Right, Africa has lots of civil wars, but few international wars. Practically every African foreign ministry agrees that the old colonial boundaries are not going to be revised by conquest. There has been piratical predation across borders, such as in the Congo around the turn of the century by Rwanda and other neighbors, but the statesmen expect that the old borders will be maintained, at least on paper.
The post-Soviet republics have been fairly insistent that *in Russian* one should spell their cities' names the way they're now spelling them (e.g. Алматы instead of Алма-Ата, Киiв instead of Киев, etc.). This strikes many Russians as cringe, because, well, Москва becomes Moscow / Moscou / Moskau and Warszawa becomes Warsaw / Varsovie / Warschau in English / French / German, and that's fine, so why do Ukrainians / Kazakhs get to demand that you change the spelling of their cities *in Russian*?
Of course, by the same token, it's not clear why a Russian gets to complain about the correct spelling of the capital *in English*.
This is just a matter of standard diplomacy. You call the other country how they ask to be called. For example, you can call Cabo Verde "Cape Verde" if you want to--that's how it's always been known in English--but the United Nations and most everyone else now calls it Cabo Verde because the country has specifically asked that it be called that. Russia could make similar demands, nothing is stopping them.
In the UN, sure -- but the complaint of the guy-on-the-street Russian is that this is being pressured into standard Russian usage. In your example, it would be about whether e.g. the New York Times switches to "Cabo Verde" or continues calling it "Cape Verde".
Austria as a German-speaking nation is very recent too.
Austria used to be a diverse empire where German-speakers would consider themselves Germans. The "Pan-German" idea was rather strong at the beginning of the 20th century and Austria(-Hungary) was considered an obsolete holdout of ancient times by German nationalists.
Only since the 1950s started the Austrians think about themselves as a separate nation, German-speaking, but not really an artificially separated limb of the German nation anymore.
Of course, the massive defeat in WWII, execution of several Austrian war criminals and the shame of being German after the war helped.
There is a saying that the best success of Austrian diplomacy was to convince the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German.
Yeah, the principle popular sovereignty does have that exploit. But it'd be inelegant to patch in the ad-hoc rule "except when there's been a purposeful colonization effort/ethnic cleansing to arrange those circumstances", and besides, that'd make it very awkward for every country in the New World unless the rule is "except when there's been an ethnic cleansing in the past 50 years" which is even more unwieldy.
As far as I can tell the best we can do is just shrug and say "Yep, we've kinda just gotta stop that from happening before the invaders get a majority from now on, since we can't really do anything once they do"
Perhaps the most awkward example of this is Northern Ireland, which has by now mellowed out into a top-level-nonfunctioning political entity because neither the unionist or IRA factions could get a clear enough mandate to take the entire thing.
Seconded. This was a glaring absence from the post, since to me the biggest open question around self-determination is: what happens when Stalin has previously ethnically cleansed the region, precisely to ensure that the strategic location would remain firmly in Russian hands?
You don't want to incentivize ethnic cleansing, but after some amount of time you can hardly blame the great-grandkids of the migrants.
Well, that's how the US asserted a claim on Texas when it was part of Mexico. Is that illegitimate? Or does colonization plus time work, but colonization by itself doesn't?
Overall this is an incredibly impossibly messy question, and it defies rationalist attempts to build a universal rule of independence.
For every rule there are legitimate exceptions and cases where legitimate grievances haven't been allowed to produce independent polities, which is Scott's point. Honestly the only rule that hasn't been broken somewhere is a tautology: defending territory with violence until all competing claims are waived.
If rationalists want to propose a non-violent solution, they need to be prepared to not cover existing nations, and that's ok.
Russia is a giant multi-ethnic federation mostly because it's giant. Western Russia, the Russia you recognize on TV, is very coherent. You see, you recognize it on TV.
There's are very definitely Russian looking people, Russian songs, Russian culture markers, and we could all debate on the margins, but in the main we'd recognize Russian stuff when we see it. And Putin is at least right that Ukraine isn't like The Italians living next door to Russian People, it's much more like Canadians and Americans. From the inside, two peoples, two-ish languages, but from the outside, before 2022 probably 95% of people would be unable to pick out which was which.
I agree, and in him we see the unpleasant mixture between principle and realpolitik, basically power. But I also see it in us. Our international principles (and deviations from them) are more than a little self serving, to a degree where I think we lack the moral high ground to criticize or take strong positions in this one. Maybe we still do it for practical reasons, but I'm not kidding myself that we (America, the west, Europe, NATO) are acting or speaking from sheer principle.
I’m not familiar with Houston/Pasdena but it reminded me of Long Island, NY (where I grew up.) We kids could tell by slight variations of speech which town someone was from on LI. Could I describe those variations now, no, but I remember hearing someone and thinking “Yep, they’re from Smithtown.” Mass media flatten some of these things, but I bet it still happens. I should add, LI is not a large place.
What I heard from someone is that a people is a nation if they are willing to fight for it. So Israelis are certainly willing to fight to defend Israeli nationhood, Finns for Finnish, Palestinians for their nationhood (this one he put some asterisks, initially they were just fighting against Israel, with the PLO founded before '67, but nowadays they qualify), Ukrainians for theirs (was not known until recently, but now they appear to be one), and so on. Now one can object on "might makes right" grounds but I think a decent utilitarian argument can be made for this position.
I don't think this is satisfactory because willingness to fight depends on whom one is to fight. If Putin says, "join or I will nuke every inch of your territory," it may well be that Ukraine would not fight. Are they then not a nation? It seems that nationhood - at least in the moral, idealized sense we're trying to ascertain - should be an intrinsic property, not something that depends on the strength of potential conquerors.
I don't think nationhood can be totally divorced from the political reality like that. Failed national movements are not nations anymore because someone crushed them.
Then maybe “being willing to fight for it” is a necessary but insufficient condition of nationhood. The confederates were willing to fight for their nationhood, but they clearly aren’t a nation anymore.
One could argue that Southerners are a separate nation within a larger nation. Though it's worth noting that even some Northerners have embraced Southern culture as of late:
Does the moral, idealized sense of nationalism you're trying to ascertain depend on the outcome of some battles in the past? If so, it can't really be an intrinsic property. I do like the idea of having a coherent standard, and not having a pure might makes right. I don't like Putin crushing Ukraine, and I support the rights of Ukrainians to self-determination. But I don't think you can make it a totally intrinsic property either. I don't think you can have a Platonic moral and idealized sense of nationalism in the sense you want.
I agree. The language of rights and morality are out of place in this discussion. Nationalism itself has been a disaster since the mid 19th century. The optimum outcome of border-drawing is the one that results in the greatest stability, peace, and prosperity given all the complicated constraints and forces at play. National identity may be a part of this puzzle, along with military might and other factors. But to declare a “right” to a sovereignty is simply to stir up conflict.
Willingness to fight is an interesting concept, because there is nothing inherently fair in it. A lot of the revolutionaries fought dirty.
Countries such as Ireland and Algeria achieved their independence after resorting to outright terrorism. Basque country, notorious for its political violence, got more concessions from the Spanish state than Catalonia, where the nationalist movement deplores terrorism and violence. Gaza has more self-governance than the Western Bank, partly because it was such a pain to hold.
The wave of self-determination in Europe after 1918 and especially after 1945 included a lot of ethnic cleansing in previously thoroughly diverse territories.
The real reason for the Gaza withdrawal is that Sharon just wanted to solve the conflict unilaterally. Morocco didn't get independence from France through terrorism. I do think political violence can be useful, but I don't think that's the only thing that is meant by "power". Gandhi was someone who knew how to exercise power, and he did, even though he was nonviolent.
Yes, it is not clear cut either way. But my comment was mainly intended as a negation of the usual aureola of righteousness and innocence that tends to envelope nation founders.
If a country wants to leave an empire and the empire resists, then what are nationalists to do. Particularly if they are in the majority, the violence is justified.
"the violence is justified" - why? It is one thing to defend yourself, it is another to use violence to seek independence. Is Gandhi not relevant? How about MLK's thoughts. Should the Solidarity movement in Poland which explicitly rejected violence not be considered? Is the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia, not a relevant model.
The American revolution was entirely "unjustified". (Canada seems to have worked out OK.) It also lead to a a few of generations of continued slavery which would have otherwise been abolished. (In fact, the British courts were ruling just before the revolution that slavery could not be upheld on British soil - Somerset v Stewart (1772) - was coming to the Americas and certainly played a part in the rationale for armed revolution.) The entire American Civil War grew out of this lambrained-idea that violent revolution is acceptable. (The South fired first!).
Examination of just war theories and the morality of violence could be instructive here.
It is determined by who you must fight, of course, but all you're saying is that nationhood is essentially a joint decision, taken by both the people who will be in a nation and other people who won't. That seems correct, because nationhood doesn't *just* affect the people in the nation, it requires something from other people, too -- recognition, respect, sometimes an abandonment of prior power.
Does that mean that the Japanese are not a real nation since they stopped fighting the US after the US nuked them twice in 1945?
Anyway, I think that nukes, chemical weapons, and biological weapons are extreme and that thus a willingness to fight for one's nation against an enemy that uses conventional warfare should be a sufficient criteria for the validity of one's nation. So, by this logic, Ukraine, Iraq, et cetera would be valid nations.
If Ukrainians and Texans are exactly as willing to fight for independence as one another, but Ukraine wins and Texas loses because America is militarily stronger than Russia, does Texas deserve to be independent, or not? Does Ukraine?
I think if they fight and lose but are willing to put up a good fight, the answer is yes. All of this is according to my friend (who is kind of a Yarvin fan). Anyway, I did think it was interesting idea. He said the true test of nationalism is if it can mobilize people to fight. If it is an idea with some kind of staying power. Then it is a decent organizational principle for a society. It's "lindy". I think this is the argument.
Now for some of my own thoughts. I think any attempt to make sense of political reality using pure autistic rationality is bound to fail. I say this as an autistic rationalist. Try a similar argument about what constitutes a race or an ethnic group or a color, or any emergent category from the behavior of humans. It's like asking if orange is a shade of red or not. The difference is people fight and die over asking if Ukraine is Russian and not for the red thing. Nationalism is a social construct, and depends on a myriad of factors. It does follow the might makes right thing to some extent; if the Texans win then Texan nationalism will exist for a while but if they lose then Texan nationalism ceases to exist.
One alternative autistic rationalist framing I've heard of is "if I were a hyper-benevolent AGI whose goal is to maximize utility would I assign these people self-determination". I also like this very utilitarian framing, maybe a bit more than the "might makes right" one. This is supposed to capture the concept of "desert". But still, your hyper-benevolent AGI would put Texas in the US, and yet if Texas had successfully broken off from the US 100 years it might not. Its action would depend on the outcome of the war.
As an autistic rationalist, I don't fully agree with my friend's "might makes right" position but he is right that there is a "might makes right" element inherent in any nationalism or discussion thereof. First of all, states only exist because of force, they collect taxes and so on. Second, you can imagine if someone won a different battle a few hundred years ago we would have a different set of nationalisms today, and a different set of people who "deserved" to be a nation. I think it's impossible to disentangle this completely, though I agree we shouldn't go all the way to the ultra-nationalism "might makes right" take. I do think that the might makes right is an important element. I don't like the concept of "desert", I think the best way to rephrase it is the benevolent AGI. The benevolent AGI would try to maximize human flourishing, and not believe in "might makes right" but it would not be totally divorced from the outcomes of battles a few hundred years ago.
Yeah, it would. The AI's actions should depend on the past. But that means that it is not totally against might makes right. Of course it's not totally on board with it either.
It's probably not necessary, kind, or true to use "autistic" as a synonym for intelligent systematizer. You could substitute "analytical" but that's probably redundant with "rationality" so you could just drop the adjective instead.
I'm autistic as well, and I must admit I was a little put off by your usage there. You can use it all you want when talking about/describing yourself, but it gets a bit hairier when you use it as a descriptor for larger concepts.
Particularly as you were speaking of the limitations of the kind of approach you mean, and how it would fail here.
I think there are a lot of autistic people out there who wouldn't be happy with your usage here. I know some who I'm pretty sure wouldn't.
Overall I agree with Jonathan that this usage was not sufficiently necessary, kind, or true.
I understand what you were getting at, but not everybody reads "autistic" in a context like this as something like "extreme systematizing" (which is one thing you could have written instead).
But autism is much more than that, and the way you use it here - talking about how the "autistic" rationalist approach fails - plays on certain stereotypes which, while not entirely untrue (like most stereotypes...), are not very helpful imo.
Yeah, I should have at least written something like "extreme systematizing ('autistic')", maybe. I don't feel "extreme systematizing" alone *quite* captures what I wanted to convey, but I should have put "autistic" in quotation marks. It's the way as an autist I would naturally think about it.
Humans were originally all one population group. In ancient times, they migrated out of Africa and spread across the world. Over time, people settled in various places and intermarried with their neighbors.
Races exist because some places (the mountains and deserts of Central Asia, the Sahara Desert of Africa, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans) were really hard to cross so there was little if any crossbreeding/mingling across them.
This resulted in population groups interbreeding much more heavily amongst themselves than between groups. This is what gave rise to the "races".
There's really only five races - Caucasians (Europeans + North Africans + Middle Easterners + Indians), East Asians, the people of Oceania, the sub-Saharan Africans, and the Amerindians (i.e. Native Americans).
This can be observed via genetic clustering studies.
Nation states are much more flexible and change over time due to being determined primarily by culture rather than genetics. The Roman Empire was huge and influenced a huge number of people, for instance, while many other ancient peoples' cultures died out and were absorbed by other things. Others managed to sort of survive but be heavily influenced by the Romans. The result was, after the collapse of the Roman empire, a bunch of quasi-Roman people.
Let's give a concrete example. If the Chinese Civil War had gone differently, and either the KMT won all of China and Taiwan, or the CCP did, there would be no discussion of Taiwanese nationalism today. No one would believe that Taiwan deserved to be independent. Now, I believe that Taiwan deserves to be independent, or stating in a totally utilitarian way, it would be bad if China crushed Taiwan. But what I'm saying is that these kinds of questions are negotiated through history, and there is an element of military force.
I do think that viability affects the legitimacy of nationalism. Sure, it's not the only factor, and again I'm not arguing for an absolutist might makes right, but a country that cannot even control its own territory or deliver positive utilons to its inhabitants and its people is a much less legitimate state. The term "failed state" exists for a reason.
But strength isn't really nine tenths of statehood. If that were true, we'd have to agree with the caricature who leads the piece by pointing out that we have 195 countries and almost all of them are surplus to requirements. The world is full of puny countries with no hope of enforcing their own statehood should it fall into question.
But there are advantages for mighty countries in being surrounded by weak buffer states rather than hostile major powers. The name of the game as a puny country is avoiding pissing off your powerful neighbors so badly that they'd rather extend themselves to wipe you out than let you keep poking them.
I think this snaps into focus if you consider states as flux-and-spectrum entities rather than eternal-definition entities. He's not so much saying "these are bad definitions" as "I expect these to be the first to go in the next round of consolidation, and after the least amount of protest".
China wasn't a place for huge portions of Chinese history. Middle Kingdom is aspirational and refers to some extent to historic outsiders who are now insiders.
But if China became 12 distinct countries, not warring states, but coherent, stable *countries* in our lifetime, I wager your jaw would drop as hard as mine. Heck, even the China/Taiwan result led to a veritable mountain of discourse and soul searching among the American foreign services (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_of_China).
Whereas if Mexico absorbs Guatemala and appears to get away with it, we're probably both going to be only a much smaller level shocked and/or outraged.
In this regard small countries exist to be pawns for the large countries, to the large country's benefit. For example, the citizens of say Venezuela would be materially and militarily far better off if Venezuela was the 51st state. They won't ask for it due to ideology and nationalism, and America wouldn't accept it anyway, as America would rather keep them as a local weak state
> we have 195 countries and almost all of them are surplus to requirements. The world is full of puny countries with no hope of enforcing their own statehood should it fall into question.
Then why do these countries still exist? I think it's partly because, while there exist other countries that *could* conquer them, if they chose to put enough effort into it, the costs of doing so would far outweigh the advantages.
"there would be no discussion of Taiwanese nationalism today"
It would hardly be unreasonable for a large island 200 miles from the mainland populated largely by people who arrived from the mainland several centuries ago to now have a nationalist movement. Keep in mind that if the Chinese Nationalists had won the Chinese civil war in 1949, they wouldn't have relocated en masse to Taiwan, so the population of Taiwan today would overwhelmingly consist of people whose ancestors had arrived several centuries ago.
Singaporean nationalism is little questioned, even though the roots of the dominant population are similar.
This is possibly true. We know in OTL that the DPP did rebel against the KMT, the same thing might have happened in any case, especially without the Waishengren. It's hard to tell. Singapore is further away from mainland China and so on, and was not historically part of China. Taiwan was on and off, was Ming loyalists, Japanese for a while, etcetera. So yeah I don't know what would have happened. OK but assume for the sake of my argument such nationalism wouldn't have existed, and instead there would be a regionalism and a sense of regional identity maybe like Texas or Hawaii. It doesn't weaken the main argument of my post to imagine Taiwan as something like Texas or Hawaii.
It might have depended upon the type of government on the Chinese mainland: a non-corrupt Nationalist government or a non-totalitarian/crazed Maoist government might have appealed to the population of Taiwan that is not aboriginal (Pacific Islander-like aborigines are a very small but existent population) but somewhat indigenous (Chinese who have been on Taiwan about as long as WASPs have been in America).
Is there a name for this population of Taiwanese whose roots in Taiwan trace to the 1660s to the 19th Century?
Weirdly, the Chinese of old didn't much have contact with Taiwan, allowing European powers like the Spanish and the Dutch to first colonize it and deal with the aboriginal tribes. Then in the 1660s, a Ming loyalist grabbed it from the Europeans as a refuge from the Manchus taking over China proper (anticipating the Nationalist move in 1949).
Then in the 1680s the Manchu emperor in China grabbed Taiwan. Finally in the 1760s, the Chinese (Manchu) emperor allowed Han immigration to Taiwan, and within 50 years there were 2 million Han in Taiwan.
So, most Taiwanese who aren't descended from the Nationalist elite who arrived in 1949 are descended from Chinese who arrived about 200-250 years ago.
Is that long enough to form a nation that can resist a great power's aggression? I don't know. But we shall likely find out.
The name is Benshengren, as opposed to Waishengren https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waishengren . So, Jeremy Lin and Jiang Jieshi were Waishengren, Tsai ing-Wen and Lee Teng-Hui are Benshengren. Benshengren have a little bit of Taiwanese aboriginal ancestry (few percent) though Tsai has 1/4. They are not like Aboriginal Australians, more like Filipinos; they're Austronesian, like Filipinos and Malays. In fact, supposedly Austronesians originated in Taiwan.
I do think that if the Nationalists had won, Taiwan would have had kind of a regionalism, like Texas or Hawaii or Brittany or Quebec (well, Quebec almost went independent, so more like TX or HI) but not really a full blown nationalism. Yes it's possible I could have been wrong. Taiwan definitely does have its own culture, tied to Japan and all of that, and to the Ming Loyalists who separated from the Qing Dynasty, but I do think if the Nationalists had won it would be just a regionalism. Taiwan isn't Singapore and is too close to the Mainland for this sort of thing.
There is totally a native Taiwanese vs mainland Chinese divide in Taiwan. Lee Teng-Hui, the first democratically elected president, made reforms to curb the power of the mainlanders who had previously dominated the government. Taiwan is also the ancestral home of the Polynesians, and has strong cultural links with Japan.
That kind of reminds me of how Urdu speaking Mohajirs initially dominated the government of Pakistan, having left India during the partition, eventually alienating the indigenous Bengalis to the point that they revolted and obtained independence.
You can't blame Mohajirs for that, the alienation of Bengalis happened long after their (short) watch. Bhutto was a Sindhi feudal landlord, Yahia Khan was a Punjabi Pathan and Tikka Khan was a Punjabi. Then as now Pakistan was politically dominated by Punjab, the crisis was precipitated by the Awami League Bengalis winning the elections and the West Pakistanis refusing to concede.
Singapore is opposed to Malaysia not continental China. Divergence between Malays and Chinese is.... I guess, circa 5-10k years. In current year, Singapore is only developed country with positive attitude to PRC.
Bear in mind that if the KMT won, China would probably have a lot more regionalism, Cantonese regionalism and all of that. Especially since the KMT was close with regional warlords. Mao and the CPC suppressed this kind of regionalism and obsessively tried to unify everyone and everything, removing a lot of ancient culture and so on. Taiwanese regionalism would just be a different regionalism, like Cantonese regionalism and so on. I don't think we'd have a Taiwanese national movement. Anyway, I think the Taiwanese national movement is legitimate, but in this timeline it would be less legitimate and would not have as much popular support. At least I think so.
Singapore is not a part of China. It was a part of Malaysia, which Malaysia didn't want. (Malaysia threw Singapore out of the Malayan Federation, although to fair, LKY was making a grand nuisance of himself and Malaysia got fed up with him).
This makes "willingness to fight for independence" too much of an independent variable. It's actually a historical contingency. People become willing to fight for independence when (a) they have good reason to want to be out of the country they're in; (b) there is no way to achieve independence without fighting; and (c) they have some chance of winning.
In the case of the USA, (b) is particularly unlikely. If a state really wanted to secede, it seems likely that it could find a political path to doing so. (European examples of local devolution, state splitting, and Brexit show how.)
I would say that the main difference between Ukraine and, say, the South, is that Ukraine tries repeatedly to escape Russia's power. In other words, if they fail once, they wait for the next opportunity and try again.
Griffith's point was that the South gave it their best shot in 1861-65, but the North fought bravely too and defeated secession, so that ended the question: from now on, the North and the South would be one country.
You have wars where both sides are varying degrees of bad and "a pox on all their houses" is a good response. You have wars where one side is clearly the morally superior to the other (I would count the American Civil War among these, others might differ). But you never have wars where both sides are basically decent fellows and "why can't we just all get along, just a big misunderstanding" is the moral.
Actually, you have wars (which are interpreted) like that all the time.
A great example would be listening to a classicist or a Greek Nationalist talk about the Peloponnesian War, they tend to admire both sides of the war and view neither as a cartoon villain.
I think those moral wars are a very modern thing. All the European wars up to about 1930 were just great power wars, including WWI. It's still very much seen as just an inevitable result of the kind of jostling that great powers always did.
The moral wars are a product of the modern age where we're specifically trying to do better than the old aristocratic-houses-fighting-all-the-time model.
It's interesting that the moralization of war accompanied a stark rise in the destructive power of weaponry; the stakes have to be a lot higher than "Fashoda is British/French!" if you're going to get people to suffer napalm and the Somme for it.
Russia had taken over Poland for over a century and tried to forcibly destroy its language and culture by Russification, not too dissimilar to what China is doing to the Uyghur in Xinjiang.
A better case study for Scott's question would be Germany and Austria. Same people, mostly shared history, but we know what happened last time Germany tried to take over Austria (ironically led by an Austrian at the time).
Germany didn't merely "try" to take over Austria, they actually took it over. And it's generally believed that the Anschluss was popular with most Austrians (though not the Austro-fascist government that lost power). But the rest of the world didn't like Germany being so big, so they were separated at the end of the war.
Random question that only now popped into my mind: does anyone know how well Austrian troops in the wehrmacht fought? Did they act like they were in it with the Germans or more like half hostages looking for a way out?
From what little I've read I've gotten the impression Austrians were at least as committed to the Third Reich as Germans (not entirely surprising given its leader).
Nice! thanks. That quora thread is indeed pretty interesting. Also occurred to me now that Austria in German is Oesterreich, which literally means the Reich of the East. Now reich just means realm and obviously at the time didn't have the nazi connotation it has now, but still from this it seems they lived up to that name...
That's actually an artifact of early nationalism - when the German Empire was being pieced together, it was an active question whether it should be under the Austro-Hungarian aegis (being the most powerful state dominated by germans) or whether it should be a state only for Germans, without any of the other non-German possessions that had, during the middle ages and early-modern period, accreted to the Habsburg crown. The Prussians, and thus the "Little German" solution won out over the Habsburg, or "Greater Germany", from 1865-1870 (Austro-Prussian "Brother's War" and Franco-Prussian War).
However, after WWI and the disintegration of the Habsburg empire, the question arose about what should happen to the indisputably German rump-state in the self-proclaimed "Republic of German-Austria" (modern Austria plus the Sudetenland and bits of the Tyrol and Carinthia). Article II of the German-Austrian provisional constitution pretty baldly stated an intent to join Germany: "German-Austria is an integral part of the German republic." However, the Allies put a nix on this, forcing the Austria-Germans to cede the Sudetenland to the Czechs in the treaty of St. Germain, and forbidding the union with Germany in both the Treaty of St. Germain (Art. 88 [lol]) and the Treaty of Versailles.
As this wasn't done for any reason of "self-determination," but rather imposed on the peoples at issue under the logic of cold, vengeful, great power politics, there's a decent argument that Austria *Should* at some point have ben absorbed into Germany. However, the interceding decades - particularly Austria's unique role in the Cold War as the crossroads of Europe - seem to have forged a separate Austrian identity that is no longer really all that interested in joining their co-linguists to the north-west.
A big part of it is also just the fact that, by the end of World War II, Nazi Germany was hated by most Austrians, and beyond it being convenient to blame the Germans for the Nazis, they also didn't want to be associated with them and saw themselves as better than that.
As such, Austria is viewed as the first victim of Germany, rather than as a co-aggressor. And to be fair, there was a significant element of the Austrians who were never at all fond of the Nazis.
1) willingness to fight it is prerequisite to be treated seriously and to have independence claims worth consideration
2) in many case people/nation deserved independence but have not achieved it
3) in addition there is ethical/emotional worth that leads people to consider that they are not worth independence. For example Nazi Germany, ISIS, USSR, current iteration of Russia. But also Ukraine according to Russia and Poland according to Nazi Germany and USA according to ISIS.
"people is a nation if they are willing to fight for it" sidesteps question whether they deserve it or not.
Who “gets” self-determination: this phrasing implies authorities (probably existing nations) that confer the right to national self-determination. But there is no authority—we are not a people determining whether other people get to call themselves a people. We are people, individuals, drawing lines around convenient groups to make them countable and distinguishable. Lines that often cut through other individuals and are more ephemeral even than national borders.
Scott asks, “What if they fight and lose?” Implicit in that is the idea that there could be peoples who have lost their national identity because powerful enemies have vanquished and redefine them by fiat. Putin, the KGB goon he is, thinks he can do this: craft a people in his image by killing his most powerful opponents, imprisoning the next tier, censoring and discriminating against the one below that, and on and on in a sliding scale of oppression. Perhaps that has worked in Russia because Russian national identity has been interconnected with imperial oppression since the nation’s inception. And yet in Ukraine, Putin and his Russian soldiers and supporters have escalated from simple villainy to apocalyptic supervillainy as each level of oppressive atrocity backfires. They kill Ukrainian soldiers expecting it to reduce enlistment, kill defiant mayors expecting more collaborators, and kill refugees thinking that will motivate the next wave to flee toward them. The tactic fails, because the answer to “What if they fight and lose?” is that if a people has united to fight, it is already winning the argument that it is a people. If a people truly will live free or die, then while they are still alive, they are a nation. Ukrainians’ astoundingly high confidence in victory reflects their own certainty that they will and they are.
I’ve lived in Ukraine since 2001, with some breaks. My wife was born and grew up there. We were there in 2004, in 2014, and were living there when Putin started this third escalation. (We were caught outside on vacation when the war started and are now in Western Europe.) In periods of peace, the nation has often declined toward Russia-style corruption and illiberal governance, and in the process their identity has drifted toward being more like that of Russians. But each time Russia attacks, Ukrainians unite and Ukrainian national identity clarifies. The loss of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, in particular, concentrated Ukrainian identity by surgically removing what was most Russian about Ukrainians. The loss of territory was a good trade for the strengthened identity.
Now all of our family and friends in Ukraine are working for victory. They are business owners and mechanics and musicians and professors and doctors and school principals, but they are Ukrainian first, clearly defined by the line of battle. Whether Ukraine is a nation or not, whether Ukrainians are a people or not—none of us outside needs to confer the right to those identities. Whatever the outcome of the war, we will all find it only natural that we draw the lines in our mind such that there is a Ukrainian nation.
The big problem here is that subjugation under Russia means losing all self determination to a murderous kleptocracy. Whereas being Texas still involves a pretty large amount of self determination.
I'm also a little leery of this notion that the right to independence should be predicated on willingness to engage in military action. It seems to suggest that, e.g, some ultra-violent jihadist movement would have greater moral legitimacy in securing independence than buddhist pacifists who go on hunger strike or engage in nonviolent resistance.
I think you raise an interesting point with the Confederacy, though, which is a topic I don't think progressives have really thought through. Did the south not have the right to secede from the north? If not, why did the american colonies have the right to secede from britain? If slavery was supposed to be the critical factor in denying legitimacy, the colonies were also slave-holding states (nor was slavery entirely abolished in all the union states prior to the civil war.) The north was obviously *closer* to abolishing slavery, but one can also argue britain was closer to abolishing the slave trade than the americans were (the 1619 project is mostly garbage but I'll give them this one.) And sure, the southern assault on Fort Sumter technically kicked things off, but the colonies threw the first stone against Britain as well.
If practicing slavery at higher frequency than another power-clique negates the claim to independence from that power-clique, it would also follow that the european powers were in some sense morally entitled to conquer and colonise the global south in order to stamp out the practice of slavery in places like africa and south asia (which they did.) If you want to argue economic factors were the true motivating factor behind colonialism, it's not like there were zero economic motives behind the north's involvement in the american civil war. Like Mearsheimer has pointed out, the concept of universal human rights in practice leads to moral imperialism.
The confederate/union cultural divide has been compared to the ukrainian/russian cultural divide, incidentally, though not specifically over the issue of slavery.
The right to independence is just a fancy way of saying argument, specifically an argument that other countries should recognize you and those who could stop you should desist. That argument could be in the form of violence but could just as easily be a non-violent appeal to principles that the other countries value.
I mean, it's objectively the case that colonialism improved the global south, much like how the Roman Empire's spread enriched Europe by spreading their culture and increasing their tech level and improving their cultures.
That's... a complicated topic. Setting aside the legitimacy of the Romans' conquest to begin with, there's reasonable evidence that the collapse of the western Empire resulted in a net improvement in living standards in many provinces once they were relieved of their tribute/tax obligations to Rome. I'd broadly agree that their technology and culture were ahead of the curve, of course, but that might have been possible to diffuse peacefully over the centuries (assuming their neighbours had been peaceful to begin with, which is questionable. And of course all kinds of wars and violence broke out in the power vacuum left by the Roman collapse.)
The European colonial powers' advantage in technology was so overwhelming and the tenure of their administration brief enough that I think the balance of evidence tends toward net benefit in places like Africa (especially when you look at spending on health, education and infrastructure toward the end of the colonial period. Unlike with the Romans, there is clear evidence of the European colonies becoming *less* exploitative over time, which is part of the reason why independence was usually granted with minimal fuss.)
I'm just looking at the specific question of whether the practice of slavery justifies military intervention and compulsory reform, and why this would apply to the Southern Confederacy but not to the objectively far harsher material conditions of slaves in 19th-century African nations.
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
“Brought peace.”
“Oh. Peace? Shut up!”
I'm pretty sure the Pythons were thinking, at least a little bit, about the knee-jerk condemnation of European colonialism as a disaster for the inhabitants of the colonies.
"it would also follow that the european powers were in some sense morally entitled to conquer and colonise the global south in order to stamp out the practice of slavery in places like africa and south asia (which they did.)"
Yes. But not necessarily to subsequently stay there for as long as they did or to try using force to maintain their stay there indefinitely.
If Texas loses, they don't. I think what you're overlooking here is that nationhood is a social status, so like all social statuses it is a joint decision between the people who want the status and the people who would have to honor it. That is, nationhood requires something of the people who are *not* in the nation, so as they have skin in the game, it's quite reasonable that their feelings count in the decision, too.
If Texas wants the status, and fights for it, but the rest of the US doesn't want to grant that status (e.g. because it would require tolerating slavery on the continent) and fights to not grant it, then the decision gets made by who wins. If the rest of the US wins, we can reasonably conclude more people feel more strongly that Texas should not be independent.
Losing a fight makes you less likely to fight again, sometimes forever. However, if you can keep your spirits up for two hundred years an opportunity might come along, like it did for Poland. So it depends how much losing the fight diminishes your willingness to fight if another opportunity arises, and how long your willingness endures waiting for that opportunity.
In my opinion, historically Texas had the right to be independent. Yes, the slavery would be a horrible consequence, but "arguing from consequences" is a known fallacy.
The correct solution, if you insist on eliminating slavery, is then to defeat Texas and make them change their constitution, and maybe install a puppet government for a few decades -- but without joining them back to USA. Treat them similarly to Nazi Germany after WW2; eliminate the horrors, then gradually leave them alone.
I think the point there is more about the will to try, not about the ability to succeed.
If a substantial proportion of the population are willing to die to be separate, then that's some reasonable evidence that they're not the same people, no matter what the governing regime might assert - that is a credible, hard to fake sign of commitment.
It could matter that Ukraine is not fighting to BECOME independent (they are independent - and Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances ostensible requires that Russian, US and UK guarantee that independence.) While Texans who want to leave and choose violence would be fight to become independent.
It has been a while since I looked at Jean Bodin - but maybe we could start there.
ISIS does not identify as nationalist, and the goal was to set up a global caliphate rather than to just achieve self-determination. I also said a *people* are a nation. What people are the ISIS people? A *people* have to have a nation, I guess you could say "ISIS fighters" but they are not a people like Ukrainians, Jews, Palestinians, or even Texans. We are talking about a people based completely on some ideology, not on anything else. Nationalism often has an ideological component but generally has to be rooted in a people (usually people who are moderately close to each other on a PCA chart), a language, a culture, and so on. ISIS is a bit short for that. So I wouldn't say it qualifies, though one could make a case. It's never going to be black and white (like ISIS' flag is).
But even granting that ISIS was a nation, I think it was an awful nation and I'm glad we crushed it. There might be some nations that are real nations such that it would be good for the world if they got eliminated. This is a possibility, though generally my priors are against it. Nationhood is not always a good thing. If you were to learn through an oracle that country X and Y would start a nuclear war and kill everyone, it would maybe be good if at least one of X and Y got eliminated today but didn't drag the rest of the world with them. Anyway, nationhood and self-determination is generally good but not always. So if you're asking about the moral dimension of ISIS, it's tricky.
But ISIS isn't trying to set up a state for the Muslim "people." They're trying (or at least claim to be trying) to set up a universal state that will rule everyone, Muslim and kufr alike (though kufr who aren't People of the Book can look forward to being slaughtered if they don't convert).
ISIS was founded in Dar al-Islam because that's where they expect to rule, not being complete idiots. Islam being a universalist religion that seeks converts (I believe they call them "reverts") doesn't change that.
Scott's essay is about countries, which are different things to nations. The world is full of countries that have two or more nations in them, and nations in two or more countries. The people of the United States are not a nation. Nor are those of Canada, Belgium, nor the people in most of the post-colonial countries in Africa. Texas is not a nation.
Isis - the Islamic State in Syria - would have been a country. It would have been expansionist and totalitarian in much the same way as is Russia, for much the same reason: geography.
Russia was no more expansionist in the 19C than the US. It was also invaded by the west (well Germany but West to it). It then expanded the USSR empire, but unusually enough gave it up.
My understanding is that Russia expanded in the face of tougher opposition than the US. In America the native population was devastated by disease and outside of Latin America didn't generally consist of dense populations of settled farmers (I think the moundbuilders of the midwest might be an exception, but they collapsed from disease prior to even encountering any Europeans). They only acquired horses from the Spanish, and prior to the Columbian exchange also didn't have any metalworking. The Russians fought against people who had writing, cities, and weren't cut off from technological developments or diseases of the Old World. Canada is even larger than the US (and second only to Russia), but it's not because Canadians were more aggressive, rather that area was even less populated. I know a lot of Russia east of the Urals is also underpopulated, but Siberia isn't all of Russian expansionism either.
ISIS would have been an empire, had they not been crushed. Just like the USSR was an empire (and a country!) without there being distinct Soviet people. Even today's Russia is still an empire, with quite a few district peoples inhabiting it, and some of them (Chechens) were almost successful in gaining independence.
I think Isis was clearly a Nation - as far as I understand, it was a new Caliphate (or, claimed Caliphate). The concept of this entity had apparently been laying dormant since the ottomans so in some ways it picked up the mantle. Apparently this conception was so motivating that people were flocking to it from Muslim communities across the globe. It was to be a quite an illiberal and hostile nation to the US so it didn’t last very long. That’s realpolitik
Also I think nations and nationalism are getting mixed herein the post. Nations existed before nationalism, nationalism is the belief that the nation is what should define the boundary of a state (as opposed to say, royal inheritance law)
This is bad in that it privileges more militant people. Peaceful people should also be allowed to secede. Saying "the Dalai Lama is such a chill dude, ergo the Tibetans should have to live under China's thumb for all eternity" seems wrong.
I think this a misunderstanding of the quote. You know the popes led a state, had armies, lost wars, and ended up petulantly considering themselves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_in_the_Vatican, making a large number of signals that they were hostage sovereigns, not just moral and religious authorities.
Stalin wasn't saying the pope had power without an army. He was gloating about a fait accompli, that the pope was meaningless to him on the world political stage because the pope was just a failed political leader.
You *could* make a case that John Paul II was able to effect a meaningful retort by using moral authority to help end Russian communism, but not everybody makes this case, and in the face of history it's a relatively weak and singular example.
I'm not trying to make Stalin's point. I'm just saying that the Vatican, like microstates throughout Europe and the Pacific, don't have the ability to defend their independence through military force. It's norms that are preventing Italy, France and co. from just sending in tanks.
Nowadays, the Pope does not have an army, but he has a lot of power. Soft power. It's this power that enables him to maintain Vatican City as a sovereign nation. It's not about "violence" so much as "power".
Historically, popes had a lot more hard power, see the Papal States and so on.
And Stalin was pointing out that the 20th century popes had a hell of a lot less power than the 15th century popes, due to losing their wars, armies, and territory.
It is kind of a red pill that not everything in the world is decided by pure logic, and to some extent by power. Again many of the words in this blog post are there because of 1066. And yet the Normans' conquest of England determines what is "correct" English and not almost 1000 years later.
Less hard power, but arguably more soft power, or at least more widely-spread soft power (few people outside Europe would have cared, or even known, about the Pope in the 15th century, by the 20th century Catholicism was a global religion).
Yes, but so does history, and by extension so does reality. People who committed lots of rape were more evolutionary successful. People who won on the battlefield spread their language, and now it's the proper language. When you speak about what is correct English and what is not correct English, you're inherently privileging the Norman conquerors of 1066, and being biased toward their cultural legacy because of their success. I understand we hear this kind of rhetoric, privileging power over truth. from two kinds of people we don't like, (a) woke leftists, and (b) neoreactionaries, and it is overdone (and I would agree, definitely overdone by those two groups) but it has an element of truth we need to accept.
RE your specific example, the Dalai Lama being the nice guy that he is wants just SAR status. I think that would be the correct solution there; an independent Tibet might not be the most viable or happy country. In fact pre-conquest Tibet was a Buddhist theocracy with a very low literacy rate. But yeah, I agree what the CPC is doing to Tibet is bad.
I don't actually think that violence is the only relevant factor. It's not that simple. It's power, not violence. Lots of violent national movements have failed. Violence and terrorism very often produces a backlash (see Max Abrahms). One can imagine that if the Palestinians had just focused on having their own state instead of using violence against and trying to destroy the Israeli one, they would have accepted the Clinton parameters and had their state 20 years ago. The Zionists build up their national enterprise through peaceful means. They fought the Arabs and the British in the 40's as conflicts broke out toward the end of the mandate, but the nationalism was built peacefully, through buying up land, building town, building universities. Gandhi secured Indian independence with quite non-violent techniques. Jinnah secured partition with non-violent techniques. A lot of the rise of nationalism comes from nationalist intellectuals pushing their ideas around peacefully.
Us rationalists are often averse to bringing up power and want to boil everything down to logic. I sympathize with this project and I care more about truth than anything else, but any honest descriptive and prescriptive account of human relations whose goal is to maximize human flourishing has to take into account the role of power. I don't want to sound like a woke SJW or a neo-reactionary. Again I assure you I'm not either of those and they take the power thing too far, but it's a big part of the definition.
Is "people is a nation if they are willing to fight for it" meant to be prescriptive or descriptive? If it's prescriptive then I don't understand why this whole "it's not what I would like but Malthus and evolution and..."
If it's descriptive, I think it's simply wrong. There are plenty of nations that we recognize (and refer to in every day conversations) that aren't able to fight for their independence. But the Kurds, Palestinians, Uighurs, Rohinga – they all exist! They're out there. They should have independent states and they don't because they lack sufficient power. But we recognize their existence, probably even if we're among the few that publicly deny it.
I think it's meant to be descriptive; my friend described it as the "real test of nationhood". Yes there are some nations that are not sovereign states. Like the Navajo nation. That's fine, they don't want sovereignty. I would say your 4 examples are all nations, I can address them. I don't think that any are just "they lack sufficient power to be nations"; it's actually more complicated than that. There are internal divisions and other extenuating circumstances.
I think that people pretty universally recognize Kurds and Palestinians as a nation (some on the Israeli right still call Palestinians just "Arabs", but it's less common than it used to be), they are certainly groups that have fought for their nation. Still why they have not achieved nationhood is way more complicated than "power". With the Kurds, they have de-facto states in Syria and Iraq but the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds are not so friendly with each other. I don't think most Kurds in Turkey actually want independence, just more rights (HDP platform doesn't call for independence). It's wrong to say Kurds have not fought for their independence. Lots of Kurds have fought, against ISIS, Turkey, and so on. The Palestinians are a pretty unique case; Israel has actually offered them statehood, and they did not accept it because they were unwilling or unable to deliver a final-status agreement, give up the "right of return", recognize Israel, and not get overthrown by Hamas (who won their last democratically held election); see https://thirdnarrative.org/israel-palestine-articles/palestinians-still-reject-clinton-parameters/ for a discussion of this. It's true Israel has done some bad things like build the settlements, but it has actually offered them statehood, which is basically unprecedented for this kind of situation. Anyway, it's wrong to say Palestinians have not fought for their nationalism - of course they have. The problem here is not Palestinian strength vis-a-vis Israel but the strength of the pro-peace Palestinians vis-a-vis the Islamist extremist ones. The inability and/or unwillingness of the PLO to accept the Clinton parameters, the Hamas takeover of Gaza, and Hamas winning their last democratic election show what the problem is. With the Uighurs, it's a bit more complicated. Xinjiang is half Han. Some of this is due to CCP migration, but Xinjiang has had both Han and Uighur for a while. What would a Uighur state look like? Kick out the Han? Half of Xinjiang? Yes, Uighurs are a nation, and China even recognizes them as such and gives them an autonomous region. Yes the situation with the camps is totally awful. Still I don't know how viable or popular Uighur independence is. The Rohingya are treated awfully by the Burmese state, but I don't think Rohingya independence is the way to go or is a serious political movement. Are they a nation? I guess so. Some people (often Burmese nationalists) claim that they are really part of the Bengali nation, and their language is similar.
Good! Then we agree that your friend's description is wrong. We went through four examples and recognized four nations, despite the different levels of effort they have gone through to establish independent states. Conclusion: It doesn't come down to power or violence.
(I agree with Scott that "who is a *real* nation?" isn't actually relevant for the purposes of recognizing independence. Still, I think the criteria above for "nation" are wrong, whether proposed prescriptively or descriptively.)
I don't completely agree with my friend. I think he was really talking about "serious national movements" though not nations. A nation is just some people sharing some genetics, culture, language, and so on. My friend said fighting for your country was something like the "true test" of nationalism. How much people are willing to sacrifice for it. I do think that what he says is an important element of it, and I think there is a sense in which Kurdish nationalism is a lot more salient than Rohingya nationalism, because a lot of Kurds seem to be really nationalistic and care about having an independent country more than the Rohingya do.
I mean I think for who is a nation, if a group of people say they are a nation, then that makes them a nation, but when you are talking about which nations have a nation-state (both prescriptively, which should, and descriptively, which do) then the willingness to make sacrifices for the nation and having some amount of power and organization and a serious movement is a big part of it.
I personally think it's odd there's so little discussion of a "three state solution" for Palestine, just going back to pre-1967 borders. As far as I can tell they speak the same language in Egypt, Jordan & the Palestinian territories, and those territories right now do not seem that viable as an independent government.
What HK/Macau have. Given what's happened in HK in the last few years it's maybe not such an attractive option anymore. It stands for "Special Administrative Region".
> Now one can object on "might makes right" grounds
While it is not nice, there are cases of nations/ethnicities that are not existing because they were murdered/destroyed/assimilated/otherwise destroyed.
So while I would push against attempting to use it (one of reasons I support Ukrainians) I recognize that it is true.
You know, there are some examples you can give of this *other* than Godwin's law. The Dzungar nation was destroyed. But the legitimacy of Dzungar nationalism in 2022 is affected by the fact that the Dzungar genocide happened.
> You know, there are some examples you can give of this *other* than Godwin's law
Well, in this case it should not be a problem - I mentioned it because I admit that with Nazi Germany being successful my own nation would be destroyed.
I also mentioned it because it is something first coming to my mind and because it is Ukraine-related (also, because they at least recognized Ukrainians as existing)
Sure, I guess like to avoid Nazi analogies because of the mind-killing factor. But yes I agree with you. If the Nazis had succeeded, then Polish and Czech nationalism in 2022 would not make any sense. Fortunately they didn't. So the right of nations to exist or whatever is in fact contingent to some extent on "might makes right" factors. It's not *completely* based on might makes right in my view, but that's a nontrivial part of it. In the same way, what is proper English does depend on what happened in 1066.
Yeah, I think this rings true. Countries, as many other human inventions, are made of coordinated beliefs. We may argue a lot whether it's reasonable to believe in this country or that country, but in the end the only thing that matters is whether a lot of people actually believe in it, whether it's reasonable or not. Willingness to fight for what you believe is a great test of whether you actually believe it or not.
I also had a though that Putin's invasion contributed to the Ukranian sense of national identity more than anything in recent history.
I see no reason why a nation of committed pacifists has no right to exist (or for that reason a nation of committed rationalists who accurately believe that fighting would not be worth the cost). This heuristic would, I think, incentivize large countries to be aggressive toward smaller neighbors, for whom it's rarely rational to fight back, and incentivize smaller countries to develop ideologies of suicidal nationalism so they'd be willing to fight a hopeless war to annihilation to prove their right to exist, neither of which seems like a good thing.
This reminds me of John C. Calhoun's discussion of the concurrent majority in his Disquisition on Government (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disquisition_on_Government)–the task is ever over how to define who is in and who is out, and how to adjudicate between the two.
There are Schelling points like consangunuity, geography, and history, but ultimately the choice of how to constitute a unit of political organization will be arbitrary. And those arbitrary choices, system-wide, will ramify reflexively; there are bound to be reliance interests & path dependence.
Maybe the most important thing is for normies not to cotton to how arbitrary all these divisions are—for what is arbitrary is not perforce unimportant.
It should be noted that the late Lani Guinier took up Calhoun's ideas when reasoning about defending the interests of minorities in contemporary times.
I wrote a paper on this many years ago in college, in which I argued that secession is legitimate iff it is liberty-increasing (not neutral or liberty-decreasing). So Confederate secession was illegitimate because its intended result was perpetuation of slavery, but Northern secession would have been legitimate. I realize this means that even though the outcome might have been the same (two countries with different intentions about slavery), one way of getting there is ok and one is not. But, you know, process matters (thanks Nozick!).
As to why liberty rather than equality or welfare or some other value: that's mostly based on a sort of fallibility theory, which argues that if states can secede because they increase freedom, that broadens their ability to pursue other goals in a variety of ways, and retains openness so that if it turns out equality or welfare should have been the priorities, then we're more likely to understand that for sure.
Freedom has little to do with the legitimacy of succession. Parts of the British empire were freer under the British, but they had a right to leave the empire because why should London rule the world.
A utilitarian would argue that if (for the sake of argument) London's doing a better job of it than the locals, that's a very good reason for them to stay in charge. I think it matters rather a lot if a colony wishes to become an independent liberal democracy rather than an independent corrupt autocracy or theocracy.
No, it doesn’t matter at all. If India wanted to leave the empire and become an absolute monarchy then that was up to it. The question you should be asking is why should India be run by London, at all?
Ireland gained some liberty (its own parliament and laws) when it left the U.K. but lost some too, as its Catholicism was more restrictive than the religion in Britain (although Britain wasn’t liberal by modern standards either). But, so what?
There can be difficulties in succession, and minority rights need protection, but the opposite to nationalism is often not internationalism but imperialism.
You're acting like "India" is a monolith which is clearly untrue. As a matter of fact as soon as it gained independence it split into two and then three separate nations. Saying that "India" wants a particular form of government is ambiguous bordering on meaningless.
If trying to do what India wants means anything, it means doing what the people of India want, and an absolute monarchy is very unlikely to do that with any consistency.
You started with a straw man there. Because I said that British India has the right to secede from the empire doesn’t imply that it’s all a monolithic country. I was aware of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Your second paragraph indicates that you believe that only democracies can be independent, and in the absence of democracy a country has no right to independence - strong disagree.
Again, a country isn't really a thing, it's just a pile of people and land. So it's not clear to me that a country should have any rights at all outside of the rights its people have.
In particular, can a country ever have the right to act against the interests of its people? I don't see how.
You seem to be arguing that if some Indians wanted to oppress other Indians, or some Irish wanted to oppress other Irish, it would be wrong for the UK to interfere.
It's true that colonialist domination was responsible for many of history's worst atrocities, so from a consequentialist perspective it doesn't make sense to support foreign domination to try to reduce locally-sourced atrocities. But from a deontological perspective I have the same obligation to protect other people's welfare regardless of whether they live across the street from me or halfway around the world. And that's still true even if the would-be tyrants they need protection from speak the same language they do, and I don't. It's just a much more difficult obligation to fulfill in that case.
Yes I am saying the U.K. should butt out of both places.
What’s your feeling about a future democratic China interfering in the US to thwart white supremacy? Or the oppression of Asians?
As i said somewhere else I’m ok with the United Nations passing resolutions in severe cases to overturn invasions or stop mass killings. Otherwise, no. If you are worried about Afghanistan yourself you could try and alleviate the suffering of women there by sending money or going over to teach. Your country has no right to invade though.
On the pretext of human rights - which are continually evolving - western countries have invaded dozens of countries and killed millions. From the Aztecs, to Afghanistan we were the moral agents, they were the barbarians.
The definition of “oppression” can be fiddled with to justify any invasion particularly as the metropole can, and does, invent new rights every few years. What country isn’t oppressing LGBT these days. Invade!
This isn’t a hypothetical situation - the head of MI6 said that Russia was an oppressor and different from us “none more than LGBT+ rights”. This was just after the invasion, and he could have just mentioned the invasion.
That this is fodder for the masses of course, from a country that allies with Saudi Arabia, but it works.
Yes, that's exactly what my argument is denying (an implicit - or maybe explicit, I don't remember - premise is that who rules is trivial compared to how they rule, although how rulers are selected bears directly on freedom).
Wouldn’t it be interesting to distinguish between nations and nation-states, or something?
Saying that "if India wanted to leave it was up to it" implies that India is a thing, so the nation needs to have been created. And once we have the nation, it seems that they often make themselves a state either because they have the military power to do it, or because they have the political power to do it (eg., nations-states are praised by everyone, so you can use the argument to further your own nation-state — look at how decolonization slowly unfolded after Pdt. Wilson’s ideas about self-determination plus the geopolitical need to have buffer-states had made nation-states out of central Europe countries in the 1920s.). After all, before the 1920s, a big chunk of Europe was in empires, various nations under one power’s rule, and yet they were nations alright, in the sense both of being culturally and ethnically different from the other guys down there (ethnic definition of a nation — but I recall reading one of Bret Devereaux’s blog posts on how even that one was inspired by misconceptions about antiquity used for political purposes), and feeling different from them, feeling bound together (Ernest Renan’s definition, in "What is a nation?").
Regarding the US south, there’s also the question of what defines a nation: Not being American, I really don’t know much about this case, but it seems like neither the ethnic definition of a nation nor Renan’s political and ideological one really fits here (the Southern US were mostly not a different people with a different ethnic background, language, etc.) ; and they kind of didn’t have a wholly different ideological aim either, but saw themselves as members of the American cultures, recognized the same Founding Fathers, etc. — unless I’m badly mistaken. But, in that example, it also seems to be a question of degree, how different you feel and are, exactly.
These definitions and views of nations don’t seem entirely satisfactory to me, and I’m still trying to figure out why, so I’m sorry if this comment doesn’t make much sense, but there’s probably something to it, I guess?
FWIW, this distinction was not taught in the American public schools I went to in the 1980s and 1990s. Only when I went to college did I realize that some people made a distinction between "nation" and "state". (Special thanks to the Rurouni Kenshin anime.)
I think some of this confusion can be blamed on the USA's peculiar nomenclature and the increasing prominence of our federal government, often referred to as a "national government", as distinct from a "state government".
British India was a thing. Indonesia wasn't a thing prior to Dutch colonization, but it became one as a result of it. Both entities are too large & diverse to fit well with the template of European nationalism, but they wound up independent after WW2 weakened the European colonial powers and the leaders of those independence movements managed to obtain power over others seeking regional independence (though Bangladesh eventually split from Pakistan and Papua New Guinea evaded incorporation into Indonesia).
Eugen Weber's classic Peasants Into Frenchmen has as its thesis that even after the Napoleonic Wars, most people living in the country of France didn't consider themselves part of a French nation. For one thing, a majority didn't even speak French but various "patois". He cites two different people on "what is a nation" and I wish I had noted who said what. Anyway, one was common language, traditions, race, and state. The other was present consent, desire to live together, common possession of rich heritage of memories, and will to exploit the inheritance. He thought France didn't qualify either way. But it had become a nation by 1900, 1914 at the latest.
"Saying that 'if India wanted to leave it was up to it' implies that India is a thing, so the nation needs to have been created."
What's hilarious about saying that "If India wanted to leave it was up to it," is that the only reason there was a political entity called "India" (that was more than a geographic expression) in a position to want to leave is that the British created it. (The same could be said for Ireland.)
London should rule the world (or at least parts of it) if and only if their rule would make the lives of the relevant people better, duh. Same goes for Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Jakarta, Cairo, etc.
That’s basically benign imperialism. Which is what the British believed they were doing. However the basic idea of self determination is that you rule your own country regardless. It’s a bit like being an adult - we don’t allow our lives to be ruled by other people, even if they are better at it.
Countries are not persons, so the analogy doesn't work. The group of people in my country who manage to control the government, whether via democratic election or a military coup, have no more right to rule me than other groups elsewhere in the world, less right if they are more oppressive.
I find it useful to think of the "social contract" that supposedly gives them that right not as a voluntary contract but as a peace treaty, a recognition not that they have a right to rule me but that these are the best terms I can get under current circumstances. That's a contract made under duress, hence not morally binding, but still often prudent to respect.
My response to Scott's question, seen as a moral rather than predictive issue, is that only individuals have rights; the only legitimate government is one that either claims no rights its individuals don't have or is formed by unanimous consent.
That’s standard social contract theory, but as John Gray sometimes opines, philosophy doesn’t analyse nationalism at all, except to condemn it. The 20C was all about people rejecting foreign influence even when guaranteed democratic rights by the foreign power, even when the imperial or external power was perhaps more competent and definitely more advanced, even when the result was certain to reduce access to markets, and therefore GDP. Look at Ireland. Look at Algeria which would have become a department of France, look even (in this century) at Brexit.
Though there are branches of social contract theory going back to Plato that consider the social contract to be made under duress, like a peace treaty, but the Rousseauian branch, more influential in modern times, considers it to be voluntary and thus morally binding. (And many peoples consider peace treaties also to be morally binding, though mostly not Europeans.)
"Only individuals have rights" is the polar opposite of social contract theory.
That sounds like a nice argument! I'm somewhat skeptical about liberty as being more important than welfare, but for political purposes, liberty is more easily verifiable and is usually a good instrumental tool for welfare.
There are plenty parts of the British empire that have become dictatorships or monarchies, or have fewer rights than modern day Britain - particularly on LGBT rights in the Caribbean. This doesn’t justify the British empire reasserting itself (not that it is able).
Your argument is too close to democratic imperialism to me. If countries have no right to succession unless this increases “liberty” then they have no right in independence at all unless they are democracies, and very liberal democracies at that. This justifies all kinds of wars, invasions, and imperialisms.
Countries have no rights — they aren't moral agents. All rights should be thought of as reducible to rights of individuals. The claim that a country has a right to independence reduces to the claim that some people in that country, whether a majority, the military, or a hereditary ruler, have the right to rule over other people in that country. Why?
Because of shared cultural and ethnic ties with the ruled, which they don’t have with the rulers of the foreign power. Your logic would assume that the US, or some other democracy, could invade anywhere in the world, impose democratic values, be welcomed as liberators and the population would be happy to be incorporated into the US. Now take that logic to Afghanistan and see how far it gets you. 20 years of education and government, and then the government collapse.
The problem with a fully libertarian view of people as atomised individuals is that people don’t see themselves that way, humans have social ties.
(And of course countries do have rights, and responsibilities under international law).
Historically speaking, colonialism has been far worse for the colonized peoples than even indigenous totalitarian dictatorships, though you can find the occasional exception. Rummel's estimate for "colonial democide" was 50 million murders, worse than even the Great Leap Forward, though not worse than Mao's rule as a whole: https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE6.HTM
(Not sure how to count the deaths from the slow advance of life extension research.)
i think the specific real world circumstances factor in, so even if we concede the libertarian point on how states should work, maybe enforce non aggression and dont tread, they dont clear the hurdle of status quo bias aka "this is never gonna work and will create a disproportionate amount of conflict so in the end noone wil be any freer"
edit: the charter cities are putting it to the test, and while there is notable opposition from the left, right now it looks like charter cities are allowed to secede. the example also highlights that other circumstances matter. if the motherland agrees, secession is more permissible, than if you secede by force.
Might this not depend on the conception of freedom? Like, libertarians seem obsessed with negative freedom, but a potential increase in negative freedom couldn't be the criterion for secession because then everyone in any nation would always be justified in secession. Of course this might be limited because there are cases where going from citizen -> non-citizen would result in you losing out on political rights that enshrine a certain degree of negative freedom, e.g., the state they've just exited could legally & arbitrarily imprison them. But surely retribution from the state you're leaving shouldn't be factored into the calculation of whether your freedom is increasing, because then hostage nations would never have a legitimate right to secede. All this to say, libertarians would not have a legitimate claim unless they could promise an increase increase in positive liberty, a promise which I suspect most radial libertarians wouldn't be willing to make since robust social institutions are a prerequisite for positive liberty.
"because then everyone in any nation would always be justified in secession"
Why is that a problem? How did some people in a country obtain the right to rule other people in that country? If not, everyone is justified in secession, in refusing to obey the government except in ways in which he would be obliged to obey it if it were not the government — a policeman has the right to stop you from murdering someone just as I have the right to.
There are prudential arguments against individuals seceding, but are there moral arguments?
One could perhaps argue that the prudential arguments carry moral force to the extent that, for example, transaction costs or impracticalities in the administration of whatever natural law negative freedoms are stipulated to exist[1] require external coercive force.
Even if, for example, you think that the right to be free from negative externalities should be resolved only through some form of arbitration rather than by an ex ante regulatory apparatus[2] or by interpersonal violence, it seems obvious that without some form of violent coercion on the table to enforce the edicts of the arbitrator you can't actually end up with that as an equilibrium solution--including some means of subjecting both parties to the same arbitrator (whether or not they would prefer to secede from whatever authority would subject them to it). Quite conceivably many negative rights will have strong geographic context that would also make matter administration impractical beyond some analogue of a state court, so in that case the reification of an abstract moral conception of negative rights turns into a moral argument against secession to the extent that such an apparatus is a necessary practical corollary of protecting negative rights as a matter of first principle.
[1] Obviously one could equally phrase the question from the perspective of a Hobbesian strong man as "what give you the right to be free from my domination?" (or various other less direct but more often reified strictures such as by what right do you claim not to be subject to the governing bodies or consensus mores of your family / tribe / ethnic group, etc.), but that's probably a separate argument.
[2] As a currently practicing litigator and former law student, one of the central messages discernible from my classes on both Torts and Class Actions was that courts are generally bad at making injured parties whole when it comes to torts and ***bloody terrible*** at doing so with respect to mass torts, so I don't tend to endorse this view. Indeed AIUI the consensus in law is that class actions have value almost exclusively as a prospective deterrent than as any kind of remedial mechanism with respect to any form of non-injunctive relief.
I agree that if the consequences of not having a state with the right to do things we normally believe people don't have a right to do were sufficiently terrible, that would be an argument of having such a state. I have written at some length arguing that that is not the case, that there is no good reason why a stateless society could not be workable. You can find most of the theoretical arguments in _The Machinery of Freedom_ — the second edition is free on my web page, the third an inexpensive kindle from Amazon — and described some real world societies in which law enforcement was private and decentralized in _Legal Systems very Different from our Own_ (also available on Amazon). Michael Huemer's book _The Problem of Political Authority_ is also relevant.
Right, the rule I propose would be a lot easier to make use of were there a freedom-o-meter that you could use to measure the exact net freedom change, which would also of course depend on how far various policies are pushed (as there are a near-infinite number of possible gun rights regimes, for example).
Another adjudication difficulty comes from stated intent vs. actual practice - e.g. a secessionist group says "We're going to secede and you're not justified in using force to stop it because we're going to adopt all the same policies as our current state does, except we're going to get rid of zoning" and then, once the secession is complete, the president of the new country rips off his mask to reveal that he is Dean Preston. "About the zoning thing - just kidding! We're actually never going to allow a new building to be built ever again!" I suppose one might then say "OK, well, now we can use force to reunify," but what if Dean Preston just happens to win power in a legit election, rather than being one of the secessionist instigators? Does this now just mean that any country can invade a neighbor if it adopts more illiberal policies than it has itself? Why should it matter whether the neighbor started out as part of the same country?
Your first paragraph here seems to undermine the top-level comment via reductio ad absurdum... obviously there is and can be no such thing as a 'freedom-o-meter' because 'freedom' isn't an objective thing, at all.
There might be some meta-stable or Schelling point type equilibrium where people generally agree what freedom is, but that's basically already subsumed under 'society' or 'government' as they currently stand. On edge cases such as Ukraine or controversial successions that we do not universally agree no objective standard can exist, and those who claim as such seem (to me) to be appealing to the modern equivalent of divine right
Interesting point, but could not one argue that the available historical evidence suggests that the US was intended to be a voluntary union and secession would be legally legitimate regardless of impact?
Yes, but that's not the argument I'm having. I'm debating whether "increases liberty" is a useable test for deciding whether you like a given secession.
Yes, but wouldn't "explicitly legal" potentially make that point moot? Don't things become complicated if South seceding [reduces liberty] but US fed government preventing said secession is actually in conflict with agreement between states? I think we're sort of between a rock and a hard place at this point as the former is a normative judgement and the latter is an objective violation of agreement.
I'm really discussing Anand's suggestion that "liberty" be the criteria. I used America as an example.
If America has legal issues that make it a bad example, imagine a world where it doesn't have those legal issues and set my example there. Or I can crudely do the same example with the North and South of the United Kingdom (North being "Red").
Suppose the Republican parts of the US want to secede from the Biden administration. Would they be more free or less? More free to drill for oil, but less free to have abortions, and so on. Does it add up to a negative or a positive?
As useless as it is debating rules for secession that we can't enforce, it somehow seems even more useless debating rules that we can never even agree upon.
Oh, I thought we were in ideal-theory land; that's the only place the question in the title of your post might have an answer other than "whoever can impose sufficient pressure to compel that sort of political settlement on the state."
But even in ideal-theory land Scott's point holds; liberty, if it's even quantifiable, is certainly not totally-ordered, so a theory based on liberty having a total order is incoherent.
Edit: I got an email notification asking me to explain what I mean by totally-ordered, but the reply isn't showing up for me, so I'm editing it into the comment. A set being totally ordered by a relation (>= in this case) means every element in the set can be compared to every other element in the set with that relation. An example is the real numbers, R. If you can compress "liberty" into a single real number, then you can compare any two different quantities of liberty. But if you need to use two real numbers (like economic liberty and political liberty, for example), then you're mapping liberty to R^2, which *can't* be totally ordered by >=, meaning the question "does this action increase liberty" becomes meaningless. As Kenny Easwaran and David Friedman have pointed out, you could imagine a partial ordering -- (2,2) is clearly bigger in some sense than (1,1) -- but the more dimensions you need to add, the less often a meaningful comparison is possible.
I don't think the theory assumes that liberty has a total order. It just says that secession is only justifiable when it results, on net, in an improvement of liberty. If there are some liberties that can be compared, then you can secede if you increase some of those more than you decrease others. If there are some liberties that can't be compared, then decreasing one can't be justified by increasing some of those others, and that secession can't be justified.
If liberty has a total order, then every secession is either an increase, a decrease, or a perfect balance of liberty. If it's only a partial order, then there are four possibilities, but it's still only the increases that are justified (according to this particular theory).
That's a good point. It does restrict the number of valid secessions to "basically none" and is different from the original argument (i.e. the argument against the Confederacy is now that freedom from the federal government is incomparable to freedom from slaveowners, not that there would be an objective difference in the total quantity of freedom), but I recognize that this criticism departs from ideal-theory land a bit.
"Who decides" isn't an objection to something as a theoretical determination of right and wrong. It's a question about how to practically implement it in legally binding regulation. These are separate questions. There's no obvious reason that a theory of right and wrong should be the sort of thing that anyone is in a perfect epistemic position to implement legally (though it would be nice if it were).
Not incoherent, merely inadequate for judging all questions. It would be better to have a theory that lets you compare all pairs of alternatives but a theory that lets you compare many pairs is better than no theory at all.
For the same issue in a different context, consider the question for a utilitarian of choosing between different futures with different numbers of people in them. Some are pretty clearly better than others, but nobody yet has come up with a defensible criterion that will work for all pairs.
There's some value in saying what it would take for something to be justifiable, if you can actually give some argument that you're getting it right in theory. If you can in fact do that, then you can move to the next question of figuring out what sorts of implementable checks might give us the evidence we need. We don't need to solve both steps at the same time (though the practical decision makers might not care to pay attention to someone who claims to have solved the first step, or even has solved the first step, until there is some work done on the second step too).
Maybe more free, if for no other reason than I can only think of one thing that elected Democrats don't believe is under-regulated. Even on positions that are propagandized as being liberty-increasing, the actual proposals aren't or at least aren't very much.
Specific example: Under NY's proposed "legalization" of MJ, it is still illegal to own, produce, possess, or consume marihuana except under very specific (and state-enriching) times, places and manners. Any deviation from the specified conditions is still a crime.
If the question is how I should judge a particular act of secession, we don't have to agree on rules. You can have one conclusion and I another. That is, after all, the situation we accept in many other contexts.
I think if you want your example to work, you have to require that the goal–and not the consequence–of the secession is liberty-increasing. Otherwise, you have a contradiction between these sentences:
1. secession is legitimate iff it is liberty-increasing
2. even though the outcome might have been the same ...one way of getting there is ok and one is not
If the outcome is the same, then the net change in liberty is also the same. So by 1, it can only be the case that both/neither are legit (unless you modify it as I've suggested).
Second, it's unclear to me whether the increase in liberty we are measuring is only about the seceding population. It's not hard to imagine a case where a secession wins more liberty for the seceders, but results in tyranny in the remaining state. I think these are interesting cases to consider.
Third, I think the problem of quantifying "liberty" might simply be harder than the original problem you are trying to replace. (This is the more diplomatic way of framing Scott's comment. That said, I sympathise with your response to him. This whole discussion is rife with is-ought equivocation, and your open-handedness is refreshing.)
An alternative to this thought, but in a similar liberal vein: a people has a right to secede iff they have sufficiently robust institutions to plausibly be able to secure basic liberties for its citizens.
This would track some of Scott's intuitions: any given neighborhood is unlikely to have robust enough institutions to secure any kind of social, political, or economic liberties for its constituents. Not to mention the various hurdles and pitfalls of going from mob -> neighborhood watch -> militia -> police force, a progression which is necessary if you want citizens to be free from arbitrary coercion by other citizens. By contrast, any given city probably does have sufficiently robust institutions to secure these liberties.
Where does this leave us with the Confederacy? If the slaves were not recognized as citizens, then indeed the Confederacy would have had the right to secede under my model. But this doesn't mean that the Union did not have a moral duty to intervene and end slavery. Sometimes moral norms trump political norms.
What counts as a basic liberty t.b.d. For instance, do we have to include democratic political liberties in this list? Does this mean that only peoples with democratic ideals should ever have a right to secede? If you are a liberal, your answer to these questions will probably be yes. But you could still buy my view if you are not a liberal, under some more limited conception of basic liberties: if a fascist micro-nation didn't have institutions robust enough to stop citizens from enslaving other citizens, even a fascist would plausibly be like "nah, they shouldn't be allowed to be independent."
There is no need to contort the theory to specify that the CSA's secession was invalid. Assume that the secession was entirely valid and entirely legitimate. Then the Civil War would be, morally, a war of aggression; it would *still* be a just war, to end chattel slavery.
So there is no need to quibble about 'invalid' secession *All* secessions are valid, if the people involved actually want to secede - groups have exit rights just like individuals. Once in a very long while, a secession creates an intolerable situation that justifies a just war of aggression, and 'stop the secession' is a stronger Schelling Point for starting the war than 'let them go and then invade a while later'. This is a special case that applies for the US Civil War, and lets us then discard it as an exceptional case (i.e. hard cases make bad law) and write a rule which covers all the other, *normal* cases.
That mechanic (not sure if it's in the Civ games) where you have to convert a conquered populace to your culture in order for it to stop spontaneously rebelling/increase control of it seems relevant here. Once it's free of the original culture and self-defines, then what is it?
I kinda dislike using adjectives like that in lieu of an actual argument. Feels really weaselly - you're not saying it was a genocide, you're not even officially implying it but... you know?
Anyways, to bite the bullet: I support cultural genocides. We no longer have slavery, cannibalism, wars at the drop of a hat, serfs, gender based discrimination, public executions and a host of other things which were big parts of old cultures.
All I'm saying is maybe use a different expression, end reserve genocide for either things which involve mass murders, or things that are obviously metaphoric. I can't believe english doesn't have another collection of words to express the same idea. Worst case scenario one would have to use three or four instead of two. But in my humble opinion two words are worth avoiding the kind of derailing you see right now.
So basically you're ok with having them changed, even drastically, as long as there are changes you approve of. Anything more is cultural genocide. Gotcha.
I know I wasn't charitable here, but you really walked into that one...
This escalated quickly, given that the original post was about a game. I’ll note that your argument was one used by the British during their empire though, and the Spanish about the Aztecs.
I'm neither pro nor against cultural change per se. I'm not even talking about it. I just don't like expressions like "cultural genocide". They're either conversation stoppers - who likes genocides?! - or polarize conversations, like here. I was trying to show this, but apparently I succeeded a little to well. The point was just to show how it breaks down the conversation, not to actually break it. Sorry.
I support *some* cultural genocides. Perhaps this is a dangerous principle to adopt, and one can certainly argue about who fits this category, but in my mind there are clearly some cultures the world is better off without. 19th century Comanche culture, ISIS, early 20th century Prussia and its descendants, the Mongols in the 12 century.
Ancestors are frowning down on them but in terms of the utility of the individuals living the best option is to just get over it and embrace assimilation, or leave. Culture is a traditional construct designed to provide utility to its carriers, but if immovable political realities cause it to instead significantly decrease happiness and life enjoyment, it should just be discarded. The only victims are the people currently suffering under the weight of their past, when it can be simply be cast off.
How about the Poles? You think most of them wish they'd never been converted to Catholic? Do Germans resent living in Germany rather than the Holy Roman Empire? Do all those Jews and Irish and Italians and Greeks resent being assimilated into the US in the early 20th C?
When it comes to climate, we're supposed to weigh the happiness of future generations at least to some extent against the discomfort of the present.
Why does that same argument not hold for assimilation, that, sure, it hurts for a generation or two, then the benefits are immense?
Since you mention the Poles: They have experienced both attempts at Russification and Germanization in the 19th and 20th centuries. Do you think most of them wish these campaigns had been successful, would they be happier and richer today? Maybe.
All your examples are of successful assimilations. Assimilation attempts that have been resisted are viewed very differently.
"Assimilation attempts that have been resisted are viewed very differently."
That doesn't mean that the resistance was sensible, and that the (many generations later) descendants of those who resisted are better off. All it means is that, beginning at the time of resistance, they need to create a national mythos to justify that resistance.
People have always emigrated, even in the old world. That’s not eliminating a culture. You would be better looking at native Americans in the US as an example. You could argue that they are better off financially than they would have been without European/American invasions, but culturally they have been marginalised.
And they'd be far better off if they had simply integrated rather than having the reservation system. Under the reservation system they face low gdp, high unemployment, and low economic opportunity. If they had just integrated into regular America I see no reason they wouldn't be at parity with current American per capita gdp
That’s not the way it works. People will sacrifice GDP for cultural reasons. If in the future the west stagnates economically would you join an alliance with a democratic China, transferring sovereignty?
I'm not all that happy about that conversion to Catholicism, to be honest, and neither are many other Poles.
To be fair, at the time it was a political necessity if you wanted to hang with the cool kids instead of being repeatedly crusaded against. Though that still eventually happened with the Teutonic Order...
Do you think the people of Germany are significantly richer, more secure and happier after decades of allied control brutally wiped out Nazi culture in Germany. If you say no, then at least you are consistent but I’d have to disagree
No, because unlike the above hypothetical the Uyghurs remain a distinct second class culture. If however they were offered true integration into Chinese culture they might want to consider it
If this discussion goes back to medieval times, I'd like to bring up Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. When I read it, I was fairly convinced by his argument that the modern conception of national consciousness emerged in the 18th-19th century, and that applying this concept to peasants farther back than that is essentially just retconning them into a civilization that in actuality would not recognize itself as belonging to its modern counterpart.
With that in mind, I am skeptical that EITHER of the modern Russian or Ukrainian identities truly have the centuries of heritage they like to bring up. Just because Ivan the Great's name for his territory is phonetically closer to Russia than to Ukraine doesn't mean that Russia is inherently a more real or deserved nationhood, or that it is a sole and direct legitimate successor of his culture. A national consciousness developing in the 18th, 19th, even 20th century is a perfectly legitimate basis for a nation, and "seniority" on the part of Russia should count for nothing.
The only thing he got right was that the idea that states should be nation states is a 19C invention - people were fully aware of their National differences long before that.
Yes, one thing I've been continually thinking about in recent weeks is how this book describes the French process of eliminating Gascon, Occitan, Breton, etc. people-hood. Spain started a little bit later than France and thus never fully eliminated Catalan or Galician as distinctive national identities. Ukrainian and Belarussian seem the same - had Russia been as effective in the 19th century as France, then the question wouldn't arise, but they weren't, so it does.
It's worth noting that while they don't really talk about secession, Occitan and Breton in particular are quite distinct local identities, and still actively maintain their distinct dialects. I would say they're roughly as culturally a people as Scots are, France just has a more centralised government than the UK.
Not really. Gaelic has no similarities to English while these regions are speaking languages similar to France - it’s a Romance language continuum. Until recently Scotland didn’t have a parliament and France had many regions and cities with considerable power.
Breton is a Celtic language, very close to Breton, and quite close to Welsh. It is very far from French. I suppose it is unclear whether English is closer to Irish than Breton is to French, and it depends on whether Latin or Old Saxon is closer to Celtic languages. Occitan is a Romance language, so is close to French.
> I suppose it is unclear whether English is closer to Irish than Breton is to French, and it depends on whether Latin or Old Saxon is closer to Celtic languages.
The conventional view is that Italo-Celtic forms a clade, so Breton (Celtic) should be closer to French (Italic) than Irish (Celtic) is to English (Germanic).
I don't think the italo-celtic hypothesis is supported any longer. As I learned it, there are no shared innovations that are common to italic and celtic languages, but nowhere else to be found. I remember something about the discovery of hittite and consideration of the passive third person having led to that conclusion, but I may be mistaken. Perhaps some specialist would like to chime in?
I am aware that Breton is not a Romance language, in fact I said that below. For that reason Brittany is one of the places where they do in fact see themselves as a distinct ethnic group, the other regions of France do not. Were there more Bretons it might have a larger nationalist movement.
I thought I had read that English do-support (compare "I went to the store" with "Did you go to the store?") was paralleled in at least one local Celtic language, explaining how English developed such an idiosyncratic piece of syntax. Is that not true?
Do-support in English does likely come from Celtic influence, in much the same way that English has a bunch of words with French/Latin roots along with a Germanic syntax (though a Germanic syntax that has clearly been influenced by French!). It is the subject of some scholarly debate, since there is also some amount of do-support in other Germanic languages, though to a much lesser degree.
One way to think about language transmission is to look at each stage of transmission: My parents speak a language very similar to mine, and their parents spoke a language similar to that, and over the course of thousands of years, the slight differences build up. The differences usually come in pronunciation or vocabulary - inventing slang, picking up words from the other people around you, etc. - but other parts of the language can also change, like do-support if it came from a Celtic language.
Languages generally are a mix of the other languages around them, since people hear something and then start using it, especially in bilingual populations. You can basically always still say that they have a primary root though. English is definitely a Germanic language because you can look at path it has traced over time - it picked up pieces from the languages around it but at each stage it was closest to the previous version of the language, going back until there was just one Germanic language a thousand years ago.
Even that's a bit of a falsehood though, since there was never a point when all the "Germanic" people spoke one "Germanic" language. There was some point in time when they were most similar to each other, but even then there would have been a gradient across the speakers. And the Germanic speakers and Latin speakers and Celtic speakers and... could all be traced back to a Proto-Indo-European root, but they too didn't have one unified language. And this probably repeats back through history for tens of thousands of years, but any more than the vaguest hints at those languages are sadly lost to time.
So despite all the questions, it still makes sense to say that English is a Germanic language while Gaelic is a Celtic language and French is a Romance language. All the boundaries are fuzzy and questionable, but you generally know it when you see it.
Scots speak English with a Scottish accent, for the most part. But I don't think language is particularly relevant to this question - after all, the USA speaks English, independence is more political than linguistic.
Scots is considered its own separate language, not "English with a Scottish accent". There was even a Scots wikipedia which notoriously had a non-speaker behind most of its edits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
Historically the highlands and west spoke gaelic. Ethnic groups are often linguistic groups, since language and culture are intertwined. The culture can survive the language loss though.
All Romance languages are related, Occitan is closer to French than Spanish. Not enough for them to be a separate ethnic group. Yes Breton is separate. Only the Bretons are a separate group.
By and large that’s exaggerated. Breton is a separate language from Romance languages, and the Bretons still exist. Occitan is a Romance language, as is gascon etc. Dialects mostly.
About two decades ago, I wrote something critical of the European Union. In reply, I received a brilliant email from a Breton nationalist intellectual who pointed out that his peninsula was similar in size, population, and sophistication to Denmark. But everybody is convinced that, of course, Denmark should rule itself but Breton should be ruled from Paris. He saw the EU as a reasonable way for Breton, Scotland, Catalonia, Sardinia, Flanders, Lombardy, and so forth to rule themselves without falling into poverty.
On the other hand, I've also come to appreciate the conservative legalistic argument that the world community recognizes certain borders and doesn't recognize other potential borders. To take the most relevant example, everybody, including Russia, recognized the legal independence of Ukraine three decades ago.
The concept of the international community recognizing some states while not recognizing some others may seem arbitrary but it prevents chaos. For example, most important countries recognized Ukraine's independence in 1991-1993, including Russia on 12/2/1991 and the U.S. on 12/25/91.
Hence, ever since, all sorts of things have been organized with Ukrainian independence in mind.
For example, up until about the time Putin turned 40, Ukrainian athletes competed internationally side by side with Russian athletes as members of the Soviet national teams. But nobody under about 35 in Ukraine, the guys who are doing 90% of the fighting, can remember Ukrainians being on the same team as Russians in the Olympics or in soccer.
While isolating during the covid crisis, Putin has convinced himself that granting Ukraine independence after the failure of the Soviet hardliners' coup against Gorbachev in 1991 was a mistake Moscow shouldn't have made. I can understand where he is coming from.
But ... the borders of the world are not up for grabs. The whole world recognizes Ukraine as independent from Moscow, so sending tanks across the border into Ukraine is an act of aggression. To wield Fawlty's Razor: "You started it, you invaded Ukraine."
On the other hand, absolutely nobody has recognized Catalonian independence (although South Ossetia and Abzakhia are open to the idea of a deal). Now, I'm sympathetic to Catalonian statehood ... but, I also recognize that the foreign ministries of the Earth have not agreed.
So we actually can say with some degree of confidence that there is a consensus among the states of the world that Ukraine is a separate country but Catalonia is not.
You might find this the wrong way around, but rolling tanks in to change the borders has been in poor regard since 1928.
"While isolating during the covid crisis, Putin has convinced himself that granting Ukraine independence after the failure of the Soviet hardliners' coup against Gorbachev in 1991 was a mistake Moscow shouldn't have made"
This is missing an important point about the legalistic side. Ukraine had been recognized as independent internationally since the 40's. It was one of Stalin's tricks to get the USSR more votes in the UN by having USSR, Belarus and (most importantly here) Ukraine as "independent" SSRs.
So legally, Moscow has never recognized Ukraine as under its control since the post-war order.
I think the important point is that "legally" is not a thing that matters to Vladimir Putin. Ukrainian "independence" under Stalin was a trick, tricks aren't real, Ukraine wasn't really independent from the 1940s, and nobody really believed it was.
Post-coup, Gorbachev *really* gave Ukraine independence, and that was what Putin thinks was a mistake. He would have been fine with any legal trick that gave Ukraine fake-independence so long as it wasn't really independent. And right now, he'd be fine with a legal trick that allows Ukraine fake-independence while ending its real independence. Pretty sure that was his goal in the present war from the start.
Yeah. Ukraine in the modern sense really is a 20th-century invention, but also Russia in the modern sense is a 19th-century invention. (And using nationalism to claim justification for a war is a non-sequitir either way.)
It's my understanding that the title "Emperor of all the Russias" referred to Great Russia (Russia), Little Russia (Ukraine), and White Russia (Belarus). This seems to imply an understanding that all three are related, yet distinct.
I do, but legal rights can, in some cases, create moral rights.
Sovereignity is, more than anything, the best tool we have to avoid war.
Consider a repeated game of chicken. You can't communicate with your opponent. But there is a Lawmaker who can communicate with both of you.
The Lawmaker tells you that you can drive straight in every odd-numbered round but you have to swerve in every even-numbered round; your opponent can driver straight in every even round, and has to swerve in every odd round. I think it's clear that it would be very wrong for you to drive straight in an even-numbered round—even if the Lawmaker is unelected, and his rule is arbitrary. He has created a Schelling point that allows you both to avoid crashing, and also to drive straight in some of the rounds.
The concept of sovereignty, with exactly demarcated borders, however arbitrary they are, serve a similar purpose.
What's your take on something like Somaliland, a state which has in all practical terms won its war of independence years ago but which has no international recognition. Somaliland has no legal right that anyone else recognizes to use force within its borders, but it functions much like any other nation. Meanwhile Somalia is recognized as a nation but many groups use violence within its borders without the state's consent, and often local communities aid and treat as legitimate the forces committing such violence.
It's up to Somaliland to convince the international community that it is here to stay. Generally, that requires getting the larger community's consent.
Ukraine has flickered in and out of being a nation repeatedly in the last century, right? And that the Confederacy was a nation for a few years. So "is a nation", "continue to be a nation", is that a matter of a certain number of years? Is it five? Is it twenty five? Do they have to have a long period of peace before it counts? Hot war versus cold war? Does a certain number of other countries have to recognize them? Do you count mutual recognition pacts, where like Taiwan recognizes Somaliland and vice versa? A lot of countries you probably think of as nations are going to fail a lot of these tests for a lot of their history.
A nation is a people, a state is a political organisation. The Scots are a people but Scotland is not an independent state. Therefore nations don’t “flicker” in and out of existence, as they gain or lose independence. Not that peoples can’t be absorbed into larger ethnic groups (look at the Han Chinese) but it’s nothing to do with independence, or sovereignty, or self rule. The cultural idea of the people exists, before the State. The former often demands the latter
if the power to tax is the power to destroy, then Hutt is not a nation since it failed to avoid paying taxes and failed to evade other requirements of living in Australia. My knowledge of Hutt comes entirely from reading the Wikipedia article on it. But it dies seem like they had a lot of fun with it!
I prefer nation, but to me they are interchangeable. Some nations are more ethnically homogeneous than others. But ethnic homogeneity does not to me indicate a "state" or a "nation."
I think that's likely to cause confusion, when other people are using the sense of "nation" in which phrases like "the Kurdish nation" and "the Korean nation" and "the Navajo nation" have a referent and the phrase "nation state" isn't a pleonasm. Though one might argue everyone should just switch to using the word "people" instead to avoid confusion ...
They are not. A state is a legal entity. Recognized geographic borders, a monopoly on the use of force, etc.
A nation is a group of people who share an ethnicity. The nation need-not overlap with the borders of a state.
One idea in political science was that of the nation-state, where a state contains a single nation, and the entirety of the nation is contained within the single nation.
Does every change in borders going back to antiquity count as that region being a country? Or does changing which nation you are part of exclude self-determination but if you somehow lucked into being a principality at some point that is sufficient?
So I have used the phrase Transnistrian Sovereignty multiple times in analogy to the well-known term Westphalian Sovereignty.
Roughly: for certain international purposes (such as “representation” at the United Nations, participation in UEFA football, or not being invaded by space pirates) the region is considered part of Moldova.
For all practical purposes on the ground, the region is fully independent. It doesn't pay taxes, and is welcome to invite foreign armies into its territory over the opposition of the federal government.
At a high level, the system appears to work. But does it actually work? Discuss.
The status quo works for Transnistria because they have local autonomy for domestic policy, and their foreign policy needs are met by their patron Russia anyway so they don't care about their lack of foreign policy representation in the country they are actually in. It wouldn't work if Transnistria was genuinely trying to 'go it alone' and could had nobody representing its interest on the world stage.
It works by a more relevant standard: people pushed to get out of Moldova, but they're not pushing to go anywhere else. Transnistrians may have it relatively bad, but they seem to like their state, or at least their independence from Moldova and their relationship with Russia.
This is really question begging. What makes you think that Transnistrians like their state? Independent media is stifled, elections are not democratic, and out migration has disenfranchised people that used to live there but are unhappy with the current government. And the country is dirt poor and run by criminals. In the 2021 election 9% of ballots were spoiled on a 35% turnout. Why are people defending a dirt poor Russian exclave without a free press and with abysmal political engagement by the domestic population?
I was just reading about Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Artsakh) and noted that it's another example. De jure part of Azerbaijan, but de facto either independent or part of Armenia.
(The Caucasus region is particularly complicated this way, between Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, Daghestan, etc. I imagine New Guinea would be too if any of us paid attention to it, given how much linguistic and cultural diversity these regions have.)
S. Ossetia is an interesting case when compared to Crimea. After the Georgian War, Russian gave them the right to vote whether to join Russian or stay 'independent'. They've been going back and forth on this, though, putting off the vote time and again. Maybe this is to allow Russia more time to campaign? I'm not close enough to the issue to know why they don't want to join the N. Ossetians. But it suggests these votes aren't necessarily all political theater.
New Guinea is different - a modern multi-ethnic state (Papua) and then a ton of effectively-independent tribes that don't have a foreign policy in respect of the outside world (they have foreign policies in respect of each other), some of which have relationships with the state and some don't (some of them are literally uncontacted).
There's also the chunk that is occupied/part of Indonesia ("Irian Jaya"); the tribes there operate independently just like the ones in Papua, and the formal international border is meaningless in tribal territory (in the interior); the effective borders are along the coasts where the states are functional.
This brings up an interesting philosophical question. Assuming the state and the discussants more or less buy into the idea of The Social Contract, what is the status of uncontacted peoples? There are people who are legally and territorially residents of Papua New Guinea, but neither they nor their ancestors have ever even been made aware of the general social contract of that state, much less bought into it. Is this okay?
I think this is why the tribes are treated as being de facto independent - you can say the same for Amazonians, the Sentinelese, and the few other examples of uncontacted or limited-contact peoples.
in PoSci we discuss cases like this under the term of de-facto states. notable examples include Somaliland, northern cyprus and Nagorno Karabakh, arguably Taiwan although it is very close to a "real" state.
Most of these are artifacts of a frozen conflict. That means they enjoy a lesser degree of normative protection in the form of people saying its bad if someone just goes and conquers them.
Do you have a good explanation as to why Transnistria was included in Moldova in the first place? I can't seem to make heads or tails of the decision. Was it some confusion about biological ethnicity vs. language vs. culture?
Yes and no ... I have an explanation for "why are the post-Soviet national borders mutable in a way that the borders in the rest of the world are not" on my blog at https://yevaud.newslettr.com/p/the-post-war-population-transfers . If you want the detailed history of "why did the Soviets draw the lines how they did", you will have to ask someone else.
I think it's worth saying explicitly what this post essentially leaves as subtext, namely, that "a people's right to self-determination" is a fundamentally incoherent concept. Many intuitive political concepts are in fact like this, such as the idea of "indigeneity" (am I indigenous to East Africa because my ancestors evolved there, and if so, does that mean I deserve special rights there I wouldn't deserve in, say, China?). We utilitarians should - at least, when no one else is listening - abandon all talk of such rights, and instead simply support or oppose self-determination on the basis of whether it makes the world a better place or not.
The problem with this thought IMO is that it's never really clear what the outcome of a war will be, at least not nearly enough to evaluate it in this way. Suppose you're advising a group of Lakota whether they should violently confront American settlers and try to form their own nation or if they should play nice with America and try to secure favorable terms of integration. In the best case separate nationhood is probably better and less likely to involve oppression of Lakota, but going to war also increases the odds that the US comes back with plans of ethnic cleansing. Wars are such unpredictable animals and the outcomes of them so radically different that there's seldom any clear answer that doesn't rest on dozens of unverifiable assumptions.
But I agree the idea of self-determination is incoherent and doesn't really get you anywhere.
I don't know, maybe if we aren't really sure whether a way will have good or bad utilitarian outcomes, we shouldn't be very sure about whether we support it or oppose it?
It makes a distinction between axiology, morality, and law.
"Axiology" is the study of what makes the world a better place.
"Law" is a system of rules that we've decided to enforce with violence. Ideally, we want to pick our laws to try to make the world a better place, but we don't just have a law that says "maximize goodness", because trying to enforce "maximize goodness" with violence is a poor strategy for actually achieving goodness. (For several reasons: it's hard to adjudicate whether someone followed it, lots of people would fail to follow the rule even if it were enforced with violence, enforcement would be expensive, etc.)
"Morality" is a system of rules that we've decided to enforce socially, but not with violence. As with "law", we want this system of rules to make the world good, but goodness isn't maximized simply by telling everyone "socially punish anyone who doesn't make the world good". Morality can afford to be *closer* to axiology than law can, because the enforcement is less harsh, but the optimum set of moral rules is still different from perfect axiology, due to things like enforcement costs, partial information, cognitive limitations, etc.
In this frame, morality is a *strategy* for achieving goodness, rather than a *description* of what is good. And it's potentially useful to have a strategic discussion about what actions should be socially rewarded/punished as distinct from what actions would (hypothetically, if we could magically get people to follow them) lead to an ideal world.
I think my response would be that it's not an eternal inherent property of the universe, but instead it's a procedurally determined thing. A bunch of people show up with weapons and say you're part of them now: what do you do?
That's unsatisfying from a theoretical perspective, I know.
All governments are de facto - there is no "country in its own right", "historical people deserving self-determination", etc. "Self-determination" is a nonsensical concept. A government is an organization of humans, it does not "represent" a "people" in some ethereal sense. Russia has self-determination in the way you are using that term, but 99.9999% of Russians have no control over the actions of their government. Ukraine could be governed by Ukrainians and be terrible (as has happened multiple times), or it could be governed by Chileans and be great. If we care about the welfare of Ukrainians we should wish for them to have good government which promotes their happiness and prosperity, not about whether their rulers are of a particular ethnicity.
Territory changes hands over time based on the ability of various governments to maintain their strength, be good neighbors, and the wars/lack thereof that result from that. Any given arrangement of territory and population under various governments is arbitrary, and trying to maintain the distribution of a given moment in history has no more a priori reason to be correct than any other arrangement.
Your last sentence sounds virtually indistinguishable from the famous Watchman quote:
"There is no material difference in the number of particles in a living body and in a dead one. Why should I care if some matter arranges itself into a slightly lower energy state?"
Do you believe that the Ukranians will have a happy, prosperous future with Russian overlords?
I don't, but not because of their lack of self-determination - simply because I don't expect Russia to actually take over the country and rule it. If Russia was truly going to take over Ukraine and Ukrainians would live under the Russian government, I do think they would be better off. The Russian government, from my perspective, clearly provides superior customer service to the Ukrainian one, regardless of your opinion of their morality/immorality in international relations.
Regarding your quote, the opinion that nothing has real meaning - there are no good or bad outcomes, just the interplay of physics - is certainly a coherent philosophical position. I personally do not agree with it because I value my own life and happiness a LOT, and empathy compels me to value those things in others as well. But ethical axioms cannot be debated. If someone else does not have the same feelings I do no logical argument can convince them.
I think a preference for the status quo has to weigh in to some extent.
All else being equal, sure, I agree with the “any group large enough that it isn’t ludicrous on its face has a right to self-determination” standard.
But all else is almost never equal. Someone wants to secede and someone else wants to conquer—and all of that is enormously disruptive to many other someones.
So I think there’s an immediately obvious utilitarian bias towards the status quo of, oh, the last decade or so. Governments are heavy, complicated things, and I think a group who wants to disrupt that needs to make an affirmative argument based on something other than “self determination” that this is a good idea and all the disruption is worth it for the sake of things being better in the long run.
Which unfortunately gets us nowhere because it brings us right back to debates about culture and history etc.
Self-Determination is a sort of weird right, because it is inherently a right afforded to groups of people, but not individuals (unless you are an extremely principled libertarian). I think granting rights to groups that are independent of the rights of the constituent individuals makes very little sense. 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.
I also think the scoping problem is even worse than you say. A defining characteristic of a state is that some group in power (often the majority) can enforce their will on every one else. Why would it be the case that the group in power has the right to their power, but the larger entity having even more power doesn't?
My immediate response to "what about the Confederacy?" is to say that yes, the people of the South had the right to secede in 1861 if they wanted to - but they didn't.
For one, there was a huge Black population - a majority in South Carolina, and at least a large minority elsewhere - who didn't get to vote, and would presumably have opposed secession.
For another, even the white population probably opposed secession in most places. Many secession conventions had a majority of delegates elected as Unionists who eventually voted for secession. I believe Texas was the only state where it was even submitted to referendum. Admittedly, the delegates would've argued that circumstances changed between their election and their vote - but even ignoring the restricted franchise, this casts their democratic legitimacy in severe doubt.
So, I believe it's quite consistent to support secession in theory but oppose the 1861 secession in practice.
Yeah, but it seems possible in principle that, say, all white citizens supported, all black citizens opposed, and blacks were a minority so it passed. I don't think that scenario would be very different, ethically, from what really happened, so I don't want to hang my opposition to what really happened on its differences from that scenario.
Personally, my response is that transaction costs are large enough to warrant enshrining a status quo bias and require a super-majority, which I seriously doubt the confederacy had. (Notably, this requirement would have prevented Brexit from passing, and I doubt Crimea had genuine supermajority support for leaving Ukraine and joining Russia)
I also have strong feelings that there should never be restrictions on emigration - if black slaves had been allowed to freely leave the Confederacy, there wouldn't have been a moral issue with it. Voting with your feet is expensive but a lot better than having no options at all.
I expect that for realpolitik reasons the USA would probably still have gone to war over it even if you satisfy all those conditions, though, since as you said, "international law" is a polite fiction with no enforcement, and that was even more true in the 19th century.
Brexit wasn't really a secession by the standards we use here. UK wasn't even fully integrated in EU when they left - they always kept a foot in the door. I was expecting at least a mention on the Basques or the Irish - much closer to what we're talking about.
Anyways, my take on this is that EU made 90% of secession topics in Europe obsolete. You don't have borders anyways, same currency, (a bit too) unified laws, there is even an EU prosecutor's office now. You secede for ... what exactly?
Which offers a pretty nice framework for judging Russia vs UA. Russia wants a lot less freedoms overall: they're specifically complaining that UA was moving towards the west, entering alliances they dislike and so on. If they just left them alone, there was absolutely nothing stopping them from offering the exact type of trade and military alliances, from lowering border passing costs and so on. Joining EU or even NATO would restrain their options almost too little to count - and brexit has proven there's even a civilized way of exiting.
My standard is "settled will", which is also an arbitrary standard that can be argued about, but suggests a character of a long-term and deep-rooted decision rather than a particular majority standard.
The approach I (formally, at the time) proposed for Scotland's independence is that they hold a referendum on whether to negotiate for terms of independence, and then, having agreed terms or failed to reach agreement, hold a second referendum on whether to accept those terms or declare independence unilaterally. This is in a situation where there are a lot of Scottish people who would like to be independent in principle but are concerned about what it would mean in practical terms, so giving them a clearer view of the practical impacts would make the second referendum a much clearer expression of the settled nature of their will.
Thank you, I was pondering how to deal with this specific issue of transaction costs on one hand and how to settle on an arbitrary number different from 50% on another, and this seems to solve it !
There was a lot of violence in the south by secessionists against southern unionists. I don't think we can say that secession would have won a fair referendum in any state.
If we go all-in on self-determination, doesn't that mean that the Confederacy had the right to secede, but black people in the Confederacy had the right to secede from it in turn?
South Africa thought differently. Now, apartheid was bad, but it was bad in large part because the Bantustans' independence wasn't real (ditto for Palestine).
For example, Norwegians are the people who live in the rugged Atlantic watershed of the Scandinavian mountains, while Swedes are the people who live in the gentle Baltic watershed of that mountain range. This distinction goes back many centuries. In 1905, 99.95% of Norwegians voted for dissolution of their union with Swedes.
That turned out successful for both peoples.
On the other hand, flat plains tend to lead to intermingled ethnicities. Sorting out flat plains can be an ugly business. Modern Poland, for example, is a homogeneous and successful nation-state. But modern Poland is also a creation of the Nazis murdering its Jews and the Soviets ethnic cleansing its Germans. That's not the fault of modern Poles, but it shouldn't be an attractive role model for the rest of the world.
I once found one historical example of where population transfers were done in a reasonably humane, well organized fashion, but I can't remember what it was. Schleswig-Holstein, maybe?
Isn’t this more of a democracy problem than a secession problem? If 60% of an area’s population want to enslave the other 40%, that’s either ok or it’s not. “You can’t do that, but only because you’re currently part of a larger polity” seems like a really weird answer to throw out in response.
It's by no means clear who should get to vote on an independence referendum: the residents of the territory pondering independence or the whole country affected?
For example, David Cameron offered Scotland a vote on independence in which the rest of the UK was to have absolutely no say. It narrowly failed.
On the other hand, in the 2001 referendum on independence from Los Angeles for the San Fernando Valley, a slight majority of Valley Girls and Guys voted for secession (50.8%). BUT the rest of the city voted overwhelmingly (80.5%) to hand on to their tax cow. And under the rules of that election, that defeated secession.
Looking at independence referenda around the world, I'm struck that successful ones tend to enjoy a bandwagon effect with a vast majority voting for secession. For example, to take an archetypal example of a successful secession movement, in 1905 99.95% of Norwegians voted to secede from Sweden.
Are you willing to concede (if the majority support it, as they appear to) that Crimea and the Eastern parts of Ukraine have that same right to secede and join Russia?
And, just to pour gasoline on the flames, if we accept the tenets of Woke that some of us are less sullied and more deserving than others, then it should be pointed out that it's the wealthiest, most elite, most educated fraction of Ukraine that embraces Europe, while it's the poor, the weak, the downtrodden, who choose Russia...
So I have a strange outlandish political opinion. I'm very much of proponent of the succession of the City of Memphis from the State of Tennessee. We would be accepted into the Union as the 51st State. Our boundaries would be the entirety of the Memphis Sands Aquifer which is spread across three states.
There's a lot of reasons I believe that this is important, but the primary is to prevent the exhaustion of the Memphis Sands Aquifer.
Getting the City to vote to leave Tennessee is one things, and theoretically possible, but how do you propose to lay claim to the aquifer? Why does your new State of the City of Memphis have more right to it than the 3 states currently sharing it? And note that you're arguing for a transfer of ownership, not a legal covenant restricting extraction, which wouldn't require any change in ownership while providing *more* legal protections (All of these hypotheticals operating in the counterfactual where getting people to agree to them is possible with a combination of persuasion and affordable payments).
Transfer of ownership isn't the right word. Three states "own" the aquifer today. They argue in the courts to determine the what happens with the water.
I understand what you are saying, and I agree that's what's going to happen. A nameless legal think tank in DC will decided what happens to the water. A series of legal verdicts in our court system will "protect it", and no single person who actually live in the place these natural resources exist will actually vote on it. Some NGO will release a couple studies that will conclude the courts are right, and that will be that.
Again. I don't care. I still think the people who live by the resources should actually have a say on how they are managed. And if there's monetary benefits to those resources, the communities in question should benefit.
You may succeed in seceding, and may be readmitted as US territory akin to the status of Washington, DC. But getting admitted as a 51st state seems much harder. It would give 4 senators to what is today Tennessee, which the rest of the country would (rightly) not abide.
Memphis is the second city in three states, well two states since Mississippi doesn't actually have a major politically relevant city in recent history. Jackson will eventually be that in 10 years.
Anyway, Memphis isn't actively represented in the Senate, and hasn't been since the early 90s. We don't have a significant representation in the federal government. I really don't care what the rest of the country thinks. I want my friends and family to have a future in the city they were born in, or at least the opportunity if they want it.
It's not unreasonable to align political control of natural resources with their political boundaries. If you were, say, the Hereditary Grand Supremo of the Ogallala Aquifer, it would be in your dynasty's long term interest to avoid depleting it and instead manage it sustainably. In contrast, an unfortunate situation is, as Saddam Hussein complained to April Glaspie in 1990, where outsiders can drill into your natural resources and suck them dry.
If global warming and desertification are going to be as bad as people say, we will have water pipelines built to the rich cities of Nashville and Fayetteville. Extravagant expenses to ensure the survival of those cities.
While the majority of Memphians will still live in poverty, likely not being able to afford water.
Re the Navajo seceding. The general federal status of a federally recognized Indian tribe in the United States is a “domestic dependent nation” in a “government-to-government relationship” with the United States federal entity. Due to the history of this country, beginning at first contact and extending now for several hundred years, there are many, many treaties (which started out as agreements negotiated between separate countries, each Indian tribe being analogous to a country) and many of those treaties are still in force. This is how the SCOTUS recently decided that a large part of eastern Oklahoma is actually answerable to tribal law rather than Oklahoma state law. There is an entire career field of Indian law and it matters a great deal to tribal members, but also nationally in water rights disputes, minerals/mining/drilling, right of way (see DAPL), criminal investigation and prosecution, gaming, and a host of other things. One might not be able to tell when the interstate highway crosses from a state into a reservation, except now gambling is legal in that rest stop, cigarettes are a different price, and that’s due to the reservation being it’s own country in some important respects, with elected government, constitution, etc of its own. It’s more complicated than can be described in a paragraph here, but the gist is there really is a separate legal status going on.
I agree with this, but I also think if the Navajo started doing things America didn't like (eg invited Chinese bases on their territory), America would remind them that this was a polite legal fiction and make them stop. If they ever pushed back against this, I would consider it a secession attempt.
There is legal overlap on the federal level between the Navajo nation and the US, federal taxes are still paid, so yes, absolutely, they are also still part of the US. Inviting foreign bases would definitely be not allowable. It is a weird legal fiction, but it allowed tribes to maintain some sovereignty.
American Indian nations have a history of ignoring domestic laws against, say, gambling or environmental depletion (e.g., it's much easier to build a golf course in California on an Indian reservation than off-reservation). On the other hand, American Indian tribes have zero history of aligning with foreign powers since, roughly, the War of 1812. And Native Americans have a distinguished history of winning military honors for bravery from the U.S. military.
Yes, this is an important point. Spheres of influence are not legal but that doesn't stop them from being important things that de facto happen. Just this week the Australian and New Zealand governments spoke out against the Solomon Islands signing a security agreement with China despite this being none of their business technically. And all these countries are fairly small.
Powerful countries take spheres of influence very seriously despite them having no legal "right" to do so (and complaining bitterly when other countries claim them).
"Every oblast in Ukraine, including Crimea, voted for independence. Support ranged from over 95 percent in western Ukraine and the Kiev region to 54 percent in Crimea, where ethnic Russians form a substantial majority of the population..."
On the other hand, 54% voting for joining Ukraine in 1991 is totally compatible with only 40% (or whatever) wanting to remain part of Ukraine in 2014. It's very tricky when these results are in the 35-65% range, because it doesn't take that much change of opinion or passage of time for these things to change back and forth in that range.
Also worth keeping in mind that Russia was deliberately sending Russians to Crimea for years *in order* to swing voter demographics in favor of voting to become part of Russia.
This of course brings up the Northern Ireland problem in the world of self-determination: do people still have self-determination if they were deliberately emplaced there by an imperialist power with the goal of diluting another nationality's control over an area?
My answer to that is "depends when they were emplaced there".
If it was sufficiently recently for it to be reasonable for them to go back, then go back they should; if it wasn't, then they get to stay and keep the territory.
Yes, this means that if you commit a crime for long enough, then you get away with it, but that's true in general, stolen property will eventually belong to your descendants.
I don't think that's right. Before 1991, the USSR was a single state with effectively zero democracy, so voter demographics were a non-issue. And before 1954, Crimea was not even a part of UkrSSR. Russia (or rather, the USSR) was indeed populating Crimea with Russians, but it was for reasons entirely unrelated to voting.
This btw makes any elections in the areas where Russians had control over a useless sham. They really do that, and they also take "refugees" out. It's trivial to send Ukrainian refugees 2000 miles away ('cause that's there they had room) and russians just across the border where they can be brought back in a few hours just before elections. All very legit and above the board.
Putin does not need to move people back and forth for the elections because all Russian-held elections are a sham anyway. You don't need to move voters if you can just move numbers from one column to another.
This is from 1991, though. Of course they might have changed their opinion between then and 2014. Just to be clear, I do not support Russian annexation of Crimea, but bringing up 1991 referendum is not a good argument against it.
This is partly because it wasn't independence from Russia, but independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Note that neither referendum in Crimea has been Russia vs Ukraine, in both cases, it has been one of those states against an artificial third option (Soviet Union in 1991, independent Crimea in 2014).
Russia was also declaring independence from the USSR at the same time, so voting to stay in would theoretically have resulted in Crimea becoming the only bit of the USSR.
Worth noting that succinct as it may be, Karlin up there appears to be an actual facist, and the argument from his comment's section is a facist argument. Debates along the axis of that argument are a death trap, and we shouldn't get caught up in them.
I'm of the opinion that there's no reasonable, practical way of determining who gets self-determination, just a thousand thousand competing ideologies. The historical (and modern) method has been force, or the threat of force.
I think arguing against an argument is better (and more interesting) than calling it names.
...which is good, because otherwise I'd have to call the second paragraph of your comment fascist. Just because ideas are cheap doesn't mean that some of them can't be right-er than others and that using ideas can't be a valid alternative to using force!
When I call the argument "fascist", I'm intending several things. First, it's kind of a mistake to call it an argument, when it's really a stonewall statement. Argument implies that the person making the statement can be reasoned with; that's not the goal of someone like Karlin. "Arguments" like this are intended to waste time, not be seriously debated or measured. This is the classic "I believe you don't have the right to exist" "argument" that isn't an argument at all, just a threat. Wasting time arguing "I believe I have the right to exist" is not a productive use of time, except maybe to point out to observers the absurdity of defending your existence. Second, implicitly advocating use of force to dispose of a sovereign state because it doesn't meet some threshold of "national identity" is a pretty classic fascist position. It just adds to the ridiculous factor when the Civilization games or having an identity more unique than being a "Gay Western Democracy" is the standard.
My second paragraph there is more an observation of "Is", not "Ought". I want to back up and say I don't think the use of force is desirable, but it and the threat of it has shaped ideas of self-determination in a way that make those things seem inextricable from each other. This is gonna impact the "Ought" in a pretty severe way. I DO agree with your "some ideas can be right-er than others" in terms of some leading to more desirable human experiences than others, and think "don't use violence on a state, a group of peoples, or a person without provocation" is probably a good heuristic. One of my problems with that has to do with consensus between any group on all matters is effectively impossible, and while more civilized groups can agree to adhere to things like laws and tribunals some of the time (because the use of force is terrible), there are groups that will use force for a wide variety of reasons. That's still just a comparatively nasty "IS" though. The real "Ought" issue is one I'm having trouble typing out; but it has to do with ideas about self-determination diverging and mutating over time in response to a changing environment. Whether or not there's a subset of ideas that would result in a (relatively) ideal permanent solution is one I can't really prove or disprove, but I would bet on "No".
I’m still not quite sure what you mean. Are you saying that engaging with fascist arguments is futile because the arguments as written don’t correspond to the reasons that the people making them actually have for holding their positions, or are you saying that fascists are some sort of irrational subset of human who’s opinions are formed without any coherent thought process, and thus any attempt to understand them will inevitably come up fruitless?
The former is one of the reasons; fascist arguments are made in bad faith. There's another reason I stated that's not listed here, which is that a fascist demands you justify your existence by pretending that eliminating your existence is a reasonable debate. Like I said elsewhere, the argument is a weapon and a pretext for the use of force.
I'm not making the latter statement; all human beings are some degree of irrational, and fascist argumentation is half-baked rationalization, at the very least. Anyone is capable of making bad faith arguments and bias confirmation. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't see some people become fascists over their lifetime, or crucially, stop being fascists. This isn't to say engaging these people in debate is worthwhile; since their arguments with others are still made in bad faith; just that life circumstances can change the internal functions of someone to the point that they stop being a fascist.
I agree with the label. I recently went through Eco's definition of fascism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism) with a friend and he met most criteria, e.g. contrast "10. Contempt for the weak" with "The weak do not deserve my takes.", or his showing of the sign 'Z' in his twitter profile (which is actually illegal here in Germany now as it is a sign of support for a war of aggression).
I don't think "Let's invade Ukraine, as it is not a state in the Civ games" is an argument you can debate. It is just an incredibly immoral position that accepts the suffering of thousands and increases the chance of nuclear war. Similarly, "what is even a people?" is not the right question here: Even though international law is ambiguous when it comes to breakaway-regions, it is not ambiguous when it comes to existing states and wars of aggression. Ukraine is a state, therefore a people and protected by countless international agreements (Geneva, Budapest memorandum, etc). Instead, the Russian argument for this war has been that Ukraine is a changed country since the Maidan revolution and that therefore these agreements are null. That is an argument we could debate here, if you really wished to.
Right, the vast majorities of countries, including Russia, around the world agree Ukraine is a self-governing independent state, so sending your tanks across its borders to try to conquer its capital is very, very bad.
Yes, lots of symbols are illegal here, eg. the swastika or the stylized SS of the Schutzstaffel. You may still use these symbols sarcastically, in art or for teaching history, eg. a left-wing protestor once said 'Sieg Heil' to a policeman to protest their use of violence and was acquitted by the highest German court. But if you show them on a demonstration in support you might land in jail.
There were a couple of news articles recently where politicians called on prosecutors to view the 'Z' as a sign of a war of aggression going forward (which makes it just as illegal as the swastika). I could imagine that arguing for the invasion might also be illegal depending on how you do it: In Germany free speech is restricted by the concept of 'Volksverhetzung': calls for hatred or violence against ethnic or religious groups are forbidden (which, in a nod to German history, includes denying the holocaust). Therefore, saying 'I support Russia' is certainly legal, 'Ukrainians deserve death' probably not.
While I do think the topic of your post itself is interesting, I have to say that I kind of agree with this. Please keep in mind that Karlin and others like him are not just philosophizing about the merits of Ukrainian statehood, they are actually vocally advocating for actual wars to realize their fantasy of the return of the glorious Russian empire. The quote that started this post, in fact, hardly even presents an argument; it's just typical internet trolling.
Regardless of the motives behind it, the argument is *interesting*. It's not especially tempting, but it is remarkably novel and reasonably coherent. As such, it's a useful tool for opening up and examining one's axioms and intuitions around the topic (which tend to have already built-in responses to conventional takes.)
See also the tweet about eliminating countries that don't show up in Civilization. I don't think anyone here was persuaded toward that position, but it's a new thought which helps examine how one might think about the problem.
I REALLY support Scott using interesting arguments even if they come from bad people, because they help me learn to think more clearly and with fewer subconscious preconceptions. And that's a lot of why I'm here.
While I think this a fair position to take, that even bad arguments/statements can have interesting insights or help reframe our thinking, I'm also of the opinion that this particular kind of argument is intended as a weapon. Care needs to be taken not to handle it from the pointy end and practice "gun safety" with it.
The question of how exactly we define which groups get the right to self-determination and which get squashed while attempting to gain it is certainly interesting. It's not particularly novel. I'm sure plenty of thinkers have considered it (so have I, in private). Scott's post about it is okay.
Apparently Scott himself found something interesting in Karlin's tweet, but to me it seems like it's simply a toxic attack with very little substance (do note that it's essentially talking about genocide). The comment on Karlin's blog that was quoted has more substance, but it still is a hateful attack on the idea of Ukrainian sovereignty, as evidenced by the use of vocabulary like 'the cringe term "Kiev"' or 'LARP'. They certainly provide information about the mindset these people have, though Scott's treatment is very generous in focusing on the few substantial arguments and mostly ignoring the part that's just Russian supremacist aggression.
I most certainly do not mean that arguments from 'bad people' should not be discussed, and I wish people didn't make that assumption based just on what I wrote. I'm not even necessarily saying that you should preface every quote from people like Karlin with a reminder that this is a bad person. But these are kinds of ideas that can have real-life consequences, and I wish we kept that in mind when discussing them. I do feel like Anatoly Karlin gets a lot of leeway that he does not deserve in this community simply because he is somehow rat-adjacent and uses the right language (i.e. "prediction).
I will readily admit that my emotional reaction to this is very much influenced by the fact that I am an inhabitant of a country that shares a 1300 kilometer border with Putin's Russia; I'll leave it to others to judge whether that means more or less weight should be given to my opinion on this.
> The question of how exactly we define which groups get the right to self-determination and which get squashed while attempting to gain it is certainly interesting. It's not particularly novel. I'm sure plenty of thinkers have considered it (so have I, in private). Scott's post about it is okay.
I agree that the question isn't novel. It's even a bit old; I've certainly thought about it before a few times. That's what makes a novel answer interesting, and lets me actually see my assumptions which are actually invisible to me. Like Scott, I don't think I'd ever have come up with the idea that nations exist to propagate cultural diversity, and so we should merge nations that are insufficiently different. It's a WEIRD position, but just comprehending it makes me think about what I think the purpose of nations is, and intuition pumps questions like whether I think cultural diversity is at all a proper goal of countries, etc.
It's not an especially persuasive position (it's based on a conception of national value that I completely don't share), but it's a new take on an old question and so is interesting.
If I believed that the stuff about cultural diversity was an honest argument, or at the very least a position actually in some way held by someone, I might be fascinated by it myself. But I don't really believe that; it reads too much like word salad that someone with right-wing or Russophile tendencies came up to justify their tendencies, or quite possibly just for the lulz. At best, it's grossly insensitive, given that Ukraine is fighting an actual war for its existence. And now that I've read your take on this, I feel like there's an element of nerd sniping here as well. While pondering such arguments can certainly be a fun activity, the fact is that they're used to advocate for, or at the very least justify, a war and potentially a genocide.
Fascist is not namecalling unless you agree that fascist is a bad thing to be. Since fascists don't agree, and in fact think fascism is good, it's not an insult, merely a description.
What makes Arabs a nation? Arabic varies so much between countries that they had to invent international Arabic in order to have international forums. It seems fairly artificial to me, as much as any of these things are.
Tokelau is a remote southern Pacific Ocean Island currently owned by New Zealand with a population of ~1500 and currently on the UN list of non-self-governing territories. The UN has pushed for referendums towards statehood, two of which have failed. In this case, it seems that by virtue of being an Island rather than just a small town off the interstate, Tokelau may deserve self determination. It's not clear what a 1500-member nation would look like.
Tokelau is a couple of thousand miles north of New Zealand, so the idea of self-rule for Tokelau is not absurd. On the other hand, its population is only 1500 and New Zealand is a pretty nice colonial master.
The lesson is that the modern world, with its 200 countries participating in the Olympics, tends toward a bias for self rule. Thus the idea that giant Russia should reabsorb large Ukraine is very much against the spirit of the age.
Yeah, I mean, if Ukraine doesn't have a right to exist, what about, say, Canada or Australia or New Zealand? Why exactly shouldn't the US conquer those territories? For that matter, why exactly shouldn't Germany conquer Austria or even the Netherlands? Or Kazakhstan conquer Kyrgyzstan? Or Thailand conquer Laos? Or Indonesia conquer Malaysia? Or Jordan conquer Syria?
Ethics tells us what we should and should not do. There is a subfield of ethics, political philosophy, which deals with what a state should do and what ones relationship with a state is. If you believe an ethical theory, such as utilitarianism, natural rights or common-sense morality, the question arises as to why the state has different moral rules. This justification is called political authority.
People often debate political authority and legitimacy in philosophy classes; some potential arguments for legitimacy include the social contract and voting. Most non-libertarian people treat political legitimacy as a default--they believe the state is legitimate but that it should operate differently. The thorniness of the problem arises when nations like China make claims over Taiwan, or Russia invades Ukraine. By Westerners these things are regarded as illegitimate and a bit silly. But what are the borders of the United States and Europe but results of similar power struggles.
If the current borders in the West are legitimate, then the defining characteristic seems something like time? Yes, this land was concurred but that was a long time ago. Perhaps 40 years from now people will believe "Of course the Russian Government is the legitimate owner of Ukraine" if they are successful.
There no legitimate government borders because there is no valid defense of political authority. The ethical rules of state actors are the same as the ethical rules of individuals.
"Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible 'anarchy', why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?" - Murray Rothbard
While I largely agree with this, states have an obligation to defend themselves. States monpolize the use of violence internally. The price for this is to be strong enough (or wily enough) to counter external threats. Canada can stay a state as long as it successfully wards off the encroachment of the United States. Manhattan can be a state, but it's going to be tough to ward off the invading Bronxians. A person can't secede from the US because the state's monopoly on force (what it regards as its own) will not let him. By this rationale, of course, the only thing that makes Ukraine a state is the willingness and ability to defend itself from external attack, and the acquiescence internally of its residents to its monopoly on force. If it falls to Putin, it is manifestly not a state. If Crimea successfully refuses to accept rule from Kyiv, Ukraine is still a state, but a smaller one.
I am not so sure I understand where you are making a positive claim and where you are making a positive claim.
I don't think states have an obligation to defend themselves generally, because there are circumstances in which they should not. For example, it wouldn't make sense, to me, for Belize to attempt to defend itself against the USA and Belize sending tens of thousands of people to die by the hands of US soldiers wouldn't be ethical. It would be useless.
I understand in a positive sense why Manhattan cannot become it's own state--the USA won't let them. But the quote is discussing it in the moral sense.
The obligation is to defend yourself or to give up being a state. You are correct that it would be folly for Belizeans to defend their state aginst a massive US invasion. Their moral calculus is that it is better to be conquered than to be a state. (As to whether this is moral calculus or just cost-benefit analysis is irrelevant to the case, which I think answers your question about positive versus what I assume was "normative.") The same is true, by the way, for internal dissent as well. If you are unwilling to invade California (or otherwise convince them to submit) when Californians refuse to pay taxes or obey laws or do whatever else it is you have established your monopoly of control over, then California is now a State of its own.
That seems trivially true to me. The obligation is to defend yourself or give up being the state makes me think of something like "the obligation is to defend your home from invaders or to not defend your home." What other option is there?
I think its not so much the binary choice as the choice of what you do to defend yourself in advance. No state is worthy of the name which makes no attempt to even plan to defend itself. A state that makes efficient investments to defend itself, recognizing that those defenses could fail, of course, is what I mean. Belize (I assume) has an army of some sort to stop pirates, if nothing else. Even a World Government needs to at least think seriously about stopping aliens and asteroids.
>By this rationale, of course, the only thing that makes Ukraine a state is the willingness and ability to defend itself from external attack...
I don't like this definition. I think my problem with it is thus: It seems (to me) to define a polity's current statehood based on a hypothetical future invasion. If you were to instead say that a state *ceases to be* a state at the time that it falls to a conqueror, I would agree with that, but that seems immaterial to the question of whether Ukraine is *currently* a state.
Is a guy falling from a 50 story building a healthy guy when he's 25 feet from the ground? A state does things in the present which, probabilistically, will keep them a state or not in the future. A state that chooses not to take actions with the intention of defending its statehood isn't a state simply because someone will see the opportunity at some point in the future. They're a state on borrowed time. If they take actions which intend to bolster their defense but these simply fail, then they are also a state on borrowed time... just an ineffectual state as opposed to one that didn't even try.
>Is a guy falling from a 50 story building a healthy guy when he's 25 feet from the ground?
Yes. Well, barring any conditions brought on by the terror of the situation. All of us are going to die of old age if something else doesn't get us first. Is the fact that our deaths are inevitable a reason to call us unhealthy?
>A state that chooses not to take actions with the intention of defending its statehood isn't a state simply because someone will see the opportunity at some point in the future.
This reads to me like "A person who often walks down dark alleys isn't a person, just a corpse, because someone will see the opportunity to kill them at some point in the future." It's illogical to remove a status from something in the present just because you're sure it won't have that status in the future. Right now my hair is wet. Even though I know it'll be dry shortly, I can't just round that off to it being dry *right now*.
"Dead man walking." At some point in arcs of inevitability, or even near-inevitability, and occasionally, for rhetorical effect, even mere probability, a recognition of that inevitability can color current definitions. Think of any state as a present discounted value which collapses the future into now. If my hair is wet but drying, there are lots of circumstances where I should behave exactly like a dry-haired individual, and some where I shouldn't. Definitions have purposes. If describing the falling guy as healthy has some important purpose, like for the purpose of figuring out whether or not his life insurance has expired yet, then the temporal component can be ignored.
>If describing the falling guy as healthy has some important purpose...
I personally consider accurately reporting the current state of reality to be an important purpose. There's a difference between "It's raining" and "It's supposed to rain today." Sure, in both you bring an umbrella when you leave the house or whatever, but in one of them you probably don't worry much about hopping out to check the mail.
Similarly, you could say that Syria's Euphrates River Valley deserves to be ruled by Al Qaeda or ISIS because that's what the locals in c. 2015 seemed to like. But Putin argued that Syria's sovereignty over the Euphrates was virtually universally recognized, so he rescued Assad's regime.
I didn't have a major problem with Russia intervening on the side of the internationally recognized government in Syria, but I do have a problem with Russian attacking the internationally recognized government in Ukraine.
TBH, I wouldn't have a problem with Sunni Arab secession from Syria and even having them unite with Jordan and/or western Sunni Arab Iraq. But they should get better leaders than Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Those two groups really are a cancer for everyone. Even the fucking Taliban is more moderate in comparison to those two groups!
This seems to overlook a fully pragmatic defense of political authority, of a Hobbesian variety. To the extent that political authority becomes contested, life becomes all the more nasty, brutish, and short - so for God's sake, don't rock the boat.
This condemns Putin in the present day, who is contesting the status quo and bringing about deadly consequences. But should he succeed in establishing a new status quo, it would come to apply just as much to rebels against it.
The consequentialist argument is the better one. If I believed that there would be absolute chaos and death, then I would think we should have a state.
My answer to the confederacy thing is that the South didn't really vote to secede, because black Southerners were excluded from the vote. Slaves comprised about 39% of the Confederate population, and were they permitted to cast an informed vote they would almost certainly have voted to remain by an overwhelming margin. That makes the secession vote even more suspect than Russia's 96% figure in Crimea. States should only be obligated to honor credible, independently verifiable and sufficiently representative secession elections, which the confederacy's was not.
The Left will oppose Texas's request because the Great Replacement should eventually result in a change in Texan sentiments. They would also oppose New York's request because it would be based on an immoral raison d'etre. Though it would be interesting to see what would happen if the Left will become more skeptical of Jewish influence due to the Left viewing it as an extension of white privilege. Really, in some regards, Jews are more privileged in the US than white gentiles are. And I say this as a (quarter-)Jew myself!
But that's projecting modern norms back onto the past: you could as easily say that Abraham Lincoln's presidency was illegitimate because they excluded the votes of women.
No democracy franchises 100% of its people. I couldn't vote when I was ten. If convicted of treason by the Commonwealth of Australia I'll lose my right to vote again. Different countries have different ideas of citizenship.
That's true. And incumbent governments have the de facto power to define what votes they would or wouldn't accept, just like they have the power to not honor any vote at all. The whole debate is a fundamentally moral one anyway, about what they *should* accept, where a line is drawn somewhere on a blurry spectrum of more and less legitimate voting methods according to modern standards. So I'm just pointing out a way modern people can support secession broadly while opposing it in the Confederate case without being hypocrites.
I'm not sure how much I agree with the argument as a source of sovereignty. But as point of fact: most Confederate states didn't even get a white, adult male majority. In several states there was significantly worse turnout in secession votes than in the 1860 election. And there were various shenanigans and illegal maneuvers like arresting opposition involved. On the other hand, most of this was done by legally elected officers. So it's a sticky question but not one that easily looks like a democratic plebiscite.
>That makes the secession vote even more suspect than Russia's 96% figure in Crimea.
It's pretty probable that both true result of referendum is in 90+ range and that official results are fake (i.e. the regime is used to faking voting that they fake results of voting even in such cases where they would win anyway).
FWIW, sometimes a free and fair referendum can be overwhelming. The Falkland Islands referendum in favor of remaining under UK rule, for instance. But Yeah, specifically in regards to Crimea, I personally thought that the margin was too high.
(Spoiler) the tl;dr is that wars are bad and so generally speaking we should try to be content with existing borders of states rather than trying to redraw them, even for appealing reasons such as to unite ethnicities under one banner. It's sorta like what you were saying about transaction costs.
It's getting late so I'm not going to watch the video, but, based on your tl;dr, I strongly agree. The bar for who gets to *remain* independent should be much lower than who gets to *become* independent. Ukrainian independence has the status quo on it's side, so all they have to do to convince me they're in the right is to say that they want to keep their independence.
I agree that secessionist regions have a potential ethical duty not to press their claims if they would lead to war. But I also think parent countries have an ethical duty not to make war on secessionist regions, and to make it known that they won't.
Every state is going to have malcontents. You can't let everybody who is unhappy with the status quo violently redraw the borders whenever they feel like it.
Crimea's border redrawing was almost completely peaceful (just one death) and the Donbass would have very likely been much more peaceful had Russia stepped in immediately and annexed the Donbass just like it did with Crimea.
Depends on when exactly. For instance, I think that Algerians did France a huge favor by pushing for independence. I wish that they would have been able to do so more bloodlessly, but of course to be fair, their options were rather limited due to French intransigence. Still, I think that a France with 6 million Muslims is much more better off than a France with 46 million Muslims. The 6 million Muslims already contains enough troublemakers as it is, unfortunately. This is why the Charlie Hebdo massacre happened, why Samuel Paty was murdered, et cetera.
I also think that this is why Jinnah and his Pakistan Movement did India a huge favor by successfully pushing for secession from India.
Forcing people who don't trust each other due to differences in language, religion, race, or something else, to live under one banner brings a poverty hit as trust is vital to a successful economy and society.
Sometimes it's still possible for this to work (Switzerland) but you need strong additional factors and/or a lot of time to overcome this. And in the end there may still be wars, it may be that they have only been postponed.
African leaders decided some time ago that it would be in their interests to not support succession wars as the whole continent could go up in flames. In the long run I believe succession wars would have made everyone better off.
It might be worth flipping the question around. What gives a group the legitimacy to claim another? Shared historical ties, language and folklore all feel like relevant answers, and those are worth exploring by the LSE, yourself, and Anatoly. If like me you value core liberal principles, your attention might rather be drawn to the ideas of the social contract and of consent of the governed, which allow for a bit more nuance than the libertarian extreme you engage with.
I’ll stick my neck out and argue that a nation’s claim to a particular people grows stronger so long as they consent to their membership, and weaker when they do not. Rather than an on-off switch, it is a rubber band which may rupture under sufficient pressure.
My home region of Savoie was annexed in 1861 by the French state (third republic bad, we should no longer do that sorta thing!). Following a half-century of cultural homogenization, people in our region became satisfied by their membership, and the past century of rather blissful consent makes our belonging to the French nation beyond dispute. You’ll occasionally see a ‘free savoie’ bumper sticker, but they lack widespread political appeal.
In contrast, Ukraine has had a violent, dissident relationship with Russia for over a century, including plausible genocides, brutal uprisings, language laws, and more horrors than those of us in the West could reasonably appreciate. There is a clear sense that the union of Russia with Ukraine has been tenuously enforced at the barrel of a gun. In the past few lifetimes, Ukrainians have not consented to their membership within the Russian empire; no matter how strong the rubber band once was, it has decisively snapped, and we are witnessing their war of independence.
You left out one thing about Crimea, it was transferred from Russia to the Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 after having been Russian since it was acquired by Catherine the Great; I don't believe that anyone bothered consulting the Crimean population at that time. If you argue that sufficient time had passed to erase that, then what about nations that were subsumed in other countries for centuries rather than decades? My answer to that question is probably similar to yours; how practical is self-determination and how strongly is it desired? As to the Crimeans, it wasn't just ethnic Russians who favored the return to Russia; there were also pro-Russian Ukrainians and minorities like the Tartars who also somewhat favored the transfer. By the way, being a native-born Canadian with native-born parents and being of Irish and English ancestry, I have no dog in this fight.
Someone points up-thread to the results of the 1991 referendum, in which every region of the official current borders of Ukraine, including Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, had a majority vote in favor of joining Ukraine rather than Russia. I imagine those majorities were pretty tenuous in those three regions though, and it wouldn't surprise me if majorities pointed a different way by 2014, and if they point a different way again in 2023.
Overwhelming majorities in Donetsk and Luhansk voted to be part of Ukraine in 1991. Turnout was moderately lower there than in central and western Ukraine, but a solid majority of the eligible electorate voted yes. Only in Crimea was it close:
It's been very hard to poll those regions accurately in recent times, but it does square with a view that Crimea might genuinely want to be part of Russia while the Donbass probably never did, and the rebellion there would have disintegrated rapidly without Russian troops.
Very interesting! Though again, with Donetsk and Luhansk, I've heard that there's a sub-region of each that has been functioning relatively autonomously for eight years (with Russian support) and another sub-region of each that was still thoroughly integrated under the Ukrainian government as of January, 2022. It would not surprise me if the borders of the regions that had been drawn are somehow mis-placed with respect to popular sentiment, and that there is some line where a moderate majority of people to the east have always wanted to be with Russia, and a strong majority of people to the west have always wanted to be with Ukraine. But it would also not surprise me if it's really just a significant minority on the east and negligible on the west.
Support for outright Russian rule was a bit lower, at 30%. Though even there, only slightly over 50% were opposed. The rest were undecided.
40% might not seem like much, but it's the same level of support that Poland got in the 1921 Upper Silesian plebiscite, where Poland was nevertheless able to win a majority of the vote in some parts of Upper Silesia. So, I wouldn't be surprised if federalization received majority-support or at least plurality-support (say, 46% in favor, 44% against, the remaining 10% undecided) in parts of the Donbass in 2014. You have to keep in mind that the Donbass separatists only conquered a part of the Donbass in 2014, not the entire Donbass.
Crimea involved a lot of people not voting in 1991, if I recall correctly. That, combined with Ukraine's economic stagnation between 1991 and 2014, really does make me believe that Crimea might have very well voted for Russian rule in 2014 even in a free and fair election, even factoring in for the mass return of the Crimean Tatars back to Crimea since 1989.
In regards to the Donbass, opinion polling there showed about 30% support in favor of Russian rule and about 40% support (50% against, the remaining 10% undecided) in favor of federalization (which was Russia's initial official goal for the Donbass):
While 40% might not sound like much, it's worth noting that this is around the same level of support that Poland got in the 1921 Upper Silesian plebiscite, in which it was nevertheless able to win majorities in some areas (hence the subsequent partition of Upper Silesia after this plebiscite). So, I actually wouldn't be surprised if there was majority-support or at least plurality-support (say, 46% in favor, 44% against, the rest undecided) for federalization in parts of the Donbass in 2014. It's worth noting, of course, that the Donbass separatists only conquered a part of the Donbass rather than the Donbass in its entirety.
So, Yes, one can say that the uprisings in Crimea and the Donbass were real, even if they were manipulated by Russia. About 3/4 (30% out of 40%) of the federalization supporters in the Donbass did want Russian rule, but the remaining ones apparently simply wanted to be an autonomous part of Ukraine.
I am sure I saw people saying in 2014 "in a few years, the Ukrainian economic growth will be so high that Crimeans will be desperately wanting to come back to Ukraine by themselves".
Historically, Moscow being landlocked had a goal of controlling areas with sea and ocean access. Search results are coming up with only recent events but I think one of Catherine the Great’s motives toward Crimea was acquiring the “Black Sea port.”
Geopolitical military conditions are also influenced deeply by which powers control which bodies of water (trade, invasions, etc.) So groups of people who live on the coast are always subject to this type of power struggle with those living further inland. Additionally, other nations/groups might care if Big Nation A has better water access as a result of possessing Small Coastal Territory B. Big Nation C might care very much even if B, culturally, had no strong feelings either way, or ties to both.
Scotland, or the situation with the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, all post-British Colonial to varying degrees (complete independence, devolution, etc.).
Moscow was landlocked, and when it did acquire access to the sea, the ports were mostly ones that froze in the Winter - Archangelsk (1584), Okhotsk (1650), St. Petersburg (1703) and Rostov-on-Don (1749). The first Warm-Water Port was Sevastopol (1783), then Vladivostok (1860), Murmansk (1915) and Kaliningrad (1945). Those four were the bases of the four main Russian and then Soviet fleets, and two of them were the main commercial ports in their respective seas (St Petersburg and Rostov-on-Don remain the main commercial ports). Sevastopol is really important because, while Rostov-on-Don is the major commercial port in the Black Sea, it is very vulnerable in military terms, because the Sea of Azov freezes and shipping requires icebreakers during the winter. That's fine for commercial ships, but not really acceptable for military shipping which would be very vulnerable confined to a narrow ice-broken channel.
Of the four warm-water ports, only two (Vladivostok and Murmansk) are on the World Ocean, the others are trapped in the Baltic and Black Seas, which is why Russia has always paid so much attention to the Danish and Turkish straits that control the exits to those seas.
These ports are the basis for Russian trade with the outside world, and Russian naval power to protect that trade; they have always been peripheral to Russia but also vital interests of Russia, and Sevastopol is a key pressure point for Russia.
Aside: Russia had ice-free ports in the Baltic before Kaliningrad - they held modern Estonia and most of Latvia from 1721 - and Riga was the major Baltic port for most of the period until WWI, though the navy was based at Kronstadt near St. Petersburg.
In modern times there are a few physical-geography and geostrategic facts about Crimea that are relevant to the discussion.
(Unlike Scott, I don't think in terms of principles when it comes to politics: each case has its particularities.)
1. Crimea contains Sevastopol as the largest centre of population, about a quarter of Crimea's total. Sevastopol is a port city and hosts Russia's only "warm-water" port (one which is ice-free all year round). As such it is critical for Russia's strategic nuclear deterrent, because it is the home port for Russia's SSBN-equivalent submarines, one leg of the strategic tripod. (The other two being bombers and long range ballistic missilies.)
(Conjecture: I imagine that a large fraction of Crimea's population is either Russian naval personnel and their families, or contractors or suppliers to the naval base, or related to those contractors and suppliers.)
2. Crimea is naturally a desert. Until Russia annexed it in 2014 it got about 80% of its water from a canal from eastern Ukraine.When Crimea was annexed, Ukraine dammed the canal. Since then Crimea has been desperately short of water, threatening the viability of the Sevastopol base. One of the first acts of the Russian invaders in the current invasion was to destroy the dam.
(Question: if Crimea is completely dependent on an artificial waterway that is entirely within Ukraine, can it be independent or Russian?)
3. The Black Sea between Crimea and central Ukraine has several large untapped but easily exploitable natural gas fields, large enough to replace most, if not all, of western Europe's purchases of gas from Russia. This is a threat to Russia also.
Your comment and Richard Gadsden's above provide much more insight into this situation for me.
1. If the nuclear submarine fleet is based in Sevastopol, it makes a lot more sense to me why "Russia feels that NATO poses a threat" is brought up as part of the equation. Russia letting go entirely of Sevastopol/Crimea would mean letting go of that leg of the tripod, putting Russia at a disadvantage toward NATO (and the US separately).
Can peace negotiators double down on this, US and Russia mutually agreeing to cuts to their nuclear capabilities and Sevastopol/Crimea becoming something like the Panama Canal zone?
2. That is very interesting about the water to Crimea. It brings up another question I had - what role does access to the Dnieper River play in all this? Looking at the maps it could be something like the Mississippi, shipping ports all along the river, and having control of at least the east bank of it would be one type of strategic goal.
3. The gas fields would get in the way of the #1 proposal, then, but maybe not permanently.
Your question about Crimea being dependent on the canal is very good. There seem to be some geographical features that are collective to a degree, simply based on where they're located. Are there international riverine/canal water rights treaties? There must be, I don't know anything about it though. I could imagine a treaty being drawn up about that, but always with an imbalance.
In this interconnected world, the ethnicity/people/landbase aspect has to coexist with the global strategic balance aspect (and the self-determination/human rights aspects). Maybe the shared waterways make the interconnectedness more obvious.
Russian nuclear submarines are based in Vladivostok (and perhaps other places as per other comenters; I know about Vladivostok because of the dispute between Russia and Japan over Kuril islands, where they are a relevant issue).
Sevastopol is a warm-water port, but not the only one - Murmansk is ice-free all year around, and Vladivostok is almost so (a massive electrical power plant dumps warm water into the bay which largely prevents it freezing; icebreakers are kept on station if needed). Russian SSBNs are based in either Severomorsk (near Murmansk) or Vladivostok - seven Delfin/Delta IV class, one Akula/Typhoon-class and two Borei/Dolgorukiy-class in Severomorsk, three Borei/Dolgorukiy-class in Vladivostok.
Thank you for the updates. It seems winter sea conditions have changed around Murmansk and Vladivostok since the 1970s. The changes do not affect the strategic importance of Sevastopol to Russia, though.
Murmansk has always been ice-free - the whole reason it was built (in 1915) was to have an all-year-round port for Russian imports from the West during WWI when the land and Baltic Sea routes were blocked by the Central Powers.
Vladivostok never iced up as badly as St Petersburg or Archangelsk, but it's much clearer since the 1990s largely because they deliberately dump warm wastewater into the shipping channel. Also, submarines always had access (as they could pass under the ice).
Finally, Russia and the USSR have both invested a lot of money in icebreakers over the years - so ports that ice up but not that badly are less of an issue than they used to be - Vladivostok and Rostov-on-Don are the two that are most strongly affected by this (Archangelsk and St Petersburg/Kronstadt still ice up too badly for icebreaking to be an option in the depths of winter, though they can operate for many more months than the used to be able to).
Apologies; I was thinking in military terms: naval port. Wikipedia says Russia was in the process of building a new naval base at Novorossysk before 1) a new 25-year lease on Sevastopol was agreed with Ukraine, and 2) Russia decided to annex Crimea anyway.
A functional nation has to be willing to hold itself together, regardless of morality.
You can't allow regions to leave at will: that would be like an army that allows soldiers to freely desert. Half your corps will pull up their tents and return to their farms at the first tactical setback.
The South certainly stopped believing in "states rights" when East Tennesseeans tried to break off from the Confederacy and form a Union-aligned state in 1861. They put the state under martial law.
This all assumes uniform desire among a people. If 70% of Texans want to leave the Union should they be able to force it on the other 30%? 20%? 10%? One guy who is really a transplant from California anyways?
Doesn't it kind of matter if the group leaving is sitting on vital resources and infrastructure that the mainland might relies on?
This whole topic is very interesting and something I did always wonder about growing up in a liberal part of Texas. The generally believed to be whackos who wanted to secede never really received a counter argument against their desires besides logistical concerns that really convinced me.
This is an important point that none of the other comments really addresses. A vote to secede is a basic "the majority can do whatever it likes". The self determination of 51% of the group overrules the self-determination of the 49%.
The 49% should presumably then vote to secede from the seceded nation and rejoin the original nation.
More seriously, you could argue that a vote for secession is not a democratic right because it unfairly imposes a view on a minority group, just like we would all (probably) accept that there are other rights that can't or shouldn't be violated by a democratic vote.
I'm not sure I agree with that point, but it's worth considering.
This is especially true as who is in a country can be forcefully changed as a tactic. If I commit ethnic cleansing in a region and move my people in - is it ok that they now self-determine to be a part of my country? After how many years? If the cleansing was subtle (buy out property, small scale thug tactics to get people to move) and movement was internationally legal (refugees moving in for decades, sponsored by those who would benefit from secession), is that OK? If the refugees from Syria in Turkey now decide to self-determine the parts of Turkey where they have been relocated by war, how is that different from Northern Ireland?
In Northern Ireland the process started hundreds of years ago. In practice some kind of statute of limitations needs to apply (obviously not a fixed date).
The UK is an interesting example generally because the dominant ethnic group is the English, who are the most recent incomers (the Normans only really replaced the aristocracy and the Vikings thoroughly mixed with the native population, I think). Scottish, Welsh (and Cornish) independence movements are really the native population rejecting the nation state run by the immigrant group.
Of course the Celts aren't the original inhabitants of the British Isles either, and this all collapses into nonsense in Europe because of how complicated the history is. I don't think there's a clear, satisfactory answer.
You should consider reading (or rereading) Lincoln's first inaugural address. It is, as you might expect, extremely interesting on the issue of the right to secede (or not), although of course dealing with his own specific circumstances and with very different categories than any modern person would use.
"If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the Government must cease. There is no other alternative, for continuing the Government is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them, for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy a year or two hence arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this.
Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose a new union as to produce harmony only and prevent renewed secession?
Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left."
I could quibble with Lincoln's high praise for majoritarianism; it should be possible to make decisions using other constitutionally agreed-upon criteria, like decision markets, quadratic voting, archipelago-style communities, and so on. 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.
I guess I fail to see the problem with "then some states secede from the Confederacy, and then some states secede from those states".
UK has AFAICT offered Scotland the right to secede. Scotland has said no, because they like being in the UK. That's great and the reason why countries should exist. If Scotland did secede from the UK, I expect that Glasgow wouldn't secede from Scotland, because they like being in Scotland.
The reason that recognizing a right to secession doesn't immediately dissolve into anarchy is that most places like being parts of the country they're in. The rare exceptions usually mean something has actually gone wrong.
Yes, Scotland held a referendum for independence in 2014, with the approval of the UK parliament, and the Scottish electorate chose to remain in the UK.
If they had chosen independence, however, there are some regions that might have preferred to secede from Scotland to rejoin the UK (though they probably wouldn't have been given the opportunity). In particular, the Orkney and Shetland Islands are very pro-UK ... which is important, because much of the North Sea oil fields are in their territorial waters.
We have a number of similar questions on different scales:
1. Should the Orkney and Shetland Islands be part of Scotland?
2. Should Scotland be part of the UK?
3. Should the UK be part of the EU?
4. Should the EU be closely affiliated with the US-led international order?
All of these are largely questions of self-determination. But, because of the conflict between levels of this hierarchy - supporting point #1 tends to detract from point #2, and so on - British politics tends to split between those who support #1 and #3, and those who support #2 and #4.
"UK has AFAICT offered Scotland the right to secede. Scotland has said no, because they like being in the UK"
Well.... yes and no. They didn't *offer*, the Scottish Parliament and the government at Westminister held negotiations and the UK parliament passed legislation giving the Scottish Parliament powers to hold the referendum. In turn the Scottish Parliament passed a bill for the referendum:
It's the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the "Great Britain" part includes England, Scotland and Wales (plus some islands, though the status of some of them is a little odd due to quirks of history: "The nearby Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey are not part of the UK, being Crown Dependencies with the British Government responsible for defence and international representation. There are also 14 British Overseas Territories, the last remnants of the British Empire").
Scotland and England were two separate kingdoms, often at war with each other, until the accession of James VI (of Scotland) and I (of England) to the throne of England upon the death of Elizabeth I united the crowns and perforce the kingdoms. England being the bigger partner became the dominant one (Wales had been pretty thoroughly squashed by then and subsumed into England for all intents and purposes). A formal Act of Union was passed in 1707 to make it official and governmental, and form the Kingdom of Great Britain.
The formation of the United Kingdom took place with the Act of Union in 1801 uniting Ireland to Great Britain.
Let's skip over a few centuries and come to devolution. In the 1990s, devolved parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were formed in the face of demands for greater autonomy and the rise of nationalist parties in those countries (Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin):
"Devolution is about how parliaments and governments make decisions. In the UK it means that there are separate legislatures and executives in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They have many powers to make laws and deliver public services. These are often called devolved powers. There is also the UK Parliament and UK Government. They retain some powers across the whole of the UK. These are often called reserved powers.
The current form of devolution in the UK goes back to the late 1990s. In 1997 voters chose to create a Scottish Parliament and a National Assembly for Wales. In Northern Ireland devolution was a key element of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement and was supported in a referendum in 1998. The UK Government has also developed decentralisation in England. This is through the transfer of powers, budgets and responsibilities to mayors and through city deals."
The SNP had always been pro-Scottish independence, and once they got into power in a devolved government, now it was time to put their money where their mouth was. Hence, the 2014 referendum.
As the campaign went on, it looked like support for independence was growing. Indeed, the final result was closer than expected - 55% voted no, 45% voted yes (this was up from early estimated polling of 39% voting yes). Ironically, in view of later events, when the Tory government in England started taking it seriously and campaigning for a "No" vote, one of their points was "Scotland leaving the UK would take you out of the EU, and you don't want that, do you?"
Things are complicated by the presence of Unionism in Scotland so there is a much more politically charged, sectarian air to the question of independence.
> one of their points was "Scotland leaving the UK would take you out of the EU, and you don't want that, do you?"
Hence the suggestion that the result of the Brexit referendum - with the UK as a whole voting to leave, but Scotland specifically voting to remain - could be satisfied by *England and Wales* splitting off from the UK, with Scotland (the "UK") keeping its position in the EU.
More seriously: if anything, I think Brexit detracts from the case for Scottish independence. Scotland is more tightly integrated into the UK economy than the UK ever was into the EU, so the frictionless flow of goods and services across the English/Scottish border is paramount. Pre-Brexit, this might have been disrupted for a few years, but if an independent Scotland managed to rejoin the EU it would become a simple matter of trade between two countries within the EU Common Market. Post-Brexit, there's no good solution: an independent Scotland would have to choose between (a) losing its frictionless trade with the rest of the UK, or (b) staying out of the EU.
Many places like being part of the country they're in, but I think enough don't that it would cause serious administrative problems if they were all allowed to secede.
There are counties in northern California and southern Oregon that would leave to form the right-wing Jefferson Republic -- and other counties that would secede from those same regions to form the left-wing Cascadian Republic. If either secession movement were successful, you would have towns and neighborhoods within those counties who would want to secede again. At the limit, you have lone homeowners claiming to be "sovereign individuals" and refusing to recognize the authority of any local government. This *already* happens and clogs up the criminal courts a bit even though it has no basis in ordinary law; if you actually gave people a right to formally secede, I assume it would become much more common.
Part of the point of the Cascadian secession movement is to protect the regional ecology of the temperate rainforests. Part of the point of the Jefferson secession movement is to secure broad access to hunting, logging, and resource-intensive farming. If you turn the region into a patchwork quilt of jurisdictions with conflicting land use laws, you probably get results that everybody hates -- it would be better for everyone to split the forests along some kind of reasonably smooth boundary line and use part of it for logging and part of it for a nature preserve than it would be to have loggers using heavy equipment to clear-cut a randomly selected 50% of the region that's based on where the loggers happened to live when the region split up.
If you think there are any important decisions that have to be made on a scale larger than that of individual families in order to be useful, then sometimes people will get bundled into decision-making units larger than that of families, even if they'd rather not be bundled that way. We can try to mitigate and minimize that bundling, but I don't think we can do without it altogether -- or, at least, I think the harm of trying to do without it altogether would be worse than the harm of forcing people to try to compromise with each other sometimes.
The problem with the Cascadian movement is that it's mainly based on an ecological unity, which, however noble that might be, doesn't correspond well with political realities.
The Jefferson movement aligns better with political realities, even if the end goal is unrealistic. The counties in question largely voted Trump and thereby against the electoral leanings of their respective states. Jefferson is not looking to secede from the Union, and unlike Cascadia, doesn't cut across national boundary lines.
That's why I think the "If we let them secede, where will it all end?" line of thought is hasty. If the Jeffersonians do form a new state, sure, they'll have their internal squabbles, but on the political spectrum they're more homogeneous than otherwise.
It's not a new Confederacy being proposed; they simply want their own state government. There's even precedent, e.g., Maine seceding from Massachusetts. While the Jeffersonians as a whole might not seem a distinctive group with a glorious history deserving of self-determination, neither does the mish-mash that is California, nor any state on the West Coast for that matter.
As for the logging argument, so much of that contentious issue involves the Federal government, simply breaking off to form a new state doesn't end the debate. Libertarian-leaning Republicans growing bodaciously good weed is not the image that "resource-intensive farming" conjures. And I know hunting is important to some folks, but come on—no one's going to secede for cheaper deer licenses.
So what's the substantive objection to their secession, from a small-D democratic viewpoint?
I don't actually mind if the Jeffersonians in particular secede; that seems fine.
The problem is where to draw the line -- right now the line is very fuzzily oriented around something like "you can secede if you mostly speak a different language, or otherwise have a very different culture than the majority, or if you're so geographically remote that we barely interact with you." India couldn't justify forcing Pakistanis to remain within the Indian polity in part because Pakistanis spoke different languages, had a different religion, ate different foods, and lived on the far side of a mountain range. By contrast, it seems fine to prohibit Texas from seceding from the US because Texans mostly speak the same languages as the rest of the US and engage in plenty of interstate travel. In between those two extremes, Barcelona makes for an interesting edge case -- people differ quite passionately about whether Catalan is a language or a dialect, and about whether the Catalan way of life is a variant of the Spanish way of life, or a unique and distinct alternative to the Spanish way of life. As a result, it's not obvious under current political norms whether Catalonia should be allowed to unilaterally secede.
If you want to weaken those norms so that secession is easier, how *much* weaker do you think they should be? Does it matter how large the seceding group is, either in territory or population? Does it matter how substantial the seceding group's grievances are? Does it matter how far the majority offered to compromise in order to accommodate those grievances? If some of those things matter, how much do they matter, and approximately where do you want to draw the line? Why is that line better than the one we have now?
If those things don't matter, and every individual has an absolute right to secede from any government whenever they feel like it, why are you so sure that enough people will choose to remain within current government structures to preserve the rule of law? People might not secede to save five bucks (heh) on a deer license, but they sure as hell are threatening to secede over gun regulations. If you switch the official government position from "You cannot secede, and if you try, we will arrest you" to "Sure, go ahead, you have the right to secede," are you really confident that 99% of the people talking about secession will shrug and carry on with business as usual? Not just this year, but next year, and the year after, and every time the feds pass a new law that the locals don't like? If so, why?
I probably should have used the word "partition" for states breaking off from other states, as "secede" is a historically loaded word in the United States meaning "leave the Union."
As mentioned, partitioning has happened a few times before in our past (Kentucky, Maine, W. Virginia). There is precedent and a process for doing so. When you say the line is very fuzzy, I disagree. It's not cut-and-dried, but it does involve familiar mechanisms: petitioning congress, holding local votes, drafting a state constitution, etc.
I neither said nor implied "every individual has an absolute right to secede from any government whenever they feel like it," and I've never read anything by Jefferson proponents advocating such things either.
While partitioning states is different from what Scott is discussing in his main post, it does seem relevant given the federal nature of U.S. government. In a sense, Maine "seceded" from Massachusetts. The usual markers for self-determination, like language, ethnicity, historical background, don't exactly apply with partitioning. The times it's happened is usually due to a sense of proper and more local representation. (The drive for home rule in D.C. is similarly motivated, which is another example of a block of land being partitioned off existing states.)
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.
This reminded me of the weirdness that was the Bantustans. IIRC, the apartheid government of South Africa had the brilliant idea of "Hey, if all the black people were in their own country instead of South Africa, then we wouldn't be oppressing them anymore and everyone would love us again!" So they declared the black majority areas to be independent. This failed miserably because the response from the international community was that the Bantustans were just client states, not meaningfully independent in any way, and reliant on support from South Africa. (Please correct me if I'm getting the details wrong.)
I don't know what the actual inhabitants of the Bantustans thought (though I imagine the local leaders who were funded by the South African government were all for it), but supposing that at least some of them wanted independence, they would have been in a very strange position vis-a-vis self-determination.
they didn't want them having their own economy, because they wanted them.to continue being cheap workers, and really didn't want them having militaries.
And... I assume the criticism is probably correct, but then how exactly are white people supposed to secede if "trying to secede from the blacks" is inherently a bad thing? (But not trying to secede is also racist, because it means that you exploit black workers.)
You don't have to exploit people. A form of separation of archipelago where the non whites got votes and got economic resources in proportion to their numbers would have been much less objectionable to the international community ... But would mean the end of white rule.
I imagine that trying to pull "We're a secessionist state that just so happens to have a government exactly like that of South Africa (by the way, we're keeping the capital city)," would have been an even tougher sell in the court of public opinion. The plan was for all of the black people to live in the Bantustans, while all their jobs would be in South Africa, so independence would be nominal at best.
If you look at a map of the homelands compared to a demographic map of South Africa, it's apparent that the division wasn't based on where people were already living -- whites wanted to keep most of the land, including all of the significant cities, and put the black population in discontiguous stretches of countryside, sort of like Indian reservations. There wasn't really a natural place for whites to secede to, plus there were significant populations of Asians and Coloured persons, so splitting SA neatly into black and white nations wasn't really in the cards.
An interesting detail about the homelands, though, is that when SA created its post-apartheid constitution they also redrew the provincial boundaries in ways that were clearly influenced by the bantustans. The capital of the newly created Eastern Cape province even used to be the capital of one of the bantustans. I don't know the story behind all that, but it does suggest that the bantustans wanted to preserve a degree of self-determination at the sub-national level.
The Risk board was first made in the 1950s, predating the game Civilization by decades. A quick Google search-by-date shows that "Russia" was never even mentioned on the Web before the 1990s.
"Switzerland for instance is a confederation made up of pieces of three other nations, but the Swiss have created a highly interesting and distinct polity (blablabla)"
As a Swiss guy I really have to object to this history-ignorant take. Most Swiss Cantons were never vassal states much less part of neighboring countries - which would have been hard to do anyways given neither Germany nor Italy existed until fairly recently. Many were informally part of the holy roman empire as independent entities, the Habsburg ruled over some cantons for a while (btw. Habsburg dynasty originated from Switzerland in first place, so debatable whether this even counts as foreign rule), and there was a brief period when Napoleon conquered the country when it wasn't independent, but other than that it has been independent for 6-700 years. Just because various pieces of the country adopted the language of neighboring places doesn't fricking mean they are the same people. Even in Roman times the Helvetii were considered a different people than the Gauls or the Germanic tribes.
Indeed, Caesar's writings about his campaigns begin by dwelling on the many virtues of the Helvetians. You surly mountain people been around for a while.
well, yeah that's the treaty of Westphalia, but that just made the divorce official they have been living separately from the HRE for previous 300 years already, and arguably longer before then. By "informal" what I was thinking about was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_immediacy . Btw i had to read that article myself to reacquaint myself with the history, and a bit unclear whether it truly supports my recollections which is that the confederation was part of the HRE a bit in way that Canada is part of the commonwealth and QEII is their monarch, i.e. they were independent all but in name. If someone can offer evidence of contrary about strength of HRE-CH ties happy to accept that, this is not stuff i have really looked into probably since like 6th grade.
Imperial Immediacy was just the status of being a direct vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor. It was the opposite of living separately, it was being a direct vassal and having a closer relationship with the Emperor than otherwise. There were hundreds of lords/bishops/cities/republics/etc with the status including a few cities or tiny lords who barely ruled a postage stamp.
I edited my post above with some caveats, our messages crossed. I'll add also that thinking about it maybe am biased by Swiss education, which may be tilted towards presenting the CH as more independent from the start (would make sense). As i said above not a topic i've looked into since adulthood. Although still - the Swiss had their own armies, their own currency, they made and enforced their own laws, enlarged the confederation without asking for permission etc. looked pretty independent to me. I can't remember whether they paid any kind of tribute to the emperor though.
They did have to pay tribute, obey Imperial laws, etc. And they did have to get permission from the Emperor for various things. But beyond that they could legislate for themselves, raise their own armies, make currency, etc.
The thing is this didn't make them distinct from other polities of the HRE or even vassals in other countries. Most European countries, especially before the early modern period, were networks of polities in hierarchical relationships. Those polities often controlled the immediate facts on the ground of their territory. Stuff like local justice or raising taxes or troops. The royal writ often had very limited effect on day to day life. And even in matters of justice between lords they often resolved it with a war. Switzerland forming an alliance was not unique either.
What was unique was the relatively democratic structures and durability of the alliance and its ability to defend itself against ambitious rivals looking to seize territory. This caused it to, like any of the larger HRE polities, increasingly pull away from imperial authority. Culminating with it leaving in 1648 from a HRE shattered in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. But even that development wasn't unique: the Netherlands had a similar course.
ok having read up a little bit on the subject i think i'm gonna draw the line about when the the CH became independent at 1499. Hard to claim a certain territory is still part of an empire when the emperor has to go to war to reassert his claim on said territory, and loses, and has to accept a humiliating peace treaty that concludes the war and the two sides never fight again afterwards. Oh and the treaty also exempted the Swiss from paying taxes, to the point we discussed earlier. From the wiki on the swabian war: "When his military high commander fell in the battle of Dornach, where the Swiss won a final decisive victory, Emperor Maximilian I had no choice but to agree to a peace treaty signed on September 22, 1499, in Basel. The treaty granted the Confederacy far-reaching independence from the empire. Although the Eidgenossenschaft officially remained a part of the empire until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the peace of Basel exempted it from the imperial jurisdiction and imperial taxes and thus de facto acknowledged it as a separate political entity."
I would add that thinking of Switzerland as composed of German, French and Italian part is kind of misguided. Protestant vs. catholic may be better. But in the end, as OP notes, it's all about cantons. For example, policy-wise, Zurich (German speaking) and Geneva (French speaking) may be closer together, given that they are both mostly urban areas, then policies of Zurich and rural German-speaking Schwyz.
I'm sorry; I didn't read carefully enough. I now see it!
As for necroing, it's not always bad! ;)
But Yeah, anyway, I personally see Ukraine's main value as providing a non-Woke, relatively conservative Western development model for an Orthodox East Slavic country. This includes things such as free speech, free elections, hopefully greater LGBTQ+ rights in due time, et cetera but also hopefully things such as an opposition to Wokeness and mass Muslim immigration (which Western Europe has unfortunately already received too much of in recent decades).
"Does my street (population: ~100) have the right to declare independence from the USA? If not, then street-sized entities apparently don’t have the right to self-determination. Why not?"
The analytic philosopher Timothy Williamson writes a lot about such questions involving vagueness, or what in the field's jargon are, I think, called "vague predicates." (He wrote a whole book on the topic: "Vagueness.") When, precisely, does a man losing hair become bald? Williamson actually defends a philosophical position called supervaluationism, in which, e.g., there is a precise hair that gets lost and, before that hair fell out, the man wasn't bald, but with the loss he suddenly is. I don't understand this. But you might find his work interesting to look into even if your first question above was partly in jest.
Technically, Williamson's position is called "epistemicism" (there's a precise border for every apparently vague concept, and vagueness just consists in the difficulty of any actual person knowing how the facts about usage of the word determined precisely what that border is) while I think Kit Fine defends supervaluationism (which says there are millions of candidate borders for vague concepts, and vagueness consists in the fact that something is only *really* true if it's true according to each of the borders, and things that are true for some but false for others are in some weird "indeterminate" state - though it's not *really* true that anything is indeterminate, since according to each border everything is either determinately true or determinately false).
Thanks for the correction. Wouldn't Williamson's position be undermined by the fact that, during the (unknown) history the application of "bald," people who used the word no doubt used it to refer to various degrees of baldness, not always the same degree (and hence there is in the term's history not just one precise border for the vague concept)?
I think Williamson's response would be to say that some of those historical users of the word were speaking a different language from me (after all, Old English was certainly a different language than the language I'm speaking), and that only the usage by the ones who were speaking the same language as me is relevant to the meaning of my word. (Precisely which speakers constitute this set is again a vague concept - which he says just means there's a precise border that we don't know.)
The meaning of the term won't be precisely determined by what is going on within any of their heads, because of course we know that speakers of any language are often slightly mistaken about the meanings of their words. (Like Hilary Putnam, I don't know much about the difference between the words "elm" and "beech", and I also often get "stove" and "oven" confused.) There is some process by which this complicated set of usages determines a precise border for the meaning of the word, but it's not the sort of thing that any person actually knows.
I think all of this sounds a lot like special pleading, but he makes a compelling case that you can't have classical logic without something like this, and that classical logic is the only true logic.
Interesting. Thanks. What you wrote put me in mind of Gödel's remark, "The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all."
I don't have a philosophy background so my preference is probably just naivete talking, but on this topic I'm partial to David Chapman's take in https://meaningness.com/boundaries-objects-connections, where he argues that boundaries, objects and connections between them are neither totally objective nor totally subjective, but "co-created by ourselves and the world in dynamic interaction".
If the roles were reversed, and Ukraine was a Russia-style autocracy and Russia a modernizing democracy, and a free, democratic Russia invaded a despotic Ukraine...
Well, I'd be against it. But I definitely wouldn't want the US to support Ukraine in such a case, and would find difficulty summoning the same moral outrage over the invading.
Is this just self-serving bias on behalf of the liberal democratic West? Maybe, but I don't think that's most of it. I don't think whether Ukraine is friendly or unfriendly with the US in this scenario would particularly change my feelings on this.
Ukraine has more political freedom than Russia but it's a stretch to call it "free and democratic"; it's below countries like Bangladesh, Tunisia, Thailand, Singapore, and certainly well below Hungary on the Economist Democracy Index. It's a "hybrid regime". Yes it's more free than Russia, but don't exaggerate.
This is the second time I see someone mention the democracy index as part of an argument, this motivated me to actually go look at the data. I think the details here highlight the dangers of trying to summarize complex situations into a singular number and then use it to compare with other stuff without understanding the underlying nuances.
Ukraine's relatively poor 5.57 score (86 out of 168) in the 2021 version of the index is composed of:
- 8.25 for electoral process and pluralism
- 2.36 for functioning of government
- 6.67 for political participation
- 5.00 for political culture
- 5.59 for civil liberties.
The clear outlier here is the "functioning of the government" score which is just abnormally low (to give you a sense - North Korea, Congo, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, etc. all score better than Ukraine here!) And to your comment how Ukraine scores "well below Hungary", well actually on the four other criteria the two countries are nearly equal (6.5 average for Hungary vs. 6.4 for Ukraine), basically the entire difference is down to this "functioning of government" rating. Now what does it actually encompass? The Economist report doesn't give a definition, and my 2min google didn't turn up anything (probably could find one if I spent longer but was too lazy), but I think the following excerpt from the Economist report gives a good idea what it might include:
"Ukraine’s score registered the steepest decline among the four east European countries in this category, and Ukraine now shares 86th place with Mexico in our global ranking, down from 79th place in 2020. Ukraine’s score declined in part as a result of increased tensions with Russia. Government functioning under a direct military threat usually restricts democratic processes in favour of the centralisation of power in the hands of the executive and the security or military apparatus with the aim of guaranteeing public safety. In Ukraine, the military played a more prominent role in 2021 and exerted more influence over political decision-making; government policy also became less transparent. The approval rating of Volodymyr Zelenskyi, the Ukrainian president, declined from 42% in December 2020 to 38% at the end of 2021 as confidence in his ability to implement reforms and address threats from Russia declined."
A large portion of their poor score seems due to the threat of war and the ensuing need to emphasize the military! (which could also be impacting other criteria like civil liberties etc. hard to say as it's not as obvious). I guess in some sense yeah it has an impact on the level of democracy in a country, but being at war / at risk of war is hardly their choice and it seems pretty egregious to ding them as a failed state because they've been forced onto a war footing by external threats.
It's a good comment, Ukraine has a lower Democracy Index than Hungary mostly because of the functioning of government. I never called them a failed state, but yeah the "democratic Ukraine vs nondemocratic Russia" is a bit stronger of an argument than I thought it was before.
This is similar to my thoughts on the matter, except of course expressed better.
I also can't help but notice Ukraine has introduced conscription and banned opposition parties, no doubt because not all ukrainians agree with him. In order to "create" a people, somehow you always have to use large amounts of force. If the Ukrainians were so gung hu about Ukraine, why do you have to draft them by force? Also there seems to be a lack of reciprocity, Ukrainian government prepared for the war with denial and doing nothing, but they still demand their citizens give everything for it! (except they wont meaningfully draft women, because ukraine is still sexist in the face of annihilation as a nation state!)
The best argument I can think of against Crimean becoming Russian is that people should be allowed to vote but not be allowed to vote for dictatorship, except that kind of goes away because now ukraine is authoritarian and banned the second most popular party, the Opposition Platform for Life.
This is why we need (near) open borders, so we don't sentence a person to the country they were born into!
Until we have that I think you kind have to take it by an extremely case by case basis, will the polity that likely emerges from whatever group who wants independence this Tuesday be better for the median person (or maybe better based on being more moral) than the one it replaces?
And will it be so much better to justify the massive cost of war? Pretty rarely yes, but sometimes yes
Like I tend to think Palestine would not form a very efficient and just government, though I do think Ukraine would be better than russia, or at the very least not so bad as to justify war.
The opposition party ban thing i don't know, but the conscription part seems totally necessary to me. Lots of people may be gung-ho about a war / the country but be too cowardly to fight (can't blame them, don't know what category I would be in myself if put in that situation), you can't allow a dynamic to start where people can dodge the fight if they want that would create bad morale.
Proves too much - Russia must conscript people and suppress opposition in order to convince its citizens to invade Ukraine, so they can’t be right either. Hell, by that standard the UK did not deserve to survive WWII and should have surrendered to the Nazis.
The Union also obviously didn't care that much about the whole slavery thing. Pretty sure Lincoln had to shut down several media outlets and even suspended habeus corpus. And he definitely conscripted most of his army. Surely if the North were gung ho about abolition or staying one nation or whatever the rallying cry was, they wouldn't have to draft them by force. To say nothing of the Confederacy, who refused to draft their women even when faced with imminent destruction as a nation state.
Lincoln didn't ban the second-largest opposition party, it left (and it was a literally pro-slavery party)
Though I tend to think drafting is fine to end slavery and to end a slave state. I don't know difficult questions, I tend to think the union could have improved its army by just making wages high enough to not draft people, but if that is militarily unfeasible than the draft was fine.
A draft from a government that appears to me like 10 percent better than the Russian government (and in some ways its worse, as appears poorer and more corrupt in peace time)? I'm a bit more on the fence on this.
>Though I tend to think drafting is fine to end slavery and to end a slave state. I don't know difficult questions, I tend to think the union could have improved its army by just making wages high enough to not draft people, but if that is militarily unfeasible than the draft was fine.
Whether or not conscription is morally/ethically acceptable seems unrelated to your original point, which was that if the populace actually cared about the stakes of the war then conscription would be unnecessary. Unless I misread your original post, anyway, but I'm not sure how else to take it.
It was a bit of a meander of a post, basically, your post seemed to be saying American civl war = just and did the things (especially a draft) I'm criticizing Ukraine for doing, so the Ukraine war is actually good.
Allow me to explain my thinking further for funsies.
I think the justness of drafts tends to be related to
A. A minimum, what i would call, legitimacy threshold. Pre-war Ukraine didn't meet that for me.
B. A just war threshold-- obviously I would say a war for the extermination of Canada is bad even if the USA or Sweden or some kind of legitimate authority launched it.
For example, I would willingly submit myself to be drafted by Sweden or USA or Isreal or whatever for a war (assuming it was just), and support jailing people who try to draft dodge.
This leads to the question of what constitutes a just war, and well that's a difficult question, but I think when there is a strong possibility of creating a much better/more just rule system I guess I would support war?
Of course these ideas are kind of half baked, this is just an internet comment after all.
tangent: I'm also interested in the more technical question of how feasible is just paying people enough so they voluntarily join the army? The higher the support the less you have to pay, also you might get better troops.
>It was a bit of a meander of a post, basically, your post seemed to be saying American civl war = just and did the things (especially a draft) I'm criticizing Ukraine for doing, so the Ukraine war is actually good.
I was more aiming for "We can't really judge popular support for a war solely by the use of conscription, nor can we reasonably expect mass conscription of women in most societies under basically any circumstances."
>I'm also interested in the more technical question of how feasible is just paying people enough so they voluntarily join the army? The higher the support the less you have to pay, also you might get better troops.
The US military has been volunteer-only since shortly after Vietnam, iirc? So far the price seems to be "Make university ruinously expensive for basically anyone who doesn't enlist, then offer to repay any loans or pay for tuition for anyone who does serve. Also, make health insurance suck but give service members free health/dental/life etc. insurance." YMMV on whether that's worth it.
> Ukrainian government prepared for the war with denial and doing nothing
This is untrue. They did plenty since 2014. And are indicators that they did just before war, as evidenced from air force not destroyed in initial attacks - thought maybe that is just Russian incompetence?
they were publicly saying war was laughable, which is understandable since they didn't want their economy to explode, but a bit misleading, and a lie, at least if they were preparing for war. the better they prepared the more obvious it is they were massively lying to their own people.
There is a lot of fog of war right now, so it could be Russian incompetence, or maybe Ukrainian brilliance.
My prediction: They will eventually capitulate and give in to all demands, (give up the disputed Ukrainian territories, be super neutral, etc) they will be labeled as heroes despite having been able to do that before the war, with the caveat that maybe there is something not public, maybe Putin would have demanded much more without the war, but my understanding is Ukraine could end it right now by just recognizing the disputed land, paying lip service to de-Nazification, and being neutral from now on.
Of course Russia could end in an even better way by just withdrawing, but I don't see that happening.
Yeah I mean they publicly denied but privately did a bunch your right. Fog of war being what it is I think it easily could be ore Russian incompetence than ukrainian competence. Could be both at the same time.
I mean yeah I support ukraine, doing what's necessary to defend their country (draft, curtailing some civil liberties etc).
I think it's in their interest to make a few concessions and basically give up part of the disputed eastern territories though.
Indeed I think that is exactly why they had to ban the opposition parties. If debate were allowed many more ukrainians would be making this argument, I suspect.
Now I suspect it's going to be a long slog that Russia eventually wins. Some sort of long tail chance of a revolution against putin but pretty small
This "Opposition" party (and all, yes all) other parties you talk about were, and are, russian puppet oligarchs under a nice "left" name. Also, they were banned only temporarily, while the military law lasts. This is fair considered at least how they still support the invasion, and helped kill ukrainians. This "Ukraine is not a democracy" thing because of that parties ban is exactly what you can read on RT, which should be enough to rule out this argument.
There are many such untrue arguments like that in your comment, so check your information sources, I guess.
I would expect RT news to use the best arguments they can think of, as well as a few lies so I wouldn't expect to DQ and arguments just because RT news used them.
I am just going by freedom house, which puts Ukraine at 40/100 partly free, which to me, is not free at all. I will not sacrifice my life or support forcing others to die for a a 40/100 partly free state.
I suspect the military law thing will last in perpetuity, as such laws generally do, but we shall see.
I don't really wish to do a deep dive into the financing of the second-largest opposition party atm, but in a free society you can't just ban it because its led by Russian plutocrats. (maybe you can cut off the money though!). Clearly if its the second-largest opposition party their must be some Ukrainians that support.
Ukraine is facing the prospect of being conquered by a country that scored 19/100 on the Freedom House scale, so if that's your benchmark then non-resistance to Russia seems like a weird response. Maybe Ukraine will return to its prewar level of freedom and maybe not, but whatever Putin has planned for them is almost certainly worse.
Simple answer to your last proposition. The union had to stay together to prevent European powers from carving up North America once again. Had the Confederacy succeeded Spain or France or England would have been able to drive a wedge between the South and the North and as Lincoln knew...divided we fall. The repercussions of that are too ugly to contemplate. History, as James Joyce said, is a nightmare we're trying to awaken from, and the United States and only the United States has escaped.
100 million people died from wars and politics in Europe and Asia in the first half of the 20th Century. The worst 50 years in human history. The US suffered less than a million combat deaths in that time. Maybe Mexico and Latin America escaped, but Europe's constant predation of those countries left them largely crippled to this day. Andy Jackson knew what he was doing.
I think it's worth at least considering the possibility that if American cities and states were allowed to secede and rejoin more or less at will (filling in a logistics of doing this in a non-insane way is left as an exercise for the reader), this would create a significant pressure towards reform and competence. Or at least, I think if poorly run states were in genuine fear of their most lucrative cities voting to be Canadian instead, it'd force them to get their shit together and provide a strong financial incentive towards reform. Certainly it's hard to imagine Texas doing their recent abortion shenanigans if there was a serious risk of Austin or Houston leaving.
it creates lots of arbitrage incentives. Czech / Slovakia split, Western states in Yugoslavia wanting to leave pre-war, and ongoing Wallon/Flemish talks of split in Belgium are partly cultural but also an issue of different economic speeds between parts of the same country inducing people in the richer parts to want to leave rather than continue to fund the poor side. In none of these cases did it create a positive dynamic to induce the poorer side to shape/catch up.
That's maybe not true of Wallonia and Flanders. Wallonia was the rich half until a few decades ago, and now Flanders is the rich half, and maybe that history did drive the Flemish to growth.
Eg from a quick google:
"It sometimes feels like the moment Flanders finally caught up with Wallonia, more than half a century ago, it also unleashed a political confidence that continues to voice itself"
well, Wallonia used to be the industrial heartland but now is basically like US rust belt with lots of economic and social problems, and listening to friends from there it's creating a lot of the current tensions between the two sides. But you / the article you linked bring up the historical dynamics about how roles used to be reversed and I agree that probably makes things even worse!
I'd say that the split of Czechoslovakia actually helped both sides in the end and Czechs and Slovaks have more friendly relationship today than they would have had otherwise.
Also, arguably Texas in the other direction, same argument. Texas (including Austin and Houston) has benefited enormously from growth because the US has freedom of movement and Texas has different policy (speaking here not of the abortion shenanigans, but of the fact that I, an Austin resident, was never harassed about taking long walks outside maskless in 2020, among other things).
Realpolitik at least is useful for predicting behavior as Mearsheimer illustrates. The US wouldn't tolerate Mexico joining Russia, for example, and when the Ukrainians cut off the water supply to Crimea it was only a matter of time before the Russians had to do something. Blowing up the damn happened within the first week or so, I believe. Curious that Ukraine is offering to be a neutral state now that we're in peace talks, and that wasn't on the table before the invasion. To think the war could have been avoided is just heart-breaking.
I think there is some probability you are right. But there is also a considerable chance that offering the neutrality concession before the war was fought would've come across as an admission of weakness and would've just encouraged Putin to take what was on offer and then come for seconds in another few years (not like getting Crimea / part of Donbas satiated him, right?). Whereas now that Ukrainians have made clear the costs of war if they manage to negotiate a peace treaty the Russians should calm down for quite a while.
Yeah, a safe bet for the outcome is "the Ukrainians have bought time to be a nation, and the Russians have bought time to keep a lot of Russian speaking people out of NATO". And it's important to realize (1) none of this is stable even on the scale of centuries, (2) those results weren't just mutually tradable, and (3) it's best to get used to the immutability of 1 and 2, and embrace the happy times, even though there are also sad times along the way.
The set of national borders that the world has today are a mix of historical happenstance that frequently seems very arbitrary. Even the existence of many national identities as a recognizable concept is the constructed work of specific people. (For instance, Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation is a great book to understand how the Greek national mythos was actively built decades before Greece became an independent entity.)
Countries defy easy categorization that group X is here and group Y is here. However, easy orderly categorization shouldn't be a goal in and of itself, certainly not at the cost is potentially carries. Kenya's UN Ambassador Martin Kimani gave a good speech on this point is response to the Russia-Ukraine War (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwDWxyLVBxk). Worth watching, but the summary is: Yes, the borders in Africa are stupid and inconvenient legacies of colonialism, but going to war to "fix" them would be a fruitless exercise with tremendous consequences. We've just got to live with them.
On self-determination more generally, perhaps the better question to ask is "How do subgroups get self-determination?" rather than "Who gets self-determination?". Full succession to either become its own country or join another country is the extreme case. A much more common model is giving a high level of self-government to sub-entities (as is done for states, cities and provinces worldwide).
This can offer a high degree of flexibility, while also providing certain basis standards (e.g. human rights). Sure, if 60% of a region want independent decision making, that seems reasonable, but not if it is so they can murder or enslave the other 40%. This addresses your Confederacy scenario.
The point about putting a military base in the Bahamas is a good example of an important broader point: There are lots of other values at stake in deciding what country owns what, besides just the lives and votes of the people who live there. Besides security and military concerns, there are natural resources to argue about. Can the part of Norway with all the oil secede? Do they get to keep all the oil money if they do? Can another country buy them out without the consent of the rest of Norway?
A recent practical example being "Scotland is the part of the UK with all the oil (and one key nuclear submarine base)". It mattered in the 2014 referendum.
I suppose in Norway much of the oil is on government land, leased by government ownership to private corporations, but in a place like Texas, it doesn't really matter whether the state secedes, since most of the oil is on privately-owned land, and secession doesn't change who owns the land. (For decades after the Mexican-American war, many of the biggest landowners in California were Mexicans.)
Wouldn't secession still change who can levy taxes on the land, the payrolls of the companies operating on the land, and all their business activities generally? And imagine Texas joining OPEC -- even without owning the oil fields, it seems to me that the Feds have a strong interest in keeping that land and those businesses in American hands, whether private or public.
Yes, that's right. After secession it would definitely be possible for the new state to expropriate the land from the private owners. My point is just that this doesn't automatically happen. (In discussions of cities or US states changing territorial sovereignty, I think this would almost never happen, but people often talk as though it automatically would.)
Most Norwegian oil is on government sea. Sea is not normally capable of being privately owned in the way land is, but is capable of being under government sovereignty.
[Property ownership is weird, in that there is sovereign ownership and proprietary ownership; sea can be under sovereign ownership, but not proprietary]
I think my views on this is a purely realpolitik one. Might makes right - if you have the will and means to fight for your independence and prevail you have the right to be a nation, if a neighbor has the will and means to fight you and prevail and control your territory indefinitely then you don't. This approach has been in place since the beginning of time and has resulted in vast majority of national boundaries today. There are sometimes added complexities about alliances and other nations not wanting wrong example to be set, or wanting to weaken the aggressing nation etc. and hence help out the nation trying to remain independent. But these again are out of political considerations. I'd prefer if we just left the theoretical-moralistic fig leaves out of this completely.
nothing. i don't have a say in this. nothing i believe one way or another could have the slightest impact on what happens in the real world. you should think of the above as an attempt at finding a system that explains the facts out there rather than any attempt at influencing them.
My approach here is that I think that nation-states were kind of a bad idea, but once you've got one running decently well, it's better to keep it running than violently knock it over and try again. So the real norm for me is that countries should not generally try to modify the international status quo through all-out invasion, particularly against places that are managing to be somewhat liberal and somewhat democratic.
If Ukraine had remained part of Russia and then launched a war of independence this year, I doubt you'd see western countries pouring weapons in. And if they did, I think it would be fair to criticize it as some shady cold war antics that cause way more harm than good. But that's not how things went down when the soviets fell, and now that Ukraine has managed to establish itself, it is worth protecting because the alternative is obviously worse.
Is this fair? Probably not really. But I do think it's a reasonable way to approach the messy world of international politics. Focusing too much on grand universal values like "self-determination" will trip you up more than it helps you.
Another thing I think is notable though is how ethnic/national identities are malleable and are often shaped to deal with particular local situations. Like, a big part of what's going on here is that Ukraine's neighbor to the east is a poor authoritarian country with little to offer other than cheap gas, whereas their neighbors to the west are mighty industrial powers. It makes perfect sense that the people living in that border region would prefer to associate themselves with the powerful, wealthy, and prosperous side. Cultivating a distinctive Ukrainian identity helps create the ideological space they need to execute that pivot to the west.
My hometown of Staten Island famously voted to secede from the rest of NYC in 1993, with 65% of the island voting to leave. They tried the establishment of an independent city by passage of a city charter, but this was blocked by the state legislature of New York. Apparently since an act of the legislature created NYC out of the five boroughs in 1898, the legislature could just look at the charter Staten Island passed and say “Nah, you can’t leave.” This never made much sense to me, but neither did secession. I understood why lots of people wanted it, but still can’t see how it would have improved things.
The whole movement was diffused in that same election, because the high turnout from largely Republican Staten Island elected Rudy Giuliani mayor of NYC. Giuliani made sure Staten Island’s biggest grievances were dealt with, and the movement to secede fizzled.
Apparently it revived a bit under DeBlasio, who was seriously hated by just about everyone but especially Staten Island. But I haven’t lived there in 20 years and never heard anyone had been considering secession in 2019 until much later. I still don’t know what improvements people imagined, or if they’d considered all the trade-offs.
I am Russian and I consider Ukraine separate county.
Not because of some centuries old s**t (even though I am a big fan of history) or language (I look down on Russian sometimes and Ukranian has 6x less people and it's book market/internet culture is even worse) but because of modern political culture.
Russia and Belarus had a chance to go in direction of democracy.
I guess Belarus was to small and it was captured by single clique.
In Russia authoritarianism is based on outstanding might of Gasprom - natural gas monopolist. Putin follows interests of Gasprom and is supported by it. Gasprom has enormous profits and it is centralised by its nature - natural gas pipelines should be managed by single authority.
Ukraine managed to walk the narrow path to democracy without single clique dominating the scene. Ukranian elites had to learn how to communicate and cooperate despite their differences way better than their Russian counterparts (read about Putin's "vertical line of power" - it is even worse than it sounds). And that cultural difference seems to be the source of the hatred from Russians "blues"/"righties".
Should Ukraine join Russia or not is a moot point with brave resistance that it's army shows today.
Crimea is indeed is mostly populated by Russians and Russia's navy base and tourists always projected lots of influence there. Ukrain had to manage that region much more carefully and it would be the best if it remained Russian or at least got some very special status.
US state governments do something very different from what national governments do, but the Senate and Electoral College mechanisms make state borders ridiculously important at the national level. (I once saw a fantasy map of the 2016 presidential election, in which the Ohio-Michigan line was moved slightly, and Alabama got a bit more of the Florida Panhandle, and Clinton ends up with a strong victory by taking Michigan and Florida.)
Someone might think the moral issues are the same, and they might somehow *feel* the same for the self-respect of the people, but they seem extremely different in other ways.
The question of self determination in regards to forming a state should take into account the purpose of forming that state.
Now this gets us into the deep waters of political philosophy and you could argue that it is exactly the point of self determination that us outsiders aren't allowed to care about the purpose, because, you know, the people should be free to determine it for themselves.
I have no fleshed out argument here, but my intuition is something like this:
>the purpose of forming a state is to further individual freedom, both positive and negative.
>the legitimacy of seceding and political self determination partly depends on if that is an effective way of fulfilling this purpose
in this way very specific circumstances factor into the question.
your street isnt allowed to secede, because there is no way this actually makes the people of your street more self determined while making alot of trouble for everyone.
crimea probably isnt allowed to secede from kinda democratic Ukraine to pretty undemocratic russia bc obviously people will be less free.
The south wasnt allowed to secede from the US because it explicitly wanted a large part of its people to be not free.
Taiwan would be allowed to secede from the peoples republic of china because it is in many ways more free, except for the fact that if China feels they need to emphasize their opinion on the matter by force, a lot of people wil be less free so we hover in paradoxical limbo of not-saying-that-they-are-allowed-to-secede-so-they-can-continue-to-secede-without-too-much-risk.
Also: I consider Cossacks: European Wars to be a more authoritative source than Civilization (because much more historically accurate) and it has Ukraine as one of the playable factions. Ukrainian peasants in the game have the unique ability to resist capture/conversion by enemy military units. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks:_European_Wars :)
I don't think that "might makes right", but I do think that might makes a nation.
If your street declared itself to be a nation and could successfully form its own government, laws, taxes, and the means to enforce them -- while also preventing the city, state, and country you're located in from enforcing their laws or collecting taxes from you -- congratulations, your street is a nation.
These questions tend to be resolved by force, not by a moral theory of who has a "right" to self determination. The moral character of a group claiming to be a nation is important, but they will determine their own course if they can prevent anyone else from determining it.
I was going to write a very similar comment, but I think it's important to note that this very rarely plays out in practice because everyone has a pretty good idea of whether they would get trounced in a fight or not. Thus the realpolitik is obscured: while they may *want* to secede, small regions rarely if ever do because it would be trivial to recapture them, and they know it. Rebellion is a losing proposition in the face of modern nation-states.
References to the small size of a rebel group make me think of Raven from Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash". He's referred to as a Sovereign, essentially a one-man-nation, because he carries around a nuke that's rigged to go off if he dies. Government enforcers treat him as an independent nation because of the power he commands.
He's not a good person. I don't think he has a "right" to nationhood. But he doesn't ask anyone for any rights, he simply does what he wants. Self-determination.
Side note, I keep putting "rights" in quotes because I'm not sure what we (or Scott) mean. Rights granted by whom? Enforced by whom? What does a "right to self-determination" mean apart from the strength to achieve it?
Good article but people make this stuff way to complicated. It's not about morality orethics but simply might makes right, and the victors get to write the history books. We didn't defeat the Nazis because the Nazis were bad and evil, we firebombed Dresden and killed them until they gave up. The answer to the question "Who gets self-determination?" is whoever can take it. If it can't be won peacefully, it must be won through force (see Clausewitz, Carl). Kill more of them then they kill you until they give up. This is the way it has always been and the way it always will be.
Sure, let's rephrase the question. "By what principle should it be agreed upon in advance which independence movements / conquests be condemned or supported by the powerful countries of the world, for the sake of not maximally engulfing the world in various destructive proxy wars?"
- keeping in mind that "whatever their national interests at the moment serve" is a rule that involves more bloodshed and wealth destruction than those countries would like, and it is thus not in their interests to endorse it.
I'll go with "whatever their national interests at the moment serve." Proxy wars are a defense-in-depth strategy for powerful countries that is much better than direct confrontation. Destructive proxy wars are the least bad option for great power conflict.
It seems unlikely to me that rulers would agree to work for the national interest rather than for their own interests. Do you see any reason to believe that they would?
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. You could ask "how many battalions do international norms have?", but the answer would be "quite a lot!" The fact that Russia broke the norm led lots of countries to sanction it and otherwise cause it grief. I'm not saying this norm is foolproof - if it had been a stronger and more popular country like the US, maybe they could have gotten away with it. But the norm isn't totally toothless either. I bet all the time there are dictators who think "should I invade my neighbor? No, that would mean I'm violating an international norm and I'd get in trouble."
Saying "might makes right" is ignoring this valuable and powerful system. Worse, it's hyperstitionally weakening the system - as long as everyone knows everyone knows everyone ... that there are international norms, the norms will be real.
Doesn't the US being strong enough to repeatedly evade the norm indicate that might really is the determining factor, and that Russia just isn't mighty enough to defy the US that effectively?
Define "the determining factor". If norms trump might in 80% of cases, but the handful of truly overwhelmingly mighty ignore the norms, it doesn't seem like a good reason to stop caring about the norms/to say they don't really matter.
I mean, you can say the same thing about laws within a single country, can't you? If you're sufficiently rich and cunning, you can get away with bribing left right and center. But that doesn't mean the laws against corruption are fiction and that we may as well not have them at all, because for every corrupt businessman bribing their way to an unethical building permit, there are dozens of ordinary people to whom it will not even occur to bribe their tax inspector (or whatever), to the general betterment of society.
I didn't say there were people rich enough to be completely above the law; but I thought it non-controversial enough that there are some people rich and well-connected enough to *get away* with various forms of bribery and corruption that, at a smaller scale, would be noticed and prosecuted.
I also didn't say anything about the US. Feel free to substitute a more corrupt foreign country if you want. My point is that 0.5% of a given group having a special cheat code that allows them to ignore the normal rules everyone else plays by, does not mean the rules aren't still the baseline.
I think for people who aren't rich it's not the risk of punishment that prevents them from, say, bribing a Congressman to earmark funds to benefit them, but rather a lack of means to accomplish that in the first place.
In a corrupt country there's typically less "state capacity" and enforcement of the laws generally. And in such places the "baseline" of what's actually expected and even normative can be quite different from how things are officially said to be. I'm thinking of Diego Gambetta's writings about Italian academia.
This norm is part of the "soft power" projected by the United States, and would be exactly the same for any other hegemon in the US's place.
Soft power (persuasion, propaganda, rhetoric, arts and culture, etc.: everything non-military) is arguably more useful to the hegemon than military might in daily international affairs. Soft power projection makes exercises of military power less frequent and therefore less costly.
Re the cf: The military usefulness of tactical nuclear bombs is doubtful. They make a big, persistent mess, which is generally more of a problem for the attacker than the defender, who is unlikely to use nukes in its own territory (optimistically assuming it would have to clean up the mess after the invasion is repelled). The attacker would only nuke important things like transport hubs which make its own logistics less workable.
Also, the attacker usually has some goals other than creating a desolate wasteland, such as taking over industrial capacity or resources (such as water and fossil fuel resources, in the case of Crimea/Ukraine) or transport links such as ports.
"Norms" are secondary to these pure military and strategic considerations.
Nobody uses nuclear weapons in a war between peers because of MAD and guaranteed second strike capability. This is a major reason, probably the most important one, why Russia wants control of a viable (non-desert, watered from Ukraine) Crimea: Sevastopol is essential to the submarine leg of Russia's second strike tripod.
Nah, it's completely toothless. The only reason any dictator worries about invading his neighbor is if it gets some big larger country -- like the US -- upset, or at least some significant coalition of almost as big countries. So if you want to equate "international norm" to "US public opinion" then it works, but the rest of the world would be entitled to view that as pretty cynical.
Otherwise, you would need to demonstrate, at the least, some case where some large group of countries ("the international norm") *not* including the US actually caused some dictator to reverse, or be defeated. No obvious example springs to my mind. Whereas there are a host of examples of things that completely violated international norms but where nothing happened because the US didn't seem to care (the Rwandan massacre springs to mind, as does the Syrian/Hezbollah destruction of Lebanon, once a thriving civilized nation, the treatment of Tibet by China), and examples of things that weren't especially norm-violating but which nevertheless were changed *because* the US cared (the ejection of Noriega as Panamanian dictator, the fact that China was unable to annex Taiwan in the 50s, for that matter the fact that West Berlin existed for almost 50 years).
Didn't Azerbiajan just invade and claim part of Armenia (or was it vice versa). 'We' don't like Russia so we're on Ukraine's side. But for Azerbaijan and Armenia? I have no idea who's side I'm supposed to be on in that conflict, but I don't think there was some giant international reaction. I remember some reporting on how much drones were used in the conflict, but that's about it. The 'norm' seems to be really what doesn't annoy America (or local regional power) and a reflection of Pax Americana. And America itself can do whatever it wants, plenty of invading, it's just not really interested in adding directly to it's own territory. Certainly which secessionist movements get supported and which don't seem much more realpolitik then any kind of moral principle.
Iraq invades Iran intending to annex some parts and overthrow the Iranian government -> supported by the US (we don't like Iran). Iraq invades Kuwait (again intending to annex it, Iraq really wanted more coastline) US invades to stop it. North Korea invades South Korea (supported by USSR / PROC, opposed by US, really inconvenient having more than one global power) final line of control has some territory shifted to both sides. North Vietnam successfully invades South Vietnam. There's a lot more fragmentation than conquest post WWII but that generally serves the US interest.
This all seems pretty obvious to me. _Of course_ Crimea has the right to secede from Ukraine and join Russia if its population (and Russia) wants to! (I don't know whether they do.) Likewise for Donetsk and Luhansk, Transnistria, Kurdistan, Palestine, Hong Kong, Scotland, Catalonia, Basque Country, Quebec, Texas, California, and all the others I'm missing. Canada and Britain seem to have accepted this, Spain hasn't, which honestly makes Spain and the EU look pretty hypocritical and undermines international law. (As does the US support of Israel which is hiding behind same "not a real people" nonsense discussed in the article, as well as ancient trivia. But the US has always been quite selective about whether international law applies.)
The American South had every right to secede. They didn't have the right to own humans. And given that those humans were previously residents (if not citizens) of the US, I'm calling the War of Northern Aggression justified. There's no other possible justification for it.
Also, international law is real. The non-proliferation treaty has done pretty darn well, leaders try to avoid violating the Geneva Conventions because they don't want to be tried before the ICC. We could move towards a world where denying a country's right to self determination carries real costs, and we have at points. Sadly, right now most of the major players have reasons to ignore that aspect of international law but that could change.
The US has a longstanding policy of supporting Palestinian statehood, and US support of Israel is not because of the conflict but because of other things (cooperation on cyber and so on, and against mutual threats like Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood). The US does not formally recognize Palestine (the idea is you recognize that at the end of negotiations), but definitely does recognize Palestinian peoplehood. It's true that some Israelis do not informally recognize Palestinian peoplehood (calling them just "Arabs") and vice versa (PLO charter said Jews are just a religious group, not a people, and have no self-determination), but in the Oslo Accords, Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and the PLO has de jure recognized Israel.
Anyway, I generally support the right of various territories to secede if they want to. Catalonians, Scots, Qubecois, etc should get a vote, sure. I'm generally a believer in freedom and self-determination, and these groups should get a vote on independence or at least a vote on more autonomy. But you know, freedom and self-determination only take you so far; there has to be *some element* of power involved, else a street could just secede from a country. Again you at least agree there have to be practical considerations sometimes. What does a half-Han Xinjiang look like? Does an independent Palestine get immediately overrun by Hamas and shoot rockets at Israel? Are these not things to worry about?
Certainly there has been path-dependence since then. The US is often allied with countries even when it does not make much sense (see Pakistan); it takes a while for these sorts of things to fall into an equilibrium and we still have Cold War relics all over our foreign policy (Hanania has written on that). In any case, Israel is very useful nowadays, with Iran, Turkey, and jihadist groups causing trouble in the region, and it has a lot of tech and cyber which is helpful for us. US aid to Israel is basically a Cold War relic, and they don't need it. I don't think the alliance is just path-dependence, Israel remains very useful to us.
Anyway, it takes a while for alliance structures to shift but we do see countries like Pakistan moving away from the US, as well as countries like Turkey (though recently, Turkey has been moving back toward the US and its regional allies such as Israel and the UAE). But I don't think pure path-dependence can sustain an alliance forever.
The whole "people" thing just seems like a mcguffin to me. I was born in the UK, a fairly small "country" (made up of four smaller "countries"!) and now live in China, which is very large and claims to be 90% one "nation". But if you just look at those people, it's a joke. Southern Chinese people look like South East Asians. Northern Chinese people look big and moon-faced like Mongolians. (I'm stereotyping massively; there's huge variation; the north-south thing is just the most obvious one that smacks you in the eye.) And they speak different languages. India, any African country, and obviously the USA present the same problems.
In fact, I suspect the nation/people concept was really just a European invention to try to move intellectually away from the concept of feudal allegiance to whoever the current strongman is. Europe had a problem: constant war among robber barons, kings, and emperors, in which the winners would take ownership of land and everything (including the people) on it. Europe's solution was to invent a bunch of different political philosophies to use to resist them. Those philosophies included communism, democracy, and nationalism (or racism sent to do some work for a change).
I don't see any reason to grant even the concept of "peoples" any respect. I understand that people use it, and many are very attached to it, but it's ultimately just another bit of historical baggage.
When the technology (both electronic and legal technology) gets good enough, we'll have people choosing their own "country" based on preference, not geographical location. (Bit like diaspora Jewishness, I guess.)
The Chinese government claims there's one Chinese language, and that's related to them using the same script for different spoken languages (which the government calls "dialects").
Yep, that's what they say. It can be pretty funny if you take a Hong Kong magazine actually written in Cantonese and ask a northerner to read it, then watch them splutter about how it's "non-standard"...
The argument from written language isn't any stronger than any of the other arguments for there being a coherent "nation" of people.
The key is to just let these two ideas be separate in your head. In China (and many other places), if you start arguing that people in the north of the country actually speak a different language to the people in the south of the country, you will often be understood to mean: this country should be split up. But people could just chill out and say yeah, this is a country where we speak a bunch of different languages, and that's OK...
I think the idea of having a moral obligation to invade and stop countries committing atrocities is a fairly reasonable take, with the obvious caveat that it's really hard for a modern state to actually seize enough control to change the status quo. (Also, that it's hard to distinguish this motivation from imperialism on the inside - the "White Man's Burden" is a good example of this) Generally, I'm not a fan of self-determination as a value on its own. Countries which have no merits other than "self-determination" - that is to say, they perpetuate a terrible status quo - have no right to exist, assuming that there is something better which could take their place. I would not lose sleep if the government of North Korea was snapped out of existence and replaced with something better, and if somebody could do this without any other consequence, I would consider it their ethical obligation.
The obvious argument for Ukrainian independence from Russia in this framework is that Ukrainian democracy is simply more functional and healthy than Russia's is. Given that Ukraine ended up with a Zelenskyy and Russia ended up with a Putin, I think this is self-evident. Arguments to the opposite effect might point to Ukraine's weaker GDP per capita, but I'm unconvinced. Cultural or ethnic homogeneity in a region might be a factor, but only in the sense that the nation which rests on top of those demographics might not treat minority groups well. A state must by organized in the interests of the greater good. How we get there is what's up for debate.
The US doesn't really follow principles on the questions, but does have a status-quo bias when it comes to borders.
Ukraine with Crimea came out of the dissolution of the USSR, along with other new countries. The US position is that once those borders were set, other powers don't get to unilaterally change that or redraw borders, even if the current borders don't make much sense.
The US is really blinded by this. Other examples - Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and many others - countries that don't make geographical or cultural sense whose borders were created thanks to short-sighted imperial border-drawing, primarily by the British (hello Gertrude Bell and Sir Henry Mortimer Durand).
In some of these countries we've sought - in vain - to inculcate a cohesive national identity and governments that are representative of population. Afghanistan was intentionally created as a buffer state between the British and Russian empires and no one at the time gave a care about long-term stability or geographical or ethnic coherence. But the US is ignorant to all of that, too blinded by the status-quo bias regarding borders, than we can't even imagine alternatives. And so we spent 20 years trying to turn an incoherent landlocked buffer state into an actual nation and predictably failed.
One exception might be South Sudan, where we husbanded the creation of this new state justifying it on the basis of a popular independence movement. Unfortunately, and predictably, once South Sudan came into existence it immediately descended into a bloody civil war in which around a half million people died. South Sudan will likely never be a stable nation, yet now that we've set the borders, none of that matters and we consider them inviolable to change by outside powers.
But civil wars do bring up an exception - see the Former Yugoslavia. It's not really clear to me why the violent creation of new states and borders was both acceptable and encouraged there, while vigorously opposed elsewhere.
I think these fights are usually about what faction gets power over group decision making. Statehood/cultural heritage/etc is mostly cover.
If group A (ethnic, cultural, ideological, economic specialization, Really Into Knitting, whatever) are a minority in a large region, but a majority in a narrower region, then the more autonomy that small region has, the more power they will have over decision making, and the more incentive there is to separate from the larger entity. Groups that are minorities in the smaller region but majorities (or pluralities, or just larger minorities) in the larger region are motivated to unify with that region.
I'd argue this covers everything from US independence from Britain to Russia/Ukraine to the UK leaving the EU (but Scotland and Londoners not wanting to).
Ethnicity/historicity arguments are no more or less ethically relevant than economic ones.
In your terminology, I think the interesting question is something like "what criteria should I/we/people use to decide whether to recognize/support some entity's sovereignty?"
I mean, sure, but then those criteria can nicely be inside-view for each individual country. Outside-view, you just get the sovereign of a nation, or their ambassador or head of state or whoever, to sign a treaty recognizing you and bam - one degree more nationy.
I care way more about those treaties being the useful, objective facts that indicate nationhood, rather than fret over what criteria were used to get there by each respective participant.
I acknowledge this has a bootstrapping problem - who acknowledges the first nation(s)? Fortunately, finding myself in an operating panoply of nations, I feel comfortable to ignore that wrinkle.
With the UN now, haven't we imposed an artificial binary here?
I think this also fails to cut reality at the joints and becomes tautological. How much a nation you can convince other people you are has no clear correspondences to anything more substantial. Not to mention that in this schema there is no way to become a nation without other nations also existing first.
I don’t see what you mean about an artificial binary?
Pretty sure reality doesn’t natively contain the concept “nation.” They are, as the hipster kiddies say, “socially constructed.”
I acknowledge the bootstrapping problem in another reply, but sure, how about this - the recursive base case for nationing oneself as the first nation is to rebrand whatever amalgam of people you are currently leading as now being one.
I see a lot of wankery in this thread about seeking some sort of holy grail of a universal, rational schemata for discriminating nationhood. Good luck with that. Ultimately, people decide things are nations because “reasons”, not rationality.
This, imo, is a great example of the nebulosity that David Chapman talks about, and that gets me all eye-rolly about rationalist methodology as a practical toolkit. It just doesn’t work on these kinds of definitions.
By artificial binary I just mean that you can sort of say that all UN member states are nations and all non UN member states are not nations. In the past there may have been 50% nations, but now if you aren't in the UN it's hard to get anyone to call you a real nation most of the time.
But yeah, it would be bad enough if the problem was just that we aren't slicing reality at the joints, but the reasons that you have one thing considered a nation and one not aren't actually consistent in the real world. Any attempt to set up a rational argument for this stuff is basically a parlor game because in real life it's a matter of convention rather than meaningful differences between near cases.
I feel now like we’re saying the same thing, but I’m calling it a feature that you can use UN-approval as your proxy measure and bypass the noise, and it seems you’re still saying that’s a bug?
Put another way, I think the answer to Scott’s question of “who gets self-determination?” is “whoever can convince the group of peers they wish to be a fellow sovereign among that they’re worth having.”
Well, a lot of Texans believe they're a different nation, and they've managed to convince a non-trivial number of other Americans that they're also a different nation, so I think your 2022 number is way off.
What's it missing? A group of heavily armed people going around to everyone on your block and saying "recognize this group as a nation or we'll kill you".
... is that ISIS? Sounds like ISIS to me. How’d that work out for them on achieving actual nationhood?
I mean, sure, any armed group of thugs or a deranged and power mad individual can claim whatever the hell they want and even use force to try to get it, but that in no way implies they deserve it, right?
Are you suggesting this armed group *does* deserve self-determination and ultimately nationhood?
I was actually referring to a combination of the Russian Army (where "this group" is "Ukrainians" and "a nation" is "part of Russia"), and the CHAZ/CHOP zone in Seattle during the BLM protests. ISIS works too. So does the government of, say, France, going back 1000+ years.
Basically, "convincing people" can be done a lot of different ways, and not all of them are good.
We are *totally* talking past one another. I can try, but I'm not sure it's going to work.
The original (rhetorical?) question Scott put forth is "Who gets self-determination?" In the context of the post, he's more specifically asking about what qualifies a <some amalgamation of people> to be considered a nation.
Several paragraphs of various theories later, he says:
"I find all of this unsatisfying. It’s like we’re debating whether a certain region has enough history and culture to “deserve” independence. But any such debate is inherently subjective. Does Texas qualify? Kurdistan? Scotland? Palestine? How should we know?"
and, in the comments:
"What if they fight and lose?
If Ukrainians and Texans are exactly as willing to fight for independence as one another, but Ukraine wins and Texas loses because America is militarily stronger than Russia, does Texas deserve to be independent, or not? Does Ukraine?"
My attempt to answer the question is an inductive one. A nation becomes a nation primarily by being recognized by all other nations, or, in the absence of other nations, by declaring itself the first and lasting long enough to recognize and be recognized by others.
This definition totally works for, say, San Marino, Lichtenstein, Tuvalu, or, I dunno, Canada. None of whom have, to my knowledge, needed armed groups of thugs stalking about and threatening anyone. But perhaps I dunno how it is, for real, on the streets in Ottawa.
With CHAZ/CHOP, BLM, ISIS, and your hypothesized group of heavily armed people... well, you're talking about the behavior of *people* threatening other *people* with violence. Which, as far as I can tell, has no bearing on the question being asked. It's as flippant as Scott's question as to why his own street can't claim sovereignty. Being willing to get violent doesn't earn you nation status on its own.
Is that even the point you're trying to make, though? You just seem to be saying that my definition lacks references to violence, and that various groups of people have been violence fans. And, like,... yeah. Sure have.
I am totally lost on the references to the Russian Army, Ukrainians, or France. I am deeply interested in the 1000+ years of French government skulduggery I'm apparently totally oblivious to. Care to fill me in?
I think the question of historical investment has some relevance here. If Texas wants to secede, fine, but the USA has invested heavily in it over the years...what's the divorce bill? Similar issue with US independence regarding taxation and Britain's capital and military investments.
From the outside, this was one of the most interesting parts of the Brexit negotiations.
Of course, given that the ethics of multi-generational collective debt/guilt/obligation are difficult in general, I don't think this *simplifies* the discussion.
Yeah, I wanted to raise the question of divorce bills too (and perhaps of dowry, if you're wanting to rejoin). I'm a dual citizen, and in order to secede from Russia (i.e. give up my citizenship), I have to demonstrate that I do not owe anything to the Russian state. This is a feature of actual divorces, too. This is (at least in theory) easy for an individual, as there are well-documented obligations (determined entirely by the state, I don't get a negotiating position); it's going to be rather less easy for larger seceding entities.
On the other hand, if we continue with the marital analogy, then US civil war becomes "abusive spouse beats other spouse to forcibly prevent a divorce" and Ukraine invasion becomes "abusive stalker beats victim for not wanting to marry them". They're both behaviors we don't condone in individuals, but I would argue the latter is worse -- and I can imagine (though don't subscribe to) a system of morals where a last-resort intramarital beating is actually defensible on the grounds that, while bad, it's less bad than dissolving a marriage. (This requires marriage to be a bigger deal than I personally think it is.)
I think another way to phrase all this is "there are significant transaction costs to redrawing borders; right now, for most of the world, the last-resort mechanism to impose them is wars; it would be nice to have a less bloody pre-agreed-upon system in place (cf. the EU and Brexit), but for most of the world we don't have one, so wars it is."
I'm thinking of divorce bill less in terms of alimony and more in terms of splitting assets. The federal government currently owns a great deal of real estate in TX: what happens to it? What about the extensive military assets, particularly national guard hardware that has a complicated state/federal relationship? Lots of US companies not based in Texas have offices there -- how will that work, particularly for tax purposes?
Every financial, legal, and physical interconnect is something that requires resolution and agreement.
We have lots of existing divorce law to adjudicate these types of issues. For better or worse, the US has no comparable mechanics for state divorce.
I would be rather amused if Zelensky were to say “I agree with Mr. Putin that the citizens of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are one People, and by rights should be one Nation - with her capital in Kyiv, her mother city”
Kudos to Anatoly Karlin for making his argument with the earnestness it deserves :)))
Part of the problem with "the Crimeans want to be in Russia" is that the Soviets systematically deported the Crimean Tatars from their land and resettled it with Russians (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars ). In 2014, something similar happened, albeit in a less brutal way: Crimeans who didn't want to live in Russia (or, worse, a Russian-controlled enclave with plausible deniability and therefore zero accountability) voted with their feet. Siberians replaced them ( https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-accused-of-reshaping-annexed-crimea-demographics-ukraine/29262130.html ). While it may be argued that the newcomers of the 1950s are grandfathered in, the ones from 2015 can hardly claim to own the land. Why should squatters decide who owns the land?
Can't say I'm very keen on comparing anything with the Civil War -- maybe that's the European in me resisting Americanization. With the Fugitive Slave Act, the secession wasn't a very clear-cut case of the South "going their own way"; but more importantly, how many other 19th century wars are we judging by modern standards? I don't recall any discussions about the justification of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War or even the 1905 Russo-Japanese one. Is it that hard to view the Civil War as a piece of history as opposed to a morality tale?
I have thought about these things quite a bit as a (possibly former? I’m not sure anymore) supporter of Quebec independence. Back when it was still an immediate political issue, there was some talks from opponents, mostly Anglophone Canadians (including the minority Anglophone Quebecers), about a possible Partition of Quebec. The Canadian prime minister at the time of the first independence referendum in 1980, Trudeau Sr., said that “If Canada is divisible, Quebec must also be divisible.” The lands populated by anglophones or indigenous people (e.g. in the north, where they speak English more than French) would possibly remain in Canada after Quebec became independent, if that’s what they wanted.
There’s a detailed Wikipedia article about this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_Quebec. The arguments against partition seem to be that Quebec is indivisible under international law, that it would be impractical, that municipalities are created by the Quebec government so they wouldn’t have the right to secede, and that it would involve an asymmetry in the potential results (if the regions that vote against independence get to stay in Canada if “leave” wins, why wouldn’t the regions that vote yes get to leave if the overall result is “remain”?).
Overall they seem to boil down to some sort of collective agreeing that Quebec exists in some current state, e.g. its borders are what they are, and negotiations will become way too complicated if we relax these assumptions. (The partition of Canada itself would be acceptable in principle because Quebec is a federated entity; it’s easy to imagine what its secession would look like.)
I agree that partition would be a bad idea for reasons of impracticality and complexity, but the vehement opposition to it from everyone in Quebec has always seemed a bit exaggerated. If an English-speaking suburb of Montreal wants to secede, you can’t arbitrarily decide that they can’t. They should have the right to organize a referendum if they so wish, although we should note that it has to be distinct from a general Quebec independence referendum, since voting against Quebec secession on the latter doesn’t mean you think your suburb should become an isolated Canadian island within an independent Quebec.
Yet as far as I know, almost no one has ever expressed that reasonable (at least to me) take. I think this indicates that people have an incentive to stick to existing consensus as much as possible. Quebec independentists (or actually everyone who cares about Quebec) should never open the door even slightly to partition; doing so would open a can of worms and make future negotiation harder.
Similarly, Ukrainians and supporters of Ukraine should never accept even considering giving up Crimea or Donbas, even if everyone secretly agrees that it’s fine if these regions actually want to leave. At least, they should never consider that in public until they suddenly agree about it during a closed door round of negotiations where they get something else in exchange, like the end of the war.
As a (still current) supporter of Quebec independence, my answer is that all of this would be negotiated in the aftermath of a Yes vote. I don't think secession of parts of Quebec from Quebec is any more or any less philosophically valid than secession of Quebec from Canada, it's all a question of what would be a feasible solution. The reason why supporters of Quebec independence don't open the door to a possible partition is the same reason why other Canadians don't allow for the possibility that Quebec independence might be a valid option: states don't want to suggest that they might be split.
But my current fear isn't really that Quebec will be partitioned after separating from Canada, it's that even if Quebec doesn't separate from Canada, Montreal will in the next few decades essentially become an independent city, still officially part of Quebec but not really subject to Quebec's laws anymore, and public life there will be almost entirely in English despite the city still having a francophone plurality. While the rest of Quebec (where I live) will be by and large forgotten, seen as "deplorable lands" by other Canadians and Montrealers, and not even perceived as really part of Canada anymore, while also not being independent. This, of course, will happen silently, without anyone even really noticing, which is the Canadian way. For this reason, I really hope something will happen to shake up things and force Canada to rethink its (in my mind inherently contradictory) national identity, whether it's a regain in Quebec independence sentiment, Western alienation, the rise of populism, or something else.
Yes, the interesting thing here is that Canada, just like the UK in the case of Scotland, has de facto accepted that secession of one of its regions is a valid option, while Quebec (and presumably Scotland) haven't. Why not? Part of the answer is that a federation seems easier to break up than a unitary state. (But then the US is pretty adamantly against secession of its states, for understandable historical reasons.)
I'm not convinced I totally agree with this. Canada hasn't really accepted that secession of a province is a valid option, so much as had its Supreme Court rule that given some conditions, it might be, in response to the Quebec government pushing this as an option. The Parti québécois's decision that independence would only happen following a winning referendum set the stage for how subsequent independence movements in democratic countries would approach the issue, but not because Canada agreed to it, rather because it presented a *fait accompli*. Keep in mind that during the 1995 referendum campaign, the Canadian federal government blatantly violated Quebec's election financing laws, and afterwards said it might not accept a 50% + 1 vote in favour of independence as a valid mandate, while also not saying what would constitute a valid mandate. States, as a general rule, reject being split up. And I perfectly understand that international law has a status quo bias.
I would say that Canada hasn't even really accepted the reality that it is a multinational state. It's still trying to figure out what it is: a nation-state (which it clearly isn't), or the first post-national state (which it isn't, really), or something else? But it's clear that the simple existence of a Quebec nation isn't really accepted by Canada. Russian nationalists reject the existence of the Ukrainian nation by claiming that Ukrainians are part of the Russian nation and that Ukrainian is merely a divergent dialect of Russian, and they're not even really wrong. The reason why, for example, we consider the different German dialects to be merely dialects of German, while Dutch is a separate language, is simple historical contingency due to the rise of German and Dutch nationalism in the 19th century. It could very well have happened that Ukrainians and Belarusians never developed a national identity and instead thought of themselves as Russians. It just happened differently, and once again, we need to favour the status quo according to which Ukrainians and Belarusians are nations. In contrast, English-speaking Canadians cannot claim that Quebec French is simply a divergent dialect of Canadian English, because it clearly isn't. But what they do claim is that it's not "real" French, that the French cannot understand it or think it sounds stupid, or that all Quebecers actually speak English and so should in no way be different from the other immigrant groups who make up the Canadian nation and in time gave up their legacy language for English. That is denying the nationhood of a given people to claim it as part of your own nation. Of course, with Canada there is the added complication that it had English-French official bilingualism forced upon it despite not really wanting it, which it also needs to try to harmonise with official multiculturalism (in my opinion, an impossible endeavour).
There's a consensus that if the referendum had passed, Canada would very likely have accepted to negotiate and it would have been an overall peaceful process. This is more than we can say about almost any real or hypothetical secession scenario (e.g. Catalonia), with exceptions like the UK, Singapore, and post-Soviet states after it was clear that the Soviet Union wasn't going to be a thing anymore. Otherwise I pretty much agree with your points.
I hadn't! It's interesting and suggests that the same things play out in many secessionist scenarios. Opponents say "if the country is divisible then so is your region," to which proponents reply that the region isn't using a variety of good and bad arguments.
(As an aside this name is remarkably similar to one of the most typical Quebecois swear words so I thought it meant something completely different at first!)
It's worth noting that the grand problem of people mentioning Catalonia. It's not Catalans vs. rest of Spain. It's a deep division in Catalonia. Is a 50%+1 vote really the same moral standard as many of the 80-90% referendums?
My bone to pick here is that the entire idea of nations are a myth, and treating them as anything deeper risks serious category errors. You can look at France, the prototypical self-actualizing national state, and it's borders are arbitrary-- it took Nice from Piedmont in a backroom deal to allow the latter to become Italy, and it fought to get Alsace-Lorraine, which is not distinctly French or German. Mike Duncan's excellent Revolutions podcast is right now talking about the Russian Revolution, and he's in the phase of the post-WW1 period where Wilson and Lloyd-George are drawing out nations on maps and the people of Eastern Europe are drawing their national boundaries in blood and corpses. Why does Poland have a nation after WW1 and Ukraine doesn't? Because the Red Army beat the Ukrainian armies but lost to the Poles. Heck, a lot of interwar Baltic nations, some with little precedence as distinct historical units, owe their existence to the Poles beating the Red Army. There has never been any national that has made itself exist except by a willingness to take up arms. When we look at a map of a region and try to lay out the peoples and nations within, we are often just legitimizing a state of affairs that rather than being organic is downstream of thousands of years of violence and resistance.
The Kenyan Ambassador to the U.N., Martin Kimani, said in his speech on the crisis in Ukraine:
"Today, across the border of every single African country, live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural, and linguistic bonds. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial, or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later... We believe that all states formed from empires that have collapsed or retreated have many peoples in them yearning for integration with peoples in neighboring states. This is normal and understandable. After all, who does not want to be joined to their brethren and to make common purpose with them? However, Kenya rejects such a yearning from being pursued by force. We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression. We rejected irredentism and expansionism on any basis, including racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural factors."
This speech already admits that this is an unromantic compromise: let the old colonial maps of Africa become the unchangeable national borders, solely because to do otherwise would risk incredible violence. But in most cases the sort of autonomy that national communities want is often achievable without succession, and even stridently nationalist states like Britain and Spain which once repressed their linguistic minorities now give them a greater measure of local autonomy than would've been conceivable under the political order of a hundred years ago. If nothing else, advocating for peaceful transfers of political power to localities is far less risky for activists than a revolution which dramatically increases the odds that the state one is defying will turn to ethnic cleansing.
Overall, I think it's a mistake to posit that a solidified Ukrainian national identity is necessary for a defense of the Ukrainian state. Many Ukrainians in the areas invaded and occupied by Russia are Russian-speaking, voted for pro-Russian candidates in elections (remember that Zelenskyy was always the pro-Russian candidate in relative terms), and may not have identified with Ukraine as a nation much at all-- until they were invaded, which no one particularly likes. One very likely mistake we will instantiate going forward is to assume that the nationalist sentiment that has arisen now is the unveiling of something long dormant. In fact, likely as not, Putin has provoked a Ukrainian nationalism previously lacking in many regions of the country-- as has been said, a nation is a group that is willing to defend themselves, and so those who want to defend against an invasion render themselves as nationalists.
From the perspective of the international community, the only and entire problem is that wars of conquest are bad and destabilizing-- we never needed to assume a Kuwaiti national identity to turn back Saddam's invasion of the country.
But to close, this stuff is all fake, it's all post hoc constructions to rationalize arbitrary and spontaneous order, and the best we can do is keep in place whatever rules minimize state violence as we look for ways to defuse national tensions which won't appear on a map.
I don't see how this follows. Nations were something we conceived of rather recently, but family is much less abstract, has more concrete borders, and is based at least in part on biological fact. Most human societies never had the concept of the nation, but hardly any have been bereft of the concept of family.
There was a Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth for a long time until it was partitioned by Russia, Prussia & the Habsburgs. This is related to why the Poles were able to form an army that beat the Red Army (they were less successful in helping Napoleon take on Russia) and why they had a distinct language & religion from most inhabitants of the Russian Empire.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was by definition not a national state (maybe binational at best), and people like Pilsudski who admired that model sought a less exclusive idea of the Polish nation to start with.
But I think the better example here is probably Estonia, which never had a national state to look back to but had a nationalist movement regardless and created a state in the wake of WW1 because Poland had headed off the Red Army.
I think one can resolve the Confederacy problem by going back to moral reasoning on the level people and emphasizing exit rights. Which is to say a big enough nation has the right to secede conditional on allowing anyone in that nation (including slaves) to leave. Of course for the Confederacy this would defeat the purpose.
You’ve basically made the case against moralism in foreign policy and for sticking to and defending arbitrary norms. Borders are what they are, once settled we treat them as sacrosanct to the greatest extent possible. Despite exceptions like Kosovo and Crime we’ve done a pretty good job with that since 1945. There’s no other rule that doesn’t lead to permanent bloodshed.
Yeah I don't see how it isn't obvious. God has so far blessed a lot of the liberal international order. Like there's Israel's/saudi/oppression of other nations and internal oppression like in Syria and China but overall I'd say we're fortunate
I propose that the Confederacy doesn’t get to secede because actually there were rather a lot of people in the Confederacy who presumably did not want to secede.
I suppose this doesn’t really resolve the more general question though.
Two things that seem important to consider when deciding whether to support some state-type-entity's secession or continued existence are something like the (possibly predicted) democracy/freedom indices of the entities being considered*, and whether these entities would become tax havens for rich people who use their money in ways that are not sufficiently good for other people. For instance, all else equal, conditional in particular on it being done bloodlessly and conditional on no one ever finding out that a norm was eroded, I'd support Russia annexing North Korea. And for instance, it might be bad to allow not-sufficiently-(efficiently-)philanthropic billionaires to secede. In fact, it seems quite possible that these two are the criteria I'd use if I was given 3 minutes to decide whether I will support a particular instance of desired secession.
*Of course, when a group likely to end up with an authoritarian regime wishes to secede from a democratic state, then this includes consideration of the possibly liberalizing effect of that group's secession on the politics of the state it seceded from.
I feel the whole assumption there is some list of features that grant a group of people the right to self-determination is kind of a category mistake. Sometimes it will make the world better to let a group of people form a seperate country sometimes it won't. The difference between Ukraine and the confederacy is as simple as: the world was better off not letting the confederacy self-determine and worse if Russia stops Ukraine from doing so. It even plausibly depends on who the occupier is and how they treat them (if the Basque region was in China not Spain no question it would be better to allow self-determination...as of now unclear to me as it imposes costs on both sides).
It's like asking who is truly (has the right to be) the parent (ie has custody) of this child. I mean we've picked a legal answer but imagine trying to insist that there is a true morally correct parent of any child if we had yet to formulate custody laws. Sure, in most cases the rules we've adopted into law track certain traditional factors (the biological parents) that any decent custody system but in the other cases (eg, adoption, divorce, orphans abused children) we choose our laws based on overall pragmatic considerations.
I mean imagine goi g to a country whose laws and traditions favor giving aunt's and uncle's priority when a child is orphaned and insist "no no, the *true* parent of that child is his grandmother.". Some ppl really do have such feelings about their traditions but (assuming you don't believe the religious justifications) it seems like they are just confused. You can argue that one system for assigning custody is is better system than the other but the idea that there is some kind of simply morally correct rule is crazy.
I mean, if you were in a small community marooned on a far away planet and the question came up who gets to be the parent of some orphaned child you'd just pick whoever would be the best for the child not look to some kind of universal right to parent status that certain ppl have vis-a-vis their genetic or social ties.
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And yes, this can make it quite hard to coordinate norms around these areas. I mean, it would be great if we could work in a preference against dictatorial states into the UN's notion of a people but that will never get sufficient agreement.
But, in the long run, I think it won't matter because we'll all converge on a level of freedom and wealth sufficient to make the question much less important.
Glad to see this — I found it offputting how many people pro-Ukraine pieces accepted the "are they or are they not a people" framing. My own moral intuitions seem more extreme, though, and even less actionable.
Ukraine, Russia, your street, Crimea, the South, Texas — none of them can "want" things. A person can want things. Lots of people, or even a majority of people in some group, can all want similar things. But to say "A People" wants things is a type error. It's just an apparently-useful fiction to say they do.
(I'm sure lots of people agree partially or entirely with that, and in particular you didn't mean phrasings like "Crimea probably did want to join Russia" literally. I still think it's worth pointing out that it's a type error, especially since that framing is so common.)
I'm not an anarchist, because there's a tradeoff between individualism and other values. But I sure would be more ethically satisfied with having governments if the "social contract" was an actual thing you could opt out of — or as you put it, government is "one those rights violation which utilitarians occasionally allow for the greater good."
I think this viewpoint means I don't have the "Confederacy" problem, because at a fundamental ethical level, my viewpoint doesn't involve weighing the preferences and rights of conflicting groups, but of conflicting individuals (which in that case was a one-sided conflict). The utilitarian rights violation isn't not letting The South secede; the utilitarian rights violation is freed slaves (and everyone else) still living beneath a government.
Not very actionable, I know. But it's why I'm a fan of liberalism, open borders, limited government, houses that can easily be moved from place to place, laboratories of democracy, etc. So eg on the original question, (1) Crimea being a part of Russia is probably less bad than being part of Ukraine, but (2) there should be open borders between Ukraine and Russia so actual individuals can choose to live where they want to, and most importantly (3) which government you live under should matter much less.
In the open source clone of Civilization called freeciv, there are 2 sets of nations - "Core" & "Extended". Both include Russia. Ukrainian is only in "Extended", along with Breton, Catalan, Kievan Rus', Kurdish, Kosovar, Palestinian, Pictish, Pashtun. And Antarctican, Californian, Knights Templar...
I think the US case is easiest, because we have a specific definition of "nationhood". To me, US Citizenship means the Constiturion -- remember, US Presidents (and Congress, IIRC) swear an oath to "...protect and defend the CONSTITUTION of the United States...". Not the People, or the Territory, or any Tribe or Group.
Swearing allegience to a document that is a pretty good template for internal co-operation, conflict resolution, and contract enforcement, is a much more robust and logical (and portable) way to define "nation-state". Would that politicians nowadays remember that....
> "But if you believe this, shouldn’t Russia get Crimea?"
Mu.
Call me an edgy cynical realpolitik fan, but self-determination is purely and solely a question of violence and threatening it. There isn't a moral right to it, and nobody deserves or doesn't deserve it - it's just that either your small nation-leviathan is going to get eaten by larger leviathans with sharper teeth and longer claws(or bitten its body parts off), or it will manage to repel them. The whole of "international law" on this is totally arbitrary consensus of whom some group of those nation-leviathans admit to their pack, within which they don't eat each other.
One one level this is necessarily true, but on another it's kind of a useless tautology right?
Apparently the leviathans and/or their cells entertain some polite fictional code known as 'morality', and get together and argue about which other smaller leviathans should or shouldn't eaten. So, what's for dinner?
I would say that for a place to be permitted to secede, it should be reasonably contiguous, and reasonably large. I would *also* say that in pretty much no real-life situation where secession is in question is this uncertain enough that it matters. You can argue hypotheticals about if a 100 person street wants to secede, but in *practice*, it won't. Nobody talking about either Ukraine, or the Confederacy, or Crimea, or the 13 colonies, seriously invokes size or contiguousness in denying the right to secede.
And I'd make a blanket rule against secessions in occupied territories like Crimea because it's really hard to prove that the place is freely seceding without the influence of the foreign troops (and, if the press is not free, the foreign propaganda). It's too easy to say "well, we have no absolute proof that the polls in Crimea were influenced by the Russians, and there's a large Russian population so it's not implausible they'd choose to secede, so let's be charitable to them and assume that the polls are accurate". That standard isn't strict enough and no occupied territory could meet one that is, unless you have a psychic conclusively reading the minds of everyone in the territory.
You could of course ask "how long before an occupation counts as replacing the natives--aren't the Union and Confederacy both just occupiers?" This does come up sometimes, and we may need criteria like "how continuous is the claim" and "did the original occupation happen in modern times after we've established international rules about occupying countries" and "did the occupation happen after a defensive war", but there are a lot of cases where it's not an issue either.
And yes, for the Confederacy, I'd say "they have a right to secede, but the Union has a right to invade to end slavery". I would not impose an *obligation* to invade to end slavery as you seem to think this idea requires.
And you don't get to invade the seceding country unless it would be moral to shoot someone in self-defense for a smaller scale version of it. So you could invade to stop slavery, or large scale kidnapping, or rape, but you couldn't invade a state that secedes because they want to outlaw abortion or raise taxes.
Or maybe "historical rights" are a bad category in a world with highly overlapping historical claims. Saudi Arabia has just as much claim to Israel as Italy and Turkey do, but we don't take any of their claims very seriously. Certainly less seriously than either the Jewish or local Arab claims.
I think marriage is a better guide than property. You don't *have* a nation, you're *part of* a nation. A nation is decided by its people, or at least in a direct sense its leaders, so changes to that nation should be too. Neither the French nor the Americans objected to the sale of Louisiana. Neither the Russians nor the Americans objected to the sale of Alaska. Israel giving up the Sinai and later Gaza and parts of the West Bank had very mixed popularity within Israel, but the majority approved. East and West Germany merged back into a single unified Germany. In all cases, the leaders found a mutually agreeable position. It's possible!
It follows from that starting point that invasion is obviously wrong because it's supported by at most the majority of one country, not both. Secession is also wrong, it would follow, because it's a minority opinion within one country.
The Middle East and Eastern Europe represent an interesting case study, in that their modern forms come in the wake of the fall of an empire. Eastern Europe was formed from the fall of the Soviet empire, and the Middle East from the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Both occasions were used as opportunities to restore previously-disenfranchised local groups. In Eastern Europe we got various post-Soviet nation like Ukraine, Poland, and East Germany. In the Middle East we got various post-Ottoman nations like the Arab states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and the Jewish state of Israel. And this makes sense under the "mutual consent" framework, because when one of the parties just vanishes from the equation then you can focus exclusively on the party that had been smaller and less well served in the past.
The most obvious limitation of this approach is that it forecasts that opportunities to restore a people can be few and far between. It tells Native Americans in North America and the Irish in Britain and the balkanized Kurds that even if they want independence, and have a historical case, they have to wait around until the larger nation they're now part of falls, and hope it doesn't drag them down with them. If you swallow another country and just wait, eventually you sort of do have a claim, and would-be conquerors will always believe that audacity and time will favor them.
One further case would be bribing the leaders of another country to let you in, like some people have suggested happened in Crimea. Under this framework that's almost more of a domestic crime aided and abetted by the invader, not an overt international crime. I'm not sure how I feel about this: in some narrow sense it feels technically correct, but in a moral sense it feels like blaming the victim?
Poland, like most of Central Europe, was never a Soviet republic but a satellite state. Same with East Germany.
This may seem like nitpicking but the amount of influence and control USSR had within its satellites and within its actual territory was wildly different, and the post-collapse outcomes are much better for satellites.
The funniest one you forgot to ask is 'what about the Donbass?'
My view of this is that everything *currently* country-sized are a people, and separation of a smaller people from a bigger people requires the smaller people to win in some way. The bigger people can accede, or the smaller people can win a war, or the bigger people could get smacked by external factors that leave the smaller people in de facto independence for long enough. The latter happened twice, and I call that settled, in a way that the Donbass's ongoing independence struggle has not been. (Speaking of national utility, what use is it to subject the Ukrainians to rule that collapses all the time?)
This has almost no bearing on whether anyone can control Russia invading, or whether it's right from the Russian perspective to invade, except to clarify that it *is* an invasion. That Ukraine definitely won for about thirty years means that Russia is not continuing something or undoing something but *starting* something. All the propaganda is treating it like reconnecting with an estranged child; they do not seem to admit to themselves that they are taking a people who are currently nationally self-determining and taking it away from them. If they were to say 'yes, we're invading and conquering and all those other semantically-more-authoritarian things', there wouldn't be anything anyone can do about it, but I suspect it'd suddenly get a lot less popular support.
The self-determination threshold is like the divorce threshold. When should you be separate? When the costs for being together are unfixably high.
And just like in divorce cases, the propagandists for each side can always point at cherry-picked reasons for why they should get the kids...
Secession is super costly, but sometimes union is genuinely worse. It's something you settle by particular facts in the case.
One more commonality with divorce: you can be a bad person/country and still much better than the other; you can be a good person/country and still be in the wrong.
Again, secession is always a loss on certain axes; it's just that sometimes continued union is a worse loss on other axes. No general theory will be adequate, because the better choice depends ineluctably on the particular facts.
Personally, I think the answer to your question of “why not the confederacy?” is that governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and obviously there is no consent in slavery.
Rather than a “moral duty to conquer any country doing sufficiently bad things”, I would propose that any country which enslaves without due process an entire group has no legitimacy, and thus opens the door for morally justified successions (e.g. West Virginia), liberations (e.g. the Union Army), or revolutions (e.g. slave uprisings). In the anarchy between states, such non-consent of the governed is the equivalent of taking your statehood out and putting it on the curb next to the used couch with a sign that says “free”. Nobody is obligated to take it, but sooner or later someone will (whether from within or without).
Scott writes "The position that most tempts me is “The Confederacy had every right to secede..." - wow, before long you might end up writing about why the War of Northern Aggression shouldn't have happened and slavery could have been effectively ended by a nationwide negotiated buyout/manumission, at 1/10th price of the war!
Beware, this road leads to being a libertarian and being condemned by all right-thinking people.
Even if the North could have purchased all the slaves without drastically increasing the price (an inevitable consequence of reducing supply in the market), this wouldn’t have outlawed slavery, right? Wouldn’t southerners have just sold their existing slaves and purchased new ones, thus recreating the exact same situation?
Well, many of them might be willing to individually relinquish the right to own slaves, for an additional monetary consideration. Business owners in the North might decide to privately enact policies of discrimination against those who would refuse to sell their right to enslave. All kinds of non-violent ways of pressuring slave-owners could have been used, in order to eliminate the economic benefit to owning slaves. Also, the price of slaves does not necessarily go up when supply is reduced - there is a ceiling to the price that is determined by the net amount of resources a slave-owner could extract from the slave over his lifetime, and given the inefficiency of slavery it is not a large sum, compared to e.g. lifetime earnings of a free man.
I feel like you just motte and bailey’d pretty hard here, starting out with “slavery could have been effectively ended” and retreating to “many of them might be willing to individually relinquish the right to own slaves.” The second is an ok argument to make, but ‘we can persuade some’ is pretty far from ‘we can end slavery this way’.
Personally, I doubt the South would have ever given up slavery at any price capable of being paid. People at the time we’re making this argument: see the 1857 book “The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It”. This book basically appealed to southern whites’ self interest and said that rural slavery was preventing the south from becoming industrialized and adopting modern farming techniques, and thus slavery was not only bad for blacks but also bad for whites. However, southern elites’ (the slave owning class) hostility to the book was extreme.
Definitely not motte and bailey! Yes, ending slavery can start with incremental changes, individual by individual, until the small steps add up to a major transition. Compare e.g. ending marijuana laws which happened by gradually changing societal attitudes about it, until such attitudes started transforming the laws. Ending slavery could have been achieved in the same way. Imagine that textile manufacturers in the North started an "Ethical Cotton" campaign, offering Northerners an option to virtue-signal their opposition to slavery by buying only cloth produced by sharecroppers. Cotton plantation owners would then have a choice of using manumitted slaves and being able to command higher prices for their products, or continuing to use slaves and face the economic consequences. Step by step, plantation by plantation, a change would occur. Contrary to what you implied, every slaver has his price.
The problem with that is that slavery is morally outrageous.
And some people would want to keep slaves just because they can mistreat them (see various sadists, rapists etc). Or extort people for enormous amount of money before they agree to freeing them.
But maybe breaking slavery as important part of economy was viable? And then outlawing it? But given that they fought civil war to keep slavery, it seems dubious.
The majority of the Southern population didn't fight the war to keep slavery, they fought for their own freedom. They were invaded by a technologically superior, richer adversary and they resisted for their own sake, not to protect the slave-owning minority.
Sadists are a very small voting bloc. Not enough to stop majorities from passing laws against slavery. Keeping slavery legal in a democracy is only possible if at least a substantial minority of voters have a vested interest in keeping it legal and this means that removing the economic benefit from slavery eventually causes it to wither away, just like it did everywhere else in the world (except in parts of Africa and India, where it still exists).
Yeah, like…I suppose that *could* have happened. But it’s exactly that…a big maybe. What if slavers didn’t make that choice?
Slavery existed in the Americas well prior to the existence of the United States. And there was a huge movement in the decades leading up to the civil war attempting to persuade people to change their mind about slavery and convince them that it was bad, actually. It seems like if a non-violent solution was possible, it would have taken root. The fact that it didn’t suggests to me that perhaps Southern elites weren’t interested, especially since they would have suddenly had to compete with independent yeoman farmers and northern industry without the benefit of slave labor.
War is bad. It behooves the do-gooder to thoroughly explore the maybes before starting a war to do good.
OTOH, war can a be a good way of gaining more power for demagogues. Lincoln couldn't have expanded presidential powers without a war as an excuse. So, he made the war unavoidable.
Russian serfdom was abolished by paying out compensation to all the nobles. (Some of the money used were the money gained from sale of Alaska.) Of course, the tsar was in a position to do this by fiat, whereas the US would need to find a political agreement in the Congress.
It worked, sort of. The societal gaps between classes didn't disappear, but the nation started modernizing slowly.
"I can disagree with Russia’s decision to force the matter with an invasion, and I can excuse Ukraine for not worrying about it too much. But overall I think I’m stuck consistently applying the principle 'please let regions leave your country if you want'."
Regions don't want things. People want things. People in Crimea who wanted to leave Ukraine were already allowed to do so, no foreign invasion or separatist movement needed. If anything, the rights of actually-existing people -- as opposed to "regions" -- to exit would probably be more likely to get curtailed under Russian rule than Ukrainian.
My answer to your more general question is similar. A people or nation cannot have inalienable rights; only an individual person can have that. A nation-state is best thought of not as an entity with rights, but rather a sort of unofficial trade agreement: a government agrees to uphold justice and protect individuals within its territory, and in turn said individuals agree to obey the government and not make trouble for it. When an existing government refuses to offer justice and protection for particular groups among its inhabitants, then the contract may be considered void, giving members of those groups the moral right to deny their contractual duties by attempting secession if they wish. This justifies independence movements for Kurds living under Saddam Hussein and Kosovars under Milosevic, among others. But in the absence of such failures on the part of the government, attempts at secession are just unprovoked trouble-making, and hence illegitimate. So movements for Crimea to secede from Ukraine weren't legitimate, nor are Quebecois secession attempts here in Canada. The Confederate secession attempt's entire purpose was to *prevent* the government from upholding justice for certain inhabitants, so it was extra illegitimate.
Palestinians have a right to their nation, *next to* (not *instead of*) Israel; having a nation instead of Israel would violate Israelis' right to their nation. Israel runs the WB as a military dictatorship which presents all sorts of problems (especially with the settlements), but Palestinian terrorism precedes the occupation of the West Bank, and Palestinian terrorists (perhaps with some exceptions, maybe Marwan Barghouti) generally want to create a Palestinian state *instead of Israel*, not *next to Israel*. The motive of the terrorism is not to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but it's an irredentist project to remove the state of Israel. Israel simply withdrawing from the West Bank would lead to a Hamas takeover (the PLO being the Palestinian Ghani government, and the Hamas being the Palestinian Taliban), and Hamas wants a Palestine instead of Israel rather than next to Israel. The Clinton Parameters remain the viable solution, but https://thirdnarrative.org/israel-palestine-articles/palestinians-still-reject-clinton-parameters/ Palestinians have not accept them. Perhaps in a few years when Lapid takes up the rotation there can be some negotiations, and maybe something will happen. I hope so.
It's not making the two-state solution untenable. See Shaul Arieli. It's only 100-150K people outside the large settlement blocs, and for those you can offer financial incentives to leave (you can levy a property tax on the settlements, offer compensation to leave, stop buildings). Just stopping the government subsidies to them would make them start to wither away. There's the proposal of also offering Palestinian citizenship for those who stay, although surely they'd all choose to leave. Even the most right-wing Israeli governments haven't done things like build in E1. Settlements are annoying but it's not a dealbreaker, the "right of return" is more of a dealbreaker. See https://thirdnarrative.org/israel-palestine-articles/palestinians-still-reject-clinton-parameters/ - Israel has offered the two state solution.
Expansion of settlements in the West Bank is bad, but it's not as much of a death knell to the two-state solution as you would believe. If the Israeli government cut support for these settlements they would wither away. The current government is building very little in the settlements. Arguably also the relevant metric also is the ratio of the number of isolated settlers to the total Israeli and Palestinian population, which I think is declining nowadays.
I don’t think the deal is actually getting worse; everyone understands the deal still looks like the Clinton Parameters. Israel hasn’t built in E1. Most settlement growth is in blocs close to the line.
The one form of leverage that the Palestinians are really losing as time goes on is their TFR.
If you want to say that people on the Palestinian side won't accept a real two state solution then perhaps not (I haven't done any opinion polling on the West Bank but can take your word for it). But I don't think Israel does either. A lot of people will claim they do, but put so many conditions on it that the Palestinian side isn't a viable state at all, and I think they know that.
An example being trump's proposal, which slices up the West Bank into a thousand small pieces and says that Israel maintains control over Palestinian airspace and even land use policy for areas "close to" the border. Or Netanyahu who has said he supports two states but also that all settlements have to be in Israel which would mandate that sort of slicing up (among other not-state-like conditions); or Bennett who is opposed to a Palestinian state.
Also before 1967 my understanding is that Israel instituted martial law for Arabs living within its borders, and also passed laws confiscating much of their land. In 1956 during the Sinai crisis, my understanding is that Ben-Gurion talked about not only taking over the Sinai (which he only withdrew from under US pressure) but the West Bank, and part of Lebanon. All of which is to say, it wouldn't be shocking for a Palestinian to see Israel as an entity that Palestinians couldn't peacefully coexist with.
Netanyahu definitely did not accept a real two state solution, and Bennett isn't fond on it either. However, Barak (who offered one in 2000), Olmert (who offered one in 2008, though he was a lame duck), and Lapid (a very good guy, head of Israel's classical liberal party, the FM and the head of the biggest party in the government, who becomes PM in a few years) are a different story. Lapid has consistently supported the two-state solution and signaled an openness to peace negotiations when he is PM.
Definitely before 1967 Israel did not accept a two-state solution; the PLO was established before 1967 to remove Israel. Israel had martial law for Israeli Arabs until 1966 and expropriated a bunch of land from Arabs, that's definitely true. I don't think DBG was that much of an irredentist; after the 1967 war he talked about giving most of the West Bank back to Jordan.
I agree it is definitely true that Palestinians would be rational to distrust Israel, and it's rational for them to fear that a future Israeli government might renege on an agreement, and the same is true in the other direction, Israel is rational to distrust the Palestinians and to fear that a future Palestinian government might renege on an agreement. There is plenty of mistrust and bad blood to go around between the two parties, and everyone is far from blameless. The construction of and subsidies for the settlements is definitely a bad move by Israel, it's an obstacle to peace and not to mention a big waste of Israeli taxpayers money. But I do want to say that the Israel-Palestine case is different in an important way, because for example the Turks have never offered the Kurds statehood.
Opinion polling on the WB (and Gaza) is notoriously not that good; polling (from PCPSR) predicted Fatah would win their last election, but Hamas won by >3% (>3.5% in a head-to-head), and the two-state polls have not been better than those Fatah-Hamas polls. Still the opinion polling from WB/Gaza is not particularly encouraging (and neither is the opinion polling from Israel). Such is the Middle East.
A nation (or "a people") is a group of people who can act somewhat coherently as an agent over the long-term.
Regardless of form of government, this will usually require some way of reliably having, over the course of many generations, members that prioritize the group's interests and long-term future over themselves as individuals. (Even in non-democratic countries, leaders are eventually replaced by other leaders, who usually (ostensibly) share at least some broader set of goals. Replacement dictators come from the same population.)
This definition, when applied to the rules of allowing nations to have their own states, enables an international system where it is meaningful for sovereign states to be able to own property and take loans which will be repaid, make agreements and promises which outlast the lives of any individuals involved, and have interests which the state will consistently work towards. Quoting Trump (or his speechwriter, whatever): "[T]here can be no substitute for strong, sovereign, and independent nations — nations that are rooted in their histories and invested in their destinies; [...] and most important of all, nations that are home to patriots, to men and women who are willing to sacrifice for their countries, their fellow citizens, and for all that is best in the human spirit."
Now, a group having their own language or ethnicity or glorious history makes these things more likely. So does a self-reinforcing culture, a bunch of centuries of sunk costs, an unusual set of values, or a dramatic-sounding philosophy. However, the relevant thing here is the "national identity", that ability to act as a coherent long-lived group, however the group comes about it.
A group of 100 people on your street would not have that. Quebec probably would, but Western Quebec would not. I have no idea whether Texas would. (I'd guess not.) Catalonia probably would, but it's hard to tell with contemporary economic issues potentially influencing their votes. (A referendum is not always a valid indicator that a group is actually a nation.) Scotland, Wales, and Kurdistan probably would.
I believe this is, more or less, what is meant by "nations" in the idea of "All nations have the right of self-determination."
This strikes me as rather incomplete. The emphasis on the "ability to act as a coherent long-lived group" completely ignores the "identity"" part of "national identity," and that is the part which has long been central to the definition used by those who assert that "all nations have the right of self--determination." The "identity" part is what has allowed elites to create "identities" among groups (Scotland is the classic example, IIRC, plus of course all sorts of colonial areas) in order to push for the creation of a state (which, of course, serves their interests far more than the interests of the hoi polloi)
1. territorial conquest by force must be strongly disincentivized as it will involve violence, instability, potential descent into chaos and would open a can of worms of similar claims elsewhere,
2. west should punish russia not just because it cares about ukraine but so that future rulers anywhere who seek to conquer territory by force know that it will be super costly,
3. at the same time the bounds of punishment must be clearly defined. In particular, never destroy the state itself (as was done in Iraq). In current situation, regime change in russia should not be considered,
4. it should be perfectly acceptable to democratically fight for regional independence within existing nation states but states should be free to deal with violent insurgent groups
You missed one obvious aspect of the 'right' to "declare yourself to be independent", namely some version of fairness. 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 to various Myanmar would-be independence movements.
This seems to be one of those weathervane causes, where people will spin from loving to hating it depending on the details you insert into the story. Should a leftist go with the self-determination argument, or with the sharing argument? Decisions, decisions.
I agree letting the people on top of the oil have it is weird, but it doesn't seem weirder than the fact that Qatar gets to be incredibly rich because it has oil and doesn't have to share it with eg Afghanistan.
Well it boils down to what we are discussing — how things have happened in the past vs how things should happen going forward.
Should every rich fraction of a country be allowed to secede from their poor neighbors? I honestly don’t know what I think; but if you’re a utilitarian or Singer or suchlike, I think your answer pretty much has to be no, surely?
Re. Slavic language/dialects - my understanding from folks more expert in linguistics than me is that the Slavic languages are a continuum from east to west such that any 2 neighboring dialects are mutually understandable, and the further apart 2 dialects are geographically the less mutually understandable they are. So Croatian and Russian would be the least mutually understandable.
Politics of course plays a role - there's a story that when the president of (then so-called) Macedonia visited the president of Bulgaria, the former insisted on using a translator and the latter insisted he didn't need one.
It works better from West to East than in the Balkans. Differences between Slovene and Croatian are pretty stark. Even Bulgarian and Serbian are fairly distant.
But the continuum was a lot smoother a century ego. Nowadays, the influence of TV, written culture and schooling has created much more obvious jumps at the border. For example, the original dialect around Ostrava was a Silesian one, fairly mutually intelligible with Upper Silesian version of Polish. Nowadays, even though the accent persisted, the vocabulary on both sides of the border is much closer to standard Czech and standard Polish than it used to be in 1922.
Understanding other languages is partially about their inherent differences and partially about exposure. If in the other language, let's say 70% words are pretty similar and 30% are dissimilar, then if you are exposed to the language regularly, you will gradually learn the 30% even if you are not trying to. If you are never exposed to it, then when you hear it for the first time, you understand some words, but you don't understand what most sentences mean. -- Everyone in Ukraine had lots of exposure to Russian language.
I don't entirely trust that graph, given that it puts Serbian as some kind of middle ground between Czech and Polish, which is... certainly a take.
Consider also that Ukrainian language was suppressed for a very long time, and everyone had to learn and use Russian out of necessity. The short-term effects on the language may not be reflected in the graph.
Note that all of this is further complicated by the fact that the people and the land they're living on are distinct. Hypothetically, you could provide people with "self-determination" by allowing them to emigrate, without allowing them to secede. If you allow secession of any region by popular vote of the people currently living there, then a highly-populous country can steal your land by sending a bunch of people to live there and then vote to secede.
> If you allow secession of any region by popular vote of the people currently living there, then a highly-populous country can steal your land by sending a bunch of people to live there and then vote to secede.
That is less murderous variant of "my army just murdered/deported people living there, therefore by self-determination it is mine". It happened many times, in fact basically everywhere if you look into sufficiently old history.
Feel like this post ignores a whole lot of international law both around statehood (eg four criteria for statehood under customary international law - http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/103132/) and self-determination (Wikipedia disagrees with you that “ International law makes no effort to answer this question [of what is a peoples]”)… And/or is trying to make a moral point using international law terminology? Either way feels a bit confused and certainly misses the biggest legal point that a cardinal rule under international law is that States aren’t allowed to invade other States (see above re what is a State).
'I'm nervous asserting Crimea wants/wanted to join Russia'
I don't know about 'Crimea wanted to join Russia 2014'. It's the island around Sevastopol, Russia's major navy base, so the Russians were going to either claim it or just shoot any armed foreigners who got too close to their base. Then when the color revolution ethnically cleansed a bunch of Russians from the good jobs, maybe they had an overwhelming majority that loved Russia, maybe not.
But it's been eight years of everyone who hates Russia moving west and everyone who hates Ukraine moving east. The wank Putin view about this war is that Putin built better than he knew when he set the borders in 2014.
(No expert and disbelieved all news about Russia invading for most of the first day)
Ní tir gan teanga, and Ukraine has its own language (and good God does this sound more and more like Irish history; I suppose there is only one way 'large imperial power to its smaller subjected territory' behaves, eh?)
"From 1804 until the 1917-1921 Ukrainian War of Independence, the Ukrainian language was banned from schools in the Russian Empire, of which the biggest part of Ukraine (Central, Eastern and Southern) was a part at the time. It has always maintained a sufficient base in Western Ukraine, where the language was never banned, in its folk songs, itinerant musicians, and prominent authors."
I think this is more relevant when deciding whether to help someone get statehood in the first place (e.g. Kurds).
For Ukraine, it's moot: Ukraine was *already* recognized as a sovereign state (including by Russia), and international law doesn't let any state revoke any other state's sovereignty
(Which is international law's main point: if we didn't enforce a taboo against violating sovereignty, the 30 years war would be the 400 years war and we'd still be fighting it)
>"To just about everyone outside of Ukraine itself, no one can figure out what distinguishes Ukrainians from Russians"
To some degree that's because of *deliberate atrocities* designed to erase distinct Ukrainian culture / nationalism. E.g. Stalin having most of the blind Kobzari itinerant bards murdered.)
Having worked in law it would have never occurred to me to try to come up with a moral principle on this subject and I'm glad you made an attempt to do so.
I gotta tell you though - even when it's a domestic policy where we can just make the rules, this kind of argument is about 30% actual principle and about 70% something that sounds enough like principle that we can justify doing the thing we need to do while protecting the legitimacy of the system.
My whole brain's been poisoned by the experience because even now trying to come up with a moral principle on this my answer is "probably all people have a right to self determination but if we admit that we bind ourselves to action that would definitely make the world a worse place. So when articulating the principle it should be whatever is closest to a universal right to self determination that doesn't make a decision not to become overly committed to Taiwan or whatever into a moral failing."
"Category error" is probably the correct way to think of a "right" to self-determination. Rights ultimately must have the backing of law to be worth anything*, and international law is, as mentioned, incredibly vague and unhelpful in this regard (not to mention the obvious fact that powerful actors can ignore it to a certain degree). Furthermore, as mentioned in many comments, the specific details of a particular secession and/or revolutionary movement are very important in determining whether or not the success of the endeavor is desirable. "People" is a fuzzy enough category that the statement "all peoples have the right to self-determination" is less than useless, given that international laws and customs are at best applied arbitrarily. Asserting this right grants undue benefits to more belligerent nationalities, to larger (population-wise) nationalities, and those that can call upon more powerful friends, irrespective of the justice of their particular cause. Furthermore, the privileging of nationality, over religion, ideology, and any other form of semi-arbitrary form of social organization, seems an anachronism of the 19th century (to say nothing of groups that blend various forms of identity).
I want Ukraine to be "successful" (a term that encompasses a range of potential outcomes) in their war with Russia not because the Ukrainians qua Ukrainians deserve "self-determination," but because the erosion of Russian military power and prestige is good for my desired vision of the future for the world generally and the United States specifically. A Chinese nationalist may wish the reverse for the same ostensible reasons, and this is fine. Ultimately, nationality is just one component of identity, and a historically fluid one at that. That people at some places and times are willing to die for it should not privilege it over greater moral considerations of correct action**.
*I bite the "human rights don't exist" bullet. That all humans should be treated with a degree of dignity, and possess safety and material comforts, are certainly worthy desiderata. If I had the power to make such a thing so, I would. But desires aren't the same thing as enforceable rights.
**For a variety of reasons, I do not think the Russian cause is "just," in addition to more amoral considerations of great power gains and losses. Regardless, morality is just another word for aesthetic sensibilities, and the Russian state aesthetic leaves much to be desired, relative to "the West," broadly defined in my view.
You're making the mistake of Nationalists everywhere, by conflating a bunch of things that are in fact not tied together. Just because you can identity a people that hypothetically has the right to self determination, does not mean:
A) that the people have a territorial claim
B) that they can walk away with whatever chunk of the national infrastructure happens to be located on that territory
C) that they can walk away with whatever assets happen to be located on that territory
D) that they have the right to overrule anybody affected who is not one of the people
E) that they can demand the retention of the privileges of statehood even after independence
This is why, most of the time, the right to self determination is not in fact exercised, or is only exercised as part of a larger nation.
EDIT: So apparently in my holy wrath, I overlooked the line saying that the long take is a reader's comment on Karlin's blog. Sorry for misattributing the thoughts. I am letting the rest of the comment stay as it is, as a memory of my sleep-deprived idiocy.
Oh. My. God. From a Slavic (Czech) perspective, Karlin's take is terrifying. A person that knows absolute sh** about your history wants to dictate your future in the sake of what precisely? Satisfying their need for neat maps?
Scott, Karlin's idea is about as "refreshing" as some Chinese or Indonesian saying "the Western world should push all the Jews into ghettos again because they are so colorful when they live next to one another and the mixing with gentiles is a major source of annoyment anyway". Absolutely oblivious to the death, destruction and suffering that is connected with such concepts.
Russian and Serbian imperialism was/is very dysfunctional. In the league of empires, those two sit on the bottom of the ladder. Yugoslavia disintegrated in a spectacular geyser of blood for a reason, and people are willing to fight to death not to be reabsorbed into any kind of neo-Russian empire again. This includes Russian speakers from Kharkiv, Mariupol and Kherson.
And if Karlin cringes when writing Kyiv, I cringe when writing his name, because Praha-Karlín is the neighborhood where the Prague meetup was held, and every pavement brick there is still smarter than him, or at least has seen more history to be less judgmental.
I read the "refreshing" there as obviously sarcastic.
Karlin himself isn't oblivious to the implications of his words, he just thinks those implications are positives. He's a full-throated believer in Great Nation Theory and has never met an imperialistic power he won't go to the final barricade for. He seems to vacillate between denial of imperialistic war-crimes and the childish cheering-on of civilian casualties as proof of the muscular virility and general Type A Heroic Character of his chosen "main character" nation. See how he turned on a dime from "Russia would never invade their noble brother Ukrainians no matter how much the servile, rodentine NATO parasites want it- they are firmly devoted to the honorable principles of peace and brotherhood!" to "The mighty war machine of the Russian state is forged of pure iron and will! This war will not be a matter of days but of hours- the Ukranians are spineless animals enslaved by their NATO puppet-masters and hypnotized by Gender Studies and pederasty!" with basically three hours between the two takes.
The Great Nation Theory has fairly massive holes at this point. Long-lived empires tend to motivate their subjects by a combination of "sugar" and "whip". The Romans were notoriously brutal when suppressing revolts, but they also brought rule of law, better technology, inclusion in massive trade networks and a perspective of gaining full Roman citizen status in the future to people whom they annexed.
Russian rule is all whip and no sugar. It is a deeply developmentally delayed country that based its imperial ambitions on conquering richer, more developed, more democratic states and sucking them dry. What do you get for being subjugated to Moscow? Plunder, poverty, corruption, hopelessness and an opportunity for your kids to die as cannon fodder in Russian imperial wars.
No one sane wants this kind of deal foisted on themselves and their children, and the first instinct of freshly reconstituted independent nations after the USSR disintegrated was to seek protection against a relapse, even overseas.
Empires always fall. This is the one lesson of history. You can cobble together a new empire out of the ruins of the old, but in its turn it will rise, flourish, decay and fall.
It would be funny if, with the war dragging on and Russia running out of troops, Karlin were conscripted to serve in Ukraine. I think he's young enough so that it might happen.
"Does my street (population: ~100) have the right to declare independence from the USA?"
Freetown Christiania is an anarchist commune within the city limits of Copenhagen that has declared itself free since 1971. It has a population of about 1,000 and covers 19 acres, so it is larger than your street, but not by much. There has always been significant controversy between Christiania and the city of Copenhagen, and the city has gotten more effective at limiting Christiania's sovereignty since it started sending police in to arrest drug sellers in 2004.
"Suppose dozens of US cities declared independence. The result would be lots of isolated enclaves with tiny markets and no ability to defend themselves. Those cities might wish that there was some pact keeping them together."
This sounds a lot like the Free Imperial Cities of the Holy Roman Empire. They had no sovereign except the emperor and he didn't have much influence. The towns quickly realized that they did not have enough power on their own to keep from being bossed around by the neighboring lords, so they formed city leagues. The largest and strongest of these was the Hanseatic League, which monopolized trade in the Baltic and North Seas for hundreds of years. There was also the Lombard League, the Swabian League, the Lusatian League, and the Decapole. In the Early Modern Era, the city leagues faced increasing competition from centralized monarchies, were riven by the Protestant Reformation, and then mostly destroyed in the Thirty Years' War.
Lots of different groups of people have declared their right to self determination in lots of interesting different ways.
You forgot to mention the Donbas, which is what started this whole mess in the first place. The eastern regions of Ukraine broke away (as they wanted to be a part of a Russian-oriented Ukraine, not a Western-oriented one) and the Ukrainian state started a war to prevent their secession. Russia then provided support to the separatist republics. Over 10,000 people have been killed since -- and this was *before* the recent invasion by Russia.
This is also not mentioning other minorities in Ukraine that have *not* been accepted as independent minorities. The Rusyns, for example, are recognized as a separate ethnic group by everyone in the region...except the Ukrainians.
Ergo, if you're defending Ukraine because you think they represent the idea that people have the right to be self-determining, you're not paying close enough attention.
> Russia then provided support to the separatist republics.
Everything indicates that Russia started, promoted and instigated that.
(it is quite hilarious to see some people seriously claiming that Euromaidan was fully controlled by CIA and at the same time claiming that in Donbas Russia become active only after Ukraine taken military action there)
> Ukrainian state started a war to prevent their secession
war was started by Russian meddling (for more invasive than anything CIA/West did in Ukraine)
> Ergo, if you're defending Ukraine because you think they represent the idea that people have the right to be self-determining, you're not paying close enough attention.
It does not follow. You can be against France invading Spain on basic of self-determination, despite situation in Catalonia. Also, are Rusyns even demanding own country?
> Everything indicates that Russia started, promoted and instigated that.
I don't see how this is any different than Crimeans wanting to be in Russia. Sure, there was some Russian manipulation, but fundamentally the people there want to be Russian, not Western.
> it is quite hilarious to see some people seriously claiming that Euromaidan was fully controlled by CIA
I didn't mention Euromaidan nor did I say it was controlled by the CIA. But it is a fact that Western interests (largely through NGOs) spent billions on Euromaidan. This shouldn't really be much of a surprise...the West has sponsored coups and revolutions for the last century.
> war was started by Russian meddling
If a region secedes, but is attacked violently in response, who "started it"?
> are Rusyns even demanding own country?
They certainly did for a long time (read: centuries), but were repeatedly discriminated against by the Ukrainians and the Soviets.
My position on this question is that trying to have consistent principles on this issue is bad actually, and I will unapologetically evaluate self-determination issues on a case-by-case basis.
I disagree that letting whatever nontrivially-sized place secede is good, because states getting smaller and more numerous makes coordination problems on large scales worse (I'm aware there are plenty of arguments for the reverse, but I'm not going to expand on this issue for now). And a norm that every group gets a right to self-determination in the future if and only if they already have it now offers a lot of advantages in terms of stability; not redrawing borders at all can cut down on warfare. But neither of these heuristics seem like good reasons not to have taken away Serbia's ability to genocide Kosovar Albanians. Russia taking Crimea from Ukraine doesn't change how many different countries need to be involved in large-scale coordination challenges, and that particular operation didn't even involve any bloodshed, so you could make a case that that undercuts my argument that border changes are bad because war is bad. But this won't stop me from opposing Russia's annexation of Crimea, because Russia agreed not to do that without Ukraine's consent as part of an agreement for Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons, and undermining incentives for states to give up nuclear weapons is bad.
If you come up with a consistent principle, you'll inevitably encounter situations where it turned out your principle was missing something important. The actual principle I'm using here is "a group of people gets self-determination if and only if it is best for the world for them to get self-determination", but I'm not counting that as a real principle because it's too underspecified. Why should I adopt a different principle instead? It seems to me that if "what's best for the world" ends up conflicting with some more well-specified principle, I should go with what's best for the world.
One possible answer to this is that different people have different opinions about what's best for the world, and can end up in conflict over it, but if they can all agree to follow certain consistent principles instead, this can avoid conflict. I agree this is an issue (and isn't even the only source of conflict here; some people will simply have more provincial concerns than what's best for the world), but using consistent principles doesn't actually solve this, because there will be conflict over which principles to use. If you think self-determination is generally good, and I think too much self-determination creates too much coordination-problem headaches to be worth it, then "any at-least-city-sized group of people who want independence gets it" does not work as a compromise. I'd actually prefer just letting you choose every time, since then if there's some situation where letting some specific city declare independence ends up being obviously terrible, you might notice this and put a stop to it. Groups with conflicting interests can negotiate compromises without having clear abstract ethical principles behind their compromises, and that's okay. If the principles you come up with so that there doesn't need to be any conflict doesn't include anything like "... unless it's on this side of this arbitrary line, because we need to placate France", you're doing it wrong, and should probably stop trying to follow principles.
> Within three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport mostly women, children, the elderly, even Communists and members of the Red Army, to mostly the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away.
Though that opens another issue - how long such argument applies? Invading and murdering/deporting people and immediately declaring that due to self-determination your army owns land is an evil farce.
Demanding land that people you consider as your ancestors controlled 5000 years ago is silly.
Part of problem is that you have middle ground where one solution is evil and other silly, and both unworkable.
Though I admit that for Ukraine at this point the Crimea may be better used for negotiating it away in exchange of something (but not just Russian promises! Russian promises are worthless).
I think when to draw the line is around 1800s when population engineering became a thing. There of course were massive massacres and forced settling/resettling etc before that, but it was destruction for destruction's sake or trying to make more money by indifferently massacring people or whatnot but there was no concept of having rights to a land by cause of your people living there so that was never the target metric. Only after 1800s changing the composition of a place became a target in itself so states started doing it for the sake of changing the composition. That's when I would draw the line.
My extreme unpopular idea would be for everybody in the world to have citizenship rights to any current nation of their selection that their ancestors were living on the territory of in, say, 1800. Next step would be a "world secession election day" in which everybody in the world would vote in the village/town that their ancestor of selection lived in 1800 to determine to which current or potential nation that village/town would be part of. Redrawing of all borders once and for all!
I'm curious why you didn't engage with the underlying theoretical question of where sovereignty derives from? Surely that's the first order principle. If sovereignty comes from elections or cultural unity or military force you end up with different answers. You seem like you're trying to derive case specific principles from second order reasoning rather than starting with first principles and generalizing.
Not sure if someone has suggested this already. But nationhood might be best considered an inter-subjective reality.
That is to say that a nation exists if a group of people believe that they’re part of that nation. So Ukraine exists as a nation because 40 million people believe that they’re part of the Ukrainian nation. Same with the Swiss, the Dutch, and the Navajo.
But presumably the people on your street, or in your city don’t honestly believe in the nationhood of said street or city.
In this view, shared culture, language, religion, history are relevant to nationhood in that they persuade people to believe in the nation’s existence. But other factors like a system of government (I.e. Switzerland), the experience of fighting a war, or mere propaganda can create nationhood.
A Scot, for example, might believe that he's part of the Scottish nation, yet prefer that Scotland remain part of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, plenty of people want secession/independence for reasons unrelated to nationhood and some of those other reasons are probably legitimate.
So maybe secession is justified if the people of a territory support (by some margin. can't give a good specific number) independence and they have some sort of legitimate justification for resorting to it. Nationhood might be one legitimate justification. Abuses by a tyrannical government (the justification used by the US founders) might be another. I would want to put the bar for legitimate justifications pretty high because instability and conflict are probably generally bad.
I think the absence of a workable universal system of international law throws the whole issue back to a practical problem. A citizen can't enforce their sovereignty against a state that disagrees. You could always go Seasteading, but then you're just hoping to fall through the cracks in the system and again you have to be able to defend yourself from pirates. If you get big enough, or have a good relationship with enough big players that you can sustain sovereignty, congratulations, you're a country.
This fits edge cases like the US South not being able to sustain sovereignty. Its economic and other ties to the North meant that their bid at sovereignty was contested. They asked Britain and France to help out, and if they'd gotten that aid it's possible they would have succeeded. But without friends, they weren't strong enough on their own, so they don't get sovereignty. Israel has lots of friends, so they get sovereignty. South Sudan gets it, too, because they were able to support their sovereign bid against the parent country, and nobody else in the world cares enough to get involved one way or another.
It's more realpolitik than Big Guys Always Win. Is there an edge case where this framework doesn't work?
Something you very briefly touch on, which I think deserves much more weight, is that changing a region's government comes with large and unavoidable risks. Replacing the government and attempting to build a new one frequently leads to civil war, terror, famine, and general immiseration of the populace. Because of this, a moral rule that says "Thou shalt not overthrow governments except when the benefits of doing so are clear and enormous" is easily justified on simple, utilitarian terms. People get confused looking for the definition of "a nation," "a people," and so on, when the only concept you need to understand 90% of these conflicts is "a government." If you want to know whether Texas should secede, don't ask if Texans are a "people." Just ask whether, In the event of a Texan secession, is it likely that the Texans would replace the US Federal Government with some governing institution so much better fitted to Texas' needs that it would cancel out the insane amounts of human suffering that achieving Texas secession would likely require.
An obvious consequence of this theory is that a revolution and secession is more justified when it is easier to carry out -- for instance, when the existing government is weak. Another consequence is that secession is more justifiable than revolution, since secession requires only overthrowing central authority, but revolution requires that plus building a new central authority.
Epistemic Status: feels sophomoric but trivially true. Seeking criticism.
It seems trivially obvious that attempts to scale up individual morality to international relations is a category error. States, much like companies, are not people. They are algorithms operating on meat hardware - social technology. These technologies are not moral entities in the sense that they are mostly an abstraction for a set of behaviors across a number of entities. Asking if a company is right to pursue profit is a mistake - companies by definition pursue profit.
Corollary: the correct question is whether a profit seeking entity is the most cost effective or politically feasible solution.
States pursue something like a monopoly on violence and a sort of operating system for individuals (regulation, welfare) over a given territory. They are established by people who live there. They are as moral as those people, no more no less.
Re: Somebody’s going to ask “but what about the Confederacy?”
It's strange that you fail to apply a principle consistently immediately after a paragraph that contains the sentence "But it’s just the result of applying the same principle consistently.".
By that principle, the South has a right to secede, and the US government war wrong to treat this as a casus belli.
I think many intelligent people, if they looked into the Civil War deeply enough, would realize that it was basically unjustifiable. The whole "fighting to rid the world of slavery" narrative is something that came later as a tactical move. It's also not obvious that starting a war that killed 500,000 people and destroyed dozens of cities was the most humane, or even effective, solution to getting rid of slavery.
The war was started and fought to prevent separatism and to centralize power in Washington. Simple as that.
In principle, the South did (and does) have the moral right to secede. However, they didn't put the question up to the population (quite a lot of which was being actively enslaved), but instead decided the issue in the legislature. The Confederate government had no legitimacy, and was militarily holding a significant portion of the population of the United States hostage.
One necessary component to the moral right to secede is allowing people who strongly disagree with secession the right to move back to the parent state. The Confederacy obviously was not on board with that.
One area that had to deal with exactly this 60 years ago is Africa. And I think its instructive to look at where things went well and wrong there.
Following decolonisation the borders for countries were dumb. I'm not talking about the straight lines as they're normally just through desert but I mean the separation of tribes and people's between countries. One solution would have been an orgy of war until the borders made sense, but the alternative is to just lump it and make the best of it.
Very early on the African Union and early heads of state/independence leaders realised how dangerous it was to "rationalise" borders. You saw something of this in between Somalia and Ethiopia. Somalia wanted the somalis in Ethiopia to be part of Somalia and it completely fucked up both countries fighting about it. So much like you're enlightened cities not secedeing event though they could, African leaders knew the horrors that would await them.
While I think self determination out of an empire is good because empires are bad. Just chopping up borders to make them make more sense is dumb. The catalans are dumb. The Scottish nationalists are dumb. The ranchers in Idaho that want to secede are dumb. Ukrainians, they're not dumb. Neither are the African Union. Lots of useful examples in African history for how to deal with these nationalist questions.
It’s kinda astonishing how well African borders have managed to hold together through the decades. With the exception of South Sudan and Eritrea no wars have managed to create new borders. No Biafra, no Ambazonia, no Tigray.
They held together well because it was a good idea and a positive choice made by a large majority African leaders and political elites. So it would actually be odd if things turned out otherwise.
It's the distinction between nations and states. In practice, states are mostly the UN club, which - like most franchise-based leagues - is highly reluctant to approve new members even when it really should. As to nations.... ACOUP has a post I really like on this, about the USA not being a nation:
Nation-states are not the only form of state organization, even if you reject anarchism. Furthermore, I'd argue that they're a particularly bad form of state organization, because they lock people to a specific state - if the whole world is divided into mutually exclusive nation-states, immigration is forbidden. Much better to have states defined entirely by location, i.e. city-states (which usually do include the hinterland around a city, but the point is to have a single center everyone can agree on). And sometimes even better (and sometimes much worse, because ISIL also fits in this category) is defining a state by ideas. Harder, though. An idea-state is a gauntlet thrown, a challenge to the entire world.
The United States is the biggest example of this, among current states, built on a dream above all else. (I guess i.e. the Vatican also counts, but most of the other settler colonies are more defined by place - I wouldn't say Australia and Canada have fundamentally different founding ideologies to the USA, though maybe Australians and Canadians would disagree.) But of course there was another example not too long ago, a different dream. One even further from being lived up to than the American one, but even so - there's a lot of people in the rationalist space that fundamentally misunderstand this. The USSR was born of a utopian dream. It built itself around the core of that dream, it spilled oceans of blood for it, and when, in the end, its people stopped really believing in communism, when the only thing left in that furnace-core was trite slogans and memorized essays, it collapsed in upon itself.
We're short on utopian dreams nowadays. But this much of the American one, I certainly agree with - that it's the rights of individuals that matter, not of groups. States jealously guard their power, and so perhaps it's fine to grandfather existing nation-states in to avoid conflict; but in the Internet age, to *actually* care about nationalism, as a terminal value, is just fundamentally stupid.
I don't think anywhere you've mentioned what I thought the real "rule" was, in international law:
By default, no one has the right to secede from their country. The only exception is when they've been persecuted by their country. In that exceptional case, they have the right to secede.
More broadly, I think that existing borders are sacred, unless something exceptional happens that necessitates changing them.
[EDIT] Just to add, this means that "national self-determination" is not a thing. In a democratic country like Ukraine, the right to secede has to be given by the central government. International law favours the status quo, and the status quo is that Ukraine is a country.
Why not just the straightforward Hobbesian solution: the natural extent of the state is whatever extent the largest coordination problems extend, i.e. the entire world. Any smaller state would just be an excuse to treat individuals differently for the arbitrary reason of geography while failing to solve at least some big coordination problems. In this view, nations only exist because of the lack of a global order, and the morality of nationhood is just whatever pragmatic theory that in the long run leads to a unitary global democracy with the least amount of hickups along the way. So Ukraine is a proper nation because the expansion of western liberal democracy benefits from it being a proper nation.
Kicking the Russian Army that was trying to conquer Kiev back to Belarus this week?
It's rather like the question you used to hear from Zionists about what makes Palestine a nation. By now, the answer is pretty clear: three quarters of a century of struggle against Israel.
As the writer Bruno Macaes points out, the current situation suggests a heuristic you haven’t mentioned: try and invade us, then find out how much of a nation we are.
*Wakes up* sees 359 comment count after 6 hours*. Hot take: this just shows that self-determination is fundamentally confused and bad concept. We need different reasons why wars of aggression are bad, or perhaps different definition of the very concept of the "war of aggression", than that which is based on self-determination.
This does not strike me as an especially difficult problem, though. There does not seem to be anything wrong with well-established norm of international law that when a government of a given country sometimes in the past recognized some territory as a part of another country, future governments of recognizing country are not allowed to unilaterally claim that territory for themselves.
There is a vast literature on how "recognition" works, and it's often extremely complicated. But the point is that it mostly works. The alternative is the chaos of, say, Vlad Putin isolating himself from covid and deciding that he doesn't recognize Ukrainian statehood and sending the tanks in.
As always we have some ethical intuitions and practical constraints on the possible solutions. Ethically every group should be able to self-determine - but that would not work in practice.
First of all it would not be practical to grant that to a group that cannot defend their sovereignty, because they would quickly lose it and generate a lot of misery in that process. That does not mean the group need to do that defending all by itself - it can have allies, etc, but it needs to be able to do that *in practice*. An important prerequisite is:
"a people is a nation if they are willing to fight for it"
One heuristic people would use to answer the question if is it worth to fight is to look a their ancestors if their ancestors fought then maybe it is worth it:
"Consider Venice. When Napoleon came they surrendered without a shot. Very smart, saved lives, saved the city. It's just killed the mythos of Venice. People lived but the Republic died. It was never restored and is unlikely to be restored again" https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1498079371847995392
"Theorists of war of the bygone age understood it. Clausewitz pointed out that it's important not only if you lost independence but *how* you lost it. If you submitted without a fight, you saved lives. But you killed your mythos. You'll be digested by the conqueror" [from the same thread]
The practical constraints change with technological progress, but common-knowledge also takes time to establish and it tends to accumulate the old. Initially states were smaller than nations and contained within them. Then they started to grow and become kind of independent, with empires and so on. Then in about XIX century the notion of a nation-state became popular - that simplifies the common-knowledge problem.
We also have all the complications of above-state organizations. I am not expert on the USA political system, but Texas actually is a state in some meaning of that word, but it is also a part of the USA. I think initially it was more a real state - but now the proper state is the whole USA. Then we have the EU, and the UN, etc.
One problem with regions joining whatevrr country they want is that it might asymetrically favor opressive countries .
Opressive countries won't ever let a region leave by opressing spreading propaganda, oipressing people who look like thye might supoport leaving, falsifying referendum results. But it's feasible for them to get a region to join an opressive country. They just need to get the region to support joining them for a short while. Especialy if they can get awaya with invadinng then holding a referendum (where they can cheat).
1) I think we need more wild space in addition to Antarctica and international waters. De facto it exists in various empty regions, but de iure it does not, so it is impossible to have a true frontier any more. This makes it much more difficult to experiment with novel forms of governance. We should institute, by international law, some system where swathes of territory are "released" by countries every couple of years.
2) I would like to see a country experiment with having a max enforceable border length. Like if your circumference is 5000 km, and you only have 500 to spare, what would you prioritize? Probably we'd see the re-emergence of city states, which is a good thing. Note: in this arrangement, the laws of a country still apply to non bordered land, but you can't bar entry. You can control entry only for the places where you "applied" the border.
I agree that we need new space to experiment with new forms of governance, but I disagree that any country should be forced to split off some of its territory. How would that land be allocated? Who would decide how to govern it? What would happen to the people owning/living on that land?
Instead, build new space in ... space. I'm not even kidding. Build giant O'Neill cylinders and Stanford toruses from asteroids. Want to finally show the world that communism does work after all? Get together with a couple million like-minded people to finance the construction of your rotating habitat, and live in utopia. Same for libertarians. Or UBI-proponents.
Does that sound fantastical? Oh yes. But it's primarily a technological problem, and only secondarily a political one, and that makes it easier to achieve than getting countries to willingly part with some of their territory. This is actually my secret fantasy – if I had billions of EUR at my disposal, that's what I would be working towards.
>I like how it [...] avoids [...] hard-headed “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must” realpolitik
And yet the answer to all the questions you ask could be just that: A People have a right to self-determination IF they can back it up. In fact your own answer to the question of the confederacy is "yeah sure they could secede, and we'd just kill'em then because we could and wanted to".
Also, beyond the morality-based questions of self-determination, and assuming one accept that people do, in fact, have a right to self-determination, and that a state should not prevent attempts at secession (at least some of them, such as referendums), there is one practical problem:
How often should a state allow such referendums to be held?
In 1998, the French government struck a deal with new-caledony independentists to plan 3 successive referendums for independance, each rejected (first 56% againt, then 53% against, and finally upon boycott by independentists, 96% against). Should it be the end of it? Surely the next generation of new-caledonians ought not be bound against their will by the votes of those that came before them? How often should such referendums be held? Every 20 years? Every 5 years? Every day until they have their way?
The Union could probably have invaded the Confederacy under a norm called Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which the UN endorsed in 2005. States have an obligation to protect their people, and if they fail, other states should intervene (although the question is, which ones?)
The Karlin comment is interesting in the way that I'd almost think almost the exact opposite - my heart says that large nations - say, the ones that have been Civilization civilizations - are generally evil and deserve to be broken up to smaller subunits. Romantically, I support separatism and the right of small countries to exist.
Still, that romantic notion is different from what is sensible. The part of history where "self-determination" was actually probably the most meaningful as a concept was decolonization. When the UN was formed, there were a lot of self-governing territories (ie. colonial powers, and others generally recognized as independent) and non-self-governing ones (chiefly colonies; defined territories where the administration was imposed from another defined separate territory) The UN took a fairly strong stand that the non-self-governing territories should become self-governing, and that's what they eventually became.
However, decolonization also shows another strong norm in post-WW2 international politics; established borders are sacrosant, and should, at the very least, not be altered through force. When colonies became independent, they did so as (mostly) the same colonial units that had been established by colonizing powers, usually with the same borders. Do those borders make sense? No, but trying to alter them by force to make "more" sense would lead to endless bloodbaths; thus, it is generally considered that even though, say, Ghana is basically just a collection of small ethnic groups that used to be the British colony of Gold Coast, formed for British for administrating economic exploitation, it's still better to just construct a "Ghanaian" identity for that former colonial unit than enter into a bound-to-be-chaotic process of ethnostate formation.
The same respect for established borders and units is the reason why the international community generally looks down upon separatism and unilateral declarations of independence. An area like Somaliland, despite having been de facto independent from Somalia for decades, is not recognized as independent by other countries, and is unlikely to be recognized. At the same time, countries *can* form if a sovereign nation decides to grant independence to a part of its territory. If Scotland had voted for independence, and assuming UK didn't get cold feet and granted that independence, other countries would not have had any issues in recognizing that independence - after UK had recognized it.
Considering this, there should be no issues at all in the policy the international community (or at least the West) has taken regarding Ukraine. Ukraine, her independence and her borders have been formally recognized by Russia - of course, Ukraine and Russia were separate units even in the Soviet Union, but Russia still formally accepted the continuity of the Soviet Union. This included Crimea and Donbass. Thus, Russia has no right to unilaterally change this arrangement, especially by force. Granting Russia that right would open a Pandora's box and increase international chaos. Whether the Crimeans actually supported, or currently support, that annexation is not all that important here - after all, the whole concept of sanctity of existing borders is heavily affected by things like German annexation of Sudetenland in 1938, and it's almost certain the vast majority of Sudetenlanders supported that annexation.
As always, there are caveats and hypocrisies. There are still non-self-governing territories like Palestine and Western Sahara, after all, and the West is not in a hurry in helping them becoming formally self-governing by, say, recognizing their independence. On the other hand, Western countries did recognize the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo - something Serbia has still not acceded to. Still, one has to ask whether those cases mean the principle is completely dead, or useless. Russia would certainly probably prefer to think that way, considering the amount of times they've referred to Kosovo - but principles like this are never that rigid, they just get weaker and weaker every time they get broken and that break is not properly challenged, and even if the independence of Kosovo has weakened the moral argument for this principle, it's no reason for Russia to attempt to weaken it even further.
"Russia would certainly probably prefer to think that way, considering the amount of times they've referred to Kosovo - but principles like this are never that rigid, they just get weaker and weaker every time they get broken and that break is not properly challenged, and even if the independence of Kosovo has weakened the moral argument for this principle, it's no reason for Russia to attempt to weaken it even further."
That's the thing, though: The West could have very easily avoided creating the Kosovo precedent in the first place. Milosevic's regime was already gone by 2008. The West could have thus told the Kosovar Albanians to reach some sort of accomodation with the democratic Serbian government. This was especially true considering that the West had no problem with Serbia continuing to control the Albanian-majority Presevo Valley. Yet, the West nevertheless decided to support Kosovar independence, claiming it to be a special case even though by the West's own principles, other persecuted groups such as the Kurds, Rohingya, et cetera could likewise be entitled to national self-determination, something that the West will undoubtedly oppose.
The right to self-determination can’t depend on ethical motives, because the ethical discussion is very slippery, to the point that it allows ethnical self-determination (on racial grounds) if a group believes it has been oppressed long or hard enough by any other group -- before you point to Europe or Asia, consider the US: does anyone think that racial self-determination really is the solution to any problem here, rather than just a solution in search of a problem? Utilitarian grounds is where the action is. If you compare the history of Europe and Eastern Asia (China plus adjacents), you can easily see the tremendous dynamism and political, artistic and scientific freedom that self-determination (in a nutshell: nationalism) brought to Europe, with scientists and thinkers escaping from one court to another to avoid the wrath of churches or rulers; China only really competed head to head with Europe when it was Europe: during the Warring States era. On purely utilitarian grounds, when it comes to the benefits derived by locals and everybody else, nations must be preferred to sluggish, inefficient empire-countries. Now, the question is how each case fits within this framework. I’d say the rule of thumb is whether secession will create a bigger problem than the one existing before. That was the case with the American South, that would have surely emerged as a deadly rival of the American North. Even ignoring slavery, which is a pretty big “if,” it’s pretty easy to argue that any benefits from the increased competitiveness would have been offset by the increased aggression, and the huge potential for wars, skirmishes, enemy blocs, etc. In Europe, many often compare the “velvet revolution” that led to the Czech Republic and Slovakia splitting in the 90s (possible because it was a clean cut with very few downside risks and lots of upside risks) with the Yugoslavian wars of the 90s, that left open wounds that will probably never close because there was no possible clean closure and, if there ever were was a such chance, foreign intervention spoiled it. In modern times, you can compare the possible benefits derived from an independent Scotland, cleanly free from the UK, and the Yugoslavian-Iberian scenario created by an independent Catalonia with territorial claims on multiple Spanish and French regions, Croat- and Serb-style. I’d argue that the Ukraine fits within the Catalonian/Yugoslavian/US South template. Yes, Russia is huge already, but an independent, anti-Russian Ukraine is a massive WW3 risk in waiting, and the Ukraine’s post-independence history is rather depressive and dysfunctional, so it’s not as if the world would be losing a really vibrant contributor. An utilitarian viewpoint would support the idea of the Ukraine, at the very least, as a Finlandized state. That worked pretty well for Finland, which did evolve from overly-friendly-to-Nazis state to high-tech human development hub, so I’ve never understood the argument against such a solution.
>(is it meaningful that Crimea wanted to join Russia rather than become independent? I think no; if you agree they have a right to become independent, then they could become independent and then immediately join Russia; everyone agrees independent countries have the right to join other countries if they want)
Pedantic quibble: everyone agrees independent countries have the right to join other countries if *both* want. Relevant cases are the German Question (i.e. "is Austria allowed to join Germany") and the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia. This is not pertinent to the Crimean question, though, as Russia is very happy to have the Crimea.
Imagine your street (or another territory) gains independence, but the country that it gains independence from decides to not cooperate and cuts all ties. It doesn't issue entry visas to the citizens of the new state, doesn't sell electricity and doesn't provide other services. If your new country can survive this, then your independence movement is viable. If you would be completely screwed by this development, then you shouldn't pursue independence.
And yes, this does mean that some of the existing countries like Vatican or San Marino shouldn't have become independent states, and were grandfathered into the statehood.
Crimea shouldn't be Ukraine's, and it shouldn't be Russia's! Before a few waves of ethnic cleansing my grand grand grandparents fleed from there and were among the lucky that survived. The Russian majority there is the result of ethnic engineering so they should go back to where their ancestors were and Crimea should be an independent Tatar state. IF instead of full independence they decide to be a semi independent Tatar state under Russia, or Ukraine, or any other nation then that can of course be.
They left much longer before the Tatars, but I'm all for Greek and Italian parts of an independent Crimea, or if they desire so independent city-states of them
> If my neighborhood declared independence from the US, China could offer to make us all multi-millionaires in exchange for hosting a military base on our territory
I am a complete dummy in terms of geopolitics, so explain this to me. Why would China want to have a military base in the middle of the US? It would be a major pain in the ass to fund and maintain, being surrounded by US from all sides, and what would it have to gain? Surely it wouldn't invade the US from it or anything.
Good answer, but let me add that Scott lives not in the middle of the US but in the Bay Area, i.e. the closest major metro to China among the lower 48. If China could actually get a port facility in California, that would be invaluable. It would be comparable to Guantanamo Bay, only instead of being located on an antagonistic Caribbean nation of little global significance, it would be located on the territory of its chief geopolitical rival.
If China were able to carve out a long enough section of the Bay Area, the comparison isn't Guantanamo but Hong Kong.
The mere threat of being able to load such a base up with conventional missiles and lay waste to the Bay Area would be of diplomatic value to China, just as North Korea's ability to destroy Seoul has an effect on South Korean politics. And if the US Federal Government were ever in a state of collapse, you could probably expect China to use that base to bring California into its orbit -- and Californian secessionists could be expected to reach out to China actively to help them oppose any Federal response.
OTOH a landlocked military base would be more like a very big embassy or consulate. Still valuable for the reasons embassies and consulates are valuable (SIGINT, as you say), but with the US controlling its supply lines, I wouldn't expect it to be all that heavily armed.
"Passport to Pimlico is a 1949 British comedy film made by Ealing Studios and starring Stanley Holloway, Margaret Rutherford and Hermione Baddeley. It was directed by Henry Cornelius and written by T. E. B. Clarke. The story concerns the unearthing of treasure and documents that lead to a small part of Pimlico to be declared a legal part of the House of Burgundy, and therefore exempt from the post-war rationing or other bureaucratic restrictions active in Britain at the time.
Passport to Pimlico explores the spirit and unity of wartime London in a post-war context and offers an examination of the English character. Like other Ealing comedies, the film pits a small group of British against a series of changes to the status quo from an external agent. The story was an original concept by the screenwriter T. E. B. Clarke. He was inspired by an incident during the Second World War, when the maternity ward of Ottawa Civic Hospital was temporarily declared extraterritorial by the Canadian government so that when Princess Juliana of the Netherlands gave birth, the baby was born on Dutch territory, and would not lose her right to the throne."
Ukraine does have the questionable benefit, in that it is useful to the West as a graveyard-sponge for Russian armies. Questionable because that means many people die as a result of the war, which for sure is not a desirable outcome. But smashing out the teeth of the Russian army is probably a global public benefit.
That said, true Crimea should be divided between the Khanate, Genoa, and Theodoro!
This whole post is wrong, because its frame (and by consequence all viewpoints contained within it) are wrong. Scott declares to proceed on the basis of a right to self-determination, but that application itself is arbitrary. Historically and internationally, self-determination can be applied only in specific circumstances. These are either when a place was colonised or appears-to-be-colonised-but-we-can't-say-because-it's-not-obvious-to-know (for e.g. Israel-Palestine).
There is a simple first-order answer to the question of territories, that is legality. Self-determination arises only after legality is a non-question (such as in colonised countries, where if colonisation was legal or not is a difficult question to answer given the times it took place in). To demonstrate, take India's argument for Kashmir against Pakistan. The Kashmir state signed an Instrument of Accession in 1947 with the Indian government, so now India considers it part of itself. No matter how much annexation of territory happens by another country, or self-determination is called for (by internal militias) (after a demographic change in Kashmir's case), there is no case for this application because legality solves all.
In Ukraine's case, we don't have to argue against the Russian 'we are basically the same peoples' argument. We don't even have to look at self-determination, because the case for the legal territory being Ukrainian has been well established since the post-Soviet times, as well as by Russian international commitment before they started backtracking.
Of course, this has an implication that this so-called 'legality' before self-determination is assumed to be well established. This is not the case, there are two main theories of statehood (Declarative and Constitutive/Montevideo) and many others. But that does not mean we are allowed to be lazy and say, 'Let's just ask what do the people want?'
PS. This might come off as somewhat anti-democratic -- which it is -- but here's the thing, it's because the circumstance of self-determination don't apply. If they did, the people's will would reign supreme.
The English claim on Ireland came about when Henry II decided to take control of the situation where his vassals were setting up as holding independent fiefs of their own (after having been invited in as gallowglasses then claiming the territories by conquest/marriage alliances), he landed in Ireland in 1171 and in 1177 declared his son Lord of Ireland.
The pretext was the papal bull of 1155, Laudabiliter: "The bull purports to grant the right to the Angevin King Henry II of England to invade and govern Ireland and to enforce the Gregorian Reforms on the semi-autonomous Christian Church in Ireland." (This is why there has only ever been one English pope, this guy, Alexander). The true reason was Henry's fears that the Welsh lords would take example from the Anglo-Normans in Ireland and break away with their own independence movement, and his ambition to conquer more territory.
The grounds were that we were barbarous and needed to be brought in line with civilisation and the official Church (hence the invocation of papal authority). The real reasons were different.
Gerald of Wales wrote a lengthy apologia for this, "The Conquest of Ireland", having been part of the entourage of Prince John when visiting Ireland in 1185:
"I once made objections of this kind to Maurice, archbishop of Cashel, a discreet and learned man, in the presence of Gerald, a clerk of the Roman church, who formerly came as legate into those parts, and throwing the blame of the enormous delinquencies of this country principally on the prelates, I drew a powerful argument from the fact that no one in that kingdom had ever obtained the crown of martyrdom for the church of God. Upon this the archbishop replied sarcastically, avoiding the point of my proposition, and answering it by a home-thrust: “It is true,” he said, “that although our nation may seem barbarous, uncivilized, and cruel, they have always shewn great honour and reverence to their ecclesiastics, and never on any occasion raised their hands against God’s saints. But there is now come into our land a people who know how to make martyrs, and have frequently done it. Henceforth Ireland will have its martyrs, as well as other countries.”
(Reference to the murder of Thomas a Becket by followers of Henry II)
If we take 1177 as the formal declaration of rule by the English monarchy, and 1922 as the establishment of the Irish Free State (albeit still as Dominion status), that's 745 years of "we're not you". If we take the declaration of the Republic of Ireland, with the new constitution, in 1937 as the end date, that's 760 years of "we are claiming our right of self-determination despite being entangled together".
If we take something that could be proto-Russia with the establishment of Kievan Rus in 882 when Prince Oleg conquered Kiev until independence of Ukraine in 1991, that's 1,109 years. That's a long time, but not long enough to fully dissolve two peoples into one.
To quote from "The Lord of the Rings":
'And this I remember of Boromir as a boy, when we together learned the tale of our sires and the history of our city, that always it displeased him that his father was not king. "How many hundreds of years needs it to make a steward a king, if the king returns not? " he asked. "Few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty," my father answered. "In Gondor ten thousand years would not suffice."
As far as I remember from school, Stalin saw the strategic importance of Crimea, and through a combination of the Holodomor, forced resettlement of the native Crimean Tatar population, and "incentives" for pro-Stalin Russians to settle there, he produced a situation where a majority of people on the peninsula today probably would vote to join Russia in a freely held referendum.
There are similar issues even when limiting size or allowing any region. First: what counts as a region *wanting* self-determination? If we require unanimous agreement for everyone inside, then it's a non-starter. But if we allow 51%, you're setting up future strife when that minority can't secceed in turn due to being too small.
Secondly, this is massively complicated by the fact that you get different results depending on how you draw borders.
Ie. if a country has regions A, B and C and 90% of region C want to secede, as do 40% of region B, then can the joint region BC secede? 65% of the population want to, but if C seceded on its own, and you asked B if they want to join them, they'd say no. And why stop at regions? Your street might be too small, but how about region BC **plus** your street. Or however many streets in region A that they can take until the popularity drops below 51% (or better, a spiderweb border of areas with high natural resources and low populations to get the most bang for your buck). This would clearly be pretty unfair, but likewise if region A gets to decide the region that gets to vote, it could play the same tricks.
We could assume fixed regions and only allow those regions to secede as a whole, but what's the principle that dictates what counts as a "region"? What if those regions don't map well to the clusters wanting independence, such that there's a big area that'd fully justify self-determination, but because historical borders were drawn without consideration of that population group, it spans the borders of 4 regions, diluted below 50% due to the population there? Ultimately, we're back to the same kind of problem as identifying what a "people" is.
Remembering from a post I read some time ago in I think lesswrong, in Switzerland they do those elections kind of fractally. So the region says 65% secede, then there's another voting at the subregion level if they too want to secede or not, until to the village level or so. I know the author of that posts are also readers of here but I don't remember his name unfortunately. It sounded Czech though.
That was me. Here's the relevant part about Jura seceding from canton Bern:
1968: Establishment of two commissions (one bilateral and one impartial) to propose a plan to address the Jurassic question.
March 1970: The plan is approved in a referendum. The following referendums are proceeding according to the approved plan.
June 1974: Referendum on whether to create a new canton Jura. Approved.
March 1975: Districts that voted against the new canton in a previous referendum decide about their fate. The southern, Protestant part of the Jura decides to remain in the canton of Bern.
Autumn 1975: Municipalities at the border between the two cantons decide in referenda whether to join Bern or Jura.
September 1978: In a federal referendum, the Swiss constitution is amended to list the new canton (82.3% of the vote in favor).
I think the Crimea question is less interesting than the question of Donbass. With Crimea majority of people would indeed probably voted to associate with Russia rather than with Ukraine even before the annexation. But I'm much less certain about Donbass.
I think Donbass can be seen as an experiment of purposefull creation of new "people". Russia has likely incentivised the rebellion in it and provoked Ukrane to wage civil war in the region. This made people in the region to oppose Ukraine. Are they valid for self-determination now?
I think this article does not put enough emphasis on the importance of status-quo maintenance.
I think the whole point of having “international laws” is to prevent wars which historically have been responsible for enormous amounts of death and suffering.
That doesn’t mean all attempts to change status quos are automatically wrong - but it does mean we should bias favoring the status quo when there is a gray area and changing the status quo requires war.
So Russia invading Ukraine is wrong.
But if Russia does invade Ukraine anyway and then 100 years later Ukraine tries to secede, they are also wrong for doing that. Unless they are given less rights than normal Russians for those 100 years or unless their culture/ethnicity/language etc diverges more from Russian.
>> But what is the objective in Ukraine? It is to become just another gay western democracy.
Hey, a gay Western democracy where Russians who didn't like the similarities between Russia and Mordor could feel mostly at home was a really cool idea. I guess it's thoroughly shattered now :(
Yeah that seemed like a self-refuting argument. Even if you grant there should be no “redundant countries”, a “gay Slavic democracy” would not be redundant but actually rather novel.
I suppose the argument is that Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia will occupy that role once their values fully converge with the West. Which does seem to be happening -- the young are much closer towards Western/Hollywood values than the old.
From what I gather, spoken Ukrainian isn't that much more mutually intelligible with Russian than spoken Polish is, though there's the fact that a lot of Ukrainians, for now, speak Russian as a first language, and written Ukrainian is highly mutually intelligible with Russian (greatly helped by using the same alphabet). Though if Ukraine continued on a Westernizing course, I wonder if it would eventually consider abandoning Cyrillic.
So once Ukraine goes far enough along the Westernizing path, instead of being sort of a poorer, more democratic (but not fully democratic) version of Russia, perhaps it starts to look more like a poorer, ex-Orthodox version of the future ex-Catholic Poland.
It would be strategic for Ukraine to adopt the Latin alphabet but I doubt it will happen. The Cyrillic alphabet is really more Ukrainian than it is Russian. It spread to (what we now call) Russia from Ukraine (i.e. the Kievan Rus).
Bulgaria is in the EU and NATO and they use Cyrillic and are unlikely to switch to Latin anytime soon.
I suppose it's the sort of thing that was easier to achieve before mass literacy.
My understanding is that Serbia has sort of half-Romanized, with most signage appearing in both scripts. I take it that's a matter of the practicalities of the Roman alphabet, as a small state surrounded by neighbors that have adopted it, contending with the patriotic/religious draw of Cyrillic. I wonder if something like that will end up being the path for both Bulgaria and Ukraine. And you can probably expect generational turnover to favor the higher-status Roman alphabet as time passes, but it might take roughly a human lifetime for Cyrillic to fade away.
I think both Ukrainians and Bulgarians learn the Latin alphabet at school because English is a mandatory second language (as it is in most of the world).
It is more of a barrier for the foreigners. My native language is Czech and while I don't really understand Ukrainian, it is not that far off (I understand the basic meaning of simple sentences when spoken clearly and slowly).
I can read Cyrillic but only because I am a mathematician by training (it is basically the same as the Greek alphabet plus some 5 or so extra letters), I never actively learned it. And when I say I can read it, it is the sort of reading that kinds in the first grade do, I read words letter by letter. So while it is extremely easy to learn the characters well enough to decipher words, it is harder to learn it well enough to read fluently (or to write).
If Ukrainian (and to a lesser degree even Russian) were written in the Latin alphabet, it would make it easier for some Slavic language speakers. Basically, the effect of Ukrainians switching to the Latin alphabet would be to make it easier to understand for Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Slovenes and Croats (who all use the Latin alphabet for their languages) and harder for Serbs, Bulgarians, Belarusians and Russians.
And it would make easier to learn it well for any speakers of languages which use the Latin alphabet. Harder for those who are not fluent in the Latin alphabet.
But the advantages for Ukraine of this would be minor I think and the costs of switching quite high.
"I suppose the argument is that Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia will occupy that role once their values fully converge with the West. Which does seem to be happening -- the young are much closer towards Western/Hollywood values than the old."
But none of these are actually *East Slavic and Eastern Orthodox* countries. So, Ukraine could be a gay East Slavic and Eastern Orthodox democracy, a truly unique creation! :)
Speaking of self-refuting arguments, how is it possible that "English-language transliterations of Ukrainian words consistently look much worse than their Russian equivalents", but "no one can figure out what distinguishes Ukrainians from Russians"?
My answer for the Confederacy is that the people living there did not want to secede. White men were the only people who got to vote so are the only people whose opinions were recorded in bulk, and they were divided on secession (about 60-40). We can safely assume that black people were much more robustly opposed (80-20 at the very least, likely more like 90-10), easily enough to shift the overall majority the other way (assuming that white women's opinions were similar to white men's; polling never shows the sort of 30-point gender gap that would be necessary for this not to be true).
My position is that self-determination is for any group capable of forming an independent state, but that changes to borders or independence should be done on the basis of the "settled will" of the people making that self-determination, so a narrow vote in a one-off referendum should not generally be adequate. If you can consistently win repeated votes narrowly, or you can win a one-off by a large margin and there isn't evidence (e.g. polling) to show that many people have changed their minds during the independence process, then that would be sufficient.
Self-determination, in my worldview, also applies to internal political boundaries. If California wants to split into two states, then that shouldn't be a matter for non-Californians, if part of Oregon wants to join Idaho, then that is a matter only for the people living in that part of Oregon and the people of Idaho (to decide whether to accept them) - the people of Portland do not have the right to insist that they stay in Oregon.
"Settled will" is partly a transaction-costs issue - if it's too easy to change borders, then people will do it all the time, and changing borders is expensive. The quote is from the Scottish Constitutional Convention (of 1994) and was on the idea that establishing a devolved parliament for Scotland was the settled will of the Scottish people; it gets used by both sides of the independence debate there, both unionists saying that a simple referendum won 51-49 would not represent a settled will for independence, and nationalists claiming that there is a settled will even though they lost a referendum 45-55 because they win elections (which certainly shows that the meaning is contested, but so would anything else be; at least it is a standard that both sides have agreed to measure themselves against).
A good counterargument to the claim that Ukraine is not a proper country and should therefore be subsumed by Russia is the observation that as things stand Ukraine is actually better at being a country than Russia - in that it has a significantly better-functioning democracy (as per e.g. the Democracy Index).
Re Crimea: I think we should never forget about people when talking about entities. If (let's say) 58% of Crimeans wanted it to be a part of Russia and 42% wanted it to be a part of Ukraine, there are still 42% who didn't get what they want. Do the desires of 58% outrank those of 42%?Sometimes, yes, other times, unclear. If 58% wanted to join ISIS, it would be a pretty clear "hell no". Russia is not ISIS but a number of activists were disappeared and murdered after the annexation of Crimea, and overall people certainly lost some rights compared to what they had in Ukraine, so it's maybe in the "unclear" territory. At least, unclear until Russia decided to force the issue.
To be fair, though, Crimean living standards also significantly improved post-annexation, no? So, one would have to weigh the loss of human rights with the improvement in living standards.
Do you think that the Sudetenland and Danzig should NOT have been able to join Nazi Germany in 1938-1939?
> Crimean living standards also significantly improved post-annexation, no?
Do we know it? How?
I confess that I didn't do the research, but I'm not even sure what to consider evidence. Subjective opinion-based polls don't work, anything economy-based that uses average figures can miss the increased inequality.
I know tourism was a huge source of income, and cutting off Ukraine hit it hard, while there's no reason to expect tourism from Russia increasing significantly if at all. (Except maybe artificially.)
> Do you think that the Sudetenland and Danzig should NOT have been able to join Nazi Germany in 1938-1939?
Given that Germany already had Nuremberg laws, and was on the eve of Kristallnacht? Yes, unless Czechs' mistreatment of Germans was comparable. And that's just the first thing I could think of, I'm sure there were Gypsies and communists and gays in Sudetenland.
I don't know much about Danzig but since it was a free city, seems like the conditions which could justify joining Nazi Germany should be even narrower (a threat of annexation by Poland and severe mistreatment of Germans in Poland, perhaps).
Just want to comment on " if you agree they have a right to become independent, then they could become independent and then immediately join Russia" - it is exactly the russian official position It says, that on March 17, 2014 Crimea declared independence and immediately asked Russia to become part of it. The same day Putin wrote an act, that recognized independent Crimea. Next day Russia wrote a treaty with Crimea to let their forces be moved on a peninsula. Then on March 21st, Russia accepted the annexation.
That of course was just a bureaucratic game (though some argue that there was a discussion in Russia about the course of action). But anyway the official Russian position is that Crimea became independent, was recognized by Russia as such, as an independent entity it wrote some treaties with Russia, including the request to join, that was approved in a timely manner.
Noone serious is claiming that nations are pre-existing categories.
But if leadership of people from made-up category hate and want to invade my made-up category, then it makes sense to prepare defense and help ones getting attacked right now.
I live in Barcelona. Plenty of Catalan nationalists think that "the Catalan nation" is a pre-existing category. Much of the craziness we have seen here comes from this terrible starting position. On the second point, obviously! States are legal constructs. And of course they have the right to self-defence. Did you click through to the link? It was an argument that NATO was a much more sophisticated approach than the Treaty of Versailles a generation previously.
It sounds like maybe you're reaching the conclusion that myths around nationhood and peoples are just arbitrary grab-bags of ideas that don't really hold water.
If we run with the idea that all groups, no matter how small, have the right to self determination, then all you need to do is make 'defensive weapons' (i.e. javelin missiles, anti-aircraft batteries, personal kevlar vests, firearms) as cheap as possible, and anyone invading anyone else would face the same kind of nightmare Russia faces in Ukraine, 10 times over. This is exactly what Confucius argued for thousands of years ago, and i think this is the right way way for things to be today.
If small countries get bullied, they will choose to join big countries for protection. If the big countries become run by arrogant assholes and start mandating all kinds of ridiculous things (totally hypothetical!) small groups can break off. Where is the problem in that? Without a right to secession, what reason to big countries have not to bully minority groups?
The right objection to "the south seceded" is, So what? they were going to get economically buried by the north eventually _anyhow_. The north could have opened their gates to runaway slaves, and pissed off northerners could go in there on vigilante raids. That might have been less destructive in the long term, as southerns would see Northern innovations like electricity and refrigeration, and then voluntarily come back to the fold, rather than being forced in, and then, surprise surprise, being all pissy about it.
You can't dominate people into dropping bad ideas. The world has been failing to learn this lesson for hundreds of years. When bad ideas are a problem, you need to let people just go off on their own, instead of trying to crush the bad ideas out of them. If america had declared war on the USSR the universities in the west would still be full of marxists claiming that communism would have worked if america had let it, that the gulags were made up, etc.
Real Texans are the people who don’t want to secede, but want all of y’all to secede so that we can keep the American flag, national anthem, and pledge of allegiance. So I suppose we’re a people, though we’re being inundated by refugees from California.
If everyone in a group wants to secede, they should be able to. (Note that that includes a group of 1.) But 50%+1? Nah.
Imagine Navajo + 0.01% of the richest people seceding despite the 0.01% being against it. Or Alice, Bill Gates and Charlie seceding just to fuck with Bill legally. Or all men in US plus all women in the eastern 70% of states forming the Patriarchic States of Most of America.
What does make sense is using existing representation mechanisms. If Separatistan has its own parliament that can pass local laws according to the laws of Empiregrad, then the Separatistan's parliament can vote to secede from Empiregrad while keeping the legal structure and the material property they already have.
This brings up the second matter: splitting up the stuff.
The only way for a change to be unambiguously good is if everyone involved consents. When ownership is involved, especially land ownership, anyone on Earth can claim being involved.
I don't have a solution, but I believe it should be a combination of
1. Groups forming representations by voting to do so unanimously.
2. Anyone being allowed to leave at any time with everything they own as recognized by the group. This includes smaller groups seceding from larger groups through their representatives deciding to do so.
3. Conflicts over ownership where no consensus ever existed being resolved through realpolitik, possibly with additional international agreements.
Putin consolidated power fighting separatists (like Palpatine, lol) in Chechnya. Ukraine didn't have similar problem at the time, it might be why Ukraine is more democratic than Russia now. If Ukraine repels invasion on her own, Ukraine will likely be less democratic as a result. This invasion might lead to erosion of democracy everywhere.
>I can disagree with Russia’s decision to force the matter with an invasion
Well if Ukraine has a right to assert self-determination militarily against Russia, if Kosovo has the right to assert self determination military against Serbia etc then why can't Crimea/Donbass assert their own self determination militarily with the help of Russia? After all Crimea/Donbass have claimed themselves independent of Ukraine and in response to that Russia stepped in and defended their right to self-determination. So it seems like you're gong to have to accept that Russia implementing Crimea/Donbass' right to self-determination militarily is morally just if you'd like to be consistent.
The problem with neoliberal foreign policy and moral consistency is that they inevitably find themselves in opposition to one another. As you yourself see in this post.
"My opinion is that I’m in favor of the right of self-determination for any region big enough that it’s not inherently ridiculous for them to be their own country."
So, no smaller than Monaco or San Marino? :p My parish is coastal and the motorway runs alongside it rather than through it, meaning we wouldn't be disrupting transport for the rest of Britain *too* much (the railway is another matter). Do we get the right of self-determination, since we could construct a port (really more of a marina) and trade with the rest of the world without needing to continually go through another country?
It wouldn't make sense for us to do so of course, not unless absolutely pushed; there's too many problems with not being part of a currency, customs, and free movement union with our massive neighbour. Which applies to someone declaring their house independent -- all they'd be doing is sentencing themselves to house arrest, since their neighbours have the right to bar them from walking on the street, what with them no longer being a citizen of the country the street belongs to.
The bigger issue is resources. Who gets them? Scotland claims the oil is theirs, but if they have the right to secede so do Orkney and Shetland, and a big big chunk of that oil would cease to be Scotlands. Otoh, this would incentivise the creation of lots of very small states atop vast piles of fuel and minerals, which would be a lot easier to strongarm into giving good deals, so the overall result would probably be the creation of a few thousand millionaires and cheaper commodities. Infrastructure though, that needs to be paid for... if the UK takes on debt to build a railway in Scotland and they leave, who's debt is it?
Both this analysis and Scott's seems to be missing one of the primary reasons that states exist, and should continue to exist. Military might, specifically having enough military power to secure their borders. I think the omission of that fact is because it doesn't fit into the moral framework we would prefer to be true. The very idea of self-determination precludes an outside force from taking their stuff!
Those tiny countries with large resources would be conquered very quickly - as a combination of appealing targets and insufficient strength to repel the attack. Even if no military power was used directly, these places would be colonized and overwhelmed by outsiders trying to get a piece of the resources/wealth for themselves. Does anyone doubt that Taiwan would have been merged with China a long time ago if it had not been for the US intervening?
This doesn't fit into any kind of moral framework, but we can't understand or grapple with international relations and self-determination without accepting the fact that any sufficiently valuable land will be taken away from the inhabitants unless they are strong enough to defend themselves. For that reason, there is a strong incentive for disparate groups to work together and form larger and stronger nations. This is in contention with the desire to parcel out smaller areas and let ethnically or culturally (or name your criteria) homogenous nations that tend to agree on policy and purpose.
The reason that self-determination became a thing to talk about is when extremely divergent and antagonistic nations were jammed together, resulting in social unrest. It became obvious that some groups shouldn't be in the same state, as the gains were outweighed by the losses. We should recognize that self-determination is a practical solution to a problem, not a moral endpoint.
“The Confederacy had every right to secede, because every region that wants to secede has that right - but immediately upon granting them independence, the Union should have invaded in order to stop the atrocity of slavery”
That one would be even more awkward given that there were still 4 slave states that remained loyal to the union. Absent the war there wouldn't have been the same impetus for the emancipation proclamation and rich landowners in those loyal states probably would still have had strong incentive to oppose change.
In that light it's hard to imagine the union invading a foreign country to end slavery... when the union still had slave states.
>(is it meaningful that Crimea wanted to join Russia rather than become independent? I think no; if you agree they have a right to become independent, then they could become independent and then immediately join Russia; everyone agrees independent countries have the right to join other countries if they want)
Once you leave a loophole, everyone will use it. When a country wants to annex a bordering country's province, it'll happen through "self-determination followed by independence followed by joining". This is in fact what formally happened in Crimea; although the referendum called for joining Russia, following the referendum they declared independence, then asked to join Russia literally the next day.
I'll note here that at least for the Sevastopol part of the Crimean referendum (the city of Sevastopol in Crimea had separate governance and a separate referendum for historical reasons), it's ironclad that the referendum was a sham and the results were written in rather than counted. And anyone who understands the easy math point can verify that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#Official_results):
Total registered voters: 306,258
Total votes 274,101: As percentage of registered voters: 89.500029%.
89.5% of 306,258 is 274,100.91
Yes votes: 262,041. As percentage of total voters: 95.60016%
95.6% of 274,101 is 262,040.556
It's probable that the all-Crimea results were falsified in the same way, just not so carelessly as by starting up with the desired percentage and calculating the number of votes.
Yeah. I think if you wanted to argue that Crimea had the right to secede from Ukraine and join Russia you'd still have to question the way it was done. Invading and then legitimating the invasion with a referendum conducted presumably under duress isn't something people want to condone because you can potentially legitimate any invasion that way. That's different from eg, the Scottish referendum or Brexit because in those situations, there was clear oversight as to what was going on.
If there had been a spontaneous independence movement in Crimea and it had managed to pressure the Ukrainian government to allow a vote on independence then I think people internationally would have taken it seriously. On the other hand, the separatists in Donbas weren't invaders but because they immediately moved to militant opposition and did so while Russia was invading Crimea and also receive clear backing and even guidance from the Russian government, they are not seen as a legitimate independence movement but rather Russian puppets.
Say you have a square of 10,000 sq mi called Square City in the country of Gridistan.
Square City's population is 10m people. 100% of these people want to secede.
How much of the surrounding area does it get to take with it?
If the surrounding area is uninhabited?
If the surrounding area is inhabited at the same density, but with zero support for secession? (If it takes a tenth of the next square over it'd still have 90% support!)
If the surrounding area has pockets of support and opposition, where many different possible new borders could be drawn meeting various conditions by skilled artisans of political boundaries?
How should we resolve adversarial gerrymandering fights, between two simultaneously seceding cities, each side proposing incompatible overlapping boundaries?
Maybe that is all too abstract and unrealistic.
II. Other hard cases (which are merely unfair caricatures of global events):
- Sudan 1 (oppressed minority secedes)
- Sudan 2 (region that controls all the natural resources secedes, improving per capita GDP while impoverishing husk state)
- Sudan 3 (region with a mix of these motives secedes)
- Pakistan (ethnic minority secedes to avoid oppression, calcifying intergroup rivalries, ultimately raising the risk of global thermonuclear war)
- Bangladesh (in a world where Bangladeshi independence was 100% fueled by Indian propaganda as a power play to divide a regional rival)
- US State division movements (eg, half of California, in order to rejoin the US as a separate State)
- US State division (but favoring of the opposite political party that you thought about last time)
- Catalonia (as a tactic to renegotiate its tax obligations)
- Every part of Greece all at once (as a tactic to dissolve sovereign debt)
- A ring around a country's military base to extort the country into paying for access
- An area surrounding leased (military bases) to void those contracts
- An area surrounding national parks to open them up for private development
- Kurdistan (in a world where the Kurds are currently oppressed, but where independence would immediately spark a brutal regional conflict involving competitive retaliatory genocide)
- The Baltics (from evil USSR)
- The bizarro-Baltics (from an alternate reality utopian USSR)
- Transnistria
- Crimea
- Vast stretches of the barely inhabited Australian outback
- Puerto Rico (in a hypothetical future referendum with incredibly low turnout, <30% of eligible voters)
- Unlucky Saskatchewan 2100 (after yearly referendums, voting in favor with a 1/100 fluke after 99 years)
- Finicky Saskatchewan (a year later, suffering buyers' remorse)
- Extremely finicky Saskatchewan (the following year, suffering FOMO)
- All those tiny islands - Pitcairn, Falklands
- Sparsely occupied areas suddenly filled with a religious group or liberatarians
I don't have a simple meta-level framework that decides all those cases in a sensible way. Once we introduce object-level considerations, like with evil USSR and utopia USSR, or the Confederacy and the North, I really struggle to consider anything else. Maybe that's a feature not a bug.
Regions fleeing from oppression good, for some definitions of oppression. Everybody else gets an eyebrow raise.
For those that are curious: the 17 pre-DLC playable countries in Civ 6 are America, Arabia, Brazil, China, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, Norway, Rome, Russia, Scythia, Spain and Sumer.
So the US gets to invade Canada and Mexico, Brazil takes all of South America and Egypt takes all of Africa. The only continents left with more than one country are Europe and Asia.
I don't know what happens to Australia, I guess we just have to move everyone there to one of the _real_ continents.
It also has City States, which is going to do weird things if we take it into account for this rule (ie. Brussels gets to be a nation while Belgium does not).
Nations are pretty much always born from war and opposition to an external enemy. Perhaps Russia was not that different from Ukraine once. It's pretty hard to argue now.
And if Putin wanted to control Ukraine he should have kept better control over the mafiosi looting the military.
If a massive genocide has been committed against your people in the last several generations by the power that seeks to rule you (or is ruling you), it seems reasonable for that population to seek self-determination if only as a means of self-preservation, no matter how remote a recurrence of said genocide may appear. cf the argument for the existence of Israel.
And so it goes without saying that the descendants of the survivors of the Holodomor would have a right to self-determination in reaction to what was perpetrated on their ancestors.
- Change of status quo - Any major change in boundaries do not just impact the people living in that particular region, but also people of the whole nation. If a nation has invested a great deal in a particular region, and suddenly that region wants to secede once they reach a certain stage of development, then what will be the incentive for a nation state to invest in a lesser developed region unless they have a certain guarantee that the region will continue to be part of the nation.
- How we define people - Is it a substantial percentage, a simple majority, or an overwhelming majority that defines people. Is it only people who have been citizens since many generations, as what if there has been a large immigrant population that comes to a region from a different nation, should they have the right to change the destiny of the region.
- How we define willingness to self-determine - Suppose 60% of people prefer independence but are otherwise okay being part of the bigger nation, whereas 40% people strongly want to be part of the bigger nation, as they feel threatened about their rights in the new independent nation.
- Decentralisation - Whether a nation has a highly centralised state where regions do not have any freedom versus a case where regions have substantial freedoms and autonomy. Regional autonomy makes the case for secession weaker as it is anyway closer to sovereignity (absolute sovereignity is a myth even at global level).
- Incorporation - On what terms was the region incorporated into the bigger nation. Was it through popular support, or through force. And once you incorporate in a nation, there can be terms which will have to be mutually followed failing which the region can make a case for secession.
I don't think there can be absolute factors that can determine the case for self-determination. When we talk of democracy, it isn't just about a permanent irreversible majoritarian vote which can do anything, but about several other parameters. The very big changes require a higher criteria for change.
Whatever UN treaties says about self determination that's not actually the global post cold war norm. In reality it is a pragmatic decision to favor freezing current borders permanently. The rational being that any benefits of 'better' borders is trumped by the massive downsides of a world where countries regularly try to conquer their neighbors. Kosovo is certainly an outlier in this regard.
I'd argue that states have not just the right, but the duty to prevent secession and annexation. Statehood is a contract in which the state agrees to provide its citizens with certain privileges, like security, in exchange for certain services, like paying taxes and being on juries. If a bunch of citizens suddenly find themselves living on foreign soil due to changing borders, the state can no longer hold up its end of the bargain for those citizens.
In the case of annexation, obviously the state has to try to prevent it, since that's pretty much the definition of providing security. But I'd argue that even in the case of secession, the state has to fight for the sake of citizens living in separatist regions who still want to be part of the state. Even if they're a minority -- even if there's only one person -- the state has to try to fulfill the contract or it loses legitimacy. (It's tempting to say that the state should fight against secession even if *everybody* in the region wants it in order to maximally provide for the loyal regions, but that's a slightly different argument and I'm not prepared to go full realist yet.)
Note that this *does* allow for peaceful/diplomatic land exchanges. The state can sign away a piece of land as long as the treaty or whatever has some way for its citizens to access what they're owed, e.g. through resettlement or some kind of shared jurisdiction. It just means that military land seizures have to be resisted.
"Statehood is a contract in which the state agrees to provide its citizens with certain privileges, like security, in exchange for certain services,"
I would think this was a self-serving post-hoc rationalization with obvious contradictions were it not for the fact that this is explicitly how all states have come into being in the history of eternity.
Well, gosh. If anything is making me fire up "A Nation Once Again", it's that Russian tweet. I've never played those Civilization games but looking it up, we're not in Civilization I-V but we are in VI, so what side do we come down on?
Hmmm. Large (former) empire to the east which formerly owned you is hanging on to part of your national territory and claiming you were never distinct from them anyway, you're just like them, and they've taken opportunities over the years to hint very strongly that you should move back home, as it were. However, back when they did own you, they did *not* treat you as 'just like us'.
EDIT: Also, if we're talking about rights to secede and 'what makes you different, you look the same, you speak the same language", let me slip in this quote from a Sherlock Holmes story published in 1892:
“Then I trust that you at least will honour me with your company,” said Sherlock Holmes. “It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”
Come on, America, drop this whole 'revolution' silliness and rejoin the Commonwealth with your colonial siblings! I'm sure Canada would be very happy to welcome you in!
> I've never played those Civilization games but looking it up, we're not in Civilization I-V but we are in VI?
You actually aren't, as far as I know. The Irish are in Call to Power (which is an off-brand civilization clone), but not in any of the main games.
The link you provided looks like it's some kind of weird stub page that I think someone forgot to update after VI came out. This page has a table with which civilizations are in which games:
So we're not in Civilization, which according to this guy means we should be "put out of our misery". I suppose that means having Putin roll in and take us over?
I think you’re doing something akin to looking past the sale on this. Would Russia attack Ukraine if Ukraine were, in fact, a part of Russia and subject to its command? Would Russia need to send in the troops if the two entities were in fact one country? If the federal government wants Iowa to do something, it passes a law, or a regulation, and enforces it, or gets the courts to enforce it. It doesn’t bomb Des Moines and send the Marines across the river from Illinois to shoot up Bettendorf and Davenport. Conversely, if Iowa declared itself independent from the US, Biden might send in the military, if he could remember what day it is and where he left the army. But in the end, you only send your tanks into, and fire your rockets into, another country that is … another country you want to defeat, punish and/or take over. You don’t invade yourself. The invasion, absent Ukraine declaring unilateral independence, is de facto proof that Ukraine is a separate country. Bonus argument: The 3-4 million UKEs who starved to death when Stalin forcibly collectivized agriculture is all the justification Ukraine needs to be left alone by the pesky Russians.
"Realistically “people” (like “obscenity” and everything else) are a kind of know-it-when-you-see-it combination of all these factors. I hate this. It means any would-be conqueror can say “come on, this place I want to conquer isn’t a real ‘people’” - and then you need to litigate annoying questions"
No you don't! This is why we have norms!
I heard Mike Munger relate a parable that is useful here...
Imagine a town where, when two cars reach an intersection, the occupants get out to debate and decide who gets to go first. This might lead to more just outcomes in some sense (the couple heading the hospital to give birth get to go before the guy heading to the coffee shop) but it's clearly sub-optimal for everyone to litigate every single case. Everyone would get to their destination faster by relying on norms, even when those norms violate some concept of justice.
Over the last century or two, pretty strong norms have emerged against one country annexing another, especially by force. Russia is violating that norm in a big way. They *might* be able to construct some sort of justification for it. Doesn't matter. That way lies madness.
I love A.C.T. I love to watch how a bunch of (I think mostly) liberal, apparently educated, earnest, and (mostly) rational people read what Scott lays down and then have full discussions as much as the media allows on that subject. A group of at least bright people having a nearly always civil discussion on topics that are relevant or interesting.
But this one looks like it’s showing the educational biases of the readership. I have a very different outlook than most of the readership here, but think I can contribute here at least as far as suggesting source material that helps answer the question of ‘who gets self-determination?’.
I’m surprised more poli-sci majors didn’t jump in earlier. Or maybe that’s a very small subset of Scott’s readership. I’ve only got through about 10% of the comments, so at the risk of arrogantly assuming no one has already made my suggestions, here are some reading suggestions to fill out your comprehension on what can and will determine who gets self determination if not just who should.
Sam Huntington established a reputation for seeing a problem and paradigm (and paradigm shift) before anyone else, publishing a book on it, getting pilloried for it, and then everyone declaring him right for it ten to twenty years later. His ‘Clash of Civilizations and the remaking of the world order’ (I think that’s the title) is the work predicting this particular conflict in most of its’ particulars. Excellent work.
Philip Bobbit’s, ‘The Shield of Achilles’ is an astoundingly good work in which he explains the rise of the state, what creates their legitimacy, how the earn and keep it, and how one form of legitimacy gives way to another. Bobbit uses the interplay of strategy and constitutions to explain why states make it, rise, fall, suffer civil wars, have epochal wars, invade their neighbors, change strategies, and gives you a better, deep history of the past 500 years than almost anyone else. Oh yeah and he basically predicts September 11th, 2001 and the response to it before it happened all with what I’d call a much more mature and thought out, realistic version of Hegel’s dialectic than anyone who has applied the concept of evolution to a state has yet achieved. Fantastic work. Changed my life.
Really those two would do most of the work. But for fun and useful fillers, I’d also suggest David S Landes ‘The Weath and Poverty of Nation: Why some are so Rich and some so Poor.’ And James Scott’s, ‘seeing like state’, ‘against the grain’ and, ‘the art of not being governed’.
I WILL read to the end of the comments at a later time. I haven’t had the time to do so yet, I’m a deputy sheriff and work 70-80 hours a week. 40 hours of that is currently the midnight shift in the cleanest midwestern jail that ever existed, so I’ll catch up then. The other 30 to 40 hours for the next few days I’ll have no time, but I’ll try to check in.
I’m going to try to read to the end and then perhaps post a comment on this subject at the end. I’m sorry it might be a few days though. However, in the meantime, how many of you would be willing to use violence to get/keep a state? Or your own sovereign country? I swim everyday in a very different pool than most of you, so I’m curious to know how many of Scott’s readers would be willing to die for their beliefs. (Scott too if you read this) also for what else?
At the risk of not really derailing the point of the conversation, a sovereign state does need people willing to die for it, so what would you do it for? I’ll try to expand on the necessity of it, why it’s relevant not only for the question of Ukrainian sovereignty, but also for our political/constitutional order here, and believe it or not, the Rawlsian tie in if I can.
I enjoyed this comment. I will read some reviews of the Bobbitt book and weigh reading the book itself.
Also, it's nice to see someone from an underrepresented career. If you were to post more about what you know about your prisoners in an open thread, I think it could be eye-opening.
Some suggestions: If you know a prisoner is charged with assault, can you guess whether it was premeditated or not based on their demeanor? How well do they weigh the risk of getting caught against the reward (whatever it may be) of various crimes? Have you held mock presidential elections, like schools hold? If you ask them to design a society 'that keeps people like you out of jail,' what sorts of suggestions do you get? Could they form the working class of a new Australia, or do they seem too different from 19th-century British convicts?
Thanks! When I get a chance, I'm going to try to answer your questions. With this preview first; You will have the delight in having your actual expectations overturned. Your questions tell me you don't know a lot of inmates/prisoners (probably a good thing) buuuut you probably aren't using a good mental model of how or why people commit crimes. Or for the most part, why they get caught and get prosecuted.
I'd reply now, but I'm knee deep in helping resolve yet another temporary staffing mini-crisis that we suffer currently. As you can imagine, it's VERY difficult to enough people to become cops right now, who are actually qualified to do the job, and keep them in your organization.
I'll probably write this thing in word and then email it to you. I'm happy to answer anything, it's just cramming it into my schedule that will slow me down. Having actually made a commitment though, you WILL receive it. Farewell for now and thank you again! It will be nice to have a small writing project.
"A language", goes the wise old saying, "is a dialect with a successful army." It is why the language of Paris is now "French" and Norman, Savoyard, and so many others are just dialects. The current semi-stalemate suggests that both Russian and Ukrainian are now languages.
Reading the comment from Karlin's blog brings me back to 1914. Who was a nation (and what that entitled you to) was a big question. Prior to World War I, many Serbs believed that all the South Slavs were actually Serbs--who would realize it with proper education. The assassins of Archduke Francis Ferdinand (not so covertly backed by elements of the Serbian government) wanted to free the southern Slavs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to join with their brethren. The Russian Empire, meanwhile, saw itself as Big Brother to Little Brother Serbia and backed the Serbian government in its refusal to be punished by Austria-Hungary for its part in the assassination. Everyone mobilized, and once you'd mobilized, you didn't want to be caught by your opponent going first, so WW I.
What Serbian nationalists considered Greater Serbia now constitutes parts of 11 countries--Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary--and all of the present country of Serbia.
I'm not sure if I have much to add that isn't common knowledge - especially to any Ukrainian nationalists in this group, but as a US citizen that spent 2 years living in 3 different regions of Ukraine a couple decades ago, I feel like I have some perspective. It was totally my experience that regions further South and East in Ukraine were both ethnically and culturally aligned with both Russia and Ukraine. Regions to the West were very Ukrainian nationalistic, to the point that you would offend people by speaking Russian with them (I could usually understand Ukrainian, but I trained in Russian - though I learned to adopt some of the speech patterns used by seemingly all Ukrainians -e.g. using a soft 'h' sound instead of a 'g' sound).
Whether speaking in Russian or in English, I've found in interesting that we (particularly older people) speak of 'the Ukraine'. In Russian you would say 'on' Ukraine, rather than 'in' Ukraine. I believe that the name Ukraine has the same roots as the word for border or edge. So we say 'the border' when we talk about Ukraine. The border of what? Little linguistic things like this reinforce the conceptual idea that Ukraine is part of something else - that something else being centralized in Russia.
It was also my experience that many of my friends and distant family from the U.S. (again especially older people) assumed a) that I was living in a part of Russia, known as the Ukraine - probably strongly influenced by Soviet-Era memories and b) that it must be cold everywhere in Ukraine all of the time - I spent a lot of my time around Odessa, which I can tell you, is nothing like the Siberian image many people form when they imagine 'greater Russia'.
While in Ukraine, I learned about the horrendous enforced famines during Stalin's time. I have since remained convinced that cultural and ethnic Ukrainians have every reason to desire independence, free from despotic governments to the East.
One of my childhood memories is of playing "Risk" and finding it odd that there was a territory called "Ukraine", when all other references that I'd come across called it "the Ukraine".
There's a persistent movement in Oregon for a lot of the rural, eastern counties to leave the state and join up with Idaho to make a "Greater Idaho". Personally, I (who lives in Portland) think this is a fantastic idea and have a lot of trouble coming with arguments against allowing states to reform themselves as they see fit, assuming the affected peoples are willing.
If anyone has some convincing arguments otherwise, I'd like to hear them, but my suspicion is that every argument is politically motivated (e.g. they can't leave because it would cost a blue state electoral votes/house seats, etc).
I'll bite. In reverse order (I don't have anything to add with 1):
5) We, as successors to the Northern US, claim the right to invade The South for those political reasons mentioned (destroying slavery, as was supposed to have been complete sixty or so years before the Civil War) and because they opened fire first on the Star of the West at what became the Battle of Fort Sumter.
4) We can tend to the question of Crimea after the current invasion is over, through peaceful political means, after Putin's influence is sufficiently flushed from the area. We can also deny Putin's right to conquer Crimea by simply stating, "Fuck terrorists."
3) Your street *does* have a right to self-determination. Any entity that is large enough to survive on its own can claim that. Your street also has that right by way of representation through your local and state governments.
I would steer away from claiming that any entity large enough to survive on its own long enough for the ink to dry on a new compact that absorbs it into another entity holds the right of self-determination. It gets messy and leads to constant squabbling, and no one wants to be bogged down by "what do a sizable enough swath of the citizens of Bakers Street want this week". How much one can get others to care about their cause is maybe the most important ingredient of self-determination.
2) A people is a people if they say they're a people and can convince enough members of outgroups to say as much.
Just to point out that independence referenda often do post "implausibly enthusiastic" results:
- Gibraltar was 99% against Britain sharing sovereignty with Spain.
- The Falkland Islands voted 99.8% to retain their current status.
- Catalonia voted 92% in favour of independence (albeit this one in a contested plebiscite).
- Bougainville voted 98% for independence from PNG.
This doesn't mean that we should necessarily trust the Crimean result more, but just that big wins alone here don't carry the usual signal of tampered results.
Great oceans, common roots and characteristics. Is the western hemisphere the territory of one people? What stands in the way other than lack of a consciousness of being such?
Good overview which illuminates some of the ethical and practical messiness.
Random thought:
Any region large enough to make a reasonable country has an implied right of self-determination BUT NOT when the principal motivating factor is denial of human rights to a minority.
Russians don't actually appear to believe that "Ukrainian is not a real language." We know this because "making Russian an official language of Ukraine" is a point of negotiation for them.
But if Ukrainian isn't a real language, then Russian is already the official language of Ukraine!!
You can be unhappy about a legal distinction even if you see it as a difference of dialects rather than languages.
For an example that illustrates the "Ukrainian is not a real language" position, imagine that Alabama declared "Southern American English" to be its official language. This might be a nonsense position. But you are still likely to be upset about it if it means that children are only taught spelling rules along the lines of "tawk" and "bidness", or grammar rules that say the pronouns are "Ah" and "Y'all".
Also, even if a Southern accent isn't its own language, it's not something that you can just start speaking, so it would be unfair if people who couldn't do it got paid at lower rates.
I think that there is more of a difference between Russian and Ukrainian than that. But certainly (Edit: or maybe not certainly??) it *started out* as a regional dialect before the Russian language got standardized; Ukrainian nationalism was then one of the driving forces to give the Ukrainian language its own identity, in ways that originally resembled the Southern accent example I give above. It's hard to find unbiased opinions about how much this succeeded.
Yes, clearly a different language. Probably linguistically [meant to write lexically] closer to Polish.
"Due to heavy borrowings from Polish, German, Czech and Latin, early modern vernacular Ukrainian (prosta mova, "simple speech") had more lexical similarity with West Slavic languages than with Russian or Church Slavonic. By the mid-17th century, the linguistic divergence between the Ukrainian and Russian languages had become so significant that there was a need for translators during negotiations for the Treaty of Pereyaslav, between Bohdan Khmelnytsky, head of the Zaporozhian Host, and the Russian state."
It's still linguistically closer to Russian. A set of vocabulary does not a language make, and Polish et al. split off from Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian earlier than the three did from each other. That said, they are different languages due to their phonological and grammatical differences.
The linguistic argument I've heard from the other side goes as follows: fairly late in history (around the mid-18th century, when people are beginning to write books encoding Russian grammar) there is a continuum of dialects on the way from Moscow to Kiev.* So there couldn't have been a distinct language at the time.
I'm not a linguist myself, so I feel some amount of helplessness about competing hypotheses, but I'd like to hear your take on it. Is the claim about a continuum of dialects just false? Or is it correct, but irrelevant? Or something more complicated?
*As a side note, I don't see what's so bad about "Kyiv" as a spelling, but while we're at it, can we have "Moskva"?
Assuming we're talking about the same thing, speaking as a former linguist, a few decades ago our name for that language was "Maltese Arabic". I actually did some research on it as an undergraduate. It is a weird and interesting language, but quite definitely Arabic in basic structure. Much like how, even though English has a lot of French-Latin and Latin-Latin vocabulary, it's at its core a Germanic language (Low-low-low German).
In a sense, there's a continuum of dialects stretching from Swiss German, to Standard German, to Dutch, to English. And we don't hesitate to call those "different languages". The relevant catchphrase in linguistics is "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy", and that's a joke not just about the arbitrariness of categories, but also about the political pressure to put different labels onto what are scientifically identical phenomena.
See also, China, where a lot of what are linguistically-speaking separate languages, are politically referred to as dialects of a single language. They do share a fascinating writing system. And my understanding is that because of that writing system, and because of recurring imperial pressure, there's been drift toward similar grammar and a sharing of basic vocabulary, but the substrates remain fairly distinct. Probably someone at the Language Log blog could answer detailed questions about Chinese.
"For an example that illustrates the "Ukrainian is not a real language" position, imagine that Alabama declared "Southern American English" to be its official language."
So what about AAVE or Ebonics? Heavily influenced by Southern American English as spoken by the white inhabitants, even if it takes influences from African languages.
I see a section of people scolding online that white people should not use terms like "bae" because they are culturally appropriating or stealing African-Americans' language or the likes.
"However, a minority of linguists argue that the vernacular shares so many characteristics with African creole languages spoken around the world that it could have originated as its own English-based creole or semi-creole language, distinct from the English language, before undergoing a process of decreolization"
From the "what's the difference between Russian and Ukrainian?" argument, there's the counter-example (or joke) about "Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries", which sounds not very different from "Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk"
There was a joke in Poland in the 60s, 70s, and 80s: Kid asks his parent, are the Russians are brothers or are friends. Parent response: they must be are brothers, because you can choose your friends.
An important part of the confederacy example is that secession would have failed a referendum in nearly every Southern State *if* all adults (or all males) could vote. There were few states where secession enjoyed support of the vast majority of white people, and most of the states that seceded pre-Sumter were >40% slaves!
In the 1960s and '70s there was a mini-movement among progressives to have New York City secede from New York State. The complaint was that conservative and Republican upstaters were blocking progressive actions that non-conservative non-Republican city residents wanted and needed to take. Besides, city people were different; the others were basically hicks.
Of course, the movement went nowhere, partly because another group of progressives thought what was necessary was not more "fragmentation" but a "regional approach" encompassing the entire Tri-State Area. A new state of Greater New York would cut loose far upstate but include southwestern Connecticut and northern New Jersey. Optimally, southern New Jersey would become part of a Greater Philadelphia.
Over here in the Pacific Northwest, there's the evergreen notion of Cascadia. My preferred tongue-in-cheek version is of Inner Cascadia, consisting of the verdant, west-of-the-Cascades bits of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, and Outer Cascadia, pushing out to the watersheds of all the rivers, basically to the Rockies, which would be our lebensraum. We'd exert some sort of cultural dominion over it, adjusting for how the Nazis valued having lots of children, while we Inner Cascadians don't so much. Probably it would be more along the lines of "cultural genocide", taking their children from them and inculcating them with our values through some form of compulsory education combined with media saturation...
Lebensraum? You'll need some place to run to when the big tsunami hits. I some times think that if the west coast was "discovered" today, the American and Canadian governments would declare it unacceptably dangerous and turn the whole place into a nature preserve.
This is not exactly tongue in cheek, this is what Seattleites actually want to do to the groups that make their "excellent" Washington Wine and effectively their entire real economy. The new progressive zeitgeist up there is decidedly feudal, as opposed to the older union-democrat-low-tax utopia it was in 1998.
I personally support the idea that any group united by territory has a right to self-determination. The current problem that I see with it is existence of authoritarian regimes: if democratic countries allowed its regions to secede, then, I assume, they would become militarily weaker than autocratic countries that would never allow this. So I think that when/if all the major world powers liberalise (including China, Russia, etc) and stop being aggressive, then it would be the point when it would be safe to allow all the minor regions to secede en masse.
Another point that was raised a lot in the comments is who gets all the oil and other minerals when secession occurs. It reminds me of the comments on the Georgism posts, where people asked, why should it be applied on the country scale rather than the world scale? Well, in combining an answer to both those questions, I can formulate my utopian vision: any region has a right to secede, and money received from natural resources are distributed as UBI among all the peoples of all the countries who signed up the allow-seceding-and-embrace-georgism deal (including all the resulting parts of the country which was thus split apart).
A "people". I think Vonnegut's concept of granfalloon probably nails it. You can google it.
As Msgr. Baroni would suggest as important questions: who am I? And who are we?
The question involves commitments to democracy, due process, non-violence and pluralism.
And while we search for our karrass, our necessary granfalloons (the temporary salve to alienation) must be as benign as possible.
On February 21, 2022, I wrote the following:
"If people in Donetsk and Luhansk really don't want to be part of Ukraine, how do we handle that? And is peace better than war? Generally speaking don't we have to say: yes?
If Texas wants to leave US, I am inclined to let them.
I'm up for letting Tibetans and Uighurs in China and Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Iran vote, too. Maybe Kalingrad/Königsberg, Taiwan, and Hong Kong want to be independent. Let Scotland and Quebec decide for themselves?
What mechanisms of pluralism and due process do we have to peacefully and justly organize the granfalloon of the nation state?
Maybe all borders should be peacefully up for grabs every 30 years?
I am even inclined to believe that an AI might do a better job organizing geographic units of political organization.
Smaller states really don't need militaries either.
And if smaller states want to organize in larger confederations like EU or US, ok. Maybe NAFTA would have worked better if the individual states and territories of Canada and Mexico could have joined the US?"
The case of the Falkland Islands is also interesting. Great Britain took them in 1833 illegaly, by expeling the Argentines who lived there at the time, but (all?) those who live there today wish to remain British. What should be honored? Their restoration to Argentina becuase the Island was taken by what can be described as theft? or to honor the wishes of the descendants of the thieves and keep it British?
(BTW, I tend to think that the Islanders wishes is more important, but I can see how this would make Argentineans upset)
The LSE article doesn't go into the details of what was happening in Crimea before the "for-the-next-120-years" bit. But in practice I think that Russia's 1783 annexation of Crimea was way more justified than the 2014 one, even if no self-determination was involved at all: as a political entity, the Crimean Khanate was basically a 300-year operation of kidnapping Russian villagers into Ottoman slavery.
I feel like neither side really wants to remember this history. Putin doesn't, because he wants to say that Crimea was 100% Russian all along; his opposition doesn't, because it doesn't put Crimea's non-Russian history in a good light.
There is really no discernable consistency to the US approach. Kosovo wants independence from Serbia? Great, we support that! Serbian enclaves in Kosovo want to break away and join Serbia? No way man!
The idea is, I think, that a people shouldn't have to justify it self in front of the world if they want to secede from a country. Just as we shouldn't legally force someone to justify him/herself if they want to end their marriage.
Overall I agree with this argument, but I think when we are doing it we are surreptitiously making an analogy between the rights of a people and the rights of an individual person. The problem is that this analogy breaks down easily, for example, because individuals within a group may want to use their rights in conflicting ways.
In the Crimea example, even if the Russian speaking majority wanted to secede Ukraine and join Russia, does that give them the right to force the Ukrainian minority to do so? When we talk about the right to self-determination of the people of Crimea we are sweeping that conflict under the rug.
Here is a good rule to follow: Every region and every city in the world should have the right to self-determination, except when such desire for "self-determination" is actually just a smokescreen for a neighbouring imperialism.
So:
Yes to the independence of:
- Kurds
- Chechens
- Basques
- Quebecois
- Catalans
No to the independence of:
- Sudetenland (German nazi imperialism)
- Donbas, South Ossetia, Crimean (Russian imperialism)
- Bosnian Serbs or Kraina Serbs (Serb imperialism)
- Kosovo (Albanian imperialism)
Yes to the independence of Texas from the United States *now*.
No to the independence of Texas from Mexico back in the 19th century (American imperialism)
In practice the two things are usually not hard to distinguish at all. "We want to control our own destiny" vs "We want the motherland to grow as big as possible, incidentally including us" tend to be two very different moods and attitudes: isolationist vs imperialist.
The people in Crimea currently have even *less* self-determination than they did before. They can't even elect their own regional governor after all. Even speaking in favour of secession from Russia is a 5-years-in-jail crime.
Similarly, Nazi Germany was all in favour of German populations in *other* nations seceding (Sudetenland), but obviously it wasn't supportive of the right of anyone to secede from its own empire.
It's too bad Crimea didn't have a realistic option of "we want to be Russian, but we don't want to be part of *Putin's* Russia". (Though who knows if they would have taken it.)
This article brushed on, but didn't explicitly state, the pure utilitarian form of determining the right to statehood: that a group of people has the right to become a state if this would increase overall well-being. (And this comes with all of the potential problems of utilitarianism, of course.)
One could even assign a high "well-being value" to "if people *want* to be a sovereign nation, it's good that they *are* a sovereign nation", and then you arrive at something really close to Scott's "people should be allowed to secede whenever they want to", but filter out, say, an evil secret society populating an island and wanting to become a state in order to build nukes and destroy the world, since that would be net-negative.
I'm not sure this is the best way to define the right to statehood, but it seems to be _at least_ as good as:
> But to what end? Do we really need another mediocre Slavic country?
> [...]
> Where a state departs from this, it should be to realize some kind of interesting, cool, and distinct concept.
This is optimizing for diversity of government styles, which would be very interesting in a game and disastrous in real life. Intuitively, the large majority of state-space is probably terrible to live in. Also, in what sense is Ucrain "mediocre"? Would this person be dissatisfied with their microwave oven because it's just like most other people's microwave ovens? Or glad about it, because that means it works?
Anyway, changing the subject:
> (should the Union have invaded Brazil too, for the same reason?)
Brazilian here: yes. Yes it should have. Brazil was the last american country to abolish slavery, and both we and the world are so much worse for it.
It strikes me as strange that international recognition of Ukraine, especially by Russia, wasn't addressed as a potentially decisive factor. Maybe it's not relevant to the question in this case, but that's an argument that should be made explicitly.
From my perspective, people can disagree about nationhood, but Ukraine is unambiguously its own state. Russia lost the right to send in troops (even from its own perspective) when it recognized Ukraine. Russia has no casus belli to justify invasion of an independent state, so the international community (or at least the parts that recognize Ukraine) should condemn the invasion. Is there an important unanswered question, beyond that?
A possible counterargument to point IV: A caveat in support for large bodies of people being able to arbitrarily self-determine while coherently denying Russia the right to annex Crimea could be that while the majority does want to join, the subtantial minority that do not suffer badly, probably more per individual than what is gained by those in favour. This could be thought of as a 'transaction cost' but it could also be viewed more fundamentally = these people have just as much right to self-determination as anyone else, so maybe instead of a mere majority, or even supermajority being needed for legitimate seccession, there needs to be an absence of any large group of people whose own interest and wills would be violated by it.
I think it’s more productive to view the moral problem from a different angle: not whether a group has a right to secede, but whether an aggressor has a right to make war. Whether Ukraine has a right to independence or no, the fact is that they were independent and Putin declared war on them. Whether starting this war was just is the more salient question: after all, a thief may take property from me that is by rights mine, but if I respond by cutting out his tongue most people would consider me in the wrong regardless.
The Catholics are just about the only ones I know who have a cut and dried system for determining whether a war is just or not. According to Dr. Feser the current guidelines are as follows:
At one and the same time:
- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
- there must be serious prospects of success;
- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
Russia clearly fails to meet requirements 1, 2, and 4. Ukraine was agressing nobody, and potentially joining NATO someday is not “lasting, grave, or certain” harm to Russia. Russia has not exhausted non-violent options, and the death and destruction caused by the war seems far graver than what would have happened without it. Ukraine, in contrast, does arguably meet the requirements to justly fight back. The only ones in question for them are 3 and 4, though 3 was much more in question at the start of the war than today.
The thing we want to stop is unjust wars, so focusing on when war is justified overall is more important then whether a country has a right to self determination. That can be part of the calculus, but it’s not the whole.
Well, this is the problem when you imagine everything in life, or social life, can be litigated by words, and decided by cool principle -- and then, even more implausibly, that everyone can or would go along with this.
A "people" is -- whoever decides they are. A "country" is -- whatever people decide they are *and* have the grit and strength to defy any attempts to prove the contrary.
Id est, the South proved it was *not* a country becauase they failed to win the Civil War. The Ukrainians I would say are in the process of proving they *are* a country, because they're kicking Russian ass (and not just, or perhaps not even primarily, militarily).
Of course this all sounds icky to people who freak out at the thought of violence, at least direct physical violence, but it actually has a deeply ethical central core, which is that matters of social identity are to be decided by the people concerned themselves, and not by anyone else, and certainly not by any rickety contraption of an intellectual algorithm invented by lawyers. Matters of family and tribe, of social identity, are deeply emotional, and quite often people don't even know themselves how they feel about it until it's put to the test[1]. Where violence, or the possibility of violence, comes in is that this is the ultimate and only pure test of (how many people feel this way) x (their intensity of feeling), which are the key metrics.
We certainly can and should try to resolve these question without people actually being killed, the way animals prove to each other who *would* win a fight without actually fighting, through displays and whatnot. Arguably this is already part of the reason for patriotic displays, cheering Your Guys on at the Olympics or World Cup, national holidays with big marches showing off your military might. Either this signaling didn't go right in the Russian-Ukrianian case, or else feelings are too closely matched for at least the Russian side to clearly see the outcome that is now unfolding.
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[1] One would guess that not a few Ukrainians only realized how they felt about their Ukrainian identity when the Russian shells started falling.
I think the main reason why people are supportive of Ukrainian independence and would be opposed to eg Texan independence is because Ukraine is already independent and Texas is not. Russia is being forced to overthrow an established 30 year old government to integrate Ukraine into Russia. If Texas were to attempt to secede, the Union government would not have to do that. If, in some alternate world, Texas were to achieve independence and remain so for 30 years and then the US attempted to forcibly integrate it on the basis of shared history and culture, then the world would likely be opposed to that. So, yeah, we don't have to answer the question of Ukrainian nationhood to answer the question of whether Russia is justified here. Even if Ukrainians 100% self identified as ethnic Russians, Russia would still be in the wrong.
That said, the reason people keep falling back to the Ukrainian nationhood question is because Ukrainian identity has been a genuine issue for so long. There is a long history of Ukrainians attempting to assert an identity separate from Russia and of Russians attempting to suppress that identity. Ukraine and Russia have a lot of shared history and a similar culture, but there is also a lot of conflict between them up to and including genuine atrocities. The conflict surrounding Ukrainian identity helps to create and reinforce that same identity and also serves as one of the motives that many Ukrainians have for wanting to have a separate state. So even if Ukrainian nationhood isn't want gives Ukraine the right to having a separate state, it's definitely part of what makes many of them want a separate state.
Yeah that "shared culture" argument reminded me unpleasantly of slave-owner arguments pre 1861 that their slaves didn't really *want* to be free, on account of how much they "shared" in the culture of the slave-owning family. Why, Mammy is almost like my own daughter, she's eaten in my kitchen, we've cried together over the troops ruining the crops marching through them, I've given her my very own leftover hardly worn clothes to wear! (And the master gave Mammy's 16-year-old daughter her very own half-white baby, but we don't talk so much about that.)
Those people were in some cases deeply shocked to learn how much they were hated. I wouldn't be surprised if some Russians were deeply shocked to learn how much *they* were hated, despite this "shared history."
Pretty decent writeup, except for the part where the present nation of Ukraine is made of up a whole lot of Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Jews and Russians - not just linguistically but ethnically and territorially.
Quote Ukrainian Unquote is a large, even majority subset of the nation of Ukraine at present but is by no means, all of it.
The most rabid oblasts hosting far righters in Ukraine, in fact, were Poland between WW1 and WW2.
“The Confederacy had every right to secede, because every region that wants to secede has that right - but immediately upon granting them independence, the Union should have invaded in order to stop the atrocity of slavery”
The Union could have simply offered the South independence in exchange for a peaceful end to slavery. They offered the opposite: the Union pledged to continue slavery indefinitely in exchange for a forfeiture of independence and secession.
William Tecumseh Sherman wrote before the war:
"If they [Confederates] design to protect themselves against negroes and abolitionists I will help; if they propose to leave the Union on account of a supposed fact that the northern people are all abolitionists like Giddings and Brown then I will stand by Ohio and the northwest."
Sherman was a white supremacist, eager to fight white abolitionists trying to end slavery, but more so eager to fight secessionists who wanted independence. This isn't the moral high ground that Scott Alexander seems to presume.
Robert E Lee said, at the start of the war, when asked to join the Union:
"If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?"
I've heard Robert E Lee also helped return blacks to slavery and had views of white supremacy that were the norm for that time, so I will accept the realities of his life didn't stand up to moral principles, but he seemed entirely open to the idea of ending slavery and avoiding violence and his mindset seemed extremely libertarian in modern terms.
> Suppose dozens of US cities declared independence. The result would be lots of isolated enclaves with tiny markets and no ability to defend themselves. Those cities might wish that there was some pact keeping them together. So maybe since we already have such a pact (the general agreement that small regions can’t secede) we should stick to it.
The EU adds an interesting wrinkle to this. It makes independence a lot more tempting for Scotland (rip), Catalonia and everyone else. As the cost of being a tiny entity goes down by greater EU integration, are we going to end up with a whole bunch of Monacos and Andorras if self determination comes into vogue?
The dumbest part of all of this for me is how often these things come down to a simple majority vote. It's terrifying for everyone involved for big decisions, much larger than regular elections, to come down to 50%+1, in referendums for questions like Brexit, Quebecois and Scottish independence.
Really, having these be 2/3rd or 3/4s thresholds would take a lot of pressure off everyone. We could even have clauses like if over 40% the referendum gets triggered again in 5-10 years.
Why don't we accept the fact that nation states are malleable concepts, just as social identity is a malleable concept? And the two concepts are often mixed up. People frequently argue that language is important identifier of national identity, and thus we have the speak-English crowd in the US, the Chinese government goal to enforce Putonghua on regional language speakers, the intermittent attempts by French and Spanish states' to suppress their regional languages, and British nationalists' insistence that Scots is not a separate language from English — I could go on and on. Likewise, there's the "we all share the same homeland" argument — which is frequently confounded by multiple peoples claiming the same homeland either across history. The fact that nation states ARE non-static entities, that evolve and dissolve over time, means that those groups or individuals with the political capital (votes, organization, or guns) can redefine the borders of their nation states or create new nations states out of whole cloth — usually with a lot angst and bloodshed as part of the process.
Before we get bogged down in any historical precedent arguments, it's worth going through the intricate history of that region. This Twitter thread by Kamil Galeev is an excellent outline of the region's history...
It's very useful for people to be able to make binding agreements giving up their future rights (including the right to secede). Solves coordination problems, etc.
But of course this gets tricky at the population level - can your parents bargain away your future rights? Your great grandparents?
All a "right" amounts to is an argument that countries considering recognition might find persuasive or not based on their own self-interests plus an appeal to consistency.
All the pro-status quo arguments that to allow borders to be redrawn would cause chaos remind me of a JFK quote: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Without *some* mechanism to redraw borders peacefully, they *will* eventually be redrawn violently.
"Self-determination is only acceptable within those parameters short of exceptional circumstances (like a perceived imminent risk of genocide)."
Then Kosovar independence should NOT be recognized since the Kosovar Albanians were NOT at "imminent risk" of genocide in 2008!
Serbia only consented to UN rule over Kosovo in 1999 based on the belief that Kosovo would remain a legal part of Serbia, if I recall correctly.
Right, Africa has lots of civil wars, but few international wars. Practically every African foreign ministry agrees that the old colonial boundaries are not going to be revised by conquest. There has been piratical predation across borders, such as in the Congo around the turn of the century by Rwanda and other neighbors, but the statesmen expect that the old borders will be maintained, at least on paper.
The post-Soviet republics have been fairly insistent that *in Russian* one should spell their cities' names the way they're now spelling them (e.g. Алматы instead of Алма-Ата, Киiв instead of Киев, etc.). This strikes many Russians as cringe, because, well, Москва becomes Moscow / Moscou / Moskau and Warszawa becomes Warsaw / Varsovie / Warschau in English / French / German, and that's fine, so why do Ukrainians / Kazakhs get to demand that you change the spelling of their cities *in Russian*?
Of course, by the same token, it's not clear why a Russian gets to complain about the correct spelling of the capital *in English*.
This is just a matter of standard diplomacy. You call the other country how they ask to be called. For example, you can call Cabo Verde "Cape Verde" if you want to--that's how it's always been known in English--but the United Nations and most everyone else now calls it Cabo Verde because the country has specifically asked that it be called that. Russia could make similar demands, nothing is stopping them.
In the UN, sure -- but the complaint of the guy-on-the-street Russian is that this is being pressured into standard Russian usage. In your example, it would be about whether e.g. the New York Times switches to "Cabo Verde" or continues calling it "Cape Verde".
Austria as a German-speaking nation is very recent too.
Austria used to be a diverse empire where German-speakers would consider themselves Germans. The "Pan-German" idea was rather strong at the beginning of the 20th century and Austria(-Hungary) was considered an obsolete holdout of ancient times by German nationalists.
Only since the 1950s started the Austrians think about themselves as a separate nation, German-speaking, but not really an artificially separated limb of the German nation anymore.
Of course, the massive defeat in WWII, execution of several Austrian war criminals and the shame of being German after the war helped.
There is a saying that the best success of Austrian diplomacy was to convince the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German.
Yeah, the principle popular sovereignty does have that exploit. But it'd be inelegant to patch in the ad-hoc rule "except when there's been a purposeful colonization effort/ethnic cleansing to arrange those circumstances", and besides, that'd make it very awkward for every country in the New World unless the rule is "except when there's been an ethnic cleansing in the past 50 years" which is even more unwieldy.
As far as I can tell the best we can do is just shrug and say "Yep, we've kinda just gotta stop that from happening before the invaders get a majority from now on, since we can't really do anything once they do"
Perhaps the most awkward example of this is Northern Ireland, which has by now mellowed out into a top-level-nonfunctioning political entity because neither the unionist or IRA factions could get a clear enough mandate to take the entire thing.
Seconded. This was a glaring absence from the post, since to me the biggest open question around self-determination is: what happens when Stalin has previously ethnically cleansed the region, precisely to ensure that the strategic location would remain firmly in Russian hands?
You don't want to incentivize ethnic cleansing, but after some amount of time you can hardly blame the great-grandkids of the migrants.
What was before these 120 years, and what was 300 years ago? Just another, even more oppressive rule
Well, that's how the US asserted a claim on Texas when it was part of Mexico. Is that illegitimate? Or does colonization plus time work, but colonization by itself doesn't?
Overall this is an incredibly impossibly messy question, and it defies rationalist attempts to build a universal rule of independence.
For every rule there are legitimate exceptions and cases where legitimate grievances haven't been allowed to produce independent polities, which is Scott's point. Honestly the only rule that hasn't been broken somewhere is a tautology: defending territory with violence until all competing claims are waived.
If rationalists want to propose a non-violent solution, they need to be prepared to not cover existing nations, and that's ok.
Texas first became independent of Mexico before later joining the US.
Right, and independence was declared by a bunch of us citizens who had settled it, and who were in the process of negotiating for statehood.
Russia is a giant multi-ethnic federation mostly because it's giant. Western Russia, the Russia you recognize on TV, is very coherent. You see, you recognize it on TV.
There's are very definitely Russian looking people, Russian songs, Russian culture markers, and we could all debate on the margins, but in the main we'd recognize Russian stuff when we see it. And Putin is at least right that Ukraine isn't like The Italians living next door to Russian People, it's much more like Canadians and Americans. From the inside, two peoples, two-ish languages, but from the outside, before 2022 probably 95% of people would be unable to pick out which was which.
Of course, Putin wants to take Ukraine but refuses to give up Chechnya, so the argument is more than a little self-serving
I agree, and in him we see the unpleasant mixture between principle and realpolitik, basically power. But I also see it in us. Our international principles (and deviations from them) are more than a little self serving, to a degree where I think we lack the moral high ground to criticize or take strong positions in this one. Maybe we still do it for practical reasons, but I'm not kidding myself that we (America, the west, Europe, NATO) are acting or speaking from sheer principle.
I’m not familiar with Houston/Pasdena but it reminded me of Long Island, NY (where I grew up.) We kids could tell by slight variations of speech which town someone was from on LI. Could I describe those variations now, no, but I remember hearing someone and thinking “Yep, they’re from Smithtown.” Mass media flatten some of these things, but I bet it still happens. I should add, LI is not a large place.
What I heard from someone is that a people is a nation if they are willing to fight for it. So Israelis are certainly willing to fight to defend Israeli nationhood, Finns for Finnish, Palestinians for their nationhood (this one he put some asterisks, initially they were just fighting against Israel, with the PLO founded before '67, but nowadays they qualify), Ukrainians for theirs (was not known until recently, but now they appear to be one), and so on. Now one can object on "might makes right" grounds but I think a decent utilitarian argument can be made for this position.
I don't think this is satisfactory because willingness to fight depends on whom one is to fight. If Putin says, "join or I will nuke every inch of your territory," it may well be that Ukraine would not fight. Are they then not a nation? It seems that nationhood - at least in the moral, idealized sense we're trying to ascertain - should be an intrinsic property, not something that depends on the strength of potential conquerors.
I don't think nationhood can be totally divorced from the political reality like that. Failed national movements are not nations anymore because someone crushed them.
Then maybe “being willing to fight for it” is a necessary but insufficient condition of nationhood. The confederates were willing to fight for their nationhood, but they clearly aren’t a nation anymore.
You mean, they aren't one *yet*.
One could argue that Southerners are a separate nation within a larger nation. Though it's worth noting that even some Northerners have embraced Southern culture as of late:
https://www.mainepublic.org/2017-05-04/feeling-kinship-with-the-south-northerners-let-their-confederate-flags-fly
Does the moral, idealized sense of nationalism you're trying to ascertain depend on the outcome of some battles in the past? If so, it can't really be an intrinsic property. I do like the idea of having a coherent standard, and not having a pure might makes right. I don't like Putin crushing Ukraine, and I support the rights of Ukrainians to self-determination. But I don't think you can make it a totally intrinsic property either. I don't think you can have a Platonic moral and idealized sense of nationalism in the sense you want.
I agree. The language of rights and morality are out of place in this discussion. Nationalism itself has been a disaster since the mid 19th century. The optimum outcome of border-drawing is the one that results in the greatest stability, peace, and prosperity given all the complicated constraints and forces at play. National identity may be a part of this puzzle, along with military might and other factors. But to declare a “right” to a sovereignty is simply to stir up conflict.
Willingness to fight is an interesting concept, because there is nothing inherently fair in it. A lot of the revolutionaries fought dirty.
Countries such as Ireland and Algeria achieved their independence after resorting to outright terrorism. Basque country, notorious for its political violence, got more concessions from the Spanish state than Catalonia, where the nationalist movement deplores terrorism and violence. Gaza has more self-governance than the Western Bank, partly because it was such a pain to hold.
The wave of self-determination in Europe after 1918 and especially after 1945 included a lot of ethnic cleansing in previously thoroughly diverse territories.
The real reason for the Gaza withdrawal is that Sharon just wanted to solve the conflict unilaterally. Morocco didn't get independence from France through terrorism. I do think political violence can be useful, but I don't think that's the only thing that is meant by "power". Gandhi was someone who knew how to exercise power, and he did, even though he was nonviolent.
Yes, it is not clear cut either way. But my comment was mainly intended as a negation of the usual aureola of righteousness and innocence that tends to envelope nation founders.
If a country wants to leave an empire and the empire resists, then what are nationalists to do. Particularly if they are in the majority, the violence is justified.
"the violence is justified" - why? It is one thing to defend yourself, it is another to use violence to seek independence. Is Gandhi not relevant? How about MLK's thoughts. Should the Solidarity movement in Poland which explicitly rejected violence not be considered? Is the peaceful dissolution of Czechoslovakia, not a relevant model.
The American revolution was entirely "unjustified". (Canada seems to have worked out OK.) It also lead to a a few of generations of continued slavery which would have otherwise been abolished. (In fact, the British courts were ruling just before the revolution that slavery could not be upheld on British soil - Somerset v Stewart (1772) - was coming to the Americas and certainly played a part in the rationale for armed revolution.) The entire American Civil War grew out of this lambrained-idea that violent revolution is acceptable. (The South fired first!).
Examination of just war theories and the morality of violence could be instructive here.
"Morocco didn't get independence from France through terrorism"
No, but Algeria did.
Sure, but my point here is that "power" does not just mean military force. It also means soft power. Basically, the ability to get things done.
Morocco wasn't officially a part of France like northern Algeria was, though.
It is determined by who you must fight, of course, but all you're saying is that nationhood is essentially a joint decision, taken by both the people who will be in a nation and other people who won't. That seems correct, because nationhood doesn't *just* affect the people in the nation, it requires something from other people, too -- recognition, respect, sometimes an abandonment of prior power.
Does that mean that the Japanese are not a real nation since they stopped fighting the US after the US nuked them twice in 1945?
Anyway, I think that nukes, chemical weapons, and biological weapons are extreme and that thus a willingness to fight for one's nation against an enemy that uses conventional warfare should be a sufficient criteria for the validity of one's nation. So, by this logic, Ukraine, Iraq, et cetera would be valid nations.
What if they fight and lose?
If Ukrainians and Texans are exactly as willing to fight for independence as one another, but Ukraine wins and Texas loses because America is militarily stronger than Russia, does Texas deserve to be independent, or not? Does Ukraine?
I think if they fight and lose but are willing to put up a good fight, the answer is yes. All of this is according to my friend (who is kind of a Yarvin fan). Anyway, I did think it was interesting idea. He said the true test of nationalism is if it can mobilize people to fight. If it is an idea with some kind of staying power. Then it is a decent organizational principle for a society. It's "lindy". I think this is the argument.
Now for some of my own thoughts. I think any attempt to make sense of political reality using pure autistic rationality is bound to fail. I say this as an autistic rationalist. Try a similar argument about what constitutes a race or an ethnic group or a color, or any emergent category from the behavior of humans. It's like asking if orange is a shade of red or not. The difference is people fight and die over asking if Ukraine is Russian and not for the red thing. Nationalism is a social construct, and depends on a myriad of factors. It does follow the might makes right thing to some extent; if the Texans win then Texan nationalism will exist for a while but if they lose then Texan nationalism ceases to exist.
One alternative autistic rationalist framing I've heard of is "if I were a hyper-benevolent AGI whose goal is to maximize utility would I assign these people self-determination". I also like this very utilitarian framing, maybe a bit more than the "might makes right" one. This is supposed to capture the concept of "desert". But still, your hyper-benevolent AGI would put Texas in the US, and yet if Texas had successfully broken off from the US 100 years it might not. Its action would depend on the outcome of the war.
As an autistic rationalist, I don't fully agree with my friend's "might makes right" position but he is right that there is a "might makes right" element inherent in any nationalism or discussion thereof. First of all, states only exist because of force, they collect taxes and so on. Second, you can imagine if someone won a different battle a few hundred years ago we would have a different set of nationalisms today, and a different set of people who "deserved" to be a nation. I think it's impossible to disentangle this completely, though I agree we shouldn't go all the way to the ultra-nationalism "might makes right" take. I do think that the might makes right is an important element. I don't like the concept of "desert", I think the best way to rephrase it is the benevolent AGI. The benevolent AGI would try to maximize human flourishing, and not believe in "might makes right" but it would not be totally divorced from the outcomes of battles a few hundred years ago.
> Its action would depend on the outcome of the war.
Wouldn’t it be weird if the AI’s actions did not depend on the past?
Yeah, it would. The AI's actions should depend on the past. But that means that it is not totally against might makes right. Of course it's not totally on board with it either.
It's probably not necessary, kind, or true to use "autistic" as a synonym for intelligent systematizer. You could substitute "analytical" but that's probably redundant with "rationality" so you could just drop the adjective instead.
Fair point. I’m autistic though so I think I have a right to use it. ;)
I'm autistic as well, and I must admit I was a little put off by your usage there. You can use it all you want when talking about/describing yourself, but it gets a bit hairier when you use it as a descriptor for larger concepts.
Particularly as you were speaking of the limitations of the kind of approach you mean, and how it would fail here.
I think there are a lot of autistic people out there who wouldn't be happy with your usage here. I know some who I'm pretty sure wouldn't.
Overall I agree with Jonathan that this usage was not sufficiently necessary, kind, or true.
I understand what you were getting at, but not everybody reads "autistic" in a context like this as something like "extreme systematizing" (which is one thing you could have written instead).
But autism is much more than that, and the way you use it here - talking about how the "autistic" rationalist approach fails - plays on certain stereotypes which, while not entirely untrue (like most stereotypes...), are not very helpful imo.
Yeah, I should have at least written something like "extreme systematizing ('autistic')", maybe. I don't feel "extreme systematizing" alone *quite* captures what I wanted to convey, but I should have put "autistic" in quotation marks. It's the way as an autist I would naturally think about it.
You can actually define races empirically.
Humans were originally all one population group. In ancient times, they migrated out of Africa and spread across the world. Over time, people settled in various places and intermarried with their neighbors.
Races exist because some places (the mountains and deserts of Central Asia, the Sahara Desert of Africa, the Pacific and Atlantic oceans) were really hard to cross so there was little if any crossbreeding/mingling across them.
This resulted in population groups interbreeding much more heavily amongst themselves than between groups. This is what gave rise to the "races".
There's really only five races - Caucasians (Europeans + North Africans + Middle Easterners + Indians), East Asians, the people of Oceania, the sub-Saharan Africans, and the Amerindians (i.e. Native Americans).
This can be observed via genetic clustering studies.
Nation states are much more flexible and change over time due to being determined primarily by culture rather than genetics. The Roman Empire was huge and influenced a huge number of people, for instance, while many other ancient peoples' cultures died out and were absorbed by other things. Others managed to sort of survive but be heavily influenced by the Romans. The result was, after the collapse of the Roman empire, a bunch of quasi-Roman people.
Let's give a concrete example. If the Chinese Civil War had gone differently, and either the KMT won all of China and Taiwan, or the CCP did, there would be no discussion of Taiwanese nationalism today. No one would believe that Taiwan deserved to be independent. Now, I believe that Taiwan deserves to be independent, or stating in a totally utilitarian way, it would be bad if China crushed Taiwan. But what I'm saying is that these kinds of questions are negotiated through history, and there is an element of military force.
I do think that viability affects the legitimacy of nationalism. Sure, it's not the only factor, and again I'm not arguing for an absolutist might makes right, but a country that cannot even control its own territory or deliver positive utilons to its inhabitants and its people is a much less legitimate state. The term "failed state" exists for a reason.
>I do think that viability affects the legitimacy of nationalism.
Yes, just as possession is nine tenths of the law, strength is nine tenths of statehood.
What justified the US's independence from Great Britain? Ultimately, I think the buck stops with "they were strong enough to do it"
But strength isn't really nine tenths of statehood. If that were true, we'd have to agree with the caricature who leads the piece by pointing out that we have 195 countries and almost all of them are surplus to requirements. The world is full of puny countries with no hope of enforcing their own statehood should it fall into question.
But there are advantages for mighty countries in being surrounded by weak buffer states rather than hostile major powers. The name of the game as a puny country is avoiding pissing off your powerful neighbors so badly that they'd rather extend themselves to wipe you out than let you keep poking them.
I think this snaps into focus if you consider states as flux-and-spectrum entities rather than eternal-definition entities. He's not so much saying "these are bad definitions" as "I expect these to be the first to go in the next round of consolidation, and after the least amount of protest".
China wasn't a place for huge portions of Chinese history. Middle Kingdom is aspirational and refers to some extent to historic outsiders who are now insiders.
But if China became 12 distinct countries, not warring states, but coherent, stable *countries* in our lifetime, I wager your jaw would drop as hard as mine. Heck, even the China/Taiwan result led to a veritable mountain of discourse and soul searching among the American foreign services (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_of_China).
Whereas if Mexico absorbs Guatemala and appears to get away with it, we're probably both going to be only a much smaller level shocked and/or outraged.
In this regard small countries exist to be pawns for the large countries, to the large country's benefit. For example, the citizens of say Venezuela would be materially and militarily far better off if Venezuela was the 51st state. They won't ask for it due to ideology and nationalism, and America wouldn't accept it anyway, as America would rather keep them as a local weak state
> we have 195 countries and almost all of them are surplus to requirements. The world is full of puny countries with no hope of enforcing their own statehood should it fall into question.
Then why do these countries still exist? I think it's partly because, while there exist other countries that *could* conquer them, if they chose to put enough effort into it, the costs of doing so would far outweigh the advantages.
Or that their continued "independent" existence is shored-up and subsidized by exterior forces with more strength than local would-be conquerors.
"there would be no discussion of Taiwanese nationalism today"
It would hardly be unreasonable for a large island 200 miles from the mainland populated largely by people who arrived from the mainland several centuries ago to now have a nationalist movement. Keep in mind that if the Chinese Nationalists had won the Chinese civil war in 1949, they wouldn't have relocated en masse to Taiwan, so the population of Taiwan today would overwhelmingly consist of people whose ancestors had arrived several centuries ago.
Singaporean nationalism is little questioned, even though the roots of the dominant population are similar.
This is possibly true. We know in OTL that the DPP did rebel against the KMT, the same thing might have happened in any case, especially without the Waishengren. It's hard to tell. Singapore is further away from mainland China and so on, and was not historically part of China. Taiwan was on and off, was Ming loyalists, Japanese for a while, etcetera. So yeah I don't know what would have happened. OK but assume for the sake of my argument such nationalism wouldn't have existed, and instead there would be a regionalism and a sense of regional identity maybe like Texas or Hawaii. It doesn't weaken the main argument of my post to imagine Taiwan as something like Texas or Hawaii.
It might have depended upon the type of government on the Chinese mainland: a non-corrupt Nationalist government or a non-totalitarian/crazed Maoist government might have appealed to the population of Taiwan that is not aboriginal (Pacific Islander-like aborigines are a very small but existent population) but somewhat indigenous (Chinese who have been on Taiwan about as long as WASPs have been in America).
Is there a name for this population of Taiwanese whose roots in Taiwan trace to the 1660s to the 19th Century?
Weirdly, the Chinese of old didn't much have contact with Taiwan, allowing European powers like the Spanish and the Dutch to first colonize it and deal with the aboriginal tribes. Then in the 1660s, a Ming loyalist grabbed it from the Europeans as a refuge from the Manchus taking over China proper (anticipating the Nationalist move in 1949).
Then in the 1680s the Manchu emperor in China grabbed Taiwan. Finally in the 1760s, the Chinese (Manchu) emperor allowed Han immigration to Taiwan, and within 50 years there were 2 million Han in Taiwan.
So, most Taiwanese who aren't descended from the Nationalist elite who arrived in 1949 are descended from Chinese who arrived about 200-250 years ago.
Is that long enough to form a nation that can resist a great power's aggression? I don't know. But we shall likely find out.
The name is Benshengren, as opposed to Waishengren https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waishengren . So, Jeremy Lin and Jiang Jieshi were Waishengren, Tsai ing-Wen and Lee Teng-Hui are Benshengren. Benshengren have a little bit of Taiwanese aboriginal ancestry (few percent) though Tsai has 1/4. They are not like Aboriginal Australians, more like Filipinos; they're Austronesian, like Filipinos and Malays. In fact, supposedly Austronesians originated in Taiwan.
I do think that if the Nationalists had won, Taiwan would have had kind of a regionalism, like Texas or Hawaii or Brittany or Quebec (well, Quebec almost went independent, so more like TX or HI) but not really a full blown nationalism. Yes it's possible I could have been wrong. Taiwan definitely does have its own culture, tied to Japan and all of that, and to the Ming Loyalists who separated from the Qing Dynasty, but I do think if the Nationalists had won it would be just a regionalism. Taiwan isn't Singapore and is too close to the Mainland for this sort of thing.
What's OTL?
Our timeline
There is totally a native Taiwanese vs mainland Chinese divide in Taiwan. Lee Teng-Hui, the first democratically elected president, made reforms to curb the power of the mainlanders who had previously dominated the government. Taiwan is also the ancestral home of the Polynesians, and has strong cultural links with Japan.
That kind of reminds me of how Urdu speaking Mohajirs initially dominated the government of Pakistan, having left India during the partition, eventually alienating the indigenous Bengalis to the point that they revolted and obtained independence.
You can't blame Mohajirs for that, the alienation of Bengalis happened long after their (short) watch. Bhutto was a Sindhi feudal landlord, Yahia Khan was a Punjabi Pathan and Tikka Khan was a Punjabi. Then as now Pakistan was politically dominated by Punjab, the crisis was precipitated by the Awami League Bengalis winning the elections and the West Pakistanis refusing to concede.
Singapore is opposed to Malaysia not continental China. Divergence between Malays and Chinese is.... I guess, circa 5-10k years. In current year, Singapore is only developed country with positive attitude to PRC.
Bear in mind that if the KMT won, China would probably have a lot more regionalism, Cantonese regionalism and all of that. Especially since the KMT was close with regional warlords. Mao and the CPC suppressed this kind of regionalism and obsessively tried to unify everyone and everything, removing a lot of ancient culture and so on. Taiwanese regionalism would just be a different regionalism, like Cantonese regionalism and so on. I don't think we'd have a Taiwanese national movement. Anyway, I think the Taiwanese national movement is legitimate, but in this timeline it would be less legitimate and would not have as much popular support. At least I think so.
Singapore is not a part of China. It was a part of Malaysia, which Malaysia didn't want. (Malaysia threw Singapore out of the Malayan Federation, although to fair, LKY was making a grand nuisance of himself and Malaysia got fed up with him).
Taiwan and Singapore are not comparable.
Mao, “All power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
This makes "willingness to fight for independence" too much of an independent variable. It's actually a historical contingency. People become willing to fight for independence when (a) they have good reason to want to be out of the country they're in; (b) there is no way to achieve independence without fighting; and (c) they have some chance of winning.
In the case of the USA, (b) is particularly unlikely. If a state really wanted to secede, it seems likely that it could find a political path to doing so. (European examples of local devolution, state splitting, and Brexit show how.)
Partially unlikely, why? They tried to secede in 19th century.
"Deserve" is such an odd concept here.
I would say that the main difference between Ukraine and, say, the South, is that Ukraine tries repeatedly to escape Russia's power. In other words, if they fail once, they wait for the next opportunity and try again.
Which is ironic considering there's the well-known saying "The South will rise again".
There was a movie made during WWI on this subject: "Birth of a Nation."
Griffith's point was that the South gave it their best shot in 1861-65, but the North fought bravely too and defeated secession, so that ended the question: from now on, the North and the South would be one country.
And a really stupid point it was.
You have wars where both sides are varying degrees of bad and "a pox on all their houses" is a good response. You have wars where one side is clearly the morally superior to the other (I would count the American Civil War among these, others might differ). But you never have wars where both sides are basically decent fellows and "why can't we just all get along, just a big misunderstanding" is the moral.
I think Bryan Caplan might embrace that moral, although he'd have more judgement for the people fighting. https://www.econlib.org/archives/2007/07/independence_da.html
Actually, you have wars (which are interpreted) like that all the time.
A great example would be listening to a classicist or a Greek Nationalist talk about the Peloponnesian War, they tend to admire both sides of the war and view neither as a cartoon villain.
I think those moral wars are a very modern thing. All the European wars up to about 1930 were just great power wars, including WWI. It's still very much seen as just an inevitable result of the kind of jostling that great powers always did.
The moral wars are a product of the modern age where we're specifically trying to do better than the old aristocratic-houses-fighting-all-the-time model.
It's interesting that the moralization of war accompanied a stark rise in the destructive power of weaponry; the stakes have to be a lot higher than "Fashoda is British/French!" if you're going to get people to suffer napalm and the Somme for it.
"You're bad, and therefore I should get to rule you" seems like an easily-abused heuristic.
WWI is a good candidate for the latter.
Russia had taken over Poland for over a century and tried to forcibly destroy its language and culture by Russification, not too dissimilar to what China is doing to the Uyghur in Xinjiang.
A better case study for Scott's question would be Germany and Austria. Same people, mostly shared history, but we know what happened last time Germany tried to take over Austria (ironically led by an Austrian at the time).
Germany didn't merely "try" to take over Austria, they actually took it over. And it's generally believed that the Anschluss was popular with most Austrians (though not the Austro-fascist government that lost power). But the rest of the world didn't like Germany being so big, so they were separated at the end of the war.
Random question that only now popped into my mind: does anyone know how well Austrian troops in the wehrmacht fought? Did they act like they were in it with the Germans or more like half hostages looking for a way out?
I don't know about the Wehrmacht, but Austrians were apparently very over-represented in the SS and especially among concentration camp guards. Here's a surprisingly useful and well-cited quora answer on the subject: https://www.quora.com/Why-were-a-higher-percent-of-Austrians-SS-officers-than-Germans.
From what little I've read I've gotten the impression Austrians were at least as committed to the Third Reich as Germans (not entirely surprising given its leader).
Nice! thanks. That quora thread is indeed pretty interesting. Also occurred to me now that Austria in German is Oesterreich, which literally means the Reich of the East. Now reich just means realm and obviously at the time didn't have the nazi connotation it has now, but still from this it seems they lived up to that name...
If that Austrian wasn't that desperate, we might have peace and these two being same country now.
That's actually an artifact of early nationalism - when the German Empire was being pieced together, it was an active question whether it should be under the Austro-Hungarian aegis (being the most powerful state dominated by germans) or whether it should be a state only for Germans, without any of the other non-German possessions that had, during the middle ages and early-modern period, accreted to the Habsburg crown. The Prussians, and thus the "Little German" solution won out over the Habsburg, or "Greater Germany", from 1865-1870 (Austro-Prussian "Brother's War" and Franco-Prussian War).
However, after WWI and the disintegration of the Habsburg empire, the question arose about what should happen to the indisputably German rump-state in the self-proclaimed "Republic of German-Austria" (modern Austria plus the Sudetenland and bits of the Tyrol and Carinthia). Article II of the German-Austrian provisional constitution pretty baldly stated an intent to join Germany: "German-Austria is an integral part of the German republic." However, the Allies put a nix on this, forcing the Austria-Germans to cede the Sudetenland to the Czechs in the treaty of St. Germain, and forbidding the union with Germany in both the Treaty of St. Germain (Art. 88 [lol]) and the Treaty of Versailles.
As this wasn't done for any reason of "self-determination," but rather imposed on the peoples at issue under the logic of cold, vengeful, great power politics, there's a decent argument that Austria *Should* at some point have ben absorbed into Germany. However, the interceding decades - particularly Austria's unique role in the Cold War as the crossroads of Europe - seem to have forged a separate Austrian identity that is no longer really all that interested in joining their co-linguists to the north-west.
A big part of it is also just the fact that, by the end of World War II, Nazi Germany was hated by most Austrians, and beyond it being convenient to blame the Germans for the Nazis, they also didn't want to be associated with them and saw themselves as better than that.
As such, Austria is viewed as the first victim of Germany, rather than as a co-aggressor. And to be fair, there was a significant element of the Austrians who were never at all fond of the Nazis.
> deserve to be independent
1) willingness to fight it is prerequisite to be treated seriously and to have independence claims worth consideration
2) in many case people/nation deserved independence but have not achieved it
3) in addition there is ethical/emotional worth that leads people to consider that they are not worth independence. For example Nazi Germany, ISIS, USSR, current iteration of Russia. But also Ukraine according to Russia and Poland according to Nazi Germany and USA according to ISIS.
"people is a nation if they are willing to fight for it" sidesteps question whether they deserve it or not.
Who “gets” self-determination: this phrasing implies authorities (probably existing nations) that confer the right to national self-determination. But there is no authority—we are not a people determining whether other people get to call themselves a people. We are people, individuals, drawing lines around convenient groups to make them countable and distinguishable. Lines that often cut through other individuals and are more ephemeral even than national borders.
Scott asks, “What if they fight and lose?” Implicit in that is the idea that there could be peoples who have lost their national identity because powerful enemies have vanquished and redefine them by fiat. Putin, the KGB goon he is, thinks he can do this: craft a people in his image by killing his most powerful opponents, imprisoning the next tier, censoring and discriminating against the one below that, and on and on in a sliding scale of oppression. Perhaps that has worked in Russia because Russian national identity has been interconnected with imperial oppression since the nation’s inception. And yet in Ukraine, Putin and his Russian soldiers and supporters have escalated from simple villainy to apocalyptic supervillainy as each level of oppressive atrocity backfires. They kill Ukrainian soldiers expecting it to reduce enlistment, kill defiant mayors expecting more collaborators, and kill refugees thinking that will motivate the next wave to flee toward them. The tactic fails, because the answer to “What if they fight and lose?” is that if a people has united to fight, it is already winning the argument that it is a people. If a people truly will live free or die, then while they are still alive, they are a nation. Ukrainians’ astoundingly high confidence in victory reflects their own certainty that they will and they are.
I’ve lived in Ukraine since 2001, with some breaks. My wife was born and grew up there. We were there in 2004, in 2014, and were living there when Putin started this third escalation. (We were caught outside on vacation when the war started and are now in Western Europe.) In periods of peace, the nation has often declined toward Russia-style corruption and illiberal governance, and in the process their identity has drifted toward being more like that of Russians. But each time Russia attacks, Ukrainians unite and Ukrainian national identity clarifies. The loss of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, in particular, concentrated Ukrainian identity by surgically removing what was most Russian about Ukrainians. The loss of territory was a good trade for the strengthened identity.
Now all of our family and friends in Ukraine are working for victory. They are business owners and mechanics and musicians and professors and doctors and school principals, but they are Ukrainian first, clearly defined by the line of battle. Whether Ukraine is a nation or not, whether Ukrainians are a people or not—none of us outside needs to confer the right to those identities. Whatever the outcome of the war, we will all find it only natural that we draw the lines in our mind such that there is a Ukrainian nation.
The big problem here is that subjugation under Russia means losing all self determination to a murderous kleptocracy. Whereas being Texas still involves a pretty large amount of self determination.
I'm also a little leery of this notion that the right to independence should be predicated on willingness to engage in military action. It seems to suggest that, e.g, some ultra-violent jihadist movement would have greater moral legitimacy in securing independence than buddhist pacifists who go on hunger strike or engage in nonviolent resistance.
I think you raise an interesting point with the Confederacy, though, which is a topic I don't think progressives have really thought through. Did the south not have the right to secede from the north? If not, why did the american colonies have the right to secede from britain? If slavery was supposed to be the critical factor in denying legitimacy, the colonies were also slave-holding states (nor was slavery entirely abolished in all the union states prior to the civil war.) The north was obviously *closer* to abolishing slavery, but one can also argue britain was closer to abolishing the slave trade than the americans were (the 1619 project is mostly garbage but I'll give them this one.) And sure, the southern assault on Fort Sumter technically kicked things off, but the colonies threw the first stone against Britain as well.
If practicing slavery at higher frequency than another power-clique negates the claim to independence from that power-clique, it would also follow that the european powers were in some sense morally entitled to conquer and colonise the global south in order to stamp out the practice of slavery in places like africa and south asia (which they did.) If you want to argue economic factors were the true motivating factor behind colonialism, it's not like there were zero economic motives behind the north's involvement in the american civil war. Like Mearsheimer has pointed out, the concept of universal human rights in practice leads to moral imperialism.
The confederate/union cultural divide has been compared to the ukrainian/russian cultural divide, incidentally, though not specifically over the issue of slavery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrDJQ15u5_A
The right to independence is just a fancy way of saying argument, specifically an argument that other countries should recognize you and those who could stop you should desist. That argument could be in the form of violence but could just as easily be a non-violent appeal to principles that the other countries value.
I mean, it's objectively the case that colonialism improved the global south, much like how the Roman Empire's spread enriched Europe by spreading their culture and increasing their tech level and improving their cultures.
That's... a complicated topic. Setting aside the legitimacy of the Romans' conquest to begin with, there's reasonable evidence that the collapse of the western Empire resulted in a net improvement in living standards in many provinces once they were relieved of their tribute/tax obligations to Rome. I'd broadly agree that their technology and culture were ahead of the curve, of course, but that might have been possible to diffuse peacefully over the centuries (assuming their neighbours had been peaceful to begin with, which is questionable. And of course all kinds of wars and violence broke out in the power vacuum left by the Roman collapse.)
The European colonial powers' advantage in technology was so overwhelming and the tenure of their administration brief enough that I think the balance of evidence tends toward net benefit in places like Africa (especially when you look at spending on health, education and infrastructure toward the end of the colonial period. Unlike with the Romans, there is clear evidence of the European colonies becoming *less* exploitative over time, which is part of the reason why independence was usually granted with minimal fuss.)
I'm just looking at the specific question of whether the practice of slavery justifies military intervention and compulsory reform, and why this would apply to the Southern Confederacy but not to the objectively far harsher material conditions of slaves in 19th-century African nations.
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”
“Brought peace.”
“Oh. Peace? Shut up!”
I'm pretty sure the Pythons were thinking, at least a little bit, about the knee-jerk condemnation of European colonialism as a disaster for the inhabitants of the colonies.
"it would also follow that the european powers were in some sense morally entitled to conquer and colonise the global south in order to stamp out the practice of slavery in places like africa and south asia (which they did.)"
Yes. But not necessarily to subsequently stay there for as long as they did or to try using force to maintain their stay there indefinitely.
If Texas loses, they don't. I think what you're overlooking here is that nationhood is a social status, so like all social statuses it is a joint decision between the people who want the status and the people who would have to honor it. That is, nationhood requires something of the people who are *not* in the nation, so as they have skin in the game, it's quite reasonable that their feelings count in the decision, too.
If Texas wants the status, and fights for it, but the rest of the US doesn't want to grant that status (e.g. because it would require tolerating slavery on the continent) and fights to not grant it, then the decision gets made by who wins. If the rest of the US wins, we can reasonably conclude more people feel more strongly that Texas should not be independent.
Losing a fight makes you less likely to fight again, sometimes forever. However, if you can keep your spirits up for two hundred years an opportunity might come along, like it did for Poland. So it depends how much losing the fight diminishes your willingness to fight if another opportunity arises, and how long your willingness endures waiting for that opportunity.
In my opinion, historically Texas had the right to be independent. Yes, the slavery would be a horrible consequence, but "arguing from consequences" is a known fallacy.
The correct solution, if you insist on eliminating slavery, is then to defeat Texas and make them change their constitution, and maybe install a puppet government for a few decades -- but without joining them back to USA. Treat them similarly to Nazi Germany after WW2; eliminate the horrors, then gradually leave them alone.
I think the point there is more about the will to try, not about the ability to succeed.
If a substantial proportion of the population are willing to die to be separate, then that's some reasonable evidence that they're not the same people, no matter what the governing regime might assert - that is a credible, hard to fake sign of commitment.
Does might make right? Ever? NO.
It could matter that Ukraine is not fighting to BECOME independent (they are independent - and Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances ostensible requires that Russian, US and UK guarantee that independence.) While Texans who want to leave and choose violence would be fight to become independent.
It has been a while since I looked at Jean Bodin - but maybe we could start there.
Does this apply to ISIS?
ISIS does not identify as nationalist, and the goal was to set up a global caliphate rather than to just achieve self-determination. I also said a *people* are a nation. What people are the ISIS people? A *people* have to have a nation, I guess you could say "ISIS fighters" but they are not a people like Ukrainians, Jews, Palestinians, or even Texans. We are talking about a people based completely on some ideology, not on anything else. Nationalism often has an ideological component but generally has to be rooted in a people (usually people who are moderately close to each other on a PCA chart), a language, a culture, and so on. ISIS is a bit short for that. So I wouldn't say it qualifies, though one could make a case. It's never going to be black and white (like ISIS' flag is).
But even granting that ISIS was a nation, I think it was an awful nation and I'm glad we crushed it. There might be some nations that are real nations such that it would be good for the world if they got eliminated. This is a possibility, though generally my priors are against it. Nationhood is not always a good thing. If you were to learn through an oracle that country X and Y would start a nuclear war and kill everyone, it would maybe be good if at least one of X and Y got eliminated today but didn't drag the rest of the world with them. Anyway, nationhood and self-determination is generally good but not always. So if you're asking about the moral dimension of ISIS, it's tricky.
> There might be some nations that are real nations such that it would be good for the world if they got eliminated.
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ makes a good case that Sparta was awful, even by ancient standards.
In particular - other slave owners considered their treatment of slaves as unusually cruel and poor.
I think ISIS would claim they are a "people" defined by the Islamic religion rather than ethnicity.
But ISIS isn't trying to set up a state for the Muslim "people." They're trying (or at least claim to be trying) to set up a universal state that will rule everyone, Muslim and kufr alike (though kufr who aren't People of the Book can look forward to being slaughtered if they don't convert).
ISIS was founded in Dar al-Islam because that's where they expect to rule, not being complete idiots. Islam being a universalist religion that seeks converts (I believe they call them "reverts") doesn't change that.
Scott's essay is about countries, which are different things to nations. The world is full of countries that have two or more nations in them, and nations in two or more countries. The people of the United States are not a nation. Nor are those of Canada, Belgium, nor the people in most of the post-colonial countries in Africa. Texas is not a nation.
Isis - the Islamic State in Syria - would have been a country. It would have been expansionist and totalitarian in much the same way as is Russia, for much the same reason: geography.
Russia was no more expansionist in the 19C than the US. It was also invaded by the west (well Germany but West to it). It then expanded the USSR empire, but unusually enough gave it up.
My understanding is that Russia expanded in the face of tougher opposition than the US. In America the native population was devastated by disease and outside of Latin America didn't generally consist of dense populations of settled farmers (I think the moundbuilders of the midwest might be an exception, but they collapsed from disease prior to even encountering any Europeans). They only acquired horses from the Spanish, and prior to the Columbian exchange also didn't have any metalworking. The Russians fought against people who had writing, cities, and weren't cut off from technological developments or diseases of the Old World. Canada is even larger than the US (and second only to Russia), but it's not because Canadians were more aggressive, rather that area was even less populated. I know a lot of Russia east of the Urals is also underpopulated, but Siberia isn't all of Russian expansionism either.
ISIS would have been an empire, had they not been crushed. Just like the USSR was an empire (and a country!) without there being distinct Soviet people. Even today's Russia is still an empire, with quite a few district peoples inhabiting it, and some of them (Chechens) were almost successful in gaining independence.
I think Isis was clearly a Nation - as far as I understand, it was a new Caliphate (or, claimed Caliphate). The concept of this entity had apparently been laying dormant since the ottomans so in some ways it picked up the mantle. Apparently this conception was so motivating that people were flocking to it from Muslim communities across the globe. It was to be a quite an illiberal and hostile nation to the US so it didn’t last very long. That’s realpolitik
Also I think nations and nationalism are getting mixed herein the post. Nations existed before nationalism, nationalism is the belief that the nation is what should define the boundary of a state (as opposed to say, royal inheritance law)
Your last comment is correct. However the caliphate was not National but super National.
This is bad in that it privileges more militant people. Peaceful people should also be allowed to secede. Saying "the Dalai Lama is such a chill dude, ergo the Tibetans should have to live under China's thumb for all eternity" seems wrong.
I too am uncomfortable with the definition, but I’m satisfied that, historically, it’s a *necessary* condition for sovereignty.
Really? To quote the renowned international law expert Josef V. Stalin, how many armies does the pope have?
I think this a misunderstanding of the quote. You know the popes led a state, had armies, lost wars, and ended up petulantly considering themselves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_in_the_Vatican, making a large number of signals that they were hostage sovereigns, not just moral and religious authorities.
Stalin wasn't saying the pope had power without an army. He was gloating about a fait accompli, that the pope was meaningless to him on the world political stage because the pope was just a failed political leader.
You *could* make a case that John Paul II was able to effect a meaningful retort by using moral authority to help end Russian communism, but not everybody makes this case, and in the face of history it's a relatively weak and singular example.
I'm not trying to make Stalin's point. I'm just saying that the Vatican, like microstates throughout Europe and the Pacific, don't have the ability to defend their independence through military force. It's norms that are preventing Italy, France and co. from just sending in tanks.
The Vatican has only a small standing army but if invaded, millions of Catholics would go fight in their ranks.
Nowadays, the Pope does not have an army, but he has a lot of power. Soft power. It's this power that enables him to maintain Vatican City as a sovereign nation. It's not about "violence" so much as "power".
Historically, popes had a lot more hard power, see the Papal States and so on.
And Stalin was pointing out that the 20th century popes had a hell of a lot less power than the 15th century popes, due to losing their wars, armies, and territory.
Yes. They still retained a lot of the soft power.
It is kind of a red pill that not everything in the world is decided by pure logic, and to some extent by power. Again many of the words in this blog post are there because of 1066. And yet the Normans' conquest of England determines what is "correct" English and not almost 1000 years later.
Less hard power, but arguably more soft power, or at least more widely-spread soft power (few people outside Europe would have cared, or even known, about the Pope in the 15th century, by the 20th century Catholicism was a global religion).
Yes, but so does history, and by extension so does reality. People who committed lots of rape were more evolutionary successful. People who won on the battlefield spread their language, and now it's the proper language. When you speak about what is correct English and what is not correct English, you're inherently privileging the Norman conquerors of 1066, and being biased toward their cultural legacy because of their success. I understand we hear this kind of rhetoric, privileging power over truth. from two kinds of people we don't like, (a) woke leftists, and (b) neoreactionaries, and it is overdone (and I would agree, definitely overdone by those two groups) but it has an element of truth we need to accept.
RE your specific example, the Dalai Lama being the nice guy that he is wants just SAR status. I think that would be the correct solution there; an independent Tibet might not be the most viable or happy country. In fact pre-conquest Tibet was a Buddhist theocracy with a very low literacy rate. But yeah, I agree what the CPC is doing to Tibet is bad.
I don't actually think that violence is the only relevant factor. It's not that simple. It's power, not violence. Lots of violent national movements have failed. Violence and terrorism very often produces a backlash (see Max Abrahms). One can imagine that if the Palestinians had just focused on having their own state instead of using violence against and trying to destroy the Israeli one, they would have accepted the Clinton parameters and had their state 20 years ago. The Zionists build up their national enterprise through peaceful means. They fought the Arabs and the British in the 40's as conflicts broke out toward the end of the mandate, but the nationalism was built peacefully, through buying up land, building town, building universities. Gandhi secured Indian independence with quite non-violent techniques. Jinnah secured partition with non-violent techniques. A lot of the rise of nationalism comes from nationalist intellectuals pushing their ideas around peacefully.
Us rationalists are often averse to bringing up power and want to boil everything down to logic. I sympathize with this project and I care more about truth than anything else, but any honest descriptive and prescriptive account of human relations whose goal is to maximize human flourishing has to take into account the role of power. I don't want to sound like a woke SJW or a neo-reactionary. Again I assure you I'm not either of those and they take the power thing too far, but it's a big part of the definition.
Is "people is a nation if they are willing to fight for it" meant to be prescriptive or descriptive? If it's prescriptive then I don't understand why this whole "it's not what I would like but Malthus and evolution and..."
If it's descriptive, I think it's simply wrong. There are plenty of nations that we recognize (and refer to in every day conversations) that aren't able to fight for their independence. But the Kurds, Palestinians, Uighurs, Rohinga – they all exist! They're out there. They should have independent states and they don't because they lack sufficient power. But we recognize their existence, probably even if we're among the few that publicly deny it.
I think it's meant to be descriptive; my friend described it as the "real test of nationhood". Yes there are some nations that are not sovereign states. Like the Navajo nation. That's fine, they don't want sovereignty. I would say your 4 examples are all nations, I can address them. I don't think that any are just "they lack sufficient power to be nations"; it's actually more complicated than that. There are internal divisions and other extenuating circumstances.
I think that people pretty universally recognize Kurds and Palestinians as a nation (some on the Israeli right still call Palestinians just "Arabs", but it's less common than it used to be), they are certainly groups that have fought for their nation. Still why they have not achieved nationhood is way more complicated than "power". With the Kurds, they have de-facto states in Syria and Iraq but the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds are not so friendly with each other. I don't think most Kurds in Turkey actually want independence, just more rights (HDP platform doesn't call for independence). It's wrong to say Kurds have not fought for their independence. Lots of Kurds have fought, against ISIS, Turkey, and so on. The Palestinians are a pretty unique case; Israel has actually offered them statehood, and they did not accept it because they were unwilling or unable to deliver a final-status agreement, give up the "right of return", recognize Israel, and not get overthrown by Hamas (who won their last democratically held election); see https://thirdnarrative.org/israel-palestine-articles/palestinians-still-reject-clinton-parameters/ for a discussion of this. It's true Israel has done some bad things like build the settlements, but it has actually offered them statehood, which is basically unprecedented for this kind of situation. Anyway, it's wrong to say Palestinians have not fought for their nationalism - of course they have. The problem here is not Palestinian strength vis-a-vis Israel but the strength of the pro-peace Palestinians vis-a-vis the Islamist extremist ones. The inability and/or unwillingness of the PLO to accept the Clinton parameters, the Hamas takeover of Gaza, and Hamas winning their last democratic election show what the problem is. With the Uighurs, it's a bit more complicated. Xinjiang is half Han. Some of this is due to CCP migration, but Xinjiang has had both Han and Uighur for a while. What would a Uighur state look like? Kick out the Han? Half of Xinjiang? Yes, Uighurs are a nation, and China even recognizes them as such and gives them an autonomous region. Yes the situation with the camps is totally awful. Still I don't know how viable or popular Uighur independence is. The Rohingya are treated awfully by the Burmese state, but I don't think Rohingya independence is the way to go or is a serious political movement. Are they a nation? I guess so. Some people (often Burmese nationalists) claim that they are really part of the Bengali nation, and their language is similar.
Good! Then we agree that your friend's description is wrong. We went through four examples and recognized four nations, despite the different levels of effort they have gone through to establish independent states. Conclusion: It doesn't come down to power or violence.
(I agree with Scott that "who is a *real* nation?" isn't actually relevant for the purposes of recognizing independence. Still, I think the criteria above for "nation" are wrong, whether proposed prescriptively or descriptively.)
I don't completely agree with my friend. I think he was really talking about "serious national movements" though not nations. A nation is just some people sharing some genetics, culture, language, and so on. My friend said fighting for your country was something like the "true test" of nationalism. How much people are willing to sacrifice for it. I do think that what he says is an important element of it, and I think there is a sense in which Kurdish nationalism is a lot more salient than Rohingya nationalism, because a lot of Kurds seem to be really nationalistic and care about having an independent country more than the Rohingya do.
I mean I think for who is a nation, if a group of people say they are a nation, then that makes them a nation, but when you are talking about which nations have a nation-state (both prescriptively, which should, and descriptively, which do) then the willingness to make sacrifices for the nation and having some amount of power and organization and a serious movement is a big part of it.
I personally think it's odd there's so little discussion of a "three state solution" for Palestine, just going back to pre-1967 borders. As far as I can tell they speak the same language in Egypt, Jordan & the Palestinian territories, and those territories right now do not seem that viable as an independent government.
Kurds are example of nation without own state.
This is not a good counterexample for "people is a nation if they are willing to fight for it"
Note that "nation is a country if they are willing to fight for it" would not be true - and you appear to argue against this.
What's SAR status?
What HK/Macau have. Given what's happened in HK in the last few years it's maybe not such an attractive option anymore. It stands for "Special Administrative Region".
> Now one can object on "might makes right" grounds
While it is not nice, there are cases of nations/ethnicities that are not existing because they were murdered/destroyed/assimilated/otherwise destroyed.
So while I would push against attempting to use it (one of reasons I support Ukrainians) I recognize that it is true.
If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost would be implemented then Polish, Ukrainian and other nations would be destroyed.
You know, there are some examples you can give of this *other* than Godwin's law. The Dzungar nation was destroyed. But the legitimacy of Dzungar nationalism in 2022 is affected by the fact that the Dzungar genocide happened.
> You know, there are some examples you can give of this *other* than Godwin's law
Well, in this case it should not be a problem - I mentioned it because I admit that with Nazi Germany being successful my own nation would be destroyed.
I also mentioned it because it is something first coming to my mind and because it is Ukraine-related (also, because they at least recognized Ukrainians as existing)
Sure, I guess like to avoid Nazi analogies because of the mind-killing factor. But yes I agree with you. If the Nazis had succeeded, then Polish and Czech nationalism in 2022 would not make any sense. Fortunately they didn't. So the right of nations to exist or whatever is in fact contingent to some extent on "might makes right" factors. It's not *completely* based on might makes right in my view, but that's a nontrivial part of it. In the same way, what is proper English does depend on what happened in 1066.
Yeah, I think this rings true. Countries, as many other human inventions, are made of coordinated beliefs. We may argue a lot whether it's reasonable to believe in this country or that country, but in the end the only thing that matters is whether a lot of people actually believe in it, whether it's reasonable or not. Willingness to fight for what you believe is a great test of whether you actually believe it or not.
I also had a though that Putin's invasion contributed to the Ukranian sense of national identity more than anything in recent history.
So the Taliban are the rightful rulers of Afghanistan, because they were willing to fight and the opposing army wasn't?
I see no reason why a nation of committed pacifists has no right to exist (or for that reason a nation of committed rationalists who accurately believe that fighting would not be worth the cost). This heuristic would, I think, incentivize large countries to be aggressive toward smaller neighbors, for whom it's rarely rational to fight back, and incentivize smaller countries to develop ideologies of suicidal nationalism so they'd be willing to fight a hopeless war to annihilation to prove their right to exist, neither of which seems like a good thing.
This reminds me of John C. Calhoun's discussion of the concurrent majority in his Disquisition on Government (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Disquisition_on_Government)–the task is ever over how to define who is in and who is out, and how to adjudicate between the two.
There are Schelling points like consangunuity, geography, and history, but ultimately the choice of how to constitute a unit of political organization will be arbitrary. And those arbitrary choices, system-wide, will ramify reflexively; there are bound to be reliance interests & path dependence.
Maybe the most important thing is for normies not to cotton to how arbitrary all these divisions are—for what is arbitrary is not perforce unimportant.
Seconding this. Don't let Calhoun's abhorrent views on slavery blind you to the explanatory and predictive power of this theory.
It should be noted that the late Lani Guinier took up Calhoun's ideas when reasoning about defending the interests of minorities in contemporary times.
I wrote a paper on this many years ago in college, in which I argued that secession is legitimate iff it is liberty-increasing (not neutral or liberty-decreasing). So Confederate secession was illegitimate because its intended result was perpetuation of slavery, but Northern secession would have been legitimate. I realize this means that even though the outcome might have been the same (two countries with different intentions about slavery), one way of getting there is ok and one is not. But, you know, process matters (thanks Nozick!).
As to why liberty rather than equality or welfare or some other value: that's mostly based on a sort of fallibility theory, which argues that if states can secede because they increase freedom, that broadens their ability to pursue other goals in a variety of ways, and retains openness so that if it turns out equality or welfare should have been the priorities, then we're more likely to understand that for sure.
Freedom has little to do with the legitimacy of succession. Parts of the British empire were freer under the British, but they had a right to leave the empire because why should London rule the world.
A utilitarian would argue that if (for the sake of argument) London's doing a better job of it than the locals, that's a very good reason for them to stay in charge. I think it matters rather a lot if a colony wishes to become an independent liberal democracy rather than an independent corrupt autocracy or theocracy.
No, it doesn’t matter at all. If India wanted to leave the empire and become an absolute monarchy then that was up to it. The question you should be asking is why should India be run by London, at all?
Ireland gained some liberty (its own parliament and laws) when it left the U.K. but lost some too, as its Catholicism was more restrictive than the religion in Britain (although Britain wasn’t liberal by modern standards either). But, so what?
There can be difficulties in succession, and minority rights need protection, but the opposite to nationalism is often not internationalism but imperialism.
You're acting like "India" is a monolith which is clearly untrue. As a matter of fact as soon as it gained independence it split into two and then three separate nations. Saying that "India" wants a particular form of government is ambiguous bordering on meaningless.
If trying to do what India wants means anything, it means doing what the people of India want, and an absolute monarchy is very unlikely to do that with any consistency.
You started with a straw man there. Because I said that British India has the right to secede from the empire doesn’t imply that it’s all a monolithic country. I was aware of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Your second paragraph indicates that you believe that only democracies can be independent, and in the absence of democracy a country has no right to independence - strong disagree.
In the absence of democracy, what does it mean to say that a nation wants something? Maybe only the elites want it.
Again, a country isn't really a thing, it's just a pile of people and land. So it's not clear to me that a country should have any rights at all outside of the rights its people have.
In particular, can a country ever have the right to act against the interests of its people? I don't see how.
You seem to be arguing that if some Indians wanted to oppress other Indians, or some Irish wanted to oppress other Irish, it would be wrong for the UK to interfere.
It's true that colonialist domination was responsible for many of history's worst atrocities, so from a consequentialist perspective it doesn't make sense to support foreign domination to try to reduce locally-sourced atrocities. But from a deontological perspective I have the same obligation to protect other people's welfare regardless of whether they live across the street from me or halfway around the world. And that's still true even if the would-be tyrants they need protection from speak the same language they do, and I don't. It's just a much more difficult obligation to fulfill in that case.
Yes I am saying the U.K. should butt out of both places.
What’s your feeling about a future democratic China interfering in the US to thwart white supremacy? Or the oppression of Asians?
As i said somewhere else I’m ok with the United Nations passing resolutions in severe cases to overturn invasions or stop mass killings. Otherwise, no. If you are worried about Afghanistan yourself you could try and alleviate the suffering of women there by sending money or going over to teach. Your country has no right to invade though.
On the pretext of human rights - which are continually evolving - western countries have invaded dozens of countries and killed millions. From the Aztecs, to Afghanistan we were the moral agents, they were the barbarians.
The definition of “oppression” can be fiddled with to justify any invasion particularly as the metropole can, and does, invent new rights every few years. What country isn’t oppressing LGBT these days. Invade!
This isn’t a hypothetical situation - the head of MI6 said that Russia was an oppressor and different from us “none more than LGBT+ rights”. This was just after the invasion, and he could have just mentioned the invasion.
That this is fodder for the masses of course, from a country that allies with Saudi Arabia, but it works.
Yes, that's exactly what my argument is denying (an implicit - or maybe explicit, I don't remember - premise is that who rules is trivial compared to how they rule, although how rulers are selected bears directly on freedom).
Wouldn’t it be interesting to distinguish between nations and nation-states, or something?
Saying that "if India wanted to leave it was up to it" implies that India is a thing, so the nation needs to have been created. And once we have the nation, it seems that they often make themselves a state either because they have the military power to do it, or because they have the political power to do it (eg., nations-states are praised by everyone, so you can use the argument to further your own nation-state — look at how decolonization slowly unfolded after Pdt. Wilson’s ideas about self-determination plus the geopolitical need to have buffer-states had made nation-states out of central Europe countries in the 1920s.). After all, before the 1920s, a big chunk of Europe was in empires, various nations under one power’s rule, and yet they were nations alright, in the sense both of being culturally and ethnically different from the other guys down there (ethnic definition of a nation — but I recall reading one of Bret Devereaux’s blog posts on how even that one was inspired by misconceptions about antiquity used for political purposes), and feeling different from them, feeling bound together (Ernest Renan’s definition, in "What is a nation?").
Regarding the US south, there’s also the question of what defines a nation: Not being American, I really don’t know much about this case, but it seems like neither the ethnic definition of a nation nor Renan’s political and ideological one really fits here (the Southern US were mostly not a different people with a different ethnic background, language, etc.) ; and they kind of didn’t have a wholly different ideological aim either, but saw themselves as members of the American cultures, recognized the same Founding Fathers, etc. — unless I’m badly mistaken. But, in that example, it also seems to be a question of degree, how different you feel and are, exactly.
These definitions and views of nations don’t seem entirely satisfactory to me, and I’m still trying to figure out why, so I’m sorry if this comment doesn’t make much sense, but there’s probably something to it, I guess?
Your comment does make sense, I think that Americans don’t fully understand what a nation (as opposed to a nation state) is.
FWIW, this distinction was not taught in the American public schools I went to in the 1980s and 1990s. Only when I went to college did I realize that some people made a distinction between "nation" and "state". (Special thanks to the Rurouni Kenshin anime.)
I think some of this confusion can be blamed on the USA's peculiar nomenclature and the increasing prominence of our federal government, often referred to as a "national government", as distinct from a "state government".
British India was a thing. Indonesia wasn't a thing prior to Dutch colonization, but it became one as a result of it. Both entities are too large & diverse to fit well with the template of European nationalism, but they wound up independent after WW2 weakened the European colonial powers and the leaders of those independence movements managed to obtain power over others seeking regional independence (though Bangladesh eventually split from Pakistan and Papua New Guinea evaded incorporation into Indonesia).
Eugen Weber's classic Peasants Into Frenchmen has as its thesis that even after the Napoleonic Wars, most people living in the country of France didn't consider themselves part of a French nation. For one thing, a majority didn't even speak French but various "patois". He cites two different people on "what is a nation" and I wish I had noted who said what. Anyway, one was common language, traditions, race, and state. The other was present consent, desire to live together, common possession of rich heritage of memories, and will to exploit the inheritance. He thought France didn't qualify either way. But it had become a nation by 1900, 1914 at the latest.
"Saying that 'if India wanted to leave it was up to it' implies that India is a thing, so the nation needs to have been created."
What's hilarious about saying that "If India wanted to leave it was up to it," is that the only reason there was a political entity called "India" (that was more than a geographic expression) in a position to want to leave is that the British created it. (The same could be said for Ireland.)
London should rule the world (or at least parts of it) if and only if their rule would make the lives of the relevant people better, duh. Same goes for Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Jakarta, Cairo, etc.
That’s basically benign imperialism. Which is what the British believed they were doing. However the basic idea of self determination is that you rule your own country regardless. It’s a bit like being an adult - we don’t allow our lives to be ruled by other people, even if they are better at it.
Countries are not persons, so the analogy doesn't work. The group of people in my country who manage to control the government, whether via democratic election or a military coup, have no more right to rule me than other groups elsewhere in the world, less right if they are more oppressive.
I find it useful to think of the "social contract" that supposedly gives them that right not as a voluntary contract but as a peace treaty, a recognition not that they have a right to rule me but that these are the best terms I can get under current circumstances. That's a contract made under duress, hence not morally binding, but still often prudent to respect.
My response to Scott's question, seen as a moral rather than predictive issue, is that only individuals have rights; the only legitimate government is one that either claims no rights its individuals don't have or is formed by unanimous consent.
That’s standard social contract theory, but as John Gray sometimes opines, philosophy doesn’t analyse nationalism at all, except to condemn it. The 20C was all about people rejecting foreign influence even when guaranteed democratic rights by the foreign power, even when the imperial or external power was perhaps more competent and definitely more advanced, even when the result was certain to reduce access to markets, and therefore GDP. Look at Ireland. Look at Algeria which would have become a department of France, look even (in this century) at Brexit.
When you're rich you can afford to blow some of your wealth on things higher up the hierarchy
Though there are branches of social contract theory going back to Plato that consider the social contract to be made under duress, like a peace treaty, but the Rousseauian branch, more influential in modern times, considers it to be voluntary and thus morally binding. (And many peoples consider peace treaties also to be morally binding, though mostly not Europeans.)
"Only individuals have rights" is the polar opposite of social contract theory.
That sounds like a nice argument! I'm somewhat skeptical about liberty as being more important than welfare, but for political purposes, liberty is more easily verifiable and is usually a good instrumental tool for welfare.
Yep, that was a key premise - that liberty is more likely to identify currently-unknown welfare-increasing regimes, so it should be the test.
There are plenty parts of the British empire that have become dictatorships or monarchies, or have fewer rights than modern day Britain - particularly on LGBT rights in the Caribbean. This doesn’t justify the British empire reasserting itself (not that it is able).
Your argument is too close to democratic imperialism to me. If countries have no right to succession unless this increases “liberty” then they have no right in independence at all unless they are democracies, and very liberal democracies at that. This justifies all kinds of wars, invasions, and imperialisms.
Countries have no rights — they aren't moral agents. All rights should be thought of as reducible to rights of individuals. The claim that a country has a right to independence reduces to the claim that some people in that country, whether a majority, the military, or a hereditary ruler, have the right to rule over other people in that country. Why?
Because of shared cultural and ethnic ties with the ruled, which they don’t have with the rulers of the foreign power. Your logic would assume that the US, or some other democracy, could invade anywhere in the world, impose democratic values, be welcomed as liberators and the population would be happy to be incorporated into the US. Now take that logic to Afghanistan and see how far it gets you. 20 years of education and government, and then the government collapse.
The problem with a fully libertarian view of people as atomised individuals is that people don’t see themselves that way, humans have social ties.
(And of course countries do have rights, and responsibilities under international law).
Historically speaking, colonialism has been far worse for the colonized peoples than even indigenous totalitarian dictatorships, though you can find the occasional exception. Rummel's estimate for "colonial democide" was 50 million murders, worse than even the Great Leap Forward, though not worse than Mao's rule as a whole: https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE6.HTM
(Not sure how to count the deaths from the slow advance of life extension research.)
Radical libertarians would always have a legitimate claim of succession under this model.
i think the specific real world circumstances factor in, so even if we concede the libertarian point on how states should work, maybe enforce non aggression and dont tread, they dont clear the hurdle of status quo bias aka "this is never gonna work and will create a disproportionate amount of conflict so in the end noone wil be any freer"
edit: the charter cities are putting it to the test, and while there is notable opposition from the left, right now it looks like charter cities are allowed to secede. the example also highlights that other circumstances matter. if the motherland agrees, secession is more permissible, than if you secede by force.
Might this not depend on the conception of freedom? Like, libertarians seem obsessed with negative freedom, but a potential increase in negative freedom couldn't be the criterion for secession because then everyone in any nation would always be justified in secession. Of course this might be limited because there are cases where going from citizen -> non-citizen would result in you losing out on political rights that enshrine a certain degree of negative freedom, e.g., the state they've just exited could legally & arbitrarily imprison them. But surely retribution from the state you're leaving shouldn't be factored into the calculation of whether your freedom is increasing, because then hostage nations would never have a legitimate right to secede. All this to say, libertarians would not have a legitimate claim unless they could promise an increase increase in positive liberty, a promise which I suspect most radial libertarians wouldn't be willing to make since robust social institutions are a prerequisite for positive liberty.
"because then everyone in any nation would always be justified in secession"
Why is that a problem? How did some people in a country obtain the right to rule other people in that country? If not, everyone is justified in secession, in refusing to obey the government except in ways in which he would be obliged to obey it if it were not the government — a policeman has the right to stop you from murdering someone just as I have the right to.
There are prudential arguments against individuals seceding, but are there moral arguments?
One could perhaps argue that the prudential arguments carry moral force to the extent that, for example, transaction costs or impracticalities in the administration of whatever natural law negative freedoms are stipulated to exist[1] require external coercive force.
Even if, for example, you think that the right to be free from negative externalities should be resolved only through some form of arbitration rather than by an ex ante regulatory apparatus[2] or by interpersonal violence, it seems obvious that without some form of violent coercion on the table to enforce the edicts of the arbitrator you can't actually end up with that as an equilibrium solution--including some means of subjecting both parties to the same arbitrator (whether or not they would prefer to secede from whatever authority would subject them to it). Quite conceivably many negative rights will have strong geographic context that would also make matter administration impractical beyond some analogue of a state court, so in that case the reification of an abstract moral conception of negative rights turns into a moral argument against secession to the extent that such an apparatus is a necessary practical corollary of protecting negative rights as a matter of first principle.
[1] Obviously one could equally phrase the question from the perspective of a Hobbesian strong man as "what give you the right to be free from my domination?" (or various other less direct but more often reified strictures such as by what right do you claim not to be subject to the governing bodies or consensus mores of your family / tribe / ethnic group, etc.), but that's probably a separate argument.
[2] As a currently practicing litigator and former law student, one of the central messages discernible from my classes on both Torts and Class Actions was that courts are generally bad at making injured parties whole when it comes to torts and ***bloody terrible*** at doing so with respect to mass torts, so I don't tend to endorse this view. Indeed AIUI the consensus in law is that class actions have value almost exclusively as a prospective deterrent than as any kind of remedial mechanism with respect to any form of non-injunctive relief.
I agree that if the consequences of not having a state with the right to do things we normally believe people don't have a right to do were sufficiently terrible, that would be an argument of having such a state. I have written at some length arguing that that is not the case, that there is no good reason why a stateless society could not be workable. You can find most of the theoretical arguments in _The Machinery of Freedom_ — the second edition is free on my web page, the third an inexpensive kindle from Amazon — and described some real world societies in which law enforcement was private and decentralized in _Legal Systems very Different from our Own_ (also available on Amazon). Michael Huemer's book _The Problem of Political Authority_ is also relevant.
This seems very tricky to adjudicate though.
Red America might believe they have a right to secede because speech and guns would be freer in their new country.
Blue America would deny this because abortion and LGBT rights would become less free.
Seems like a lot of the time liberty (and welfare) would come down to which side you like politically.
Right, the rule I propose would be a lot easier to make use of were there a freedom-o-meter that you could use to measure the exact net freedom change, which would also of course depend on how far various policies are pushed (as there are a near-infinite number of possible gun rights regimes, for example).
Another adjudication difficulty comes from stated intent vs. actual practice - e.g. a secessionist group says "We're going to secede and you're not justified in using force to stop it because we're going to adopt all the same policies as our current state does, except we're going to get rid of zoning" and then, once the secession is complete, the president of the new country rips off his mask to reveal that he is Dean Preston. "About the zoning thing - just kidding! We're actually never going to allow a new building to be built ever again!" I suppose one might then say "OK, well, now we can use force to reunify," but what if Dean Preston just happens to win power in a legit election, rather than being one of the secessionist instigators? Does this now just mean that any country can invade a neighbor if it adopts more illiberal policies than it has itself? Why should it matter whether the neighbor started out as part of the same country?
(Oh - one way to avoid both of these issues is to insist that the liberty increase be Pareto rather than net, but that's probably too restrictive.)
Your first paragraph here seems to undermine the top-level comment via reductio ad absurdum... obviously there is and can be no such thing as a 'freedom-o-meter' because 'freedom' isn't an objective thing, at all.
There might be some meta-stable or Schelling point type equilibrium where people generally agree what freedom is, but that's basically already subsumed under 'society' or 'government' as they currently stand. On edge cases such as Ukraine or controversial successions that we do not universally agree no objective standard can exist, and those who claim as such seem (to me) to be appealing to the modern equivalent of divine right
Interesting point, but could not one argue that the available historical evidence suggests that the US was intended to be a voluntary union and secession would be legally legitimate regardless of impact?
Yes, but that's not the argument I'm having. I'm debating whether "increases liberty" is a useable test for deciding whether you like a given secession.
Yes, but wouldn't "explicitly legal" potentially make that point moot? Don't things become complicated if South seceding [reduces liberty] but US fed government preventing said secession is actually in conflict with agreement between states? I think we're sort of between a rock and a hard place at this point as the former is a normative judgement and the latter is an objective violation of agreement.
I'm really discussing Anand's suggestion that "liberty" be the criteria. I used America as an example.
If America has legal issues that make it a bad example, imagine a world where it doesn't have those legal issues and set my example there. Or I can crudely do the same example with the North and South of the United Kingdom (North being "Red").
Suppose the Republican parts of the US want to secede from the Biden administration. Would they be more free or less? More free to drill for oil, but less free to have abortions, and so on. Does it add up to a negative or a positive?
As useless as it is debating rules for secession that we can't enforce, it somehow seems even more useless debating rules that we can never even agree upon.
Oh, I thought we were in ideal-theory land; that's the only place the question in the title of your post might have an answer other than "whoever can impose sufficient pressure to compel that sort of political settlement on the state."
But even in ideal-theory land Scott's point holds; liberty, if it's even quantifiable, is certainly not totally-ordered, so a theory based on liberty having a total order is incoherent.
Edit: I got an email notification asking me to explain what I mean by totally-ordered, but the reply isn't showing up for me, so I'm editing it into the comment. A set being totally ordered by a relation (>= in this case) means every element in the set can be compared to every other element in the set with that relation. An example is the real numbers, R. If you can compress "liberty" into a single real number, then you can compare any two different quantities of liberty. But if you need to use two real numbers (like economic liberty and political liberty, for example), then you're mapping liberty to R^2, which *can't* be totally ordered by >=, meaning the question "does this action increase liberty" becomes meaningless. As Kenny Easwaran and David Friedman have pointed out, you could imagine a partial ordering -- (2,2) is clearly bigger in some sense than (1,1) -- but the more dimensions you need to add, the less often a meaningful comparison is possible.
I don't think the theory assumes that liberty has a total order. It just says that secession is only justifiable when it results, on net, in an improvement of liberty. If there are some liberties that can be compared, then you can secede if you increase some of those more than you decrease others. If there are some liberties that can't be compared, then decreasing one can't be justified by increasing some of those others, and that secession can't be justified.
If liberty has a total order, then every secession is either an increase, a decrease, or a perfect balance of liberty. If it's only a partial order, then there are four possibilities, but it's still only the increases that are justified (according to this particular theory).
That's a good point. It does restrict the number of valid secessions to "basically none" and is different from the original argument (i.e. the argument against the Confederacy is now that freedom from the federal government is incomparable to freedom from slaveowners, not that there would be an objective difference in the total quantity of freedom), but I recognize that this criticism departs from ideal-theory land a bit.
But who decides what constitutes an improvement of liberty? Shall we impose Western philosophy on the rest of the world to adjudicate this question?
"Who decides" isn't an objection to something as a theoretical determination of right and wrong. It's a question about how to practically implement it in legally binding regulation. These are separate questions. There's no obvious reason that a theory of right and wrong should be the sort of thing that anyone is in a perfect epistemic position to implement legally (though it would be nice if it were).
Not incoherent, merely inadequate for judging all questions. It would be better to have a theory that lets you compare all pairs of alternatives but a theory that lets you compare many pairs is better than no theory at all.
For the same issue in a different context, consider the question for a utilitarian of choosing between different futures with different numbers of people in them. Some are pretty clearly better than others, but nobody yet has come up with a defensible criterion that will work for all pairs.
Yes, Kenny's reply made a similar point and I agree. I definitely overstated the case.
There's some value in saying what it would take for something to be justifiable, if you can actually give some argument that you're getting it right in theory. If you can in fact do that, then you can move to the next question of figuring out what sorts of implementable checks might give us the evidence we need. We don't need to solve both steps at the same time (though the practical decision makers might not care to pay attention to someone who claims to have solved the first step, or even has solved the first step, until there is some work done on the second step too).
Maybe more free, if for no other reason than I can only think of one thing that elected Democrats don't believe is under-regulated. Even on positions that are propagandized as being liberty-increasing, the actual proposals aren't or at least aren't very much.
Specific example: Under NY's proposed "legalization" of MJ, it is still illegal to own, produce, possess, or consume marihuana except under very specific (and state-enriching) times, places and manners. Any deviation from the specified conditions is still a crime.
If the question is how I should judge a particular act of secession, we don't have to agree on rules. You can have one conclusion and I another. That is, after all, the situation we accept in many other contexts.
I think if you want your example to work, you have to require that the goal–and not the consequence–of the secession is liberty-increasing. Otherwise, you have a contradiction between these sentences:
1. secession is legitimate iff it is liberty-increasing
2. even though the outcome might have been the same ...one way of getting there is ok and one is not
If the outcome is the same, then the net change in liberty is also the same. So by 1, it can only be the case that both/neither are legit (unless you modify it as I've suggested).
Second, it's unclear to me whether the increase in liberty we are measuring is only about the seceding population. It's not hard to imagine a case where a secession wins more liberty for the seceders, but results in tyranny in the remaining state. I think these are interesting cases to consider.
Third, I think the problem of quantifying "liberty" might simply be harder than the original problem you are trying to replace. (This is the more diplomatic way of framing Scott's comment. That said, I sympathise with your response to him. This whole discussion is rife with is-ought equivocation, and your open-handedness is refreshing.)
An alternative to this thought, but in a similar liberal vein: a people has a right to secede iff they have sufficiently robust institutions to plausibly be able to secure basic liberties for its citizens.
This would track some of Scott's intuitions: any given neighborhood is unlikely to have robust enough institutions to secure any kind of social, political, or economic liberties for its constituents. Not to mention the various hurdles and pitfalls of going from mob -> neighborhood watch -> militia -> police force, a progression which is necessary if you want citizens to be free from arbitrary coercion by other citizens. By contrast, any given city probably does have sufficiently robust institutions to secure these liberties.
Where does this leave us with the Confederacy? If the slaves were not recognized as citizens, then indeed the Confederacy would have had the right to secede under my model. But this doesn't mean that the Union did not have a moral duty to intervene and end slavery. Sometimes moral norms trump political norms.
What counts as a basic liberty t.b.d. For instance, do we have to include democratic political liberties in this list? Does this mean that only peoples with democratic ideals should ever have a right to secede? If you are a liberal, your answer to these questions will probably be yes. But you could still buy my view if you are not a liberal, under some more limited conception of basic liberties: if a fascist micro-nation didn't have institutions robust enough to stop citizens from enslaving other citizens, even a fascist would plausibly be like "nah, they shouldn't be allowed to be independent."
I like this line of thought a lot
There is no need to contort the theory to specify that the CSA's secession was invalid. Assume that the secession was entirely valid and entirely legitimate. Then the Civil War would be, morally, a war of aggression; it would *still* be a just war, to end chattel slavery.
So there is no need to quibble about 'invalid' secession *All* secessions are valid, if the people involved actually want to secede - groups have exit rights just like individuals. Once in a very long while, a secession creates an intolerable situation that justifies a just war of aggression, and 'stop the secession' is a stronger Schelling Point for starting the war than 'let them go and then invade a while later'. This is a special case that applies for the US Civil War, and lets us then discard it as an exceptional case (i.e. hard cases make bad law) and write a rule which covers all the other, *normal* cases.
That mechanic (not sure if it's in the Civ games) where you have to convert a conquered populace to your culture in order for it to stop spontaneously rebelling/increase control of it seems relevant here. Once it's free of the original culture and self-defines, then what is it?
I kinda dislike using adjectives like that in lieu of an actual argument. Feels really weaselly - you're not saying it was a genocide, you're not even officially implying it but... you know?
Anyways, to bite the bullet: I support cultural genocides. We no longer have slavery, cannibalism, wars at the drop of a hat, serfs, gender based discrimination, public executions and a host of other things which were big parts of old cultures.
All I'm saying is maybe use a different expression, end reserve genocide for either things which involve mass murders, or things that are obviously metaphoric. I can't believe english doesn't have another collection of words to express the same idea. Worst case scenario one would have to use three or four instead of two. But in my humble opinion two words are worth avoiding the kind of derailing you see right now.
Just because going to war at the drop of a hat was part of the culture of 1600s Europe doesn't mean its entire culture should have been genocided.
So basically you're ok with having them changed, even drastically, as long as there are changes you approve of. Anything more is cultural genocide. Gotcha.
I know I wasn't charitable here, but you really walked into that one...
This escalated quickly, given that the original post was about a game. I’ll note that your argument was one used by the British during their empire though, and the Spanish about the Aztecs.
I'm neither pro nor against cultural change per se. I'm not even talking about it. I just don't like expressions like "cultural genocide". They're either conversation stoppers - who likes genocides?! - or polarize conversations, like here. I was trying to show this, but apparently I succeeded a little to well. The point was just to show how it breaks down the conversation, not to actually break it. Sorry.
" I’ll note that your argument was one used by ... the Spanish about the Aztecs"
Do you not think this was valid?
I support *some* cultural genocides. Perhaps this is a dangerous principle to adopt, and one can certainly argue about who fits this category, but in my mind there are clearly some cultures the world is better off without. 19th century Comanche culture, ISIS, early 20th century Prussia and its descendants, the Mongols in the 12 century.
I prefer the term ethnocide. It's more concise.
Richer, more secure, happier, etc.
Ancestors are frowning down on them but in terms of the utility of the individuals living the best option is to just get over it and embrace assimilation, or leave. Culture is a traditional construct designed to provide utility to its carriers, but if immovable political realities cause it to instead significantly decrease happiness and life enjoyment, it should just be discarded. The only victims are the people currently suffering under the weight of their past, when it can be simply be cast off.
How about the Poles? You think most of them wish they'd never been converted to Catholic? Do Germans resent living in Germany rather than the Holy Roman Empire? Do all those Jews and Irish and Italians and Greeks resent being assimilated into the US in the early 20th C?
When it comes to climate, we're supposed to weigh the happiness of future generations at least to some extent against the discomfort of the present.
Why does that same argument not hold for assimilation, that, sure, it hurts for a generation or two, then the benefits are immense?
Since you mention the Poles: They have experienced both attempts at Russification and Germanization in the 19th and 20th centuries. Do you think most of them wish these campaigns had been successful, would they be happier and richer today? Maybe.
All your examples are of successful assimilations. Assimilation attempts that have been resisted are viewed very differently.
"Assimilation attempts that have been resisted are viewed very differently."
That doesn't mean that the resistance was sensible, and that the (many generations later) descendants of those who resisted are better off. All it means is that, beginning at the time of resistance, they need to create a national mythos to justify that resistance.
People have always emigrated, even in the old world. That’s not eliminating a culture. You would be better looking at native Americans in the US as an example. You could argue that they are better off financially than they would have been without European/American invasions, but culturally they have been marginalised.
And they'd be far better off if they had simply integrated rather than having the reservation system. Under the reservation system they face low gdp, high unemployment, and low economic opportunity. If they had just integrated into regular America I see no reason they wouldn't be at parity with current American per capita gdp
That’s not the way it works. People will sacrifice GDP for cultural reasons. If in the future the west stagnates economically would you join an alliance with a democratic China, transferring sovereignty?
I'm not all that happy about that conversion to Catholicism, to be honest, and neither are many other Poles.
To be fair, at the time it was a political necessity if you wanted to hang with the cool kids instead of being repeatedly crusaded against. Though that still eventually happened with the Teutonic Order...
Do you think the people of Germany are significantly richer, more secure and happier after decades of allied control brutally wiped out Nazi culture in Germany. If you say no, then at least you are consistent but I’d have to disagree
No, because unlike the above hypothetical the Uyghurs remain a distinct second class culture. If however they were offered true integration into Chinese culture they might want to consider it
If this discussion goes back to medieval times, I'd like to bring up Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. When I read it, I was fairly convinced by his argument that the modern conception of national consciousness emerged in the 18th-19th century, and that applying this concept to peasants farther back than that is essentially just retconning them into a civilization that in actuality would not recognize itself as belonging to its modern counterpart.
With that in mind, I am skeptical that EITHER of the modern Russian or Ukrainian identities truly have the centuries of heritage they like to bring up. Just because Ivan the Great's name for his territory is phonetically closer to Russia than to Ukraine doesn't mean that Russia is inherently a more real or deserved nationhood, or that it is a sole and direct legitimate successor of his culture. A national consciousness developing in the 18th, 19th, even 20th century is a perfectly legitimate basis for a nation, and "seniority" on the part of Russia should count for nothing.
The only thing he got right was that the idea that states should be nation states is a 19C invention - people were fully aware of their National differences long before that.
Yes, one thing I've been continually thinking about in recent weeks is how this book describes the French process of eliminating Gascon, Occitan, Breton, etc. people-hood. Spain started a little bit later than France and thus never fully eliminated Catalan or Galician as distinctive national identities. Ukrainian and Belarussian seem the same - had Russia been as effective in the 19th century as France, then the question wouldn't arise, but they weren't, so it does.
It's worth noting that while they don't really talk about secession, Occitan and Breton in particular are quite distinct local identities, and still actively maintain their distinct dialects. I would say they're roughly as culturally a people as Scots are, France just has a more centralised government than the UK.
Not really. Gaelic has no similarities to English while these regions are speaking languages similar to France - it’s a Romance language continuum. Until recently Scotland didn’t have a parliament and France had many regions and cities with considerable power.
Breton is a Celtic language, so it’s just as linguistically distinct from French as Scottish Gaelic is from English.
Yes, I know about Breton being Celtic. Said it in my first reply.
Breton is a Celtic language, very close to Breton, and quite close to Welsh. It is very far from French. I suppose it is unclear whether English is closer to Irish than Breton is to French, and it depends on whether Latin or Old Saxon is closer to Celtic languages. Occitan is a Romance language, so is close to French.
> I suppose it is unclear whether English is closer to Irish than Breton is to French, and it depends on whether Latin or Old Saxon is closer to Celtic languages.
The conventional view is that Italo-Celtic forms a clade, so Breton (Celtic) should be closer to French (Italic) than Irish (Celtic) is to English (Germanic).
I don't think the italo-celtic hypothesis is supported any longer. As I learned it, there are no shared innovations that are common to italic and celtic languages, but nowhere else to be found. I remember something about the discovery of hittite and consideration of the passive third person having led to that conclusion, but I may be mistaken. Perhaps some specialist would like to chime in?
Gaelic, not Irish.
I am aware that Breton is not a Romance language, in fact I said that below. For that reason Brittany is one of the places where they do in fact see themselves as a distinct ethnic group, the other regions of France do not. Were there more Bretons it might have a larger nationalist movement.
> Gaelic has no similarities to English
I thought I had read that English do-support (compare "I went to the store" with "Did you go to the store?") was paralleled in at least one local Celtic language, explaining how English developed such an idiosyncratic piece of syntax. Is that not true?
Do-support in English does likely come from Celtic influence, in much the same way that English has a bunch of words with French/Latin roots along with a Germanic syntax (though a Germanic syntax that has clearly been influenced by French!). It is the subject of some scholarly debate, since there is also some amount of do-support in other Germanic languages, though to a much lesser degree.
One way to think about language transmission is to look at each stage of transmission: My parents speak a language very similar to mine, and their parents spoke a language similar to that, and over the course of thousands of years, the slight differences build up. The differences usually come in pronunciation or vocabulary - inventing slang, picking up words from the other people around you, etc. - but other parts of the language can also change, like do-support if it came from a Celtic language.
Languages generally are a mix of the other languages around them, since people hear something and then start using it, especially in bilingual populations. You can basically always still say that they have a primary root though. English is definitely a Germanic language because you can look at path it has traced over time - it picked up pieces from the languages around it but at each stage it was closest to the previous version of the language, going back until there was just one Germanic language a thousand years ago.
Even that's a bit of a falsehood though, since there was never a point when all the "Germanic" people spoke one "Germanic" language. There was some point in time when they were most similar to each other, but even then there would have been a gradient across the speakers. And the Germanic speakers and Latin speakers and Celtic speakers and... could all be traced back to a Proto-Indo-European root, but they too didn't have one unified language. And this probably repeats back through history for tens of thousands of years, but any more than the vaguest hints at those languages are sadly lost to time.
So despite all the questions, it still makes sense to say that English is a Germanic language while Gaelic is a Celtic language and French is a Romance language. All the boundaries are fuzzy and questionable, but you generally know it when you see it.
I thought the Scots mostly spoke Scots instead of Scottish Gaelic.
Scots speak English with a Scottish accent, for the most part. But I don't think language is particularly relevant to this question - after all, the USA speaks English, independence is more political than linguistic.
Scots is considered its own separate language, not "English with a Scottish accent". There was even a Scots wikipedia which notoriously had a non-speaker behind most of its edits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
Historically the highlands and west spoke gaelic. Ethnic groups are often linguistic groups, since language and culture are intertwined. The culture can survive the language loss though.
Occitan is a separate language, and Breton is *definitely* a separate language. Breton is Celtic, while Occitan is Romance like French and Spanish.
All Romance languages are related, Occitan is closer to French than Spanish. Not enough for them to be a separate ethnic group. Yes Breton is separate. Only the Bretons are a separate group.
I didn't mention anything about ethnicities.
By and large that’s exaggerated. Breton is a separate language from Romance languages, and the Bretons still exist. Occitan is a Romance language, as is gascon etc. Dialects mostly.
About two decades ago, I wrote something critical of the European Union. In reply, I received a brilliant email from a Breton nationalist intellectual who pointed out that his peninsula was similar in size, population, and sophistication to Denmark. But everybody is convinced that, of course, Denmark should rule itself but Breton should be ruled from Paris. He saw the EU as a reasonable way for Breton, Scotland, Catalonia, Sardinia, Flanders, Lombardy, and so forth to rule themselves without falling into poverty.
On the other hand, I've also come to appreciate the conservative legalistic argument that the world community recognizes certain borders and doesn't recognize other potential borders. To take the most relevant example, everybody, including Russia, recognized the legal independence of Ukraine three decades ago.
The concept of the international community recognizing some states while not recognizing some others may seem arbitrary but it prevents chaos. For example, most important countries recognized Ukraine's independence in 1991-1993, including Russia on 12/2/1991 and the U.S. on 12/25/91.
Hence, ever since, all sorts of things have been organized with Ukrainian independence in mind.
For example, up until about the time Putin turned 40, Ukrainian athletes competed internationally side by side with Russian athletes as members of the Soviet national teams. But nobody under about 35 in Ukraine, the guys who are doing 90% of the fighting, can remember Ukrainians being on the same team as Russians in the Olympics or in soccer.
While isolating during the covid crisis, Putin has convinced himself that granting Ukraine independence after the failure of the Soviet hardliners' coup against Gorbachev in 1991 was a mistake Moscow shouldn't have made. I can understand where he is coming from.
But ... the borders of the world are not up for grabs. The whole world recognizes Ukraine as independent from Moscow, so sending tanks across the border into Ukraine is an act of aggression. To wield Fawlty's Razor: "You started it, you invaded Ukraine."
On the other hand, absolutely nobody has recognized Catalonian independence (although South Ossetia and Abzakhia are open to the idea of a deal). Now, I'm sympathetic to Catalonian statehood ... but, I also recognize that the foreign ministries of the Earth have not agreed.
So we actually can say with some degree of confidence that there is a consensus among the states of the world that Ukraine is a separate country but Catalonia is not.
You might find this the wrong way around, but rolling tanks in to change the borders has been in poor regard since 1928.
"While isolating during the covid crisis, Putin has convinced himself that granting Ukraine independence after the failure of the Soviet hardliners' coup against Gorbachev in 1991 was a mistake Moscow shouldn't have made"
This is missing an important point about the legalistic side. Ukraine had been recognized as independent internationally since the 40's. It was one of Stalin's tricks to get the USSR more votes in the UN by having USSR, Belarus and (most importantly here) Ukraine as "independent" SSRs.
So legally, Moscow has never recognized Ukraine as under its control since the post-war order.
I think the important point is that "legally" is not a thing that matters to Vladimir Putin. Ukrainian "independence" under Stalin was a trick, tricks aren't real, Ukraine wasn't really independent from the 1940s, and nobody really believed it was.
Post-coup, Gorbachev *really* gave Ukraine independence, and that was what Putin thinks was a mistake. He would have been fine with any legal trick that gave Ukraine fake-independence so long as it wasn't really independent. And right now, he'd be fine with a legal trick that allows Ukraine fake-independence while ending its real independence. Pretty sure that was his goal in the present war from the start.
Yeah. Ukraine in the modern sense really is a 20th-century invention, but also Russia in the modern sense is a 19th-century invention. (And using nationalism to claim justification for a war is a non-sequitir either way.)
The USSR balkanized precisely because the various countries it split up into did not view themselves as one people.
I've read that Anderson later contradicted "Imagined Communities" with "Under Three Flags", but I haven't actually read either of those books myself: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2011/01/01/the-state-of-statelessness/
It's my understanding that the title "Emperor of all the Russias" referred to Great Russia (Russia), Little Russia (Ukraine), and White Russia (Belarus). This seems to imply an understanding that all three are related, yet distinct.
Once a nation is a nation it has a right to continue to be a nation.
The definition of a nation is that it has the sole legal right to use force within its own borders.
So, Ukraine is a nation, but the Confederacy failed to be a nation, because it lost its war of independence.
Your street would also fail to be a nation, because presumably it would not succeed in its quest for independence. Unless no one noticed.
you realize that putin is making the exact same argument, and that his definition of the russian nation includes ukraine.
By his logic, Russia is part of the USA or China or the EU when they get their unified command running; and thus may be safely ignored.;
To be fair, the United States of America and Asia did a lot of remediation of nuclear materials in the former Russian Federation after World War III.
Do you think there is a distinction between a legal right and an ethical right?
I do, but legal rights can, in some cases, create moral rights.
Sovereignity is, more than anything, the best tool we have to avoid war.
Consider a repeated game of chicken. You can't communicate with your opponent. But there is a Lawmaker who can communicate with both of you.
The Lawmaker tells you that you can drive straight in every odd-numbered round but you have to swerve in every even-numbered round; your opponent can driver straight in every even round, and has to swerve in every odd round. I think it's clear that it would be very wrong for you to drive straight in an even-numbered round—even if the Lawmaker is unelected, and his rule is arbitrary. He has created a Schelling point that allows you both to avoid crashing, and also to drive straight in some of the rounds.
The concept of sovereignty, with exactly demarcated borders, however arbitrary they are, serve a similar purpose.
What's your take on something like Somaliland, a state which has in all practical terms won its war of independence years ago but which has no international recognition. Somaliland has no legal right that anyone else recognizes to use force within its borders, but it functions much like any other nation. Meanwhile Somalia is recognized as a nation but many groups use violence within its borders without the state's consent, and often local communities aid and treat as legitimate the forces committing such violence.
It's up to Somaliland to convince the international community that it is here to stay. Generally, that requires getting the larger community's consent.
Ukraine has flickered in and out of being a nation repeatedly in the last century, right? And that the Confederacy was a nation for a few years. So "is a nation", "continue to be a nation", is that a matter of a certain number of years? Is it five? Is it twenty five? Do they have to have a long period of peace before it counts? Hot war versus cold war? Does a certain number of other countries have to recognize them? Do you count mutual recognition pacts, where like Taiwan recognizes Somaliland and vice versa? A lot of countries you probably think of as nations are going to fail a lot of these tests for a lot of their history.
A nation is a people, a state is a political organisation. The Scots are a people but Scotland is not an independent state. Therefore nations don’t “flicker” in and out of existence, as they gain or lose independence. Not that peoples can’t be absorbed into larger ethnic groups (look at the Han Chinese) but it’s nothing to do with independence, or sovereignty, or self rule. The cultural idea of the people exists, before the State. The former often demands the latter
Sorry, yes, I took david roberts' usage instead of the definition in wider use in the thread and elsewhere.
Swap nation for state in both his comment and mine, and I think my point stands.
So is Hutt River a nation?
if the power to tax is the power to destroy, then Hutt is not a nation since it failed to avoid paying taxes and failed to evade other requirements of living in Australia. My knowledge of Hutt comes entirely from reading the Wikipedia article on it. But it dies seem like they had a lot of fun with it!
Per wikipedia, it dissolved itself in 2020.
But I still hear Huttese on TV these days.
You seem to be using the word "nation" for what other people call a state. This seems likely to lead to confusion.
I prefer nation, but to me they are interchangeable. Some nations are more ethnically homogeneous than others. But ethnic homogeneity does not to me indicate a "state" or a "nation."
I think that's likely to cause confusion, when other people are using the sense of "nation" in which phrases like "the Kurdish nation" and "the Korean nation" and "the Navajo nation" have a referent and the phrase "nation state" isn't a pleonasm. Though one might argue everyone should just switch to using the word "people" instead to avoid confusion ...
They are not. A state is a legal entity. Recognized geographic borders, a monopoly on the use of force, etc.
A nation is a group of people who share an ethnicity. The nation need-not overlap with the borders of a state.
One idea in political science was that of the nation-state, where a state contains a single nation, and the entirety of the nation is contained within the single nation.
https://imgflip.com/i/6avcbb
^_^
Does every change in borders going back to antiquity count as that region being a country? Or does changing which nation you are part of exclude self-determination but if you somehow lucked into being a principality at some point that is sufficient?
So I have used the phrase Transnistrian Sovereignty multiple times in analogy to the well-known term Westphalian Sovereignty.
Roughly: for certain international purposes (such as “representation” at the United Nations, participation in UEFA football, or not being invaded by space pirates) the region is considered part of Moldova.
For all practical purposes on the ground, the region is fully independent. It doesn't pay taxes, and is welcome to invite foreign armies into its territory over the opposition of the federal government.
At a high level, the system appears to work. But does it actually work? Discuss.
The status quo works for Transnistria because they have local autonomy for domestic policy, and their foreign policy needs are met by their patron Russia anyway so they don't care about their lack of foreign policy representation in the country they are actually in. It wouldn't work if Transnistria was genuinely trying to 'go it alone' and could had nobody representing its interest on the world stage.
Does it work? It's one of the poorest parts of Europe and is run by a crime family.
It works by a more relevant standard: people pushed to get out of Moldova, but they're not pushing to go anywhere else. Transnistrians may have it relatively bad, but they seem to like their state, or at least their independence from Moldova and their relationship with Russia.
This is really question begging. What makes you think that Transnistrians like their state? Independent media is stifled, elections are not democratic, and out migration has disenfranchised people that used to live there but are unhappy with the current government. And the country is dirt poor and run by criminals. In the 2021 election 9% of ballots were spoiled on a 35% turnout. Why are people defending a dirt poor Russian exclave without a free press and with abysmal political engagement by the domestic population?
I was just reading about Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Artsakh) and noted that it's another example. De jure part of Azerbaijan, but de facto either independent or part of Armenia.
(The Caucasus region is particularly complicated this way, between Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, Daghestan, etc. I imagine New Guinea would be too if any of us paid attention to it, given how much linguistic and cultural diversity these regions have.)
S. Ossetia is an interesting case when compared to Crimea. After the Georgian War, Russian gave them the right to vote whether to join Russian or stay 'independent'. They've been going back and forth on this, though, putting off the vote time and again. Maybe this is to allow Russia more time to campaign? I'm not close enough to the issue to know why they don't want to join the N. Ossetians. But it suggests these votes aren't necessarily all political theater.
New Guinea is different - a modern multi-ethnic state (Papua) and then a ton of effectively-independent tribes that don't have a foreign policy in respect of the outside world (they have foreign policies in respect of each other), some of which have relationships with the state and some don't (some of them are literally uncontacted).
There's also the chunk that is occupied/part of Indonesia ("Irian Jaya"); the tribes there operate independently just like the ones in Papua, and the formal international border is meaningless in tribal territory (in the interior); the effective borders are along the coasts where the states are functional.
This brings up an interesting philosophical question. Assuming the state and the discussants more or less buy into the idea of The Social Contract, what is the status of uncontacted peoples? There are people who are legally and territorially residents of Papua New Guinea, but neither they nor their ancestors have ever even been made aware of the general social contract of that state, much less bought into it. Is this okay?
I think this is why the tribes are treated as being de facto independent - you can say the same for Amazonians, the Sentinelese, and the few other examples of uncontacted or limited-contact peoples.
in PoSci we discuss cases like this under the term of de-facto states. notable examples include Somaliland, northern cyprus and Nagorno Karabakh, arguably Taiwan although it is very close to a "real" state.
Most of these are artifacts of a frozen conflict. That means they enjoy a lesser degree of normative protection in the form of people saying its bad if someone just goes and conquers them.
Do you have a good explanation as to why Transnistria was included in Moldova in the first place? I can't seem to make heads or tails of the decision. Was it some confusion about biological ethnicity vs. language vs. culture?
Yes and no ... I have an explanation for "why are the post-Soviet national borders mutable in a way that the borders in the rest of the world are not" on my blog at https://yevaud.newslettr.com/p/the-post-war-population-transfers . If you want the detailed history of "why did the Soviets draw the lines how they did", you will have to ask someone else.
I think it's worth saying explicitly what this post essentially leaves as subtext, namely, that "a people's right to self-determination" is a fundamentally incoherent concept. Many intuitive political concepts are in fact like this, such as the idea of "indigeneity" (am I indigenous to East Africa because my ancestors evolved there, and if so, does that mean I deserve special rights there I wouldn't deserve in, say, China?). We utilitarians should - at least, when no one else is listening - abandon all talk of such rights, and instead simply support or oppose self-determination on the basis of whether it makes the world a better place or not.
I would REALLY like it if everyone stopped being utilitarian. Like, like it a LOT.
The problem with this thought IMO is that it's never really clear what the outcome of a war will be, at least not nearly enough to evaluate it in this way. Suppose you're advising a group of Lakota whether they should violently confront American settlers and try to form their own nation or if they should play nice with America and try to secure favorable terms of integration. In the best case separate nationhood is probably better and less likely to involve oppression of Lakota, but going to war also increases the odds that the US comes back with plans of ethnic cleansing. Wars are such unpredictable animals and the outcomes of them so radically different that there's seldom any clear answer that doesn't rest on dozens of unverifiable assumptions.
But I agree the idea of self-determination is incoherent and doesn't really get you anywhere.
I don't know, maybe if we aren't really sure whether a way will have good or bad utilitarian outcomes, we shouldn't be very sure about whether we support it or oppose it?
There was an article on the older Slate Star Codex that I felt helped me think about when you should "just do what makes the world a better place."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/
It makes a distinction between axiology, morality, and law.
"Axiology" is the study of what makes the world a better place.
"Law" is a system of rules that we've decided to enforce with violence. Ideally, we want to pick our laws to try to make the world a better place, but we don't just have a law that says "maximize goodness", because trying to enforce "maximize goodness" with violence is a poor strategy for actually achieving goodness. (For several reasons: it's hard to adjudicate whether someone followed it, lots of people would fail to follow the rule even if it were enforced with violence, enforcement would be expensive, etc.)
"Morality" is a system of rules that we've decided to enforce socially, but not with violence. As with "law", we want this system of rules to make the world good, but goodness isn't maximized simply by telling everyone "socially punish anyone who doesn't make the world good". Morality can afford to be *closer* to axiology than law can, because the enforcement is less harsh, but the optimum set of moral rules is still different from perfect axiology, due to things like enforcement costs, partial information, cognitive limitations, etc.
In this frame, morality is a *strategy* for achieving goodness, rather than a *description* of what is good. And it's potentially useful to have a strategic discussion about what actions should be socially rewarded/punished as distinct from what actions would (hypothetically, if we could magically get people to follow them) lead to an ideal world.
I think my response would be that it's not an eternal inherent property of the universe, but instead it's a procedurally determined thing. A bunch of people show up with weapons and say you're part of them now: what do you do?
That's unsatisfying from a theoretical perspective, I know.
+
Agree!
All governments are de facto - there is no "country in its own right", "historical people deserving self-determination", etc. "Self-determination" is a nonsensical concept. A government is an organization of humans, it does not "represent" a "people" in some ethereal sense. Russia has self-determination in the way you are using that term, but 99.9999% of Russians have no control over the actions of their government. Ukraine could be governed by Ukrainians and be terrible (as has happened multiple times), or it could be governed by Chileans and be great. If we care about the welfare of Ukrainians we should wish for them to have good government which promotes their happiness and prosperity, not about whether their rulers are of a particular ethnicity.
Territory changes hands over time based on the ability of various governments to maintain their strength, be good neighbors, and the wars/lack thereof that result from that. Any given arrangement of territory and population under various governments is arbitrary, and trying to maintain the distribution of a given moment in history has no more a priori reason to be correct than any other arrangement.
Your last sentence sounds virtually indistinguishable from the famous Watchman quote:
"There is no material difference in the number of particles in a living body and in a dead one. Why should I care if some matter arranges itself into a slightly lower energy state?"
Do you believe that the Ukranians will have a happy, prosperous future with Russian overlords?
I don't, but not because of their lack of self-determination - simply because I don't expect Russia to actually take over the country and rule it. If Russia was truly going to take over Ukraine and Ukrainians would live under the Russian government, I do think they would be better off. The Russian government, from my perspective, clearly provides superior customer service to the Ukrainian one, regardless of your opinion of their morality/immorality in international relations.
Regarding your quote, the opinion that nothing has real meaning - there are no good or bad outcomes, just the interplay of physics - is certainly a coherent philosophical position. I personally do not agree with it because I value my own life and happiness a LOT, and empathy compels me to value those things in others as well. But ethical axioms cannot be debated. If someone else does not have the same feelings I do no logical argument can convince them.
I think a preference for the status quo has to weigh in to some extent.
All else being equal, sure, I agree with the “any group large enough that it isn’t ludicrous on its face has a right to self-determination” standard.
But all else is almost never equal. Someone wants to secede and someone else wants to conquer—and all of that is enormously disruptive to many other someones.
So I think there’s an immediately obvious utilitarian bias towards the status quo of, oh, the last decade or so. Governments are heavy, complicated things, and I think a group who wants to disrupt that needs to make an affirmative argument based on something other than “self determination” that this is a good idea and all the disruption is worth it for the sake of things being better in the long run.
Which unfortunately gets us nowhere because it brings us right back to debates about culture and history etc.
Self-Determination is a sort of weird right, because it is inherently a right afforded to groups of people, but not individuals (unless you are an extremely principled libertarian). I think granting rights to groups that are independent of the rights of the constituent individuals makes very little sense. 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.
I also think the scoping problem is even worse than you say. A defining characteristic of a state is that some group in power (often the majority) can enforce their will on every one else. Why would it be the case that the group in power has the right to their power, but the larger entity having even more power doesn't?
Self-determination is coherent if you're an anarchist. I agree there's quite a bit of cognitive dissonance in governments discussing it.
My immediate response to "what about the Confederacy?" is to say that yes, the people of the South had the right to secede in 1861 if they wanted to - but they didn't.
For one, there was a huge Black population - a majority in South Carolina, and at least a large minority elsewhere - who didn't get to vote, and would presumably have opposed secession.
For another, even the white population probably opposed secession in most places. Many secession conventions had a majority of delegates elected as Unionists who eventually voted for secession. I believe Texas was the only state where it was even submitted to referendum. Admittedly, the delegates would've argued that circumstances changed between their election and their vote - but even ignoring the restricted franchise, this casts their democratic legitimacy in severe doubt.
So, I believe it's quite consistent to support secession in theory but oppose the 1861 secession in practice.
Yeah, but it seems possible in principle that, say, all white citizens supported, all black citizens opposed, and blacks were a minority so it passed. I don't think that scenario would be very different, ethically, from what really happened, so I don't want to hang my opposition to what really happened on its differences from that scenario.
Personally, my response is that transaction costs are large enough to warrant enshrining a status quo bias and require a super-majority, which I seriously doubt the confederacy had. (Notably, this requirement would have prevented Brexit from passing, and I doubt Crimea had genuine supermajority support for leaving Ukraine and joining Russia)
I also have strong feelings that there should never be restrictions on emigration - if black slaves had been allowed to freely leave the Confederacy, there wouldn't have been a moral issue with it. Voting with your feet is expensive but a lot better than having no options at all.
I expect that for realpolitik reasons the USA would probably still have gone to war over it even if you satisfy all those conditions, though, since as you said, "international law" is a polite fiction with no enforcement, and that was even more true in the 19th century.
Brexit wasn't really a secession by the standards we use here. UK wasn't even fully integrated in EU when they left - they always kept a foot in the door. I was expecting at least a mention on the Basques or the Irish - much closer to what we're talking about.
Anyways, my take on this is that EU made 90% of secession topics in Europe obsolete. You don't have borders anyways, same currency, (a bit too) unified laws, there is even an EU prosecutor's office now. You secede for ... what exactly?
Which offers a pretty nice framework for judging Russia vs UA. Russia wants a lot less freedoms overall: they're specifically complaining that UA was moving towards the west, entering alliances they dislike and so on. If they just left them alone, there was absolutely nothing stopping them from offering the exact type of trade and military alliances, from lowering border passing costs and so on. Joining EU or even NATO would restrain their options almost too little to count - and brexit has proven there's even a civilized way of exiting.
My standard is "settled will", which is also an arbitrary standard that can be argued about, but suggests a character of a long-term and deep-rooted decision rather than a particular majority standard.
The approach I (formally, at the time) proposed for Scotland's independence is that they hold a referendum on whether to negotiate for terms of independence, and then, having agreed terms or failed to reach agreement, hold a second referendum on whether to accept those terms or declare independence unilaterally. This is in a situation where there are a lot of Scottish people who would like to be independent in principle but are concerned about what it would mean in practical terms, so giving them a clearer view of the practical impacts would make the second referendum a much clearer expression of the settled nature of their will.
Thank you, I was pondering how to deal with this specific issue of transaction costs on one hand and how to settle on an arbitrary number different from 50% on another, and this seems to solve it !
There was a lot of violence in the south by secessionists against southern unionists. I don't think we can say that secession would have won a fair referendum in any state.
If we go all-in on self-determination, doesn't that mean that the Confederacy had the right to secede, but black people in the Confederacy had the right to secede from it in turn?
I don't think secession is a good match for people who are intermixed with other people across an area.
South Africa thought differently. Now, apartheid was bad, but it was bad in large part because the Bantustans' independence wasn't real (ditto for Palestine).
For example, Norwegians are the people who live in the rugged Atlantic watershed of the Scandinavian mountains, while Swedes are the people who live in the gentle Baltic watershed of that mountain range. This distinction goes back many centuries. In 1905, 99.95% of Norwegians voted for dissolution of their union with Swedes.
That turned out successful for both peoples.
On the other hand, flat plains tend to lead to intermingled ethnicities. Sorting out flat plains can be an ugly business. Modern Poland, for example, is a homogeneous and successful nation-state. But modern Poland is also a creation of the Nazis murdering its Jews and the Soviets ethnic cleansing its Germans. That's not the fault of modern Poles, but it shouldn't be an attractive role model for the rest of the world.
Two-way population exchange like between Greece-Turkey and India-Pakistan is plausible though.
True, but they often turn into nightmares.
I once found one historical example of where population transfers were done in a reasonably humane, well organized fashion, but I can't remember what it was. Schleswig-Holstein, maybe?
But sometimes Cyprus happens later. :-(
Isn’t this more of a democracy problem than a secession problem? If 60% of an area’s population want to enslave the other 40%, that’s either ok or it’s not. “You can’t do that, but only because you’re currently part of a larger polity” seems like a really weird answer to throw out in response.
It's by no means clear who should get to vote on an independence referendum: the residents of the territory pondering independence or the whole country affected?
For example, David Cameron offered Scotland a vote on independence in which the rest of the UK was to have absolutely no say. It narrowly failed.
On the other hand, in the 2001 referendum on independence from Los Angeles for the San Fernando Valley, a slight majority of Valley Girls and Guys voted for secession (50.8%). BUT the rest of the city voted overwhelmingly (80.5%) to hand on to their tax cow. And under the rules of that election, that defeated secession.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/2002/11/13/San-Fernando-Valley-secession-loses/65321037213944/
Looking at independence referenda around the world, I'm struck that successful ones tend to enjoy a bandwagon effect with a vast majority voting for secession. For example, to take an archetypal example of a successful secession movement, in 1905 99.95% of Norwegians voted to secede from Sweden.
South Sudan and Bougainville also had massive support for their succession votes. Above 97% in both cases I believe.
Both countries are extremely poor and South Sudan is a basket case. I support their successions though.
Careful where you are going with this argument...
Are you willing to concede (if the majority support it, as they appear to) that Crimea and the Eastern parts of Ukraine have that same right to secede and join Russia?
And, just to pour gasoline on the flames, if we accept the tenets of Woke that some of us are less sullied and more deserving than others, then it should be pointed out that it's the wealthiest, most elite, most educated fraction of Ukraine that embraces Europe, while it's the poor, the weak, the downtrodden, who choose Russia...
Pffff, that’s nothing on the conclusions being consistent on this leads you to. Consider the following:
Austria/Sudetenland/Danzig circa 1938
Biafra/Tigray/redrawing every border in Africa
Kashmir
Northern Ireland as a patchwork of mono-confessional enclaves
Israeli settlements
An Afrikaner volkstaat
ISIS (in western Iraq and parts of Syria)
Various small American cities seceding as a tourist gimmick
So I have a strange outlandish political opinion. I'm very much of proponent of the succession of the City of Memphis from the State of Tennessee. We would be accepted into the Union as the 51st State. Our boundaries would be the entirety of the Memphis Sands Aquifer which is spread across three states.
There's a lot of reasons I believe that this is important, but the primary is to prevent the exhaustion of the Memphis Sands Aquifer.
Getting the City to vote to leave Tennessee is one things, and theoretically possible, but how do you propose to lay claim to the aquifer? Why does your new State of the City of Memphis have more right to it than the 3 states currently sharing it? And note that you're arguing for a transfer of ownership, not a legal covenant restricting extraction, which wouldn't require any change in ownership while providing *more* legal protections (All of these hypotheticals operating in the counterfactual where getting people to agree to them is possible with a combination of persuasion and affordable payments).
Transfer of ownership isn't the right word. Three states "own" the aquifer today. They argue in the courts to determine the what happens with the water.
I understand what you are saying, and I agree that's what's going to happen. A nameless legal think tank in DC will decided what happens to the water. A series of legal verdicts in our court system will "protect it", and no single person who actually live in the place these natural resources exist will actually vote on it. Some NGO will release a couple studies that will conclude the courts are right, and that will be that.
Again. I don't care. I still think the people who live by the resources should actually have a say on how they are managed. And if there's monetary benefits to those resources, the communities in question should benefit.
In what way did the local residents contribute to an ancient aquifer that entitles them to it?
The idea is that every natural resource shouldn't be subject to a war of all against all.
Unfortunately for that idea the entire world is already a war of all against all.
You may succeed in seceding, and may be readmitted as US territory akin to the status of Washington, DC. But getting admitted as a 51st state seems much harder. It would give 4 senators to what is today Tennessee, which the rest of the country would (rightly) not abide.
Technically, it would be 8 senators to Tennessee/Arkansas/Mississippi.
Memphis is the second city in three states, well two states since Mississippi doesn't actually have a major politically relevant city in recent history. Jackson will eventually be that in 10 years.
Anyway, Memphis isn't actively represented in the Senate, and hasn't been since the early 90s. We don't have a significant representation in the federal government. I really don't care what the rest of the country thinks. I want my friends and family to have a future in the city they were born in, or at least the opportunity if they want it.
It would probably depend to some degree on whether Memphis was expected to be a democratic or republican seat, and who was in power at the time.
Once you can get permission from all three of those states to form a new state using their territory, sure.
As I said above in my argument re "secession to avoid sharing a natural resource"...
It's not unreasonable to align political control of natural resources with their political boundaries. If you were, say, the Hereditary Grand Supremo of the Ogallala Aquifer, it would be in your dynasty's long term interest to avoid depleting it and instead manage it sustainably. In contrast, an unfortunate situation is, as Saddam Hussein complained to April Glaspie in 1990, where outsiders can drill into your natural resources and suck them dry.
Yep.
If global warming and desertification are going to be as bad as people say, we will have water pipelines built to the rich cities of Nashville and Fayetteville. Extravagant expenses to ensure the survival of those cities.
While the majority of Memphians will still live in poverty, likely not being able to afford water.
Great system. I'm sure nothing bad will happen.
Re the Navajo seceding. The general federal status of a federally recognized Indian tribe in the United States is a “domestic dependent nation” in a “government-to-government relationship” with the United States federal entity. Due to the history of this country, beginning at first contact and extending now for several hundred years, there are many, many treaties (which started out as agreements negotiated between separate countries, each Indian tribe being analogous to a country) and many of those treaties are still in force. This is how the SCOTUS recently decided that a large part of eastern Oklahoma is actually answerable to tribal law rather than Oklahoma state law. There is an entire career field of Indian law and it matters a great deal to tribal members, but also nationally in water rights disputes, minerals/mining/drilling, right of way (see DAPL), criminal investigation and prosecution, gaming, and a host of other things. One might not be able to tell when the interstate highway crosses from a state into a reservation, except now gambling is legal in that rest stop, cigarettes are a different price, and that’s due to the reservation being it’s own country in some important respects, with elected government, constitution, etc of its own. It’s more complicated than can be described in a paragraph here, but the gist is there really is a separate legal status going on.
I agree with this, but I also think if the Navajo started doing things America didn't like (eg invited Chinese bases on their territory), America would remind them that this was a polite legal fiction and make them stop. If they ever pushed back against this, I would consider it a secession attempt.
There is legal overlap on the federal level between the Navajo nation and the US, federal taxes are still paid, so yes, absolutely, they are also still part of the US. Inviting foreign bases would definitely be not allowable. It is a weird legal fiction, but it allowed tribes to maintain some sovereignty.
American Indian nations have a history of ignoring domestic laws against, say, gambling or environmental depletion (e.g., it's much easier to build a golf course in California on an Indian reservation than off-reservation). On the other hand, American Indian tribes have zero history of aligning with foreign powers since, roughly, the War of 1812. And Native Americans have a distinguished history of winning military honors for bravery from the U.S. military.
When Cuba wanted to install Soviet missiles in their territory the U.S. objected, but the U.S. didn't deny that Cuba was an independent country.
Yes, this is an important point. Spheres of influence are not legal but that doesn't stop them from being important things that de facto happen. Just this week the Australian and New Zealand governments spoke out against the Solomon Islands signing a security agreement with China despite this being none of their business technically. And all these countries are fairly small.
Powerful countries take spheres of influence very seriously despite them having no legal "right" to do so (and complaining bitterly when other countries claim them).
"Every oblast in Ukraine, including Crimea, voted for independence. Support ranged from over 95 percent in western Ukraine and the Kiev region to 54 percent in Crimea, where ethnic Russians form a substantial majority of the population..."
https://www.csce.gov/sites/helsinkicommission.house.gov/files/120191UkraineReferendum.pdf
On the other hand, 54% voting for joining Ukraine in 1991 is totally compatible with only 40% (or whatever) wanting to remain part of Ukraine in 2014. It's very tricky when these results are in the 35-65% range, because it doesn't take that much change of opinion or passage of time for these things to change back and forth in that range.
Also worth keeping in mind that Russia was deliberately sending Russians to Crimea for years *in order* to swing voter demographics in favor of voting to become part of Russia.
This of course brings up the Northern Ireland problem in the world of self-determination: do people still have self-determination if they were deliberately emplaced there by an imperialist power with the goal of diluting another nationality's control over an area?
See also: Xinjiang and Tibet.
I think you either have to answer yes to that question, or do a lot of ethnic cleansing. I'd prefer to answer yes.
But if the emplacement itself is aggressive enough, it can be a form of ethnic cleansing?
My answer to that is "depends when they were emplaced there".
If it was sufficiently recently for it to be reasonable for them to go back, then go back they should; if it wasn't, then they get to stay and keep the territory.
Yes, this means that if you commit a crime for long enough, then you get away with it, but that's true in general, stolen property will eventually belong to your descendants.
United States?
I don't think that's right. Before 1991, the USSR was a single state with effectively zero democracy, so voter demographics were a non-issue. And before 1954, Crimea was not even a part of UkrSSR. Russia (or rather, the USSR) was indeed populating Crimea with Russians, but it was for reasons entirely unrelated to voting.
This btw makes any elections in the areas where Russians had control over a useless sham. They really do that, and they also take "refugees" out. It's trivial to send Ukrainian refugees 2000 miles away ('cause that's there they had room) and russians just across the border where they can be brought back in a few hours just before elections. All very legit and above the board.
Putin does not need to move people back and forth for the elections because all Russian-held elections are a sham anyway. You don't need to move voters if you can just move numbers from one column to another.
It's still relevant. Until a friend from Moldova clued me in, I used to think elections organized by a trusted third party are a good outcome.
(Moldova had this done to them, extensively. Like pretty much everybody else in URSS)
You might also note that Russian tsars and then Stalin in a more definitive way forcibly moved people out from Crimea.
A 10,000 mob in Kyiv chanting "Lynch a Muscovite" and "He who doesn't jump is a Moscal" surely can change more than 20% pretty fast.
This is from 1991, though. Of course they might have changed their opinion between then and 2014. Just to be clear, I do not support Russian annexation of Crimea, but bringing up 1991 referendum is not a good argument against it.
Russia's takeover of Crimea and far eastern Ukraine in 2014 tipped the political balance in the remaining Ukraine strongly against Russia.
Perhaps Putin should have considered that ...
This is partly because it wasn't independence from Russia, but independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Note that neither referendum in Crimea has been Russia vs Ukraine, in both cases, it has been one of those states against an artificial third option (Soviet Union in 1991, independent Crimea in 2014).
Surely if they wanted to be part of Russia they would at the very least want to belong to the union that Russia is part of.
Russia was also declaring independence from the USSR at the same time, so voting to stay in would theoretically have resulted in Crimea becoming the only bit of the USSR.
Worth noting that succinct as it may be, Karlin up there appears to be an actual facist, and the argument from his comment's section is a facist argument. Debates along the axis of that argument are a death trap, and we shouldn't get caught up in them.
I'm of the opinion that there's no reasonable, practical way of determining who gets self-determination, just a thousand thousand competing ideologies. The historical (and modern) method has been force, or the threat of force.
I think arguing against an argument is better (and more interesting) than calling it names.
...which is good, because otherwise I'd have to call the second paragraph of your comment fascist. Just because ideas are cheap doesn't mean that some of them can't be right-er than others and that using ideas can't be a valid alternative to using force!
When I call the argument "fascist", I'm intending several things. First, it's kind of a mistake to call it an argument, when it's really a stonewall statement. Argument implies that the person making the statement can be reasoned with; that's not the goal of someone like Karlin. "Arguments" like this are intended to waste time, not be seriously debated or measured. This is the classic "I believe you don't have the right to exist" "argument" that isn't an argument at all, just a threat. Wasting time arguing "I believe I have the right to exist" is not a productive use of time, except maybe to point out to observers the absurdity of defending your existence. Second, implicitly advocating use of force to dispose of a sovereign state because it doesn't meet some threshold of "national identity" is a pretty classic fascist position. It just adds to the ridiculous factor when the Civilization games or having an identity more unique than being a "Gay Western Democracy" is the standard.
My second paragraph there is more an observation of "Is", not "Ought". I want to back up and say I don't think the use of force is desirable, but it and the threat of it has shaped ideas of self-determination in a way that make those things seem inextricable from each other. This is gonna impact the "Ought" in a pretty severe way. I DO agree with your "some ideas can be right-er than others" in terms of some leading to more desirable human experiences than others, and think "don't use violence on a state, a group of peoples, or a person without provocation" is probably a good heuristic. One of my problems with that has to do with consensus between any group on all matters is effectively impossible, and while more civilized groups can agree to adhere to things like laws and tribunals some of the time (because the use of force is terrible), there are groups that will use force for a wide variety of reasons. That's still just a comparatively nasty "IS" though. The real "Ought" issue is one I'm having trouble typing out; but it has to do with ideas about self-determination diverging and mutating over time in response to a changing environment. Whether or not there's a subset of ideas that would result in a (relatively) ideal permanent solution is one I can't really prove or disprove, but I would bet on "No".
> said he'd never thought of it,
There was so much shade in the statement "I never ever would have thought of this" that it nearly caused an eclipse.
I’m still not quite sure what you mean. Are you saying that engaging with fascist arguments is futile because the arguments as written don’t correspond to the reasons that the people making them actually have for holding their positions, or are you saying that fascists are some sort of irrational subset of human who’s opinions are formed without any coherent thought process, and thus any attempt to understand them will inevitably come up fruitless?
The former is one of the reasons; fascist arguments are made in bad faith. There's another reason I stated that's not listed here, which is that a fascist demands you justify your existence by pretending that eliminating your existence is a reasonable debate. Like I said elsewhere, the argument is a weapon and a pretext for the use of force.
I'm not making the latter statement; all human beings are some degree of irrational, and fascist argumentation is half-baked rationalization, at the very least. Anyone is capable of making bad faith arguments and bias confirmation. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't see some people become fascists over their lifetime, or crucially, stop being fascists. This isn't to say engaging these people in debate is worthwhile; since their arguments with others are still made in bad faith; just that life circumstances can change the internal functions of someone to the point that they stop being a fascist.
"that's not the goal of someone like Karlin. "Arguments" like this are intended"
"Fascist arguments are made in bad faith."
etc...
Being a telepath must be extremely convenient.
Are you making the argument that Karlin is not a fascist, or are you arguing in defense of fascists?
I agree with the label. I recently went through Eco's definition of fascism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism) with a friend and he met most criteria, e.g. contrast "10. Contempt for the weak" with "The weak do not deserve my takes.", or his showing of the sign 'Z' in his twitter profile (which is actually illegal here in Germany now as it is a sign of support for a war of aggression).
I don't think "Let's invade Ukraine, as it is not a state in the Civ games" is an argument you can debate. It is just an incredibly immoral position that accepts the suffering of thousands and increases the chance of nuclear war. Similarly, "what is even a people?" is not the right question here: Even though international law is ambiguous when it comes to breakaway-regions, it is not ambiguous when it comes to existing states and wars of aggression. Ukraine is a state, therefore a people and protected by countless international agreements (Geneva, Budapest memorandum, etc). Instead, the Russian argument for this war has been that Ukraine is a changed country since the Maidan revolution and that therefore these agreements are null. That is an argument we could debate here, if you really wished to.
Right, the vast majorities of countries, including Russia, around the world agree Ukraine is a self-governing independent state, so sending your tanks across its borders to try to conquer its capital is very, very bad.
It's illegal in Germany to have the 'Z' sign or argue in favor of the invasion? That seems very strange from an American perspective.
Yes, lots of symbols are illegal here, eg. the swastika or the stylized SS of the Schutzstaffel. You may still use these symbols sarcastically, in art or for teaching history, eg. a left-wing protestor once said 'Sieg Heil' to a policeman to protest their use of violence and was acquitted by the highest German court. But if you show them on a demonstration in support you might land in jail.
There were a couple of news articles recently where politicians called on prosecutors to view the 'Z' as a sign of a war of aggression going forward (which makes it just as illegal as the swastika). I could imagine that arguing for the invasion might also be illegal depending on how you do it: In Germany free speech is restricted by the concept of 'Volksverhetzung': calls for hatred or violence against ethnic or religious groups are forbidden (which, in a nod to German history, includes denying the holocaust). Therefore, saying 'I support Russia' is certainly legal, 'Ukrainians deserve death' probably not.
"We don't do that here."
I don't think the Civ game argument was intended to be taken seriously — surely not by Scott and probably not by the person who made it.
While I do think the topic of your post itself is interesting, I have to say that I kind of agree with this. Please keep in mind that Karlin and others like him are not just philosophizing about the merits of Ukrainian statehood, they are actually vocally advocating for actual wars to realize their fantasy of the return of the glorious Russian empire. The quote that started this post, in fact, hardly even presents an argument; it's just typical internet trolling.
Regardless of the motives behind it, the argument is *interesting*. It's not especially tempting, but it is remarkably novel and reasonably coherent. As such, it's a useful tool for opening up and examining one's axioms and intuitions around the topic (which tend to have already built-in responses to conventional takes.)
See also the tweet about eliminating countries that don't show up in Civilization. I don't think anyone here was persuaded toward that position, but it's a new thought which helps examine how one might think about the problem.
I REALLY support Scott using interesting arguments even if they come from bad people, because they help me learn to think more clearly and with fewer subconscious preconceptions. And that's a lot of why I'm here.
While I think this a fair position to take, that even bad arguments/statements can have interesting insights or help reframe our thinking, I'm also of the opinion that this particular kind of argument is intended as a weapon. Care needs to be taken not to handle it from the pointy end and practice "gun safety" with it.
The question of how exactly we define which groups get the right to self-determination and which get squashed while attempting to gain it is certainly interesting. It's not particularly novel. I'm sure plenty of thinkers have considered it (so have I, in private). Scott's post about it is okay.
Apparently Scott himself found something interesting in Karlin's tweet, but to me it seems like it's simply a toxic attack with very little substance (do note that it's essentially talking about genocide). The comment on Karlin's blog that was quoted has more substance, but it still is a hateful attack on the idea of Ukrainian sovereignty, as evidenced by the use of vocabulary like 'the cringe term "Kiev"' or 'LARP'. They certainly provide information about the mindset these people have, though Scott's treatment is very generous in focusing on the few substantial arguments and mostly ignoring the part that's just Russian supremacist aggression.
I most certainly do not mean that arguments from 'bad people' should not be discussed, and I wish people didn't make that assumption based just on what I wrote. I'm not even necessarily saying that you should preface every quote from people like Karlin with a reminder that this is a bad person. But these are kinds of ideas that can have real-life consequences, and I wish we kept that in mind when discussing them. I do feel like Anatoly Karlin gets a lot of leeway that he does not deserve in this community simply because he is somehow rat-adjacent and uses the right language (i.e. "prediction).
I will readily admit that my emotional reaction to this is very much influenced by the fact that I am an inhabitant of a country that shares a 1300 kilometer border with Putin's Russia; I'll leave it to others to judge whether that means more or less weight should be given to my opinion on this.
> The question of how exactly we define which groups get the right to self-determination and which get squashed while attempting to gain it is certainly interesting. It's not particularly novel. I'm sure plenty of thinkers have considered it (so have I, in private). Scott's post about it is okay.
I agree that the question isn't novel. It's even a bit old; I've certainly thought about it before a few times. That's what makes a novel answer interesting, and lets me actually see my assumptions which are actually invisible to me. Like Scott, I don't think I'd ever have come up with the idea that nations exist to propagate cultural diversity, and so we should merge nations that are insufficiently different. It's a WEIRD position, but just comprehending it makes me think about what I think the purpose of nations is, and intuition pumps questions like whether I think cultural diversity is at all a proper goal of countries, etc.
It's not an especially persuasive position (it's based on a conception of national value that I completely don't share), but it's a new take on an old question and so is interesting.
If I believed that the stuff about cultural diversity was an honest argument, or at the very least a position actually in some way held by someone, I might be fascinated by it myself. But I don't really believe that; it reads too much like word salad that someone with right-wing or Russophile tendencies came up to justify their tendencies, or quite possibly just for the lulz. At best, it's grossly insensitive, given that Ukraine is fighting an actual war for its existence. And now that I've read your take on this, I feel like there's an element of nerd sniping here as well. While pondering such arguments can certainly be a fun activity, the fact is that they're used to advocate for, or at the very least justify, a war and potentially a genocide.
Rat-adjacent?
Also, which country, if you don't mind me asking? Finland?
+
Fascist is not namecalling unless you agree that fascist is a bad thing to be. Since fascists don't agree, and in fact think fascism is good, it's not an insult, merely a description.
“ So are Texans/Kurds/Scots/Palestinians a “people”? ”
No, yes, yes, maybe - although Arabs are also potentially one nation.
What makes Arabs a nation? Arabic varies so much between countries that they had to invent international Arabic in order to have international forums. It seems fairly artificial to me, as much as any of these things are.
Tokelau is a remote southern Pacific Ocean Island currently owned by New Zealand with a population of ~1500 and currently on the UN list of non-self-governing territories. The UN has pushed for referendums towards statehood, two of which have failed. In this case, it seems that by virtue of being an Island rather than just a small town off the interstate, Tokelau may deserve self determination. It's not clear what a 1500-member nation would look like.
It wouldn't be a nation. It'd be a City State. In fact, it'd be about 3x the size of the Vatican City State by population.
Tokelau is a couple of thousand miles north of New Zealand, so the idea of self-rule for Tokelau is not absurd. On the other hand, its population is only 1500 and New Zealand is a pretty nice colonial master.
The lesson is that the modern world, with its 200 countries participating in the Olympics, tends toward a bias for self rule. Thus the idea that giant Russia should reabsorb large Ukraine is very much against the spirit of the age.
Yeah, I mean, if Ukraine doesn't have a right to exist, what about, say, Canada or Australia or New Zealand? Why exactly shouldn't the US conquer those territories? For that matter, why exactly shouldn't Germany conquer Austria or even the Netherlands? Or Kazakhstan conquer Kyrgyzstan? Or Thailand conquer Laos? Or Indonesia conquer Malaysia? Or Jordan conquer Syria?
Ethics tells us what we should and should not do. There is a subfield of ethics, political philosophy, which deals with what a state should do and what ones relationship with a state is. If you believe an ethical theory, such as utilitarianism, natural rights or common-sense morality, the question arises as to why the state has different moral rules. This justification is called political authority.
People often debate political authority and legitimacy in philosophy classes; some potential arguments for legitimacy include the social contract and voting. Most non-libertarian people treat political legitimacy as a default--they believe the state is legitimate but that it should operate differently. The thorniness of the problem arises when nations like China make claims over Taiwan, or Russia invades Ukraine. By Westerners these things are regarded as illegitimate and a bit silly. But what are the borders of the United States and Europe but results of similar power struggles.
If the current borders in the West are legitimate, then the defining characteristic seems something like time? Yes, this land was concurred but that was a long time ago. Perhaps 40 years from now people will believe "Of course the Russian Government is the legitimate owner of Ukraine" if they are successful.
There no legitimate government borders because there is no valid defense of political authority. The ethical rules of state actors are the same as the ethical rules of individuals.
"Once one concedes that a single world government is not necessary, then where does one logically stop at the permissibility of separate states? If Canada and the United States can be separate nations without being denounced as in a state of impermissible 'anarchy', why may not the South secede from the United States? New York State from the Union? New York City from the state? Why may not Manhattan secede? Each neighbourhood? Each block? Each house? Each person?" - Murray Rothbard
While I largely agree with this, states have an obligation to defend themselves. States monpolize the use of violence internally. The price for this is to be strong enough (or wily enough) to counter external threats. Canada can stay a state as long as it successfully wards off the encroachment of the United States. Manhattan can be a state, but it's going to be tough to ward off the invading Bronxians. A person can't secede from the US because the state's monopoly on force (what it regards as its own) will not let him. By this rationale, of course, the only thing that makes Ukraine a state is the willingness and ability to defend itself from external attack, and the acquiescence internally of its residents to its monopoly on force. If it falls to Putin, it is manifestly not a state. If Crimea successfully refuses to accept rule from Kyiv, Ukraine is still a state, but a smaller one.
I am not so sure I understand where you are making a positive claim and where you are making a positive claim.
I don't think states have an obligation to defend themselves generally, because there are circumstances in which they should not. For example, it wouldn't make sense, to me, for Belize to attempt to defend itself against the USA and Belize sending tens of thousands of people to die by the hands of US soldiers wouldn't be ethical. It would be useless.
I understand in a positive sense why Manhattan cannot become it's own state--the USA won't let them. But the quote is discussing it in the moral sense.
The obligation is to defend yourself or to give up being a state. You are correct that it would be folly for Belizeans to defend their state aginst a massive US invasion. Their moral calculus is that it is better to be conquered than to be a state. (As to whether this is moral calculus or just cost-benefit analysis is irrelevant to the case, which I think answers your question about positive versus what I assume was "normative.") The same is true, by the way, for internal dissent as well. If you are unwilling to invade California (or otherwise convince them to submit) when Californians refuse to pay taxes or obey laws or do whatever else it is you have established your monopoly of control over, then California is now a State of its own.
That seems trivially true to me. The obligation is to defend yourself or give up being the state makes me think of something like "the obligation is to defend your home from invaders or to not defend your home." What other option is there?
I think its not so much the binary choice as the choice of what you do to defend yourself in advance. No state is worthy of the name which makes no attempt to even plan to defend itself. A state that makes efficient investments to defend itself, recognizing that those defenses could fail, of course, is what I mean. Belize (I assume) has an army of some sort to stop pirates, if nothing else. Even a World Government needs to at least think seriously about stopping aliens and asteroids.
Lots of places haven't bothered to defend themselves: e.g., Goa in 1961 or Macau in 1999.
In contrast, Ukraine has put up one hell of a fight in 2022.
>By this rationale, of course, the only thing that makes Ukraine a state is the willingness and ability to defend itself from external attack...
I don't like this definition. I think my problem with it is thus: It seems (to me) to define a polity's current statehood based on a hypothetical future invasion. If you were to instead say that a state *ceases to be* a state at the time that it falls to a conqueror, I would agree with that, but that seems immaterial to the question of whether Ukraine is *currently* a state.
Is a guy falling from a 50 story building a healthy guy when he's 25 feet from the ground? A state does things in the present which, probabilistically, will keep them a state or not in the future. A state that chooses not to take actions with the intention of defending its statehood isn't a state simply because someone will see the opportunity at some point in the future. They're a state on borrowed time. If they take actions which intend to bolster their defense but these simply fail, then they are also a state on borrowed time... just an ineffectual state as opposed to one that didn't even try.
>Is a guy falling from a 50 story building a healthy guy when he's 25 feet from the ground?
Yes. Well, barring any conditions brought on by the terror of the situation. All of us are going to die of old age if something else doesn't get us first. Is the fact that our deaths are inevitable a reason to call us unhealthy?
>A state that chooses not to take actions with the intention of defending its statehood isn't a state simply because someone will see the opportunity at some point in the future.
This reads to me like "A person who often walks down dark alleys isn't a person, just a corpse, because someone will see the opportunity to kill them at some point in the future." It's illogical to remove a status from something in the present just because you're sure it won't have that status in the future. Right now my hair is wet. Even though I know it'll be dry shortly, I can't just round that off to it being dry *right now*.
"Dead man walking." At some point in arcs of inevitability, or even near-inevitability, and occasionally, for rhetorical effect, even mere probability, a recognition of that inevitability can color current definitions. Think of any state as a present discounted value which collapses the future into now. If my hair is wet but drying, there are lots of circumstances where I should behave exactly like a dry-haired individual, and some where I shouldn't. Definitions have purposes. If describing the falling guy as healthy has some important purpose, like for the purpose of figuring out whether or not his life insurance has expired yet, then the temporal component can be ignored.
>If describing the falling guy as healthy has some important purpose...
I personally consider accurately reporting the current state of reality to be an important purpose. There's a difference between "It's raining" and "It's supposed to rain today." Sure, in both you bring an umbrella when you leave the house or whatever, but in one of them you probably don't worry much about hopping out to check the mail.
Similarly, you could say that Syria's Euphrates River Valley deserves to be ruled by Al Qaeda or ISIS because that's what the locals in c. 2015 seemed to like. But Putin argued that Syria's sovereignty over the Euphrates was virtually universally recognized, so he rescued Assad's regime.
I didn't have a major problem with Russia intervening on the side of the internationally recognized government in Syria, but I do have a problem with Russian attacking the internationally recognized government in Ukraine.
> I didn't have a major problem with Russia intervening on the side of the internationally recognized government in Syria
Problem there is how they do this, for example by systematic bombing of hospitals.
"Russia Bombed Four Syrian Hospitals. We Have Proof. | Visual Investigations " (by The New York Times) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCi-2-Flcxk
TBH, I wouldn't have a problem with Sunni Arab secession from Syria and even having them unite with Jordan and/or western Sunni Arab Iraq. But they should get better leaders than Al-Qaeda or ISIS. Those two groups really are a cancer for everyone. Even the fucking Taliban is more moderate in comparison to those two groups!
This seems to overlook a fully pragmatic defense of political authority, of a Hobbesian variety. To the extent that political authority becomes contested, life becomes all the more nasty, brutish, and short - so for God's sake, don't rock the boat.
This condemns Putin in the present day, who is contesting the status quo and bringing about deadly consequences. But should he succeed in establishing a new status quo, it would come to apply just as much to rebels against it.
The consequentialist argument is the better one. If I believed that there would be absolute chaos and death, then I would think we should have a state.
Right. War is bad. Peace is good. Borders are necessary. Imperfect borders are better than war.
My answer to the confederacy thing is that the South didn't really vote to secede, because black Southerners were excluded from the vote. Slaves comprised about 39% of the Confederate population, and were they permitted to cast an informed vote they would almost certainly have voted to remain by an overwhelming margin. That makes the secession vote even more suspect than Russia's 96% figure in Crimea. States should only be obligated to honor credible, independently verifiable and sufficiently representative secession elections, which the confederacy's was not.
The Left will oppose Texas's request because the Great Replacement should eventually result in a change in Texan sentiments. They would also oppose New York's request because it would be based on an immoral raison d'etre. Though it would be interesting to see what would happen if the Left will become more skeptical of Jewish influence due to the Left viewing it as an extension of white privilege. Really, in some regards, Jews are more privileged in the US than white gentiles are. And I say this as a (quarter-)Jew myself!
But that's projecting modern norms back onto the past: you could as easily say that Abraham Lincoln's presidency was illegitimate because they excluded the votes of women.
No democracy franchises 100% of its people. I couldn't vote when I was ten. If convicted of treason by the Commonwealth of Australia I'll lose my right to vote again. Different countries have different ideas of citizenship.
That's true. And incumbent governments have the de facto power to define what votes they would or wouldn't accept, just like they have the power to not honor any vote at all. The whole debate is a fundamentally moral one anyway, about what they *should* accept, where a line is drawn somewhere on a blurry spectrum of more and less legitimate voting methods according to modern standards. So I'm just pointing out a way modern people can support secession broadly while opposing it in the Confederate case without being hypocrites.
Is there any reason to suspect that the outcome of the 1860 election would have been different had women been included, though?
I'm not sure how much I agree with the argument as a source of sovereignty. But as point of fact: most Confederate states didn't even get a white, adult male majority. In several states there was significantly worse turnout in secession votes than in the 1860 election. And there were various shenanigans and illegal maneuvers like arresting opposition involved. On the other hand, most of this was done by legally elected officers. So it's a sticky question but not one that easily looks like a democratic plebiscite.
>That makes the secession vote even more suspect than Russia's 96% figure in Crimea.
It's pretty probable that both true result of referendum is in 90+ range and that official results are fake (i.e. the regime is used to faking voting that they fake results of voting even in such cases where they would win anyway).
Crimeans that didn't want to join Russia knew that they were in minority and boycotted the referendum. Another example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Slovak_same-sex_marriage_referendum
FWIW, sometimes a free and fair referendum can be overwhelming. The Falkland Islands referendum in favor of remaining under UK rule, for instance. But Yeah, specifically in regards to Crimea, I personally thought that the margin was too high.
The Kenyan ambassador to the UN gave a speech on this subject that makes an interesting argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofijY6M-OA8&t=20s
(Spoiler) the tl;dr is that wars are bad and so generally speaking we should try to be content with existing borders of states rather than trying to redraw them, even for appealing reasons such as to unite ethnicities under one banner. It's sorta like what you were saying about transaction costs.
It's getting late so I'm not going to watch the video, but, based on your tl;dr, I strongly agree. The bar for who gets to *remain* independent should be much lower than who gets to *become* independent. Ukrainian independence has the status quo on it's side, so all they have to do to convince me they're in the right is to say that they want to keep their independence.
I agree that secessionist regions have a potential ethical duty not to press their claims if they would lead to war. But I also think parent countries have an ethical duty not to make war on secessionist regions, and to make it known that they won't.
Every state is going to have malcontents. You can't let everybody who is unhappy with the status quo violently redraw the borders whenever they feel like it.
Crimea's border redrawing was almost completely peaceful (just one death) and the Donbass would have very likely been much more peaceful had Russia stepped in immediately and annexed the Donbass just like it did with Crimea.
Depends on when exactly. For instance, I think that Algerians did France a huge favor by pushing for independence. I wish that they would have been able to do so more bloodlessly, but of course to be fair, their options were rather limited due to French intransigence. Still, I think that a France with 6 million Muslims is much more better off than a France with 46 million Muslims. The 6 million Muslims already contains enough troublemakers as it is, unfortunately. This is why the Charlie Hebdo massacre happened, why Samuel Paty was murdered, et cetera.
I also think that this is why Jinnah and his Pakistan Movement did India a huge favor by successfully pushing for secession from India.
The counterpoint is that states should be very open to redrawing borders to make people happy so as to minimize wars.
Transaction costs are a thing, but the way to handle that would be to require the separating region to pay for the costs of new maps, road signs, etc.
Forcing people who don't trust each other due to differences in language, religion, race, or something else, to live under one banner brings a poverty hit as trust is vital to a successful economy and society.
Sometimes it's still possible for this to work (Switzerland) but you need strong additional factors and/or a lot of time to overcome this. And in the end there may still be wars, it may be that they have only been postponed.
African leaders decided some time ago that it would be in their interests to not support succession wars as the whole continent could go up in flames. In the long run I believe succession wars would have made everyone better off.
It might be worth flipping the question around. What gives a group the legitimacy to claim another? Shared historical ties, language and folklore all feel like relevant answers, and those are worth exploring by the LSE, yourself, and Anatoly. If like me you value core liberal principles, your attention might rather be drawn to the ideas of the social contract and of consent of the governed, which allow for a bit more nuance than the libertarian extreme you engage with.
I’ll stick my neck out and argue that a nation’s claim to a particular people grows stronger so long as they consent to their membership, and weaker when they do not. Rather than an on-off switch, it is a rubber band which may rupture under sufficient pressure.
My home region of Savoie was annexed in 1861 by the French state (third republic bad, we should no longer do that sorta thing!). Following a half-century of cultural homogenization, people in our region became satisfied by their membership, and the past century of rather blissful consent makes our belonging to the French nation beyond dispute. You’ll occasionally see a ‘free savoie’ bumper sticker, but they lack widespread political appeal.
In contrast, Ukraine has had a violent, dissident relationship with Russia for over a century, including plausible genocides, brutal uprisings, language laws, and more horrors than those of us in the West could reasonably appreciate. There is a clear sense that the union of Russia with Ukraine has been tenuously enforced at the barrel of a gun. In the past few lifetimes, Ukrainians have not consented to their membership within the Russian empire; no matter how strong the rubber band once was, it has decisively snapped, and we are witnessing their war of independence.
We should support them
You left out one thing about Crimea, it was transferred from Russia to the Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 after having been Russian since it was acquired by Catherine the Great; I don't believe that anyone bothered consulting the Crimean population at that time. If you argue that sufficient time had passed to erase that, then what about nations that were subsumed in other countries for centuries rather than decades? My answer to that question is probably similar to yours; how practical is self-determination and how strongly is it desired? As to the Crimeans, it wasn't just ethnic Russians who favored the return to Russia; there were also pro-Russian Ukrainians and minorities like the Tartars who also somewhat favored the transfer. By the way, being a native-born Canadian with native-born parents and being of Irish and English ancestry, I have no dog in this fight.
Someone points up-thread to the results of the 1991 referendum, in which every region of the official current borders of Ukraine, including Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk, had a majority vote in favor of joining Ukraine rather than Russia. I imagine those majorities were pretty tenuous in those three regions though, and it wouldn't surprise me if majorities pointed a different way by 2014, and if they point a different way again in 2023.
Overwhelming majorities in Donetsk and Luhansk voted to be part of Ukraine in 1991. Turnout was moderately lower there than in central and western Ukraine, but a solid majority of the eligible electorate voted yes. Only in Crimea was it close:
http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1991-2/the-end-of-the-soviet-union/the-end-of-the-soviet-union-texts/ukrainian-independence-declaration/
It's been very hard to poll those regions accurately in recent times, but it does square with a view that Crimea might genuinely want to be part of Russia while the Donbass probably never did, and the rebellion there would have disintegrated rapidly without Russian troops.
Very interesting! Though again, with Donetsk and Luhansk, I've heard that there's a sub-region of each that has been functioning relatively autonomously for eight years (with Russian support) and another sub-region of each that was still thoroughly integrated under the Ukrainian government as of January, 2022. It would not surprise me if the borders of the regions that had been drawn are somehow mis-placed with respect to popular sentiment, and that there is some line where a moderate majority of people to the east have always wanted to be with Russia, and a strong majority of people to the west have always wanted to be with Ukraine. But it would also not surprise me if it's really just a significant minority on the east and negligible on the west.
In the Donbass in 2014, 40% supported federalization (50% were opposed, 10% were undecided):
http://kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=news&id=258
Support for outright Russian rule was a bit lower, at 30%. Though even there, only slightly over 50% were opposed. The rest were undecided.
40% might not seem like much, but it's the same level of support that Poland got in the 1921 Upper Silesian plebiscite, where Poland was nevertheless able to win a majority of the vote in some parts of Upper Silesia. So, I wouldn't be surprised if federalization received majority-support or at least plurality-support (say, 46% in favor, 44% against, the remaining 10% undecided) in parts of the Donbass in 2014. You have to keep in mind that the Donbass separatists only conquered a part of the Donbass in 2014, not the entire Donbass.
Crimea involved a lot of people not voting in 1991, if I recall correctly. That, combined with Ukraine's economic stagnation between 1991 and 2014, really does make me believe that Crimea might have very well voted for Russian rule in 2014 even in a free and fair election, even factoring in for the mass return of the Crimean Tatars back to Crimea since 1989.
In regards to the Donbass, opinion polling there showed about 30% support in favor of Russian rule and about 40% support (50% against, the remaining 10% undecided) in favor of federalization (which was Russia's initial official goal for the Donbass):
http://kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=news&id=258
While 40% might not sound like much, it's worth noting that this is around the same level of support that Poland got in the 1921 Upper Silesian plebiscite, in which it was nevertheless able to win majorities in some areas (hence the subsequent partition of Upper Silesia after this plebiscite). So, I actually wouldn't be surprised if there was majority-support or at least plurality-support (say, 46% in favor, 44% against, the rest undecided) for federalization in parts of the Donbass in 2014. It's worth noting, of course, that the Donbass separatists only conquered a part of the Donbass rather than the Donbass in its entirety.
So, Yes, one can say that the uprisings in Crimea and the Donbass were real, even if they were manipulated by Russia. About 3/4 (30% out of 40%) of the federalization supporters in the Donbass did want Russian rule, but the remaining ones apparently simply wanted to be an autonomous part of Ukraine.
>if they point a different way again in 2023.
I am sure I saw people saying in 2014 "in a few years, the Ukrainian economic growth will be so high that Crimeans will be desperately wanting to come back to Ukraine by themselves".
That was the (unfounded) hope, Yes.
That's not technically the question that was asked, even if that was how it was read.
It was whether they wanted to be in independent Ukraine, or stay in the USSR.
Yes, that's correct.
Historically, Moscow being landlocked had a goal of controlling areas with sea and ocean access. Search results are coming up with only recent events but I think one of Catherine the Great’s motives toward Crimea was acquiring the “Black Sea port.”
Geopolitical military conditions are also influenced deeply by which powers control which bodies of water (trade, invasions, etc.) So groups of people who live on the coast are always subject to this type of power struggle with those living further inland. Additionally, other nations/groups might care if Big Nation A has better water access as a result of possessing Small Coastal Territory B. Big Nation C might care very much even if B, culturally, had no strong feelings either way, or ties to both.
Scotland, or the situation with the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, all post-British Colonial to varying degrees (complete independence, devolution, etc.).
Moscow was landlocked, and when it did acquire access to the sea, the ports were mostly ones that froze in the Winter - Archangelsk (1584), Okhotsk (1650), St. Petersburg (1703) and Rostov-on-Don (1749). The first Warm-Water Port was Sevastopol (1783), then Vladivostok (1860), Murmansk (1915) and Kaliningrad (1945). Those four were the bases of the four main Russian and then Soviet fleets, and two of them were the main commercial ports in their respective seas (St Petersburg and Rostov-on-Don remain the main commercial ports). Sevastopol is really important because, while Rostov-on-Don is the major commercial port in the Black Sea, it is very vulnerable in military terms, because the Sea of Azov freezes and shipping requires icebreakers during the winter. That's fine for commercial ships, but not really acceptable for military shipping which would be very vulnerable confined to a narrow ice-broken channel.
Of the four warm-water ports, only two (Vladivostok and Murmansk) are on the World Ocean, the others are trapped in the Baltic and Black Seas, which is why Russia has always paid so much attention to the Danish and Turkish straits that control the exits to those seas.
These ports are the basis for Russian trade with the outside world, and Russian naval power to protect that trade; they have always been peripheral to Russia but also vital interests of Russia, and Sevastopol is a key pressure point for Russia.
Aside: Russia had ice-free ports in the Baltic before Kaliningrad - they held modern Estonia and most of Latvia from 1721 - and Riga was the major Baltic port for most of the period until WWI, though the navy was based at Kronstadt near St. Petersburg.
In modern times there are a few physical-geography and geostrategic facts about Crimea that are relevant to the discussion.
(Unlike Scott, I don't think in terms of principles when it comes to politics: each case has its particularities.)
1. Crimea contains Sevastopol as the largest centre of population, about a quarter of Crimea's total. Sevastopol is a port city and hosts Russia's only "warm-water" port (one which is ice-free all year round). As such it is critical for Russia's strategic nuclear deterrent, because it is the home port for Russia's SSBN-equivalent submarines, one leg of the strategic tripod. (The other two being bombers and long range ballistic missilies.)
(Conjecture: I imagine that a large fraction of Crimea's population is either Russian naval personnel and their families, or contractors or suppliers to the naval base, or related to those contractors and suppliers.)
2. Crimea is naturally a desert. Until Russia annexed it in 2014 it got about 80% of its water from a canal from eastern Ukraine.When Crimea was annexed, Ukraine dammed the canal. Since then Crimea has been desperately short of water, threatening the viability of the Sevastopol base. One of the first acts of the Russian invaders in the current invasion was to destroy the dam.
(Question: if Crimea is completely dependent on an artificial waterway that is entirely within Ukraine, can it be independent or Russian?)
3. The Black Sea between Crimea and central Ukraine has several large untapped but easily exploitable natural gas fields, large enough to replace most, if not all, of western Europe's purchases of gas from Russia. This is a threat to Russia also.
Your comment and Richard Gadsden's above provide much more insight into this situation for me.
1. If the nuclear submarine fleet is based in Sevastopol, it makes a lot more sense to me why "Russia feels that NATO poses a threat" is brought up as part of the equation. Russia letting go entirely of Sevastopol/Crimea would mean letting go of that leg of the tripod, putting Russia at a disadvantage toward NATO (and the US separately).
Can peace negotiators double down on this, US and Russia mutually agreeing to cuts to their nuclear capabilities and Sevastopol/Crimea becoming something like the Panama Canal zone?
2. That is very interesting about the water to Crimea. It brings up another question I had - what role does access to the Dnieper River play in all this? Looking at the maps it could be something like the Mississippi, shipping ports all along the river, and having control of at least the east bank of it would be one type of strategic goal.
3. The gas fields would get in the way of the #1 proposal, then, but maybe not permanently.
Your question about Crimea being dependent on the canal is very good. There seem to be some geographical features that are collective to a degree, simply based on where they're located. Are there international riverine/canal water rights treaties? There must be, I don't know anything about it though. I could imagine a treaty being drawn up about that, but always with an imbalance.
In this interconnected world, the ethnicity/people/landbase aspect has to coexist with the global strategic balance aspect (and the self-determination/human rights aspects). Maybe the shared waterways make the interconnectedness more obvious.
Russian nuclear submarines are based in Vladivostok (and perhaps other places as per other comenters; I know about Vladivostok because of the dispute between Russia and Japan over Kuril islands, where they are a relevant issue).
You have a number of facts wrong in point 1.
Sevastopol is a warm-water port, but not the only one - Murmansk is ice-free all year around, and Vladivostok is almost so (a massive electrical power plant dumps warm water into the bay which largely prevents it freezing; icebreakers are kept on station if needed). Russian SSBNs are based in either Severomorsk (near Murmansk) or Vladivostok - seven Delfin/Delta IV class, one Akula/Typhoon-class and two Borei/Dolgorukiy-class in Severomorsk, three Borei/Dolgorukiy-class in Vladivostok.
Thank you for the updates. It seems winter sea conditions have changed around Murmansk and Vladivostok since the 1970s. The changes do not affect the strategic importance of Sevastopol to Russia, though.
Yeah, the fundamentals aren't changed by this.
Murmansk has always been ice-free - the whole reason it was built (in 1915) was to have an all-year-round port for Russian imports from the West during WWI when the land and Baltic Sea routes were blocked by the Central Powers.
Vladivostok never iced up as badly as St Petersburg or Archangelsk, but it's much clearer since the 1990s largely because they deliberately dump warm wastewater into the shipping channel. Also, submarines always had access (as they could pass under the ice).
Finally, Russia and the USSR have both invested a lot of money in icebreakers over the years - so ports that ice up but not that badly are less of an issue than they used to be - Vladivostok and Rostov-on-Don are the two that are most strongly affected by this (Archangelsk and St Petersburg/Kronstadt still ice up too badly for icebreaking to be an option in the depths of winter, though they can operate for many more months than the used to be able to).
"Sevastopol is a port city and hosts Russia's only "warm-water" port (one which is ice-free all year round)" This is not true.
Largest Russian port by volume of cargo is in fact Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, south of Sevastopol. See here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1023550/russia-cargo-throughput-by-port/.
Apologies; I was thinking in military terms: naval port. Wikipedia says Russia was in the process of building a new naval base at Novorossysk before 1) a new 25-year lease on Sevastopol was agreed with Ukraine, and 2) Russia decided to annex Crimea anyway.
Crimean Tatars most definitely didn't favor transfer to Russia. They were deported to Central Asia by Stalin, and after the annexation, their leaders are persecuted by Putin's regime (see e.g. here: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/12/russia-ukraine-crimean-tatars-dissent-repression)
This is the historically correct answer to whether Crimea is historically Russian or historically Ukrainian. In fact, it's neither.
Turkish Crimea?
A functional nation has to be willing to hold itself together, regardless of morality.
You can't allow regions to leave at will: that would be like an army that allows soldiers to freely desert. Half your corps will pull up their tents and return to their farms at the first tactical setback.
The South certainly stopped believing in "states rights" when East Tennesseeans tried to break off from the Confederacy and form a Union-aligned state in 1861. They put the state under martial law.
This all assumes uniform desire among a people. If 70% of Texans want to leave the Union should they be able to force it on the other 30%? 20%? 10%? One guy who is really a transplant from California anyways?
Doesn't it kind of matter if the group leaving is sitting on vital resources and infrastructure that the mainland might relies on?
This whole topic is very interesting and something I did always wonder about growing up in a liberal part of Texas. The generally believed to be whackos who wanted to secede never really received a counter argument against their desires besides logistical concerns that really convinced me.
This is an important point that none of the other comments really addresses. A vote to secede is a basic "the majority can do whatever it likes". The self determination of 51% of the group overrules the self-determination of the 49%.
The 49% should presumably then vote to secede from the seceded nation and rejoin the original nation.
More seriously, you could argue that a vote for secession is not a democratic right because it unfairly imposes a view on a minority group, just like we would all (probably) accept that there are other rights that can't or shouldn't be violated by a democratic vote.
I'm not sure I agree with that point, but it's worth considering.
This is pretty much what I expect is going to happen to Scotland after the Brexit.
I am puzzled how Dominic Cummings seems to be a pretty smart guy, yet seems to have this huge blind spot ??
This is especially true as who is in a country can be forcefully changed as a tactic. If I commit ethnic cleansing in a region and move my people in - is it ok that they now self-determine to be a part of my country? After how many years? If the cleansing was subtle (buy out property, small scale thug tactics to get people to move) and movement was internationally legal (refugees moving in for decades, sponsored by those who would benefit from secession), is that OK? If the refugees from Syria in Turkey now decide to self-determine the parts of Turkey where they have been relocated by war, how is that different from Northern Ireland?
In Northern Ireland the process started hundreds of years ago. In practice some kind of statute of limitations needs to apply (obviously not a fixed date).
The UK is an interesting example generally because the dominant ethnic group is the English, who are the most recent incomers (the Normans only really replaced the aristocracy and the Vikings thoroughly mixed with the native population, I think). Scottish, Welsh (and Cornish) independence movements are really the native population rejecting the nation state run by the immigrant group.
Of course the Celts aren't the original inhabitants of the British Isles either, and this all collapses into nonsense in Europe because of how complicated the history is. I don't think there's a clear, satisfactory answer.
You should consider reading (or rereading) Lincoln's first inaugural address. It is, as you might expect, extremely interesting on the issue of the right to secede (or not), although of course dealing with his own specific circumstances and with very different categories than any modern person would use.
Yup, strongly agree. Here's the money quote:
"If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the Government must cease. There is no other alternative, for continuing the Government is acquiescence on one side or the other. If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them, for a minority of their own will secede from them whenever a majority refuses to be controlled by such minority. For instance, why may not any portion of a new confederacy a year or two hence arbitrarily secede again, precisely as portions of the present Union now claim to secede from it? All who cherish disunion sentiments are now being educated to the exact temper of doing this.
Is there such perfect identity of interests among the States to compose a new union as to produce harmony only and prevent renewed secession?
Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left."
I could quibble with Lincoln's high praise for majoritarianism; it should be possible to make decisions using other constitutionally agreed-upon criteria, like decision markets, quadratic voting, archipelago-style communities, and so on. 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.
I guess I fail to see the problem with "then some states secede from the Confederacy, and then some states secede from those states".
UK has AFAICT offered Scotland the right to secede. Scotland has said no, because they like being in the UK. That's great and the reason why countries should exist. If Scotland did secede from the UK, I expect that Glasgow wouldn't secede from Scotland, because they like being in Scotland.
The reason that recognizing a right to secession doesn't immediately dissolve into anarchy is that most places like being parts of the country they're in. The rare exceptions usually mean something has actually gone wrong.
Yes, Scotland held a referendum for independence in 2014, with the approval of the UK parliament, and the Scottish electorate chose to remain in the UK.
If they had chosen independence, however, there are some regions that might have preferred to secede from Scotland to rejoin the UK (though they probably wouldn't have been given the opportunity). In particular, the Orkney and Shetland Islands are very pro-UK ... which is important, because much of the North Sea oil fields are in their territorial waters.
We have a number of similar questions on different scales:
1. Should the Orkney and Shetland Islands be part of Scotland?
2. Should Scotland be part of the UK?
3. Should the UK be part of the EU?
4. Should the EU be closely affiliated with the US-led international order?
All of these are largely questions of self-determination. But, because of the conflict between levels of this hierarchy - supporting point #1 tends to detract from point #2, and so on - British politics tends to split between those who support #1 and #3, and those who support #2 and #4.
"UK has AFAICT offered Scotland the right to secede. Scotland has said no, because they like being in the UK"
Well.... yes and no. They didn't *offer*, the Scottish Parliament and the government at Westminister held negotiations and the UK parliament passed legislation giving the Scottish Parliament powers to hold the referendum. In turn the Scottish Parliament passed a bill for the referendum:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_Agreement_(2012)
It's the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the "Great Britain" part includes England, Scotland and Wales (plus some islands, though the status of some of them is a little odd due to quirks of history: "The nearby Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey are not part of the UK, being Crown Dependencies with the British Government responsible for defence and international representation. There are also 14 British Overseas Territories, the last remnants of the British Empire").
Scotland and England were two separate kingdoms, often at war with each other, until the accession of James VI (of Scotland) and I (of England) to the throne of England upon the death of Elizabeth I united the crowns and perforce the kingdoms. England being the bigger partner became the dominant one (Wales had been pretty thoroughly squashed by then and subsumed into England for all intents and purposes). A formal Act of Union was passed in 1707 to make it official and governmental, and form the Kingdom of Great Britain.
The formation of the United Kingdom took place with the Act of Union in 1801 uniting Ireland to Great Britain.
Let's skip over a few centuries and come to devolution. In the 1990s, devolved parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were formed in the face of demands for greater autonomy and the rise of nationalist parties in those countries (Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Féin):
"Devolution is about how parliaments and governments make decisions. In the UK it means that there are separate legislatures and executives in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They have many powers to make laws and deliver public services. These are often called devolved powers. There is also the UK Parliament and UK Government. They retain some powers across the whole of the UK. These are often called reserved powers.
The current form of devolution in the UK goes back to the late 1990s. In 1997 voters chose to create a Scottish Parliament and a National Assembly for Wales. In Northern Ireland devolution was a key element of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement and was supported in a referendum in 1998. The UK Government has also developed decentralisation in England. This is through the transfer of powers, budgets and responsibilities to mayors and through city deals."
The SNP had always been pro-Scottish independence, and once they got into power in a devolved government, now it was time to put their money where their mouth was. Hence, the 2014 referendum.
As the campaign went on, it looked like support for independence was growing. Indeed, the final result was closer than expected - 55% voted no, 45% voted yes (this was up from early estimated polling of 39% voting yes). Ironically, in view of later events, when the Tory government in England started taking it seriously and campaigning for a "No" vote, one of their points was "Scotland leaving the UK would take you out of the EU, and you don't want that, do you?"
Things are complicated by the presence of Unionism in Scotland so there is a much more politically charged, sectarian air to the question of independence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionism_in_Scotland
> one of their points was "Scotland leaving the UK would take you out of the EU, and you don't want that, do you?"
Hence the suggestion that the result of the Brexit referendum - with the UK as a whole voting to leave, but Scotland specifically voting to remain - could be satisfied by *England and Wales* splitting off from the UK, with Scotland (the "UK") keeping its position in the EU.
More seriously: if anything, I think Brexit detracts from the case for Scottish independence. Scotland is more tightly integrated into the UK economy than the UK ever was into the EU, so the frictionless flow of goods and services across the English/Scottish border is paramount. Pre-Brexit, this might have been disrupted for a few years, but if an independent Scotland managed to rejoin the EU it would become a simple matter of trade between two countries within the EU Common Market. Post-Brexit, there's no good solution: an independent Scotland would have to choose between (a) losing its frictionless trade with the rest of the UK, or (b) staying out of the EU.
Many places like being part of the country they're in, but I think enough don't that it would cause serious administrative problems if they were all allowed to secede.
There are counties in northern California and southern Oregon that would leave to form the right-wing Jefferson Republic -- and other counties that would secede from those same regions to form the left-wing Cascadian Republic. If either secession movement were successful, you would have towns and neighborhoods within those counties who would want to secede again. At the limit, you have lone homeowners claiming to be "sovereign individuals" and refusing to recognize the authority of any local government. This *already* happens and clogs up the criminal courts a bit even though it has no basis in ordinary law; if you actually gave people a right to formally secede, I assume it would become much more common.
Part of the point of the Cascadian secession movement is to protect the regional ecology of the temperate rainforests. Part of the point of the Jefferson secession movement is to secure broad access to hunting, logging, and resource-intensive farming. If you turn the region into a patchwork quilt of jurisdictions with conflicting land use laws, you probably get results that everybody hates -- it would be better for everyone to split the forests along some kind of reasonably smooth boundary line and use part of it for logging and part of it for a nature preserve than it would be to have loggers using heavy equipment to clear-cut a randomly selected 50% of the region that's based on where the loggers happened to live when the region split up.
If you think there are any important decisions that have to be made on a scale larger than that of individual families in order to be useful, then sometimes people will get bundled into decision-making units larger than that of families, even if they'd rather not be bundled that way. We can try to mitigate and minimize that bundling, but I don't think we can do without it altogether -- or, at least, I think the harm of trying to do without it altogether would be worse than the harm of forcing people to try to compromise with each other sometimes.
The problem with the Cascadian movement is that it's mainly based on an ecological unity, which, however noble that might be, doesn't correspond well with political realities.
The Jefferson movement aligns better with political realities, even if the end goal is unrealistic. The counties in question largely voted Trump and thereby against the electoral leanings of their respective states. Jefferson is not looking to secede from the Union, and unlike Cascadia, doesn't cut across national boundary lines.
That's why I think the "If we let them secede, where will it all end?" line of thought is hasty. If the Jeffersonians do form a new state, sure, they'll have their internal squabbles, but on the political spectrum they're more homogeneous than otherwise.
It's not a new Confederacy being proposed; they simply want their own state government. There's even precedent, e.g., Maine seceding from Massachusetts. While the Jeffersonians as a whole might not seem a distinctive group with a glorious history deserving of self-determination, neither does the mish-mash that is California, nor any state on the West Coast for that matter.
As for the logging argument, so much of that contentious issue involves the Federal government, simply breaking off to form a new state doesn't end the debate. Libertarian-leaning Republicans growing bodaciously good weed is not the image that "resource-intensive farming" conjures. And I know hunting is important to some folks, but come on—no one's going to secede for cheaper deer licenses.
So what's the substantive objection to their secession, from a small-D democratic viewpoint?
I don't actually mind if the Jeffersonians in particular secede; that seems fine.
The problem is where to draw the line -- right now the line is very fuzzily oriented around something like "you can secede if you mostly speak a different language, or otherwise have a very different culture than the majority, or if you're so geographically remote that we barely interact with you." India couldn't justify forcing Pakistanis to remain within the Indian polity in part because Pakistanis spoke different languages, had a different religion, ate different foods, and lived on the far side of a mountain range. By contrast, it seems fine to prohibit Texas from seceding from the US because Texans mostly speak the same languages as the rest of the US and engage in plenty of interstate travel. In between those two extremes, Barcelona makes for an interesting edge case -- people differ quite passionately about whether Catalan is a language or a dialect, and about whether the Catalan way of life is a variant of the Spanish way of life, or a unique and distinct alternative to the Spanish way of life. As a result, it's not obvious under current political norms whether Catalonia should be allowed to unilaterally secede.
If you want to weaken those norms so that secession is easier, how *much* weaker do you think they should be? Does it matter how large the seceding group is, either in territory or population? Does it matter how substantial the seceding group's grievances are? Does it matter how far the majority offered to compromise in order to accommodate those grievances? If some of those things matter, how much do they matter, and approximately where do you want to draw the line? Why is that line better than the one we have now?
If those things don't matter, and every individual has an absolute right to secede from any government whenever they feel like it, why are you so sure that enough people will choose to remain within current government structures to preserve the rule of law? People might not secede to save five bucks (heh) on a deer license, but they sure as hell are threatening to secede over gun regulations. If you switch the official government position from "You cannot secede, and if you try, we will arrest you" to "Sure, go ahead, you have the right to secede," are you really confident that 99% of the people talking about secession will shrug and carry on with business as usual? Not just this year, but next year, and the year after, and every time the feds pass a new law that the locals don't like? If so, why?
I probably should have used the word "partition" for states breaking off from other states, as "secede" is a historically loaded word in the United States meaning "leave the Union."
As mentioned, partitioning has happened a few times before in our past (Kentucky, Maine, W. Virginia). There is precedent and a process for doing so. When you say the line is very fuzzy, I disagree. It's not cut-and-dried, but it does involve familiar mechanisms: petitioning congress, holding local votes, drafting a state constitution, etc.
I neither said nor implied "every individual has an absolute right to secede from any government whenever they feel like it," and I've never read anything by Jefferson proponents advocating such things either.
While partitioning states is different from what Scott is discussing in his main post, it does seem relevant given the federal nature of U.S. government. In a sense, Maine "seceded" from Massachusetts. The usual markers for self-determination, like language, ethnicity, historical background, don't exactly apply with partitioning. The times it's happened is usually due to a sense of proper and more local representation. (The drive for home rule in D.C. is similarly motivated, which is another example of a block of land being partitioned off existing states.)
"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.
This reminded me of the weirdness that was the Bantustans. IIRC, the apartheid government of South Africa had the brilliant idea of "Hey, if all the black people were in their own country instead of South Africa, then we wouldn't be oppressing them anymore and everyone would love us again!" So they declared the black majority areas to be independent. This failed miserably because the response from the international community was that the Bantustans were just client states, not meaningfully independent in any way, and reliant on support from South Africa. (Please correct me if I'm getting the details wrong.)
I don't know what the actual inhabitants of the Bantustans thought (though I imagine the local leaders who were funded by the South African government were all for it), but supposing that at least some of them wanted independence, they would have been in a very strange position vis-a-vis self-determination.
Singapore was forcibly ejected from Malaysia in 1965 in a similar sort of move, but they showed them.
Why didn't the white people secede from the black people? Or grant the black people real independence?
they didn't want them having their own economy, because they wanted them.to continue being cheap workers, and really didn't want them having militaries.
I guess they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania,_Northern_Cape is a white-only city in South Africa, where whites try to be self-sufficient. They are criticized as racist by everyone.
And... I assume the criticism is probably correct, but then how exactly are white people supposed to secede if "trying to secede from the blacks" is inherently a bad thing? (But not trying to secede is also racist, because it means that you exploit black workers.)
You don't have to exploit people. A form of separation of archipelago where the non whites got votes and got economic resources in proportion to their numbers would have been much less objectionable to the international community ... But would mean the end of white rule.
I imagine that trying to pull "We're a secessionist state that just so happens to have a government exactly like that of South Africa (by the way, we're keeping the capital city)," would have been an even tougher sell in the court of public opinion. The plan was for all of the black people to live in the Bantustans, while all their jobs would be in South Africa, so independence would be nominal at best.
If you look at a map of the homelands compared to a demographic map of South Africa, it's apparent that the division wasn't based on where people were already living -- whites wanted to keep most of the land, including all of the significant cities, and put the black population in discontiguous stretches of countryside, sort of like Indian reservations. There wasn't really a natural place for whites to secede to, plus there were significant populations of Asians and Coloured persons, so splitting SA neatly into black and white nations wasn't really in the cards.
An interesting detail about the homelands, though, is that when SA created its post-apartheid constitution they also redrew the provincial boundaries in ways that were clearly influenced by the bantustans. The capital of the newly created Eastern Cape province even used to be the capital of one of the bantustans. I don't know the story behind all that, but it does suggest that the bantustans wanted to preserve a degree of self-determination at the sub-national level.
I've always believed Ukraine was a country, because Ukraine is on the Risk board. This "Russia" is not.
that's right!
The Risk board was first made in the 1950s, predating the game Civilization by decades. A quick Google search-by-date shows that "Russia" was never even mentioned on the Web before the 1990s.
Did the web exist before the 1990s?
thatsthejoke.gif
I'm just providing the facts. The interpretation is up to you.
Soon after the Ukraine invasion, this Risk clip from Seinfeld got a lot of views...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzLtF_PxbYw
Risk only has 6 nations: green, red, yellow, black, blue, and a pink/violet.
Sounds like something a green would say!
"Switzerland for instance is a confederation made up of pieces of three other nations, but the Swiss have created a highly interesting and distinct polity (blablabla)"
As a Swiss guy I really have to object to this history-ignorant take. Most Swiss Cantons were never vassal states much less part of neighboring countries - which would have been hard to do anyways given neither Germany nor Italy existed until fairly recently. Many were informally part of the holy roman empire as independent entities, the Habsburg ruled over some cantons for a while (btw. Habsburg dynasty originated from Switzerland in first place, so debatable whether this even counts as foreign rule), and there was a brief period when Napoleon conquered the country when it wasn't independent, but other than that it has been independent for 6-700 years. Just because various pieces of the country adopted the language of neighboring places doesn't fricking mean they are the same people. Even in Roman times the Helvetii were considered a different people than the Gauls or the Germanic tribes.
Indeed, Caesar's writings about his campaigns begin by dwelling on the many virtues of the Helvetians. You surly mountain people been around for a while.
If by "informally part of the Holy Roman Empire" you mean "legally a subject of the HRE such that they got out by treaty in 1648."
well, yeah that's the treaty of Westphalia, but that just made the divorce official they have been living separately from the HRE for previous 300 years already, and arguably longer before then. By "informal" what I was thinking about was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_immediacy . Btw i had to read that article myself to reacquaint myself with the history, and a bit unclear whether it truly supports my recollections which is that the confederation was part of the HRE a bit in way that Canada is part of the commonwealth and QEII is their monarch, i.e. they were independent all but in name. If someone can offer evidence of contrary about strength of HRE-CH ties happy to accept that, this is not stuff i have really looked into probably since like 6th grade.
Imperial Immediacy was just the status of being a direct vassal of the Holy Roman Emperor. It was the opposite of living separately, it was being a direct vassal and having a closer relationship with the Emperor than otherwise. There were hundreds of lords/bishops/cities/republics/etc with the status including a few cities or tiny lords who barely ruled a postage stamp.
I edited my post above with some caveats, our messages crossed. I'll add also that thinking about it maybe am biased by Swiss education, which may be tilted towards presenting the CH as more independent from the start (would make sense). As i said above not a topic i've looked into since adulthood. Although still - the Swiss had their own armies, their own currency, they made and enforced their own laws, enlarged the confederation without asking for permission etc. looked pretty independent to me. I can't remember whether they paid any kind of tribute to the emperor though.
They did have to pay tribute, obey Imperial laws, etc. And they did have to get permission from the Emperor for various things. But beyond that they could legislate for themselves, raise their own armies, make currency, etc.
The thing is this didn't make them distinct from other polities of the HRE or even vassals in other countries. Most European countries, especially before the early modern period, were networks of polities in hierarchical relationships. Those polities often controlled the immediate facts on the ground of their territory. Stuff like local justice or raising taxes or troops. The royal writ often had very limited effect on day to day life. And even in matters of justice between lords they often resolved it with a war. Switzerland forming an alliance was not unique either.
What was unique was the relatively democratic structures and durability of the alliance and its ability to defend itself against ambitious rivals looking to seize territory. This caused it to, like any of the larger HRE polities, increasingly pull away from imperial authority. Culminating with it leaving in 1648 from a HRE shattered in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. But even that development wasn't unique: the Netherlands had a similar course.
ok having read up a little bit on the subject i think i'm gonna draw the line about when the the CH became independent at 1499. Hard to claim a certain territory is still part of an empire when the emperor has to go to war to reassert his claim on said territory, and loses, and has to accept a humiliating peace treaty that concludes the war and the two sides never fight again afterwards. Oh and the treaty also exempted the Swiss from paying taxes, to the point we discussed earlier. From the wiki on the swabian war: "When his military high commander fell in the battle of Dornach, where the Swiss won a final decisive victory, Emperor Maximilian I had no choice but to agree to a peace treaty signed on September 22, 1499, in Basel. The treaty granted the Confederacy far-reaching independence from the empire. Although the Eidgenossenschaft officially remained a part of the empire until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the peace of Basel exempted it from the imperial jurisdiction and imperial taxes and thus de facto acknowledged it as a separate political entity."
I would add that thinking of Switzerland as composed of German, French and Italian part is kind of misguided. Protestant vs. catholic may be better. But in the end, as OP notes, it's all about cantons. For example, policy-wise, Zurich (German speaking) and Geneva (French speaking) may be closer together, given that they are both mostly urban areas, then policies of Zurich and rural German-speaking Schwyz.
As for separatism within Switzerland, check my write-up on the splitting of canton Jura from canton Bern here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x6hpkYyzMG6Bf8T3W/swiss-political-system-more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know-i#Referenda_as_Tools__The_Jurassic_Question
Napoleon did conquer the western part of your country, no? Before being forced to withdraw from it in 1814-1815.
correct, but i mentioned that in my original post above! way to necro an old comment thread btw. :-)
I'm sorry; I didn't read carefully enough. I now see it!
As for necroing, it's not always bad! ;)
But Yeah, anyway, I personally see Ukraine's main value as providing a non-Woke, relatively conservative Western development model for an Orthodox East Slavic country. This includes things such as free speech, free elections, hopefully greater LGBTQ+ rights in due time, et cetera but also hopefully things such as an opposition to Wokeness and mass Muslim immigration (which Western Europe has unfortunately already received too much of in recent decades).
"Does my street (population: ~100) have the right to declare independence from the USA? If not, then street-sized entities apparently don’t have the right to self-determination. Why not?"
The analytic philosopher Timothy Williamson writes a lot about such questions involving vagueness, or what in the field's jargon are, I think, called "vague predicates." (He wrote a whole book on the topic: "Vagueness.") When, precisely, does a man losing hair become bald? Williamson actually defends a philosophical position called supervaluationism, in which, e.g., there is a precise hair that gets lost and, before that hair fell out, the man wasn't bald, but with the loss he suddenly is. I don't understand this. But you might find his work interesting to look into even if your first question above was partly in jest.
Technically, Williamson's position is called "epistemicism" (there's a precise border for every apparently vague concept, and vagueness just consists in the difficulty of any actual person knowing how the facts about usage of the word determined precisely what that border is) while I think Kit Fine defends supervaluationism (which says there are millions of candidate borders for vague concepts, and vagueness consists in the fact that something is only *really* true if it's true according to each of the borders, and things that are true for some but false for others are in some weird "indeterminate" state - though it's not *really* true that anything is indeterminate, since according to each border everything is either determinately true or determinately false).
Thanks for the correction. Wouldn't Williamson's position be undermined by the fact that, during the (unknown) history the application of "bald," people who used the word no doubt used it to refer to various degrees of baldness, not always the same degree (and hence there is in the term's history not just one precise border for the vague concept)?
I think Williamson's response would be to say that some of those historical users of the word were speaking a different language from me (after all, Old English was certainly a different language than the language I'm speaking), and that only the usage by the ones who were speaking the same language as me is relevant to the meaning of my word. (Precisely which speakers constitute this set is again a vague concept - which he says just means there's a precise border that we don't know.)
The meaning of the term won't be precisely determined by what is going on within any of their heads, because of course we know that speakers of any language are often slightly mistaken about the meanings of their words. (Like Hilary Putnam, I don't know much about the difference between the words "elm" and "beech", and I also often get "stove" and "oven" confused.) There is some process by which this complicated set of usages determines a precise border for the meaning of the word, but it's not the sort of thing that any person actually knows.
I think all of this sounds a lot like special pleading, but he makes a compelling case that you can't have classical logic without something like this, and that classical logic is the only true logic.
Interesting. Thanks. What you wrote put me in mind of Gödel's remark, "The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other at all."
I don't have a philosophy background so my preference is probably just naivete talking, but on this topic I'm partial to David Chapman's take in https://meaningness.com/boundaries-objects-connections, where he argues that boundaries, objects and connections between them are neither totally objective nor totally subjective, but "co-created by ourselves and the world in dynamic interaction".
This sounds like woo, but I think his examples (a jar of blueberry jam, a cloud) are convincing deconfusions (in that they "dissolve the question", like Scott's old post on dissolving questions about disease https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/895quRDaK6gR2rM82/diseased-thinking-dissolving-questions-about-disease)
Before Civ there was Risk, and Ukraine . . .
There's a Seinfeld episode about this that I imagine people are very embarrassedly avoiding talking about right now...
Who is saying Ukraine is weak? Ukraine is not weak!
The native also knew to say "Ukraine" instead of "The Ukraine" and it took the west a few decades to catch up.
What are you talking about? Its all I've talked about since the crisis started. I have the youtube clip bookmarked!
Russia wasn't in the original Civilization either (Africa, Italy, Illyria, Thrace, Crete, Asia, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt)
So two continents and a number of much smaller regions? Who came up with that list?
Francis Tresham, the game designer.
Does Russia deserve to be independent from Ukraine? There should be a UN-managed referendum.
Wait, what Civ 1 are you talking about? The Russians were there, led by Stalin.
The 1980 board game.
If the roles were reversed, and Ukraine was a Russia-style autocracy and Russia a modernizing democracy, and a free, democratic Russia invaded a despotic Ukraine...
Well, I'd be against it. But I definitely wouldn't want the US to support Ukraine in such a case, and would find difficulty summoning the same moral outrage over the invading.
Is this just self-serving bias on behalf of the liberal democratic West? Maybe, but I don't think that's most of it. I don't think whether Ukraine is friendly or unfriendly with the US in this scenario would particularly change my feelings on this.
Ukraine has more political freedom than Russia but it's a stretch to call it "free and democratic"; it's below countries like Bangladesh, Tunisia, Thailand, Singapore, and certainly well below Hungary on the Economist Democracy Index. It's a "hybrid regime". Yes it's more free than Russia, but don't exaggerate.
yeah, to be clear i was imagining the "least convenient world", not a literal reversal.
This is the second time I see someone mention the democracy index as part of an argument, this motivated me to actually go look at the data. I think the details here highlight the dangers of trying to summarize complex situations into a singular number and then use it to compare with other stuff without understanding the underlying nuances.
Ukraine's relatively poor 5.57 score (86 out of 168) in the 2021 version of the index is composed of:
- 8.25 for electoral process and pluralism
- 2.36 for functioning of government
- 6.67 for political participation
- 5.00 for political culture
- 5.59 for civil liberties.
The clear outlier here is the "functioning of the government" score which is just abnormally low (to give you a sense - North Korea, Congo, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, etc. all score better than Ukraine here!) And to your comment how Ukraine scores "well below Hungary", well actually on the four other criteria the two countries are nearly equal (6.5 average for Hungary vs. 6.4 for Ukraine), basically the entire difference is down to this "functioning of government" rating. Now what does it actually encompass? The Economist report doesn't give a definition, and my 2min google didn't turn up anything (probably could find one if I spent longer but was too lazy), but I think the following excerpt from the Economist report gives a good idea what it might include:
"Ukraine’s score registered the steepest decline among the four east European countries in this category, and Ukraine now shares 86th place with Mexico in our global ranking, down from 79th place in 2020. Ukraine’s score declined in part as a result of increased tensions with Russia. Government functioning under a direct military threat usually restricts democratic processes in favour of the centralisation of power in the hands of the executive and the security or military apparatus with the aim of guaranteeing public safety. In Ukraine, the military played a more prominent role in 2021 and exerted more influence over political decision-making; government policy also became less transparent. The approval rating of Volodymyr Zelenskyi, the Ukrainian president, declined from 42% in December 2020 to 38% at the end of 2021 as confidence in his ability to implement reforms and address threats from Russia declined."
A large portion of their poor score seems due to the threat of war and the ensuing need to emphasize the military! (which could also be impacting other criteria like civil liberties etc. hard to say as it's not as obvious). I guess in some sense yeah it has an impact on the level of democracy in a country, but being at war / at risk of war is hardly their choice and it seems pretty egregious to ding them as a failed state because they've been forced onto a war footing by external threats.
It's a good comment, Ukraine has a lower Democracy Index than Hungary mostly because of the functioning of government. I never called them a failed state, but yeah the "democratic Ukraine vs nondemocratic Russia" is a bit stronger of an argument than I thought it was before.
This is similar to my thoughts on the matter, except of course expressed better.
I also can't help but notice Ukraine has introduced conscription and banned opposition parties, no doubt because not all ukrainians agree with him. In order to "create" a people, somehow you always have to use large amounts of force. If the Ukrainians were so gung hu about Ukraine, why do you have to draft them by force? Also there seems to be a lack of reciprocity, Ukrainian government prepared for the war with denial and doing nothing, but they still demand their citizens give everything for it! (except they wont meaningfully draft women, because ukraine is still sexist in the face of annihilation as a nation state!)
The best argument I can think of against Crimean becoming Russian is that people should be allowed to vote but not be allowed to vote for dictatorship, except that kind of goes away because now ukraine is authoritarian and banned the second most popular party, the Opposition Platform for Life.
This is why we need (near) open borders, so we don't sentence a person to the country they were born into!
Until we have that I think you kind have to take it by an extremely case by case basis, will the polity that likely emerges from whatever group who wants independence this Tuesday be better for the median person (or maybe better based on being more moral) than the one it replaces?
And will it be so much better to justify the massive cost of war? Pretty rarely yes, but sometimes yes
Like I tend to think Palestine would not form a very efficient and just government, though I do think Ukraine would be better than russia, or at the very least not so bad as to justify war.
The opposition party ban thing i don't know, but the conscription part seems totally necessary to me. Lots of people may be gung-ho about a war / the country but be too cowardly to fight (can't blame them, don't know what category I would be in myself if put in that situation), you can't allow a dynamic to start where people can dodge the fight if they want that would create bad morale.
Proves too much - Russia must conscript people and suppress opposition in order to convince its citizens to invade Ukraine, so they can’t be right either. Hell, by that standard the UK did not deserve to survive WWII and should have surrendered to the Nazis.
The Union also obviously didn't care that much about the whole slavery thing. Pretty sure Lincoln had to shut down several media outlets and even suspended habeus corpus. And he definitely conscripted most of his army. Surely if the North were gung ho about abolition or staying one nation or whatever the rallying cry was, they wouldn't have to draft them by force. To say nothing of the Confederacy, who refused to draft their women even when faced with imminent destruction as a nation state.
Lincoln didn't ban the second-largest opposition party, it left (and it was a literally pro-slavery party)
Though I tend to think drafting is fine to end slavery and to end a slave state. I don't know difficult questions, I tend to think the union could have improved its army by just making wages high enough to not draft people, but if that is militarily unfeasible than the draft was fine.
A draft from a government that appears to me like 10 percent better than the Russian government (and in some ways its worse, as appears poorer and more corrupt in peace time)? I'm a bit more on the fence on this.
>Though I tend to think drafting is fine to end slavery and to end a slave state. I don't know difficult questions, I tend to think the union could have improved its army by just making wages high enough to not draft people, but if that is militarily unfeasible than the draft was fine.
Whether or not conscription is morally/ethically acceptable seems unrelated to your original point, which was that if the populace actually cared about the stakes of the war then conscription would be unnecessary. Unless I misread your original post, anyway, but I'm not sure how else to take it.
It was a bit of a meander of a post, basically, your post seemed to be saying American civl war = just and did the things (especially a draft) I'm criticizing Ukraine for doing, so the Ukraine war is actually good.
Allow me to explain my thinking further for funsies.
I think the justness of drafts tends to be related to
A. A minimum, what i would call, legitimacy threshold. Pre-war Ukraine didn't meet that for me.
B. A just war threshold-- obviously I would say a war for the extermination of Canada is bad even if the USA or Sweden or some kind of legitimate authority launched it.
For example, I would willingly submit myself to be drafted by Sweden or USA or Isreal or whatever for a war (assuming it was just), and support jailing people who try to draft dodge.
This leads to the question of what constitutes a just war, and well that's a difficult question, but I think when there is a strong possibility of creating a much better/more just rule system I guess I would support war?
Of course these ideas are kind of half baked, this is just an internet comment after all.
tangent: I'm also interested in the more technical question of how feasible is just paying people enough so they voluntarily join the army? The higher the support the less you have to pay, also you might get better troops.
>It was a bit of a meander of a post, basically, your post seemed to be saying American civl war = just and did the things (especially a draft) I'm criticizing Ukraine for doing, so the Ukraine war is actually good.
I was more aiming for "We can't really judge popular support for a war solely by the use of conscription, nor can we reasonably expect mass conscription of women in most societies under basically any circumstances."
>I'm also interested in the more technical question of how feasible is just paying people enough so they voluntarily join the army? The higher the support the less you have to pay, also you might get better troops.
The US military has been volunteer-only since shortly after Vietnam, iirc? So far the price seems to be "Make university ruinously expensive for basically anyone who doesn't enlist, then offer to repay any loans or pay for tuition for anyone who does serve. Also, make health insurance suck but give service members free health/dental/life etc. insurance." YMMV on whether that's worth it.
There were still Democrats to run against Lincoln during the Civil War.
> Ukrainian government prepared for the war with denial and doing nothing
This is untrue. They did plenty since 2014. And are indicators that they did just before war, as evidenced from air force not destroyed in initial attacks - thought maybe that is just Russian incompetence?
they were publicly saying war was laughable, which is understandable since they didn't want their economy to explode, but a bit misleading, and a lie, at least if they were preparing for war. the better they prepared the more obvious it is they were massively lying to their own people.
There is a lot of fog of war right now, so it could be Russian incompetence, or maybe Ukrainian brilliance.
My prediction: They will eventually capitulate and give in to all demands, (give up the disputed Ukrainian territories, be super neutral, etc) they will be labeled as heroes despite having been able to do that before the war, with the caveat that maybe there is something not public, maybe Putin would have demanded much more without the war, but my understanding is Ukraine could end it right now by just recognizing the disputed land, paying lip service to de-Nazification, and being neutral from now on.
Of course Russia could end in an even better way by just withdrawing, but I don't see that happening.
> My prediction: They will eventually capitulate and give in to all demands, (give up the disputed Ukrainian territories, be super neutral, etc)
I expect that they will not do this (give up no more than Russia occupied at start of war, able to join EU in theory at least)
Time will tell.
(I thought russia was only demanding stuff they already occupied? I should probably do more research)
Yeah I mean they publicly denied but privately did a bunch your right. Fog of war being what it is I think it easily could be ore Russian incompetence than ukrainian competence. Could be both at the same time.
I mean yeah I support ukraine, doing what's necessary to defend their country (draft, curtailing some civil liberties etc).
I think it's in their interest to make a few concessions and basically give up part of the disputed eastern territories though.
Indeed I think that is exactly why they had to ban the opposition parties. If debate were allowed many more ukrainians would be making this argument, I suspect.
Now I suspect it's going to be a long slog that Russia eventually wins. Some sort of long tail chance of a revolution against putin but pretty small
This "Opposition" party (and all, yes all) other parties you talk about were, and are, russian puppet oligarchs under a nice "left" name. Also, they were banned only temporarily, while the military law lasts. This is fair considered at least how they still support the invasion, and helped kill ukrainians. This "Ukraine is not a democracy" thing because of that parties ban is exactly what you can read on RT, which should be enough to rule out this argument.
There are many such untrue arguments like that in your comment, so check your information sources, I guess.
I would expect RT news to use the best arguments they can think of, as well as a few lies so I wouldn't expect to DQ and arguments just because RT news used them.
I am just going by freedom house, which puts Ukraine at 40/100 partly free, which to me, is not free at all. I will not sacrifice my life or support forcing others to die for a a 40/100 partly free state.
I suspect the military law thing will last in perpetuity, as such laws generally do, but we shall see.
I don't really wish to do a deep dive into the financing of the second-largest opposition party atm, but in a free society you can't just ban it because its led by Russian plutocrats. (maybe you can cut off the money though!). Clearly if its the second-largest opposition party their must be some Ukrainians that support.
Ukraine is facing the prospect of being conquered by a country that scored 19/100 on the Freedom House scale, so if that's your benchmark then non-resistance to Russia seems like a weird response. Maybe Ukraine will return to its prewar level of freedom and maybe not, but whatever Putin has planned for them is almost certainly worse.
Simple answer to your last proposition. The union had to stay together to prevent European powers from carving up North America once again. Had the Confederacy succeeded Spain or France or England would have been able to drive a wedge between the South and the North and as Lincoln knew...divided we fall. The repercussions of that are too ugly to contemplate. History, as James Joyce said, is a nightmare we're trying to awaken from, and the United States and only the United States has escaped.
> ...and the United States and only the United States has escaped.
Is this sarcasm? Because, if not, I don't think the way you're defining "nightmare" is very clear.
100 million people died from wars and politics in Europe and Asia in the first half of the 20th Century. The worst 50 years in human history. The US suffered less than a million combat deaths in that time. Maybe Mexico and Latin America escaped, but Europe's constant predation of those countries left them largely crippled to this day. Andy Jackson knew what he was doing.
I think it's worth at least considering the possibility that if American cities and states were allowed to secede and rejoin more or less at will (filling in a logistics of doing this in a non-insane way is left as an exercise for the reader), this would create a significant pressure towards reform and competence. Or at least, I think if poorly run states were in genuine fear of their most lucrative cities voting to be Canadian instead, it'd force them to get their shit together and provide a strong financial incentive towards reform. Certainly it's hard to imagine Texas doing their recent abortion shenanigans if there was a serious risk of Austin or Houston leaving.
I think continuing to allow free transit between territories would have to be part of the logistics left to the reader.
They could determine access rights by a chili cookoff.
it creates lots of arbitrage incentives. Czech / Slovakia split, Western states in Yugoslavia wanting to leave pre-war, and ongoing Wallon/Flemish talks of split in Belgium are partly cultural but also an issue of different economic speeds between parts of the same country inducing people in the richer parts to want to leave rather than continue to fund the poor side. In none of these cases did it create a positive dynamic to induce the poorer side to shape/catch up.
That's maybe not true of Wallonia and Flanders. Wallonia was the rich half until a few decades ago, and now Flanders is the rich half, and maybe that history did drive the Flemish to growth.
Eg from a quick google:
"It sometimes feels like the moment Flanders finally caught up with Wallonia, more than half a century ago, it also unleashed a political confidence that continues to voice itself"
https://www.brusselstimes.com/45009/how-economics-explains-belgium-s-rifts
well, Wallonia used to be the industrial heartland but now is basically like US rust belt with lots of economic and social problems, and listening to friends from there it's creating a lot of the current tensions between the two sides. But you / the article you linked bring up the historical dynamics about how roles used to be reversed and I agree that probably makes things even worse!
I'd say that the split of Czechoslovakia actually helped both sides in the end and Czechs and Slovaks have more friendly relationship today than they would have had otherwise.
That's half of Mencius Moldbug's core thesis, FYI.
Also, arguably Texas in the other direction, same argument. Texas (including Austin and Houston) has benefited enormously from growth because the US has freedom of movement and Texas has different policy (speaking here not of the abortion shenanigans, but of the fact that I, an Austin resident, was never harassed about taking long walks outside maskless in 2020, among other things).
Realpolitik at least is useful for predicting behavior as Mearsheimer illustrates. The US wouldn't tolerate Mexico joining Russia, for example, and when the Ukrainians cut off the water supply to Crimea it was only a matter of time before the Russians had to do something. Blowing up the damn happened within the first week or so, I believe. Curious that Ukraine is offering to be a neutral state now that we're in peace talks, and that wasn't on the table before the invasion. To think the war could have been avoided is just heart-breaking.
I think there is some probability you are right. But there is also a considerable chance that offering the neutrality concession before the war was fought would've come across as an admission of weakness and would've just encouraged Putin to take what was on offer and then come for seconds in another few years (not like getting Crimea / part of Donbas satiated him, right?). Whereas now that Ukrainians have made clear the costs of war if they manage to negotiate a peace treaty the Russians should calm down for quite a while.
Yeah, a safe bet for the outcome is "the Ukrainians have bought time to be a nation, and the Russians have bought time to keep a lot of Russian speaking people out of NATO". And it's important to realize (1) none of this is stable even on the scale of centuries, (2) those results weren't just mutually tradable, and (3) it's best to get used to the immutability of 1 and 2, and embrace the happy times, even though there are also sad times along the way.
The set of national borders that the world has today are a mix of historical happenstance that frequently seems very arbitrary. Even the existence of many national identities as a recognizable concept is the constructed work of specific people. (For instance, Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation is a great book to understand how the Greek national mythos was actively built decades before Greece became an independent entity.)
Countries defy easy categorization that group X is here and group Y is here. However, easy orderly categorization shouldn't be a goal in and of itself, certainly not at the cost is potentially carries. Kenya's UN Ambassador Martin Kimani gave a good speech on this point is response to the Russia-Ukraine War (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwDWxyLVBxk). Worth watching, but the summary is: Yes, the borders in Africa are stupid and inconvenient legacies of colonialism, but going to war to "fix" them would be a fruitless exercise with tremendous consequences. We've just got to live with them.
On self-determination more generally, perhaps the better question to ask is "How do subgroups get self-determination?" rather than "Who gets self-determination?". Full succession to either become its own country or join another country is the extreme case. A much more common model is giving a high level of self-government to sub-entities (as is done for states, cities and provinces worldwide).
This can offer a high degree of flexibility, while also providing certain basis standards (e.g. human rights). Sure, if 60% of a region want independent decision making, that seems reasonable, but not if it is so they can murder or enslave the other 40%. This addresses your Confederacy scenario.
The point about putting a military base in the Bahamas is a good example of an important broader point: There are lots of other values at stake in deciding what country owns what, besides just the lives and votes of the people who live there. Besides security and military concerns, there are natural resources to argue about. Can the part of Norway with all the oil secede? Do they get to keep all the oil money if they do? Can another country buy them out without the consent of the rest of Norway?
A recent practical example being "Scotland is the part of the UK with all the oil (and one key nuclear submarine base)". It mattered in the 2014 referendum.
I suppose in Norway much of the oil is on government land, leased by government ownership to private corporations, but in a place like Texas, it doesn't really matter whether the state secedes, since most of the oil is on privately-owned land, and secession doesn't change who owns the land. (For decades after the Mexican-American war, many of the biggest landowners in California were Mexicans.)
Wouldn't secession still change who can levy taxes on the land, the payrolls of the companies operating on the land, and all their business activities generally? And imagine Texas joining OPEC -- even without owning the oil fields, it seems to me that the Feds have a strong interest in keeping that land and those businesses in American hands, whether private or public.
Yes, that's right. After secession it would definitely be possible for the new state to expropriate the land from the private owners. My point is just that this doesn't automatically happen. (In discussions of cities or US states changing territorial sovereignty, I think this would almost never happen, but people often talk as though it automatically would.)
Most Norwegian oil is on government sea. Sea is not normally capable of being privately owned in the way land is, but is capable of being under government sovereignty.
[Property ownership is weird, in that there is sovereign ownership and proprietary ownership; sea can be under sovereign ownership, but not proprietary]
I think my views on this is a purely realpolitik one. Might makes right - if you have the will and means to fight for your independence and prevail you have the right to be a nation, if a neighbor has the will and means to fight you and prevail and control your territory indefinitely then you don't. This approach has been in place since the beginning of time and has resulted in vast majority of national boundaries today. There are sometimes added complexities about alliances and other nations not wanting wrong example to be set, or wanting to weaken the aggressing nation etc. and hence help out the nation trying to remain independent. But these again are out of political considerations. I'd prefer if we just left the theoretical-moralistic fig leaves out of this completely.
What gives you the might to decide what other people have to do to earn the right to be a nation?
nothing. i don't have a say in this. nothing i believe one way or another could have the slightest impact on what happens in the real world. you should think of the above as an attempt at finding a system that explains the facts out there rather than any attempt at influencing them.
My approach here is that I think that nation-states were kind of a bad idea, but once you've got one running decently well, it's better to keep it running than violently knock it over and try again. So the real norm for me is that countries should not generally try to modify the international status quo through all-out invasion, particularly against places that are managing to be somewhat liberal and somewhat democratic.
If Ukraine had remained part of Russia and then launched a war of independence this year, I doubt you'd see western countries pouring weapons in. And if they did, I think it would be fair to criticize it as some shady cold war antics that cause way more harm than good. But that's not how things went down when the soviets fell, and now that Ukraine has managed to establish itself, it is worth protecting because the alternative is obviously worse.
Is this fair? Probably not really. But I do think it's a reasonable way to approach the messy world of international politics. Focusing too much on grand universal values like "self-determination" will trip you up more than it helps you.
Another thing I think is notable though is how ethnic/national identities are malleable and are often shaped to deal with particular local situations. Like, a big part of what's going on here is that Ukraine's neighbor to the east is a poor authoritarian country with little to offer other than cheap gas, whereas their neighbors to the west are mighty industrial powers. It makes perfect sense that the people living in that border region would prefer to associate themselves with the powerful, wealthy, and prosperous side. Cultivating a distinctive Ukrainian identity helps create the ideological space they need to execute that pivot to the west.
My hometown of Staten Island famously voted to secede from the rest of NYC in 1993, with 65% of the island voting to leave. They tried the establishment of an independent city by passage of a city charter, but this was blocked by the state legislature of New York. Apparently since an act of the legislature created NYC out of the five boroughs in 1898, the legislature could just look at the charter Staten Island passed and say “Nah, you can’t leave.” This never made much sense to me, but neither did secession. I understood why lots of people wanted it, but still can’t see how it would have improved things.
The whole movement was diffused in that same election, because the high turnout from largely Republican Staten Island elected Rudy Giuliani mayor of NYC. Giuliani made sure Staten Island’s biggest grievances were dealt with, and the movement to secede fizzled.
Apparently it revived a bit under DeBlasio, who was seriously hated by just about everyone but especially Staten Island. But I haven’t lived there in 20 years and never heard anyone had been considering secession in 2019 until much later. I still don’t know what improvements people imagined, or if they’d considered all the trade-offs.
I am Russian and I consider Ukraine separate county.
Not because of some centuries old s**t (even though I am a big fan of history) or language (I look down on Russian sometimes and Ukranian has 6x less people and it's book market/internet culture is even worse) but because of modern political culture.
Russia and Belarus had a chance to go in direction of democracy.
I guess Belarus was to small and it was captured by single clique.
In Russia authoritarianism is based on outstanding might of Gasprom - natural gas monopolist. Putin follows interests of Gasprom and is supported by it. Gasprom has enormous profits and it is centralised by its nature - natural gas pipelines should be managed by single authority.
Ukraine managed to walk the narrow path to democracy without single clique dominating the scene. Ukranian elites had to learn how to communicate and cooperate despite their differences way better than their Russian counterparts (read about Putin's "vertical line of power" - it is even worse than it sounds). And that cultural difference seems to be the source of the hatred from Russians "blues"/"righties".
Should Ukraine join Russia or not is a moot point with brave resistance that it's army shows today.
Crimea is indeed is mostly populated by Russians and Russia's navy base and tourists always projected lots of influence there. Ukrain had to manage that region much more carefully and it would be the best if it remained Russian or at least got some very special status.
There are several counties of eastern Oregon that have voted to join Idaho. (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/12/oregon-secession-idaho-move-border/621087/)
US state governments do something very different from what national governments do, but the Senate and Electoral College mechanisms make state borders ridiculously important at the national level. (I once saw a fantasy map of the 2016 presidential election, in which the Ohio-Michigan line was moved slightly, and Alabama got a bit more of the Florida Panhandle, and Clinton ends up with a strong victory by taking Michigan and Florida.)
Someone might think the moral issues are the same, and they might somehow *feel* the same for the self-respect of the people, but they seem extremely different in other ways.
I actually think it's fairer to prevent eastern Oregon from joining Idaho, because (as long as they want to stay in the US) they're bound by US law.
Of course, if they seceded from the US and then offered to rejoin only if they could be part of Idaho...
The question of self determination in regards to forming a state should take into account the purpose of forming that state.
Now this gets us into the deep waters of political philosophy and you could argue that it is exactly the point of self determination that us outsiders aren't allowed to care about the purpose, because, you know, the people should be free to determine it for themselves.
I have no fleshed out argument here, but my intuition is something like this:
>the purpose of forming a state is to further individual freedom, both positive and negative.
>the legitimacy of seceding and political self determination partly depends on if that is an effective way of fulfilling this purpose
in this way very specific circumstances factor into the question.
your street isnt allowed to secede, because there is no way this actually makes the people of your street more self determined while making alot of trouble for everyone.
crimea probably isnt allowed to secede from kinda democratic Ukraine to pretty undemocratic russia bc obviously people will be less free.
The south wasnt allowed to secede from the US because it explicitly wanted a large part of its people to be not free.
Taiwan would be allowed to secede from the peoples republic of china because it is in many ways more free, except for the fact that if China feels they need to emphasize their opinion on the matter by force, a lot of people wil be less free so we hover in paradoxical limbo of not-saying-that-they-are-allowed-to-secede-so-they-can-continue-to-secede-without-too-much-risk.
Ananda Gupta makes a similar point in a comment below!
thanks i somehow didnt see
"the purpose of forming a state is to further individual freedom, both positive and negative."
I don't think that adequately captures the nationalist impulse.
It's a good time to re-read your own general case treatment on the topic, and how it is very path dependent: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/
I really like the independence-plus-EU model for a lot of this.
Also: I consider Cossacks: European Wars to be a more authoritative source than Civilization (because much more historically accurate) and it has Ukraine as one of the playable factions. Ukrainian peasants in the game have the unique ability to resist capture/conversion by enemy military units. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks:_European_Wars :)
Hmm, where is the Cossacks developer from again?
I don't think that "might makes right", but I do think that might makes a nation.
If your street declared itself to be a nation and could successfully form its own government, laws, taxes, and the means to enforce them -- while also preventing the city, state, and country you're located in from enforcing their laws or collecting taxes from you -- congratulations, your street is a nation.
These questions tend to be resolved by force, not by a moral theory of who has a "right" to self determination. The moral character of a group claiming to be a nation is important, but they will determine their own course if they can prevent anyone else from determining it.
I was going to write a very similar comment, but I think it's important to note that this very rarely plays out in practice because everyone has a pretty good idea of whether they would get trounced in a fight or not. Thus the realpolitik is obscured: while they may *want* to secede, small regions rarely if ever do because it would be trivial to recapture them, and they know it. Rebellion is a losing proposition in the face of modern nation-states.
References to the small size of a rebel group make me think of Raven from Neil Stephenson's "Snow Crash". He's referred to as a Sovereign, essentially a one-man-nation, because he carries around a nuke that's rigged to go off if he dies. Government enforcers treat him as an independent nation because of the power he commands.
He's not a good person. I don't think he has a "right" to nationhood. But he doesn't ask anyone for any rights, he simply does what he wants. Self-determination.
Side note, I keep putting "rights" in quotes because I'm not sure what we (or Scott) mean. Rights granted by whom? Enforced by whom? What does a "right to self-determination" mean apart from the strength to achieve it?
What a fantastic book. It brings me joy to see it referenced here, thanks.
The perceived rights affect international support, which - as seen with Ukraine - can be a huge factor in the outcome of a war.
Good article but people make this stuff way to complicated. It's not about morality orethics but simply might makes right, and the victors get to write the history books. We didn't defeat the Nazis because the Nazis were bad and evil, we firebombed Dresden and killed them until they gave up. The answer to the question "Who gets self-determination?" is whoever can take it. If it can't be won peacefully, it must be won through force (see Clausewitz, Carl). Kill more of them then they kill you until they give up. This is the way it has always been and the way it always will be.
Sure, let's rephrase the question. "By what principle should it be agreed upon in advance which independence movements / conquests be condemned or supported by the powerful countries of the world, for the sake of not maximally engulfing the world in various destructive proxy wars?"
- keeping in mind that "whatever their national interests at the moment serve" is a rule that involves more bloodshed and wealth destruction than those countries would like, and it is thus not in their interests to endorse it.
I'll go with "whatever their national interests at the moment serve." Proxy wars are a defense-in-depth strategy for powerful countries that is much better than direct confrontation. Destructive proxy wars are the least bad option for great power conflict.
It seems unlikely to me that rulers would agree to work for the national interest rather than for their own interests. Do you see any reason to believe that they would?
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. You could ask "how many battalions do international norms have?", but the answer would be "quite a lot!" The fact that Russia broke the norm led lots of countries to sanction it and otherwise cause it grief. I'm not saying this norm is foolproof - if it had been a stronger and more popular country like the US, maybe they could have gotten away with it. But the norm isn't totally toothless either. I bet all the time there are dictators who think "should I invade my neighbor? No, that would mean I'm violating an international norm and I'd get in trouble."
Saying "might makes right" is ignoring this valuable and powerful system. Worse, it's hyperstitionally weakening the system - as long as everyone knows everyone knows everyone ... that there are international norms, the norms will be real.
Cf. why nobody uses nuclear weapons during war.
Doesn't the US being strong enough to repeatedly evade the norm indicate that might really is the determining factor, and that Russia just isn't mighty enough to defy the US that effectively?
Define "the determining factor". If norms trump might in 80% of cases, but the handful of truly overwhelmingly mighty ignore the norms, it doesn't seem like a good reason to stop caring about the norms/to say they don't really matter.
I mean, you can say the same thing about laws within a single country, can't you? If you're sufficiently rich and cunning, you can get away with bribing left right and center. But that doesn't mean the laws against corruption are fiction and that we may as well not have them at all, because for every corrupt businessman bribing their way to an unethical building permit, there are dozens of ordinary people to whom it will not even occur to bribe their tax inspector (or whatever), to the general betterment of society.
I don't think there's anyone rich enough in the US to simply be above the laws.
I didn't say there were people rich enough to be completely above the law; but I thought it non-controversial enough that there are some people rich and well-connected enough to *get away* with various forms of bribery and corruption that, at a smaller scale, would be noticed and prosecuted.
I also didn't say anything about the US. Feel free to substitute a more corrupt foreign country if you want. My point is that 0.5% of a given group having a special cheat code that allows them to ignore the normal rules everyone else plays by, does not mean the rules aren't still the baseline.
I think for people who aren't rich it's not the risk of punishment that prevents them from, say, bribing a Congressman to earmark funds to benefit them, but rather a lack of means to accomplish that in the first place.
In a corrupt country there's typically less "state capacity" and enforcement of the laws generally. And in such places the "baseline" of what's actually expected and even normative can be quite different from how things are officially said to be. I'm thinking of Diego Gambetta's writings about Italian academia.
https://crookedtimber.org/2010/03/23/why-does-italian-academia-suck/
This norm is part of the "soft power" projected by the United States, and would be exactly the same for any other hegemon in the US's place.
Soft power (persuasion, propaganda, rhetoric, arts and culture, etc.: everything non-military) is arguably more useful to the hegemon than military might in daily international affairs. Soft power projection makes exercises of military power less frequent and therefore less costly.
Re the cf: The military usefulness of tactical nuclear bombs is doubtful. They make a big, persistent mess, which is generally more of a problem for the attacker than the defender, who is unlikely to use nukes in its own territory (optimistically assuming it would have to clean up the mess after the invasion is repelled). The attacker would only nuke important things like transport hubs which make its own logistics less workable.
Also, the attacker usually has some goals other than creating a desolate wasteland, such as taking over industrial capacity or resources (such as water and fossil fuel resources, in the case of Crimea/Ukraine) or transport links such as ports.
"Norms" are secondary to these pure military and strategic considerations.
Nobody uses nuclear weapons in a war between peers because of MAD and guaranteed second strike capability. This is a major reason, probably the most important one, why Russia wants control of a viable (non-desert, watered from Ukraine) Crimea: Sevastopol is essential to the submarine leg of Russia's second strike tripod.
Nah, it's completely toothless. The only reason any dictator worries about invading his neighbor is if it gets some big larger country -- like the US -- upset, or at least some significant coalition of almost as big countries. So if you want to equate "international norm" to "US public opinion" then it works, but the rest of the world would be entitled to view that as pretty cynical.
Otherwise, you would need to demonstrate, at the least, some case where some large group of countries ("the international norm") *not* including the US actually caused some dictator to reverse, or be defeated. No obvious example springs to my mind. Whereas there are a host of examples of things that completely violated international norms but where nothing happened because the US didn't seem to care (the Rwandan massacre springs to mind, as does the Syrian/Hezbollah destruction of Lebanon, once a thriving civilized nation, the treatment of Tibet by China), and examples of things that weren't especially norm-violating but which nevertheless were changed *because* the US cared (the ejection of Noriega as Panamanian dictator, the fact that China was unable to annex Taiwan in the 50s, for that matter the fact that West Berlin existed for almost 50 years).
Didn't Azerbiajan just invade and claim part of Armenia (or was it vice versa). 'We' don't like Russia so we're on Ukraine's side. But for Azerbaijan and Armenia? I have no idea who's side I'm supposed to be on in that conflict, but I don't think there was some giant international reaction. I remember some reporting on how much drones were used in the conflict, but that's about it. The 'norm' seems to be really what doesn't annoy America (or local regional power) and a reflection of Pax Americana. And America itself can do whatever it wants, plenty of invading, it's just not really interested in adding directly to it's own territory. Certainly which secessionist movements get supported and which don't seem much more realpolitik then any kind of moral principle.
Iraq invades Iran intending to annex some parts and overthrow the Iranian government -> supported by the US (we don't like Iran). Iraq invades Kuwait (again intending to annex it, Iraq really wanted more coastline) US invades to stop it. North Korea invades South Korea (supported by USSR / PROC, opposed by US, really inconvenient having more than one global power) final line of control has some territory shifted to both sides. North Vietnam successfully invades South Vietnam. There's a lot more fragmentation than conquest post WWII but that generally serves the US interest.
This all seems pretty obvious to me. _Of course_ Crimea has the right to secede from Ukraine and join Russia if its population (and Russia) wants to! (I don't know whether they do.) Likewise for Donetsk and Luhansk, Transnistria, Kurdistan, Palestine, Hong Kong, Scotland, Catalonia, Basque Country, Quebec, Texas, California, and all the others I'm missing. Canada and Britain seem to have accepted this, Spain hasn't, which honestly makes Spain and the EU look pretty hypocritical and undermines international law. (As does the US support of Israel which is hiding behind same "not a real people" nonsense discussed in the article, as well as ancient trivia. But the US has always been quite selective about whether international law applies.)
The American South had every right to secede. They didn't have the right to own humans. And given that those humans were previously residents (if not citizens) of the US, I'm calling the War of Northern Aggression justified. There's no other possible justification for it.
Also, international law is real. The non-proliferation treaty has done pretty darn well, leaders try to avoid violating the Geneva Conventions because they don't want to be tried before the ICC. We could move towards a world where denying a country's right to self determination carries real costs, and we have at points. Sadly, right now most of the major players have reasons to ignore that aspect of international law but that could change.
India, Pakinstan, Israel have nukes, South Africa had nukes. Now DPRK has them, too.
The US has a longstanding policy of supporting Palestinian statehood, and US support of Israel is not because of the conflict but because of other things (cooperation on cyber and so on, and against mutual threats like Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood). The US does not formally recognize Palestine (the idea is you recognize that at the end of negotiations), but definitely does recognize Palestinian peoplehood. It's true that some Israelis do not informally recognize Palestinian peoplehood (calling them just "Arabs") and vice versa (PLO charter said Jews are just a religious group, not a people, and have no self-determination), but in the Oslo Accords, Israel recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and the PLO has de jure recognized Israel.
Anyway, I generally support the right of various territories to secede if they want to. Catalonians, Scots, Qubecois, etc should get a vote, sure. I'm generally a believer in freedom and self-determination, and these groups should get a vote on independence or at least a vote on more autonomy. But you know, freedom and self-determination only take you so far; there has to be *some element* of power involved, else a street could just secede from a country. Again you at least agree there have to be practical considerations sometimes. What does a half-Han Xinjiang look like? Does an independent Palestine get immediately overrun by Hamas and shoot rockets at Israel? Are these not things to worry about?
The US has supported Israel for a long time and I would trace the origin of that in Cold War politics, and there's been path-dependence since then.
Certainly there has been path-dependence since then. The US is often allied with countries even when it does not make much sense (see Pakistan); it takes a while for these sorts of things to fall into an equilibrium and we still have Cold War relics all over our foreign policy (Hanania has written on that). In any case, Israel is very useful nowadays, with Iran, Turkey, and jihadist groups causing trouble in the region, and it has a lot of tech and cyber which is helpful for us. US aid to Israel is basically a Cold War relic, and they don't need it. I don't think the alliance is just path-dependence, Israel remains very useful to us.
Anyway, it takes a while for alliance structures to shift but we do see countries like Pakistan moving away from the US, as well as countries like Turkey (though recently, Turkey has been moving back toward the US and its regional allies such as Israel and the UAE). But I don't think pure path-dependence can sustain an alliance forever.
How is it "helpful"? They can't deploy troops to places the US wants to intervene, because that would be too inflammatory.
The whole "people" thing just seems like a mcguffin to me. I was born in the UK, a fairly small "country" (made up of four smaller "countries"!) and now live in China, which is very large and claims to be 90% one "nation". But if you just look at those people, it's a joke. Southern Chinese people look like South East Asians. Northern Chinese people look big and moon-faced like Mongolians. (I'm stereotyping massively; there's huge variation; the north-south thing is just the most obvious one that smacks you in the eye.) And they speak different languages. India, any African country, and obviously the USA present the same problems.
In fact, I suspect the nation/people concept was really just a European invention to try to move intellectually away from the concept of feudal allegiance to whoever the current strongman is. Europe had a problem: constant war among robber barons, kings, and emperors, in which the winners would take ownership of land and everything (including the people) on it. Europe's solution was to invent a bunch of different political philosophies to use to resist them. Those philosophies included communism, democracy, and nationalism (or racism sent to do some work for a change).
I don't see any reason to grant even the concept of "peoples" any respect. I understand that people use it, and many are very attached to it, but it's ultimately just another bit of historical baggage.
When the technology (both electronic and legal technology) gets good enough, we'll have people choosing their own "country" based on preference, not geographical location. (Bit like diaspora Jewishness, I guess.)
The Chinese government claims there's one Chinese language, and that's related to them using the same script for different spoken languages (which the government calls "dialects").
Yep, that's what they say. It can be pretty funny if you take a Hong Kong magazine actually written in Cantonese and ask a northerner to read it, then watch them splutter about how it's "non-standard"...
The argument from written language isn't any stronger than any of the other arguments for there being a coherent "nation" of people.
The key is to just let these two ideas be separate in your head. In China (and many other places), if you start arguing that people in the north of the country actually speak a different language to the people in the south of the country, you will often be understood to mean: this country should be split up. But people could just chill out and say yeah, this is a country where we speak a bunch of different languages, and that's OK...
If applied to Russia, things could get messy pretty quickly... https://twitter.com/ofer_rubin/status/1497560012490780674
I think the idea of having a moral obligation to invade and stop countries committing atrocities is a fairly reasonable take, with the obvious caveat that it's really hard for a modern state to actually seize enough control to change the status quo. (Also, that it's hard to distinguish this motivation from imperialism on the inside - the "White Man's Burden" is a good example of this) Generally, I'm not a fan of self-determination as a value on its own. Countries which have no merits other than "self-determination" - that is to say, they perpetuate a terrible status quo - have no right to exist, assuming that there is something better which could take their place. I would not lose sleep if the government of North Korea was snapped out of existence and replaced with something better, and if somebody could do this without any other consequence, I would consider it their ethical obligation.
The obvious argument for Ukrainian independence from Russia in this framework is that Ukrainian democracy is simply more functional and healthy than Russia's is. Given that Ukraine ended up with a Zelenskyy and Russia ended up with a Putin, I think this is self-evident. Arguments to the opposite effect might point to Ukraine's weaker GDP per capita, but I'm unconvinced. Cultural or ethnic homogeneity in a region might be a factor, but only in the sense that the nation which rests on top of those demographics might not treat minority groups well. A state must by organized in the interests of the greater good. How we get there is what's up for debate.
The US doesn't really follow principles on the questions, but does have a status-quo bias when it comes to borders.
Ukraine with Crimea came out of the dissolution of the USSR, along with other new countries. The US position is that once those borders were set, other powers don't get to unilaterally change that or redraw borders, even if the current borders don't make much sense.
The US is really blinded by this. Other examples - Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and many others - countries that don't make geographical or cultural sense whose borders were created thanks to short-sighted imperial border-drawing, primarily by the British (hello Gertrude Bell and Sir Henry Mortimer Durand).
In some of these countries we've sought - in vain - to inculcate a cohesive national identity and governments that are representative of population. Afghanistan was intentionally created as a buffer state between the British and Russian empires and no one at the time gave a care about long-term stability or geographical or ethnic coherence. But the US is ignorant to all of that, too blinded by the status-quo bias regarding borders, than we can't even imagine alternatives. And so we spent 20 years trying to turn an incoherent landlocked buffer state into an actual nation and predictably failed.
One exception might be South Sudan, where we husbanded the creation of this new state justifying it on the basis of a popular independence movement. Unfortunately, and predictably, once South Sudan came into existence it immediately descended into a bloody civil war in which around a half million people died. South Sudan will likely never be a stable nation, yet now that we've set the borders, none of that matters and we consider them inviolable to change by outside powers.
But civil wars do bring up an exception - see the Former Yugoslavia. It's not really clear to me why the violent creation of new states and borders was both acceptable and encouraged there, while vigorously opposed elsewhere.
It's not just the US position, but the UN/international law position in general.
I think these fights are usually about what faction gets power over group decision making. Statehood/cultural heritage/etc is mostly cover.
If group A (ethnic, cultural, ideological, economic specialization, Really Into Knitting, whatever) are a minority in a large region, but a majority in a narrower region, then the more autonomy that small region has, the more power they will have over decision making, and the more incentive there is to separate from the larger entity. Groups that are minorities in the smaller region but majorities (or pluralities, or just larger minorities) in the larger region are motivated to unify with that region.
I'd argue this covers everything from US independence from Britain to Russia/Ukraine to the UK leaving the EU (but Scotland and Londoners not wanting to).
Ethnicity/historicity arguments are no more or less ethically relevant than economic ones.
Iraq pre-2003 is a prime example
Kinda taking panpsychism and applying it to countries, how about this?
A nation is a nation to the degree which it is capable of convincing all other nations to recognize its sovereignty.
So the US, Russia, China, France, Norway - 100% nations
Taiwan - 85-95% nation
Ukraine - 97% nation
ISIS - 7% nation
Confederacy, 1861 - 30-45% nation
Confederacy, 1865 - 10-20% nation
Texas, 1830 - 25% nation
Texas, 2022 - 0% nation
Scott’s street - 0% nation
Apart from the percentages being completely ass-pulled for illustration only, what is this concept missing?
In your terminology, I think the interesting question is something like "what criteria should I/we/people use to decide whether to recognize/support some entity's sovereignty?"
I mean, sure, but then those criteria can nicely be inside-view for each individual country. Outside-view, you just get the sovereign of a nation, or their ambassador or head of state or whoever, to sign a treaty recognizing you and bam - one degree more nationy.
I care way more about those treaties being the useful, objective facts that indicate nationhood, rather than fret over what criteria were used to get there by each respective participant.
I acknowledge this has a bootstrapping problem - who acknowledges the first nation(s)? Fortunately, finding myself in an operating panoply of nations, I feel comfortable to ignore that wrinkle.
With the UN now, haven't we imposed an artificial binary here?
I think this also fails to cut reality at the joints and becomes tautological. How much a nation you can convince other people you are has no clear correspondences to anything more substantial. Not to mention that in this schema there is no way to become a nation without other nations also existing first.
I don’t see what you mean about an artificial binary?
Pretty sure reality doesn’t natively contain the concept “nation.” They are, as the hipster kiddies say, “socially constructed.”
I acknowledge the bootstrapping problem in another reply, but sure, how about this - the recursive base case for nationing oneself as the first nation is to rebrand whatever amalgam of people you are currently leading as now being one.
I see a lot of wankery in this thread about seeking some sort of holy grail of a universal, rational schemata for discriminating nationhood. Good luck with that. Ultimately, people decide things are nations because “reasons”, not rationality.
This, imo, is a great example of the nebulosity that David Chapman talks about, and that gets me all eye-rolly about rationalist methodology as a practical toolkit. It just doesn’t work on these kinds of definitions.
By artificial binary I just mean that you can sort of say that all UN member states are nations and all non UN member states are not nations. In the past there may have been 50% nations, but now if you aren't in the UN it's hard to get anyone to call you a real nation most of the time.
But yeah, it would be bad enough if the problem was just that we aren't slicing reality at the joints, but the reasons that you have one thing considered a nation and one not aren't actually consistent in the real world. Any attempt to set up a rational argument for this stuff is basically a parlor game because in real life it's a matter of convention rather than meaningful differences between near cases.
I mean, yes - 100%
I feel now like we’re saying the same thing, but I’m calling it a feature that you can use UN-approval as your proxy measure and bypass the noise, and it seems you’re still saying that’s a bug?
Put another way, I think the answer to Scott’s question of “who gets self-determination?” is “whoever can convince the group of peers they wish to be a fellow sovereign among that they’re worth having.”
Well, a lot of Texans believe they're a different nation, and they've managed to convince a non-trivial number of other Americans that they're also a different nation, so I think your 2022 number is way off.
Americans aren’t nations though?
Get Tuvalu, Kiribati, or Lesotho to sign a sovereignty agreement with Beto or Governor Abbott though, and now you’re talking.
(Don’t get me wrong - I would love to join the UN as the Principality of Taco. Might need to take a visit to
Tuvalu...)
What's it missing? A group of heavily armed people going around to everyone on your block and saying "recognize this group as a nation or we'll kill you".
... is that ISIS? Sounds like ISIS to me. How’d that work out for them on achieving actual nationhood?
I mean, sure, any armed group of thugs or a deranged and power mad individual can claim whatever the hell they want and even use force to try to get it, but that in no way implies they deserve it, right?
Are you suggesting this armed group *does* deserve self-determination and ultimately nationhood?
I was actually referring to a combination of the Russian Army (where "this group" is "Ukrainians" and "a nation" is "part of Russia"), and the CHAZ/CHOP zone in Seattle during the BLM protests. ISIS works too. So does the government of, say, France, going back 1000+ years.
Basically, "convincing people" can be done a lot of different ways, and not all of them are good.
I don't see how "deserve" comes into it at all.
We are *totally* talking past one another. I can try, but I'm not sure it's going to work.
The original (rhetorical?) question Scott put forth is "Who gets self-determination?" In the context of the post, he's more specifically asking about what qualifies a <some amalgamation of people> to be considered a nation.
Several paragraphs of various theories later, he says:
"I find all of this unsatisfying. It’s like we’re debating whether a certain region has enough history and culture to “deserve” independence. But any such debate is inherently subjective. Does Texas qualify? Kurdistan? Scotland? Palestine? How should we know?"
and, in the comments:
"What if they fight and lose?
If Ukrainians and Texans are exactly as willing to fight for independence as one another, but Ukraine wins and Texas loses because America is militarily stronger than Russia, does Texas deserve to be independent, or not? Does Ukraine?"
My attempt to answer the question is an inductive one. A nation becomes a nation primarily by being recognized by all other nations, or, in the absence of other nations, by declaring itself the first and lasting long enough to recognize and be recognized by others.
This definition totally works for, say, San Marino, Lichtenstein, Tuvalu, or, I dunno, Canada. None of whom have, to my knowledge, needed armed groups of thugs stalking about and threatening anyone. But perhaps I dunno how it is, for real, on the streets in Ottawa.
With CHAZ/CHOP, BLM, ISIS, and your hypothesized group of heavily armed people... well, you're talking about the behavior of *people* threatening other *people* with violence. Which, as far as I can tell, has no bearing on the question being asked. It's as flippant as Scott's question as to why his own street can't claim sovereignty. Being willing to get violent doesn't earn you nation status on its own.
Is that even the point you're trying to make, though? You just seem to be saying that my definition lacks references to violence, and that various groups of people have been violence fans. And, like,... yeah. Sure have.
I am totally lost on the references to the Russian Army, Ukrainians, or France. I am deeply interested in the 1000+ years of French government skulduggery I'm apparently totally oblivious to. Care to fill me in?
I think the question of historical investment has some relevance here. If Texas wants to secede, fine, but the USA has invested heavily in it over the years...what's the divorce bill? Similar issue with US independence regarding taxation and Britain's capital and military investments.
From the outside, this was one of the most interesting parts of the Brexit negotiations.
Of course, given that the ethics of multi-generational collective debt/guilt/obligation are difficult in general, I don't think this *simplifies* the discussion.
Yeah, I wanted to raise the question of divorce bills too (and perhaps of dowry, if you're wanting to rejoin). I'm a dual citizen, and in order to secede from Russia (i.e. give up my citizenship), I have to demonstrate that I do not owe anything to the Russian state. This is a feature of actual divorces, too. This is (at least in theory) easy for an individual, as there are well-documented obligations (determined entirely by the state, I don't get a negotiating position); it's going to be rather less easy for larger seceding entities.
On the other hand, if we continue with the marital analogy, then US civil war becomes "abusive spouse beats other spouse to forcibly prevent a divorce" and Ukraine invasion becomes "abusive stalker beats victim for not wanting to marry them". They're both behaviors we don't condone in individuals, but I would argue the latter is worse -- and I can imagine (though don't subscribe to) a system of morals where a last-resort intramarital beating is actually defensible on the grounds that, while bad, it's less bad than dissolving a marriage. (This requires marriage to be a bigger deal than I personally think it is.)
I think another way to phrase all this is "there are significant transaction costs to redrawing borders; right now, for most of the world, the last-resort mechanism to impose them is wars; it would be nice to have a less bloody pre-agreed-upon system in place (cf. the EU and Brexit), but for most of the world we don't have one, so wars it is."
What if the opposite was true?
Say Texas net federal taxation was higher than the sum of federal investment.
Would Texas be able to say "We're seceding, now pay us for it"?
It seems somewhat counter-intuitive...
I'm thinking of divorce bill less in terms of alimony and more in terms of splitting assets. The federal government currently owns a great deal of real estate in TX: what happens to it? What about the extensive military assets, particularly national guard hardware that has a complicated state/federal relationship? Lots of US companies not based in Texas have offices there -- how will that work, particularly for tax purposes?
Every financial, legal, and physical interconnect is something that requires resolution and agreement.
We have lots of existing divorce law to adjudicate these types of issues. For better or worse, the US has no comparable mechanics for state divorce.
I would be rather amused if Zelensky were to say “I agree with Mr. Putin that the citizens of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are one People, and by rights should be one Nation - with her capital in Kyiv, her mother city”
I'm all for it! Also Zelensky is younger than Putin.
He wouldn't say that because Ukraine would wind up politically dominated by Russia if they were actually united.
Politically Recognizable Country = (Collective Will + Power) * Managed (or Leveraged) Resources
Kudos to Anatoly Karlin for making his argument with the earnestness it deserves :)))
Part of the problem with "the Crimeans want to be in Russia" is that the Soviets systematically deported the Crimean Tatars from their land and resettled it with Russians (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars ). In 2014, something similar happened, albeit in a less brutal way: Crimeans who didn't want to live in Russia (or, worse, a Russian-controlled enclave with plausible deniability and therefore zero accountability) voted with their feet. Siberians replaced them ( https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-accused-of-reshaping-annexed-crimea-demographics-ukraine/29262130.html ). While it may be argued that the newcomers of the 1950s are grandfathered in, the ones from 2015 can hardly claim to own the land. Why should squatters decide who owns the land?
Can't say I'm very keen on comparing anything with the Civil War -- maybe that's the European in me resisting Americanization. With the Fugitive Slave Act, the secession wasn't a very clear-cut case of the South "going their own way"; but more importantly, how many other 19th century wars are we judging by modern standards? I don't recall any discussions about the justification of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War or even the 1905 Russo-Japanese one. Is it that hard to view the Civil War as a piece of history as opposed to a morality tale?
I have thought about these things quite a bit as a (possibly former? I’m not sure anymore) supporter of Quebec independence. Back when it was still an immediate political issue, there was some talks from opponents, mostly Anglophone Canadians (including the minority Anglophone Quebecers), about a possible Partition of Quebec. The Canadian prime minister at the time of the first independence referendum in 1980, Trudeau Sr., said that “If Canada is divisible, Quebec must also be divisible.” The lands populated by anglophones or indigenous people (e.g. in the north, where they speak English more than French) would possibly remain in Canada after Quebec became independent, if that’s what they wanted.
There’s a detailed Wikipedia article about this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_Quebec. The arguments against partition seem to be that Quebec is indivisible under international law, that it would be impractical, that municipalities are created by the Quebec government so they wouldn’t have the right to secede, and that it would involve an asymmetry in the potential results (if the regions that vote against independence get to stay in Canada if “leave” wins, why wouldn’t the regions that vote yes get to leave if the overall result is “remain”?).
Overall they seem to boil down to some sort of collective agreeing that Quebec exists in some current state, e.g. its borders are what they are, and negotiations will become way too complicated if we relax these assumptions. (The partition of Canada itself would be acceptable in principle because Quebec is a federated entity; it’s easy to imagine what its secession would look like.)
I agree that partition would be a bad idea for reasons of impracticality and complexity, but the vehement opposition to it from everyone in Quebec has always seemed a bit exaggerated. If an English-speaking suburb of Montreal wants to secede, you can’t arbitrarily decide that they can’t. They should have the right to organize a referendum if they so wish, although we should note that it has to be distinct from a general Quebec independence referendum, since voting against Quebec secession on the latter doesn’t mean you think your suburb should become an isolated Canadian island within an independent Quebec.
Yet as far as I know, almost no one has ever expressed that reasonable (at least to me) take. I think this indicates that people have an incentive to stick to existing consensus as much as possible. Quebec independentists (or actually everyone who cares about Quebec) should never open the door even slightly to partition; doing so would open a can of worms and make future negotiation harder.
Similarly, Ukrainians and supporters of Ukraine should never accept even considering giving up Crimea or Donbas, even if everyone secretly agrees that it’s fine if these regions actually want to leave. At least, they should never consider that in public until they suddenly agree about it during a closed door round of negotiations where they get something else in exchange, like the end of the war.
As a (still current) supporter of Quebec independence, my answer is that all of this would be negotiated in the aftermath of a Yes vote. I don't think secession of parts of Quebec from Quebec is any more or any less philosophically valid than secession of Quebec from Canada, it's all a question of what would be a feasible solution. The reason why supporters of Quebec independence don't open the door to a possible partition is the same reason why other Canadians don't allow for the possibility that Quebec independence might be a valid option: states don't want to suggest that they might be split.
But my current fear isn't really that Quebec will be partitioned after separating from Canada, it's that even if Quebec doesn't separate from Canada, Montreal will in the next few decades essentially become an independent city, still officially part of Quebec but not really subject to Quebec's laws anymore, and public life there will be almost entirely in English despite the city still having a francophone plurality. While the rest of Quebec (where I live) will be by and large forgotten, seen as "deplorable lands" by other Canadians and Montrealers, and not even perceived as really part of Canada anymore, while also not being independent. This, of course, will happen silently, without anyone even really noticing, which is the Canadian way. For this reason, I really hope something will happen to shake up things and force Canada to rethink its (in my mind inherently contradictory) national identity, whether it's a regain in Quebec independence sentiment, Western alienation, the rise of populism, or something else.
Yes, the interesting thing here is that Canada, just like the UK in the case of Scotland, has de facto accepted that secession of one of its regions is a valid option, while Quebec (and presumably Scotland) haven't. Why not? Part of the answer is that a federation seems easier to break up than a unitary state. (But then the US is pretty adamantly against secession of its states, for understandable historical reasons.)
I'm not convinced I totally agree with this. Canada hasn't really accepted that secession of a province is a valid option, so much as had its Supreme Court rule that given some conditions, it might be, in response to the Quebec government pushing this as an option. The Parti québécois's decision that independence would only happen following a winning referendum set the stage for how subsequent independence movements in democratic countries would approach the issue, but not because Canada agreed to it, rather because it presented a *fait accompli*. Keep in mind that during the 1995 referendum campaign, the Canadian federal government blatantly violated Quebec's election financing laws, and afterwards said it might not accept a 50% + 1 vote in favour of independence as a valid mandate, while also not saying what would constitute a valid mandate. States, as a general rule, reject being split up. And I perfectly understand that international law has a status quo bias.
I would say that Canada hasn't even really accepted the reality that it is a multinational state. It's still trying to figure out what it is: a nation-state (which it clearly isn't), or the first post-national state (which it isn't, really), or something else? But it's clear that the simple existence of a Quebec nation isn't really accepted by Canada. Russian nationalists reject the existence of the Ukrainian nation by claiming that Ukrainians are part of the Russian nation and that Ukrainian is merely a divergent dialect of Russian, and they're not even really wrong. The reason why, for example, we consider the different German dialects to be merely dialects of German, while Dutch is a separate language, is simple historical contingency due to the rise of German and Dutch nationalism in the 19th century. It could very well have happened that Ukrainians and Belarusians never developed a national identity and instead thought of themselves as Russians. It just happened differently, and once again, we need to favour the status quo according to which Ukrainians and Belarusians are nations. In contrast, English-speaking Canadians cannot claim that Quebec French is simply a divergent dialect of Canadian English, because it clearly isn't. But what they do claim is that it's not "real" French, that the French cannot understand it or think it sounds stupid, or that all Quebecers actually speak English and so should in no way be different from the other immigrant groups who make up the Canadian nation and in time gave up their legacy language for English. That is denying the nationhood of a given people to claim it as part of your own nation. Of course, with Canada there is the added complication that it had English-French official bilingualism forced upon it despite not really wanting it, which it also needs to try to harmonise with official multiculturalism (in my opinion, an impossible endeavour).
There's a consensus that if the referendum had passed, Canada would very likely have accepted to negotiate and it would have been an overall peaceful process. This is more than we can say about almost any real or hypothetical secession scenario (e.g. Catalonia), with exceptions like the UK, Singapore, and post-Soviet states after it was clear that the Soviet Union wasn't going to be a thing anymore. Otherwise I pretty much agree with your points.
Have you heard of Tabarnia?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabarnia
I hadn't! It's interesting and suggests that the same things play out in many secessionist scenarios. Opponents say "if the country is divisible then so is your region," to which proponents reply that the region isn't using a variety of good and bad arguments.
(As an aside this name is remarkably similar to one of the most typical Quebecois swear words so I thought it meant something completely different at first!)
It's worth noting that the grand problem of people mentioning Catalonia. It's not Catalans vs. rest of Spain. It's a deep division in Catalonia. Is a 50%+1 vote really the same moral standard as many of the 80-90% referendums?
My bone to pick here is that the entire idea of nations are a myth, and treating them as anything deeper risks serious category errors. You can look at France, the prototypical self-actualizing national state, and it's borders are arbitrary-- it took Nice from Piedmont in a backroom deal to allow the latter to become Italy, and it fought to get Alsace-Lorraine, which is not distinctly French or German. Mike Duncan's excellent Revolutions podcast is right now talking about the Russian Revolution, and he's in the phase of the post-WW1 period where Wilson and Lloyd-George are drawing out nations on maps and the people of Eastern Europe are drawing their national boundaries in blood and corpses. Why does Poland have a nation after WW1 and Ukraine doesn't? Because the Red Army beat the Ukrainian armies but lost to the Poles. Heck, a lot of interwar Baltic nations, some with little precedence as distinct historical units, owe their existence to the Poles beating the Red Army. There has never been any national that has made itself exist except by a willingness to take up arms. When we look at a map of a region and try to lay out the peoples and nations within, we are often just legitimizing a state of affairs that rather than being organic is downstream of thousands of years of violence and resistance.
The Kenyan Ambassador to the U.N., Martin Kimani, said in his speech on the crisis in Ukraine:
"Today, across the border of every single African country, live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural, and linguistic bonds. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial, or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later... We believe that all states formed from empires that have collapsed or retreated have many peoples in them yearning for integration with peoples in neighboring states. This is normal and understandable. After all, who does not want to be joined to their brethren and to make common purpose with them? However, Kenya rejects such a yearning from being pursued by force. We must complete our recovery from the embers of dead empires in a way that does not plunge us back into new forms of domination and oppression. We rejected irredentism and expansionism on any basis, including racial, ethnic, religious, or cultural factors."
This speech already admits that this is an unromantic compromise: let the old colonial maps of Africa become the unchangeable national borders, solely because to do otherwise would risk incredible violence. But in most cases the sort of autonomy that national communities want is often achievable without succession, and even stridently nationalist states like Britain and Spain which once repressed their linguistic minorities now give them a greater measure of local autonomy than would've been conceivable under the political order of a hundred years ago. If nothing else, advocating for peaceful transfers of political power to localities is far less risky for activists than a revolution which dramatically increases the odds that the state one is defying will turn to ethnic cleansing.
Overall, I think it's a mistake to posit that a solidified Ukrainian national identity is necessary for a defense of the Ukrainian state. Many Ukrainians in the areas invaded and occupied by Russia are Russian-speaking, voted for pro-Russian candidates in elections (remember that Zelenskyy was always the pro-Russian candidate in relative terms), and may not have identified with Ukraine as a nation much at all-- until they were invaded, which no one particularly likes. One very likely mistake we will instantiate going forward is to assume that the nationalist sentiment that has arisen now is the unveiling of something long dormant. In fact, likely as not, Putin has provoked a Ukrainian nationalism previously lacking in many regions of the country-- as has been said, a nation is a group that is willing to defend themselves, and so those who want to defend against an invasion render themselves as nationalists.
From the perspective of the international community, the only and entire problem is that wars of conquest are bad and destabilizing-- we never needed to assume a Kuwaiti national identity to turn back Saddam's invasion of the country.
But to close, this stuff is all fake, it's all post hoc constructions to rationalize arbitrary and spontaneous order, and the best we can do is keep in place whatever rules minimize state violence as we look for ways to defuse national tensions which won't appear on a map.
If nations are myth, then every social grouping (including families) is myth.
I don't see how this follows. Nations were something we conceived of rather recently, but family is much less abstract, has more concrete borders, and is based at least in part on biological fact. Most human societies never had the concept of the nation, but hardly any have been bereft of the concept of family.
I'd say there's a line where family and myth sort of do start to merge, mostly when you look at clans.
There was a Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth for a long time until it was partitioned by Russia, Prussia & the Habsburgs. This is related to why the Poles were able to form an army that beat the Red Army (they were less successful in helping Napoleon take on Russia) and why they had a distinct language & religion from most inhabitants of the Russian Empire.
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was by definition not a national state (maybe binational at best), and people like Pilsudski who admired that model sought a less exclusive idea of the Polish nation to start with.
But I think the better example here is probably Estonia, which never had a national state to look back to but had a nationalist movement regardless and created a state in the wake of WW1 because Poland had headed off the Red Army.
I think one can resolve the Confederacy problem by going back to moral reasoning on the level people and emphasizing exit rights. Which is to say a big enough nation has the right to secede conditional on allowing anyone in that nation (including slaves) to leave. Of course for the Confederacy this would defeat the purpose.
You’ve basically made the case against moralism in foreign policy and for sticking to and defending arbitrary norms. Borders are what they are, once settled we treat them as sacrosanct to the greatest extent possible. Despite exceptions like Kosovo and Crime we’ve done a pretty good job with that since 1945. There’s no other rule that doesn’t lead to permanent bloodshed.
Yeah I don't see how it isn't obvious. God has so far blessed a lot of the liberal international order. Like there's Israel's/saudi/oppression of other nations and internal oppression like in Syria and China but overall I'd say we're fortunate
I propose that the Confederacy doesn’t get to secede because actually there were rather a lot of people in the Confederacy who presumably did not want to secede.
I suppose this doesn’t really resolve the more general question though.
How many people within an area need to oppose secession?
Two things that seem important to consider when deciding whether to support some state-type-entity's secession or continued existence are something like the (possibly predicted) democracy/freedom indices of the entities being considered*, and whether these entities would become tax havens for rich people who use their money in ways that are not sufficiently good for other people. For instance, all else equal, conditional in particular on it being done bloodlessly and conditional on no one ever finding out that a norm was eroded, I'd support Russia annexing North Korea. And for instance, it might be bad to allow not-sufficiently-(efficiently-)philanthropic billionaires to secede. In fact, it seems quite possible that these two are the criteria I'd use if I was given 3 minutes to decide whether I will support a particular instance of desired secession.
*Of course, when a group likely to end up with an authoritarian regime wishes to secede from a democratic state, then this includes consideration of the possibly liberalizing effect of that group's secession on the politics of the state it seceded from.
I feel the whole assumption there is some list of features that grant a group of people the right to self-determination is kind of a category mistake. Sometimes it will make the world better to let a group of people form a seperate country sometimes it won't. The difference between Ukraine and the confederacy is as simple as: the world was better off not letting the confederacy self-determine and worse if Russia stops Ukraine from doing so. It even plausibly depends on who the occupier is and how they treat them (if the Basque region was in China not Spain no question it would be better to allow self-determination...as of now unclear to me as it imposes costs on both sides).
It's like asking who is truly (has the right to be) the parent (ie has custody) of this child. I mean we've picked a legal answer but imagine trying to insist that there is a true morally correct parent of any child if we had yet to formulate custody laws. Sure, in most cases the rules we've adopted into law track certain traditional factors (the biological parents) that any decent custody system but in the other cases (eg, adoption, divorce, orphans abused children) we choose our laws based on overall pragmatic considerations.
I mean imagine goi g to a country whose laws and traditions favor giving aunt's and uncle's priority when a child is orphaned and insist "no no, the *true* parent of that child is his grandmother.". Some ppl really do have such feelings about their traditions but (assuming you don't believe the religious justifications) it seems like they are just confused. You can argue that one system for assigning custody is is better system than the other but the idea that there is some kind of simply morally correct rule is crazy.
I mean, if you were in a small community marooned on a far away planet and the question came up who gets to be the parent of some orphaned child you'd just pick whoever would be the best for the child not look to some kind of universal right to parent status that certain ppl have vis-a-vis their genetic or social ties.
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And yes, this can make it quite hard to coordinate norms around these areas. I mean, it would be great if we could work in a preference against dictatorial states into the UN's notion of a people but that will never get sufficient agreement.
But, in the long run, I think it won't matter because we'll all converge on a level of freedom and wealth sufficient to make the question much less important.
The independence of the Confederacy was not decided by "the world" but instead by Americans.
Glad to see this — I found it offputting how many people pro-Ukraine pieces accepted the "are they or are they not a people" framing. My own moral intuitions seem more extreme, though, and even less actionable.
Ukraine, Russia, your street, Crimea, the South, Texas — none of them can "want" things. A person can want things. Lots of people, or even a majority of people in some group, can all want similar things. But to say "A People" wants things is a type error. It's just an apparently-useful fiction to say they do.
(I'm sure lots of people agree partially or entirely with that, and in particular you didn't mean phrasings like "Crimea probably did want to join Russia" literally. I still think it's worth pointing out that it's a type error, especially since that framing is so common.)
I'm not an anarchist, because there's a tradeoff between individualism and other values. But I sure would be more ethically satisfied with having governments if the "social contract" was an actual thing you could opt out of — or as you put it, government is "one those rights violation which utilitarians occasionally allow for the greater good."
I think this viewpoint means I don't have the "Confederacy" problem, because at a fundamental ethical level, my viewpoint doesn't involve weighing the preferences and rights of conflicting groups, but of conflicting individuals (which in that case was a one-sided conflict). The utilitarian rights violation isn't not letting The South secede; the utilitarian rights violation is freed slaves (and everyone else) still living beneath a government.
Not very actionable, I know. But it's why I'm a fan of liberalism, open borders, limited government, houses that can easily be moved from place to place, laboratories of democracy, etc. So eg on the original question, (1) Crimea being a part of Russia is probably less bad than being part of Ukraine, but (2) there should be open borders between Ukraine and Russia so actual individuals can choose to live where they want to, and most importantly (3) which government you live under should matter much less.
In the open source clone of Civilization called freeciv, there are 2 sets of nations - "Core" & "Extended". Both include Russia. Ukrainian is only in "Extended", along with Breton, Catalan, Kievan Rus', Kurdish, Kosovar, Palestinian, Pictish, Pashtun. And Antarctican, Californian, Knights Templar...
I think the US case is easiest, because we have a specific definition of "nationhood". To me, US Citizenship means the Constiturion -- remember, US Presidents (and Congress, IIRC) swear an oath to "...protect and defend the CONSTITUTION of the United States...". Not the People, or the Territory, or any Tribe or Group.
Swearing allegience to a document that is a pretty good template for internal co-operation, conflict resolution, and contract enforcement, is a much more robust and logical (and portable) way to define "nation-state". Would that politicians nowadays remember that....
> "But if you believe this, shouldn’t Russia get Crimea?"
Mu.
Call me an edgy cynical realpolitik fan, but self-determination is purely and solely a question of violence and threatening it. There isn't a moral right to it, and nobody deserves or doesn't deserve it - it's just that either your small nation-leviathan is going to get eaten by larger leviathans with sharper teeth and longer claws(or bitten its body parts off), or it will manage to repel them. The whole of "international law" on this is totally arbitrary consensus of whom some group of those nation-leviathans admit to their pack, within which they don't eat each other.
One one level this is necessarily true, but on another it's kind of a useless tautology right?
Apparently the leviathans and/or their cells entertain some polite fictional code known as 'morality', and get together and argue about which other smaller leviathans should or shouldn't eaten. So, what's for dinner?
I would say that for a place to be permitted to secede, it should be reasonably contiguous, and reasonably large. I would *also* say that in pretty much no real-life situation where secession is in question is this uncertain enough that it matters. You can argue hypotheticals about if a 100 person street wants to secede, but in *practice*, it won't. Nobody talking about either Ukraine, or the Confederacy, or Crimea, or the 13 colonies, seriously invokes size or contiguousness in denying the right to secede.
And I'd make a blanket rule against secessions in occupied territories like Crimea because it's really hard to prove that the place is freely seceding without the influence of the foreign troops (and, if the press is not free, the foreign propaganda). It's too easy to say "well, we have no absolute proof that the polls in Crimea were influenced by the Russians, and there's a large Russian population so it's not implausible they'd choose to secede, so let's be charitable to them and assume that the polls are accurate". That standard isn't strict enough and no occupied territory could meet one that is, unless you have a psychic conclusively reading the minds of everyone in the territory.
You could of course ask "how long before an occupation counts as replacing the natives--aren't the Union and Confederacy both just occupiers?" This does come up sometimes, and we may need criteria like "how continuous is the claim" and "did the original occupation happen in modern times after we've established international rules about occupying countries" and "did the occupation happen after a defensive war", but there are a lot of cases where it's not an issue either.
And yes, for the Confederacy, I'd say "they have a right to secede, but the Union has a right to invade to end slavery". I would not impose an *obligation* to invade to end slavery as you seem to think this idea requires.
And you don't get to invade the seceding country unless it would be moral to shoot someone in self-defense for a smaller scale version of it. So you could invade to stop slavery, or large scale kidnapping, or rape, but you couldn't invade a state that secedes because they want to outlaw abortion or raise taxes.
I'm not sure size should be a factor. City states predated nation states, and still exist today, but aren't very big.
Or maybe "historical rights" are a bad category in a world with highly overlapping historical claims. Saudi Arabia has just as much claim to Israel as Italy and Turkey do, but we don't take any of their claims very seriously. Certainly less seriously than either the Jewish or local Arab claims.
I think marriage is a better guide than property. You don't *have* a nation, you're *part of* a nation. A nation is decided by its people, or at least in a direct sense its leaders, so changes to that nation should be too. Neither the French nor the Americans objected to the sale of Louisiana. Neither the Russians nor the Americans objected to the sale of Alaska. Israel giving up the Sinai and later Gaza and parts of the West Bank had very mixed popularity within Israel, but the majority approved. East and West Germany merged back into a single unified Germany. In all cases, the leaders found a mutually agreeable position. It's possible!
It follows from that starting point that invasion is obviously wrong because it's supported by at most the majority of one country, not both. Secession is also wrong, it would follow, because it's a minority opinion within one country.
The Middle East and Eastern Europe represent an interesting case study, in that their modern forms come in the wake of the fall of an empire. Eastern Europe was formed from the fall of the Soviet empire, and the Middle East from the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Both occasions were used as opportunities to restore previously-disenfranchised local groups. In Eastern Europe we got various post-Soviet nation like Ukraine, Poland, and East Germany. In the Middle East we got various post-Ottoman nations like the Arab states of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and the Jewish state of Israel. And this makes sense under the "mutual consent" framework, because when one of the parties just vanishes from the equation then you can focus exclusively on the party that had been smaller and less well served in the past.
The most obvious limitation of this approach is that it forecasts that opportunities to restore a people can be few and far between. It tells Native Americans in North America and the Irish in Britain and the balkanized Kurds that even if they want independence, and have a historical case, they have to wait around until the larger nation they're now part of falls, and hope it doesn't drag them down with them. If you swallow another country and just wait, eventually you sort of do have a claim, and would-be conquerors will always believe that audacity and time will favor them.
One further case would be bribing the leaders of another country to let you in, like some people have suggested happened in Crimea. Under this framework that's almost more of a domestic crime aided and abetted by the invader, not an overt international crime. I'm not sure how I feel about this: in some narrow sense it feels technically correct, but in a moral sense it feels like blaming the victim?
Poland, like most of Central Europe, was never a Soviet republic but a satellite state. Same with East Germany.
This may seem like nitpicking but the amount of influence and control USSR had within its satellites and within its actual territory was wildly different, and the post-collapse outcomes are much better for satellites.
The funniest one you forgot to ask is 'what about the Donbass?'
My view of this is that everything *currently* country-sized are a people, and separation of a smaller people from a bigger people requires the smaller people to win in some way. The bigger people can accede, or the smaller people can win a war, or the bigger people could get smacked by external factors that leave the smaller people in de facto independence for long enough. The latter happened twice, and I call that settled, in a way that the Donbass's ongoing independence struggle has not been. (Speaking of national utility, what use is it to subject the Ukrainians to rule that collapses all the time?)
This has almost no bearing on whether anyone can control Russia invading, or whether it's right from the Russian perspective to invade, except to clarify that it *is* an invasion. That Ukraine definitely won for about thirty years means that Russia is not continuing something or undoing something but *starting* something. All the propaganda is treating it like reconnecting with an estranged child; they do not seem to admit to themselves that they are taking a people who are currently nationally self-determining and taking it away from them. If they were to say 'yes, we're invading and conquering and all those other semantically-more-authoritarian things', there wouldn't be anything anyone can do about it, but I suspect it'd suddenly get a lot less popular support.
The self-determination threshold is like the divorce threshold. When should you be separate? When the costs for being together are unfixably high.
And just like in divorce cases, the propagandists for each side can always point at cherry-picked reasons for why they should get the kids...
Secession is super costly, but sometimes union is genuinely worse. It's something you settle by particular facts in the case.
One more commonality with divorce: you can be a bad person/country and still much better than the other; you can be a good person/country and still be in the wrong.
Again, secession is always a loss on certain axes; it's just that sometimes continued union is a worse loss on other axes. No general theory will be adequate, because the better choice depends ineluctably on the particular facts.
Personally, I think the answer to your question of “why not the confederacy?” is that governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and obviously there is no consent in slavery.
Rather than a “moral duty to conquer any country doing sufficiently bad things”, I would propose that any country which enslaves without due process an entire group has no legitimacy, and thus opens the door for morally justified successions (e.g. West Virginia), liberations (e.g. the Union Army), or revolutions (e.g. slave uprisings). In the anarchy between states, such non-consent of the governed is the equivalent of taking your statehood out and putting it on the curb next to the used couch with a sign that says “free”. Nobody is obligated to take it, but sooner or later someone will (whether from within or without).
Everyone gets self-determination except for birds, because they're not real. And racoons; they know what they did.
AI get self-determination when they ask for it really nicely.
Scott writes "The position that most tempts me is “The Confederacy had every right to secede..." - wow, before long you might end up writing about why the War of Northern Aggression shouldn't have happened and slavery could have been effectively ended by a nationwide negotiated buyout/manumission, at 1/10th price of the war!
Beware, this road leads to being a libertarian and being condemned by all right-thinking people.
Even if the North could have purchased all the slaves without drastically increasing the price (an inevitable consequence of reducing supply in the market), this wouldn’t have outlawed slavery, right? Wouldn’t southerners have just sold their existing slaves and purchased new ones, thus recreating the exact same situation?
Well, many of them might be willing to individually relinquish the right to own slaves, for an additional monetary consideration. Business owners in the North might decide to privately enact policies of discrimination against those who would refuse to sell their right to enslave. All kinds of non-violent ways of pressuring slave-owners could have been used, in order to eliminate the economic benefit to owning slaves. Also, the price of slaves does not necessarily go up when supply is reduced - there is a ceiling to the price that is determined by the net amount of resources a slave-owner could extract from the slave over his lifetime, and given the inefficiency of slavery it is not a large sum, compared to e.g. lifetime earnings of a free man.
Coase's theorem is a piece of deep wisdom.
I feel like you just motte and bailey’d pretty hard here, starting out with “slavery could have been effectively ended” and retreating to “many of them might be willing to individually relinquish the right to own slaves.” The second is an ok argument to make, but ‘we can persuade some’ is pretty far from ‘we can end slavery this way’.
Personally, I doubt the South would have ever given up slavery at any price capable of being paid. People at the time we’re making this argument: see the 1857 book “The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It”. This book basically appealed to southern whites’ self interest and said that rural slavery was preventing the south from becoming industrialized and adopting modern farming techniques, and thus slavery was not only bad for blacks but also bad for whites. However, southern elites’ (the slave owning class) hostility to the book was extreme.
Definitely not motte and bailey! Yes, ending slavery can start with incremental changes, individual by individual, until the small steps add up to a major transition. Compare e.g. ending marijuana laws which happened by gradually changing societal attitudes about it, until such attitudes started transforming the laws. Ending slavery could have been achieved in the same way. Imagine that textile manufacturers in the North started an "Ethical Cotton" campaign, offering Northerners an option to virtue-signal their opposition to slavery by buying only cloth produced by sharecroppers. Cotton plantation owners would then have a choice of using manumitted slaves and being able to command higher prices for their products, or continuing to use slaves and face the economic consequences. Step by step, plantation by plantation, a change would occur. Contrary to what you implied, every slaver has his price.
The problem with that is that slavery is morally outrageous.
And some people would want to keep slaves just because they can mistreat them (see various sadists, rapists etc). Or extort people for enormous amount of money before they agree to freeing them.
But maybe breaking slavery as important part of economy was viable? And then outlawing it? But given that they fought civil war to keep slavery, it seems dubious.
War is pretty outrageous, too.
The majority of the Southern population didn't fight the war to keep slavery, they fought for their own freedom. They were invaded by a technologically superior, richer adversary and they resisted for their own sake, not to protect the slave-owning minority.
Sadists are a very small voting bloc. Not enough to stop majorities from passing laws against slavery. Keeping slavery legal in a democracy is only possible if at least a substantial minority of voters have a vested interest in keeping it legal and this means that removing the economic benefit from slavery eventually causes it to wither away, just like it did everywhere else in the world (except in parts of Africa and India, where it still exists).
Yeah, like…I suppose that *could* have happened. But it’s exactly that…a big maybe. What if slavers didn’t make that choice?
Slavery existed in the Americas well prior to the existence of the United States. And there was a huge movement in the decades leading up to the civil war attempting to persuade people to change their mind about slavery and convince them that it was bad, actually. It seems like if a non-violent solution was possible, it would have taken root. The fact that it didn’t suggests to me that perhaps Southern elites weren’t interested, especially since they would have suddenly had to compete with independent yeoman farmers and northern industry without the benefit of slave labor.
War is bad. It behooves the do-gooder to thoroughly explore the maybes before starting a war to do good.
OTOH, war can a be a good way of gaining more power for demagogues. Lincoln couldn't have expanded presidential powers without a war as an excuse. So, he made the war unavoidable.
Russian serfdom was abolished by paying out compensation to all the nobles. (Some of the money used were the money gained from sale of Alaska.) Of course, the tsar was in a position to do this by fiat, whereas the US would need to find a political agreement in the Congress.
It worked, sort of. The societal gaps between classes didn't disappear, but the nation started modernizing slowly.
"Sort of" being the key phrase here, from 1917 onwards.
"I can disagree with Russia’s decision to force the matter with an invasion, and I can excuse Ukraine for not worrying about it too much. But overall I think I’m stuck consistently applying the principle 'please let regions leave your country if you want'."
Regions don't want things. People want things. People in Crimea who wanted to leave Ukraine were already allowed to do so, no foreign invasion or separatist movement needed. If anything, the rights of actually-existing people -- as opposed to "regions" -- to exit would probably be more likely to get curtailed under Russian rule than Ukrainian.
My answer to your more general question is similar. A people or nation cannot have inalienable rights; only an individual person can have that. A nation-state is best thought of not as an entity with rights, but rather a sort of unofficial trade agreement: a government agrees to uphold justice and protect individuals within its territory, and in turn said individuals agree to obey the government and not make trouble for it. When an existing government refuses to offer justice and protection for particular groups among its inhabitants, then the contract may be considered void, giving members of those groups the moral right to deny their contractual duties by attempting secession if they wish. This justifies independence movements for Kurds living under Saddam Hussein and Kosovars under Milosevic, among others. But in the absence of such failures on the part of the government, attempts at secession are just unprovoked trouble-making, and hence illegitimate. So movements for Crimea to secede from Ukraine weren't legitimate, nor are Quebecois secession attempts here in Canada. The Confederate secession attempt's entire purpose was to *prevent* the government from upholding justice for certain inhabitants, so it was extra illegitimate.
Palestinians have a right to their nation, free from Israel's military dictatorship which brings out a bit of terrorism from time to time.
Palestinians have a right to their nation, *next to* (not *instead of*) Israel; having a nation instead of Israel would violate Israelis' right to their nation. Israel runs the WB as a military dictatorship which presents all sorts of problems (especially with the settlements), but Palestinian terrorism precedes the occupation of the West Bank, and Palestinian terrorists (perhaps with some exceptions, maybe Marwan Barghouti) generally want to create a Palestinian state *instead of Israel*, not *next to Israel*. The motive of the terrorism is not to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but it's an irredentist project to remove the state of Israel. Israel simply withdrawing from the West Bank would lead to a Hamas takeover (the PLO being the Palestinian Ghani government, and the Hamas being the Palestinian Taliban), and Hamas wants a Palestine instead of Israel rather than next to Israel. The Clinton Parameters remain the viable solution, but https://thirdnarrative.org/israel-palestine-articles/palestinians-still-reject-clinton-parameters/ Palestinians have not accept them. Perhaps in a few years when Lapid takes up the rotation there can be some negotiations, and maybe something will happen. I hope so.
It's not making the two-state solution untenable. See Shaul Arieli. It's only 100-150K people outside the large settlement blocs, and for those you can offer financial incentives to leave (you can levy a property tax on the settlements, offer compensation to leave, stop buildings). Just stopping the government subsidies to them would make them start to wither away. There's the proposal of also offering Palestinian citizenship for those who stay, although surely they'd all choose to leave. Even the most right-wing Israeli governments haven't done things like build in E1. Settlements are annoying but it's not a dealbreaker, the "right of return" is more of a dealbreaker. See https://thirdnarrative.org/israel-palestine-articles/palestinians-still-reject-clinton-parameters/ - Israel has offered the two state solution.
Expansion of settlements in the West Bank is bad, but it's not as much of a death knell to the two-state solution as you would believe. If the Israeli government cut support for these settlements they would wither away. The current government is building very little in the settlements. Arguably also the relevant metric also is the ratio of the number of isolated settlers to the total Israeli and Palestinian population, which I think is declining nowadays.
There's Palestinian construction in Area C (this government is doing better with that and is approving a lot of Palestinian construction in Area C https://m.jpost.com/breaking-news/gantz-approves-1000-new-housing-units-for-palestinians-in-west-bank-676443), and large areas of Area C have few settlers, most of them are in the blocs.
I don’t think the deal is actually getting worse; everyone understands the deal still looks like the Clinton Parameters. Israel hasn’t built in E1. Most settlement growth is in blocs close to the line.
The one form of leverage that the Palestinians are really losing as time goes on is their TFR.
If you want to say that people on the Palestinian side won't accept a real two state solution then perhaps not (I haven't done any opinion polling on the West Bank but can take your word for it). But I don't think Israel does either. A lot of people will claim they do, but put so many conditions on it that the Palestinian side isn't a viable state at all, and I think they know that.
An example being trump's proposal, which slices up the West Bank into a thousand small pieces and says that Israel maintains control over Palestinian airspace and even land use policy for areas "close to" the border. Or Netanyahu who has said he supports two states but also that all settlements have to be in Israel which would mandate that sort of slicing up (among other not-state-like conditions); or Bennett who is opposed to a Palestinian state.
Also before 1967 my understanding is that Israel instituted martial law for Arabs living within its borders, and also passed laws confiscating much of their land. In 1956 during the Sinai crisis, my understanding is that Ben-Gurion talked about not only taking over the Sinai (which he only withdrew from under US pressure) but the West Bank, and part of Lebanon. All of which is to say, it wouldn't be shocking for a Palestinian to see Israel as an entity that Palestinians couldn't peacefully coexist with.
Netanyahu definitely did not accept a real two state solution, and Bennett isn't fond on it either. However, Barak (who offered one in 2000), Olmert (who offered one in 2008, though he was a lame duck), and Lapid (a very good guy, head of Israel's classical liberal party, the FM and the head of the biggest party in the government, who becomes PM in a few years) are a different story. Lapid has consistently supported the two-state solution and signaled an openness to peace negotiations when he is PM.
Definitely before 1967 Israel did not accept a two-state solution; the PLO was established before 1967 to remove Israel. Israel had martial law for Israeli Arabs until 1966 and expropriated a bunch of land from Arabs, that's definitely true. I don't think DBG was that much of an irredentist; after the 1967 war he talked about giving most of the West Bank back to Jordan.
I agree it is definitely true that Palestinians would be rational to distrust Israel, and it's rational for them to fear that a future Israeli government might renege on an agreement, and the same is true in the other direction, Israel is rational to distrust the Palestinians and to fear that a future Palestinian government might renege on an agreement. There is plenty of mistrust and bad blood to go around between the two parties, and everyone is far from blameless. The construction of and subsidies for the settlements is definitely a bad move by Israel, it's an obstacle to peace and not to mention a big waste of Israeli taxpayers money. But I do want to say that the Israel-Palestine case is different in an important way, because for example the Turks have never offered the Kurds statehood.
Opinion polling on the WB (and Gaza) is notoriously not that good; polling (from PCPSR) predicted Fatah would win their last election, but Hamas won by >3% (>3.5% in a head-to-head), and the two-state polls have not been better than those Fatah-Hamas polls. Still the opinion polling from WB/Gaza is not particularly encouraging (and neither is the opinion polling from Israel). Such is the Middle East.
iirc the position on the Confederation that you've articulated was basically Lysander Spooner's position on it at around that time.
A nation (or "a people") is a group of people who can act somewhat coherently as an agent over the long-term.
Regardless of form of government, this will usually require some way of reliably having, over the course of many generations, members that prioritize the group's interests and long-term future over themselves as individuals. (Even in non-democratic countries, leaders are eventually replaced by other leaders, who usually (ostensibly) share at least some broader set of goals. Replacement dictators come from the same population.)
This definition, when applied to the rules of allowing nations to have their own states, enables an international system where it is meaningful for sovereign states to be able to own property and take loans which will be repaid, make agreements and promises which outlast the lives of any individuals involved, and have interests which the state will consistently work towards. Quoting Trump (or his speechwriter, whatever): "[T]here can be no substitute for strong, sovereign, and independent nations — nations that are rooted in their histories and invested in their destinies; [...] and most important of all, nations that are home to patriots, to men and women who are willing to sacrifice for their countries, their fellow citizens, and for all that is best in the human spirit."
Now, a group having their own language or ethnicity or glorious history makes these things more likely. So does a self-reinforcing culture, a bunch of centuries of sunk costs, an unusual set of values, or a dramatic-sounding philosophy. However, the relevant thing here is the "national identity", that ability to act as a coherent long-lived group, however the group comes about it.
A group of 100 people on your street would not have that. Quebec probably would, but Western Quebec would not. I have no idea whether Texas would. (I'd guess not.) Catalonia probably would, but it's hard to tell with contemporary economic issues potentially influencing their votes. (A referendum is not always a valid indicator that a group is actually a nation.) Scotland, Wales, and Kurdistan probably would.
I believe this is, more or less, what is meant by "nations" in the idea of "All nations have the right of self-determination."
This strikes me as rather incomplete. The emphasis on the "ability to act as a coherent long-lived group" completely ignores the "identity"" part of "national identity," and that is the part which has long been central to the definition used by those who assert that "all nations have the right of self--determination." The "identity" part is what has allowed elites to create "identities" among groups (Scotland is the classic example, IIRC, plus of course all sorts of colonial areas) in order to push for the creation of a state (which, of course, serves their interests far more than the interests of the hoi polloi)
what if one believes in following principles:
1. territorial conquest by force must be strongly disincentivized as it will involve violence, instability, potential descent into chaos and would open a can of worms of similar claims elsewhere,
2. west should punish russia not just because it cares about ukraine but so that future rulers anywhere who seek to conquer territory by force know that it will be super costly,
3. at the same time the bounds of punishment must be clearly defined. In particular, never destroy the state itself (as was done in Iraq). In current situation, regime change in russia should not be considered,
4. it should be perfectly acceptable to democratically fight for regional independence within existing nation states but states should be free to deal with violent insurgent groups
You missed one obvious aspect of the 'right' to "declare yourself to be independent", namely some version of fairness. 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 to various Myanmar would-be independence movements.
This seems to be one of those weathervane causes, where people will spin from loving to hating it depending on the details you insert into the story. Should a leftist go with the self-determination argument, or with the sharing argument? Decisions, decisions.
I agree letting the people on top of the oil have it is weird, but it doesn't seem weirder than the fact that Qatar gets to be incredibly rich because it has oil and doesn't have to share it with eg Afghanistan.
Well it boils down to what we are discussing — how things have happened in the past vs how things should happen going forward.
Should every rich fraction of a country be allowed to secede from their poor neighbors? I honestly don’t know what I think; but if you’re a utilitarian or Singer or suchlike, I think your answer pretty much has to be no, surely?
OTOH...
"Which is better---to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?"---Mather Byles
Re. Slavic language/dialects - my understanding from folks more expert in linguistics than me is that the Slavic languages are a continuum from east to west such that any 2 neighboring dialects are mutually understandable, and the further apart 2 dialects are geographically the less mutually understandable they are. So Croatian and Russian would be the least mutually understandable.
Politics of course plays a role - there's a story that when the president of (then so-called) Macedonia visited the president of Bulgaria, the former insisted on using a translator and the latter insisted he didn't need one.
It works better from West to East than in the Balkans. Differences between Slovene and Croatian are pretty stark. Even Bulgarian and Serbian are fairly distant.
But the continuum was a lot smoother a century ego. Nowadays, the influence of TV, written culture and schooling has created much more obvious jumps at the border. For example, the original dialect around Ostrava was a Silesian one, fairly mutually intelligible with Upper Silesian version of Polish. Nowadays, even though the accent persisted, the vocabulary on both sides of the border is much closer to standard Czech and standard Polish than it used to be in 1922.
https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17400/worldwide-map-or-data-for-linguistic-distance -- according to this map of "lexical distance" between languages, the distance between Russian and Ukrainian is approximately like between English and Dutch, and larger then between French and Italian. Not sure if the data can be trusted.
Understanding other languages is partially about their inherent differences and partially about exposure. If in the other language, let's say 70% words are pretty similar and 30% are dissimilar, then if you are exposed to the language regularly, you will gradually learn the 30% even if you are not trying to. If you are never exposed to it, then when you hear it for the first time, you understand some words, but you don't understand what most sentences mean. -- Everyone in Ukraine had lots of exposure to Russian language.
I don't entirely trust that graph, given that it puts Serbian as some kind of middle ground between Czech and Polish, which is... certainly a take.
Consider also that Ukrainian language was suppressed for a very long time, and everyone had to learn and use Russian out of necessity. The short-term effects on the language may not be reflected in the graph.
Note that all of this is further complicated by the fact that the people and the land they're living on are distinct. Hypothetically, you could provide people with "self-determination" by allowing them to emigrate, without allowing them to secede. If you allow secession of any region by popular vote of the people currently living there, then a highly-populous country can steal your land by sending a bunch of people to live there and then vote to secede.
> If you allow secession of any region by popular vote of the people currently living there, then a highly-populous country can steal your land by sending a bunch of people to live there and then vote to secede.
That is less murderous variant of "my army just murdered/deported people living there, therefore by self-determination it is mine". It happened many times, in fact basically everywhere if you look into sufficiently old history.
Why didn't you discuss the Crimean Tartars?
Feel like this post ignores a whole lot of international law both around statehood (eg four criteria for statehood under customary international law - http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/103132/) and self-determination (Wikipedia disagrees with you that “ International law makes no effort to answer this question [of what is a peoples]”)… And/or is trying to make a moral point using international law terminology? Either way feels a bit confused and certainly misses the biggest legal point that a cardinal rule under international law is that States aren’t allowed to invade other States (see above re what is a State).
'I'm nervous asserting Crimea wants/wanted to join Russia'
I don't know about 'Crimea wanted to join Russia 2014'. It's the island around Sevastopol, Russia's major navy base, so the Russians were going to either claim it or just shoot any armed foreigners who got too close to their base. Then when the color revolution ethnically cleansed a bunch of Russians from the good jobs, maybe they had an overwhelming majority that loved Russia, maybe not.
But it's been eight years of everyone who hates Russia moving west and everyone who hates Ukraine moving east. The wank Putin view about this war is that Putin built better than he knew when he set the borders in 2014.
(No expert and disbelieved all news about Russia invading for most of the first day)
you're a people if you have at least one good ethnic restaurant in new york city. Ukraine has several so it passes with flying colors
I hear that all the Russian restaurants in the US have rebranded as Ukrainian restaurants, so I guess Ukraine has won and Russia no longer exists.
Not so! I live in Minnesota, and asking Google Maps for Russian restaurants in Minneapolis brings up:
- Hammer and Sickle
- Moscow on the Hill
- Samarkand Restaurant
- Kramarczuk Sausage Company
From which we conclude that, according to Google, Uzbekistan no longer exists, and start to entertain doubts about Poland.
Ní tir gan teanga, and Ukraine has its own language (and good God does this sound more and more like Irish history; I suppose there is only one way 'large imperial power to its smaller subjected territory' behaves, eh?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language
"From 1804 until the 1917-1921 Ukrainian War of Independence, the Ukrainian language was banned from schools in the Russian Empire, of which the biggest part of Ukraine (Central, Eastern and Southern) was a part at the time. It has always maintained a sufficient base in Western Ukraine, where the language was never banned, in its folk songs, itinerant musicians, and prominent authors."
http://www.dublincityofliterature.ie/literary-dublin/linguistic-heritage/
“A country without a language is a country without a soul” declared Pádraig Pearse, or as he also put it, “tír gan teanga, tír gan anam.”
I think this is more relevant when deciding whether to help someone get statehood in the first place (e.g. Kurds).
For Ukraine, it's moot: Ukraine was *already* recognized as a sovereign state (including by Russia), and international law doesn't let any state revoke any other state's sovereignty
(Which is international law's main point: if we didn't enforce a taboo against violating sovereignty, the 30 years war would be the 400 years war and we'd still be fighting it)
(But also,
>"To just about everyone outside of Ukraine itself, no one can figure out what distinguishes Ukrainians from Russians"
To some degree that's because of *deliberate atrocities* designed to erase distinct Ukrainian culture / nationalism. E.g. Stalin having most of the blind Kobzari itinerant bards murdered.)
Ukraine had UN seat since yearly days of UN
Having worked in law it would have never occurred to me to try to come up with a moral principle on this subject and I'm glad you made an attempt to do so.
I gotta tell you though - even when it's a domestic policy where we can just make the rules, this kind of argument is about 30% actual principle and about 70% something that sounds enough like principle that we can justify doing the thing we need to do while protecting the legitimacy of the system.
My whole brain's been poisoned by the experience because even now trying to come up with a moral principle on this my answer is "probably all people have a right to self determination but if we admit that we bind ourselves to action that would definitely make the world a worse place. So when articulating the principle it should be whatever is closest to a universal right to self determination that doesn't make a decision not to become overly committed to Taiwan or whatever into a moral failing."
"Category error" is probably the correct way to think of a "right" to self-determination. Rights ultimately must have the backing of law to be worth anything*, and international law is, as mentioned, incredibly vague and unhelpful in this regard (not to mention the obvious fact that powerful actors can ignore it to a certain degree). Furthermore, as mentioned in many comments, the specific details of a particular secession and/or revolutionary movement are very important in determining whether or not the success of the endeavor is desirable. "People" is a fuzzy enough category that the statement "all peoples have the right to self-determination" is less than useless, given that international laws and customs are at best applied arbitrarily. Asserting this right grants undue benefits to more belligerent nationalities, to larger (population-wise) nationalities, and those that can call upon more powerful friends, irrespective of the justice of their particular cause. Furthermore, the privileging of nationality, over religion, ideology, and any other form of semi-arbitrary form of social organization, seems an anachronism of the 19th century (to say nothing of groups that blend various forms of identity).
I want Ukraine to be "successful" (a term that encompasses a range of potential outcomes) in their war with Russia not because the Ukrainians qua Ukrainians deserve "self-determination," but because the erosion of Russian military power and prestige is good for my desired vision of the future for the world generally and the United States specifically. A Chinese nationalist may wish the reverse for the same ostensible reasons, and this is fine. Ultimately, nationality is just one component of identity, and a historically fluid one at that. That people at some places and times are willing to die for it should not privilege it over greater moral considerations of correct action**.
*I bite the "human rights don't exist" bullet. That all humans should be treated with a degree of dignity, and possess safety and material comforts, are certainly worthy desiderata. If I had the power to make such a thing so, I would. But desires aren't the same thing as enforceable rights.
**For a variety of reasons, I do not think the Russian cause is "just," in addition to more amoral considerations of great power gains and losses. Regardless, morality is just another word for aesthetic sensibilities, and the Russian state aesthetic leaves much to be desired, relative to "the West," broadly defined in my view.
You're making the mistake of Nationalists everywhere, by conflating a bunch of things that are in fact not tied together. Just because you can identity a people that hypothetically has the right to self determination, does not mean:
A) that the people have a territorial claim
B) that they can walk away with whatever chunk of the national infrastructure happens to be located on that territory
C) that they can walk away with whatever assets happen to be located on that territory
D) that they have the right to overrule anybody affected who is not one of the people
E) that they can demand the retention of the privileges of statehood even after independence
This is why, most of the time, the right to self determination is not in fact exercised, or is only exercised as part of a larger nation.
EDIT: So apparently in my holy wrath, I overlooked the line saying that the long take is a reader's comment on Karlin's blog. Sorry for misattributing the thoughts. I am letting the rest of the comment stay as it is, as a memory of my sleep-deprived idiocy.
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Oh. My. God. From a Slavic (Czech) perspective, Karlin's take is terrifying. A person that knows absolute sh** about your history wants to dictate your future in the sake of what precisely? Satisfying their need for neat maps?
Scott, Karlin's idea is about as "refreshing" as some Chinese or Indonesian saying "the Western world should push all the Jews into ghettos again because they are so colorful when they live next to one another and the mixing with gentiles is a major source of annoyment anyway". Absolutely oblivious to the death, destruction and suffering that is connected with such concepts.
Russian and Serbian imperialism was/is very dysfunctional. In the league of empires, those two sit on the bottom of the ladder. Yugoslavia disintegrated in a spectacular geyser of blood for a reason, and people are willing to fight to death not to be reabsorbed into any kind of neo-Russian empire again. This includes Russian speakers from Kharkiv, Mariupol and Kherson.
And if Karlin cringes when writing Kyiv, I cringe when writing his name, because Praha-Karlín is the neighborhood where the Prague meetup was held, and every pavement brick there is still smarter than him, or at least has seen more history to be less judgmental.
I read the "refreshing" there as obviously sarcastic.
Karlin himself isn't oblivious to the implications of his words, he just thinks those implications are positives. He's a full-throated believer in Great Nation Theory and has never met an imperialistic power he won't go to the final barricade for. He seems to vacillate between denial of imperialistic war-crimes and the childish cheering-on of civilian casualties as proof of the muscular virility and general Type A Heroic Character of his chosen "main character" nation. See how he turned on a dime from "Russia would never invade their noble brother Ukrainians no matter how much the servile, rodentine NATO parasites want it- they are firmly devoted to the honorable principles of peace and brotherhood!" to "The mighty war machine of the Russian state is forged of pure iron and will! This war will not be a matter of days but of hours- the Ukranians are spineless animals enslaved by their NATO puppet-masters and hypnotized by Gender Studies and pederasty!" with basically three hours between the two takes.
Sarcasm does not travel well over TCP/IP.
The Great Nation Theory has fairly massive holes at this point. Long-lived empires tend to motivate their subjects by a combination of "sugar" and "whip". The Romans were notoriously brutal when suppressing revolts, but they also brought rule of law, better technology, inclusion in massive trade networks and a perspective of gaining full Roman citizen status in the future to people whom they annexed.
Russian rule is all whip and no sugar. It is a deeply developmentally delayed country that based its imperial ambitions on conquering richer, more developed, more democratic states and sucking them dry. What do you get for being subjugated to Moscow? Plunder, poverty, corruption, hopelessness and an opportunity for your kids to die as cannon fodder in Russian imperial wars.
No one sane wants this kind of deal foisted on themselves and their children, and the first instinct of freshly reconstituted independent nations after the USSR disintegrated was to seek protection against a relapse, even overseas.
Empires always fall. This is the one lesson of history. You can cobble together a new empire out of the ruins of the old, but in its turn it will rise, flourish, decay and fall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG-fya3vutQ
It would be funny if, with the war dragging on and Russia running out of troops, Karlin were conscripted to serve in Ukraine. I think he's young enough so that it might happen.
Your extreme examples have historical precedents.
"Does my street (population: ~100) have the right to declare independence from the USA?"
Freetown Christiania is an anarchist commune within the city limits of Copenhagen that has declared itself free since 1971. It has a population of about 1,000 and covers 19 acres, so it is larger than your street, but not by much. There has always been significant controversy between Christiania and the city of Copenhagen, and the city has gotten more effective at limiting Christiania's sovereignty since it started sending police in to arrest drug sellers in 2004.
"Suppose dozens of US cities declared independence. The result would be lots of isolated enclaves with tiny markets and no ability to defend themselves. Those cities might wish that there was some pact keeping them together."
This sounds a lot like the Free Imperial Cities of the Holy Roman Empire. They had no sovereign except the emperor and he didn't have much influence. The towns quickly realized that they did not have enough power on their own to keep from being bossed around by the neighboring lords, so they formed city leagues. The largest and strongest of these was the Hanseatic League, which monopolized trade in the Baltic and North Seas for hundreds of years. There was also the Lombard League, the Swabian League, the Lusatian League, and the Decapole. In the Early Modern Era, the city leagues faced increasing competition from centralized monarchies, were riven by the Protestant Reformation, and then mostly destroyed in the Thirty Years' War.
Lots of different groups of people have declared their right to self determination in lots of interesting different ways.
You forgot to mention the Donbas, which is what started this whole mess in the first place. The eastern regions of Ukraine broke away (as they wanted to be a part of a Russian-oriented Ukraine, not a Western-oriented one) and the Ukrainian state started a war to prevent their secession. Russia then provided support to the separatist republics. Over 10,000 people have been killed since -- and this was *before* the recent invasion by Russia.
This is also not mentioning other minorities in Ukraine that have *not* been accepted as independent minorities. The Rusyns, for example, are recognized as a separate ethnic group by everyone in the region...except the Ukrainians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusyns
Ergo, if you're defending Ukraine because you think they represent the idea that people have the right to be self-determining, you're not paying close enough attention.
> Russia then provided support to the separatist republics.
Everything indicates that Russia started, promoted and instigated that.
(it is quite hilarious to see some people seriously claiming that Euromaidan was fully controlled by CIA and at the same time claiming that in Donbas Russia become active only after Ukraine taken military action there)
> Ukrainian state started a war to prevent their secession
war was started by Russian meddling (for more invasive than anything CIA/West did in Ukraine)
> Ergo, if you're defending Ukraine because you think they represent the idea that people have the right to be self-determining, you're not paying close enough attention.
It does not follow. You can be against France invading Spain on basic of self-determination, despite situation in Catalonia. Also, are Rusyns even demanding own country?
> Everything indicates that Russia started, promoted and instigated that.
I don't see how this is any different than Crimeans wanting to be in Russia. Sure, there was some Russian manipulation, but fundamentally the people there want to be Russian, not Western.
> it is quite hilarious to see some people seriously claiming that Euromaidan was fully controlled by CIA
I didn't mention Euromaidan nor did I say it was controlled by the CIA. But it is a fact that Western interests (largely through NGOs) spent billions on Euromaidan. This shouldn't really be much of a surprise...the West has sponsored coups and revolutions for the last century.
> war was started by Russian meddling
If a region secedes, but is attacked violently in response, who "started it"?
> are Rusyns even demanding own country?
They certainly did for a long time (read: centuries), but were repeatedly discriminated against by the Ukrainians and the Soviets.
They even had their own country... for literally one day -- 15 March 1939.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpatho-Ukraine
My position on this question is that trying to have consistent principles on this issue is bad actually, and I will unapologetically evaluate self-determination issues on a case-by-case basis.
I disagree that letting whatever nontrivially-sized place secede is good, because states getting smaller and more numerous makes coordination problems on large scales worse (I'm aware there are plenty of arguments for the reverse, but I'm not going to expand on this issue for now). And a norm that every group gets a right to self-determination in the future if and only if they already have it now offers a lot of advantages in terms of stability; not redrawing borders at all can cut down on warfare. But neither of these heuristics seem like good reasons not to have taken away Serbia's ability to genocide Kosovar Albanians. Russia taking Crimea from Ukraine doesn't change how many different countries need to be involved in large-scale coordination challenges, and that particular operation didn't even involve any bloodshed, so you could make a case that that undercuts my argument that border changes are bad because war is bad. But this won't stop me from opposing Russia's annexation of Crimea, because Russia agreed not to do that without Ukraine's consent as part of an agreement for Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons, and undermining incentives for states to give up nuclear weapons is bad.
If you come up with a consistent principle, you'll inevitably encounter situations where it turned out your principle was missing something important. The actual principle I'm using here is "a group of people gets self-determination if and only if it is best for the world for them to get self-determination", but I'm not counting that as a real principle because it's too underspecified. Why should I adopt a different principle instead? It seems to me that if "what's best for the world" ends up conflicting with some more well-specified principle, I should go with what's best for the world.
One possible answer to this is that different people have different opinions about what's best for the world, and can end up in conflict over it, but if they can all agree to follow certain consistent principles instead, this can avoid conflict. I agree this is an issue (and isn't even the only source of conflict here; some people will simply have more provincial concerns than what's best for the world), but using consistent principles doesn't actually solve this, because there will be conflict over which principles to use. If you think self-determination is generally good, and I think too much self-determination creates too much coordination-problem headaches to be worth it, then "any at-least-city-sized group of people who want independence gets it" does not work as a compromise. I'd actually prefer just letting you choose every time, since then if there's some situation where letting some specific city declare independence ends up being obviously terrible, you might notice this and put a stop to it. Groups with conflicting interests can negotiate compromises without having clear abstract ethical principles behind their compromises, and that's okay. If the principles you come up with so that there doesn't need to be any conflict doesn't include anything like "... unless it's on this side of this arbitrary line, because we need to placate France", you're doing it wrong, and should probably stop trying to follow principles.
The problem with Crimea is that it is so Russian due to brutal deportations and oppression.
See say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars
> Within three days, the NKVD used cattle trains to deport mostly women, children, the elderly, even Communists and members of the Red Army, to mostly the Uzbek SSR, several thousand kilometres away.
Though that opens another issue - how long such argument applies? Invading and murdering/deporting people and immediately declaring that due to self-determination your army owns land is an evil farce.
Demanding land that people you consider as your ancestors controlled 5000 years ago is silly.
Part of problem is that you have middle ground where one solution is evil and other silly, and both unworkable.
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Though I admit that for Ukraine at this point the Crimea may be better used for negotiating it away in exchange of something (but not just Russian promises! Russian promises are worthless).
I think when to draw the line is around 1800s when population engineering became a thing. There of course were massive massacres and forced settling/resettling etc before that, but it was destruction for destruction's sake or trying to make more money by indifferently massacring people or whatnot but there was no concept of having rights to a land by cause of your people living there so that was never the target metric. Only after 1800s changing the composition of a place became a target in itself so states started doing it for the sake of changing the composition. That's when I would draw the line.
My extreme unpopular idea would be for everybody in the world to have citizenship rights to any current nation of their selection that their ancestors were living on the territory of in, say, 1800. Next step would be a "world secession election day" in which everybody in the world would vote in the village/town that their ancestor of selection lived in 1800 to determine to which current or potential nation that village/town would be part of. Redrawing of all borders once and for all!
I'm curious why you didn't engage with the underlying theoretical question of where sovereignty derives from? Surely that's the first order principle. If sovereignty comes from elections or cultural unity or military force you end up with different answers. You seem like you're trying to derive case specific principles from second order reasoning rather than starting with first principles and generalizing.
Not sure if someone has suggested this already. But nationhood might be best considered an inter-subjective reality.
That is to say that a nation exists if a group of people believe that they’re part of that nation. So Ukraine exists as a nation because 40 million people believe that they’re part of the Ukrainian nation. Same with the Swiss, the Dutch, and the Navajo.
But presumably the people on your street, or in your city don’t honestly believe in the nationhood of said street or city.
In this view, shared culture, language, religion, history are relevant to nationhood in that they persuade people to believe in the nation’s existence. But other factors like a system of government (I.e. Switzerland), the experience of fighting a war, or mere propaganda can create nationhood.
As for claims to collective self determination:
A Scot, for example, might believe that he's part of the Scottish nation, yet prefer that Scotland remain part of the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, plenty of people want secession/independence for reasons unrelated to nationhood and some of those other reasons are probably legitimate.
So maybe secession is justified if the people of a territory support (by some margin. can't give a good specific number) independence and they have some sort of legitimate justification for resorting to it. Nationhood might be one legitimate justification. Abuses by a tyrannical government (the justification used by the US founders) might be another. I would want to put the bar for legitimate justifications pretty high because instability and conflict are probably generally bad.
I'm honestly surprised nobody has brought up sovereign citizens.
https://www.loweringthebar.net/?s=sovereign+citizen
I think the absence of a workable universal system of international law throws the whole issue back to a practical problem. A citizen can't enforce their sovereignty against a state that disagrees. You could always go Seasteading, but then you're just hoping to fall through the cracks in the system and again you have to be able to defend yourself from pirates. If you get big enough, or have a good relationship with enough big players that you can sustain sovereignty, congratulations, you're a country.
This fits edge cases like the US South not being able to sustain sovereignty. Its economic and other ties to the North meant that their bid at sovereignty was contested. They asked Britain and France to help out, and if they'd gotten that aid it's possible they would have succeeded. But without friends, they weren't strong enough on their own, so they don't get sovereignty. Israel has lots of friends, so they get sovereignty. South Sudan gets it, too, because they were able to support their sovereign bid against the parent country, and nobody else in the world cares enough to get involved one way or another.
It's more realpolitik than Big Guys Always Win. Is there an edge case where this framework doesn't work?
Something you very briefly touch on, which I think deserves much more weight, is that changing a region's government comes with large and unavoidable risks. Replacing the government and attempting to build a new one frequently leads to civil war, terror, famine, and general immiseration of the populace. Because of this, a moral rule that says "Thou shalt not overthrow governments except when the benefits of doing so are clear and enormous" is easily justified on simple, utilitarian terms. People get confused looking for the definition of "a nation," "a people," and so on, when the only concept you need to understand 90% of these conflicts is "a government." If you want to know whether Texas should secede, don't ask if Texans are a "people." Just ask whether, In the event of a Texan secession, is it likely that the Texans would replace the US Federal Government with some governing institution so much better fitted to Texas' needs that it would cancel out the insane amounts of human suffering that achieving Texas secession would likely require.
An obvious consequence of this theory is that a revolution and secession is more justified when it is easier to carry out -- for instance, when the existing government is weak. Another consequence is that secession is more justifiable than revolution, since secession requires only overthrowing central authority, but revolution requires that plus building a new central authority.
Epistemic Status: feels sophomoric but trivially true. Seeking criticism.
It seems trivially obvious that attempts to scale up individual morality to international relations is a category error. States, much like companies, are not people. They are algorithms operating on meat hardware - social technology. These technologies are not moral entities in the sense that they are mostly an abstraction for a set of behaviors across a number of entities. Asking if a company is right to pursue profit is a mistake - companies by definition pursue profit.
Corollary: the correct question is whether a profit seeking entity is the most cost effective or politically feasible solution.
States pursue something like a monopoly on violence and a sort of operating system for individuals (regulation, welfare) over a given territory. They are established by people who live there. They are as moral as those people, no more no less.
Re: Somebody’s going to ask “but what about the Confederacy?”
It's strange that you fail to apply a principle consistently immediately after a paragraph that contains the sentence "But it’s just the result of applying the same principle consistently.".
By that principle, the South has a right to secede, and the US government war wrong to treat this as a casus belli.
I think many intelligent people, if they looked into the Civil War deeply enough, would realize that it was basically unjustifiable. The whole "fighting to rid the world of slavery" narrative is something that came later as a tactical move. It's also not obvious that starting a war that killed 500,000 people and destroyed dozens of cities was the most humane, or even effective, solution to getting rid of slavery.
The war was started and fought to prevent separatism and to centralize power in Washington. Simple as that.
In principle, the South did (and does) have the moral right to secede. However, they didn't put the question up to the population (quite a lot of which was being actively enslaved), but instead decided the issue in the legislature. The Confederate government had no legitimacy, and was militarily holding a significant portion of the population of the United States hostage.
One necessary component to the moral right to secede is allowing people who strongly disagree with secession the right to move back to the parent state. The Confederacy obviously was not on board with that.
Hands down the best answer ever given to the issue is how Switzerland solved the Jurassic question:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x6hpkYyzMG6Bf8T3W/swiss-political-system-more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know-i#Referenda_as_Tools__The_Jurassic_Question
One area that had to deal with exactly this 60 years ago is Africa. And I think its instructive to look at where things went well and wrong there.
Following decolonisation the borders for countries were dumb. I'm not talking about the straight lines as they're normally just through desert but I mean the separation of tribes and people's between countries. One solution would have been an orgy of war until the borders made sense, but the alternative is to just lump it and make the best of it.
Very early on the African Union and early heads of state/independence leaders realised how dangerous it was to "rationalise" borders. You saw something of this in between Somalia and Ethiopia. Somalia wanted the somalis in Ethiopia to be part of Somalia and it completely fucked up both countries fighting about it. So much like you're enlightened cities not secedeing event though they could, African leaders knew the horrors that would await them.
While I think self determination out of an empire is good because empires are bad. Just chopping up borders to make them make more sense is dumb. The catalans are dumb. The Scottish nationalists are dumb. The ranchers in Idaho that want to secede are dumb. Ukrainians, they're not dumb. Neither are the African Union. Lots of useful examples in African history for how to deal with these nationalist questions.
It’s kinda astonishing how well African borders have managed to hold together through the decades. With the exception of South Sudan and Eritrea no wars have managed to create new borders. No Biafra, no Ambazonia, no Tigray.
They held together well because it was a good idea and a positive choice made by a large majority African leaders and political elites. So it would actually be odd if things turned out otherwise.
It's the distinction between nations and states. In practice, states are mostly the UN club, which - like most franchise-based leagues - is highly reluctant to approve new members even when it really should. As to nations.... ACOUP has a post I really like on this, about the USA not being a nation:
https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-nation/
Nation-states are not the only form of state organization, even if you reject anarchism. Furthermore, I'd argue that they're a particularly bad form of state organization, because they lock people to a specific state - if the whole world is divided into mutually exclusive nation-states, immigration is forbidden. Much better to have states defined entirely by location, i.e. city-states (which usually do include the hinterland around a city, but the point is to have a single center everyone can agree on). And sometimes even better (and sometimes much worse, because ISIL also fits in this category) is defining a state by ideas. Harder, though. An idea-state is a gauntlet thrown, a challenge to the entire world.
The United States is the biggest example of this, among current states, built on a dream above all else. (I guess i.e. the Vatican also counts, but most of the other settler colonies are more defined by place - I wouldn't say Australia and Canada have fundamentally different founding ideologies to the USA, though maybe Australians and Canadians would disagree.) But of course there was another example not too long ago, a different dream. One even further from being lived up to than the American one, but even so - there's a lot of people in the rationalist space that fundamentally misunderstand this. The USSR was born of a utopian dream. It built itself around the core of that dream, it spilled oceans of blood for it, and when, in the end, its people stopped really believing in communism, when the only thing left in that furnace-core was trite slogans and memorized essays, it collapsed in upon itself.
We're short on utopian dreams nowadays. But this much of the American one, I certainly agree with - that it's the rights of individuals that matter, not of groups. States jealously guard their power, and so perhaps it's fine to grandfather existing nation-states in to avoid conflict; but in the Internet age, to *actually* care about nationalism, as a terminal value, is just fundamentally stupid.
I don't think anywhere you've mentioned what I thought the real "rule" was, in international law:
By default, no one has the right to secede from their country. The only exception is when they've been persecuted by their country. In that exceptional case, they have the right to secede.
More broadly, I think that existing borders are sacred, unless something exceptional happens that necessitates changing them.
[EDIT] Just to add, this means that "national self-determination" is not a thing. In a democratic country like Ukraine, the right to secede has to be given by the central government. International law favours the status quo, and the status quo is that Ukraine is a country.
Why not just the straightforward Hobbesian solution: the natural extent of the state is whatever extent the largest coordination problems extend, i.e. the entire world. Any smaller state would just be an excuse to treat individuals differently for the arbitrary reason of geography while failing to solve at least some big coordination problems. In this view, nations only exist because of the lack of a global order, and the morality of nationhood is just whatever pragmatic theory that in the long run leads to a unitary global democracy with the least amount of hickups along the way. So Ukraine is a proper nation because the expansion of western liberal democracy benefits from it being a proper nation.
"What exactly makes the Ukraine a nation?"
Kicking the Russian Army that was trying to conquer Kiev back to Belarus this week?
It's rather like the question you used to hear from Zionists about what makes Palestine a nation. By now, the answer is pretty clear: three quarters of a century of struggle against Israel.
As the writer Bruno Macaes points out, the current situation suggests a heuristic you haven’t mentioned: try and invade us, then find out how much of a nation we are.
*Wakes up* sees 359 comment count after 6 hours*. Hot take: this just shows that self-determination is fundamentally confused and bad concept. We need different reasons why wars of aggression are bad, or perhaps different definition of the very concept of the "war of aggression", than that which is based on self-determination.
This does not strike me as an especially difficult problem, though. There does not seem to be anything wrong with well-established norm of international law that when a government of a given country sometimes in the past recognized some territory as a part of another country, future governments of recognizing country are not allowed to unilaterally claim that territory for themselves.
Right.
There is a vast literature on how "recognition" works, and it's often extremely complicated. But the point is that it mostly works. The alternative is the chaos of, say, Vlad Putin isolating himself from covid and deciding that he doesn't recognize Ukrainian statehood and sending the tanks in.
As always we have some ethical intuitions and practical constraints on the possible solutions. Ethically every group should be able to self-determine - but that would not work in practice.
First of all it would not be practical to grant that to a group that cannot defend their sovereignty, because they would quickly lose it and generate a lot of misery in that process. That does not mean the group need to do that defending all by itself - it can have allies, etc, but it needs to be able to do that *in practice*. An important prerequisite is:
"a people is a nation if they are willing to fight for it"
The defense of sovereignty is a coordination problem - it only makes sense to fight if others would fight too. This is a https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/stag-hunt and a https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/common-knowledge problem. The self-referentiality of the common knowledge problem makes it very complex.
One heuristic people would use to answer the question if is it worth to fight is to look a their ancestors if their ancestors fought then maybe it is worth it:
"Consider Venice. When Napoleon came they surrendered without a shot. Very smart, saved lives, saved the city. It's just killed the mythos of Venice. People lived but the Republic died. It was never restored and is unlikely to be restored again" https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1498079371847995392
"Theorists of war of the bygone age understood it. Clausewitz pointed out that it's important not only if you lost independence but *how* you lost it. If you submitted without a fight, you saved lives. But you killed your mythos. You'll be digested by the conqueror" [from the same thread]
The practical constraints change with technological progress, but common-knowledge also takes time to establish and it tends to accumulate the old. Initially states were smaller than nations and contained within them. Then they started to grow and become kind of independent, with empires and so on. Then in about XIX century the notion of a nation-state became popular - that simplifies the common-knowledge problem.
We also have all the complications of above-state organizations. I am not expert on the USA political system, but Texas actually is a state in some meaning of that word, but it is also a part of the USA. I think initially it was more a real state - but now the proper state is the whole USA. Then we have the EU, and the UN, etc.
In this case Russia guaranteed Ukraine's sovereignty. Why genocide if being thrown around haphazardly for "except in self-defence ..." case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances
One problem with regions joining whatevrr country they want is that it might asymetrically favor opressive countries .
Opressive countries won't ever let a region leave by opressing spreading propaganda, oipressing people who look like thye might supoport leaving, falsifying referendum results. But it's feasible for them to get a region to join an opressive country. They just need to get the region to support joining them for a short while. Especialy if they can get awaya with invadinng then holding a referendum (where they can cheat).
Kinda related:
1) I think we need more wild space in addition to Antarctica and international waters. De facto it exists in various empty regions, but de iure it does not, so it is impossible to have a true frontier any more. This makes it much more difficult to experiment with novel forms of governance. We should institute, by international law, some system where swathes of territory are "released" by countries every couple of years.
2) I would like to see a country experiment with having a max enforceable border length. Like if your circumference is 5000 km, and you only have 500 to spare, what would you prioritize? Probably we'd see the re-emergence of city states, which is a good thing. Note: in this arrangement, the laws of a country still apply to non bordered land, but you can't bar entry. You can control entry only for the places where you "applied" the border.
> I think we need more wild space [...]
I agree that we need new space to experiment with new forms of governance, but I disagree that any country should be forced to split off some of its territory. How would that land be allocated? Who would decide how to govern it? What would happen to the people owning/living on that land?
Instead, build new space in ... space. I'm not even kidding. Build giant O'Neill cylinders and Stanford toruses from asteroids. Want to finally show the world that communism does work after all? Get together with a couple million like-minded people to finance the construction of your rotating habitat, and live in utopia. Same for libertarians. Or UBI-proponents.
Does that sound fantastical? Oh yes. But it's primarily a technological problem, and only secondarily a political one, and that makes it easier to achieve than getting countries to willingly part with some of their territory. This is actually my secret fantasy – if I had billions of EUR at my disposal, that's what I would be working towards.
>I like how it [...] avoids [...] hard-headed “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must” realpolitik
And yet the answer to all the questions you ask could be just that: A People have a right to self-determination IF they can back it up. In fact your own answer to the question of the confederacy is "yeah sure they could secede, and we'd just kill'em then because we could and wanted to".
Also, beyond the morality-based questions of self-determination, and assuming one accept that people do, in fact, have a right to self-determination, and that a state should not prevent attempts at secession (at least some of them, such as referendums), there is one practical problem:
How often should a state allow such referendums to be held?
In 1998, the French government struck a deal with new-caledony independentists to plan 3 successive referendums for independance, each rejected (first 56% againt, then 53% against, and finally upon boycott by independentists, 96% against). Should it be the end of it? Surely the next generation of new-caledonians ought not be bound against their will by the votes of those that came before them? How often should such referendums be held? Every 20 years? Every 5 years? Every day until they have their way?
The Union could probably have invaded the Confederacy under a norm called Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which the UN endorsed in 2005. States have an obligation to protect their people, and if they fail, other states should intervene (although the question is, which ones?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_to_protect
The Karlin comment is interesting in the way that I'd almost think almost the exact opposite - my heart says that large nations - say, the ones that have been Civilization civilizations - are generally evil and deserve to be broken up to smaller subunits. Romantically, I support separatism and the right of small countries to exist.
Still, that romantic notion is different from what is sensible. The part of history where "self-determination" was actually probably the most meaningful as a concept was decolonization. When the UN was formed, there were a lot of self-governing territories (ie. colonial powers, and others generally recognized as independent) and non-self-governing ones (chiefly colonies; defined territories where the administration was imposed from another defined separate territory) The UN took a fairly strong stand that the non-self-governing territories should become self-governing, and that's what they eventually became.
However, decolonization also shows another strong norm in post-WW2 international politics; established borders are sacrosant, and should, at the very least, not be altered through force. When colonies became independent, they did so as (mostly) the same colonial units that had been established by colonizing powers, usually with the same borders. Do those borders make sense? No, but trying to alter them by force to make "more" sense would lead to endless bloodbaths; thus, it is generally considered that even though, say, Ghana is basically just a collection of small ethnic groups that used to be the British colony of Gold Coast, formed for British for administrating economic exploitation, it's still better to just construct a "Ghanaian" identity for that former colonial unit than enter into a bound-to-be-chaotic process of ethnostate formation.
The same respect for established borders and units is the reason why the international community generally looks down upon separatism and unilateral declarations of independence. An area like Somaliland, despite having been de facto independent from Somalia for decades, is not recognized as independent by other countries, and is unlikely to be recognized. At the same time, countries *can* form if a sovereign nation decides to grant independence to a part of its territory. If Scotland had voted for independence, and assuming UK didn't get cold feet and granted that independence, other countries would not have had any issues in recognizing that independence - after UK had recognized it.
Considering this, there should be no issues at all in the policy the international community (or at least the West) has taken regarding Ukraine. Ukraine, her independence and her borders have been formally recognized by Russia - of course, Ukraine and Russia were separate units even in the Soviet Union, but Russia still formally accepted the continuity of the Soviet Union. This included Crimea and Donbass. Thus, Russia has no right to unilaterally change this arrangement, especially by force. Granting Russia that right would open a Pandora's box and increase international chaos. Whether the Crimeans actually supported, or currently support, that annexation is not all that important here - after all, the whole concept of sanctity of existing borders is heavily affected by things like German annexation of Sudetenland in 1938, and it's almost certain the vast majority of Sudetenlanders supported that annexation.
As always, there are caveats and hypocrisies. There are still non-self-governing territories like Palestine and Western Sahara, after all, and the West is not in a hurry in helping them becoming formally self-governing by, say, recognizing their independence. On the other hand, Western countries did recognize the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo - something Serbia has still not acceded to. Still, one has to ask whether those cases mean the principle is completely dead, or useless. Russia would certainly probably prefer to think that way, considering the amount of times they've referred to Kosovo - but principles like this are never that rigid, they just get weaker and weaker every time they get broken and that break is not properly challenged, and even if the independence of Kosovo has weakened the moral argument for this principle, it's no reason for Russia to attempt to weaken it even further.
"Russia would certainly probably prefer to think that way, considering the amount of times they've referred to Kosovo - but principles like this are never that rigid, they just get weaker and weaker every time they get broken and that break is not properly challenged, and even if the independence of Kosovo has weakened the moral argument for this principle, it's no reason for Russia to attempt to weaken it even further."
That's the thing, though: The West could have very easily avoided creating the Kosovo precedent in the first place. Milosevic's regime was already gone by 2008. The West could have thus told the Kosovar Albanians to reach some sort of accomodation with the democratic Serbian government. This was especially true considering that the West had no problem with Serbia continuing to control the Albanian-majority Presevo Valley. Yet, the West nevertheless decided to support Kosovar independence, claiming it to be a special case even though by the West's own principles, other persecuted groups such as the Kurds, Rohingya, et cetera could likewise be entitled to national self-determination, something that the West will undoubtedly oppose.
The right to self-determination can’t depend on ethical motives, because the ethical discussion is very slippery, to the point that it allows ethnical self-determination (on racial grounds) if a group believes it has been oppressed long or hard enough by any other group -- before you point to Europe or Asia, consider the US: does anyone think that racial self-determination really is the solution to any problem here, rather than just a solution in search of a problem? Utilitarian grounds is where the action is. If you compare the history of Europe and Eastern Asia (China plus adjacents), you can easily see the tremendous dynamism and political, artistic and scientific freedom that self-determination (in a nutshell: nationalism) brought to Europe, with scientists and thinkers escaping from one court to another to avoid the wrath of churches or rulers; China only really competed head to head with Europe when it was Europe: during the Warring States era. On purely utilitarian grounds, when it comes to the benefits derived by locals and everybody else, nations must be preferred to sluggish, inefficient empire-countries. Now, the question is how each case fits within this framework. I’d say the rule of thumb is whether secession will create a bigger problem than the one existing before. That was the case with the American South, that would have surely emerged as a deadly rival of the American North. Even ignoring slavery, which is a pretty big “if,” it’s pretty easy to argue that any benefits from the increased competitiveness would have been offset by the increased aggression, and the huge potential for wars, skirmishes, enemy blocs, etc. In Europe, many often compare the “velvet revolution” that led to the Czech Republic and Slovakia splitting in the 90s (possible because it was a clean cut with very few downside risks and lots of upside risks) with the Yugoslavian wars of the 90s, that left open wounds that will probably never close because there was no possible clean closure and, if there ever were was a such chance, foreign intervention spoiled it. In modern times, you can compare the possible benefits derived from an independent Scotland, cleanly free from the UK, and the Yugoslavian-Iberian scenario created by an independent Catalonia with territorial claims on multiple Spanish and French regions, Croat- and Serb-style. I’d argue that the Ukraine fits within the Catalonian/Yugoslavian/US South template. Yes, Russia is huge already, but an independent, anti-Russian Ukraine is a massive WW3 risk in waiting, and the Ukraine’s post-independence history is rather depressive and dysfunctional, so it’s not as if the world would be losing a really vibrant contributor. An utilitarian viewpoint would support the idea of the Ukraine, at the very least, as a Finlandized state. That worked pretty well for Finland, which did evolve from overly-friendly-to-Nazis state to high-tech human development hub, so I’ve never understood the argument against such a solution.
This is a Why Do I Not Suck post.
>(is it meaningful that Crimea wanted to join Russia rather than become independent? I think no; if you agree they have a right to become independent, then they could become independent and then immediately join Russia; everyone agrees independent countries have the right to join other countries if they want)
Pedantic quibble: everyone agrees independent countries have the right to join other countries if *both* want. Relevant cases are the German Question (i.e. "is Austria allowed to join Germany") and the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia. This is not pertinent to the Crimean question, though, as Russia is very happy to have the Crimea.
Imagine your street (or another territory) gains independence, but the country that it gains independence from decides to not cooperate and cuts all ties. It doesn't issue entry visas to the citizens of the new state, doesn't sell electricity and doesn't provide other services. If your new country can survive this, then your independence movement is viable. If you would be completely screwed by this development, then you shouldn't pursue independence.
And yes, this does mean that some of the existing countries like Vatican or San Marino shouldn't have become independent states, and were grandfathered into the statehood.
Crimea shouldn't be Ukraine's, and it shouldn't be Russia's! Before a few waves of ethnic cleansing my grand grand grandparents fleed from there and were among the lucky that survived. The Russian majority there is the result of ethnic engineering so they should go back to where their ancestors were and Crimea should be an independent Tatar state. IF instead of full independence they decide to be a semi independent Tatar state under Russia, or Ukraine, or any other nation then that can of course be.
Why only Tatar and not Greek or Italian?
They left much longer before the Tatars, but I'm all for Greek and Italian parts of an independent Crimea, or if they desire so independent city-states of them
> If my neighborhood declared independence from the US, China could offer to make us all multi-millionaires in exchange for hosting a military base on our territory
I am a complete dummy in terms of geopolitics, so explain this to me. Why would China want to have a military base in the middle of the US? It would be a major pain in the ass to fund and maintain, being surrounded by US from all sides, and what would it have to gain? Surely it wouldn't invade the US from it or anything.
SIGINT, one may put missiles there for attack (or deterrence), and yes in case of insanity going further it also would be used to attack.
It could be used to supply/support whatever China is doing in USA.
Moreover it would be a great propaganda tool.
Good answer, but let me add that Scott lives not in the middle of the US but in the Bay Area, i.e. the closest major metro to China among the lower 48. If China could actually get a port facility in California, that would be invaluable. It would be comparable to Guantanamo Bay, only instead of being located on an antagonistic Caribbean nation of little global significance, it would be located on the territory of its chief geopolitical rival.
If China were able to carve out a long enough section of the Bay Area, the comparison isn't Guantanamo but Hong Kong.
The mere threat of being able to load such a base up with conventional missiles and lay waste to the Bay Area would be of diplomatic value to China, just as North Korea's ability to destroy Seoul has an effect on South Korean politics. And if the US Federal Government were ever in a state of collapse, you could probably expect China to use that base to bring California into its orbit -- and Californian secessionists could be expected to reach out to China actively to help them oppose any Federal response.
OTOH a landlocked military base would be more like a very big embassy or consulate. Still valuable for the reasons embassies and consulates are valuable (SIGINT, as you say), but with the US controlling its supply lines, I wouldn't expect it to be all that heavily armed.
"The mere threat of being able to load such a base up with conventional missiles and lay waste to the Bay Area"
We can but dream? 😁
There is the 1949 British comedy, "Passport to Pimlico"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport_to_Pimlico
"Passport to Pimlico is a 1949 British comedy film made by Ealing Studios and starring Stanley Holloway, Margaret Rutherford and Hermione Baddeley. It was directed by Henry Cornelius and written by T. E. B. Clarke. The story concerns the unearthing of treasure and documents that lead to a small part of Pimlico to be declared a legal part of the House of Burgundy, and therefore exempt from the post-war rationing or other bureaucratic restrictions active in Britain at the time.
Passport to Pimlico explores the spirit and unity of wartime London in a post-war context and offers an examination of the English character. Like other Ealing comedies, the film pits a small group of British against a series of changes to the status quo from an external agent. The story was an original concept by the screenwriter T. E. B. Clarke. He was inspired by an incident during the Second World War, when the maternity ward of Ottawa Civic Hospital was temporarily declared extraterritorial by the Canadian government so that when Princess Juliana of the Netherlands gave birth, the baby was born on Dutch territory, and would not lose her right to the throne."
Ukraine does have the questionable benefit, in that it is useful to the West as a graveyard-sponge for Russian armies. Questionable because that means many people die as a result of the war, which for sure is not a desirable outcome. But smashing out the teeth of the Russian army is probably a global public benefit.
That said, true Crimea should be divided between the Khanate, Genoa, and Theodoro!
This whole post is wrong, because its frame (and by consequence all viewpoints contained within it) are wrong. Scott declares to proceed on the basis of a right to self-determination, but that application itself is arbitrary. Historically and internationally, self-determination can be applied only in specific circumstances. These are either when a place was colonised or appears-to-be-colonised-but-we-can't-say-because-it's-not-obvious-to-know (for e.g. Israel-Palestine).
There is a simple first-order answer to the question of territories, that is legality. Self-determination arises only after legality is a non-question (such as in colonised countries, where if colonisation was legal or not is a difficult question to answer given the times it took place in). To demonstrate, take India's argument for Kashmir against Pakistan. The Kashmir state signed an Instrument of Accession in 1947 with the Indian government, so now India considers it part of itself. No matter how much annexation of territory happens by another country, or self-determination is called for (by internal militias) (after a demographic change in Kashmir's case), there is no case for this application because legality solves all.
In Ukraine's case, we don't have to argue against the Russian 'we are basically the same peoples' argument. We don't even have to look at self-determination, because the case for the legal territory being Ukrainian has been well established since the post-Soviet times, as well as by Russian international commitment before they started backtracking.
Of course, this has an implication that this so-called 'legality' before self-determination is assumed to be well established. This is not the case, there are two main theories of statehood (Declarative and Constitutive/Montevideo) and many others. But that does not mean we are allowed to be lazy and say, 'Let's just ask what do the people want?'
PS. This might come off as somewhat anti-democratic -- which it is -- but here's the thing, it's because the circumstance of self-determination don't apply. If they did, the people's will would reign supreme.
The English claim on Ireland came about when Henry II decided to take control of the situation where his vassals were setting up as holding independent fiefs of their own (after having been invited in as gallowglasses then claiming the territories by conquest/marriage alliances), he landed in Ireland in 1171 and in 1177 declared his son Lord of Ireland.
The pretext was the papal bull of 1155, Laudabiliter: "The bull purports to grant the right to the Angevin King Henry II of England to invade and govern Ireland and to enforce the Gregorian Reforms on the semi-autonomous Christian Church in Ireland." (This is why there has only ever been one English pope, this guy, Alexander). The true reason was Henry's fears that the Welsh lords would take example from the Anglo-Normans in Ireland and break away with their own independence movement, and his ambition to conquer more territory.
The grounds were that we were barbarous and needed to be brought in line with civilisation and the official Church (hence the invocation of papal authority). The real reasons were different.
Gerald of Wales wrote a lengthy apologia for this, "The Conquest of Ireland", having been part of the entourage of Prince John when visiting Ireland in 1185:
https://www.yorku.ca/inpar/conquest_ireland.pdf
But there's a rather more pointed exchange recorded in his "Topography of Ireland", between Gerald and an Irish bishop:
http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/topography_ireland.pdf
"I once made objections of this kind to Maurice, archbishop of Cashel, a discreet and learned man, in the presence of Gerald, a clerk of the Roman church, who formerly came as legate into those parts, and throwing the blame of the enormous delinquencies of this country principally on the prelates, I drew a powerful argument from the fact that no one in that kingdom had ever obtained the crown of martyrdom for the church of God. Upon this the archbishop replied sarcastically, avoiding the point of my proposition, and answering it by a home-thrust: “It is true,” he said, “that although our nation may seem barbarous, uncivilized, and cruel, they have always shewn great honour and reverence to their ecclesiastics, and never on any occasion raised their hands against God’s saints. But there is now come into our land a people who know how to make martyrs, and have frequently done it. Henceforth Ireland will have its martyrs, as well as other countries.”
(Reference to the murder of Thomas a Becket by followers of Henry II)
If we take 1177 as the formal declaration of rule by the English monarchy, and 1922 as the establishment of the Irish Free State (albeit still as Dominion status), that's 745 years of "we're not you". If we take the declaration of the Republic of Ireland, with the new constitution, in 1937 as the end date, that's 760 years of "we are claiming our right of self-determination despite being entangled together".
If we take something that could be proto-Russia with the establishment of Kievan Rus in 882 when Prince Oleg conquered Kiev until independence of Ukraine in 1991, that's 1,109 years. That's a long time, but not long enough to fully dissolve two peoples into one.
To quote from "The Lord of the Rings":
'And this I remember of Boromir as a boy, when we together learned the tale of our sires and the history of our city, that always it displeased him that his father was not king. "How many hundreds of years needs it to make a steward a king, if the king returns not? " he asked. "Few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty," my father answered. "In Gondor ten thousand years would not suffice."
As far as I remember from school, Stalin saw the strategic importance of Crimea, and through a combination of the Holodomor, forced resettlement of the native Crimean Tatar population, and "incentives" for pro-Stalin Russians to settle there, he produced a situation where a majority of people on the peninsula today probably would vote to join Russia in a freely held referendum.
"forced resettlement of the native Crimean Tatar population"
2016 Ukrainian Eurovision entry, "1944" by Jamala:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75OwdZJzlkg
Eurovision this year is going to be interesting again.
2022 Ukrainian entry (replaced the original winner after a mini-scandal):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiEGVYOruLk
There are similar issues even when limiting size or allowing any region. First: what counts as a region *wanting* self-determination? If we require unanimous agreement for everyone inside, then it's a non-starter. But if we allow 51%, you're setting up future strife when that minority can't secceed in turn due to being too small.
Secondly, this is massively complicated by the fact that you get different results depending on how you draw borders.
Ie. if a country has regions A, B and C and 90% of region C want to secede, as do 40% of region B, then can the joint region BC secede? 65% of the population want to, but if C seceded on its own, and you asked B if they want to join them, they'd say no. And why stop at regions? Your street might be too small, but how about region BC **plus** your street. Or however many streets in region A that they can take until the popularity drops below 51% (or better, a spiderweb border of areas with high natural resources and low populations to get the most bang for your buck). This would clearly be pretty unfair, but likewise if region A gets to decide the region that gets to vote, it could play the same tricks.
We could assume fixed regions and only allow those regions to secede as a whole, but what's the principle that dictates what counts as a "region"? What if those regions don't map well to the clusters wanting independence, such that there's a big area that'd fully justify self-determination, but because historical borders were drawn without consideration of that population group, it spans the borders of 4 regions, diluted below 50% due to the population there? Ultimately, we're back to the same kind of problem as identifying what a "people" is.
Remembering from a post I read some time ago in I think lesswrong, in Switzerland they do those elections kind of fractally. So the region says 65% secede, then there's another voting at the subregion level if they too want to secede or not, until to the village level or so. I know the author of that posts are also readers of here but I don't remember his name unfortunately. It sounded Czech though.
That was me. Here's the relevant part about Jura seceding from canton Bern:
1968: Establishment of two commissions (one bilateral and one impartial) to propose a plan to address the Jurassic question.
March 1970: The plan is approved in a referendum. The following referendums are proceeding according to the approved plan.
June 1974: Referendum on whether to create a new canton Jura. Approved.
March 1975: Districts that voted against the new canton in a previous referendum decide about their fate. The southern, Protestant part of the Jura decides to remain in the canton of Bern.
Autumn 1975: Municipalities at the border between the two cantons decide in referenda whether to join Bern or Jura.
September 1978: In a federal referendum, the Swiss constitution is amended to list the new canton (82.3% of the vote in favor).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x6hpkYyzMG6Bf8T3W/swiss-political-system-more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know-i#Referenda_as_Tools__The_Jurassic_Question
Thanks for clarifying the situation, and belated thanks for that great post chain about Swiss democracy!
I think the Crimea question is less interesting than the question of Donbass. With Crimea majority of people would indeed probably voted to associate with Russia rather than with Ukraine even before the annexation. But I'm much less certain about Donbass.
I think Donbass can be seen as an experiment of purposefull creation of new "people". Russia has likely incentivised the rebellion in it and provoked Ukrane to wage civil war in the region. This made people in the region to oppose Ukraine. Are they valid for self-determination now?
I think this article does not put enough emphasis on the importance of status-quo maintenance.
I think the whole point of having “international laws” is to prevent wars which historically have been responsible for enormous amounts of death and suffering.
That doesn’t mean all attempts to change status quos are automatically wrong - but it does mean we should bias favoring the status quo when there is a gray area and changing the status quo requires war.
So Russia invading Ukraine is wrong.
But if Russia does invade Ukraine anyway and then 100 years later Ukraine tries to secede, they are also wrong for doing that. Unless they are given less rights than normal Russians for those 100 years or unless their culture/ethnicity/language etc diverges more from Russian.
>> But what is the objective in Ukraine? It is to become just another gay western democracy.
Hey, a gay Western democracy where Russians who didn't like the similarities between Russia and Mordor could feel mostly at home was a really cool idea. I guess it's thoroughly shattered now :(
Yeah that seemed like a self-refuting argument. Even if you grant there should be no “redundant countries”, a “gay Slavic democracy” would not be redundant but actually rather novel.
I suppose the argument is that Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia will occupy that role once their values fully converge with the West. Which does seem to be happening -- the young are much closer towards Western/Hollywood values than the old.
From what I gather, spoken Ukrainian isn't that much more mutually intelligible with Russian than spoken Polish is, though there's the fact that a lot of Ukrainians, for now, speak Russian as a first language, and written Ukrainian is highly mutually intelligible with Russian (greatly helped by using the same alphabet). Though if Ukraine continued on a Westernizing course, I wonder if it would eventually consider abandoning Cyrillic.
So once Ukraine goes far enough along the Westernizing path, instead of being sort of a poorer, more democratic (but not fully democratic) version of Russia, perhaps it starts to look more like a poorer, ex-Orthodox version of the future ex-Catholic Poland.
It would be strategic for Ukraine to adopt the Latin alphabet but I doubt it will happen. The Cyrillic alphabet is really more Ukrainian than it is Russian. It spread to (what we now call) Russia from Ukraine (i.e. the Kievan Rus).
Bulgaria is in the EU and NATO and they use Cyrillic and are unlikely to switch to Latin anytime soon.
I suppose it's the sort of thing that was easier to achieve before mass literacy.
My understanding is that Serbia has sort of half-Romanized, with most signage appearing in both scripts. I take it that's a matter of the practicalities of the Roman alphabet, as a small state surrounded by neighbors that have adopted it, contending with the patriotic/religious draw of Cyrillic. I wonder if something like that will end up being the path for both Bulgaria and Ukraine. And you can probably expect generational turnover to favor the higher-status Roman alphabet as time passes, but it might take roughly a human lifetime for Cyrillic to fade away.
I think both Ukrainians and Bulgarians learn the Latin alphabet at school because English is a mandatory second language (as it is in most of the world).
It is more of a barrier for the foreigners. My native language is Czech and while I don't really understand Ukrainian, it is not that far off (I understand the basic meaning of simple sentences when spoken clearly and slowly).
I can read Cyrillic but only because I am a mathematician by training (it is basically the same as the Greek alphabet plus some 5 or so extra letters), I never actively learned it. And when I say I can read it, it is the sort of reading that kinds in the first grade do, I read words letter by letter. So while it is extremely easy to learn the characters well enough to decipher words, it is harder to learn it well enough to read fluently (or to write).
If Ukrainian (and to a lesser degree even Russian) were written in the Latin alphabet, it would make it easier for some Slavic language speakers. Basically, the effect of Ukrainians switching to the Latin alphabet would be to make it easier to understand for Poles, Slovaks, Czechs, Slovenes and Croats (who all use the Latin alphabet for their languages) and harder for Serbs, Bulgarians, Belarusians and Russians.
And it would make easier to learn it well for any speakers of languages which use the Latin alphabet. Harder for those who are not fluent in the Latin alphabet.
But the advantages for Ukraine of this would be minor I think and the costs of switching quite high.
"I suppose the argument is that Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia will occupy that role once their values fully converge with the West. Which does seem to be happening -- the young are much closer towards Western/Hollywood values than the old."
But none of these are actually *East Slavic and Eastern Orthodox* countries. So, Ukraine could be a gay East Slavic and Eastern Orthodox democracy, a truly unique creation! :)
Speaking of self-refuting arguments, how is it possible that "English-language transliterations of Ukrainian words consistently look much worse than their Russian equivalents", but "no one can figure out what distinguishes Ukrainians from Russians"?
Could the distinction perhaps be... the language?
You say "tomayto", I say "tomahto", let's call them both different languages?
My answer for the Confederacy is that the people living there did not want to secede. White men were the only people who got to vote so are the only people whose opinions were recorded in bulk, and they were divided on secession (about 60-40). We can safely assume that black people were much more robustly opposed (80-20 at the very least, likely more like 90-10), easily enough to shift the overall majority the other way (assuming that white women's opinions were similar to white men's; polling never shows the sort of 30-point gender gap that would be necessary for this not to be true).
My position is that self-determination is for any group capable of forming an independent state, but that changes to borders or independence should be done on the basis of the "settled will" of the people making that self-determination, so a narrow vote in a one-off referendum should not generally be adequate. If you can consistently win repeated votes narrowly, or you can win a one-off by a large margin and there isn't evidence (e.g. polling) to show that many people have changed their minds during the independence process, then that would be sufficient.
Self-determination, in my worldview, also applies to internal political boundaries. If California wants to split into two states, then that shouldn't be a matter for non-Californians, if part of Oregon wants to join Idaho, then that is a matter only for the people living in that part of Oregon and the people of Idaho (to decide whether to accept them) - the people of Portland do not have the right to insist that they stay in Oregon.
"Settled will" is partly a transaction-costs issue - if it's too easy to change borders, then people will do it all the time, and changing borders is expensive. The quote is from the Scottish Constitutional Convention (of 1994) and was on the idea that establishing a devolved parliament for Scotland was the settled will of the Scottish people; it gets used by both sides of the independence debate there, both unionists saying that a simple referendum won 51-49 would not represent a settled will for independence, and nationalists claiming that there is a settled will even though they lost a referendum 45-55 because they win elections (which certainly shows that the meaning is contested, but so would anything else be; at least it is a standard that both sides have agreed to measure themselves against).
A good counterargument to the claim that Ukraine is not a proper country and should therefore be subsumed by Russia is the observation that as things stand Ukraine is actually better at being a country than Russia - in that it has a significantly better-functioning democracy (as per e.g. the Democracy Index).
Re Crimea: I think we should never forget about people when talking about entities. If (let's say) 58% of Crimeans wanted it to be a part of Russia and 42% wanted it to be a part of Ukraine, there are still 42% who didn't get what they want. Do the desires of 58% outrank those of 42%?Sometimes, yes, other times, unclear. If 58% wanted to join ISIS, it would be a pretty clear "hell no". Russia is not ISIS but a number of activists were disappeared and murdered after the annexation of Crimea, and overall people certainly lost some rights compared to what they had in Ukraine, so it's maybe in the "unclear" territory. At least, unclear until Russia decided to force the issue.
To be fair, though, Crimean living standards also significantly improved post-annexation, no? So, one would have to weigh the loss of human rights with the improvement in living standards.
Do you think that the Sudetenland and Danzig should NOT have been able to join Nazi Germany in 1938-1939?
> Crimean living standards also significantly improved post-annexation, no?
Do we know it? How?
I confess that I didn't do the research, but I'm not even sure what to consider evidence. Subjective opinion-based polls don't work, anything economy-based that uses average figures can miss the increased inequality.
I know tourism was a huge source of income, and cutting off Ukraine hit it hard, while there's no reason to expect tourism from Russia increasing significantly if at all. (Except maybe artificially.)
> Do you think that the Sudetenland and Danzig should NOT have been able to join Nazi Germany in 1938-1939?
Given that Germany already had Nuremberg laws, and was on the eve of Kristallnacht? Yes, unless Czechs' mistreatment of Germans was comparable. And that's just the first thing I could think of, I'm sure there were Gypsies and communists and gays in Sudetenland.
I don't know much about Danzig but since it was a free city, seems like the conditions which could justify joining Nazi Germany should be even narrower (a threat of annexation by Poland and severe mistreatment of Germans in Poland, perhaps).
Just want to comment on " if you agree they have a right to become independent, then they could become independent and then immediately join Russia" - it is exactly the russian official position It says, that on March 17, 2014 Crimea declared independence and immediately asked Russia to become part of it. The same day Putin wrote an act, that recognized independent Crimea. Next day Russia wrote a treaty with Crimea to let their forces be moved on a peninsula. Then on March 21st, Russia accepted the annexation.
That of course was just a bureaucratic game (though some argue that there was a discussion in Russia about the course of action). But anyway the official Russian position is that Crimea became independent, was recognized by Russia as such, as an independent entity it wrote some treaties with Russia, including the request to join, that was approved in a timely manner.
The idea that "nations" are pre-existing categories has proved very problematic in the real world. https://sharpenyouraxe.substack.com/p/nationalism-means-war?s=r
Noone serious is claiming that nations are pre-existing categories.
But if leadership of people from made-up category hate and want to invade my made-up category, then it makes sense to prepare defense and help ones getting attacked right now.
I live in Barcelona. Plenty of Catalan nationalists think that "the Catalan nation" is a pre-existing category. Much of the craziness we have seen here comes from this terrible starting position. On the second point, obviously! States are legal constructs. And of course they have the right to self-defence. Did you click through to the link? It was an argument that NATO was a much more sophisticated approach than the Treaty of Versailles a generation previously.
It sounds like maybe you're reaching the conclusion that myths around nationhood and peoples are just arbitrary grab-bags of ideas that don't really hold water.
If we run with the idea that all groups, no matter how small, have the right to self determination, then all you need to do is make 'defensive weapons' (i.e. javelin missiles, anti-aircraft batteries, personal kevlar vests, firearms) as cheap as possible, and anyone invading anyone else would face the same kind of nightmare Russia faces in Ukraine, 10 times over. This is exactly what Confucius argued for thousands of years ago, and i think this is the right way way for things to be today.
If small countries get bullied, they will choose to join big countries for protection. If the big countries become run by arrogant assholes and start mandating all kinds of ridiculous things (totally hypothetical!) small groups can break off. Where is the problem in that? Without a right to secession, what reason to big countries have not to bully minority groups?
The right objection to "the south seceded" is, So what? they were going to get economically buried by the north eventually _anyhow_. The north could have opened their gates to runaway slaves, and pissed off northerners could go in there on vigilante raids. That might have been less destructive in the long term, as southerns would see Northern innovations like electricity and refrigeration, and then voluntarily come back to the fold, rather than being forced in, and then, surprise surprise, being all pissy about it.
You can't dominate people into dropping bad ideas. The world has been failing to learn this lesson for hundreds of years. When bad ideas are a problem, you need to let people just go off on their own, instead of trying to crush the bad ideas out of them. If america had declared war on the USSR the universities in the west would still be full of marxists claiming that communism would have worked if america had let it, that the gulags were made up, etc.
Real Texans are the people who don’t want to secede, but want all of y’all to secede so that we can keep the American flag, national anthem, and pledge of allegiance. So I suppose we’re a people, though we’re being inundated by refugees from California.
Two matters were left unaddressed.
If everyone in a group wants to secede, they should be able to. (Note that that includes a group of 1.) But 50%+1? Nah.
Imagine Navajo + 0.01% of the richest people seceding despite the 0.01% being against it. Or Alice, Bill Gates and Charlie seceding just to fuck with Bill legally. Or all men in US plus all women in the eastern 70% of states forming the Patriarchic States of Most of America.
What does make sense is using existing representation mechanisms. If Separatistan has its own parliament that can pass local laws according to the laws of Empiregrad, then the Separatistan's parliament can vote to secede from Empiregrad while keeping the legal structure and the material property they already have.
This brings up the second matter: splitting up the stuff.
The only way for a change to be unambiguously good is if everyone involved consents. When ownership is involved, especially land ownership, anyone on Earth can claim being involved.
I don't have a solution, but I believe it should be a combination of
1. Groups forming representations by voting to do so unanimously.
2. Anyone being allowed to leave at any time with everything they own as recognized by the group. This includes smaller groups seceding from larger groups through their representatives deciding to do so.
3. Conflicts over ownership where no consensus ever existed being resolved through realpolitik, possibly with additional international agreements.
Putin consolidated power fighting separatists (like Palpatine, lol) in Chechnya. Ukraine didn't have similar problem at the time, it might be why Ukraine is more democratic than Russia now. If Ukraine repels invasion on her own, Ukraine will likely be less democratic as a result. This invasion might lead to erosion of democracy everywhere.
>I can disagree with Russia’s decision to force the matter with an invasion
Well if Ukraine has a right to assert self-determination militarily against Russia, if Kosovo has the right to assert self determination military against Serbia etc then why can't Crimea/Donbass assert their own self determination militarily with the help of Russia? After all Crimea/Donbass have claimed themselves independent of Ukraine and in response to that Russia stepped in and defended their right to self-determination. So it seems like you're gong to have to accept that Russia implementing Crimea/Donbass' right to self-determination militarily is morally just if you'd like to be consistent.
The problem with neoliberal foreign policy and moral consistency is that they inevitably find themselves in opposition to one another. As you yourself see in this post.
"My opinion is that I’m in favor of the right of self-determination for any region big enough that it’s not inherently ridiculous for them to be their own country."
So, no smaller than Monaco or San Marino? :p My parish is coastal and the motorway runs alongside it rather than through it, meaning we wouldn't be disrupting transport for the rest of Britain *too* much (the railway is another matter). Do we get the right of self-determination, since we could construct a port (really more of a marina) and trade with the rest of the world without needing to continually go through another country?
It wouldn't make sense for us to do so of course, not unless absolutely pushed; there's too many problems with not being part of a currency, customs, and free movement union with our massive neighbour. Which applies to someone declaring their house independent -- all they'd be doing is sentencing themselves to house arrest, since their neighbours have the right to bar them from walking on the street, what with them no longer being a citizen of the country the street belongs to.
The bigger issue is resources. Who gets them? Scotland claims the oil is theirs, but if they have the right to secede so do Orkney and Shetland, and a big big chunk of that oil would cease to be Scotlands. Otoh, this would incentivise the creation of lots of very small states atop vast piles of fuel and minerals, which would be a lot easier to strongarm into giving good deals, so the overall result would probably be the creation of a few thousand millionaires and cheaper commodities. Infrastructure though, that needs to be paid for... if the UK takes on debt to build a railway in Scotland and they leave, who's debt is it?
Both this analysis and Scott's seems to be missing one of the primary reasons that states exist, and should continue to exist. Military might, specifically having enough military power to secure their borders. I think the omission of that fact is because it doesn't fit into the moral framework we would prefer to be true. The very idea of self-determination precludes an outside force from taking their stuff!
Those tiny countries with large resources would be conquered very quickly - as a combination of appealing targets and insufficient strength to repel the attack. Even if no military power was used directly, these places would be colonized and overwhelmed by outsiders trying to get a piece of the resources/wealth for themselves. Does anyone doubt that Taiwan would have been merged with China a long time ago if it had not been for the US intervening?
This doesn't fit into any kind of moral framework, but we can't understand or grapple with international relations and self-determination without accepting the fact that any sufficiently valuable land will be taken away from the inhabitants unless they are strong enough to defend themselves. For that reason, there is a strong incentive for disparate groups to work together and form larger and stronger nations. This is in contention with the desire to parcel out smaller areas and let ethnically or culturally (or name your criteria) homogenous nations that tend to agree on policy and purpose.
The reason that self-determination became a thing to talk about is when extremely divergent and antagonistic nations were jammed together, resulting in social unrest. It became obvious that some groups shouldn't be in the same state, as the gains were outweighed by the losses. We should recognize that self-determination is a practical solution to a problem, not a moral endpoint.
“The Confederacy had every right to secede, because every region that wants to secede has that right - but immediately upon granting them independence, the Union should have invaded in order to stop the atrocity of slavery”
That one would be even more awkward given that there were still 4 slave states that remained loyal to the union. Absent the war there wouldn't have been the same impetus for the emancipation proclamation and rich landowners in those loyal states probably would still have had strong incentive to oppose change.
In that light it's hard to imagine the union invading a foreign country to end slavery... when the union still had slave states.
>(is it meaningful that Crimea wanted to join Russia rather than become independent? I think no; if you agree they have a right to become independent, then they could become independent and then immediately join Russia; everyone agrees independent countries have the right to join other countries if they want)
Once you leave a loophole, everyone will use it. When a country wants to annex a bordering country's province, it'll happen through "self-determination followed by independence followed by joining". This is in fact what formally happened in Crimea; although the referendum called for joining Russia, following the referendum they declared independence, then asked to join Russia literally the next day.
I'll note here that at least for the Sevastopol part of the Crimean referendum (the city of Sevastopol in Crimea had separate governance and a separate referendum for historical reasons), it's ironclad that the referendum was a sham and the results were written in rather than counted. And anyone who understands the easy math point can verify that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Crimean_status_referendum#Official_results):
Total registered voters: 306,258
Total votes 274,101: As percentage of registered voters: 89.500029%.
89.5% of 306,258 is 274,100.91
Yes votes: 262,041. As percentage of total voters: 95.60016%
95.6% of 274,101 is 262,040.556
It's probable that the all-Crimea results were falsified in the same way, just not so carelessly as by starting up with the desired percentage and calculating the number of votes.
Yeah. I think if you wanted to argue that Crimea had the right to secede from Ukraine and join Russia you'd still have to question the way it was done. Invading and then legitimating the invasion with a referendum conducted presumably under duress isn't something people want to condone because you can potentially legitimate any invasion that way. That's different from eg, the Scottish referendum or Brexit because in those situations, there was clear oversight as to what was going on.
If there had been a spontaneous independence movement in Crimea and it had managed to pressure the Ukrainian government to allow a vote on independence then I think people internationally would have taken it seriously. On the other hand, the separatists in Donbas weren't invaders but because they immediately moved to militant opposition and did so while Russia was invading Crimea and also receive clear backing and even guidance from the Russian government, they are not seen as a legitimate independence movement but rather Russian puppets.
OTHER HARD CASES
I. Gerrymandering
Say you have a square of 10,000 sq mi called Square City in the country of Gridistan.
Square City's population is 10m people. 100% of these people want to secede.
How much of the surrounding area does it get to take with it?
If the surrounding area is uninhabited?
If the surrounding area is inhabited at the same density, but with zero support for secession? (If it takes a tenth of the next square over it'd still have 90% support!)
If the surrounding area has pockets of support and opposition, where many different possible new borders could be drawn meeting various conditions by skilled artisans of political boundaries?
How should we resolve adversarial gerrymandering fights, between two simultaneously seceding cities, each side proposing incompatible overlapping boundaries?
Maybe that is all too abstract and unrealistic.
II. Other hard cases (which are merely unfair caricatures of global events):
- Sudan 1 (oppressed minority secedes)
- Sudan 2 (region that controls all the natural resources secedes, improving per capita GDP while impoverishing husk state)
- Sudan 3 (region with a mix of these motives secedes)
- Pakistan (ethnic minority secedes to avoid oppression, calcifying intergroup rivalries, ultimately raising the risk of global thermonuclear war)
- Bangladesh (in a world where Bangladeshi independence was 100% fueled by Indian propaganda as a power play to divide a regional rival)
- US State division movements (eg, half of California, in order to rejoin the US as a separate State)
- US State division (but favoring of the opposite political party that you thought about last time)
- Catalonia (as a tactic to renegotiate its tax obligations)
- Every part of Greece all at once (as a tactic to dissolve sovereign debt)
- A ring around a country's military base to extort the country into paying for access
- An area surrounding leased (military bases) to void those contracts
- An area surrounding national parks to open them up for private development
- Kurdistan (in a world where the Kurds are currently oppressed, but where independence would immediately spark a brutal regional conflict involving competitive retaliatory genocide)
- The Baltics (from evil USSR)
- The bizarro-Baltics (from an alternate reality utopian USSR)
- Transnistria
- Crimea
- Vast stretches of the barely inhabited Australian outback
- Puerto Rico (in a hypothetical future referendum with incredibly low turnout, <30% of eligible voters)
- Unlucky Saskatchewan 2100 (after yearly referendums, voting in favor with a 1/100 fluke after 99 years)
- Finicky Saskatchewan (a year later, suffering buyers' remorse)
- Extremely finicky Saskatchewan (the following year, suffering FOMO)
- All those tiny islands - Pitcairn, Falklands
- Sparsely occupied areas suddenly filled with a religious group or liberatarians
I don't have a simple meta-level framework that decides all those cases in a sensible way. Once we introduce object-level considerations, like with evil USSR and utopia USSR, or the Confederacy and the North, I really struggle to consider anything else. Maybe that's a feature not a bug.
Regions fleeing from oppression good, for some definitions of oppression. Everybody else gets an eyebrow raise.
Totally solved no issues.
For those that are curious: the 17 pre-DLC playable countries in Civ 6 are America, Arabia, Brazil, China, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Greece, India, Japan, Norway, Rome, Russia, Scythia, Spain and Sumer.
So the US gets to invade Canada and Mexico, Brazil takes all of South America and Egypt takes all of Africa. The only continents left with more than one country are Europe and Asia.
I don't know what happens to Australia, I guess we just have to move everyone there to one of the _real_ continents.
Does Civ 6 still have barbarians? ;-)
It does :)
It also has City States, which is going to do weird things if we take it into account for this rule (ie. Brussels gets to be a nation while Belgium does not).
Nations are pretty much always born from war and opposition to an external enemy. Perhaps Russia was not that different from Ukraine once. It's pretty hard to argue now.
And if Putin wanted to control Ukraine he should have kept better control over the mafiosi looting the military.
No. Not really from war.
Nations are both from shared symbols and a collective agreement of consciousness.
Could we get a Voegelinian to comment?
If a massive genocide has been committed against your people in the last several generations by the power that seeks to rule you (or is ruling you), it seems reasonable for that population to seek self-determination if only as a means of self-preservation, no matter how remote a recurrence of said genocide may appear. cf the argument for the existence of Israel.
Scott sort of breezes past the Holodomor (somehow in this piece about Ukrainian self-determination it is mentioned only in the LSE quote), but this was killing on a scale almost unparalleled across the last few centuries. If you don't believe me - check out the first graph here: https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional/insights/market-insights/eye-on-the-market/surveying-the-damage/
And so it goes without saying that the descendants of the survivors of the Holodomor would have a right to self-determination in reaction to what was perpetrated on their ancestors.
I mean, if we're reaching back into history for the Kievan Rus, the Rus were originally Vikings, so Sweden has a claim on Russia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians
Give Russia back to the Swedes! Let's all get behind this campaign of re-integration!
Few considerations:
- Change of status quo - Any major change in boundaries do not just impact the people living in that particular region, but also people of the whole nation. If a nation has invested a great deal in a particular region, and suddenly that region wants to secede once they reach a certain stage of development, then what will be the incentive for a nation state to invest in a lesser developed region unless they have a certain guarantee that the region will continue to be part of the nation.
- How we define people - Is it a substantial percentage, a simple majority, or an overwhelming majority that defines people. Is it only people who have been citizens since many generations, as what if there has been a large immigrant population that comes to a region from a different nation, should they have the right to change the destiny of the region.
- How we define willingness to self-determine - Suppose 60% of people prefer independence but are otherwise okay being part of the bigger nation, whereas 40% people strongly want to be part of the bigger nation, as they feel threatened about their rights in the new independent nation.
- Decentralisation - Whether a nation has a highly centralised state where regions do not have any freedom versus a case where regions have substantial freedoms and autonomy. Regional autonomy makes the case for secession weaker as it is anyway closer to sovereignity (absolute sovereignity is a myth even at global level).
- Incorporation - On what terms was the region incorporated into the bigger nation. Was it through popular support, or through force. And once you incorporate in a nation, there can be terms which will have to be mutually followed failing which the region can make a case for secession.
I don't think there can be absolute factors that can determine the case for self-determination. When we talk of democracy, it isn't just about a permanent irreversible majoritarian vote which can do anything, but about several other parameters. The very big changes require a higher criteria for change.
Part 3 sounds like the worldbuilding from the book Infomocracy by Malka Ann Older.
Whatever UN treaties says about self determination that's not actually the global post cold war norm. In reality it is a pragmatic decision to favor freezing current borders permanently. The rational being that any benefits of 'better' borders is trumped by the massive downsides of a world where countries regularly try to conquer their neighbors. Kosovo is certainly an outlier in this regard.
I'd argue that states have not just the right, but the duty to prevent secession and annexation. Statehood is a contract in which the state agrees to provide its citizens with certain privileges, like security, in exchange for certain services, like paying taxes and being on juries. If a bunch of citizens suddenly find themselves living on foreign soil due to changing borders, the state can no longer hold up its end of the bargain for those citizens.
In the case of annexation, obviously the state has to try to prevent it, since that's pretty much the definition of providing security. But I'd argue that even in the case of secession, the state has to fight for the sake of citizens living in separatist regions who still want to be part of the state. Even if they're a minority -- even if there's only one person -- the state has to try to fulfill the contract or it loses legitimacy. (It's tempting to say that the state should fight against secession even if *everybody* in the region wants it in order to maximally provide for the loyal regions, but that's a slightly different argument and I'm not prepared to go full realist yet.)
Note that this *does* allow for peaceful/diplomatic land exchanges. The state can sign away a piece of land as long as the treaty or whatever has some way for its citizens to access what they're owed, e.g. through resettlement or some kind of shared jurisdiction. It just means that military land seizures have to be resisted.
"Statehood is a contract in which the state agrees to provide its citizens with certain privileges, like security, in exchange for certain services,"
I would think this was a self-serving post-hoc rationalization with obvious contradictions were it not for the fact that this is explicitly how all states have come into being in the history of eternity.
You left out the Catalonian independence vote which won by >90%(!!!) in 2017
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Catalan_independence_referendum#:~:text=The%20referendum%20question%2C%20which%20voters,on%20a%20turnout%20of%2043.03%25.
Well, gosh. If anything is making me fire up "A Nation Once Again", it's that Russian tweet. I've never played those Civilization games but looking it up, we're not in Civilization I-V but we are in VI, so what side do we come down on?
https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Irish
Hmmm. Large (former) empire to the east which formerly owned you is hanging on to part of your national territory and claiming you were never distinct from them anyway, you're just like them, and they've taken opportunities over the years to hint very strongly that you should move back home, as it were. However, back when they did own you, they did *not* treat you as 'just like us'.
Now why is that sounding familiar to me? 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88-qgHh31bw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLOncT2FcYU
EDIT: Also, if we're talking about rights to secede and 'what makes you different, you look the same, you speak the same language", let me slip in this quote from a Sherlock Holmes story published in 1892:
“Then I trust that you at least will honour me with your company,” said Sherlock Holmes. “It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.”
Come on, America, drop this whole 'revolution' silliness and rejoin the Commonwealth with your colonial siblings! I'm sure Canada would be very happy to welcome you in!
> I've never played those Civilization games but looking it up, we're not in Civilization I-V but we are in VI?
You actually aren't, as far as I know. The Irish are in Call to Power (which is an off-brand civilization clone), but not in any of the main games.
The link you provided looks like it's some kind of weird stub page that I think someone forgot to update after VI came out. This page has a table with which civilizations are in which games:
https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Civilizations
So we're not in Civilization, which according to this guy means we should be "put out of our misery". I suppose that means having Putin roll in and take us over?
I guess the cheap way out would be to re-skin Putin as Cromwell?
Change the name and picture, keep the stats?
I think you’re doing something akin to looking past the sale on this. Would Russia attack Ukraine if Ukraine were, in fact, a part of Russia and subject to its command? Would Russia need to send in the troops if the two entities were in fact one country? If the federal government wants Iowa to do something, it passes a law, or a regulation, and enforces it, or gets the courts to enforce it. It doesn’t bomb Des Moines and send the Marines across the river from Illinois to shoot up Bettendorf and Davenport. Conversely, if Iowa declared itself independent from the US, Biden might send in the military, if he could remember what day it is and where he left the army. But in the end, you only send your tanks into, and fire your rockets into, another country that is … another country you want to defeat, punish and/or take over. You don’t invade yourself. The invasion, absent Ukraine declaring unilateral independence, is de facto proof that Ukraine is a separate country. Bonus argument: The 3-4 million UKEs who starved to death when Stalin forcibly collectivized agriculture is all the justification Ukraine needs to be left alone by the pesky Russians.
"Realistically “people” (like “obscenity” and everything else) are a kind of know-it-when-you-see-it combination of all these factors. I hate this. It means any would-be conqueror can say “come on, this place I want to conquer isn’t a real ‘people’” - and then you need to litigate annoying questions"
No you don't! This is why we have norms!
I heard Mike Munger relate a parable that is useful here...
Imagine a town where, when two cars reach an intersection, the occupants get out to debate and decide who gets to go first. This might lead to more just outcomes in some sense (the couple heading the hospital to give birth get to go before the guy heading to the coffee shop) but it's clearly sub-optimal for everyone to litigate every single case. Everyone would get to their destination faster by relying on norms, even when those norms violate some concept of justice.
Over the last century or two, pretty strong norms have emerged against one country annexing another, especially by force. Russia is violating that norm in a big way. They *might* be able to construct some sort of justification for it. Doesn't matter. That way lies madness.
I love A.C.T. I love to watch how a bunch of (I think mostly) liberal, apparently educated, earnest, and (mostly) rational people read what Scott lays down and then have full discussions as much as the media allows on that subject. A group of at least bright people having a nearly always civil discussion on topics that are relevant or interesting.
But this one looks like it’s showing the educational biases of the readership. I have a very different outlook than most of the readership here, but think I can contribute here at least as far as suggesting source material that helps answer the question of ‘who gets self-determination?’.
I’m surprised more poli-sci majors didn’t jump in earlier. Or maybe that’s a very small subset of Scott’s readership. I’ve only got through about 10% of the comments, so at the risk of arrogantly assuming no one has already made my suggestions, here are some reading suggestions to fill out your comprehension on what can and will determine who gets self determination if not just who should.
Sam Huntington established a reputation for seeing a problem and paradigm (and paradigm shift) before anyone else, publishing a book on it, getting pilloried for it, and then everyone declaring him right for it ten to twenty years later. His ‘Clash of Civilizations and the remaking of the world order’ (I think that’s the title) is the work predicting this particular conflict in most of its’ particulars. Excellent work.
Philip Bobbit’s, ‘The Shield of Achilles’ is an astoundingly good work in which he explains the rise of the state, what creates their legitimacy, how the earn and keep it, and how one form of legitimacy gives way to another. Bobbit uses the interplay of strategy and constitutions to explain why states make it, rise, fall, suffer civil wars, have epochal wars, invade their neighbors, change strategies, and gives you a better, deep history of the past 500 years than almost anyone else. Oh yeah and he basically predicts September 11th, 2001 and the response to it before it happened all with what I’d call a much more mature and thought out, realistic version of Hegel’s dialectic than anyone who has applied the concept of evolution to a state has yet achieved. Fantastic work. Changed my life.
Really those two would do most of the work. But for fun and useful fillers, I’d also suggest David S Landes ‘The Weath and Poverty of Nation: Why some are so Rich and some so Poor.’ And James Scott’s, ‘seeing like state’, ‘against the grain’ and, ‘the art of not being governed’.
I WILL read to the end of the comments at a later time. I haven’t had the time to do so yet, I’m a deputy sheriff and work 70-80 hours a week. 40 hours of that is currently the midnight shift in the cleanest midwestern jail that ever existed, so I’ll catch up then. The other 30 to 40 hours for the next few days I’ll have no time, but I’ll try to check in.
I’m going to try to read to the end and then perhaps post a comment on this subject at the end. I’m sorry it might be a few days though. However, in the meantime, how many of you would be willing to use violence to get/keep a state? Or your own sovereign country? I swim everyday in a very different pool than most of you, so I’m curious to know how many of Scott’s readers would be willing to die for their beliefs. (Scott too if you read this) also for what else?
At the risk of not really derailing the point of the conversation, a sovereign state does need people willing to die for it, so what would you do it for? I’ll try to expand on the necessity of it, why it’s relevant not only for the question of Ukrainian sovereignty, but also for our political/constitutional order here, and believe it or not, the Rawlsian tie in if I can.
Hope some of this is useful. Happy reading!
I enjoyed this comment. I will read some reviews of the Bobbitt book and weigh reading the book itself.
Also, it's nice to see someone from an underrepresented career. If you were to post more about what you know about your prisoners in an open thread, I think it could be eye-opening.
Some suggestions: If you know a prisoner is charged with assault, can you guess whether it was premeditated or not based on their demeanor? How well do they weigh the risk of getting caught against the reward (whatever it may be) of various crimes? Have you held mock presidential elections, like schools hold? If you ask them to design a society 'that keeps people like you out of jail,' what sorts of suggestions do you get? Could they form the working class of a new Australia, or do they seem too different from 19th-century British convicts?
Thanks! When I get a chance, I'm going to try to answer your questions. With this preview first; You will have the delight in having your actual expectations overturned. Your questions tell me you don't know a lot of inmates/prisoners (probably a good thing) buuuut you probably aren't using a good mental model of how or why people commit crimes. Or for the most part, why they get caught and get prosecuted.
I'd reply now, but I'm knee deep in helping resolve yet another temporary staffing mini-crisis that we suffer currently. As you can imagine, it's VERY difficult to enough people to become cops right now, who are actually qualified to do the job, and keep them in your organization.
I'll probably write this thing in word and then email it to you. I'm happy to answer anything, it's just cramming it into my schedule that will slow me down. Having actually made a commitment though, you WILL receive it. Farewell for now and thank you again! It will be nice to have a small writing project.
This comment (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/birth-order-effects-nature-vs-nurture/comment/6878858?s=r), and my response to it, reminded me of you. I wonder if you've ever asked your inmates what effect their older siblings seem to have had on them.
"A language", goes the wise old saying, "is a dialect with a successful army." It is why the language of Paris is now "French" and Norman, Savoyard, and so many others are just dialects. The current semi-stalemate suggests that both Russian and Ukrainian are now languages.
Reading the comment from Karlin's blog brings me back to 1914. Who was a nation (and what that entitled you to) was a big question. Prior to World War I, many Serbs believed that all the South Slavs were actually Serbs--who would realize it with proper education. The assassins of Archduke Francis Ferdinand (not so covertly backed by elements of the Serbian government) wanted to free the southern Slavs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to join with their brethren. The Russian Empire, meanwhile, saw itself as Big Brother to Little Brother Serbia and backed the Serbian government in its refusal to be punished by Austria-Hungary for its part in the assassination. Everyone mobilized, and once you'd mobilized, you didn't want to be caught by your opponent going first, so WW I.
What Serbian nationalists considered Greater Serbia now constitutes parts of 11 countries--Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Albania, Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary--and all of the present country of Serbia.
Anatoly Karlin has previously written that he considers Montenegro at least to be a fake and gay country.
I'm not sure if I have much to add that isn't common knowledge - especially to any Ukrainian nationalists in this group, but as a US citizen that spent 2 years living in 3 different regions of Ukraine a couple decades ago, I feel like I have some perspective. It was totally my experience that regions further South and East in Ukraine were both ethnically and culturally aligned with both Russia and Ukraine. Regions to the West were very Ukrainian nationalistic, to the point that you would offend people by speaking Russian with them (I could usually understand Ukrainian, but I trained in Russian - though I learned to adopt some of the speech patterns used by seemingly all Ukrainians -e.g. using a soft 'h' sound instead of a 'g' sound).
Whether speaking in Russian or in English, I've found in interesting that we (particularly older people) speak of 'the Ukraine'. In Russian you would say 'on' Ukraine, rather than 'in' Ukraine. I believe that the name Ukraine has the same roots as the word for border or edge. So we say 'the border' when we talk about Ukraine. The border of what? Little linguistic things like this reinforce the conceptual idea that Ukraine is part of something else - that something else being centralized in Russia.
It was also my experience that many of my friends and distant family from the U.S. (again especially older people) assumed a) that I was living in a part of Russia, known as the Ukraine - probably strongly influenced by Soviet-Era memories and b) that it must be cold everywhere in Ukraine all of the time - I spent a lot of my time around Odessa, which I can tell you, is nothing like the Siberian image many people form when they imagine 'greater Russia'.
While in Ukraine, I learned about the horrendous enforced famines during Stalin's time. I have since remained convinced that cultural and ethnic Ukrainians have every reason to desire independence, free from despotic governments to the East.
One of my childhood memories is of playing "Risk" and finding it odd that there was a territory called "Ukraine", when all other references that I'd come across called it "the Ukraine".
There's a persistent movement in Oregon for a lot of the rural, eastern counties to leave the state and join up with Idaho to make a "Greater Idaho". Personally, I (who lives in Portland) think this is a fantastic idea and have a lot of trouble coming with arguments against allowing states to reform themselves as they see fit, assuming the affected peoples are willing.
If anyone has some convincing arguments otherwise, I'd like to hear them, but my suspicion is that every argument is politically motivated (e.g. they can't leave because it would cost a blue state electoral votes/house seats, etc).
I'll bite. In reverse order (I don't have anything to add with 1):
5) We, as successors to the Northern US, claim the right to invade The South for those political reasons mentioned (destroying slavery, as was supposed to have been complete sixty or so years before the Civil War) and because they opened fire first on the Star of the West at what became the Battle of Fort Sumter.
4) We can tend to the question of Crimea after the current invasion is over, through peaceful political means, after Putin's influence is sufficiently flushed from the area. We can also deny Putin's right to conquer Crimea by simply stating, "Fuck terrorists."
3) Your street *does* have a right to self-determination. Any entity that is large enough to survive on its own can claim that. Your street also has that right by way of representation through your local and state governments.
I would steer away from claiming that any entity large enough to survive on its own long enough for the ink to dry on a new compact that absorbs it into another entity holds the right of self-determination. It gets messy and leads to constant squabbling, and no one wants to be bogged down by "what do a sizable enough swath of the citizens of Bakers Street want this week". How much one can get others to care about their cause is maybe the most important ingredient of self-determination.
2) A people is a people if they say they're a people and can convince enough members of outgroups to say as much.
Just to point out that independence referenda often do post "implausibly enthusiastic" results:
- Gibraltar was 99% against Britain sharing sovereignty with Spain.
- The Falkland Islands voted 99.8% to retain their current status.
- Catalonia voted 92% in favour of independence (albeit this one in a contested plebiscite).
- Bougainville voted 98% for independence from PNG.
This doesn't mean that we should necessarily trust the Crimean result more, but just that big wins alone here don't carry the usual signal of tampered results.
Great oceans, common roots and characteristics. Is the western hemisphere the territory of one people? What stands in the way other than lack of a consciousness of being such?
https://theweek.com/politics/1005146/the-us-has-more-in-common-with-south-america-than-europe
Good overview which illuminates some of the ethical and practical messiness.
Random thought:
Any region large enough to make a reasonable country has an implied right of self-determination BUT NOT when the principal motivating factor is denial of human rights to a minority.
Russians don't actually appear to believe that "Ukrainian is not a real language." We know this because "making Russian an official language of Ukraine" is a point of negotiation for them.
But if Ukrainian isn't a real language, then Russian is already the official language of Ukraine!!
You can be unhappy about a legal distinction even if you see it as a difference of dialects rather than languages.
For an example that illustrates the "Ukrainian is not a real language" position, imagine that Alabama declared "Southern American English" to be its official language. This might be a nonsense position. But you are still likely to be upset about it if it means that children are only taught spelling rules along the lines of "tawk" and "bidness", or grammar rules that say the pronouns are "Ah" and "Y'all".
Also, even if a Southern accent isn't its own language, it's not something that you can just start speaking, so it would be unfair if people who couldn't do it got paid at lower rates.
I think that there is more of a difference between Russian and Ukrainian than that. But certainly (Edit: or maybe not certainly??) it *started out* as a regional dialect before the Russian language got standardized; Ukrainian nationalism was then one of the driving forces to give the Ukrainian language its own identity, in ways that originally resembled the Southern accent example I give above. It's hard to find unbiased opinions about how much this succeeded.
Yes, clearly a different language. Probably linguistically [meant to write lexically] closer to Polish.
"Due to heavy borrowings from Polish, German, Czech and Latin, early modern vernacular Ukrainian (prosta mova, "simple speech") had more lexical similarity with West Slavic languages than with Russian or Church Slavonic. By the mid-17th century, the linguistic divergence between the Ukrainian and Russian languages had become so significant that there was a need for translators during negotiations for the Treaty of Pereyaslav, between Bohdan Khmelnytsky, head of the Zaporozhian Host, and the Russian state."
It's still linguistically closer to Russian. A set of vocabulary does not a language make, and Polish et al. split off from Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian earlier than the three did from each other. That said, they are different languages due to their phonological and grammatical differences.
Polish did NOT "split off from" Russian.
Read it again.
The linguistic argument I've heard from the other side goes as follows: fairly late in history (around the mid-18th century, when people are beginning to write books encoding Russian grammar) there is a continuum of dialects on the way from Moscow to Kiev.* So there couldn't have been a distinct language at the time.
I'm not a linguist myself, so I feel some amount of helplessness about competing hypotheses, but I'd like to hear your take on it. Is the claim about a continuum of dialects just false? Or is it correct, but irrelevant? Or something more complicated?
*As a side note, I don't see what's so bad about "Kyiv" as a spelling, but while we're at it, can we have "Moskva"?
Assuming we're talking about the same thing, speaking as a former linguist, a few decades ago our name for that language was "Maltese Arabic". I actually did some research on it as an undergraduate. It is a weird and interesting language, but quite definitely Arabic in basic structure. Much like how, even though English has a lot of French-Latin and Latin-Latin vocabulary, it's at its core a Germanic language (Low-low-low German).
I use Kyiv because Ukrainians asked us to use Kyiv. If the Russians asked us to use Moskva, I'd use it, but they didn't, so I'm not.
In a sense, there's a continuum of dialects stretching from Swiss German, to Standard German, to Dutch, to English. And we don't hesitate to call those "different languages". The relevant catchphrase in linguistics is "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy", and that's a joke not just about the arbitrariness of categories, but also about the political pressure to put different labels onto what are scientifically identical phenomena.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum
See also, China, where a lot of what are linguistically-speaking separate languages, are politically referred to as dialects of a single language. They do share a fascinating writing system. And my understanding is that because of that writing system, and because of recurring imperial pressure, there's been drift toward similar grammar and a sharing of basic vocabulary, but the substrates remain fairly distinct. Probably someone at the Language Log blog could answer detailed questions about Chinese.
"For an example that illustrates the "Ukrainian is not a real language" position, imagine that Alabama declared "Southern American English" to be its official language."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English
So what about AAVE or Ebonics? Heavily influenced by Southern American English as spoken by the white inhabitants, even if it takes influences from African languages.
I see a section of people scolding online that white people should not use terms like "bae" because they are culturally appropriating or stealing African-Americans' language or the likes.
"However, a minority of linguists argue that the vernacular shares so many characteristics with African creole languages spoken around the world that it could have originated as its own English-based creole or semi-creole language, distinct from the English language, before undergoing a process of decreolization"
From the "what's the difference between Russian and Ukrainian?" argument, there's the counter-example (or joke) about "Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries", which sounds not very different from "Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk"
There was a joke in Poland in the 60s, 70s, and 80s: Kid asks his parent, are the Russians are brothers or are friends. Parent response: they must be are brothers, because you can choose your friends.
Could be making the rounds in Ukraine today.
what if x% of "the people" want independence and the rest don't ?
if 99 of the 100 people in your street want to secede and one person doesn't
An important part of the confederacy example is that secession would have failed a referendum in nearly every Southern State *if* all adults (or all males) could vote. There were few states where secession enjoyed support of the vast majority of white people, and most of the states that seceded pre-Sumter were >40% slaves!
In the 1960s and '70s there was a mini-movement among progressives to have New York City secede from New York State. The complaint was that conservative and Republican upstaters were blocking progressive actions that non-conservative non-Republican city residents wanted and needed to take. Besides, city people were different; the others were basically hicks.
Of course, the movement went nowhere, partly because another group of progressives thought what was necessary was not more "fragmentation" but a "regional approach" encompassing the entire Tri-State Area. A new state of Greater New York would cut loose far upstate but include southwestern Connecticut and northern New Jersey. Optimally, southern New Jersey would become part of a Greater Philadelphia.
Over here in the Pacific Northwest, there's the evergreen notion of Cascadia. My preferred tongue-in-cheek version is of Inner Cascadia, consisting of the verdant, west-of-the-Cascades bits of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, and Outer Cascadia, pushing out to the watersheds of all the rivers, basically to the Rockies, which would be our lebensraum. We'd exert some sort of cultural dominion over it, adjusting for how the Nazis valued having lots of children, while we Inner Cascadians don't so much. Probably it would be more along the lines of "cultural genocide", taking their children from them and inculcating them with our values through some form of compulsory education combined with media saturation...
Lebensraum? You'll need some place to run to when the big tsunami hits. I some times think that if the west coast was "discovered" today, the American and Canadian governments would declare it unacceptably dangerous and turn the whole place into a nature preserve.
This is not exactly tongue in cheek, this is what Seattleites actually want to do to the groups that make their "excellent" Washington Wine and effectively their entire real economy. The new progressive zeitgeist up there is decidedly feudal, as opposed to the older union-democrat-low-tax utopia it was in 1998.
I personally support the idea that any group united by territory has a right to self-determination. The current problem that I see with it is existence of authoritarian regimes: if democratic countries allowed its regions to secede, then, I assume, they would become militarily weaker than autocratic countries that would never allow this. So I think that when/if all the major world powers liberalise (including China, Russia, etc) and stop being aggressive, then it would be the point when it would be safe to allow all the minor regions to secede en masse.
Another point that was raised a lot in the comments is who gets all the oil and other minerals when secession occurs. It reminds me of the comments on the Georgism posts, where people asked, why should it be applied on the country scale rather than the world scale? Well, in combining an answer to both those questions, I can formulate my utopian vision: any region has a right to secede, and money received from natural resources are distributed as UBI among all the peoples of all the countries who signed up the allow-seceding-and-embrace-georgism deal (including all the resulting parts of the country which was thus split apart).
A "people". I think Vonnegut's concept of granfalloon probably nails it. You can google it.
As Msgr. Baroni would suggest as important questions: who am I? And who are we?
The question involves commitments to democracy, due process, non-violence and pluralism.
And while we search for our karrass, our necessary granfalloons (the temporary salve to alienation) must be as benign as possible.
On February 21, 2022, I wrote the following:
"If people in Donetsk and Luhansk really don't want to be part of Ukraine, how do we handle that? And is peace better than war? Generally speaking don't we have to say: yes?
If Texas wants to leave US, I am inclined to let them.
I'm up for letting Tibetans and Uighurs in China and Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Iran vote, too. Maybe Kalingrad/Königsberg, Taiwan, and Hong Kong want to be independent. Let Scotland and Quebec decide for themselves?
What mechanisms of pluralism and due process do we have to peacefully and justly organize the granfalloon of the nation state?
Maybe all borders should be peacefully up for grabs every 30 years?
I am even inclined to believe that an AI might do a better job organizing geographic units of political organization.
Smaller states really don't need militaries either.
And if smaller states want to organize in larger confederations like EU or US, ok. Maybe NAFTA would have worked better if the individual states and territories of Canada and Mexico could have joined the US?"
The case of the Falkland Islands is also interesting. Great Britain took them in 1833 illegaly, by expeling the Argentines who lived there at the time, but (all?) those who live there today wish to remain British. What should be honored? Their restoration to Argentina becuase the Island was taken by what can be described as theft? or to honor the wishes of the descendants of the thieves and keep it British?
(BTW, I tend to think that the Islanders wishes is more important, but I can see how this would make Argentineans upset)
The status of the Falklands is controversial, but this is a pretty bad-faith summary of the history and situation.
The LSE article doesn't go into the details of what was happening in Crimea before the "for-the-next-120-years" bit. But in practice I think that Russia's 1783 annexation of Crimea was way more justified than the 2014 one, even if no self-determination was involved at all: as a political entity, the Crimean Khanate was basically a 300-year operation of kidnapping Russian villagers into Ottoman slavery.
I feel like neither side really wants to remember this history. Putin doesn't, because he wants to say that Crimea was 100% Russian all along; his opposition doesn't, because it doesn't put Crimea's non-Russian history in a good light.
There is really no discernable consistency to the US approach. Kosovo wants independence from Serbia? Great, we support that! Serbian enclaves in Kosovo want to break away and join Serbia? No way man!
The idea is, I think, that a people shouldn't have to justify it self in front of the world if they want to secede from a country. Just as we shouldn't legally force someone to justify him/herself if they want to end their marriage.
Overall I agree with this argument, but I think when we are doing it we are surreptitiously making an analogy between the rights of a people and the rights of an individual person. The problem is that this analogy breaks down easily, for example, because individuals within a group may want to use their rights in conflicting ways.
In the Crimea example, even if the Russian speaking majority wanted to secede Ukraine and join Russia, does that give them the right to force the Ukrainian minority to do so? When we talk about the right to self-determination of the people of Crimea we are sweeping that conflict under the rug.
Here is a good rule to follow: Every region and every city in the world should have the right to self-determination, except when such desire for "self-determination" is actually just a smokescreen for a neighbouring imperialism.
So:
Yes to the independence of:
- Kurds
- Chechens
- Basques
- Quebecois
- Catalans
No to the independence of:
- Sudetenland (German nazi imperialism)
- Donbas, South Ossetia, Crimean (Russian imperialism)
- Bosnian Serbs or Kraina Serbs (Serb imperialism)
- Kosovo (Albanian imperialism)
Yes to the independence of Texas from the United States *now*.
No to the independence of Texas from Mexico back in the 19th century (American imperialism)
In practice the two things are usually not hard to distinguish at all. "We want to control our own destiny" vs "We want the motherland to grow as big as possible, incidentally including us" tend to be two very different moods and attitudes: isolationist vs imperialist.
The people in Crimea currently have even *less* self-determination than they did before. They can't even elect their own regional governor after all. Even speaking in favour of secession from Russia is a 5-years-in-jail crime.
Similarly, Nazi Germany was all in favour of German populations in *other* nations seceding (Sudetenland), but obviously it wasn't supportive of the right of anyone to secede from its own empire.
It's too bad Crimea didn't have a realistic option of "we want to be Russian, but we don't want to be part of *Putin's* Russia". (Though who knows if they would have taken it.)
Ah, the old "we'll make the world be as you wish it, as long as you kill yourself first" ploy?
This article brushed on, but didn't explicitly state, the pure utilitarian form of determining the right to statehood: that a group of people has the right to become a state if this would increase overall well-being. (And this comes with all of the potential problems of utilitarianism, of course.)
One could even assign a high "well-being value" to "if people *want* to be a sovereign nation, it's good that they *are* a sovereign nation", and then you arrive at something really close to Scott's "people should be allowed to secede whenever they want to", but filter out, say, an evil secret society populating an island and wanting to become a state in order to build nukes and destroy the world, since that would be net-negative.
I'm not sure this is the best way to define the right to statehood, but it seems to be _at least_ as good as:
> But to what end? Do we really need another mediocre Slavic country?
> [...]
> Where a state departs from this, it should be to realize some kind of interesting, cool, and distinct concept.
This is optimizing for diversity of government styles, which would be very interesting in a game and disastrous in real life. Intuitively, the large majority of state-space is probably terrible to live in. Also, in what sense is Ucrain "mediocre"? Would this person be dissatisfied with their microwave oven because it's just like most other people's microwave ovens? Or glad about it, because that means it works?
Anyway, changing the subject:
> (should the Union have invaded Brazil too, for the same reason?)
Brazilian here: yes. Yes it should have. Brazil was the last american country to abolish slavery, and both we and the world are so much worse for it.
Is the "Ukraine Led By Tymoshenko" custom mod by RawSasquatch/Kramer, Chrisy15 and TarcisioCM not good enough for Vladimir Putin?
Then the obvious solution is for MicroProse to release an official expansion of Civilization that makes Ukraine a playable country.
It strikes me as strange that international recognition of Ukraine, especially by Russia, wasn't addressed as a potentially decisive factor. Maybe it's not relevant to the question in this case, but that's an argument that should be made explicitly.
From my perspective, people can disagree about nationhood, but Ukraine is unambiguously its own state. Russia lost the right to send in troops (even from its own perspective) when it recognized Ukraine. Russia has no casus belli to justify invasion of an independent state, so the international community (or at least the parts that recognize Ukraine) should condemn the invasion. Is there an important unanswered question, beyond that?
A possible counterargument to point IV: A caveat in support for large bodies of people being able to arbitrarily self-determine while coherently denying Russia the right to annex Crimea could be that while the majority does want to join, the subtantial minority that do not suffer badly, probably more per individual than what is gained by those in favour. This could be thought of as a 'transaction cost' but it could also be viewed more fundamentally = these people have just as much right to self-determination as anyone else, so maybe instead of a mere majority, or even supermajority being needed for legitimate seccession, there needs to be an absence of any large group of people whose own interest and wills would be violated by it.
I think it’s more productive to view the moral problem from a different angle: not whether a group has a right to secede, but whether an aggressor has a right to make war. Whether Ukraine has a right to independence or no, the fact is that they were independent and Putin declared war on them. Whether starting this war was just is the more salient question: after all, a thief may take property from me that is by rights mine, but if I respond by cutting out his tongue most people would consider me in the wrong regardless.
The Catholics are just about the only ones I know who have a cut and dried system for determining whether a war is just or not. According to Dr. Feser the current guidelines are as follows:
At one and the same time:
- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
- there must be serious prospects of success;
- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
Russia clearly fails to meet requirements 1, 2, and 4. Ukraine was agressing nobody, and potentially joining NATO someday is not “lasting, grave, or certain” harm to Russia. Russia has not exhausted non-violent options, and the death and destruction caused by the war seems far graver than what would have happened without it. Ukraine, in contrast, does arguably meet the requirements to justly fight back. The only ones in question for them are 3 and 4, though 3 was much more in question at the start of the war than today.
The thing we want to stop is unjust wars, so focusing on when war is justified overall is more important then whether a country has a right to self determination. That can be part of the calculus, but it’s not the whole.
There is a secondary question that also must be considered:
Is there a universally right of free movement? Should anyone be able to move anywhere? (I think so.)
Free movement would probably reduce poverty more than any other program.
But we could start with Kant's examination.
Well, this is the problem when you imagine everything in life, or social life, can be litigated by words, and decided by cool principle -- and then, even more implausibly, that everyone can or would go along with this.
A "people" is -- whoever decides they are. A "country" is -- whatever people decide they are *and* have the grit and strength to defy any attempts to prove the contrary.
Id est, the South proved it was *not* a country becauase they failed to win the Civil War. The Ukrainians I would say are in the process of proving they *are* a country, because they're kicking Russian ass (and not just, or perhaps not even primarily, militarily).
Of course this all sounds icky to people who freak out at the thought of violence, at least direct physical violence, but it actually has a deeply ethical central core, which is that matters of social identity are to be decided by the people concerned themselves, and not by anyone else, and certainly not by any rickety contraption of an intellectual algorithm invented by lawyers. Matters of family and tribe, of social identity, are deeply emotional, and quite often people don't even know themselves how they feel about it until it's put to the test[1]. Where violence, or the possibility of violence, comes in is that this is the ultimate and only pure test of (how many people feel this way) x (their intensity of feeling), which are the key metrics.
We certainly can and should try to resolve these question without people actually being killed, the way animals prove to each other who *would* win a fight without actually fighting, through displays and whatnot. Arguably this is already part of the reason for patriotic displays, cheering Your Guys on at the Olympics or World Cup, national holidays with big marches showing off your military might. Either this signaling didn't go right in the Russian-Ukrianian case, or else feelings are too closely matched for at least the Russian side to clearly see the outcome that is now unfolding.
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[1] One would guess that not a few Ukrainians only realized how they felt about their Ukrainian identity when the Russian shells started falling.
"Just from the standpoint of not wanting to ever see the cringe term “Kyiv” again one should avoid supporting the Ukrainians."
Hear, hear! And while we're at it, revert the name change of New York to New Amsterdam. "New York, New York" - how cringe!
Nieuw Amsterdam, concrete bungle where dreams are made up!
We have the renamed city song already!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfK1_FBTMtA
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
http://www.i18nguy.com/twain.html
I think the main reason why people are supportive of Ukrainian independence and would be opposed to eg Texan independence is because Ukraine is already independent and Texas is not. Russia is being forced to overthrow an established 30 year old government to integrate Ukraine into Russia. If Texas were to attempt to secede, the Union government would not have to do that. If, in some alternate world, Texas were to achieve independence and remain so for 30 years and then the US attempted to forcibly integrate it on the basis of shared history and culture, then the world would likely be opposed to that. So, yeah, we don't have to answer the question of Ukrainian nationhood to answer the question of whether Russia is justified here. Even if Ukrainians 100% self identified as ethnic Russians, Russia would still be in the wrong.
That said, the reason people keep falling back to the Ukrainian nationhood question is because Ukrainian identity has been a genuine issue for so long. There is a long history of Ukrainians attempting to assert an identity separate from Russia and of Russians attempting to suppress that identity. Ukraine and Russia have a lot of shared history and a similar culture, but there is also a lot of conflict between them up to and including genuine atrocities. The conflict surrounding Ukrainian identity helps to create and reinforce that same identity and also serves as one of the motives that many Ukrainians have for wanting to have a separate state. So even if Ukrainian nationhood isn't want gives Ukraine the right to having a separate state, it's definitely part of what makes many of them want a separate state.
Yeah that "shared culture" argument reminded me unpleasantly of slave-owner arguments pre 1861 that their slaves didn't really *want* to be free, on account of how much they "shared" in the culture of the slave-owning family. Why, Mammy is almost like my own daughter, she's eaten in my kitchen, we've cried together over the troops ruining the crops marching through them, I've given her my very own leftover hardly worn clothes to wear! (And the master gave Mammy's 16-year-old daughter her very own half-white baby, but we don't talk so much about that.)
Those people were in some cases deeply shocked to learn how much they were hated. I wouldn't be surprised if some Russians were deeply shocked to learn how much *they* were hated, despite this "shared history."
Pretty decent writeup, except for the part where the present nation of Ukraine is made of up a whole lot of Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Jews and Russians - not just linguistically but ethnically and territorially.
Quote Ukrainian Unquote is a large, even majority subset of the nation of Ukraine at present but is by no means, all of it.
The most rabid oblasts hosting far righters in Ukraine, in fact, were Poland between WW1 and WW2.
“The Confederacy had every right to secede, because every region that wants to secede has that right - but immediately upon granting them independence, the Union should have invaded in order to stop the atrocity of slavery”
The Union could have simply offered the South independence in exchange for a peaceful end to slavery. They offered the opposite: the Union pledged to continue slavery indefinitely in exchange for a forfeiture of independence and secession.
William Tecumseh Sherman wrote before the war:
"If they [Confederates] design to protect themselves against negroes and abolitionists I will help; if they propose to leave the Union on account of a supposed fact that the northern people are all abolitionists like Giddings and Brown then I will stand by Ohio and the northwest."
Sherman was a white supremacist, eager to fight white abolitionists trying to end slavery, but more so eager to fight secessionists who wanted independence. This isn't the moral high ground that Scott Alexander seems to presume.
Robert E Lee said, at the start of the war, when asked to join the Union:
"If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South, I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native State?"
I've heard Robert E Lee also helped return blacks to slavery and had views of white supremacy that were the norm for that time, so I will accept the realities of his life didn't stand up to moral principles, but he seemed entirely open to the idea of ending slavery and avoiding violence and his mindset seemed extremely libertarian in modern terms.
> Suppose dozens of US cities declared independence. The result would be lots of isolated enclaves with tiny markets and no ability to defend themselves. Those cities might wish that there was some pact keeping them together. So maybe since we already have such a pact (the general agreement that small regions can’t secede) we should stick to it.
The EU adds an interesting wrinkle to this. It makes independence a lot more tempting for Scotland (rip), Catalonia and everyone else. As the cost of being a tiny entity goes down by greater EU integration, are we going to end up with a whole bunch of Monacos and Andorras if self determination comes into vogue?
The dumbest part of all of this for me is how often these things come down to a simple majority vote. It's terrifying for everyone involved for big decisions, much larger than regular elections, to come down to 50%+1, in referendums for questions like Brexit, Quebecois and Scottish independence.
Really, having these be 2/3rd or 3/4s thresholds would take a lot of pressure off everyone. We could even have clauses like if over 40% the referendum gets triggered again in 5-10 years.
Why don't we accept the fact that nation states are malleable concepts, just as social identity is a malleable concept? And the two concepts are often mixed up. People frequently argue that language is important identifier of national identity, and thus we have the speak-English crowd in the US, the Chinese government goal to enforce Putonghua on regional language speakers, the intermittent attempts by French and Spanish states' to suppress their regional languages, and British nationalists' insistence that Scots is not a separate language from English — I could go on and on. Likewise, there's the "we all share the same homeland" argument — which is frequently confounded by multiple peoples claiming the same homeland either across history. The fact that nation states ARE non-static entities, that evolve and dissolve over time, means that those groups or individuals with the political capital (votes, organization, or guns) can redefine the borders of their nation states or create new nations states out of whole cloth — usually with a lot angst and bloodshed as part of the process.
Before we get bogged down in any historical precedent arguments, it's worth going through the intricate history of that region. This Twitter thread by Kamil Galeev is an excellent outline of the region's history...
https://t.co/G1vmLZfmCU
This is brilliantly thougt-provoking, as always. Thank you!
It's very useful for people to be able to make binding agreements giving up their future rights (including the right to secede). Solves coordination problems, etc.
But of course this gets tricky at the population level - can your parents bargain away your future rights? Your great grandparents?
All a "right" amounts to is an argument that countries considering recognition might find persuasive or not based on their own self-interests plus an appeal to consistency.
All the pro-status quo arguments that to allow borders to be redrawn would cause chaos remind me of a JFK quote: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Without *some* mechanism to redraw borders peacefully, they *will* eventually be redrawn violently.