References
- Buchanan , A. 1991 . Secession 49 Boulder : Westview Press .
- 1979 . The Creation of States in International Law Oxford : Clarendon Press . Under international law, regions within the main body of a state have for some time been regarded differently from geographically separate territories, such as colonies. The ‘right of self-determination’ that international bodies such as the UN sometimes proclaim has only been taken to support independence movements in the latter case. In the case of a territorially compact state, it does not imply a right of secession for any part of the state, but the right of the population as a whole to determine its form of government. See J. Crawford, esp. ch. 3.
- 1995 . On Nationality Oxford : Clarendon Press . Most fully in. See also D. Miller, ‘In Defence of Nationality,’ Journal of Applied Philosophy 10 (1993) 3–16, reprinted in P. Gilbert and P. Gregory, eds., Nations, Cultures and Markets (Aldershot: Avebury 1994); D. Miller, ‘On Nationality,’ Nations and Nationalism 2 (1996,409–21).
- Buchanan . Secession See ch. 4, and W. Norman, ‘Domesticating Secession’ (unpublished).
- Buchanan , A. 1997 . ‘Theories of Secession,’ . Philosophy and Public Affairs , 26 : 31 – 61 .
- On Nationality I have given a fuller account of nationality in ch. 2.
- 1996 . Nations Against the State: The New Politics of Nationalism in Quebec, Catalonia and Scotland Macmillan : Basingstoke . I have drawn here on the discussion of Catalonia in M. Keating, ch. 5.
- Mcdowall , D. 1992 . The Kurds: A Nation Denied Edited by: Kreyenbroek , P. G. and Speri , S. London : Minority Rights Group . See; The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview (London: Routledge 1992).
- Nations Against the State 129 – 34 . It should also be said that some Kurds have chosen the route of assimilation, forgoing their Kurdish identity in favour of a Turkish one. The important contrast with the Catalan case is that a Kurd in Turkey is more or less forced to make a choice between these two identities, whereas for a Catalan in Spain a hyphenated identity is easily available, and indeed a large majority of Catalans describe themselves in these terms (for instance as ‘Equally Spanish and Catalan,’ ‘More Catalan than Spanish,’ etc.—see Keating,.
- 1905 . Nor is it to say that secession is only justified when there is a sharp conflict of national identities: national groups may decide to separate by mutual consent, as the Norwegians and the Swedes did in and here the depth of the antagonism between them is largely irrelevant. I am considering the much more common case where the Xs wish to secede but the majority Ys oppose this.
- Nielsen , K. 1993 . ‘Secession: the Case of Quebec,’ . Journal of Applied Philosophy , 10 : 357 – 72 . See. for example, 29–43; D. Gauthier, ‘Breaking Up: An Essay on Secession,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1994)
- Caney , S. , George , D. and Jones , P. , eds. 1996 . National Rights, International Obligations Boulder , CO : Westview Press . According to Hillel Steiner, for instance, ‘since nations' territories are aggregations of their members' real estate holdings, the validity of their territorial claims rests on the validity of those land titles’ (H. Steiner, ‘Territorial Justice,’ in [], 146).
- Buchanan . Secession 107 – 14 .
- If one group occupies the territory previously held by another, then, ceteris paribus, the strength of its claim to exercise authority will increase with time. At a certain point—impossible to specify exactly—it will have a stronger title than the original inhabitants. This may sound uncomfortably like a version of ‘might makes right,’ but I cannot see any reasonable alternative to the view that it is the occupation and transformation of territory which gives a people its title to that territory, from which it follows that the competing claims of the present and original inhabitants increase and diminish respectively with the passage of time.
- This brings into play questions about distributive justice which I shall address later.
- Though note the qualification recorded in f.n. 10 above.
- 1997 . Political Studies , 45 Margaret Moore argues for the relevance of numbers in ‘On National Self-Determination,’ 900–13, and in ‘Miller's Ode to National Homogeneity,’ Nations and Nationalism 2 (1996), 423–9.1 am not sure, however, that she would endorse the criterion I am discussing in its crude form because she also speaks about ‘utilitarian calculations’ which suggests taking into account intensities of feeling as well as the sheer numbers who are satisfied or dissatisfied with a proposed boundary redrawing.
- Horowitz , D. L. 1997 . “ ‘Self-Determination: Politics, Philosophy, and Law,’ in ” . In Nomos XXXIX: Ethnicity and Group Rights Edited by: Shapiro , I. and Kymlicka , W. New York : New York University Press .
- Philpott , D. ‘In Defense of Self-Determination,’ . Ethics , 105 See, for instance, (1994–95) 352–85. ‘In a heterogeneous candidate territory, the decision [to secede] rests with the majority of the territory's inhabitants, with the qualification that under the new government, minority rights—including Kymlickan cultural rights—are guaranteed’ (380).
- 1976 . The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey , : 135 – 60 . Perhaps the most interesting example of an exchange of this kind occurred between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s. Under the terms of a formal agreement between the two states, some 200,000 people of Greek descent living in Turkey were required to emigrate to Greece, and about 350,000 Turks were required to move from Greece to Turkey. Alongside the formal exchange, however, much larger numbers of Greeks—perhaps about one million—emigrated to Greece either voluntarily or as a result of Turkish oppression, and a further 100,000 Turks moved in the opposite direction. There is not a great deal of hard evidence about the overall impact of the transfer on the people who experienced it, but, focussing on the Greek side, the following four statements appear to be true. (1) Materially speaking the infrastructure and investment provided by the internationally-funded Refugee Settlement Commission allowed large numbers of immigrants to settle and flourish in their new places of residence. (2) The exchange appears also to have had a strongly positive effect on the overall economic prosperity and sense of national identity in Greece. (3) The refugees experienced psychological difficulties in adjusting to their forcible translation and continued to harbour hopes of a return to their birthplaces at least up until World War II. (4) Over the same period there were significant social divisions between natives and refugees in Greek towns and villages. To arrive at a balanced assessment, these pluses and minuses would need to be set against the likely fate of the minorities, particularly at the hands of the Turkish authorities, if the transfer had not occurred. For descriptions of the exchange, see S.P. Ladas, (New York: Macmillan 1932); D. Pentzopoulos, The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and its Impact upon Greece (Paris: Mouton 1962); J. A. Petropulos, ‘The Compulsory Exchange of Populations: Greek-Turkish Peacemaking, 1922–1930,’ Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 2
- Buchanan , Including . 1995 . Secession , : 142 – 71 . ch. 3; Gauthier, ‘Breaking Up: An Essay on Secession’; C.H. Wellman, ‘A Defense of Secession and Political Self-Determination,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 24
- Buchanan . Secession 114 ff
- Mapel , D. R. and Nardin , T. , eds. The Constitution of International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives Princeton : Princeton University Press . I have set this argument out more fully in ‘The Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice,’ in forthcoming) and in ‘Justice and Global Inequality’ in A. Hurrell and N. Woods, eds., Inequality in World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
- These two grounds do not necessarily coincide, as the Scottish case illustrates. In recent years many Scots have felt that their public culture and sense of social justice is increasingly at odds with the Thatcherite ideas that have infected some parts of British central government and administration. On the other hand, Scotland has for some while been a net beneficiary of the British system of public finance, so it would be hard for Scots to claim that they are victims of discriminatory treatment.
- There may be cases—blacks in America come to mind—in which groups suffer from injustice at the hands of the majority without having or developing a separate sense of national identity. But where a minority group is territorially concentrated, the experience of injustice has a strong tendency over time to foster such a separate identity, so that once again the cause of justice and the cause of national self-determination are fused.
- Gauthier . ‘Breaking Up: An Essay on Secession,’ section III
- Wellman . 161 – 2 . ‘A Defense of Secession and Political Self-Determination,’
- So, for example, I think that the Slovenian secession from Yugoslavia could not be condemned on the grounds that it made the achievement of liberal democracy in Yugoslavia as a whole less likely. We ought indeed to try to promote liberal and democratic ideals externally, but I don't think that our duty in this respect is so strong as to oblige us to remain in political association with groups whose culture or identity we find uncongenial.
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