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What's So Special About Nations?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Allen Buchanan
Allen Buchanan*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
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Extract

Until quite recently, most Anglo-American political philosophers have had little if anything to say about national self-determination. However, a growing number of prominent political philosophers are now endorsing national self-determination. This new-found enthusiasm is surprising if not ironic, since it comes at a time at which genocidal ethno-nationalist conflicts (in the Balkans, in Rwanda and Burundi, etc.) might seem to lend credence to the view that the doctrine that every nation should have its own state is both impractical and dangerous, and that the nationalist mentality is often racist, xenophobic, exclusionary, and morally regressive. In this essay I will question the wisdom of this new-found enthusiasm for national self-determination. I will probe what I shall call the Strong National Self-Determination Thesis (or, more briefly, the Strong Thesis). This is the assertion that every nation as such has a right to some substantial degree of self-government and there is a presumption that every nation as such has a right to its own independent state (where this includes the right to secede from another state). I call this the Strong Thesis because it is more robust than the thesis that nations have a right to some form of self-government.

Type
PART III: For and Against Nationalism
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 22: Rethinnking Nationalism , 1996 , pp. 283 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1996

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References

1 Beitz, Charles, in his excellent book Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1979), is a notable exceptionGoogle Scholar.

2 For a developed account of the right to secede as a remedial right, see Buchanan, Allen, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1991)Google Scholar.

3 Of course, if one assumed that every nation as such has the right to its own state, then any nation that did not have its own state would be treated unjustly, and then the right to secede could be understood as a remedial right. However, since what is in question is whether every nation as such has a right to its own state, it makes sense to distinguish between the view that nations have a right to independent statehood only as a remedial right in the sense of a right to recover the independent statehood of which it was unjustly deprived or as a remedy against other, independently characterizable injustices (such as genocide) and the view that every nation as such has a right to its own state.

4 Margalit, Avishai and Raz, Joseph, ‘National Self-Determination,’ The Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990), 439-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Miller, David, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996), 11Google Scholar

6 Kymlicka, Will, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Kymlicka's, view seems to shift between his Liberalism, Community, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989)Google Scholar and the more recent Multicultural Citizenship. In the former he unambiguously asserts that belonging to a culture is necessary for having a meaningful context for choice; in the latter he sometimes says that belonging to a ‘societal’ (institutionally complete) culture is necessary for having a meaningful context for choice. If his considered view is the latter, that only ‘societal’ (institutionally complete) cultures supply the needed context for meaningful choice, then there are two difficulties. First, he must somehow counter the many apparent counterexamples to this sweeping generalizationthe many cases, as Waldron notes, in which individuals seem to exist, and to thrive, while partaking of two or more cultures without being full-fledged members of any one ‘societal’ culture. And he must do so without making the notion of a ‘societal culture’ so expansive and accessible that everyone, including the member of a minority nation in the midst of a dominant culture that is not their national culture, is a member of some ‘societal’ culture or other. Second, Kymlicka must show that the ethnic cultures of immigrant groups, which he believes are not ‘societal’ cultures and hence are not capable of providing a meaningful context for choice, still matter so much for individuals that justice requires the various minority rights which he endorses for these groups.

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11 Most recently Harry Brighouse (‘Against Nationalism,’ this volume) has raised this objection, but in one form or other it has been advanced by a number of authors. See, for example, Kymlicka's discussion of the ‘benign neglect’ view in Multicultural Citizenship.

12 Harry Brighouse, ‘Against Nationalism’

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