Review article: a liberal theory of collective rights

ABSTRACT

Michel Seymour fills an important gap in Rawlsian theory. In fact, his Rawls inspired normative theory of collective rights is unprecedented. Likewise, his ideal theory of a primary right to internal self-determination (ISD) is a welcome contribution to the issue of collective rights. That said, his non-ideal theory – a remedial right only to secession – seems rather toothless in cases of non-compliance. In particular, Seymour leaves us with no guidance in the case of transition countries and situations of tension where we need to know whether the ISD of the minority (the stateless) people is enabling or disabling for the ISD of the majority (the state owning) people. The paper concludes that borrowing from Aristotle, as Rawls does, offers more in the way of guidance when it comes to these issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Agonistic rotation
• democratisation
• internal self-determination
• Rawls
• Michel Seymour

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to professor Matt Mattravers for comments and suggestions on versions of this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The UK, like Spain or Italy, are rare examples of the so-called regionalised states where such an expectation is relatively low and inter-regionally very asymmetrical, compared with more centralised states.

2. Choosing the cosmopolitan frame instead of Rawls’s own international one can be motivated by a chimeric will to connect two problematic claims and have them support each other. Indeed, Seymour’s theory opens with two apparently Rawlsian moves; the political conception of peoples in The Law of Peoples and the individualist-communitarian ‘balance’ (an overlapping consensus) he derives from Political Liberalism. However, Seymour’s two claims fall under different categories and belong to different debates. The two questions; whether an ideological authority – individualist or communitarian – is morally defensible and whether a certain territorial authority and certain borders are legitimate or legal, have no implication for one another. So, in order for us to render our cosmopolitan option theoretically relevant, even assuming Seymour’s extrapolation --that stateless peoples too are moral agents-- is not enough. We still have to do what Rawls precisely does not; that is, to derive from a liberal-communitarian overlapping consensus or from an Original Position of some sort, the fact that a given state S belongs to a given people P. We have no need in the current issue to know whether or not we should respect the individualist or communitarian opinions the members of the concerned people hold.

3. Compare with the suggestion of Brännmark and Brandstedt (2019, pp. 49, 52-55) that Rawlsian political constructivism is to be understood as ‘metaethically agnostic’; that Rawls seeks to bracket the issue of realism versus anti-realism about moral facts or truths.

4. Following Jonathan Quong’s account of contractualist methodology (Quong, 2017, pp. 74-79), we may compare – without conflating them – the ‘rationality contractualism’ of our agonistic rotation with the ‘fairness contractualism’ of Rawls: (1) The Constituency of the contractual scenario, while possibly similar – ethno-territorial groups –, will be national not global in our case. (2) The Primary Question that our contractors are given will not be ‘What is for you a fair distribution of power?’ but ‘Which political principle do you want to be ruled by: ordinary elections, strict rota, or agonistic rotation?’ (3) The Motives and Interests will be similar – the group’s identity and self-determination – but different in corresponding to rational not reasonable self-interest. (4) The Information to give or not our contractors will unveil the specific ethnicity and territory of their represented group. (5) as to what will happen to each contractor in the event of Non-Agreement and failure to negotiate a coalition, only a ‘realistic’ stipulation of equal suffering from dictatorship and backwardness will be allowed, instead of a more ‘unrealistic’ stipulation of equal suffering from (Seymour’s) potential global instability. Obviously, in such a thought experiment, the option of ordinary elections will be instantly vetoed, while agonistic rotation in office would be twice prefered to strict rota, given the nationalistic motives of the contractors and the ensuing risk of a stasis feeling like a Non-Agreement situation.