Secession as an International Phenomenon: From America?s Civil War to Contemporary Separatist Movements

“By the Force of Arms: Violence and Morality in Secessionist Conflict”

ALEKSANDAR PAVKOVIĆ By the Force of Arms Violence and Morality in Secessionist Conflict The basis of statehood, and of unity, can only be general acceptance by the participants. You cannot kill thousands of people, and keep on killing more, in the name of unity. There is no unity between the dead and those who killed them. Julius K. Nyerere, “Why We Recognized Biafra” How does a group acquire the right to secede from an existing state? This is the central question that contemporary normative theorists of secession —including Christopher Wellman in this volume—address. The question I address in this chapter is quite different: can the use of military force in order to achieve or to prevent a secession be justified on moral grounds? Even if a group does have a right to secede, this does not necessarily imply that it is morally justified to use military force and to kill people in an attempt to secure secession or independence. Whether or not there are rights to independent statehood, one can still ask, is independent statehood worth the sacrifice of human life and the misery that attends any military conflict? The word “independence” has, partly as a consequence of decolonization, gained honorific connotations that may incline us to answer this question unhesitatingly in the affirmative. This chapter attempts to offer some reasons to resist this inclination. Nyerere’s eloquent plea against the use of force to secure the unity of a state raises a parallel question: is maintaining the unity of a state—its territorial integrity —worth the sacrifice of human life and misery that attends any military conflict? [260] Aleksandar Pavkovi In economic parlance, do the benefits of having a unified state outweigh the costs in human life and other social costs that using military force to maintain its unity exacts? The two questions suggest that the two relevant aspects of statehood—its territorial integrity and its independence from other states—are goods whose maintenance or possession could be assessed in terms of the loss of human life; in consequence, the two—independent statehood and human lives—are morally commensurate goods. This chapter presents a few reasons to question this assumption. Moral considerations are here regarded as distinct from political ones; the latter but not the former concern the exercise of power over people and territories . Hence the issues of political power (control) and who exercises it are, by themselves, not moral issues. The ways in which one attempts to gain or maintain political control over people and territory are, however, open to moral assessment . Accordingly, if we say that an action is morally justified or permissible, we are assuming that it can be ranked on a scale of other morally comparable or commensurate actions or goods. The value of maintaining control over territory , I argue, is not a value that can be placed on a scale of moral values on which human life is placed. As many chapters in this volume suggest, in the initial stages of violent secessionist conflicts the question of their human costs is rarely raised, at least not before human costs become too large to be ignored. Yet the question of whether the pursuit of a secessionist or antisecessionist cause is justifiable in terms of its human cost is, I believe, central to any moral assessment of secession attempts that involve the use of lethal force. Here I attempt to assess normatively the use of violence in secessionist conflict, and thus my perspective is restricted to universal humanism. In its application, my normative assessment is limited to four secessionist conflicts—in Slovenia (1991), Kosovo (1998–99), Chechnya (1994, 1999), and Biafra (1967–70). Universal humanism, according to which human life is the highest moral value and every human life is of equal value, is a moral worldview present in a variety of religious and secular doctrines (for example, Christianity, Buddhism, Kantianism). Universal humanism allows the use of lethal force in self-defense and in the defense of the defenseless; in this, it is distinct from pacifism, which rejects any use of lethal force. A normative moral assessment of violence in attempts at secession also presupposes an account of the conflict that highlights those aspects of the use of violence that are relevant for such an assessment. I offer such an account of the secessionist conflicts in Slovenia, Kosovo, Chechnya, and Biafra. Most violent By the Force of Arms [261] secessionist conflicts, I...