The Right to Secession: Remedial or Primary?

Abstract

The Scottish referendum, and the Kurdish and Catalan endeavours to organise unilateral independence referenda has made secession, once again, a prominent political issue. Understanding what entitles collectives to claim independence, and the conditions required for this claim to be justified are fundamental issues that must be answered for an assessment of legitimate secessionism. This article compares remedial and primary right approaches to a right to secession, looking at their meeting points and discrepancies. Although the literature emphasises their differences, this article explores their convergence points, arguing that certain core oppositions derive from an imprecise distinction between ‘self-determination’ and ‘secession.’

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Helder De Schutter and Michel Seymour for their detailed comments on various drafts of this article. A special thanks to the anonymous reviewers whose comments, critiques and suggestions have made this article what it is. We would also like to acknowledge helpful suggestions by Paula Casal, Ivan Serrano, Roland Sturm, Joan Vergés, and the editors of Ethnopolitics.

ORCID

Nicolás Brando http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1238-2205

Sergi Morales-Gálvez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5790-5837

Notes

1 It should be made clear that our intention is to look at the moral justifications for secession, thus the issues that arise from translating these basic principles into political practice will not be analysed in detail.

2 Besides this ‘threat of anarchy’, Buchanan defends seven other reasons why secession should not be primary: protecting legitimate expectations; self-defence; protecting majority rule; minimisation of strategic bargaining; soft paternalism; preventing wrongful taking; and distributive justice (Buchanan, 1991, pp. 87–126). For the specific dangers of opportunistic behaviour with unrestricted secession (especially with regards to distributive justice), see Sunstein (1991) and more recently Dietrich (2014).

3 This is a claim more thoroughly addressed by Nationalist Remedial theorists. See section below.

4 Despite that some branches of liberalism are quite suspicious of group rights, Buchanan defends a conciliation of between them and individual rights (1991, pp. 74–81).

5 For a brief distinction and definitions, see Guibernau (2015).

6 Within the primary right theories there is a libertarian branch (see Tideman, 2004; Block, 2007) that we are not going to discuss. Our focus will be on primary right theories embedded in liberalism, both in its plebiscitary and its nationalist conceptions.

7 Beran considers six restrictions to a group’s potential primary right to secede: (1) if it is not viable due to its size; (2) if it does not grant the same autonomy granted to it before secession; (3) if it exploits or oppresses groups within its territory; (4) if it creates enclaves due to territorial discrepancy; (5) if its territory is culturally, economically or militarily essential to the existing state; and (6) if its territory hoards a disproportionate amount of the existing state’s resources (Beran, 1988, p. 319).

8 For a bright explanation of why nationalists ground most of their claims in individual autonomy, see Kymlicka (1995).

9 Possible variations in the assessment of the Catalan case may be needed. See note 10.

10 Regarding the Catalan case, Buchanan considers that it may seem feasible to argue that the accommodation of Catalans in Spain is losing force due to present circumstances (the increasing incompatibility of their public culture and the Spanish, the rise of secessionist support since 2012 and, especially, the Spanish violent reaction to the unilateral Catalan referendum in 2017). If this were so, Miller may have to revise his empirical examples. See Buchanan (2013, pp. 11–22).

11 It can be claimed that in the Catalan case accommodation has already being attempted through the Statute of Autonomy reform in the 2006–2010 period. It is an open debate whether this counts as a breaking point to claim secession or not in the Catalan case and we are not going to go further into this debate in this paper.

12 Uriel Abulof (2015) reaches a similar conclusion regarding how central the concept of self-determination is for the debate. Yet, there are some differences between Abulof’s position and ours. Namely, he intends to detach people’s self-determination from state’s self-determination (which is a claim we make), but we intend to add a further distinction between the right to self-determination and the right to secession.

13 For a clarifying democratic test of seceded nations and pro-independence movements, see Etzioni (2015).

14 We thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this potential critique to our main claim.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the KU Leuven Research Council [grant number PF10/001] and the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme [grant number 613344] (Project MIME).