1 SECESSION NOTES FOR PHILOSOPHY 13 DICK ARNESON In our time, secessionist aspirations and movements abound. How should we respond? Most Kurds today living in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran want to secede and form an independent sovereign Turkish state. Is this a just demand? Is there a fundamental moral right to secede, and if so who has such a right, and under what conditions? In today’s course readings, Allen Buchanan and Christopher Wellman offer opposed views on these questions. Below, I summarize their positions. My own critical comments are enclosed in square brackets, like this—[Buchanan and Wellman are full of beans.] A secession struggle is the attempt by a group of people, living under a government, to sever their connection to that government and form a separate independent state, taking a portion of the territory of the initial state. ALLEN BUCHANAN’S VIEWS Allen Buchanan distinguishes two questions we could be addressing: (1) is there a basic moral right to secede (setting aside issues of institutional implementation), and (2) is there a moral right to secede that should be recognized “as a matter of international institutional morality, including a morally defensible system of international law.” He focuses on the latter question, which he takes to be more significant. [Comment. There is a gap between holding there is a right to X and holding that we should implement this right in law and social practices in a given setting at a given time. For example, one might consistently hold that there is a moral right to voluntary physician-assisted suicide (PAS), but that there should not be a legal right to PAS in the U.S. today, because enacting PAS in law would give rise to misconduct on the part of some physicians and relatives of very ill persons leading to wrongful killings of these ill persons. But the gap is not so great. If we think there is a moral right to PAS, we should strive swiftly to bring about conditions in which it can be implemented without undue cost to other moral values. A serious moral right is hardly ever an idle wheel. Moreover, if there is a serious moral right to something, that right weighs heavily in the scales and counts for a lot when there is practical conflict with other values. If we think there is a serious right to free speech, we won’t favor banning political demonstrations on the ground that they cause extra litter. So noting as Buchanan does that there is a gap between asserting a right and asserting it should be implemented in some particular way does not deny the importance for practical choice of policy of deciding what people’s moral rights are.] [Comment. Anyway, given there is a gap between a right and the best means of implementing it, why suppose the key or sole issue is how the right would or not fit within currently recognized international morality and international law? One might think current international morality is in a pretty crude and undeveloped state and current international law is little more than agreed rhetoric and deal-making among the world’s big powers.] Buchanan notes that a special right to secede might arise from contract, promise, or special relationship. We are interested in the shape of a general right to secede, one a group would have independently of contract, promise, or special relationship.2 Buchanan divides theories asserting a general right of secession into categories, Primary Right Theories and Remedial Right Only Theories. The difference is that the latter hold that a group has a right to secede only if it suffers violations of its rights other than the alleged right of secession itself. The right to secede on this approach always rides piggy-back on other rights violations. In contrast, according to Primary Right Theories, under appropriate circumstances a group can have the right to secede from a nation even if the group is suffering no violations of its rights other than the right to secede itself. Buchanan distinguishes two varieties of Primary Right Theories, Ascriptive and Associative. According to the former, a group must have some specified special characteristics in order to acquire a primary right to secede. For example, one might hold that nations and only nations have a right of self-determination that includes a right to secede, and stipulate that a nation is a group of people united by common language, shared history and culture, and perhaps more. According to Associative Primary Right Theories, there is no requirement that a group, to have the right to secede, must have any special characteristics. Any collection of people could form a group that has the right to secede. What confers a right to secede on a group is rather the voluntary choice of its members or sufficiently many of its members to secede and form a separate and independent nation. Perhaps other conditions must be met as well, but these further conditions do not involve the characteristics of the group. As Buchanan puts it, “Any group, however heterogeneous, can qualify for the right to secede.” The extra conditions rather involve questions such as whether the group whose members voluntarily choose to secede is capable of forming an independent state and whether it would form a state that enforces the basic rights of its members and whether its departure leaves the members of the rump left behind in an unfairly precarious position. (The Remedial Right Only (RRA) Theory can add similar extra conditions; the key difference is that for the RRA theorist, a just claim to secession by a group must appeal to violations of the group’s rights other than the alleged right of secession itself.) Buchanan proposes four criteria for evaluating proposals for an international legal right to secede: 1. Minimal realism. A proposal must be morally progressive (would improve overall rights fulfillment if implemented) but also be minimally realistic, meaning the proposal must have “a significant prospect of actually being adopted in the foreseeable future, through the processes by which international law is actually made” (p. 42). 2. Consistency with well-entrenched, morally progressive features of current international law. 3. Absence of perverse incentives. A proposal, if implemented under reasonably favorable incentives, should not encourage bad behavior, behavior that leads to bad consequences, especially lesser overall fulfillment of people’s important