assume that the following is true:
- The UK must do the ethical thing and allow Scotland to vote in a referendum on leaving peacefully, whenever they feel like it
but then doesn't this also mean that the following must be true?
- If Scotland gets to become independent, they must also do the ethical thing and commit to allowing a referendum on going *back* to the UK whenever a sufficient number of locals feel like it
That's what's been bothering me about both the Catalonia and the Scottish secession attempts - never once did I hear any commitments from the leaders of the independence movement on revoting to go back to their parent country if their experiment doesn't succeed. Given that Scotland only needed 50.01% of the vote to leave the UK, it seems quite likely that 0.01% of the population would've ended up changing their mind in the opposite direction over the years, but it wasn't at all clear when the new majority would get a chance to revert their decision.
Surely a new majority could win an election on a pro-reunion platform and at least try to convince the prior state to let them back in? One shouldn't expect pro-independence politicians to emphasize that point because they'd have been voted out in such a scenario, but if the new states are democratic and a majority wants to merge...
Before giving the UK too much credit for Scotland, I think this is one of those issues where different cultures have very different views. The British don’t really have any notion of “territorial integrity” as a value in its own right, presumably due to a mixture of decolonisation, Ulster and being an island (cynically, “because they spent 200 years annexing places that weren’t near them, and in all their current disputes self-determination means they win”). Other countries like Spain obviously view it as a *huge* deal, as a kind of collective right to own some territory irrespective of the inhabitants wishes.
I guess America’s own odd history should lead to norms of secession=bad but without the same sense of sacred historical dirt ownership, because it’s basically an island but had a secession crisis (and a politics-based one at that, none of this old-fashioned ethnic-religious malarkey).
Tokelau shouldn't secede from New Zealand because it isn't actually capable of being a real independent country.
Indeed, if you look at a lot of tiny caribbean countries, the ones that gained independence are all pretty much horrible. The only ones that aren't are either large enough to be a real country (the Dominican Republic) or are possessions of a developed country.
And even amongst the large independent island countries, Cuba is destitute and Haiti is one of the poorest places on the planet.
Also, WRT: the United States:
It should be remembered how much of "The United States is evil" is authoritarian propaganda.
IRL, the reason why the US "gets away" with it is because the US invades awful places run by totalitarian regimes or anarchic places that barely have governments at all.
Moreover, the US's involvement in the first Gulf War was the US responding to a country invading another country and had full UN support. The US entry into Afghanistan also had UN support. The US entry into Afghanistan was also on behalf of one side in an ongoing civil war; the same applied to Kosovo. And both the Kosovo intervention and the intervention into Iraq were against genodical regimes which were killing civilians.
The US was, in fact, greeted as liberators by the majority of the Iraqi population. The Kuwaitis were thrilled we rescued them from Iraq in the first Gulf War. Kosovo was grateful for our help in that. And the Northern Alliance was happy we helped them against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The US attacks bad guys, which gives it a lot of moral authority in its interventions; even if you disagree with them, it's hard to sympathize with the people they're fighting against, as they're all awful.
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> Moldbug’s claim that the pre-WWI system was good at preventing wars and atrocities is dubious given how many wars and atrocities there were before WWI (I would guess eg more conflict deaths per capita in the 19th century than the 21st, although I know this sort of thing is hard to quantify).
Correct. Indeed, the rate of global violence has declined very markedly; we live in the most peaceful era of all time.
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And yes, I actually agree that there's no actual consistent heuristic for this, as well as the general notion that, barring undue levels of oppression (and no, "not getting your way" is not oppression), it's generally a bad idea to redraw international borders, as this leads to better long-term outcomes.
The actual goal is not self-determination (there's nothing good about slavers or religious zealots being able to self-determine), it's trying to improve overall social welfare globally.
> Is there any reason not to go with the greatest good for the greatest number here (and allow the secession)? Maybe (counterfactual) India is very liberal and both Hindus and Muslims in that subregion have lots of rights, but if the region were allowed to secede it would become a Muslim fundamentalist state that oppressed its minorities.
I think that this (greatest good for the greatest number) is a sensible practical solution, but it doesn't solve the problem that self determination is incoherent. If you are a consequential your policy isn't people get self determination when it is what causes the greatest good, your policy is always do what is for the greatest good. The notion of self determination adds nothing. It is only if you are trying to construct a deontological framework where the notion of rights adds anything of value. However, if you are a deontologist, you can't lean back on this practical solution to the problems with the right to self determination in particular. Therefore, I don't think you have really solved the philosophical problems with considering self determination to be a right.
Isn't this really what the courts interpreting the US Constitution describes as "freedom of association". Free speech plus assembly plus right to petition for redress = freedom of association.
"Self-determination" is freedom of association limited by sovereignty.
The current sovereign must consent to any rearrangement of sovereignty.
"Agreed about the weird right. This paper, which I linked in the original, tries to discuss what group rights would mean, although it ends up settling on them being simple if a group has a government that claims to speak for them, which most secessionist regions do."
Group rights are a big thing nowadays among academia (and you will not see critiques of them because of how much of a political monoculture it is). Especially when it comes to "indigenous peoples", who get an absolute ton of group-based rights, often including outrageous shit like the ability to prevent outsiders using aspects of their culture. I mean have you read the UNDRIP? It gives an insane selection of rights to certain groups based solely on their ethnicity!
"and nobody thinks we should give it back to the Indians now"
Re: 12. Who gets to define what constitutes persecution? Because I'd claim that current levels of taxation and personal regulation in the US already constitute persecution.
I think it matters how much and how consistently people care, there needs to be a real strength of feeling for a significant length of time among a significant amount of people before any referendum.
I don't find it convincing to say "the Confederancy can't secede because the slaves couldn't vote". That argument is about noncitizens, not about slaves specifically, and if you take it seriously there are all sorts of cases where people don't have citizenship, including countries with lots of foreign workers (including illegal aliens), countries that take prisoners of war onto their own territory, foreign invaders who don't have citizenship in the places they are invading, and even minors and felons who can't vote.
All countries have people located in the country who are not citizens and can't participate in democracy. And I'm not going to say "well, slaves get to count and illegal aliens and minors don't, because one is a bad citizenship restriction and one is a good citizenship restriction".
Point 7 - I think this 'might makes right'...really just 'might makes' is the reality of it.
Scott pushes back, but I don't find those to be convincing. The 'what about non-military power' isn't contradictory with 'might makes'. It just means looking holistically at all the power forms and the limitations of the social and physical world.
There are cultural pressures, economic pressures, patron-client pressures or corporate pressures or lobbyists or whichever words apply, political aspects, military aspects, and the broader context.
It has always been the case that a detente or equilibrium of peace between kingdoms, nations, warlords, villages etc. If you attack one group, you'll be weakened by the fighting and another group will attack us. So no one attacks. The concept of mutually assured destruction is not new and not really about nukes per se. It is a very long standing historical precedent.
It can even be a much much stronger nation would be weakened enough to be attacked on multiple sides by an alliance of weaker nations if they took over a smaller kingdom.
It all comes down to, do you have enough power to do it or not? It could be sending in spies and merchants to destabilise a region or overthrow their government or you could invade the country or threaten to invade to turn them into a vassal state.
Are not vassal states and alliances of weaker nations the bread and butter of history?
Nations and kingdoms and the wisdom or folly of their leaders turns the pages of history. They are just humans and not infallible and do things like invade Russia in the winter or drink while while Rome burns or try invasions they shouldn't have and get swallowed up by other kingdoms when they are weakened.
Might makes history and nations and is determination itself. Might is more than soldiers, swords, supply lines, guns, or airplanes, etc. and includes the full front of economic, influence, religious, information, and political warfare. Whoever wins the war decides what happens.
It sucks and long conversations about ethics and norms are simply an attempt to wield cultural power to make such actions harder or easier. I.e. easier to make sanctions against South Africa due to Apartheid or hopefully harder for the likes of the Bush family to trade with Nazi Germany in the early years of the war and harder for nations to invade others.
Power and might in all its forms combines and reality and history are churned out the other end of the usually ugly and brutal sausage machine.
This abhorrent and hopefully aliens or AI or AI aliens are benevolent and help solve this problem for us with Star Trek replicators or extreme threats of violence and surveillance or just subtly taking everything over and always making peace the best outcome or whatever. Until then, I don't see humans doing anything about our human tendency to overwhelm each other with might whenever someone feels like it and is able to organise enough political, religious, economic, influence, military, international alliances, etc. in order to see through their insanity.
Questio for all those defending the "might makes right" claim: is there any circumstance under which you would consider this claim falsified? If so, how?
"The one that bothers me the most is Israeli settlements - there ought to be some rule against sneaking in under cover of night, setting up a town on someone else’s land, and then seceding and saying it’s yours. "
I am afraid this is not an accurate description of the way the settlements in Judea and Samaria are built. In most cases they are not constructed on private lands. There are instances when private lands are confiscated for some purpose like paving roads or public or private building, but this is a law-regulated process including the right to appeal and compensation in money or alternative pieces of land, see for example https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2017-02-16/israel-law-on-the-regulation-of-settlement-in-judea-and-samaria/. There are also cases when something is being built on public land and then someone comes and states that the land is in fact private and belongs to him. Again, these disputes are settled in courts.
"nobody thinks we should give it [the USA] back to the Indians now": I'm Canadian, and I personally know at least one person who unironically believes we *should* give the whole country back. It's a view I hear increasingly often from the very-woke (and mostly white) end of the aisle here. I'd be surprised if there weren't those who seriously think this in the USA as well.
> Everyone keeps saying this and I think it's overly cynical.
> There's an international norm that says you can't launch unprovoked aggressive invasions. The norm isn't totally toothless either.
> Saying "might makes right" is ignoring this valuable and powerful system.
This is answering the real politik argument with real politiks of international agreements. It's moving the "bilateral wars" to "multilateral wars" but it's the same argument. Russia wouldn't be able to invade Ukraine at all if NATO would have answered.
But in reality, NATO didn't answer. The UN didn't answer. The EU didn't answer. (I mean, yes economic sanctions, but that's not enough to prevent this current invasion.)
In reality, the norm was toothless. That's the bet Putin made. Because of how the norm behaved in Syria and Obama came back on his word.
The norm is toothless: That's what Xi Jinping when he says the West is decadent and human rights gets ignored in Xijiang.
It's cynical. You would like not to acknowledge it. But it's real. It's what happens.
The article and many of the comments make me wonder how long it'll be before the whole concept of a country is no longer geography-based. Way Back When, there wasn't much difference between a person's location and most other aspects of their lives. Their physical appearance, their political stance, their taste in lunch menus, their fashion sense, all of it was fairly similar to that of their neighbor. It wasn't a stretch for them to draw a border around themselves and say "hey look, we're a country now, and all of our traditions and tastes and hummus recipes are part of our shared identity." But somewhere along the way we started moving around. A lot. Is that a bad thing? Maybe not, but it did raise the probability that you won't share much in common with your neighbor. Your goals might be different, your politics might be different. So ... now, how would *an area* agree sufficiently to secede from anything? That area will likely have plenty of dissenting opinions on that topic.
So what if your permanent address wasn't a factor on your citizenship? Could all Astral Codex Ten subscribers somehow agree unanimously that they're now a sovereign nation, and are seceding from whatever country they happen to live in? Could "work from home" apply to countries, too, as well as businesses?
Yeah, there are some parts of country-dom that are inherently geographically tied -- defense, land tax, utilities, etc. etc. -- but is there a way to keep those aspects separate?
>If you want to make the case that democracy necessarily returns non-abhorrent results, I’d be very interested to hear that argument.
Some make that argument for SCORE VOTING democracies, since score voting democracies allow voters to expression preference strength.
Not having abhorrent things done to you is fairly strong preference, and doing aborrent things to others tends not to be strong preference so much as a side effect of some other preference
All this boils down to an application of economies of scale to nation states as organizations, but with the unexplained twist that if someone wants to start a new one that looks non-viable or annoying to someone else, they feel entitled to prevent it.
A doctor's office, law firm, or other owner/operator enterprise can succeed at the smallest scale. Other sorts of enterprises, e.g. huge widget factories, are only viable at large scale. Presumably, at least with current technology, states are only viable at large scale. But rather than allowing upstarts to try and fail, bystanders feel justified in stifling startups. We could imagine some interested parties opposing competition for cynical self-serving reasons, by why would people with no dog in the fight go along with this?
Maybe part of the reason is that states are constructed almost entirely of myth. No other organization gets its legitimacy so strictly from what people wish it would do, rather than what it actually does. Religious institutions have a similar feature, and used to be similarly opposed to competition and innovation. Somehow, people decided to tone down going to war over religion and persecution of heretics, at least in many places. But when it comes to providing shared goods, there still can be only one in a particular place - even though that isn’t strictly true.
Yes. And? Is that an argument for or against the wisdom of allowing peaceful secession, or randomness?
Peaceful secession is 12th page news, when it happens no one notices. Even if it had been neglected in practice, that would not justify prohibiting it.
Secession does not threaten the monopoly on violence, it just redefines the members of the cartel. Are you saying this is why it won’t happen or why we should want it not to happen? Are we taking the point of view of an oligarch or an ordinary person?
It's rare but not "exists more in theory than reality" rare. Off the top of my head I can think of Slovakia and Montenegro
Even if it did not exist, it would be worth discussing. The past is not the future (TM).
Canada, Australia separation from UK?
Peaceful secession has always existed. "Peoples" move. The history of human migration is the history of peaceful succession.
Even the hatfields and McCoys, mostly are peaceful so long as you stay on the right side of the mountain or river.
Every 10 years redistricting in the U.S. is a kind of peacefully resolution conflict.
"The history of human migration is the history of peaceful succession" ... it is my understanding that the genetic record does not support this hypothesis.
I don't know exactly what you mean. Out of Africa shorthand clearly shows migration which is a form of succession.
That there are also internecine conflicts reflected in genetic record only shows that it's a small world and that sometimes walking away means walking out of pot into s as frying pan.
Finally someone mentions Westphalia.
But it would also be a mistake to call what was happening "religious" wars. Sometimes religion is the cover story for something else.
Ostensibly p vs C battles were a cover story for pre-existing pagan barbarian battles that had been going on before Rome and before Christianity.
For example, Northern Ireland was/is not really Catholics v Protestants that is the "cover" short hand for Irish vs British.
So we are back to "granfalloons". Place and language and culture (which might include religion) and food/drink are used to create shared identity/consciousness which is a salve to the problem of alienation.
We are autonomous individuals but also social creatures.
So the "who am I?" is always bound with to whom am I connected (who are we?)
We don't answer these questions just noetically (as a rationalist program), but we have the poetic and pneumatic functions of consciousness.
Is there any reason to think economies of scale exist for countries?
But European microstates are thriving, Mauritius, Cape Verde and Lesotho do well for their region.
There seems to be zero correlation between size and success.
How many of those states have a population on the order of magnitude of 10? How many of them have a population in order of magnitude 100? How many of them have a population on the order of magnitude of 1000? Obviously there is an economy of scale. You are objecting to the fact that there are some countries that far exceed The minimum or probably the optimum scale.
I would be very happy to learn that there actually was no correlation between size and success. But even framing “success “ in the most optimistic terms, where we consider states to be producers of public goods and stewards of shared resources, there seems to be a minimum plausible scale. Maybe the age of the Internet will change that but so far, no observable change.
Or maybe I’m wrong. Should we consider Bill Gates to be a state? We could think of him as contracting out most of his state-like functions to existing states, with the exception of Personal security/national defense.
I can think of tons of positive outliers among small countries (singapore, luxembourg, Liechtenstein , south korea, taiwan, monaco, vatican, norway, ireland, qatar, macau, switzerland). But I can't think of any non-communist non-civil-war small countries doing much worse than their neighbors.
Only half of those are primarily financial hubs. I would hypothesize that small territory makes government more efficient by improving their information (people are usually better informed about things close to home) and improving their incentives (adverse effects of their policies will be more visible and more likely to directly affect the people who decided).
There's a profound survivorship bias working here. One would think that any tiny little country that ran itself poorly would have an exceedingly short lifespan -- it could not survive by being merely too big to digest for a more effective country. Hence kind of ipso facto any small countries that last long enough to be observed across a nontrivial span of history are outstandingly effective. That need not have anything to do with their size per se -- or rather, their size just functions as a brutal natural selection mechanism that promptly filters out the incompetent.
I think there's *some* survivorship bias but it can't explain away the entire thing. Several of these countries were extremely poor at the end of WWII when great powers stopped absorbing their weaker neighbors (except Stalin's USSR but that made it a pariah) Notably Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Ireland. Maybe Ireland's inherent awesomeness helped it gain independence from the UK, but I doubt that. The UK was indiscriminately decolonizing places with much lower levels of human capital than Ireland. Also it seems like most of the weak countries that ceased to exist in the first half of the 20th century were resurrected by peace treaties when the world wars ended or when the USSR broke up. Russia's former vassals aren't generally doing much worse than Russia itself. They're worse off than the never-communist countries of western europe, but that can be explained by communism and perhaps a small disadvantage in IQ that antedates communism and got amplified by the communist/post-communist era brain drain.
South Korea and Taiwan are not that small, but they show what seems to be an issue in Asia: how long has it been since these countries established a market economy? Laos and Cambodia are on the poorer end, and it was more recently that socialism was relaxed there.
Many small countries are accused of being rich by virtue of being tax havens, but maybe that's just an insult for countries more neoliberal than the norm. Ireland has been happy to rake in money with a system like this.
To have autarky is to fall behind in tech, and small countries seem more aware that they are not self-reliant and must be plugged into international trade. And of course, many of them are essentially protectorates, which is usually good, but Russia's 6 de facto protectorates are not on the road to economic success, which might say something about their policies.
The principle of subsidiarity might be examined.
It could be that sports is a peaceful outlet, for secessionist desires. As long as we can root for our team, we will forgo formal demands for succession.
The fact that many times in history one power has been overwhelmingly bigger than its rivals but didn't succeed in world domination suggests diseconomies of scale in running a government.
Your statement is a bit too general. By similar logic, we could conclude that business firms have diseconomies of scale because there seems to be no strong tendency for a single firm to grow large enough to produce everything. The existence of economies of scale does not require that larger is always more efficient than smaller, just that this is true in a relevant range of sizes. So the evidence suggests that there are both sizes that are too small and too large, with a Goldilocks range in between. And this range might change depending on what criteria we use to determine what is too big, too small, or just right.
Many here seem to be using stability or continuity as their criteria. Stability is tricky because a very static state seems unlikely to be stable. In a dynamic environment, stability requires adaptation.
I don't really see any good evidence that a 50k population city-state is too small for any purpose other than not getting invaded and even then they can just align with one of the superpowers for protection.
Sure. How about a village of 5?
It might work. Startups tend to be massively more efficient and more innovative than their big corporation rivals. "Administrative overhead" doesn't hold them back.
One possible reason for objecting to the creation of non-viable countries is that a common failure mode for a country is to get absorbed by an evil warmongering country, and this failure mode has negative externalities for the rest of the world (i.e. it provides more resources to evil warmongers).
Similarly, one might object to a tiny startup with no experience trying to build and operate a nuclear reactor, on the grounds that a nuclear meltdown will cause serious problems for people who weren't nominally involved in the startup.
If that's a good reason for preventing new countries from forming, it is an even better argument for abolishing all countries, since being a country is a prerequisite for being a country absorbed by evil warmongers. The warmongers will absorb the population, territory, and resources, whether we call it a state or not. If anything, preventing peaceful secession might make all parties more vulnerable to third party warmongers, who can just encourage the “internal” conflict and wait for their victims to weaken themselves.
An unarticulated assumption of most of the arguments presented in these comments is an extreme consequentialist idea that if you think x might improve the world, that is a good argument for x, without needing first to establish that x would actually improve the world or to justify treating fellow citizens like hostages or infants even if it would. Yes, if I get to play benevolent dictator, I don’t need to consult the people my decisions affect (though I might not last long if I don’t). But no one is in that position. There are roughly two approaches, one where the assumption is that the citizens of a state are gaining from mutual cooperation, the other that a ruling class is herding around an exploited class. Can we have it both ways? I guess we could argue in favor of what we would like the ruling class to choose, but if that is really the frame, it's not clear why they would listen.
Sorry, do I understand correctly that you are arguing that conquering a small failed state is *harder* than conquering the same territory when it is part of a large successful state?
I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, and it doesn’t seem relevant. But let's go with it. Who had it easier, Hitler contemplating the conquest of France, the Allies contemplating the invasion of Nazi Germany, or Britain, USSR, USA, or whoever you name other than Alexander the Great contemplating the conquest of Afghanistan? Successful states can fail at defense, and failed states can be a nightmare. If there is a correlation, it is too weak for your argument to rest on it.
I am assuming that in an environment less hostile to secession, there are fewer reasons to tolerate a failed state or weaken an otherwise successful one. Nearby successful states can absorb population and territory peacefully, if the population involved actually agrees that the successful states are more successful and the failed state has failed.
If they are so successful, will they be warmongers? I’m not sure. Was it France's success that made Napoleon want to conquer Europe? Was Hitler inspired by Germany's success? WWI started because of suppression of separatism that boiled over into terrorism and rebellion among rigid empires with rigid and secret treaties.
Vis-a-vis building a nuke, it is not clear what sort of size you mean, or would be relevant. Certainly they would need some liability insurance and a lot of capital. But what is the analogy with secession? Whatever negative consequence of separation you are imaging could almost certainly occur (or something worse) as a result of suppressing it.
Well, if there were areas of the planet that were currently claimed by no existing country there might be more willingness to let upstart start-up nations give it a go. But there aren't. So the comparison is as if every new Silicon Valley firm consisted of a bunch of engineers at Apple fortifying a collection of cubicles and declaring themselves a new firm. You can see Apple might resent this.
Sure. But Apple claims that it is owned by shareholders, and not employees. States either claim to be cooperatives of citizens, or cooperatives of oligarchs dominating non-oligarchs. I don’t think many will explicitly admit to being an organization of oligarchs. If they did, then preventing secession would fit your analogy perfectly. But then they should stop bragging about democracy or consent of the governed and maybe start selling shares.
And please note that Apple itself was founded by former employees of other firms. (didn’t Woz work at HP?) But they mostly funded it by saving their money and seeking venture capital, not by hijacking Hp assets.
So which analogy fits secession better?
Well, parenthetically the idea that The People are sovereign is a fairly late development in history. For most of human history it's been a fairly modest number of people who have owned the state. At a minimum you'll want to consider that prior to the 19th Amendment the "shareholders" in the United States were all male, and prior to the 14th Amendment all white. Nevertheless, however small or large the set of shareholders, they would very reasonably resent someone alienating their property and proposing to own it themselves. At the time of the American Revolution there was only one shareholder who owned most of America, King George III, and he resented the alienation very much -- and he sent a whole lot of employees of England, Inc., to dispute it. We don't find that surprising.
In any event, this doesn't really change the fact that *all* the resources -- land, water, navigable rivers, airspace -- on the entire planet are owned by somebody, and have been for a long time. The same cannot be said about the idea space occupied by new corporations. You can have a brand new idea for a way to make money which no one has ever seen before, and acting on that idea, developing that business, doesn't take away from any other business.
Not the case if you're starting up a new country. For resources, it's a zero-sum game. Any land your new country has must be taken from an existing country. Any water or coal or iron ore or good location on a river or ocean for a port has to come from some existing country.
That is a very appropriate analysis from the Viewpoint an oligarch. So, are you an oligarch? Do you advocate oligarchy?
From the viewpoint of an ordinary person, or according to the supposed principles of the enlightenment, it is BS. Legitimate government is based on consent. That probably means we have yet to witness any actual legitimate government, but hey, we are evaluating an idea, not betting our lives that it will ever be tried.
OK, I'll try to say this even more simply:
Unlike starting a business, all the things you need to start a country -- land, water, natural resources -- are already owned by somebody[1], and so to start a new country you need to take them all from an existing countries. In only a few cases are the existing countries going to be cool with this.
By contrast, when you start a business, you don't need to take *anything* from existing businesses. You can get your own space, you can hire people who don't already work for an existing business, you can borrow money from a bank, not take it from an existing business in your field.
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[1] IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO THE OWNERS ARE.
I’m still not sure what your point is. I don’t disagree. I am just pointing out that using consent as a justification and then not “being cool with it” if someone stops consenting seems contradictory. Actions ought to speak louder than words, but people seem to think the fairy tale matters.
We can approach it from the direction of “what should Machiavellian oligarchs want, and how can they get it?” Or “what should supporters of liberal democracy seek, and how can they get it?” But the two answers are unlikely to resemble each other. When people mix the two together, confusion may result.
If you think this is merely an economic question you are missing the reality of the human condition.
This is the biggest error of Marx: the materialist economic reductionism.
We are not just material rational individual beings.
We are not rational economic machines.
We are also social and moral creatures, so in addition to the rationalist noetic program of consciousness, we have the poetic (the stories we tell each other) and the pneumatic functions of consciousness.
Who am I is always coupled with with whom do I belong?
Even the cosmopolitan decides which pack of dogs (see diogenes) do i run with?
Wine or beer?
Pasta or potatoes?
Calcio or basketball?
Impressionists or cubists?
These are all choices that create granfalloons. The granfallooning process affects the size optimization process (even if it is soluble - it could be a three body problem or it could have many solutions)
This is a bad argument because:
1. All the physical resources a startup company needs are likewise owned by someone else until traded for. The only resource-acquisition difference between the startup company and the startup government is with whom they need to trade for land. The startup company only needs to trade with the owner of the land. The startup government needs to trade with both the owner of the land and his government.
2. Needing to "take" the resources from an existing government presupposes you can't just trade for them, but you can just trade for them. Some governments may be irrationally opposed to selling land, but others are willing to make deals at a reasonable prices e.g. Honduras.
When you are starting a tech startup, any land you might want for office space is already owned by someone else. So you rent/buy it from whoever's willing to make a deal. Likewise startup governments can make deals. Prospera made a deal to get some territory in Honduras. It's not an insurmountable problem.
<nitpick> Yes there are, just not in places where anyone would want to start a country anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius#Current_claims_of_terra_nullius. </nitpick>
The link lists two currently, one of which has people who would like to start a country there, but keep getting harassed by a country that doesn't claim it.
Yeah, the other one is in a desert. It is inhabited, so maybe it counts as a country after all?. I imagine the nomads who wander through have a name for it, and no other country claims it. What else do they need?
By the way, I didn't have to write this up (or to finish the book review I was planning) but you might want to look into Ian Shapiro's work on the theoretical/practical application of the duty of care standard. The international one, not the one that applies to products. It underlies a lot of western liberal (as in, international institutional) thought on these kinds of issues.
The idea, very basically, is that governments legitimate themselves through providing care to their citizens. Invasions or secessions are seen as losses of sovereignty that are created through the government's refusal or inability to care for the democratically/institutionally expressed needs and desires of their citizens. It's also explicitly anti-nationalist and critiques the idea that uniting nationalities in one state is a good idea. Basically because you can invent or switch nationalities so it's a recipe for conflict.
I think the model has problems. (And I like the African Union's critique of it particularly. They issued one as a block.) But it's an important school of thought to understand how western institutions think about these things.
I was under the impression that “western institutions” at least officially respect the 1918/1945 Versailles/Wilson idea of “self-determination of peoples”. This might be how liberalism *should* view the role of government, but I thought the formal declarations were still of the older type.
The issue is that standard doesn't allow for things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If every state or peoples has a right to self-determine then you can't do things like humanitarian intervention. And that's in those documents too.
This contradiction has had a lot of ink spilled over it. The whole DoC theory is meant to reconcile them. Basically, you get sovereignty derived from the duty of care. This recasts governments as having a purpose in the international order and deriving legitimacy from it. And it certainly had some teeth in the third world where many grants of independence were premised not on ethnic independence but how colonization inherently suppresses the rights of the colonized. On the other hand, strong sovereigntists obviously disagree.
If you're looking for a philosophical principle to bite bullets for, how about this one: an unconditional right of free association a la https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/ but with, like, divorce proceedings.
Who gets the house? Who gets the car? Where do the kids spend their time? Do we try to split things exactly down the middle? If not, what kinds of reasons would make one side "deserve" a bigger share? You can ask similar questions about any two people who live on the same territory, in the same economy, using the same infrastructure, shaped by the same culture, and so forth. And maybe if you have good enough rule of law with respect to _property rights_ in those things, enforced for the most part by _states_-- i.e. "you can't just secede and take all your stuff, you owe me for X"-- then you don't need any explicit rules for the free-association part that forms and constitutes those states in the first place.
That makes sense except for the geographic monopoly aspect. The transactions costs of moving, and the cartelized nature of the state “industry” give one side huge advantages in the negotiation.
Divorce also has a huge transaction cost of moving.
In practice, but not of necessity.
This exactly. If you can and are willing to pay the costs - the transaction costs, the value (to the parent?) of the parent's property you wish to take with you, the new costs to the parent for building and maintaining new border infrastructure, etc. - then you are justified (in some philosophical sense) in seceding.
Some oppressed minority will have a very high willingness to pay to secede, and may be better off than in the status quo even if they can afford only a tiny sliver of land for their state.
Confederacy wants to secede from the Union? Sure - but if the Union doesn't want to give you the island of Fort Sumter for any price, you can't just take it. All the slaves want to secede from the confederacy? Great!
A strong norm that arbitrary polities are allowed to secede, along with norms about what costs they need to pay in order to do so, would be a wonderful thing.
Would the slaves seceding have to pay the slaveowners for the loss of their slaves? For that matter, would anyone wanting to secede have to compensate the parent country for loss of tax revenue?
They would have probably already more than paid for themselves in labor -- otherwise slaves wouldn't have been worth buying.
You're still depriving the owners from future value, which is a cost of the slaves leaving. I can't take your stuff just because you've already gotten your money's worth out of it.
The point is that the parent body can demand almost arbitrary compensation for people leaving to the point where they have effectively no sovereignty, so if you say that the seceding country has to pay costs, you have to specify what exactly is fair to count.
Yes, that's the "norms about what costs they need to pay in order to do so" part. I do not claim to have developed a framework to account for all such costs.
Thankfully in the present day, a reasonably strong international norm against slavery exists. But in a purely hypothetical bizarro world that somehow recognized both the legitimacy of slavery and also people's right to secede while paying to do so (and also the personhood of slaves!?), I suppose the slaves would be expected to pay their market price. Would a loan to finance this payment be a profitable investment, given the productivity advantages of free labor over slave labor? (In contrast, I wouldn't think South Carolina would be any more justified in seizing Fort Sumter for a "market price" than they would in claiming parts of North Carolina - they had already ceded the land to the federal government and while it was certainly inconvenient not to own it, it was a distinct island, and its occupants certainly weren't on board with secession.)
It would be interesting to observe the counterfactual world in which some Confederate states were permitted to secede. Would the rest of the Union manage to abolish its own slavery without the war? Would the fugitive slave laws be abolished, and would this increase economic pressure that would gradually result in slavery ending in the Confederacy as well? Would sympathetic northerners start covertly arming slaves to encourage slave revolts?
Fair enough on wanting to establish norms. It seems like a tricky business and easily subject to abuse, but it's not like we have a better system in place anyway.
> but if the Union doesn't want to give you the island of Fort Sumter for any price, you can't just take it.
Under your rules, could a country set up their legal standards so that the government technically owns all of the land (maybe it's "leased" to the people living there, in exchange for taxes), and then refuse to sell it at any price, and thereby make secession de facto impossible without the government's consent?
If not, why not?
If yes, isn't this just forcing governments to jump through some formal hoops to get back to the status quo ante?
See reply to Pycea above
If the Confederates secede, they should get Fort Sumter. Governments aren't people; it's not like the fort was owned by a homeowner. The Confederacy should get the fort for the same reason they should get sovereignty--it's the government's and they're now the government.
Alternatively, they should allow Fort Sumter to be owned by the Union, but the residents would have to comply with tax laws, firearms laws, and immigration laws. If they fail to do so, confiscating the land is within their remit as a government to deal with lawbreakers.
In most cases, there will be both shared assets and shared liabilities that will need to be divided. There is lots of room for negotiation, and it’s not clear what a priori principles an unbiased arbitrator should use to prevent the negotiation from stalling. An abusive spouse seems unlikely to be able to justify demanding all the assets and none of the liabilities. Or perhaps the seceding spouse gets to declare bankruptcy. If one party feels the relationship has become exploitative, there has to be an exit clause that doesn’t make them into a debt slave of the abusive spouse or the abusive spouse's creditors.
I was expecting Crimea being ethnically cleansed as recent as a century would've made the highlights but alas
I wouldn't call "ethnic cleansing" a highlight ...
Seriously, it would take an entire blog post to discuss the history of the Crimean Tatars. And, presumably, most of the ACX readers already know that history.
not the ethnic cleansing in itself but the fact that it wasn't touched upon on the original post might've earned a line of "by the way the region whose self determination we're discussing would've been a different region with a nation in it had the Crimean Tatars weren't you know ethnically cleansed". I'm being overly sensitive being a (half) Tatar myself but still. Also, average ACX reader is quite knowledgeable but I can never be sure USA/Western audiences knowing details about Turkic geography and history.
Crimean Tatars have been a minority in Crimea for a long time, even before the mass deportations.
Prior to WW2 most population centers were Tatar majority, and it's not like the cleansing began in 1944. It's been a constant thing since 1800s and 1944 was the last nail in the coffin.
Either way they had been a minority for a long time prior to the mass deportations in response to their collaboration with the Nazis.
So if (and that's an if) they became minority already before WW2, it doesn't count as ethnic cleansing against them?
It does it just means that they've been a minority for a lot longer than is let on. Anyway, the Tatars got the land through ethnic cleansing just like the Russians, that's the way of the world.
By the way I want to repeat that in my personal opinion the best approach is the one Martin Sustrik describes in his EA posts about Swiss canton border changes, start at the canton level and go until the village level though not until the street level. That seems the best balance compatible to human nature.
The problem with the case-by-case approach as advocated by Alex Mennen is: Kosovar Albanians moved to Kosovo as refugees, became a majority population and started forcibly removing Serbians from Kosovo, destroying churches, killing policemen, and in general making a place a horrible place to live, for the now Serbian minority. I personally know Serbian people from Kosovo who, while students in a student bus, were fired upon by Albanians, and the two UN peace keeping forces soldiers Read about the Kosovo "Yellow House" to find out well recorded grim details of forced organ harvesting from Serbians in Kosovo done by Albanians over Serbians. Now, was it "right" for Kosovo to gain independence? Your decision will depend on whose side of the story you hear - you now heard the Serbian version (Kosovo was historically Serbian, with UNESCO protected monasteries being burned by Albanians which we accepted as refugees but that after becoming a majority turned violent), but I am certain your decision would be different if you heard the Albanian version.
Knowing how Gell-Mann works, I assume every world conflict is at least equally complex, and what is fair is not nearly as clear cut as we would like to think, and your ability to know the truth depends on who you're listening to. Kosovo war, as it was used as an excuse to keep NATO existing, and get US a military base in Balkans, got very one-sided reporting in the west, which makes for poor decision making.
Sorry, for clarity, in which year was the Albanian take over initiated? And when did the Serbs have a majority in Kosovo? Assume we're talking 1870s-ish here?
I'd be inclined to say that 100 years is long enough that stuff changes. It is a classic case of inter-ethnic tit for that and disagreement that culminated in some extremely nasty stuff happening from mostly one side.
Albanians moving in was a gradual process from 1900 to present, with peaks when Albania was under communist regime. Does just having time pass make things fine? Will Israel be able to claim Gaza strip because "it has been ours basically for a couple of decades"? Albanians are moving to Macedonia and their % of population rises. If it crosses 51% and stays like that for X years, they can vote to join Albania, solve for X?
To clarify: I do not have answers. I understand there is some value of the precedent - a land has belonged to a people, so it should remain theirs. But what defines "a people" without coming down to racism or something like that. Kosovo separated because it was majorly Albanian, but that has caused suffering to the local Serbian population (133 crimes against Serbians publicly acknowledged in 2021, few punished, ditto with crimes of the Kosovo Liberation Army). Should that be allowed? Then what if the US South did the same with a (let's imagine) minority slave population. Burma Muslims might have the right to ask to be independent in their part of the country, as Buddhists are literally committing atrocities against them, but what calculation do we run to make sure further atrocities are worth the atrocities prevented? I am unsure. Solutions, such as formation of Bosnia & Herzegovina have failed - you end up with a forced multi-cultural state in which everyone sabotages everyone else, and the Serbian part is waiting to separate, meanwhile vetoing whatever they can to others. China including Xinjiang seems unfair to the local Muslim population, as they are being systematically exterminated, but would an independent Xinjiang be fair to Han Chinese there? A lot of problems in Africa stem from the borders being drawn by outsiders with little regard for local people and customs.
What I am saying is "I'll decide what is fair and smart on a case to case basis" demands that you are really smart indeed, and the information you will get in the moment is highly likely to be vastly distorted by the media, based on what suits the global elite at the time (or what Moloch decides). This makes for a poor law. If we are keeping borders as they were when UN was founded: why is Kosovo free? If we are not, why is Spain, China, Russia, or Ukraine allowed to insist that their borders not be changed?
The interesting thing about Xinjiang is that the Chinese government seems to be intentionally moving Han Chinese there, possibly to make that exact argument in 50 years.
Moving of the Han Chinese is the least of the problems, much bigger issue is the forced sterilization of Uighur women, incarceration of the men, and forced family pairing of Uighur women with Han men by giving financial incentives at best and using coercion at worst.
Dunning Kruger is the most over-cited and misinterpreted study on the internet.
Perhaps Gell-Mann is more apropos?
Haha, guilty as charged! :)
Thanks for pointing out - that's what I get for not being 100% concentrated when writing. I meant Gell Mann
Kosovo war indeed gets very one sided-reporting in the West, but in somewhat different way than you think.
Only context when I ever see a discussion about Kosovan war is when someone who is pro-Serbian or pro-Russian uses it as proof for why US/NATO is bad. No one else in the West except those people seem to care about Kosovan war at all.
Personally I know very little about it, but the fact that pro-Serbian arguments are usually voiced by the same people who excuse Russian invasion of Ukraine makes me kind of suspicious of them (edit: I should emphasize that I am aware of the fact that my bias here might be unfair).
That is very interesting - and makes sense now that you pointed it out.
I meant that the reporting was one-sided during the conflict, in the 90s. Looking back from this perspective, Vietnam was in the right to fight Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, but at the time, the whole West reported only from Cambodian and Thai side. 30 years later, truth is revealed (like 30 years later Kosovo president was found guilty for crimes committed during serving in Kosovo Liberation Army) but by then, it's a bit too late.
I do not excuse Russian invasion - it is illegal, immoral and unjustified. The added spotlight to NATO war crimes in '99 is welcome, although as you say, comes from a discredited side, so it is also mostly useless.
Yeah, this makes sense, and I do think that coverage of current war in Ukraine is somewhat slanted toward pro-Ukrainian side. I can totally see that in 1999 it might have been similar or worse. Its just it is obvious to me that invasion is unjustifiable even if you take account of pro-Russian facts that Western media are not eager to mention (here I think, perhaps wrongly, that I am sufficiently familiar with the situation, including pro-Russian arguments).
Americans give little thought to Serbia but when we do I think it's still typically remembered as a basically bad place that we bombed because it was committing atrocities. Kosovo and Bosnia blend together in the collective memory.
I will say though that the Internet was a smaller place back then and as a teenager with an interest in geopolitics, I never encountered a pro-Serbian or anti-Kosovar view in those days. I do recall my history teacher, who couldn't find Germany on a map, being quite convinced that Serbia needed to be stopped now or else Hitler.
Pacifica Radio here in the US was vehemently against the Kosovo involvement. Amy Goodman had one of Democracy Now's famous "debates" on the question "Are the NATO bombings war crimes?" One side was "yes, and Clinton should be tried in the Hague." The other side was "yes, but Clinton should be tried by the people of Kosovo."
Unfortunately, I commented very late on the original thread, and it probably went unseen.
The most relevant and important document here is Lincoln's first inaugural address. If the Declaration of Independence lays out the case for when secession is justified, Lincoln's address lays out the case for when it isn't. Reading this in college changed my perspective; I always knew the Confederacy was evil, but I used to have a hard time understanding why its *secession* was bad, on principle. But of course, the Civil War was fundamentally a war against secession. Slavery was the *cause*--slaveowners wanted to live in a country run by fellow slaveowners--but secession is what really, REALLY angered Northerners, to a degree that even slavery never did. Lincoln wasn't alone when he said he'd rather allow slavery to continue than let the Union fall apart. The North saw the South's secession as fundamentally anarchic--as no different from an individual declaring themselves independent, or a neighborhood, or a city. It was seen as a snub to the government's very ability to govern.
Jason Greene-Lowe posted an excerpt from Lincoln, and summarized it: "But if you forsake the basic principle that your and your neighbors should resolve your differences of opinion through some kind of formal decision-making procedure that takes all of your opinions into account, then, really, what else *is* left other than anarchy or dictatorship? There aren't as many options as we might think."
To this argument, you replied: "I guess I fail to see the problem with "then some states secede from the Confederacy, and then some states secede from those states"."
To which I responded (my old comment starts here):
"I guess I fail to see the problem with..."
And yet this is the view held by every single country on Earth. There is not a single major political party, either democratic or autocratic, which believes in the principle of "any large territory can secede from any country at any time, and everyone else has to go with it." The views stated by Lincoln are universally held. Even the Declaration of Independence does not assert this principle; the entire tone of the Declaration is "We've tried everything, but you're still bullying us, so we're going to take this continent for ourselves." Lincoln calls this the "Right to Revolution" in his first inaugural address; he understood it to be an extreme solution not to be taken lightly. (Most Southerners probably agreed; Confederate Virginia never accepted West Virginia's secession, for example. But the South's argument was that *states* were the *real* countries, and so had more sovereignty than the United States.)
A universal belief is not necessarily a true one. But it is one that deserves to be considered and engaged with on a higher level than "Well, that seems wrong to me." Why does it seem wrong? Why does it seem right to everyone else? How did we get here? Your blog post didn't satisfactorily answer any of this. To say nothing of how oddly it conflated conquering an existing nation with stifling a secession - two very different questions, even if they both relate to whether a country exists or not.
(My old comment ends here.)
Addendum: if you think the Civil War was justified, but also secession is totally cool and fine, you're basically saying that Lincoln was completely and totally wrong, that he committed an act of aggression against a sovereign state, that his goal to reunify the U.S. was a bad goal... but somehow, by some miraculous coincidence, he was the good guy for all the wrong reasons. You should be extremely suspicious of this; it's entirely too convenient. You clearly see that the Confederacy was evil, and want to believe its destruction was justified--but you don't believe in any single rationale for the war itself.
I remember Megan McArdle trying to walk this strange, dubious tightrope back in 2017. Jacob T. Levy's reply: "But "state uses armed force to put down secessionist uprising" is a dog bites man story." https://twitter.com/jtlevy/status/859091336770793474 (The whole thread might be worth reading.)
Final addendum: I want to stress, once again, that this abstract discussion of when secession is justified and when it isn't--a complex question--has very little to do with Russia's very straightforwardly evil war of conquest in Ukraine. Whether Ukraine "should" exist or not is an irrelevant question. Ukraine exists because it declared independence in 1991, and Russia did not object, for various reasons. If they had objected, things would have gotten very complicated, and it's hard to say where the dust would've settled. But they missed their chance, and "No takesy backsies" is a valid moral and geopolitical principle.
Your overwrought comment literally boils down to "Lincoln claimed that secession is bad, and used this position as casus belli. Lincoln, who never lied, can't possibly be wrong! Secession is therefore metaphysically bad, QED."
You're mad that people aren't engaging with this terrible take? LOL.
That's not what I said, and I'm not the one being overwrought. I think Lincoln artfully summarized a view that's more or less universally held. Maybe other people have summarized this view more eloquently, but I don't know who they are, so I didn't cite them.
Again, a universally held belief isn't necessarily correct, but it's one that can't just be ignored if someone's trying to make a case against it. I think Scott failed to make his case; he simply stated his view of secession-is-always-allowed without giving much thought to *why* this view has basically never been adopted anywhere by anyone.
I suspect the answer to *why* for many rationalists, sadly, boils down to the rationalist failure-mode of (to wax poetic) "We are the first truly moral people to ever walk the earth, all previous generations were wicked and mad, but our philosophy has made us a pure and new race of people who are the first to SERIOUSLY address this issue and provide the final solutions."
MOD DECISION: Major warning (50% of a ban) for this comment.
Remember, also, that a sovereign Confederacy would be an independent nation with its own goals, its own foreign policy, etc. It was already planning westward expansion, and trying to form ties with France and Britain. Allowing it to exist would be allowing a hostile nation to exist on the southern border, one whose entire purpose for existing was to expand slavery and to protect slaveowners' interests.
What if the Southern states had never joined the US, had instead formed the Confederacy in the 1780s, and the CSA had existed as an internationally recognized country for almost 100 years? Would Lincoln be justified in conquering it to halt slavery?
Of course not, that's absurd. Wars of expansion aren't undertaken for charitable reasons. Sometimes the conqueror claims to have a just goal (e.g. Japan's "co-prosperity sphere"), but this is always very obvious bullshit.
Catalonia declared independence. Spain said "No" and arrested Catalonian leaders. The international reaction to this was: well, duh, what did they expect? The US sided with Spain; China sided with Spain; Russia sided with Spain.
Catalonia's secession would have reverberations throughout Spain that would be felt by ordinary Spaniards. It's entirely within Spain's interest to maintain its territorial integrity. This is true regardless of whether it *should* be the norm to charitably give up territory.
If Catalonia had always been independent, then any attempt to conquer it by Spain would be morally atrocious, and internationally condemned. Yet I don't think contradicts the above. Is this just status quo bias? Are we saying "Now that every country's finished conquering, it's time to halt at the current borders and tally up the points. Sorry, landlocked Bolivia! Should've conquered that coastline while you had the chance!"
It's an interesting question, I'll admit. It would probably take much more space than a comment, or even an essay, to explore all the complexities here. But I think it's okay for a question to be so complex that it's hard to apply a single consistent rule. One pitfall of rationalism is a failure to accept this, and a desire to consistently apply simple rules to every scenario.
But I still think "Right to Revolution" is the right framework. Unilateral secession is an extreme act, and has always been treated as such. Though, I'm willing to entertain the notion that we should be more secession-friendly, in general, than we have been in the past, especially if the vast majority in the region supports it.
> Is this just status quo bias?
I don't think there's anything wrong with status quo bias when it comes to the question of the position of national borders. Border disputes have caused far too many wars in the past; at some point it makes sense to look at the borders that currently exist on the map and declare them good enough. I don't give a shit if someone reckons Strasbourg should be German, it's not, deal with it.
Avoiding a hostile country on your border is Russia's claim about Ukraine.
"There is not a single major political party, either democratic or autocratic, which believes in the principle of "any large territory can secede from any country at any time, and everyone else has to go with it.""
That's not entirely true, often breakaway countries are acknowledged by other countries - Germany recognised Croatia and Slovenia fairly quickly, and self determination is a pillar of the UN..
https://www.un.org/press/en/2020/gacol3342.doc.htm
I would, perhaps unfairly, summarise your large comment here as breaking away from the US = bad, breaking away from the British Empire and forming the US = good. ( Breaking away from Mexico if you are Texas is probably good as well. )
Anyway I don't think that self determination as the UN sees it applies to the US at all, except perhaps to the native Americans.
The fact that breakaway countries are often recognized doesn't contradict what I said in that quote. They're often *not* recognized as well. Sometimes they're recognized by some countries but not others. The reasons behind this depend on the individual case at hand. Germany did not recognize Croatia and Slovenia because they believe all breakaway states should always be recognized. That wasn't the argument they made, or that any country has ever made.
The article you link to is about decolonization, i.e. imperial nations granting autonomy to lands they previously invaded by force. This also is doesn't contradict what I said, although it can get complicated at the margins (e.g. with Scott's hypothetical of the Navajo Nation declaring independence).
I did say not entirely true. That said if you position your sentence like this "any large territory can secede from any country at any time, and *everyone else* has to go with it." then it is designed to be impossible to falsify because of course there's never a 100% agreement on anything. Nevertheless plenty of countries do recognise the right to self determination, as does the UN.
The article from the UN is about decolonisation but that is *mostly* what self determination is about, and why the UN is pro self determination. We can't actually discuss self determination of nations, without discussing colonialism. It is precisely anti-colonialism that has driven the ideology of self determination.
All land was conquered at some point in the past.
Can you explain the argument for how the secession of the USA from Britain could be justified, but the secession of the Confederacy from the USA would not?
Again, read Lincoln's first inaugural address; he makes this very case. The Declaration itself makes the case on the US's side, laying out a very long list of reasons why such an extreme act was necessary. This was known and acknowledged to be extraordinary: "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes..."
The Confederacy, for their part, believed this as well. Their position was that states were sovereign countries, and that the US was more of an EU-like agreement than a country itself. If they advocated a unilateral right to secession, they'd have recognized West Virginia's secession from Virginia, which they never did.
One point worth noting is that the US had a lot more to lose than Britain did. The Atlantic Ocean separated the US and Britain; the CSA would've been a hostile nation on the USA's border. The US was an overseas territory of Britain; the South was an integral part of the US. The US had no vote in Britain, and had a long list of grievances against their government; Southern whites were *over*-represented in the US Senate, and had no actual grievances beyond the US electing an abolitionist President.
I am not sure I agree with the hostile nation part being a consideration, insofar as the North was worried about a British ally on their southern border. The reason being Canada, which was a wholly owned part of the British Empire at the time. Maybe they didn't want another British state on their border, but that isn't usually what is claimed. In other words, I think the claim only makes sense if the claimant is forgetting Canada, as the worry about a British ally is that the Brits would have a foothold on the continent vs not. When you remember Canada, and the fact fighting in Canada had been part of the war of 1812, the difference becomes a lot less exciting.
You might also adduce that the American colonies were in a very different situation than the Southern states. The American colonies were *not* a regular part of England, e.g. they had no separate representation in Parlaiment, no traditional rights to self-determination. They were governed directly by the King and had much more limited means of having their grievances addressed than any other part of England.
Indeed, this was a pretty serious aspect of American dissatisfaction, and a reasonable case can be made that *had* England been willing to incorporate the colonies as a regular part of England -- including normal representation in Parlaiment -- it's possible the Revolution might not have happened. Jefferson argued pretty passionately in the Declaration that the colonists' beef was *with the King personally* and not necessarily with England, or being English, per se.
The South was in no such position. They weren't territories governed directly by the President, they were members in full and equal standing with the Northern states. They had ample representation in Congress, they supplied more than their fair share of Presidents, they had all the usual deference to state sovereignty granted by the Constitution, et cetera.
So the argument that they were in similar extremity as the colonists, in getting their voice heard, is pretty dubious. The real problem was that their voice (particularly around slavery) was starting to become a minority voice. It would be heard -- but wouldn't end up being determinative. That is, they were objecting to participating as a minority in a republic. The colonists arguably would've been OK with it.
I think you hit a nerve. You are quite right that most people seem to have a strange block in their head thinking of this sort of thing, where some secessions are good, others bad, but no obvious way to figure out which is which. We humans seem to want countries to be always the same countries, except when those countries are evil then we want them to break up or be taken over by good countries, without any process of determining or agreeing upon what defines good/evil in this case. I expect this is related to the problem of the little space in our heads where "kings... what a good idea!" is written (as Pratchett put it).
We like stability, and we dislike the loss of status that occurs when a bunch of people want to leave our group, and likewise we like it when groups we don't like become less stable and lose status. So when we think (because we were told) that the king was good, people wanting to leave his kingdom are seen as bad instead of as evidence that his kingdom wasn't so good, and when we think the king is bad we cheer for people wanting to leave because it supports our believe that he is bad. We never stop to think "Might it be that there were too many people for the government to govern, whether or not the king was good?" let alone "Maybe they agree the king was good in some ways, but bad in others that don't apply to me and so escape my notice?"
There's an additional aspect of no-take-backs that underlies some of the philosophical differences between North and South over secession. The Southern point of view was that the Union was an agreement between states, and so the states had the right to change their mind. One of the more important Northern points of view was that the Union was a decision undertaken *by the people* -- all of them -- of the country, with the states carried along for the ride, and that only *the people* could change that, not state governments.
Id est, from this point of view, what would've been needed for secession to be "legal" would be another Constitutional Convention, in which the governing rules were reformed, e.g. the country was split in two. And at that convention all the *Northern* states would get votes, just like the Southern states, because the decision would need to be one "by the people" and that includes everyone.
The same principle underlies the existence of the Fourteenth Amendment, too, I would say, since it is designed to constrain the states fundamentally. Indeed, the fact that Constitutional Amendments constrain even states that do not ratify them would seem to partake of this same philosophy -- and deny the Southern point of view that the Union was any kind of free association of the states.
There is a big step being made there that doesn't necessarily follow. The distinction between the Union being between states and being by the people seems entirely separate from whether the decision for a state to remove itself from the Union could be made unilaterally or only with permission of the other states. In other words, the level of the decision (state or people within state) and the nature of the decision (unilateral or bilateral) are two very different things. One doesn't seem to imply the other at all. (Not to mention the fact that States ratified the Constitution, not peoples, so arguing that the people are the ones who undertook the agreement is strange.)
What is stranger, although not surprising, is that they didn't bother to write in what to do if a state wants to leave the union. They seemed to miss a lot of "what happens when X bad thing happens" when it came to writing the Constitution. Just that when you are trying to write something describing an agreement that people (or states) are leery of joining, you would think there would be a clear exit clause in case they change their mind.
I don't quite think so. The point was that the original decision to form a Union was made by The People -- all of them -- and so any decision to reform, or dissolve, the Union must also be made by The People -- all of them.
I agree it's not about the level of the decision, but about the agents empowered to make it, so perhaps I phrased that badly. The Southern point of view was that we all by ourselves get to make this decision. The Nothern was, no, you don't, we *all* decided to start this business, so we *all* have to make any decision breaking it up.
Arguably there *is* a section in the Constitution on what to do about secession, it's called Article V. In principle, if South Carolina wanted to secede "legally" its only choice would be to persuade 2/3 of Congress, or 2/3 of the states, to call a Constitutional Convention to let them out, or agree on a mechanism to let them out.
There is actually a "land back" movement within the USA and Canada to try to give political and economic control over territories back to native Americans to various degrees. There are certainly people who believe that the United States should not exist and that its land should be given over to Indigenous stewardship, although for now, the more relevant goals are things like getting back the area where Mount Rushmore stands. It's different from a normal secessionist movement because of how it leads with the idea of needing to protect and nurture natural resources and the environment rather than wanting governance by or territory for a particular people. Nevermind people; should nature have a right to self-determination? What about the interests of the land itself? In the eyes of nature, are there any legitimate countries?
"Nevermind people; should nature have a right to self-determination"
Obviously not.
"What about the interests of the land itself?"
They're irrelevant because they don't exist.
"In the eyes of nature, are there any legitimate countries?"
Mu. Legitimacy and illegitimacy are man-made concepts with no equivalent in nature.
In my professional circles I've had some interactions with the "land back" movement. It has an inherent problem which, I've learned, is actually privately clear amongst leaders of today's recognized Native American tribal governments but has no identifiable solution. That issue is: give the land back to _which_ native Americans? And how to choose? (And who gets to do the choosing?)
The peoples residing in what is today North and South America were no more stable or set in their self-organization than were the contemporaneous peoples of say Europe during the same age. There was not, as of the 15th and 16th centuries when Europeans started showing up in numbers, a single overriding continental-scale American entity a la the Ottoman Empire. Rather there was and had been, for centuries at least, a fluid and ever-changing and mutually-hostile cast of tribal nations at varying scales of geography.
Some, such as the Aztecs, had become fairly large and successful through what we would today call genocidal conquest of their neighbors who then became the ground floor of a slave-based economy. When the French voyageurs first arrived in the Great Lakes region they found that the Algonquin and Iroquois confederations of tribes had been engaging in a multi-generational war of genocidal intent if not accomplishment for something like a century. What exactly suddenly happened to the Anazasi Puebloans circa 13th/14th century is a rolling controversy amongst archeologists and historians and today's native groups; a climate shift is one candidate but so is war and conquest ("anasazi" being originally a Navajo word meaning "enemy ancestors"). The Maya waxed and waned for centuries often via means which we today would view as truly horrifying. Etc etc. It's at least as big and messy a rabbit hole as say European history between the Romans and the rise of Westphalian nation-states.
So if we want to apply self-determination retroactively to the Americas, or really to the Americans as existed before 1492...._which_ Americans? And on which moral/logical/factual basis?
The focus I have seen from land back movements in Canada is 1. actually enforcing the various treaties and contracts that should theoretically be legally binding, and 2. resolving ambiguities or politically untenable committments through negotiation and/or jurisprudence. I don't see why this would be considered not to be an identifiable solution, although maybe there is a defference between our countries that I'm not aware of.
It is not a potential solution because the land back movement presents and identifies as a moral one not a practical one. ("This is an overdue reckoning not some sort of political thing; this is about justice!" as an activist firmly explained at a meeting I attended a few years ago.)
The issues/questions that I crudely summarized call into question the basis of those treaties (many of the tribes which got to sign treaties were simply the ones who happened to have won the most recent genocidal tribal war); and negotiation now has the same inherent moral rabbit hole as do the treaties.
And in Central and South America there weren't very many treaties anyway, that wasn't how the Spanish rolled.
Of course this is all absurd levels of retconning. The Native Americans were no more actually conservative of nature than the European colonists, cute mythology notwithstanding. And last I checked, they're still quite willing to fill in a marshland to build a casino, or rent land to a giant coal-fired power plant, if it will make the tribe good money.
Worryingly common retconning though. The idea of "indigenous knowledge" - especially as something special separate from and superior to Western science - is dangerously common in the conservation field.
Can you cite a dangerous example of deferring to indigenous knowledge?
a) it would seem to me that deferring to "traditional knowledge" over the scientific method would need to prove itself positive rather than the burden being to prove doing has negative effects
b) here's your example of "indigenous knowledge" meaning rejecting proven scientific treatments: https://ensia.com/features/new-zealand-indigenous-maori-scientists-kauri-tree-forest/
That article's punchline is about laboratory testing of a specific indigenous technique for stopping the specific invasive pest that the conservationists are fighting....deployment of the scientific method is hardly retconning.
Ctrl-F "intrusive".
I work in the conservation field and am glad to report that it is not. It is a fringe idea which pops up here and there.
"how it leads with the idea of needing to protect and nurture natural resources and the environment"
It doesn't though. You try getting far in the land back movement by saying that native americans only deserve the land if they're better at protecting it environmentally than non-native americans. You will get shouted out of the room.
Native american activists, in my experience, talk a big game about being environmentally friendly but if they actually have to follow environmental restrictions they complain.
Re Chipsie's 1st para: "Groups don't have subjective experiences besides the subjective experiences of the individuals, and they can't decide to exercise their rights in the same way that individuals can because they can't want things or make decisions."
Granting for now your framing of SD as a 'weird right', I don't think the above para is a good way to understand it. Isn't it true that one's subjective experience can dramatically change and grow to a different size and shape when one is part of a large group dynamic? It's not as though groups of people are simply the arithmetic sum of each individual's thoughts and feelings.
"...and they can't decide to exercise their rights in the same way...because they can't want things or make decisions." Groups absolutely can want and decide things that the individuals don't - the wisdom of crowds turns to madness all the time. I agree that groups can't exercise their rights in the same way as indivs - I don't know how they possibly could, and in any case why should this ability have bearing on SD?
SD as a right is not "independent of the individuals", it is wholly contingent on there being a bunch of individuals with rights, from which the right to SD is an extension. Let me try a hypothetical that may or may not help my case:
Imagine an ethnic subpopulation of serfs living in their motherland under a state that has robbed them of their individual sovereignty. The serfs want to form their own nation-state within their existing territory. Political practicalities aside, in order for this idea to make sense, they have to first ascend out of serfdom and gain recognition of their indiv. human rights, *then* make a case for SD as an extension thereof. Don't let this example be the focus of a rebuttal, but I think it's helpful to think of "rights pertaining to groups" as dependent on the underlying indiv. rights.
It feels strange to group Scotland with some of the other examples in this and the previous post. In the UK, there is no question that *if* the majority of Scots want Scotland to be an independent country, it will be. The debate is about the conditions under which this collective choice can be made, and the effects of such a choice. I mention this because international (often US) commenters sometimes seem to believe that Scotland is being kept in the Union against its will and is fighting the UK govt for independence, when in reality the Nationalists are fighting to convince their own population that leaving is a good idea. They were unsuccessful in the last referendum; they may be successful in the next. The situation is much closer to Brexit than anything else mentioned in your posts: no one seriously doubted whether the UK had the legal right to leave the EU - only whether they *should*.
Yeah, Brexit is in many ways a close parallel (and in both referendum campaigns, the No side was called "Project Fear" by its opponents). The outcome of the Brexit referendum hardened my opinions on Scottish independence in both directions - both "wow, leaving the UK would be much harder and more destructive than I'd realised", but also "my God, we need to get out of a country that would do something so stupid". In the 2014 independence referendum, "you'll lose your EU membership if you leave" was a major campaigning point for the No side - funny how history works out...
In defence of my younger self, Brexit has also *made* Scottish independence more difficult - the economic pain would have been much reduced if Scotland and rUK had both been EU members, able to trade without customs checks across their shared border.
Don't assume that there will be another referendum. It took 300 years to get the first one. I don't see any good reason to have another one soon.
Explanation for non-Brits: these are the current terms of the debate. Not "should Scotland be allowed independence if it votes for it?" but "should Scotland be allowed to vote for independence (at all/so soon after voting against it)?" The Scottish Tories campaign on a message of "stop IndyRef 2". At the time of IndyRef 1, it was described as a "once in a generation referendum": the argument now is that Brexit has changed the situation sufficiently (recall that "you'll keep EU membership" was an argument for the *No* side...) that it's justified to ask the question again.
So the loser wants a do-over on a one-shot game? No surprise there.
The winner might have an incentive to agree to the do-over - on the condition that the second loss is more punitive than the first one was.
Maybe the unionists could be rewarded with ranked choice voting, instead of first-past-the-post, if independence is rejected again. That would allow unionist parties to stop splitting votes in a way that benefits the dominant nationalist party.
How would ranked choice work in a binary option?
Not during the proposed 2nd referendum. After.
The Scottish parliament has elections once every 5 years. The unionist parties (Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats) might benefit from ranked choice voting. By contrast, the Nationalists (the dominant nationalist party) are further ahead of their small nationalist competitors. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Scotland#Scottish_Parliament
It wouldn't necessarily work out so neatly, however. Some Labour supporters might prefer to rank the Nationalists second, on grounds of social class sympathies / redistributive policies.
Ah, well I like ranked choice anyway. Certainly it would be useful in Scotland where the SNP are < 50% and get the majority of seats if I recall.
Well, the "once in a generation" thing was from a non-binding white paper, but yeah, IndyRef was certainly *sold* as a one-off thing. That said, I think "should we leave the UK and potentially lose access to the world's largest trading bloc?" is a very different question to "should we leave the UK, which has just voted to leave the world's largest trading bloc against Scotland's wishes, and potentially regain access to said bloc?"
I wonder if they consistently believe that. Would they still believe it if they won?
That is, if Scotland had left the UK, and then the UK had left Europe, would the SNP be saying "oh well now that Brexit has changed the question, we'd better have a second referendum to see if we should re-join the UK".
In fairness, it seems unlikely that a second referendum in that situation would lead to Scotland making a different decision because Scotland voted to Remain. Why would people vote to leave the UK and remain a member of the EU, and then decide to actually leave the EU and rejoin the country they just voted to leave now that it is less attractive?
An interesting point at the time - which I can't remember if there was a conclusive answer to - was whether Scotland would automatically join the EU if the independence campaign had won. Some EU countries with separatist movements of their own weren't hot on the idea.
You are of course right that the SNP would not accept do-overs, just as the brexiters weren't interested in repeats after winning the first one, even though e. g. Farage had openly said that a narrow win for remain would
not settle the question. It's hard to have consistent principles in politics.
> An interesting point at the time - which I can't remember if there was a conclusive answer to - was whether Scotland would automatically join the EU if the independence campaign had won.
This was never settled, and "you would probably be kicked out of the EU" was a major argument for the No campaign. Various countries (most notably Spain) threatened to block EU accession for Scotland, or at least refused to rule out doing so, and said that Scotland would have to apply for membership as a new state: https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-could-veto-independent-scotland-says-minister/. Since 2016 they've reversed that position (https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-fires-diplomat-in-scotland-over-eu-membership-letter/), presumably just to own the English; who knows what they'd actually do if Scotland were to achieve independence.
My understanding is that many Brits thought it was stupid that Cameron let Scotland have a referendum and it would have been unacceptable if Scotland had actually left.
Perhaps, but I think that's a different point at issue. Maybe some people thought the referendum was stupid, but everyone expected the result to be honoured. (Edit: for 'everyone', read 'everyone within the Overton window').
And many Scots think that the way said people phrased the issue - "Cameron let Scotland have a referendum" - shows why Scotland needs self-determination rather than relying on whatever a Tory-dominated rUK lets us have.
(I'm coming off like a hardcore Scottish nationalist, which I'm not, but it really is remarkable the extent to which Scottish and UK politics differs. The Tories are a tiny minority party in Scotland, but regularly win UK-wide general elections. That's largely because of the brokenness of the First Past The Post electoral system, but as we saw with the Brexit referendum, even on a one-man-one-vote basis things are different North and South of the border.)
Well yes, it's very easy to win a UK election without getting any votes in Scotland because 92% of the population is outside it.
Quite so - which means that if you're in the 8%, it's easy to conclude that the central government doesn't care about or represent you.
Who gets to decide what “makes the world better”? Whoever is currently the most powerful, so you're not getting rid of "might makes right" so easily. Of course, they probably hadn't become the most powerful completely arbitrarily, some objective features correlated with our innate ethical senses probably played some part in that, if you subscribe to the idea that the world gradually gets better on average.
I really didn't like most of those comments. There's the lack of understanding of what self determination means in Law. Sure in practice it does mean that you have to have the ability and power to secede but the right of self determination, according to the UN, belongs to Peoples. An oil rich region that considers itself the same nation as the rest of the State isn't going to secede in reality, and has no right to do so under international law. A region that is its own People has the right to secede.
The UN says (via Wiki)
"The right of a *people* to self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law (commonly regarded as a jus cogens rule), binding, as such, on the United Nations as authoritative interpretation of the Charter's norms. It states that peoples, based on respect for the principle of equal rights and fair equality of opportunity, have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no interference.[3]"
What's a people? Good question. Luckily wiki has a link.
"Used in politics and law it is a term to refer to the collective or community of an ethnic group, a nation, to the public or common mass of people of a polity"
And yet there was very little of that being discussed in the last post, or highlighted here. Obviously there may be ambiguity about what constitutes a People, but the acceptance that there are separate nations of Peoples, is the reason under International law why self determination is a right. Admittedly this all originated in the era of Imperialism ( as a counter to the idea of imperialism) but it remains the law now.
As to the confederacy, they were clearly not a separate People. I think a lot of Americans see succession through the prism of the civil war where succession was a bad thing. However Texas seceded from Mexico and the United States from the British Empire, and most Americans think that a good thing indeed.
It's not very interesting what the Law currently says. Laws can be changed.
Those laws are, as the article says, a jus cogens rule - which is "is the technical term given to those norms of general international law that are argued to be hierarchically superior. ". Therefore it is a law that isn't changing soon. In any case the law also explains what self determination is. Which answers the question asked.
Who has the right to self determination?
Nations or Peoples do.
The problem is that "Nations" and "Peoples" are fuzzy concepts. It's easy to say that e.g. Kurds are a separate People from Turks and Arabs, and thus are entitled to their own state, especially given the oppression they've faced within Turkish and Arab states. But it's not always that clear-cut. Do Basques and Catalonians count as distinct Peoples separate from Spaniards? Do the descendants of Chinese exiles living in Taiwan count as a separate People from the Chinese living on the mainland? If they continue to remain politically, culturally, and geographically separate for another 200 years, will they count as a separate People then? And I have no doubt that some Southerners here in the U.S. do indeed view themselves as a distinct People separate from Northerners, and they probably did even more so back in 1860, does that mean the CSA had a right to secede after all? What about places like Nigeria where there are several distinct Peoples, but dispersed throughout the country in a way that would make secession logistically impractical (since they don't really have their own distinct geographical territories and trying to figure out who originally lived where would be a nightmare)?
I am aware that nations and peoples are hard to define (although rarely for the nations or peoples themselves). However the question in the last post was who has the right to Self Determination. The answer is in general - ethnic groups and nations.
As for Nigeria, it isn't and can't be a nation state. That said rule from Nigeria trumps rule from elsewhere.
"There's the lack of understanding of what self determination means in Law. "
Since Scott isn't a lawyer, how is that germane? He wouldn't be using it as a term of art.
Well they weren't Scott's comments, for one. That said I don't think I get that we can ignore International law on what constitutes self determination either, since a country cannot be independent in reality unless it is legally recognised to be so.
I don't think that's true. Taiwan's been doing a decent job of it.
You apparently missed the section of the Wikipedia article that says "There is not yet a recognized legal definition of "peoples" in international law".
This doesn’t stop the nations or Peoples recognising themselves and the UN still supports self determination.
I don't know how that's a response to me pointing out that the entire basis of your original comment was based on a lie.
This comment section gets mighty aggressive as it threads. Before I report you for an ad hominem, if that’s possible, can you point out where I lied? Work into your answer that I said “there may be ambiguity about what constitutes a people” in my post.
That is significantly minimising the true nature of things. The UN may call self-determination a right, but it's a right where noone's sure who gets it.
I have a pro-open borders argument against self-determination. If we encourage secessions, we would get more borders, thus more barriers to the movement of people and goods. Even when seceding polity agrees to keep their borders with their original country open, next government might change it. This is bad.
I agree with the take that being sufficiently oppressed by an imperial power should count as a valid reason to declare independence. No, I do not have a ready answer on what counts as "sufficient" oppression; that would be determined on case by case basis.
Also there are situations when imperial power is willing to grant independence to its subjects on a given territory, but not to have them vote in an elections that would determine policy for the whole entity, including (former) metropolis. E.g. dissolution of the British Empire. In such cases, letting them secede is preferable option to continuing with authoritarian regime.
Other possibility is when poorer part of the country wants an independence that would result in the other part getting even richer since they would stop doing fiscal transfers to would be independent polity. In such a case there are clear utilitarian grounds to support splitting up - poorer part gets to fulfil its preferences and richer part is better off as a result. E.g. dissolution of Czechoslovakia.
In practice, I consider a lot of a real world independence movements as justified, but this is not based on a philosophical commitment to self-determination.
Indeed there's little point to independence in the modern globalised world. Scotland may gain independence but it will mean very little.
Your country ( Czechia I think) seceded from a larger one fairly recently, right, do you think that was a bad idea?
I cover it in post. In fact, it was Slovakia that seceded - Czechia is bigger than Slovakia and it has been Slovaks who mostly wanted independence, while many Czechs were opposed to letting them go.
I am however personally very glad that dissolution happened, since I do not know of any Slovak person who would now say that it was a bad thing, and for Czechia it is rather obviously very good economicaly that we do not have to fund them via fiscal transfers. Slovakia is poorer than Czechia and their political system, at least from here, looks like dysfunctional freakshow.
So you are in fact happy with more borders than previously.
Yeah, but, like, in this case, Czechs are clearly better off, and Slovaks are, as far as I know, overwhelmingly happy with the outcome. It would be absurd to be against that.
I should admit that some Czechs are unhappy with the dissolution, for reasons that I find incomprehensible/stupid and am thus unable to present them here without strawmaning
Between EU countries (both Czechia and Slovakia), borders do not mean much. You don't even need a passport these days.
The only inconvenience is currency: Czechs still use koruna, Slovaks use euro. Otherwise, you would hardly notice that there is a border.
I know about the EU, living in it. However the fact is that the country did break up and the poster was in favour of open borders, and creating borders. Anyway the breakup was way before the EU allowed either in.
I do not remember all details, but I think that the relations between Czechia and Slovakia after 1993 were quite similar to what EU countries have now.
From the average person's perspective, the dissolution meant that when you are crossing the border, you need a new currency, and (pre-EU) someone looks at your ID card. You heard much less of the other language on TV. You voted for different parties in different parliaments, so you gradually stopped understanding the political nuances of the other country. Ten years later, you were surprised to realize that the youngest generation no longer understands the other language fluently.
It was more complicated if you worked or studied on the other side of the border, but there were mutual agreements to make this easier. For example, Slovak students could study for free at Czech universities.
So, having to show your ID card at the border was annoying, but from the perspective of someone growing up in a communist regime, we associated "borders" with something much worse (having the police check your baggage, asking questions about the purpose of your trip, etc.), and none of that happened.
Speaking from the other side... agree completely about the freakshow... but economically, yes, Slovakia is poorer then Czechia, but that was already true during Czechoslovakia, so it's not like things got *worse* after independence, I think.
Given that we had only three years between the fall of communism and the dissolution of federation, it's hard to say what would have happened economically otherwise, in a free-market Czechoslovakia.
From my perspective, I am happy that no big disaster happened, and both countries safely made it into EU and NATO.
"Might makes right" is one of the axiomic statements that I feel is so reductive that it's wrong in the real world. It's like having a leaver long enough is enough to move the world, no one can dispute the truth of that statement but in reality there are no such leavers. Might making right exists in the same space, with a theoretically infinite amount of martial force you can dictate all political outcomes but no one has infinite martial force. Every country has to make cost benefit analyses of what they want, how much power it will consume to achieve this, and whether there are better alternatives.
In a practical world, you can almost write the opposite, "Right dictates might" because the actions that are considered 'right' by your geopolitical adversaries are almost unilaterally going to be the actions that require the least amount of blood and treasure to accomplish. To use a historical example, Napoleon undoubtedly had the finest military force in the world during his reign. He did not get to dictate history, however, because so many of his rivals disagreed so strongly with his vision of the future of Europe that they were happy to ally with their worst enemies to prevent it. The British then spent the next century conquering a quarter of the known world with a far inferior military because no one with sufficient force cared enough to stop them.
The geopolitical 'right' (and I use quotes because it is mostly shorthand for how nations perceive international relations rather than any allusion to morality) of a country's actions dictates the amount of might arrayed against them in many circumstances.
There are recordings of captured nazi scientists, who were informed that the allies had successfully deployed an atomic bomb. The interesting thing is that they were in agreement that Germany could never have done such a thing, because of infighting. "You'd need to have a hundred thousand people all cooperating together, nobody trying to backstab each other."
Large scale cooperation is a superpower. So yes, i think it's reasonable to believe that right makes might as well.
FWIW I believe the actual conclusion from the Farm Hall transcripts is that Heisenberg and his colleagues initially disbelieved in the atomic bomb because they had already made an estimate of the amount of U-235 needed for a critical mass and gotten an answer that was too high by a factor of 10 or so. Supposedly that's a major reason *why* Germany didn't pursue the bomb, because they (mistakenly) thought the amount of 235 needed was far too high to be realistic.
It's said on the American side that Fermi initially made the same mistake, but then for some reason felt skeptical of the easy answer, and went back to do the calculation more carefully and thereby realized it was, just, barely possible to get enough 235.
Napoleon did not have a navy that could defeat Britain. The US is dominant in a way Napoleon wasn't.
I think in this context people mostly define "might" to be (number of people) x (how passionate those people feel). I don't think people are generally thinking that if Superman arrives on Earth, with infinite awareness and infinite Kryptonian weaponry to back him up, he's entitled to do whatever the heck he wants because he's more "mighty." We're talking about the ordinary sort of human "might" -- which is, as I said, roughly (number of fighters) x (how eager they are to fight). So it's more of a short-hand way of saying something like voting, only we weight votes differently according to how strongly people feel about the issue.
It's not really a very different point of view than an ordinary fetish for democracy. The main distinction is in saying that one man = one vote might not be followed, because some people are more concerned about it than others.
If you're going to consider the transaction costs of leaving states as being a problem that justifies making secession a questionable right, why shouldn't states do everything they can to _raise_ the cost of exit? Incentives clearly matter, and it looks like the incentive for states, presently, is to continue to grab increasing amounts of power for themselves, because ... why not?
Norms are great and all, but i think we all know what happens when norms and incentives collide: people pay lip service to the norms while following the incentives.
If each state has the right to secede, then the central state has to actually _work_ to ensure that the smaller states it comprises are getting something net positive out of the deal.
But if secession _isn't_ a right, then literally every other right can be held hostage by the central state, due to the extremely high transaction costs being a thing. You might have a situation where _everyone_ is better off with the 'parent state' being disbanded, because it's pissing off _all_ of its constituent members in some way or another, but the thing lumbers on because the parent state is sufficiently democratic that its members fight each other for control of the parent state, rather than doing the sensible thing and just splitting.
An idea I'd love to see explored more is some notion of 'transnational state-interoperability and recogonfiguration' agreements. Basically something like the EU or the WTO - but for redrawing state boundaries.
The deal would have to be one where member nations adopt a set of rules that lay peaceful processes through which nations can split, combine, and regonfigure themselves - crucially that every member nation makes itself vulnerable to sub-regions seceding, but also gives itself a pathway to peacefully annexing subregions of other nations.
It would have to define things like minimum size, population, demographics, and geographic traits a region would need to have to be able to explore seceding - and whether it only has the right to join another nation (and if so, which ones), OR whether it is large enough to form its own nation. It would require also a set of rules laying out arbitration and division of shared assets (infrastructure, military, currency, regulatory etc.) between subregions and parent regions.
I think if such a thing existed it would do very interesting things to aligning the incentives of states with the needs of all their various constituent peoples and geographies - and generally lead to a more healthy (and peaceful) competitive process whereby states try to grow by being higher functioning and achieving better results for their peoples - rather than by conquest or threat of force.
Tokelau seems to illustrate an important point: that secession often works out great for the local elites, but not so much for everyone else.
If you were the mayor (or whatever, actual title Ulu-o) of Tokelau then you'd much rather be the President of an independent Tokelau; there's definite benefits to being President of a sovereign nation with a seat at the UN, there must be all sorts of nice bribes you can collect.
On the other hand if you're a random schmo on Tokelau you're much better off remaining part of New Zealand. Partially because New Zealand heavily subsidises the whole island, and partially because as a New Zealand citizen you have the right to live and work in New Zealand (or Australia) if you feel like it.
Having said that, I think it makes sense to support secession as long as:
1. The territory seceded is sufficiently large to make sense as a country (no, your street can't secede, sorry)
2. The borders of the territory seceding make some sort of sense in terms of history and/or geography. So if Texas votes for secession then that's fine, but if only 10% of Texas votes for secession then you can't draw some fractally complex border around the houses of all the pro-secession people's houses and declare that your squiggly-looking subset of Texas is now an independent country.
3. There needs to have been a properly carried out referendum which has won with some sort of supermajority. (The supermajority gives a reasonable bias towards stability, so that you don't get territories that secede with a 50.1% majority one year and then want back in with a 50.1% majority the next.)
Before, we were treating "secede and join another country" as a special case of "secede and then as a sovereign country you have the right to join another country if both countries agree".
But if we forbid tiny territories for seceding, should we then make a special case for seceding and joining another country? What if a tiny town in Texas on the border with Mexico wants to be part of Mexico?
Alternatively, what if the owner of a parcel of land on the border wanted to "export" his real estate?
Couldn't an independent Tokelau get heavily subsidized by the international community as it plays China and the US or whoever off against each other? New Zealand aid is nice but far from the only option, bribes can be development projects and such and not just go into the ruler's pocket.
"What about the Confederacy?"
I don't know how relevant this is but I think it might have been better to let the Confederacy go without a war. While the Confederate defeat meant that slavery was ended sooner than it otherwise would have I'm not sure that was worth all the bloodshed and destruction.
There's also one alternative history scenario that came to my mind. What if the Confederacy became independent but then later faced a mass slave rebellion? Would the Union then be justified in going in to topple the government and possibly re-annex the Confederacy? Does this depend on whether they have legally recognized the Confederate independence or merely tolerated it without a war while formally objecting to it?
Well, but once the principle is established it's hard to put a limit on it. Would you doubt that Texas, say, would secede from the Union today if it was merely a question of a majority vote in the Texas Legislature?
"Would you doubt that Texas, say, would secede from the Union today if it was merely a question of a majority vote in the Texas Legislature?"
I would doubt it but I'm not an American so it might be due to ignorance.
There’s a good idea for a novel in there:
The Confederacy secedes, falls to a successful slave revolt (in the 1880s or 1960s; either would be interesting in different ways), and the US has to deal with a new (hostile?) power on its southern border as against its old enemy, with factions wanting to intervene on both sides (in the 1880s due to radical republicans vs. fear of something Haiti-like and/or foreign entanglements, in the 1960s because it starts to go Communist vs. racism being a lot further beyond the pale).
A lot of interesting comments, and I agree with the defend the status quo (better the devil you know) arguments because from that perspective, you are defending the property rights schema within which you work that gives you money and power that you'd lose if you let the status quo change no matter how bad the status quo is for the individual voter/person in your society. This is just human nature not to seek martyrdom on behalf of amorphous groups of which one isn't a member of (and a HUGE reason why all this get to your ethnic corner and represent runnygazoo going on in the U.S. is so bad for all of us).
But a lot of the examples relied upon forget some things:
1. The standard that you were a baddie if you just invaded and took land is relatively recent - I would argues since 1948, ever since Israel was established as a state, the western nations began to shift on the idea of using invasion because I want it as an acceptable standard. All US imbroglios since then were on behalf of "rescuing" someone/something, not trying to take territory; other nations invade to take actions since have been roundly condemned and whatever resistance there was had outside support (the level determined by how important strategically the invadee was).
2. Self-determination implies voting as if all these invaders were direct democracies where each person got a say, but that's not how representative democracy works at all. The voters only get a say by proxy (assuming legitimate elections as opposed to fake ones), and only influence representatives' votes if somehow they have another avenue to get heard. This narrows the impact of self-determination significantly and why a nation can be at war but it appears the majority of the people wish it weren't or vice versa. Representatives waffle between doing what their constituents want, and posing as smarter than their constituents.
3. Public opinion measurement is almost worthless because how you frame the question affects the answer you get; direct democracies fall prey to preference cycling and Arrow's impossibility theorem. Meaning on any one specific issue, you've actually no idea what people want because their answer will change if affected by context, the other options, time, what those around them are saying.
4. For the record, states cannot secede from the U.S. or break up into two states without state/federal legislative consent and overcoming U.S. Supreme Court precedent, and the organization to make such a thing happen is a collective action problem that is almost insurmountable - see https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3130497
5. Scott, you dismissed the Confederacy/Civil War stuff way too easily because the legacy of areas in seceded states that didn't want to still look significantly different in culture, political orientation, and habit **regardless of the ethnicity** of the resident (e.g. East Tennessee or West Virginia).
6. Self-determination gets you nowhere when you have a large bureaucracy staffed with civil servants who aren't elected. Sure they are supposed to be apolitical, sure they are supposed to serve "the state" regardless of who is running it, but in practical application, that's not how it works. The bureaucracy as employment attracts people who like the idea of government and believe government should be involved/choose what's permissible; and the bureaucracy affects what leadership hears and thinks and does significantly. Rare is the civil servant who will recommend, this isn't a government problem and we shouldn't do anything. It's also a roadblock to any one voter being heard because 9 times out of 10, if they are interacting with government, it's with an agency/civil servant and rarely with an elected official. This effect is moreso when it comes to military action - in every nation that has some form of democracy and in many that don't, the military as a constituency with an influential voice through its leadership is significant.
7. There's something about belief contagion at work in nation/states, the COVID response often seemed as much about reacting to alarmism from other nations first, than what was really happening locally - so there's something about how elites drive policy and then nations (the ruling elites) are reacting to their peers, not the voters/people (see https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/bern12036/html). If true, this makes a mockery of self-determination.
8. For nations that have elected leaders, their legitimacy is driven mostly by true elections with orderly regime change where the stability comes from the fact that you know there will be an election, and that the winner will take office no matter who they are, and then they will leave office if termed out/lose to a challenger in an election. The stability is what the people react to when they say their government is legitimate or not. This is why in the US people acted with such alarm when Stacy Abrams refused to concede the GA governor's race, and when Trump can't shut up about his defeat; it's why people accepted the outcome of Bush v. Gore instead of debating it ad infinitum; in a stable, legitimate democracy, this isn't how it's done and the fact that it's happened twice now says something about the gap between voters and those in government that makes a mockery of self-determination.
> nobody thinks we should give it back to the Indians now
Well, actually...
Since the invasion, a book that I came across frequently being recommended is "The Internationalists" by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro. I have only recently started reading it, so don't intend to sell it too much, but so far it has been worth it.
The writers are both experts in international law. They take the "might makes right" arguments seriously, explain it as something that was true and legal in the old world order, and argue that the Kellogg-Briand Pact gave rise to a new world order where it is not legal anymore. They do acknowledge that this order is weakened and challenged by events like the current invasion as well as the US invasions early this century, though they distinguish the legality of these in some way.
A sampling of articles that may be of interest: https://www.justsecurity.org/author/hathawayoona/
Regarding jumpingjacksplash's list, and Scott's acknowledgment of Israeli settlements as a troubling exception, I think this problem is much more prevalent than Scott realizes, and also much more tricky for Scott's theory.
The piece that I was surprised Scott didn't get into was the awkward connection between nation states as an assemblage of people, and physical land. We sort of take for granted that Catalonia has Catalonians and Wales has Welsh people and Ireland has Irish people. But as Scott recognizes, Palestine has both Palestinian Arabs and ethnic Jews, and there are tremendous disputes about who is allowed to be in what place in the first place, which make self-determination tricky to evaluate.
I spent some time in former Soviet Georgia in the 2000s, and they had three different separatist regions that claimed some form of independence from Georgia: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Adjaria. Each had distinct dynamics: Adjara's leader (named Aslan, which I will always think is a badass name) was eventually run out of the country, and there wasn't a strong ethnic identity behind the separatism, so it's officially over now.
South Ossetia used to have many ethnic Georgians, and really wants to be united with North Ossetia which is inside Russia. It was the justification for Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia, which was fairly bloodless because Georgia's military folded so quickly, and because Russia was satisfied with a quasi-democratic transfer of power to a Russia-friendly oligarch and his mildly Russia-friendly allies.
Abkhazia is be far the largest of the three, used to have a large majority of ethnic Georgians, and expelled (or ethnically cleansed?) them violently after the Georgian army invaded to reestablish control in the tumultuous '90s.
In Abkhazia and South Ossetia, who would be allowed to vote in an independence referendum? Only those currently physically there? Only those born there, wherever else they might be now? What about those whose families owned homes there? What if those homes were built with their own hands? What if their whole family tree is buried in cemeteries there?
All of this, in just a country of 4 million people! My point is that this sort of incongruity between control of land and national identity is commonplace around the world.
You see this issue in Western Sahara, where Morocco has been steadily sending people year by year, so that there will be an ethnic Moroccan majority to block Independence.
I think there are 5 ways to decide who gets a say, and they all have drawbacks:
1) Current occupation. This limits the decision to whomever’s most immediately affected, and let’s everyone in that category get a say. It also incentivise occupier-settlement and/or genocide. I’d 100% support it in nice liberal democracies, but any country which left its “nice liberal democracy” card at home shouldn’t be recognised doing this.
2) Rolling cut-off. Anyone who has been there for 50/100/whatever years (either personally, or a direct, unbroken chain of ancestry) gets a say. Avoids laughable instances of abuse, but still incentivises occupation and demography-rigging.
3) Static cut-off. Anyone who has been there since 1945 or whenever gets a vote. This can’t be waited out for obvious reasons, but will eventually get ridiculous (imagine the cut-off was 1491), unless the year gets reset eventually in which case it’s just option 2.
4) “Legitimate” inhabitants can vote. People who are present (usual “you are your ancestors” caveat) legitimately can vote, and only them. This fits all our norms nicely, but operationalises to just supporting whomever you like because “legitimately” can’t be defined that easily. Does gel easily with whether people who’ve been forced out/left get the vote - they do if they were forced out “illegitimately.”
5) People who were born there get the vote. Operationalises easily, slows the advantage of occupier-settlement by 25 years or so (doesn’t stop it), and makes it easy to decide which expellees/emigrants get the vote. In nice liberal democracies, will lead to misty-eyes ex-pats having a massive sway in something that doesn’t affect them much. Would probably recommend as a Schelling point for other countries.
The static cutoff isn't as ludicrous as it seems. I wouldn't pick a static cutoff just to have a number, I'd pick it because past a certain time period, international norms about self-determination and the legitimacy of conquest have changed and there's a difference between "Neither the US nor any Native Americans would have existed if it wasn't for conquest" and Northern Cyprus or Ukraine going to the conquerors.
The principled discussions all seem to be about whether some *group of people* should get to secede. But in practice, the question is about some *region of land*. There’s a lot of reasons that it makes sense to have governments tied to regions of land, but it really complicates the principled stuff here. If governments could govern *people* without having sovereignty over *land* then that would make some of the principled stuff simpler.
In *Confederate Reckoning*, it's claimed that if there'd been an honest vote of even just the white men in the south, the majority would have been in favor of letting the legality of slavery drift. It took a lot of politicking and maybe some vote fraud to make session happen.
It's an interesting question what would have happened. For what it's worth, I looked up the number of people who voted for Breckenridge in the election of 1860, which is a decent proxy for a vote for secession, and the answer is that across all 11 states of the core Confederacy Breckenridge received 51% of the vote. Bearing in mind that the franchise did not really extend to all white men over the age of 21, it doesn't seem implausible that had secession been put to a plebiscite across all 11 states, in which every white man got to vote (but nobody else), it would've narrowly lost.
Edit: forgot to note that in South Carolina the electors for President were chosen by the Legislature, not by popular vote, so there are no results for SC in that calculation.
Something I got from _Confederate Reckoning_ was that each of the states had its own geography, agriculture, and politics. You probably shouldn't choose one to be a surrogate for all of them.
"The South seceded" deserves a lot of unpacking.
Well, that's why I took the time to add up the votes for Breckenridge in all 11 states, to see what can be said across the entire region.
But yes there are significant state-level differences. For example, Breckenridge did not achieve a majority in 4 states (GA 49%, LA 45%, VA 45%, and TN 45%), and achieved what might be considered the size of majority needed for as big a decision as secession in only 3 states (MS 59%, FL 62%, and TX 75%). It is of course well known that TN was sharply divided on the question, and VA's reluctance is well-known in the context of Lee's decisions, but I did not know TX felt that strongly. I guess in fairness they were pretty comfortable with the notion, having "seceded" from Mexico a mere 25 years earlier.
Can get around this by reworking what we mean by a nation-state?
Would a federation of free city states be free from this problem? If I'm Hanza 2.0 and some of my members want to secede, it seems like an extreme overreach to immediately sink their ships and blockade them until they join.
In fact, city states seem like the lowest limit you can go to - it's hard to consider a "state" something that cannot field or pay for an army, and a lone guy can't really do so, neither can a street (no data on Scott's group house, though Zero HP is not optimistic on that one https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1276138147521400833.html ).
Consider the European Union. If the EU was more powerful and integrated, would it be an appropriate response to invade UK when they try to brexit?
Why is this suddenly appropriate for monolithic states?
Every city (or town/village?) either going it alone or joining/leaving larger confederations at will would probably be a good way of leading to market-type improvements in government without going full Moldbug/Ancap.
I'll point out that the conclusion likely leads to fragmentation of 'countries lead by ethical people' while leaving 'countries led by unethical people' larger and more powerful. Probably a bad result.
From the Mike G comment:
> we firebombed Dresden and killed them until they gave up
It might seem a nitpick, but I would argue (as ACOUP does) that "morale bombings" were not instrumental in defeating the Nazis. Neither did the blitz subdue the British.
( See https://acoup.blog/2021/09/24/collections-no-mans-land-part-ii-breaking-the-stalemate/ Ctrl-F morale )
Regarding @obormot's link, I don't see how the analysis would apply to e.g. the Russia--Ukraine situation. The whole question is whether Ukraine is part of Russia, so saying "countries can do whatever they want within their own territories" doesn't answer the question of whether the West can use force to stop Russia from trying to control Ukraine.
Incidentally, I'm convinced by the main argument of the link: the goal of world peace is incompatible with the goal of government "for the people, by the people, and of the people". The question is then how much to choose of each. Keeping in mind that world peace is compatible with totalitarian governments, I tend to favor democracy (not sure what that means in practice though).
With only one exception, the most war-mongering countries in the world are autocracies: Russia and Saudi Arabia being two prime examples. The biggest sable rattlers are also autocracies: North Korea (w.r.t South Korea) and China (w.r.t. Taiwan).
And in the age of Kings, they were constantly going to war at a whim.
We are seeing in real-time that democracy must be suppressed in Russia for the war to continue.
The one exception, of course, is the U.S., which is the world's policeman, but is at least temporarily exhausted an is not currently fighting a large-scale hot war or even managing an insurgency. (luckily, ISIS got exhausted at roughly the same time).
So sure: if one wants to make the case that the U.S. should be "less like those autocracies" then I agree. That one country makes all of the other democracies look bad.
France is a democracy that engages in a lot of military interventions in Africa.
Most of the other democracies are sufficiently US-dependent that they’d face a Suez crisis if they tried to do their own interventionist wars without Washington’s approval. The only exception is India, which liberated Bangladesh but doesn’t obviously want anywhere else.
I think there's a game theory perspective that might be useful on secession.
We want cooperation. The foundation of a civil society is willingness to give up some of our freedoms (arguably "rights") to gain the benefits of cooperation and structure of law. I lose the right to pick fruits from your trees without permission, but others are also forbidden from entering my house and stealing my TV.
So what about secession? If secession is an easy thing, downstream from a "right to self determination", then we are enshrining a right to defect. We are also incentivizing coercion among parties via threats to secede. It's counterproductive to the goal of cooperation.
So, shift the question: when is it moral to defect? I think an intuitive answer is "if the other party has already defected against you." So the world will be on your side if you're already an oppressed minority, but they probably won't be on your side if you just struck oil and want to keep it for yourself.
The obvious flaw in this is that we DO want to keep some rights special, and keep them even if it's suboptimal for society. I do not want people to harvest my healthy organs to save five sick people. But why? Ignoring the moral perspective, the practical reason is that I am willing to fight/defect for that, and a lot of other people are, too. So it's necessary to disallow things like "harvesting my organs for the greater good" so that we can maintain social cooperation.
And that seems to be the story of rights, in general. Ignoring any appeal to the divine ("natural" or "God-given" rights), we have whatever rights we've either 1. collectively enshrined via law, or 2. are willing to fight for. Maybe it's not secession, maybe it's marching and protesting enough to get the law changed, but sometimes we do "fight for our rights." And if we win, we get to keep them!
That sounds a lot like the "might makes right" statement that you're unsatisfied with, but I think there's more nuance than "big stick makes rules." I think it's the observation that cooperation can be fragile, and unless we enforce it, we lose a lot of other rights to anarchy. So instead, we do proxy shows of might (e.g., marches and votes) instead, and we protect exactly our ability to do those things (speech, assembly, and representation) so that we can shift norms without resorting to civil war.
Your opening premise is false. You don't have the right to pick fruit from someone else's tree, nor do they have the right to steal your tv. Governments are instituted to protect those rights you already had, not take away rights to steal from each other.
Without a form of government, you don't have a fruit tree. At best, you have a fruit tree you prevent other people from harvesting, but that's a practicality rather than a right.
Either way, the specific example doesn't really matter to their argument so much as the point "there are some freedoms the law forbids".
Not at all. The notion of "mine and thine" exists before government. Animals display notions of ownership that are predictable and change over time, allowing for coexistence without constant conflict, all without government enforcement. Humans have and respect ownership when governments break down, and even when governments directly say you do not have the right to own something.
Animals also violate property rights all the time (damn squirrels won't keep off my lawn!), but honestly I don't think animals are really relevant. I also thing we may be using the term differently.
To maybe not use the word "rights" - governments constrain behavior by having a list of things you aren't allowed to do - some of which may be things like "steal from your neighbor". Having an entity that enforces such rules is generally thought to be a good thing [citation needed].
You can take these rules to have an end goal, like maintain social cohesion, and then extrapolate to how this applies to secession, which is what Jon does.
Squirrels don't care about YOUR property rights (although they are careful not to get too close) but they are pretty good at respecting other squirrels' rights. They are a little more crazy than most other animals, however*.
Even if we don't use the words rights, governments constrain behavior by having a list of things that they will punish you for doing. That list does not get created ex nihilo by governments, rather the list is based on the stuff that people all agree you should get punished for doing. Typically the rules have an end goal of roughly "Allow us to live together without fighting all the time." and the government's involvement is to make sure those rules are applied reasonably fairly and when the individuals or their immediate friends and family can't. That is the defense of rights part, essentially a mutual defense contract tied to a third party adjudication contract to avoid feuds and the like.
The fact that there are things people pretty universally accept as wrong (murder, theft) and are happy to see people punished for is an evolved trait. The governments are created as part of a group attempt to lower the cost of prevention of those wrongs, the protection of rights, but the rights exist prior. You have a lawn because you have a lawn, not because you bought a giant screen dome to keep the squirrels off of it; the dome screen does not provide you with the lawn, but you got the dome to protect the lawn you had.
* I have literally seen a squirrel sitting on the still warm corpse of another squirrel shot while eating from a bird feeder, nibbling away at bird seed and presumably enjoying not having to stand in the cold snow. There is something wrong with squirrels.
They also only find something like 5-10% of the nuts they bury. Squirrels are dumb, and I for one am sick and tired of them being held out as some kind of moral example for the rest of us.
I see now that you already tabooed the word "rights" in a paragraph in this comment and basically are saying the same thing about social norms. I'm not sure where the disagreement lies.
In the default condition there is no concept of property - there is no such thing as "someone else's tree", there's just a tree from which it is technically possible to pick fruit.
Establishing a system where someone has an exclusive right to pick fruit from that particular tree, artificially creating a right and stating that violating this right will be shunned as theft - that requires a social consensus system i.e. government, without which there literally are no "rights that you already had".
That is entirely untrue I am afraid. Animals have notions of property and territory, remarkably well developed considering the relevant species' cognitive abilities, and avoid infringing on each other. Governments come after the fact.
They certainly have strong ideas of territory, but do any animals really have any functional notions of property, meaning moveable chattels, i.e. not including real property? Would one crow fully respect the rights of another crow to a shiny thing, and not steal it the first time Crow #2 has his back turned?
Well, yes and no. Most animals do not have things they carry around, usually it is territory and food they are going to eat now. Many types of animals respect the ownership there, not challenging a current owner generally. It gets a little more complicated with food stored for later. Lots of animals do that, but often in e.g. their burrows or dens, so is that chattel or territory? Off the top of my head I can think of Butcher birds that store dead things on thorn trees and a type of American wood pecker that stores acorns in trees, either of which might share the trees with other non-family members and thus be a good example of respecting ownership of movable goods without the first party being there, but I have not seen anything written about them. (Haven't looked too hard either, admittedly.) There are lots of studies of how long birds will fight over created property like nests, however, and those point towards a sense of ownership, one that changes with the amount of time spent away from the nest.
To the crow point though. You have actually already nailed the relevant part to understanding property in your example. Crow 1 (Heckle) sees something interesting, decides he wants it, but waits till Crow 2 (Jeckle) leaves to take it. Why? Because Heckle recognizes the thing is special to Jeckle, and Jeckle will be very angry if Heckle tries to take it and strike out. That is actually huge when it comes to understanding property. The recognition that an object is special to another individual, and that individual will fight you over it, and deciding not to fight over the object based on that understanding gets you 95% of the way. That is what pushes to developing norms of who owns what and when, such that everyone agrees on what is special about some objects relative to other people but not all objects. The last 5% is realizing that if Jeckle comes back and finds his coin missing and you have it he is going to come after you, and deciding not to steal it then. Humans don't always get that last 5% right, so let's not hold it against crows. I can't stress enough though how important the recognition that a thing is important to another being in a way other things are not is such that an animal will expect a different behavior if they take it. That is literally all you need to generate group behavior that minimizes violence through a norm of "possessors get to keep it." (Or the opposite, but anti-property rights are very rare in nature, <10% of observed species/things combinations.)
A more concise way of putting it is that "stealing" presumes ownership. If an animal recognizes that it has to wait till another animal's back is turned before it takes something, it is recognizing that the other animal has claimed the object as his own.
(I honestly don't know if crows do respect ownership of little shiny bits like that, but I am inclined to think they do since they spend a lot of time away from their nests, they know where each others' nests are, and are very clever about recognizing things over long periods of time. Those three things together should lead to norms of "once it is in the nest, it is his", but I don't know. Crows are super good at hiding their nests; so far as I know no one has managed to located and study their home lives.)
Hmm, well, I appreciate the careful elucidation of the issues here, but I think I'm still not convinced of this. I would rule out immediately any case where territory is an explanation, since we definitely know most animals have a finely developed sense of that.
I think we can also rule out the case of avoiding taking things for fear of the present owner's reaction -- again, we can agree that I would not try to take a piece of meat from a lion simply out of fear of the lion's reaction to being deprived of his current thing he wants, and not necessarily because he or it has a sense of "property."
What I would say is that among humans "property" consists not just of an extension of territory -- I can own things even if I leave them on your property, for example, and leaving them does not transfer ownership to you even a little bit. It also doesn't consist of simple fear of the present owner's reaction, since we also imagine there is some "right" to be secure in your belongings that does not depend on fear of the owner -- most people feel bad taking candy from a baby.
We even think there's something wrong with taking things from someone who doesn't object that much -- we get mad at people who exploit the gullibility or generosity of others.
That is, in humans there seems to be this special category of thing: it's not territory, and it's not squabbling over resources, it seems to be some kind of extension of self, like my property is some kind of extra finger or toe.
The reason I wonder about animals is because I would wonder this is a natural extension of our unusual ability to use tools. A tool-using species would quite naturally attach a lot of importance to tools, and if the tools can represent a significant investment of personal resources to make, it's easy to see how they could become seen as an extension of self, so that a hominid would resent theft of its chipping flint as much as a lion might resent theft of its teeth or claws.
But there are other tool-using species, although none like us, and I wonder if there are some traces of this chattel ownership behaviour there.
In preemptive response to Pycea and Pete asking for evidence of animals' ownership norms, this paper has a review of the lit as of 4-5 years ago. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319291164_Endowment_Effects_in_Evolutionary_Game_Theory_Enhancing_Property_Rights
I wrote a paper with Bryan Caplan a bit before that regarding the existence of property rights in black markets, i.e. when governments explicitly say you don't have rights yet ownership is understood and functions normally and how the endowment effect and first party enforcement goes a long way towards maintaining those norms, but I can't find a handy online source (didn't get published.) The above paper covers some of the same ground, although it focuses on modeling and simulation of things a lot more.
I agree that it's immoral to take someone else's property. I agree that there's some instinct in lower animals on ownership and fairness, albeit one that is often ignored when the bigger dog wants what the smaller dog has.
But it seems like the word "right" is acting as a semantic stop sign, i.e., something that's a sacred idea so the conversation has an immediate full stop. So if we taboo the word "rights", what am I actually talking about here?
I am talking about social norms and either cooperating or defecting from them, regardless on if that norm existed before the society was formally established.
My claim is that we have social norms that limit our actions. This is cooperation, and is done to prevent anarchy. Most of us aren't the big dog, and would prefer to live in a world where the bigger dog can't take our stuff. That's a near-universal instinct, and so can exist before a formal society. Other norms are developed slowly via the decision making process of the society.
If someone ignores a social norm, then they are "defecting" from society, and should expect consequences (being "defected" to in return). Secession is a special case of group defection, and so the larger community may want a norm against that to 1. prevent coercion via threats of secession, and 2. maintain the strength of the norms. However, if the smaller group is already being mistreated, it's natural for them to say "screw this society" and fight to either exit or create a new norm.
That's just it though, the bigger dog very rarely ignores prior possession when it wants what the smaller dog has. The sort of behavior described by "the bigger animal takes what it wants, when it wants, by force over the objections of the other" happens extremely rarely. We humans like to think it is the natural way, but it really isn't.
Social norms (rights) are not extant to prevent anarchy, but to minimize conflict. The two things are not the same.
A social norm that requires staying in the group is likely to cause violence, not prevent it. That makes me rather skeptical of it as a true social norm as opposed to an imposed desire of a ruler. Letting people who are unhappy leave and do their own thing is a de-escalation move, and often is forced via exile for just that reason. Letting people leave the group allows you to avoid having to agree on norms but still trade or interact, or just shun them and no longer interact. Not letting them leave is likely to make them fight to exit as you say. Considering that in nature we typically see animal groups split as they get to a large enough size, and very rarely does the group fight over whether it happens* it seems a lot more likely that secession is a way to avoid conflict, not a cause.
* I can only think of one example in one species of this split being contested and turning bloody. That was with chimpanzees, where there was some issue with the leadership, apparently the two potential alphas being evenly matched, but one was a nut and the other more popular. The more popular one took his group and left, and importantly most of the females went with him. The less popular one, against all precedent we had seen, waged war on the new group and kidnapped the females and killed the males. I don't remember it super well, but that's the gist. If I remember it was Jane Goodall who documented it, and everyone else in the primate community said she made it up, but it seemed she was in the right. It's been a while though, so I might be conflating different chimp war stories. Chimps are horrifying little monsters, humans without the moral compass, so I don't really read much about them.
EDIT: here's the link to the war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War I had it wrong perhaps, the splinter group was the crazy chimp, not the popular one. The description I had read was rather longer than the wiki article, so maybe there was more detail, or erroneous detail *shrug*.
Since other commenters got their sites mentioned, it's worth noting that I've been blogging at https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/ since 2007.
Police sometimes get away with killing people, but they don't ALWAYS (there have been some high-profile recent convictions). The United States ALWAYS gets away with whatever it wants to do.
Mencius Moldbug relied on few people being willing to read up on history and argue with him, but I think it's worth noting that his perspective is not so simple as saying the pre-WW1 norm was satisfactory. He would also include the Greek War of Independence against the Ottomans as an example of the thing he's complaining about where it was supported by "the international community".
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/04/open-letter-pt-2-more-historical/
Eyeballing the chart from here, it seems the bloody early 20th century outpaced the 19th:
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-years
Revisiting your argument with Caplan on arbitrary deploring, he seems even more right now. The "Current Thing" is Ukraine, and people are just ignoring what Saudi Arabia is doing to Yemen (with US support!), and your own example of China's treatment of Uighurs. What people pay attention to is much more arbitrary than the enforcement priorities of a police department. As Robin Hanson would put it, we consume news to have common conversation-fodder around the water cooler, and none of us have an individual incentive to focus on the things that are actually most important from a utilitarian perspective.
I think you misunderstand the extent to which what is happening in Ukraine is a large-scale re-alignment of the global system and not just "another local war".
1. It involves two nuclear states with opposing interests.
2. It involves a country that has a large empire-building faction and mentality. There is no chance whatsoever that Saudi Arabia wants to annex Yemen and then Qatar and then Iraq etc. Saddam tried that and it didn't work, due to the international norms that Russia is violating right now.
Russia is essentially proposing a RETURN to the 19th century and early-20th century norm of empires literally annexing their neighbours and of every country needing to become an empire if it wants to feel safe.
There are so many commentaries out there that lay out the rational reason that "Ukraine is different than Yemem" that I'm surprised this meme still persists among educated people.
Russia is one nuclear state. Does Ukraine qualify as the other because it has nuclear power?
Not just early 20th century. Israel has been mentioned already, but India seized smaller territories like Goa, Hyderabad & Junagarh and Indonesia seized East Timor & part of New Guinea (they were less successful when it came to Malaysia). North Vietnam successfully invaded and took over South Vietnam. You could argue that the US opposed this, but everyone accepted that once the Saigon government fell that was the end of things.
Saudi Arabia certainly doesn't have the means to take over Iraq. Yemen is another story.
Saudi Arabia also blockaded Qatar when it tried to have an independent foreign policy, it enthusiastically backed its proxies in Syria, it funds mosques promoting a very particular and frankly intolerant vision of Islam all around the world. It's at least as enthusiastic an empire builder as Russia and shouldn't be dismissed in that regard.
One issue with the "let unhappy groups in democracies secede" is that large states will inevitable get smaller and smaller as the exit option becomes a norm for unhappy groups. So in the US, we might see CA, NY, MA split to form a left country. TX might go, and so on. The more small states we begin to see this means we also see more borders and more potential for wars over borders. One reason there has been so little war in N America post US Civil War is the consolidation of what might be 30-50 countries into a single sovereign entity with strong norms and processes hindering violent or non-violent secession. In Europe the trend is the opposite and we have yet to see the end of interstate war.
I don't mind that issue. Democracies hardly ever fight each other and as long as the small countries are democracies, they probably won't fight. Central and South America has tons of small countries and very few wars. My bigger concern is if democracies get smaller and smaller and autocracies get bigger and bigger, RealPolitik will favor the autocracies.
There was a "soccer war" in Central America, but that was decades ago.
Oklahoma and Texas did fight a border war. However small states and small armies commit smaller atrocities.
I think Scott stating that because he believes that sometime around 2014 54% of Crimeans wanted to be part of Russia the world should redraw its maps and give territory over is, well, kind of weird.
That's it? A simple majority on a poll?
You don't even have any super majority rule on this topic?
The international community deciding that SSRs can secede freely but ASSRs can only leave with the permission of the SSR they were (often quite nominally, in the Soviet period) under has caused an awful lot of trouble in the former Soviet Union. We'd have a far more peaceful '90s and a lot fewer people stuck in limbo if we had just let Crimea and other post-Soviet regions in their position just leave.
That might be the case, I'm just saying his logic in the post doesn't make much sense to me.
We can't redraw international borders every time 51% of people in [a community] decide they want to be somewhere else. 51% is a weak threshold. I think there is a lot of sense to requiring super majorities for major decisions that affect a community, and secession is in that I think undoubtedly.
>Is there any reason not to go with the greatest good for the greatest number here (and allow the secession)? Maybe (counterfactual) India is very liberal and both Hindus and Muslims in that subregion have lots of rights, but if the region were allowed to secede it would become a Muslim fundamentalist state that oppressed its minorities.
The partition of India was actually a thing that happened, and it led to something like 20 million people being displaced and a million people dying? I think this an example of what you might mean by "transaction costs", but that description makes me think of like, "annoying inconvenience" as opposed to "mass displacement of individuals and families being torn apart".
To be fair the partition happened in the 1940s when racial tensions were running really high and we had worse norms around like, not just straight up killing your neighbors because they don't share your religion, and I don't really know enough about south asian dynamics to really speak to whether it might be "better" if the partition happened today instead of 70 years ago.
I did look up India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh on the Human Development Index. There's probably a bunch of confounding effects wrt access to natural resources, internal politics, etc, but it is in fact the case that India has the highest index score (0.647), with Bangladesh only slightly behind (0.614) and Pakistan trailing at 0.56. It's definitely very possible that India would have a worse HDI score if Bangladesh and Pakistan remained part of it though.
"The one that bothers me the most is Israeli settlements - there ought to be some rule against sneaking in under cover of night, setting up a town on someone else’s land, and then seceding and saying it’s yours."
This totally fabricates the reality of the "settlements" in the West Bank. They are what we in the US would call condominium developments or housing subdivisions. They were constructed legally on lawfully acquired land. The Palestinians continue to insist that if they are granted sovereign rights over the West Bank, it must be Judenrein.
Attempts by Israelis to create fly by night settlements have been aborted by the Israeli government which has shut them down and removed the settlers promptly.
Most of the people who make your argument are simply Jew haters whose real problem with Jew in the West Bank is that they are Jews. it is depressing to see a Jew echo their propaganda.
To my knowledge Israel does not support land grabs in the West Bank. If you have contrary information you should share it with us.
Well the perspective Walter is sharing here, which I have not heard before (admittedly I have not followed developments in Israel closely in many years), is that these settlements are not being built on territory currently under the control of the PA, just territory the PA *wants* to be in a future 2 state solution.
IF, big IF, that's the case, then the points your making about no existing housing no roads etc are kind of pointless. In the US we build in territory with no roads all the time. We don't need to justify it.
The whole situation in Israel is so sad. I wish half the energy spent so far was spent on forcing changes to the Israeli state to be more inclusive rather than in separatists. There is no state in the region that offers its citizens a life anywhere near what Israel can offer its citizens. There is no rational argument that says Palestinians would be better off in their own state than as equal citizens of Israel.
It is the Palestinian political movement that has nurtured separatism. Their claims are ethno-religious. Basically that Jews should not be in any land in Dar al Islam except as dihimmi. They have never wanted to be citizens of a liberal state. Nor have they agreed to live in a separate state at peace with Israel. It is beyond the power of Israel to appease them other than by ceasing to exist. It will not happen.
Israel will not become more inclusive because it has repeatedly proclaimed itself an ethno-religious state.
To provide a bit of context here: a large majority of Israeli settlements were established in the 1970s and 80s. In the last twenty years, there have been only two new settlements - Rehelim and Brukhin - with a combined population around 2000, or 0.4% of the total settlement population. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_settlements
I used to think so, but my impression is that these settlements are basically governed by the Israeli government rather than the Palestinians.
So what? the housing developments are occupied by Israeli citizens in territory that is governed by Israel. Why is that a problem?
The idea is these places were under PLO authority, but then a settlement gets built and it becomes Israeli territory.
The housing developments are not in areas that have been granted to the PA (The PLO is a terrorist organization not part of the PA). The PA wants them in a future settlement.
I feel like the issue brought up by 1 here can be elegantly solved by requiring that changes to the status quo receive supermajority votes.
In the case of the Confederacy, I think you missed Evan P's argument. The Slave owners were not a majority of whites across the South. Where they were decisively out numbered by non slave owning small holders, such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, those states did not join the Confederacy. Even in the Confederacy, succession would probably have been defeated by a combination of blacks and non-slaveowning whites.
It would be convenient if things were that way, but is that the real solution? If it turns out that a true vote did go in favor of secession, would that really change anything?
The issue is that liberal* political theory has no way of specifying the boundary conditions of a political body. It is a method for assessing the justness of an existing political order. But, its fundamental base case is a political order that comes into being on an island with no history inhabited only by free, rational, and informed adults.
I have been reading, "The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999" by Timothy Snyder (2004) https://www.amazon.com/dp/030010586X in order to get some historical perspective on the current crisis. It is instructive. The boundaries, constitutions, and ethnic compositions of the states of Eastern Europe were created by acts of policy and events of war and chaos which happened since World War I. No political theory I know of, liberal or non-liberal, can explain or justify the situation we are in.
None of that excuses or justifies the behavior of the Russian State which is simply criminal terrorism. They must be defeated and cut off from civilized society until such time, if ever, as they have abjured and punished the criminal thugs who are their autocrats.
*liberal theories are those of the types first laid out by thinkers such as Hobbes, Spinoza, Grotius, Locke, Rousseau, Smith, and Mill. Compare and contrast Royalism, Communism, Fascism, and Islamism. It is not to be confused with the dog's breakfast of ideas propounded by contemporary "liberals" or "progressives".
If we define the "slave-owning class" as those that owned 50 or more slaves, i.e. big plantation owners, who we see in popular media, then I've read scholarly estimates that there were fewer than 8,000 of these across the entire Confederacy (which had a population at that time of ~9 million).
IIRC a slave represented a capital value of ~$1,000 in then current money anywhere from $20K to $100K in 2021 money. A 50 slave owner would have been a millionaire in modern money and were 1% of the white population.
Sure, my point is that however you look at it, the slave-owning class that we imagine was thick on the ground in the Confederacy, and the attitudes of with which we tend to paint the entire South, were actually very few.
It's as if China assumed all of the United States were well represented by the attitudes and nature of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. We would pretty naturally object.
> If you want to make the case that democracy necessarily returns non-abhorrent results, I’d be very interested to hear that argument.
Only the not-very-helpful argument that something done with majority support clearly must not have been considered abhorrent by the majority at that time, and that this is independent of whether we today think that it should have been.
> I think “makes the world better” is always your ultimate criterion, but in real life you try to have simple rules to address disagreements. In some sense I want whether some guy goes to jail to depend on whether it “makes the world better” for him to be there, but in an actual society it’s easier to have some laws where you go to jail if you break them.
I have a few responses to this.
First, judges do in fact have some discretion over what sentences to hand out, so to some extent they can take into account the specifics of the case in ways that the law couldn't anticipate.
Second, the law does not consist of simple rules. People go to law school for several years to prepare themselves to be able to figure out what the law says about any given situation, and then they end up in arguments about it in court. So it actually has some things in common with how I was proposing international agreements regarding when a territory has the right to self-determination would have to work. As a relatively tame example of complexity in law, criminal law builds in an exception to the usual rules when the perpetrator is insane. You may object that this is principled, but I think that insofar as making special cases to the rules for individuals to take into account how different individuals will react to rules seems principled and making special cases to the rules for communities to take into account how different communities will react does not, this is at least partially because our moral intuitions are trained primarily on interactions between individuals rather than on interactions between communities.
Third, predictability is part of the point of criminal law, so it can function as deterrence. This is relatively less important in the case of resolving territorial disputes than it is in criminal justice, so I think having more well-specified rules for the latter is justified.
"As for the second paragraph, I’m imagining some situation like - India is mostly Hindu. But some subregion of India is mostly Muslim. But some guy in that subregion is a Hindu. Perhaps the subregion is sad being ruled by Hindus, but that guy is happy. If we let the subregion get independence, the majority will be happy, but that one Hindu will be sad. Is there any reason not to go with the greatest good for the greatest number here (and allow the secession)?"
If the Muslims of the subregion can demand that the one Hindu submit to Muslim rule, based solely on the principle of "majority rules", why can't the collective Hindu population of India demand that the Muslims should submit to Hindu rule based on the same principle?
Because it's not based solely on majority rules. This whole discussion has been about trying to find principles to determine which subgroups have valid claims and by what criteria to enforce self determination, e.g. majority rules.
Yes, and Scott's ostensible answer to that question is that it should be based solely on the principle of "majority rules", hence my response.
In the next paragraph, Scott talks about letting them secede based on the greatest good for the greatest number, not the principle of majority rules. He talks more about his stance in the last paragraphs of the post, which again, can't really be simplified down to "majority rules".
It's clear from the examples used, both in this post and the preceding one, that Scott is treating "greatest good for the greatest number" as interchangeable with "majority rules" in this context. Otherwise, how is Putin taking over Crimea supposed to promote the greatest good for the greatest number?
The penultimate paragraph acknowledges that this might not be enforceable in practice, but still endorses it as a philosophical principle.
If the vast majority of Crimeans wanted to join Russia (determined with free elections etc etc), then you could say it should be allowed by utilitarianism. And as you noted, while that's majority rule for Crimea, it's not majority rule for Ukraine. It seems weird to simplify Scott's stance to "majority rules" when his hypotheticals illustrate the exact issue you're pointing out?
But that just gets back to the same question I originally asked -- why does utilitarianism = majority rule when it's a majority of Crimeans, but not if it's a majority of Ukrainians? I don't get the sense that Scott has a complex reasoning for this which I'm simplifying; it seems more like he's advocating a very simple stance and then avoiding the logical implications of it.
Furthermore there is no evidence that the "Vast majority" of Crimeans wanted to join Russia, except for a poll with < 40% turnout that occurred at gun point one time.
Every other poll has shown that it's pretty 50/50 split. Something Scott acknowledged, while still claiming that that's enough to justify secession.
So yeah, he is making several arguments for a simple majority on secession which is ludicrous for a number of reasons, stability chief among them.
"I think if ethical people happen to be in charge of a country, they have a (weak, potentially balanced by other things) obligation to let people leave, even if they’re not especially oppressed."
That's also the conclusion that Canada's Supreme Court came to:
"Under the Canadian Constitution (and with Quebec being a party to it since its inception), unilateral secession was not legal. However, should a referendum decide in favour of independence, the rest of Canada "would have no basis to deny the right of the government of Quebec to pursue secession." Negotiations would have to follow to define the terms under which Quebec would gain independence, should it maintain that goal."
Also: "The court stated in its opinion that, under international law, the right to secede was meant for peoples under a colonial rule or foreign occupation. Otherwise, so long as a people has the meaningful exercise of its right to self-determination within an existing nation state, there is no right to secede unilaterally."
According to Wikipedia: "The decision has been regarded as a model discussion in international law for questions of separation between national political entities, particularly in relation to the results of a referendum."
Both the separatists and the federalists were happy with the decision, for different reasons.
Putin's whole justification for going into Ukraine is his story that "Ukrainization" is equivalent to ethnic violence against ethnically Russian citizens of Ukraine. In other words, his argument is that he's invoking the exception "when they've been persecuted by their country. In that exceptional case, they have the right to secede."
(not that I believe he's arguing in good faith, or that I agree with it)
If you establish the norm that people who are internally repressed get an exception to the 'current borders doctrine', then you also have to answer the question of who gets to enforce the exception. In this case, Putin said, "I see an exemption from the rule. I'm going ahead with enforcing it." And the rest of the international community said, "Nope. We're arming the opposition."
... and we're back to realpolitik.
This has been a consistent gripe Putin has leveled at the US. The Americans establish a 'doctrine' of some kind that fits a situation where intervention is what they want. Sometimes it feels VERY ad hoc. They then say, "... and of course we'll be the ones leading the enforcement action, with some contributions from a multi-national coalition to add the veneer of legitimacy". (And if France doesn't support us, we'll rename them 'Freedom Fries'.)
Russia does the same thing and even gets their US-hating buddies to sign onto the action to give it the veneer of legitimacy. The US & Friends reject that as naked aggression, ignoring the veneer of international support as illegitimate. Putin responds with a Goose/Gander argument, but West says "it's different when we do it". In the end, the argument isn't about what the norms should be. The real question is: Who gets to enforce international norms?
I've not heard a good justification for that, since many countries that want self-determinization don't support the US-led coalition - and often BECAUSE they want a sovereignty or form of government the US refuses to support. There's just this default assumption that some coalitions (mostly those led by the US) are Just and others (anything led by Russia or China) are Evil. Where's the rule here?
I feel these arguments are traps.
It is "whataboutism" at a global scale literally justifying tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of displacements.
Let's talk about several major differences:
1. When Russia said "we believe we have reasons to enforce peace in the Donbas due to violations", where was the international presentation? Where were the international inspectors or peacekeepers sent in to see what's going on?
Did they organize and present at the UN, like the US did with the WMDs?
No, they did not. As far as I can tell they have not prepared any evidence for outside scrutiny.
2. The US went into Iraq and decapitated the government. The actual invasion of Iraq faced little civilian resistance. Yes, the collateral damage and the decade of civil wars after was a disaster. No we should not have gone in the first place. WMD intelligence was bad. All this is true.
We DID NOT LEVEL ENTIRE CITIES AND BOMB CIVILIANS INDISCRIMINATELY.
Civilians did not rise up in the streets and stand in front of our weapons.
George Bush didn't write essays on how Iraqis aren't people and are really just "Little Americans".
George Bush Senior, in the first Iraq War, didn't illegally occupy provinces in Iraq to later use to launch assaults on it.
ALL THESE THINGS MATTER A LOT.
I get it. The US did a bad thing in Iraq II. Really bad.
What the flying f*** does that have to do with the right to slaughter Ukrainians today?
NOTHING.
If there was a real case in the Donbas I'm still waiting for my goddamn power point showing me the case and the stupid UN observers to go in and investigate and everyone to sound all uncertain.
At least make an effort.
You can't just wave your hands and kill people and blame it on Bush Jr 20 years ago.
I sympathize with your position, but I'm still struggling to make it work. Nothing you said changes that for me. Say five years from now the US government falls to a Putin-style dictator, totally willing to use the last 50 years of US rhetorical justifications for whatever they want to do. Meanwhile, the Russians have ousted Putin and taken a strong turn to democracy. The two countries are still opposed to each other, making the same arguments, but the role of Justice is reverse. How should we know it?
I think many of your points are great, so long as you're assuming the US perspective represents the Good Guys and the Russian is the Bad Guys. And I sympathize with where you end up - I don't see Putin as a good-faith actor either. But this is EXACTLY my point! You complain about whataboutism? That's what Putin is leaning on. It's what he uses to justify his invasions, and not just in Ukraine. The US says, "This is okay to do because of [Rationale #4]" but that's not a consistent principle, because bad actors can absolutely use that to oppress their neighbors. Unless you're willing to admit that multiple past US interventions were examples of the US doing exactly what Russia is doing now - and that the US deserves the exact same censure for past actions as Russia deserves, you haven't enumerated a consistent principle.
Look at Georgia, where the Russians needled that internal conflict for years, then when they realized it was finally coming to a head they amassed troops on the border. They sent in 'peacekeeping' forces, marched all the way to Tbilisi, and marched through Abkhazia while they were at it. Was it justified in Western eyes? No. Was it supported by nearly EVERY corollary Putin had learned from Iraq and Afghanistan? Absolutely. Indeed, it was cleaner, quicker, and had fewer civilian casualties, so in Putin's mind he made a BETTER case for intervention in that country. Same with Crimea, and maybe call it a wash in the Donbass. And THAT's the problem.
Let's take a closer look at those 'major differences' you pointed to. Do they work, or is this just more post-hoc justification?
Must effect regime change: Like the CIA did with Mosaddegh in Iran back in the 50's, or like they did in Iraq in the 2000's? This seems like an arbitrary rule (post-hoc rationalization), and not one that will necessarily produce the best outcomes. If we can avoid outright regime change, isn't that ideal? For example, the Russian action in Georgia was much more short-lived, probably because they had a more limited scope of operations than the US did in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bush Sr.'s operation in Iraq back in the 90's seems a better template to model policy around, where he specifically avoided regime change and escalating the conflict. Even so, ousting the Taliban (who controlled large swaths of Afghanistan before the invasion and who are now the de jure government) didn't exactly happen in Afghanistan, so this is in no way a consistent principle to establish as the Rule of a Just Enforcer.
No indiscriminate bombing: The US did bomb hospitals, homes, and a lot of other 'collateral' sites. There were a lot of 'mistakes' made, where a target was thought to be an insurgent base at the time. Minimal reconnaissance would have avoided these accidents, but it's war and there's not always time to be that careful. You have to hit the terrorists before they catch wise and scurry away. Sure, the people inside died and the intent behind the ordinance does little to assuage their anger and grief. But it wasn't 'indiscriminate' so much as 'accidental'.
Russians may claim mistakes were made too, but we should only trust when the US makes that claim, not when the Russians do. After all, losing generals left and right is no excuse for making mistakes. The US gets a pass, though, because ... war is tough to get it right every time? If we're only willing to call what is clearly an immoral bombing 'accidental' when the side we agree with is doing the bombing, we can't say we've established a consistent principle. Accidents happen, yes, but if you're Wrong you should be held to account, whereas if you're in the Right you get a pass. If we can admit that some US bombings were unjustified, we can't use that as the Principle we use to identify the Just Enforcer without rejecting entire invasions of coalition forces over the past two decades. (Which spanned more than just Bush Jr's administration.)
We didn't level cities to the ground: Sure, 200k people died, large swaths of the country were bombed and destroyed in the fighting. Iraq it wasn't exactly a CLEAN operation, but what do you expect? We had a job to do and we did it (then we changed the mission and continued the occupation, but it's okay because we were in the Right). You can't expect war to be clean and easy or free of mistakes, and if your initial objectives have to change because you meet more than anticipated resistance from the locals you can't lay the blame at the feet of the coalition forces. They went in for the right reasons, and then they couldn't just leave things as-is. You break it, you bought it. And part of buying it means pacifying the resistance. People on the ground sometimes make the wrong decisions. It's war and atrocities like My Lai happen despite our best efforts to Do Better next time. The important thing is we're trying to be good, in spite of our mistakes, and that's what matters. You know we're trying to be good, too, because we make official statements telling the world as much.
Meanwhile, every atrocity committed by Russian troops is directly attributable to control by Putin himself. Sure, the man can't keep a general alive for more than a week, and his military are almost certainly frustrated having to fight an insurgency and therefore reacting in anger against the locals - exactly like Other armies who've fought insurgents - but every unjustified death should be laid at Putin's feet. Not Bush, or Obama, or Trump, or many past US presidents. There were extenuating circumstances in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and a dozen other places around the world. But Putin can't claim extenuating circumstances he is in the Wrong.
Civilians didn't rise up in the streets: Somehow, after 20 years of eliminating 'terrorists' in Afghanistan we still had 20 year old terrorists to fight in Afghanistan right up until the end. We shouldn't think of these people as 'freedom fighters', despite what many of them claimed about reclaiming their stolen sovereignty. Because the US should get to label their opponents, and the US should get to label Russia's opponents as well? If the people object to your occupation of their country and you're in the Wrong, we'll call those people civilians rising up in the streets. If you're in the Right and ordinary people arm themselves with the express purpose of ejecting your invading force from their homeland we'll call them terrorists and justify another decade or two to 'root them out', even into the next generation of civilians rising up in the streets.
UN justification: This is probably your most consistent point, because it's something the US clearly did and the Russians clearly didn't do. It's still not very convincing. In this case, I think you could say your doctrine is "unless you present your case to the UN you don't get to be the enforcer".
You admit that the US's WMD argument was bad, and that the justification was wrong, but you're not willing to go so far as to put the action on par with what Russia is doing right now in Ukraine - an illegal and immoral invasion that should be condemned outright by the international community and that should have lasting consequences to the offending regime.
"Going in for the wrong reasons" is okay, so long as you at least tried to make your case to the right forum in the international community. Not that the case has to be accepted by the nations with permanent veto power on the Security Council (US, China, and Russia aren't ever going to agree on many cases like these), but if you don't prepare the PPT, you forfeit the right to be the enforcer. Sure, Russia made a pro forma and totally illegitimate argument for intervention. It didn't need to be correct, any more than the US's illegitimate arguments for intervention in the past. It's not that their argument was bad. The problem is they failed to submit the proper forms.
Several of the comments above set conditions for legitimate secession that had not been satisfied in the 1993 split of Czechoslovakia. As a Czech, I'm curious: Will anyone here bite the bullet and actually argue that the no-drama separation of the Czechs and Slovaks was somehow wrong or illegitimate? And if you won't bite that bullet, what counterfactual would the Czech and Slovak situation have had to satisfy before you start seeing it as wrong?
Yeah, we are a weird case. Above I had to made up separate category justifiyng secession just for us. At least I don't know about any other real world example of it
Maybe someone has mentioned this already, but this is a pretty interesting framework for thinking about pandemic restrictions - take mask mandates as a proxy. You don't even need full self-determination - you only need the right to require others to wear masks, with also perhaps the right to deny others the right to decide if others have to wear masks.
Many red states have fought vigorously against nation-wide masking rules. In my own state, the legislature was very active about saying that many things ought to be decided at the state level - like masking, where unique circumstances should allow for unique state-level solutions.
But then there are blue counties in my state that enacted county-wide mask mandates. The state stepped in, saying, no - you don't have that authority. This caused the blue county officials to call the red state officials hypocrites. If the counties had the right of self-determination in this question, then perhaps they should have been able to enact their own measures. But if the right of self determination ends at the state, then that is that. But if counties have the right of self-determination regarding mask mandates, what about smaller groups?
What if there is a town within that county that does not want a mask mandate? Do they have the right to reject the county-wide rule? Could they also set up a rule that no one in their town could require mask mandates?
But what if there is a school district within that town that wants to have a mask mandate? Can they enact a mask-mandate? Does a school district have the right to self-determination on its own turf? There are, after all, many district rules/policies that do not apply to the cities in which those districts are located.
But what if a school within that district disagrees and does not want to follow the district masking rule? Do they have the right to so choose?
But what if a teacher within that school wants a mandate? Can they enforce it for their class only?
But what if an individual within that class does not want to wear a mask? Can they not do so? Do they have the right of self-determination in this instance?
It seems I saw arguments going both ways at any of these levels. It makes me conclude, as others have stated, there there are no universal principles of self-determination. But it is still interesting to see when certain rights are granted and when they are not, and what sort of groups/governments feel they have the 'right' to determine this for others.
> Otherwise as soon as oil gets discovered, the oil-rich province decides it would rather secede than share the loot. This was, of course, a large part of the background in Biafra and the Second Sudanese Civil War, and versions of this seem (as far as I can tell) to be relevant to other places, from East Timor
In all 3 of these cases the seceding entity could cite cultural, linguistic and religious differences that made them in effect a separate people with a separate national identity.
Am I the only one that thinks "coordination problems" is a pretty poor justification for "shut up and obey?"
"if it had been a stronger and more popular country like the US, maybe they could have gotten away with it"
maybe?!
I think that it's worth making a difference between secession and transfer of territory, since many of the examples used are the latter and those are conceptually different things in my opinion.
To avoid the emotions of current events, let's look at history (but of course there are modern analogies). If you're living in 1938 Sudatenland and desperately want to be part of "Germany for Germans" and not be limited by Czechoslovakian government, there is always an option for you to just go across the border to Germany. If you're living in 1916 Ireland and desperately want to be part of "Ireland for Irish" and not be limited by UK government, then your only option is a bloody revolt because otherwise there is no place for Irish people to have self-determination.
Those two situations are not the same, and so whatever justifications or criteria are considered appropriate for people who actually want self-determination do not necessarily apply for countries wanting to carve out parts of their neighbors just because some of their people live there.
The rule is that both secession and accession are fine but all parties involved get veto power. The only exception is that you lose your veto if you are violating human rights - this grants the right to annex/invade Nazi Germany and the confederacy, and grants the right for persecuted minorities to secede, and also means that when countries like the USSR want to break up amicably, they can, as can countries who want to unify (like west and east Germany).
'Saying "might makes right" is ignoring this valuable and powerful system.'
No, it isn't. It exemplifies it. Norms are created and enforced by groups of states who are powerful and persuasive enough to do so. Last I checked Haiti didn't have a seat on the UN Security Council. How is that not simply another version of "might makes right."
Also it's pretty ironic to say "might makes right ignores this...mighty system." I guess it works if you are really talking about two different kinds of "might."
I would respond that there's only one kind of might. Everything is downstream, ultimately, of economic productivity. Even morality. The reason the US won the cold war is that we out-economied the USSR. That's why the current international norm is "self determination through democracy." If the Soviets had won then the norm would have been "property is theft" or whatever.
Military might derives from economic capacity, so to first order I'm kinda ok with countries duking it out because I think the world should be maximally productive (as Tyler Cowen argued in Stubborn Attachments, economic development aliases for pretty much everything people think of as good). The catch there is you can have some strongman sacrifice long-term economic development for short-term military power and wind up with more-productive people governed by less-productive dictators. Plus you don't want too much of your economic growth tied up in costly military buildup. Of course a similar risk exists with norms too (got Woke?), so I think it's probably optimal to have an occasional military conflict act as a safety-valve on nonsensical ideological lock-in. Probably right the equilibrium is some sort of seesaw between force-driven and norm-driven modes that swaps every few decades.
There's probably some evolutionary model for this that relates to fitness signalling. A buck having large antlers is alluring to females because it signals health and strength. But you don't want to let males game that system by over-allocating calories to antler growth at the expense of, say, muscles. So it's important that bucks still fight each other for dominance to validate that their fitness signal actually maps to physical vitality.
Yes, I actually agree with you. I was trying to be charitable, as some people do try to distinguish between direct force and...well, sort of indirect force, the kind that you are saying won the Cold War without firing a shot. But I agree ultimately the distinction is less sharp than one might hope. People definitely suffer and sometimes die as a result of economic warfare, so to speak -- at least, all those who angrily lay the deaths by starvation or easily preventable disease of Third World children at the feet of First World economic selfishness would say so.
And, as you say, behind actual warfare often lies economic might, and (like the deer) we have methods of signaling to each other our might and intentions, so that many conflicts do get resolved by the mere threat of force -- something that comes from economic might.
I'd still like to think it's possible to settle things by force, as necessary, but without people actually being killed in large numbers in terrible ways, which is what war is like. More realistic war games, in which would-be enemies both participate?
For a while in the 80s and 90s it almost seemed like that was possible, that there would never again be a real shooting war in the First World, because the consequences had just become too awful. Not so much anymore. I'm very impressed with how thinkable it has become to a lot of people.
I wrote up a very long reply to two arguments people brought up here, that states have self determination when individuals (or small groups) do not, and efficiency is what we should be using to determine the size of states and whether secession makes sense. The short version is:
1: States do not control people, they control land, and that reality of how they behave does not line up with how we think about people having self determination.
2: If you are arguing against secession on the basis of small states not being efficient enough, right after you describe how you are determining efficiency and what is enough you need to start arguing for states breaking up because they are too big to be efficient and lay out when that happens.
The long version is here: https://dochammer.substack.com/p/self-determination-secession-empire?s=w
James Scott wrote that conceiving of governments as being based on control of land is a Eurocentric view, and that in southeast Asia (the focus of his study) states have instead focused on controlling people.
Do you have a link or a citation there? That seems like a very incorrect claim, given what I know of the history of China, Japan and India. It would be interesting to see if some of the smaller areas had a different standard.
(Although I admit, saying something so stupid as control of land is a Eurocentric view makes me think he doesn't know his ass from his elbow.)
"The Art of Not Being Governed". Not including Japan or India, and only some of the mountainous parts of China.
Ahh THAT James Scott, that makes a bit more sense. I will give him a bit more credit than I was first disposed to, although that "Eurocentric" claim is patently ridiculous. There definitely are tribal groups that worry less about land and more about who is in the group and who is out, but they are vastly different from conceptions of modern states. The distinction is more between entirely different ways of life, more nomadic vs vaguely settled (whether farming or hunting based). Everywhere people are vaguely settled and form groups larger than a tribe or clan the focus is on controlling land, not what people are in the group.
I will have to check out the book, I really enjoyed Seeing Like a State. Thanks for the heads up!
He's not just referring to tribal groups. He's saying that the states in that area would go to war in order to capture people, but would not really try to control mountainous terrain.
Hmmm that is a strange claim. The states have pretty clear ideas about what states have control over what mountainous terrain. If the story he is telling is similar to the stories he was telling in Seeing Like a State, the states that considered themselves to have control over the terrain didn't like that the people were hard to find and evading normal participation in the state, which usually meant paying taxes and conscription. It might be a completely different story, however. I will have to get the book and see!
I would note though that claiming China (or whomever was chasing down the mountain people, sounds like China) had no interest in controlling land because that was a European idea is silly. China was very serious about what areas of land it controlled, who was in charge of them, etc. It might not have cared much about the mountain land in question because it was largely worthless except as a place for people to hide, but the notion of controlling land was certainly not foreign to them. No one should make that sort of claim; the best you could say is "This particular region has people with very unusual ideas about controlling land that are different from pretty much everyone else in the world." Controlling land is an old and very wide spread human behavior, older than the kingdoms that we would begin to see as modern states and governments.
This is off-topic, but Scott, would you be able to confirm that you have received the Book Review Contest submissions? Just a quick email that says "I got a Book Review Contest entry with your email address, and I can open and view the Google Doc"? Thanks so much!
The UK has a history of holding independence referenda to give people the option of seceding. Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Gibraltar (twice) ... they just keep voting "no".
The most striking example, however, is the 1958 series of independence referenda in various French colonial territories. Of 19 territories, 18 chose to remain part of the French Union ... then, if I understand correctly, their governments chose nonetheless to distance themselves from France and become de facto independent. I guess there's a conflict between the interests of the electorate, who wanted stronger ties with France, and of the government, who would prefer to have more political power even if their country is poorer for it.
There were two coups in between the referenda and independence and it was as much a case of France expelling their colonies (or at least downgrading their status, in practice much of their independence is still nominal) as local leaders seeking independence.
>Saying "might makes right" is ignoring this valuable and powerful system.
This is not sufficiently steel-manning "might makes right". Relationships between countries don't exist in a vacuum, so even if state A is mighty enough to invade state B, if state C doesn't like this it may try to prevent such invasions.
> This seems to be the way the UK is treating Scotland, and I give them a lot of credit for it.
There were some moderately shady things in that. For example, the UK government made a big deal of "the Vow". A promise the moon, and then forget the promise after the referendum strategy. And they kept the discovery of a big new oil field quiet until after the referendum.
But at least there wasn't police violently attacking people or locking up prominent pro independence people, like in Catalonia.
There's a certain amount of ex post facto rationalization going on here about why the American south's secession was bad purely on organic principle when the real reason we all find is repellent is just because they did it to uphold slavery. There are pretty clearly politico-moral paradigms that surpass a certain threshold of badness to where the net negative of letting them get implemented outweighs the net positive of the maintenance of an overall net positive abstract normative principle. Maybe that kind of calculation is really fuzzy and prone to error on the margins, but I don't think things like "slavery" or "ethnic cleansing" are anywhere near those kinds of margins. Everything is a slippery slope if you galactic brain it hard enough.
But here are the rules I would draw up. The cutoffs are arbitrary-sounding, but that's what happens when you translate these incredibly complicated and nuanced calls into threshold talk (to be clear, I'm not denying the usefulness of discussions like this, but I do think that it's important to acknowledge that broad framework-derivation discussions like this are going to operate with reduced mental models).
1. The nation must have the ability to be self-sustinent as a state. This means being able to self-build infrastructure, protect borders with a military, and have an economy that is not entirely dependent on the cooperation of one singular external country to function, among other things.
2. Either 75% of the citizens must desire secession, or at least 50% must and also be actively willing and able to go to war for it. Being willing to go to war is a useful heuristic for a lot of granular important criteria here (it signals subgroup cohesiveness, an increased likelihood of a uniquely distinguishable ethnic heritage that the subgroup defines independently of the external country, and signals an increased likelihood that repression, oppression, or other bad happenings are being imposed on the area by the external country), and war is also a distinct net negative for human well-being. Which means that having a natural disposition/lean towards the outcome that doesn't involve secessionist violence isn't a terrible principle to operate by.
3. The primary motivator for secession cannot be an ideology that virulently and viscerally decreases liberty/increases oppression. No slavery and no ethnic cleansing.
"The primary motivator for secession cannot be an ideology that virulently and viscerally decreases liberty/increases oppression. No slavery and no ethnic cleansing. "
I don't accept this, because pretty much any substantial political disagreement can be couched in terms of liberty or oppression. This rule in practice would just mean that any country can delegitimize any secession movement they want. If they don't have any slaves, you could say that they're not giving enough rights to the (member of large country) minority in the smaller area, or you could claim that their politics oppresses some group like gays or fetuses or immigrants. Or maybe they have 1% of Nazis, so they're an illegitimate government because they tolerate Nazis.
Sovereignty is not binary. It's a spectrum. You can be part of some larger organization that solves important coordination problems like healthcare, free trade, defense, or climate change, while devolving everything else to the local level so that every locality can get what it wants on the non-coordinatey issues. Instead of an all-or-nothing secession referendum, provinces could have the ability to line-item self-determine using referenda in cases where they're not relevant to coordination problems and not super oppressing anyone. So for example Texas could just "secede" from FDA jurisdiction and say any drug that has been approved in Europe or Asia is legal in Texas. Another example that already happened is California legalizing weed and creating legal dispensaries even while it was still totally illegal at the federal level. The feds could have shut it all down but they let it slide. If they did shut it all down in 2017 I think a lot of people would be mad at the feds that wouldn't have been mad if the same happened in 1990 and I hope this is an example of norms moving in the direction of self-determination, and not ONLY the object-level change of opinions about weed.
(relatedly I think the fear of secession's transaction costs is a self-fulfilling prophecy where people fight hard to maintain the status quo and punish/stonewall any place that tries to secede, so of course secession looks like a clusterfuck and justifies the fear, but in the the counterfactual where secession referenda are totally normal and respected the transaction costs are way lower so secession looks better and justifies the lack of fear. But given that americans are extremely anti-secession because of the confederacy, it's probably better to use a foot in the door strategy where provinces just piecemeal take back control of the non-coordinatey issues. I think there's no chance of a scotland/quebec style independence referendum being allowed to happen in the US but there's a lot of desire for the same sorts of things that would accomplish so long as you don't call it "secession" and don't do it all at once.
A question on Scotland and the UK. Lets assume that the following is true:
- The UK must do the ethical thing and allow Scotland to vote in a referendum on leaving peacefully, whenever they feel like it
but then doesn't this also mean that the following must be true?
- If Scotland gets to become independent, they must also do the ethical thing and commit to allowing a referendum on going *back* to the UK whenever a sufficient number of locals feel like it
That's what's been bothering me about both the Catalonia and the Scottish secession attempts - never once did I hear any commitments from the leaders of the independence movement on revoting to go back to their parent country if their experiment doesn't succeed. Given that Scotland only needed 50.01% of the vote to leave the UK, it seems quite likely that 0.01% of the population would've ended up changing their mind in the opposite direction over the years, but it wasn't at all clear when the new majority would get a chance to revert their decision.
Surely a new majority could win an election on a pro-reunion platform and at least try to convince the prior state to let them back in? One shouldn't expect pro-independence politicians to emphasize that point because they'd have been voted out in such a scenario, but if the new states are democratic and a majority wants to merge...
An excellent point.
So maybe all borders should be up for grabs every 20 years, by means of a mechanism that respects due process, democracy and pluralism.
The referenda mechanism could be such a means.
>Worse, it's hyperstitionally weakening the system
What's "hyperstition"? I can't find a good definition.
Before giving the UK too much credit for Scotland, I think this is one of those issues where different cultures have very different views. The British don’t really have any notion of “territorial integrity” as a value in its own right, presumably due to a mixture of decolonisation, Ulster and being an island (cynically, “because they spent 200 years annexing places that weren’t near them, and in all their current disputes self-determination means they win”). Other countries like Spain obviously view it as a *huge* deal, as a kind of collective right to own some territory irrespective of the inhabitants wishes.
I guess America’s own odd history should lead to norms of secession=bad but without the same sense of sacred historical dirt ownership, because it’s basically an island but had a secession crisis (and a politics-based one at that, none of this old-fashioned ethnic-religious malarkey).
Tokelau shouldn't secede from New Zealand because it isn't actually capable of being a real independent country.
Indeed, if you look at a lot of tiny caribbean countries, the ones that gained independence are all pretty much horrible. The only ones that aren't are either large enough to be a real country (the Dominican Republic) or are possessions of a developed country.
And even amongst the large independent island countries, Cuba is destitute and Haiti is one of the poorest places on the planet.
Also, WRT: the United States:
It should be remembered how much of "The United States is evil" is authoritarian propaganda.
IRL, the reason why the US "gets away" with it is because the US invades awful places run by totalitarian regimes or anarchic places that barely have governments at all.
Moreover, the US's involvement in the first Gulf War was the US responding to a country invading another country and had full UN support. The US entry into Afghanistan also had UN support. The US entry into Afghanistan was also on behalf of one side in an ongoing civil war; the same applied to Kosovo. And both the Kosovo intervention and the intervention into Iraq were against genodical regimes which were killing civilians.
The US was, in fact, greeted as liberators by the majority of the Iraqi population. The Kuwaitis were thrilled we rescued them from Iraq in the first Gulf War. Kosovo was grateful for our help in that. And the Northern Alliance was happy we helped them against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The US attacks bad guys, which gives it a lot of moral authority in its interventions; even if you disagree with them, it's hard to sympathize with the people they're fighting against, as they're all awful.
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> Moldbug’s claim that the pre-WWI system was good at preventing wars and atrocities is dubious given how many wars and atrocities there were before WWI (I would guess eg more conflict deaths per capita in the 19th century than the 21st, although I know this sort of thing is hard to quantify).
Correct. Indeed, the rate of global violence has declined very markedly; we live in the most peaceful era of all time.
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And yes, I actually agree that there's no actual consistent heuristic for this, as well as the general notion that, barring undue levels of oppression (and no, "not getting your way" is not oppression), it's generally a bad idea to redraw international borders, as this leads to better long-term outcomes.
The actual goal is not self-determination (there's nothing good about slavers or religious zealots being able to self-determine), it's trying to improve overall social welfare globally.
> Is there any reason not to go with the greatest good for the greatest number here (and allow the secession)? Maybe (counterfactual) India is very liberal and both Hindus and Muslims in that subregion have lots of rights, but if the region were allowed to secede it would become a Muslim fundamentalist state that oppressed its minorities.
I think that this (greatest good for the greatest number) is a sensible practical solution, but it doesn't solve the problem that self determination is incoherent. If you are a consequential your policy isn't people get self determination when it is what causes the greatest good, your policy is always do what is for the greatest good. The notion of self determination adds nothing. It is only if you are trying to construct a deontological framework where the notion of rights adds anything of value. However, if you are a deontologist, you can't lean back on this practical solution to the problems with the right to self determination in particular. Therefore, I don't think you have really solved the philosophical problems with considering self determination to be a right.
Re: "group rights"
Isn't this really what the courts interpreting the US Constitution describes as "freedom of association". Free speech plus assembly plus right to petition for redress = freedom of association.
"Self-determination" is freedom of association limited by sovereignty.
The current sovereign must consent to any rearrangement of sovereignty.
"Agreed about the weird right. This paper, which I linked in the original, tries to discuss what group rights would mean, although it ends up settling on them being simple if a group has a government that claims to speak for them, which most secessionist regions do."
Group rights are a big thing nowadays among academia (and you will not see critiques of them because of how much of a political monoculture it is). Especially when it comes to "indigenous peoples", who get an absolute ton of group-based rights, often including outrageous shit like the ability to prevent outsiders using aspects of their culture. I mean have you read the UNDRIP? It gives an insane selection of rights to certain groups based solely on their ethnicity!
"and nobody thinks we should give it back to the Indians now"
Oh believe me, plenty of people do.
Re: 12. Who gets to define what constitutes persecution? Because I'd claim that current levels of taxation and personal regulation in the US already constitute persecution.
Then move. You're not living in North Korea; you're free to leave.
Unless taxation has driven you into poverty, the claim that taxation is persecution is ridiculous.
Parrhesia requires that someone call out this nonsense.
I think it matters how much and how consistently people care, there needs to be a real strength of feeling for a significant length of time among a significant amount of people before any referendum.
I don't find it convincing to say "the Confederancy can't secede because the slaves couldn't vote". That argument is about noncitizens, not about slaves specifically, and if you take it seriously there are all sorts of cases where people don't have citizenship, including countries with lots of foreign workers (including illegal aliens), countries that take prisoners of war onto their own territory, foreign invaders who don't have citizenship in the places they are invading, and even minors and felons who can't vote.
All countries have people located in the country who are not citizens and can't participate in democracy. And I'm not going to say "well, slaves get to count and illegal aliens and minors don't, because one is a bad citizenship restriction and one is a good citizenship restriction".
Point 7 - I think this 'might makes right'...really just 'might makes' is the reality of it.
Scott pushes back, but I don't find those to be convincing. The 'what about non-military power' isn't contradictory with 'might makes'. It just means looking holistically at all the power forms and the limitations of the social and physical world.
There are cultural pressures, economic pressures, patron-client pressures or corporate pressures or lobbyists or whichever words apply, political aspects, military aspects, and the broader context.
It has always been the case that a detente or equilibrium of peace between kingdoms, nations, warlords, villages etc. If you attack one group, you'll be weakened by the fighting and another group will attack us. So no one attacks. The concept of mutually assured destruction is not new and not really about nukes per se. It is a very long standing historical precedent.
It can even be a much much stronger nation would be weakened enough to be attacked on multiple sides by an alliance of weaker nations if they took over a smaller kingdom.
It all comes down to, do you have enough power to do it or not? It could be sending in spies and merchants to destabilise a region or overthrow their government or you could invade the country or threaten to invade to turn them into a vassal state.
Are not vassal states and alliances of weaker nations the bread and butter of history?
Nations and kingdoms and the wisdom or folly of their leaders turns the pages of history. They are just humans and not infallible and do things like invade Russia in the winter or drink while while Rome burns or try invasions they shouldn't have and get swallowed up by other kingdoms when they are weakened.
Might makes history and nations and is determination itself. Might is more than soldiers, swords, supply lines, guns, or airplanes, etc. and includes the full front of economic, influence, religious, information, and political warfare. Whoever wins the war decides what happens.
It sucks and long conversations about ethics and norms are simply an attempt to wield cultural power to make such actions harder or easier. I.e. easier to make sanctions against South Africa due to Apartheid or hopefully harder for the likes of the Bush family to trade with Nazi Germany in the early years of the war and harder for nations to invade others.
Power and might in all its forms combines and reality and history are churned out the other end of the usually ugly and brutal sausage machine.
This abhorrent and hopefully aliens or AI or AI aliens are benevolent and help solve this problem for us with Star Trek replicators or extreme threats of violence and surveillance or just subtly taking everything over and always making peace the best outcome or whatever. Until then, I don't see humans doing anything about our human tendency to overwhelm each other with might whenever someone feels like it and is able to organise enough political, religious, economic, influence, military, international alliances, etc. in order to see through their insanity.
Questio for all those defending the "might makes right" claim: is there any circumstance under which you would consider this claim falsified? If so, how?
"The one that bothers me the most is Israeli settlements - there ought to be some rule against sneaking in under cover of night, setting up a town on someone else’s land, and then seceding and saying it’s yours. "
I am afraid this is not an accurate description of the way the settlements in Judea and Samaria are built. In most cases they are not constructed on private lands. There are instances when private lands are confiscated for some purpose like paving roads or public or private building, but this is a law-regulated process including the right to appeal and compensation in money or alternative pieces of land, see for example https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2017-02-16/israel-law-on-the-regulation-of-settlement-in-judea-and-samaria/. There are also cases when something is being built on public land and then someone comes and states that the land is in fact private and belongs to him. Again, these disputes are settled in courts.
"nobody thinks we should give it [the USA] back to the Indians now": I'm Canadian, and I personally know at least one person who unironically believes we *should* give the whole country back. It's a view I hear increasingly often from the very-woke (and mostly white) end of the aisle here. I'd be surprised if there weren't those who seriously think this in the USA as well.
> Everyone keeps saying this and I think it's overly cynical.
> There's an international norm that says you can't launch unprovoked aggressive invasions. The norm isn't totally toothless either.
> Saying "might makes right" is ignoring this valuable and powerful system.
This is answering the real politik argument with real politiks of international agreements. It's moving the "bilateral wars" to "multilateral wars" but it's the same argument. Russia wouldn't be able to invade Ukraine at all if NATO would have answered.
But in reality, NATO didn't answer. The UN didn't answer. The EU didn't answer. (I mean, yes economic sanctions, but that's not enough to prevent this current invasion.)
In reality, the norm was toothless. That's the bet Putin made. Because of how the norm behaved in Syria and Obama came back on his word.
The norm is toothless: That's what Xi Jinping when he says the West is decadent and human rights gets ignored in Xijiang.
It's cynical. You would like not to acknowledge it. But it's real. It's what happens.
The article and many of the comments make me wonder how long it'll be before the whole concept of a country is no longer geography-based. Way Back When, there wasn't much difference between a person's location and most other aspects of their lives. Their physical appearance, their political stance, their taste in lunch menus, their fashion sense, all of it was fairly similar to that of their neighbor. It wasn't a stretch for them to draw a border around themselves and say "hey look, we're a country now, and all of our traditions and tastes and hummus recipes are part of our shared identity." But somewhere along the way we started moving around. A lot. Is that a bad thing? Maybe not, but it did raise the probability that you won't share much in common with your neighbor. Your goals might be different, your politics might be different. So ... now, how would *an area* agree sufficiently to secede from anything? That area will likely have plenty of dissenting opinions on that topic.
So what if your permanent address wasn't a factor on your citizenship? Could all Astral Codex Ten subscribers somehow agree unanimously that they're now a sovereign nation, and are seceding from whatever country they happen to live in? Could "work from home" apply to countries, too, as well as businesses?
Yeah, there are some parts of country-dom that are inherently geographically tied -- defense, land tax, utilities, etc. etc. -- but is there a way to keep those aspects separate?
>If you want to make the case that democracy necessarily returns non-abhorrent results, I’d be very interested to hear that argument.
Some make that argument for SCORE VOTING democracies, since score voting democracies allow voters to expression preference strength.
Not having abhorrent things done to you is fairly strong preference, and doing aborrent things to others tends not to be strong preference so much as a side effect of some other preference
Not at all enjoying the foray into IR and sad that I missed the boat for comments.