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Can There Be a Right to Secede?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

R. E. Ewin
R. E. Ewin
Affiliation:
The University of Western Australia
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Extract

‘There is a moral right to secede.’It is not, perhaps, always entirely clear what Buchanan means with his reference to a right to secede, and that is a matter we shall have to deal with in due course, but, anyway, the claim that there is a moral right to secede is a good deal more complex than is apparent from Buchanan's ground-breaking work and involves a number of assumptions that need to be gone into if Buchanan's work is to be built on. Many other people, too, seem to assume such a right, especially in the context of discussions of an alleged right to self-determination. My main concern in this paper is with the self that might be self-determining and with what it must be like if it is to have a right. My conclusion is that, though there are many important questions to raise about secession, they are not, outside the case of federations, questions about a right to secede; a right to secede has bearing only in the least interesting cases

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Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 70 , Issue 273 , July 1995, pp. 341 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1995

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References

1 Buchanan, Allen, Secession. The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec Boulder: Westview Press, 1991Google Scholar

2 Op.cit, 139–143.Google Scholar

3 See, for example, chapter 11 of Leviathan.Google Scholar

4 See the discussion of the second-order decision procedure in Ewin,Liberty Community, and Justice (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld,1987). Disputes of this sort might be sorted out at an earlier stage if discussion leads to agreement, or they might never be sorted out at all. If they are never sorted out at all, that will cause no problem if joint action between the two who disagree is not required (as it might no longer be required if secession is possible), but if joint action is required then unresolved disagreement about what to do will disrupt the project.Google Scholar

5 Leviathan, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 111–112.Google Scholar

6 On the importance of this notion of a right, see Ewin, ‘Rights and Utilitarianism,’ Philosophical Papers, November, 1990.Google Scholar

7 Op. cit.,27.Google Scholar

8 Op. cit., 27–28.Google Scholar

9 Op. cit., 127.Google Scholar

10 See p. 138 for a clear suggestion that what Buchanan wants is an impartial determiner of the issue, the point of impartiality being that it helps to make the procedure a fair (and thus binding) one even if it does nothing to make it more likely that the decision reached will be the ‘correct’ one in terms of social welfare or whateverGoogle Scholar

11 Though Kai Nielsen, for example, in 'Secession: The Case of Quebec' (Journal of Applied Philosophy. Vol. 10, No. 1, 1993, on p. 29)Google Scholar says that he is arguing that people have a right to self-determination. Hefails to distinguish people from a people and thus to make Hobbes's distinction between a people and a multitude

12 Christopher W., Besant, Two Nations, Two Destinies: A Reflection on the Significance of the Western Australian Secession Movement to Australia, Canada and the British Empire,University of Western Australia Law Review, Vol.20, 1990, No. 2, 305.Google Scholar

13 If, for example, Quebec were to secede from the rest of Canada, or if Western Australia had succeeded in its attempt to secede from the rest of Australia in 1934, then the seceding unit would contain a lot of people who had opposed secession. This sort of thing causes trouble only because those people, too, have seceded, because they count as part of the seceding unit.Google Scholar

14 Craven, Secession: The Ultimate States Right (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1986), 21.Google Scholar

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18 Benning's speech is set out in William W., Freehling and Craig M., Simpson (eds.), Secession Debated: Georgia's Showdown in 1860 (New York:Oxford University Press, 1992), 119–120 also the other speeches in this collection.Google Scholar

19 For discussion of different sorts of representation, see A. Phillips Griffith, ‘epresentation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.Supplementary Volume, 1960.Google Scholar

21 Allen Buchanan, Op. cit., 38–39. See also Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), especially chapter 7. Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York:The Free Press,1991),56.Google Scholar

23 van Creveld, Op. cit., 192–193.Google Scholar

Abraham Lincolns ‘Message to Congress in Special Session,’ 4th July, 1861, in Andrew Delbanco (ed.), The Portable Abraham Lincoln (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992),218–;219.