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CHRISTOPHER WELLMAN The Morality of Secession To say that philosophers did not write about the morality of secession until the 1990s is only a slight exaggeration. Considerable work had been done on the related subject of revolution, of course, and the social unrest of the 1960s provoked a great deal of thinking about civil disobedience, but the paucity of viable secessionist movements on the geopolitical landscape resulted in almost no one studying the morality of state breaking. This changed dramatically with the end of the Cold War, however, when the dissolution of the Soviet Union exposed the lack of theoretical work on secession as an embarrassing lacuna in political theory. Allen Buchanan did more than anyone else to fill this void with his landmark 1991 book, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec. Buchanan has subsequently expanded on and revised his views, and the literature within political philosophy on this subject is largely a reaction to his seminal work. This essay provides an overview of the morality of secession before engaging with some of Buchanan’s most recent work on this subject. In particular, after defending a relatively permissive right to secede, I argue that Buchanan has overestimated the case against reforming international law to allow for primary rights to secede. SECESSION AND SELF-DETERMINATION There are some notable exceptions, to be sure, but most political theorists who comment on state breaking belong to either of two camps, which we might label “statist” and “nationalist.” Statists deny that there can be any unilateral rights to secede grounded in self-determination because secession necessarily involves taking territory from an existing state, and legitimate states enjoy a privileged position of moral dominion over their territory. The crucial point to appreciate, according to the statist, is that secessionist contests are conflicts over territory, [20] Christopher Wellman so one cannot posit a secessionist right without thereby implying that the state has no right to retain its territorial boundaries. Now, most people are willing to concede that a state may forfeit a portion of its territory if it treats its citizens sufficiently unjustly, but statists are quick to point out that this implies only a remedial right to secede, a secondary right to escape injustice. If a group had a right to secede grounded in self-determination, on the other hand, then (like a spouse in a jurisdiction that allows no-fault divorce ) it would not need to suffer any abuse in order to have a right to secede. And if a group has been in no way treated unjustly, then it is hard to see how the state could have forfeited its sovereignty over any of its territory. Thus, statists conclude that since (1) legitimate states are morally entitled to their territory and (2) states retain this claim unless their citizens become the victims of injustice , there can be no primary right to secede grounded in self-determination. There can at most be a remedial right to secede in order to escape injustice. Nationalists tend to differ from statists not only because they place more of a premium on group self-determination but also because they deny that states retain a valid claim to their territorial integrity as long as they do not act unjustly . There is a great deal of diversity among those I bundle under the label of “nationalists,” of course, but many emphasize both that (1) a nation’s health directly affects its members’ welfare and that (2) political self-determination allows nations to bolster their health. Thus, nationalists have a special interest in group self-determination because they believe that individuals are best positioned to pursue rewarding projects and develop meaningful interpersonal relationships within the context of a healthy culture, and, they argue, a nation’s chances of supplying such a healthy cultural context depend largely on its being free to order its own affairs. In response to statists who insist that national groups have no right to demand that their self-determination be cashed out in the currency of their own sovereign nation-state, nationalists often point out not only that territorial boundaries are human constructions that can be redrawn but that they owe their current configuration to a series of violent conquests and morally dubious treaties. And if one agrees both that political states can be geographically realigned and that existing countries typically have no unimpeachable historical claim to the particular pieces of land they occupy, one is unlikely to regard the...

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