I'd like to address the following question. Is there a moral right of secession?
Now, my answer to that probably won't surprise many of you. There is.
But I'd like to begin by considering why the question itself is important.
First of all, the question whether there's a right of secession has real practical significance.
The world of politics forces decisions on us. States are made and they're remade.
As we watch states being made and remade, we have to decide, as individuals, what attitude
we'll adopt towards these events.
Do people struggling for their independence have a right to do so?
Do states have a right to attempt to crush persons' attempts to seek their own freedom?
Even if we decide to ignore events like this, we've implicitly taken a position on it.
We've implicitly adopted an attitude towards it.
So again then, politics forces us to, in one way or another, consider this question.
But the question also has real philosophical importance.
The basic question of political philosophy is this.
What is the moral basis of the state's authority?
Is there any such thing as a legitimate state?
In the history of modern political thought, three basic kinds of answers have been given
to that question.
The first is found in the writings of John Locke, the English political philosopher who
In his book, Two Treatises of Government, published in 1690, argued that legitimate political authority is founded on the consent of the governor.
Right of secession challenges this position if it says that a group of persons who have given their consent to be governed by a political authority may legitimately withdraw their consent in order to form a new political union.
A century later, the Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that we owe allegiance to government, we have a duty to obey government because government is useful to us.
Government is useful when it produces order, order which facilitates our pursuit of self-chosen ends.
But a right of secession challenges this position as well.
If it tells us that a group of persons may withdraw from a state in order to form a new one that they find more useful than the one that presently governs them.
And a third argument is found in the writings of a German philosopher, Immanuel Kant.
Kant argued that if the policies, if the laws of a state could in principle command universal agreement that is among the citizens subject to them,
The Theory of Money and Credit is a just state. Its justice is what gives it authority over the persons it governs.
But a right of secession challenges this position too. If it enables people to claim the moral right to withdraw from even a just state.
So the right of secession is an important philosophical issue because it requires us to rethink various answers that have been given to the basic problem of political theory.
It requires us to add qualifications to our views about why the state can have the authority to govern.
Contemporary political philosophers should be looking at the issue of secession.
Strangely enough, they're not.
When I decided to write a paper on secession, I was stunned by the dearth of material,
ethical material available on the subject of secession.
I found one important work written by a philosopher named Alan Buchanan, a book entitled Secession.
And I am going to, later on, towards the end of my talk, comment on some of his ideas.
But I want to divide my talk up into three parts.
First, I want to advance certain moral considerations that support a right of secession.
Secondly, I want to define the right and detail any limits on the exercise of the right.
And then finally, I'll conclude by looking at some of the objections that might be raised against a moral right of secession.
Okay, so to begin with, I want to start out by asking this, what do we mean when we say that something is a good or a value?
This is relevant to our subject because we're going to ask, what is the value or the good of political order?
We can begin by saying this, that our ideas of what is valuable to us or good to us or what motivate us to act,
They will give us reasons to do things, to realize our goals, to make things happen.
Now, there are a great many answers that philosophers have given to this question about what is good, what is valuable, and so on.
I just want to look at how we describe what is valuable or what is good.
And we can divide answers up into two basic kinds.
The first says that values or goods are personal or agent, relative, and character.
What that means is, is that anything that is a good or a value is a value for some particular person.
Very clearly this tells us why value is motivated to act.
If something is a value for me, it gives me motivation to pursue it.
It gives me a reason to try and make it happen.
When social scientists study human behavior, an agent-relative conception of value is what they have in mind.
What they have in mind is certainly economics, which is the most sophisticated of social sciences, very explicitly has developed an agent-relative conception of value.
We can also say that this appeals to common sense. We do things because we want to do them, because we find them good or we find them valuable.
But there is another conception of value, according to which value is impersonal or agent-neutral in character.
Now there are a great many versions of this, but we can say that they share the following feature.
They all say that we must value certain things. There are certain things that we must value, whether we value them or not.
And if that sounds like a strange idea, that's because it is.
To begin with, it does a very poor job of explaining what it is about value that motivates us.
Remember I started out by saying when we think about values we're asking, what is it that motivates people to act?
Agent-neutral values, the conception of impersonal or agent-neutral values, don't really help us in explaining how they motivate people to act, because they cut out the individual connection, the personal connection between a goal and the agent, the person that values.
Now, other researchers have dealt with this question of agent-neutral or impersonal values more adequately than I can hear, but I'd like to raise a couple of points about it.
The most important and most influential political theory today that employs an agent-neutral conception of value is utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism, of course, being the doctrine that whatever promotes the greatest quantity of want satisfaction or happiness, however defined, is the morally correct policy to pursue.
Now, just looking at that as an example of philosophy employing an agent-neutral conception of value, we can say that there are a couple of moral questions we can ask about it.
First of all, we can charge this doctrine with treating individuals unjustly because unless it happens to be the case, maybe by chance, that my plans, my goals, my projects are those that are endorsed by the utilitarian standard.
They just happen to fall into the category of that which promotes the greatest quantity of happiness in this case.
I have to abandon them.
I have to say, I ought not to value those things which I value, and I ought to value instead those things which happen to be endorsed by this agent-neutral utilitarian standard.
A second related objection is the idea that an agent-neutral conception of value, such as that found in utilitarianism, violates the integrity of our lives.
Human beings are pursuers of value. We identify goals and we act to achieve them. That's what makes our lives meaningful to us.
In a sense, it's meaningful to us. That's what makes our lives what they are.
But an agent-neutral conception of value, again, is manifested in utilitarianism, violates this because it makes us a tool for other persons.
It makes our lives, our energies, our efforts, and so forth, things that are valuable because they are useful for promoting the goals, the ends of others.
Well, those are things in mind. I'm going to argue for succession from the perspective of normative individualism.
Normative individualism simply being the doctrine that all human values are personal or agent relative in character.
This tells us something about political institutions, namely that political institutions are valuable and that we have a reason to support them.
only insofar as they're useful, as they facilitate our pursuit of self-chosen values.
And a set of political institutions, a state, possesses value for everyone concerned, everyone subject to it,
only insofar as it works to the mutual benefit, the mutual advantage of all concern.
So as a test to them for looking at particular moral principles, such as a right of secession, we can ask this.
When we examine a particular political principle, would it be possible to get a voluntary agreement on it?
Would people voluntarily submit to this rule?
Now, contractualism, as a moral test of political principles, the way I'm going to do it here works in kind of a backward fashion.
We're going to ask this, could anyone reasonably reject a particular political principle or rule?
If so, if we can understand why someone might reject a particular rule or principle, we
can say that it would be unjust to impose it on anyone.
This contractualist test is a version of what's known as the principle of universalizability.
There are various versions of this principle, but there's one that's well known to everybody,
the golden rule, doing to others as we would have them doing to us.
When we approach the subject of justice, we're asking what should we expect from other persons?
And the contractualist test, again, as a variant of the principle of universalizability, implies this, that what we should expect and what we should extend to others are the same.
We should extend to others the same consideration, the same recognition of ourselves as pursuers of value, as individuals whose lives have meaning to us, the same consideration that we expect for ourselves. Extend that to others.
So, with that in mind, we can ask you, would anyone be able to reasonably reject a rule, a political rule that prohibited secession under all circumstances?
Certainly, I think the answer is yes.
First of all, the contractualist test invalidates exploitative political principles.
Forceful opposition to an act of secession by a group of persons seeking their own independence, their own freedom,
benefits the state or those that oppose the act of secession at the expense of the secessionists.
In this sense then, opposition to secession becomes an exploitative policy,
one that can be rejected by normative individualism and the contractualist test I've described.
We can say that anyone could reasonably reject a rule that prohibited secession under all circumstances
In view of the fact that we can assume, realistically, that there's an inherent uncertainty about the prospects of life under any political arrangement over the long term,
it's reasonable to suggest that at some point any of us might become dissatisfied with the political system that governs us and that we might wish to succeed.
Because future dissatisfaction with a set of political institutions is possible, then anyone could reasonably reject a rule that would lock them into a political system
The Upshot of this is that any state, any just state, should provide a constitutional means for persons to secede from it.
Any state that prohibits secession, then, is an unjust one.
Now I want to move to defining the right of secession.
First of all, ask the question, whose right is it?
Now, if you can, in the philosopher I mentioned earlier, treat secession as a group right.
The idea of group rights seemed to me to be one of those, kind of like agent neutral values, the idea that only an academic could come up with.
But a group right is defined as follows. It's a right that's possessed by a group and only by a group.
It can be exercised only by a group of people, and it exists or it's justifiable because it promotes the interests of that group of people.
Typically when people think of group rights, what they have in mind are cultural or ethnic groups.
You know, a lot of the talk about, or a lot of the, you know, kind of multiculturalist dogma that we find on college campuses around the country today is based on a conception of group rights.
And when we look at the concept of secession, you know, we can ask, is it necessary that a group who wants to secede be able to identify themselves as a recognizable cultural, ethnic group and so forth?
Is this necessary?
If so, there's a problem, because that means that there's an additional obstacle that a group who wants this to see has to overcome.
That is, they have to say, we should say because we have some historical claim to this territory,
because we as a group have been, or as a class have been mistreated by the state,
or because we have some common cultural or ethnic or linguistic characteristics that we want to promote.
I want to raise a couple of points about this.
First of all, it's not obvious why shared goals, common goals are the only ones that would legitimate an act of secession.
It's not obvious why personal goals might not do the job just as well.
Let's imagine a hypothetical state in which there are various people or various groups of people,
all of whom wish to secede but for entirely different reasons.
Some wish to secede to escape high taxes.
Others wish to secede to escape oppressive laws, and still others wish to secede to avoid being subjected to ridiculously inefficient public services.
All these are different reasons, and they're all connected with personal goals, personal values, personal plans,
each of which separately seems to be a legitimate reason to wish to withdraw from a state, to conclude that the state is not a value for us.
But these aren't shared values. These are agent, relative or personal values.
So it doesn't seem necessary then that we define secession as a group right, because it can be tied to individual interests and individual values.
Secondly, the fact that group action, that collective action, is required for an act of secession is correct, is true.
But that doesn't necessarily link it to the concept of group right.
If we think, for example, of rights of due process, procedural rights to just treatment by others, collective action is required to create reliable judicial and law enforcement institutions that protect these rights.
But the value of these institutions clearly is inextricably bound to the interests that we have as individuals, not to common goals, but to personal goals.
So even if collective action is necessary for a group right, it's not obvious that individual rights are excluded from those that require collective action to produce or to protect.
With these considerations in mind, then I would suggest that we understand secession as an individual right, despite the fact that it's exercised collectively.
The interests that it protects are individual interests. The values that it promotes are individual values.
Its justification lies in a conception of the individual.
So we should think of secession then as an individual right exercised collectively by a group of individuals wishing to seek their own political independence.
Thinking of secession as an individual right promotes an ideal of the self-defined political community.
As Professor von Mises put it, the totality of freedom-minded persons who are intent on forming a state appears as the political union.
When we think of a right of secession then, we're thinking of the freedom of individuals to define for themselves their own political destiny.
The freedom to choose the government which will govern them.
As far as some of the practical instruments that should be used to enable individuals to define their own political communities.
This is, of course, a complex technical question, but I'll just very briefly make a suggestion.
It seems to me that the way in which we can say a political unit could define itself within
the confines of another and thereby succeed could be through a very simple two-stage process,
one that's found in many American states, namely initiative and referendum.
Get enough names on a petition and you have initiative.
That is, you can place a proposal for secession on the ballot, get enough votes in a referendum
and secession is a done deal.
And there's no magic number that we can pick out and say what size majority should we have, right, but there's not an obvious reason why secession should require any kind of a more difficult obstacle or a higher kind of majority than other constitutional changes or legislative acts.
So I would just, you know, kind of throwing out a suggestion, anywhere from a simple two-thirds or three-fifths majority in a popular referendum should be sufficient to conclude an act of secession.
Now, limits on the right of secession. I suggest that there are two kinds of limits on the right of secession.
Both of these are justified or understandable because of objections that people in a prospective secessionist state might make
towards the secessionist movement that wants to establish a new government.
The first is this, that a secessionist movement should be able to establish a viable political order,
Order, one that can make and enforce law over the entire territory that it will claim.
We can think about this in terms of the contractualist test.
Anybody could reasonably reject being made subject to a government that would be unable
to protect their freedom and property, in other words, to an unviable and therefore
useless state.
So this would give them grounds for objection to a particular act of secession.
It has to be able to establish a viable state.
Now as far as defense matters are concerned, this is a difficult question and I don't have
I don't have a lot of time to go into it, but I just want to suggest that, first of all, there's a good deal of evidence that shows that states do a pretty poor job of defending their citizens from foreign attack.
Over the last two centuries, for example, almost 70% of aggressor states have won wars involving major powers. It's not a very good record.
Moreover, international relations are a kind of thing that are subject to rapid change. States who are a friend one day may not be the next year or the next few months.
So there's a lot of guesswork involved in relations among states.
So I'll just say this.
First of all, as far as viability is concerned, a prospective secessionist state should be
able to do one of two things, either be large enough to raise the revenue it needs to provide
defensive forces or at the very least create diplomatic institutions that it could use
to form defensive agreements with other friendly states.
If so, then it can claim to be viable as far as its international relations are concerned.
A second limit on the right of secession.
A secessionist state must favor private property in the market.
It must be willing to establish a regime of private property in the free market.
Why? Because, again, we're talking about erecting a state.
And so individuals have to be willing to apply this contractualist test of reasonable rejection to what we're proposing to establish.
Private property in the market enable individuals to pursue self-chosen plans.
That's what makes it valuable, right, in light of normative individualism.
Secessionists must reject socialism as an economic alternative.
First of all, we can relate this to the viability requirement.
Again, as Professor von Mises showed long ago, rational economic calculation is simply impossible without a price mechanism.
It's impossible under socialism.
And so, finally, as we've all seen, you know, the socialist economies come crashing down, that socialism is not a viable economic alternative.
This gives people grounds to reasonably reject being made subject to socialism.
But there are other moral considerations as well.
Because socialism systematically prohibits individual choice in pursuing career, economic decision-making,
forming cooperative endeavors with other persons and so forth.
This is what enables individuals to reject socialism as an economic alternative.
and Economic Alternative, normative individualism, the contractualist test that I described enable people to morally reject socialism at kids. It's fundamentally unjust in this sense.
Okay, finally, so now I've come up with these two limits on the right of secession. They're, I think, not too restrictive.
As long as we can erect a viable political order, one that protects private property in the market, there should be no further obstacles to our right of secession.
But Alan Buchanan, as I mentioned earlier, comes up with a few other restrictions, so I want to just very briefly touch on some of these.
First of all, loss of state property.
You know, if the state that we want to secede from has built roads, other economic infrastructure in the territory that wishes to secede,
To see is this grounds for opposing a right of secession.
This was, of course, in the period leading up to the war between the American states
was also an issue.
One thing we can say about it is this.
If there is a general benefit among all the people involved in both the remainder state
and the prospective secessionist state prior to an act of secession, that is, if everybody
benefits, if it is to everyone's mutual advantage, before an act of secession, it's by no means
It becomes obvious why people will be deprived of the benefits of this kind of spending later. Roads, for example, insofar as they promote economic growth and productivity, you can drive your car over the road, whether it's on one side of a boundary or another.
Remember I said that we have to establish a regime of private property in the market. That means that we can't prohibit voluntary exchanges by individuals across boundaries of the remainder state and the secessionist state.
So if there's a general benefit then, there's no loss to the citizens of the remainder of the state, so they have no grounds for rejection, for opposing an act of secession on this basis.
Of course, real states don't, unfortunately, don't restrict their spending decisions to things that are universally beneficial.
We're all familiar with the pork barrel spending and so forth, and the political process, log rolling, vote trading, that promote this, are part of a political system.
A political system that we may not necessarily be able to be held responsible for.
I somehow don't feel responsible for the system of law-rolling that goes on in the U.S. Congress.
I don't really feel responsible for Port Barrel spending decisions by the U.S. Congress.
And I don't think you do either.
This is a political system established by political elites that promotes certain kinds of decisions that are not in fact universally beneficial.
This is just the kind of thing that an act of secession might motivate people to escape from.
So unless we can assign the secessionists themselves responsibility for a system of boat trading, port rail spending and so forth,
this does not, this loss of state property does not offer any reasonable grounds for opposition to an act of secession.
Second question. Majority rule. Certainly one reason that people may wish to secede is to escape a hostile majority.
Is there any special value to majority rule that would enable us to say that that's too bad for the minority?
They've lost, now they have to live by the majority decision. Secession is not an option.
You can, and Alan Buchanan suggests that that's the case.
But first of all, again, looking at the idea of normative individualism, it tells us that the value of political order, the value of majority rule included, depend on their usefulness to the individual.
Majority rule can be a useful means for collective decision, but it doesn't have any intrinsic or special value.
Certainly no agent neutral value to majority rule.
And so this provides no reason to limit secession.
Secession. Again, if secession is a means by which people can escape a majority tyranny,
then majority rule by itself doesn't give any reason to oppose it.
Okay, next, questions of territorial sovereignty. You know, when a group of persons secede,
the state loses some territory, and on the face of it, it seems like an objection, a
reasonable objection to an act of secession. The state or the remainder, the citizens of
the remainder state have lost something. But does this give them moral grounds to oppose
What is an act of secession? The fact that territory is being lost. Buchanan asked this question, how can the secessionists claim authority and control over this territory?
How can they say that this territory should be theirs rather than that of the state they're trying to leave and the citizens of the remainder state?
How can the citizens show this? And again, Buchanan suggests bringing the concept of group rights that they need to be able to show some special relationship to the territory.
The Territorial Claim of a State has no meaning and therefore no validity apart from the value
that citizens ascribe to the state and apart from their free choice in deciding which government
will in fact govern them. So once the state loses the acceptance of its authority by secession
it also loses its territorial claim. Too bad for the old state. Finally, are there alternatives
to secession? That is, can we find alternatives that would be just as morally appealing as
secessionism? Okay, two alternatives that Buchanan considers are nullification and group
Group Veto. Both of these were ideas that were discussed, again, in the United States
in the 19th century. Nullification, meaning that in a federal system, the federal units,
American states, for example, could nullify or simply refuse to recognize the validity
of acts of the national government. Group veto being John Calhoun's idea of concurrent
majorities, that is, that people should, that different groups that are going to be affected
by a rule can exercise a kind of veto power over the rule, a kind of veto power over legislation
that will affect them.
Are these replacements for an act of secession?
Certainly, they are valuable elements
of a political constitution,
but are they replacements for secession?
If so, then a right of secession is not so strongly justified
because we could say, well,
we can replace it with something else.
You can suggest two criteria.
First of all, in making this decision,
first of all, the independence
that a right offers is better.
How much independence do we gain
by having a right of secession on the one hand
Disruption vs. Right of Nullification or Group Veto on the Other
So, independence then, one criterion.
A second, disruption. That is, how disruptive is the exercise of the right?
How much of a problem does it cause to other people when we exercise our right of secession or nullification in group veto?
So, you can't suggest that we need to weigh these considerations against one another.
Sometimes you suggest, for example, that the disruptive effects of a particular act of secession may be so great
that they seem to outweigh the independence that the right offers to its bearer.
As a result, he says, the choice between these rights is indeterminate.
In response, I would suggest that very clearly we should weight independence,
the value of independence, over that of disruption. Why?
First of all, otherwise, people can be locked in to a political order that they disvalue.
But this is precisely what I was saying that contractualism and normative individualism enables them to reject.
So we get a strong hint from what we've already talked about then that independence must be weighted over disruption.
Secondly, normative individualism tells individuals that morally they can stand up for themselves and reject calls for them to abandon their own goals on behalf of the goals and the interests of others.
With those considerations in mind then we can say that secession and the criterion of independence that is connected with should be ranked over nullification and group veto.
Secession then is essential for any just constitution. Nullification, group veto, not suitable replacements.
Okay, to conclude, I've talked about the limits on the right of secession to erect a viable
political order, one that establishes a regime of private property in the market.
The upshot of the argument is that all states should provide a peaceful means for persons
within their borders to secede and establish a new political order for themselves.
Not war, not destruction, not violence and death, but a constitutional right of secession.
This is required for any just state.