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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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*.
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.
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.
"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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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 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?
>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.
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.
> 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?
"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?
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?
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."
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was expecting Crimea being ethnically cleansed as recent as a century would've made the highlights but alas
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.
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.
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?
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*.
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.
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.
"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.
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.)
"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?
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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 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?
>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.
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.
> 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?
"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?
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?
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."
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
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
---
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.
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.