Daniel Weltman (Ashoka University), "A cosmopolitan instrumentalist theory of secession"
Forthcoming, The Southern Journal of Philosophy
In 2015, either as part of a Russian plot to destabilize the United States or out of a desire for a more just arrangement of political power, Louis Marinelli founded “Yes California,” a political organization dedicated to Californian secession: removing California from the United States of America and turning it into a brand-new independent state.
Yes California is now defunct, but it is just one in a long history of Californian secessionist movements. And secession fever is hardly limited to California. There are hundreds of extant secessionists movements. Many of the armed conflicts being waged today are between secessionists and the governments they aim to secede from. For example, India, where I live, contains many secessionist movements, from the Khalistan movement calling for the secession of Punjab to the secessionists in Jammu and Kashmir.
The main normative philosophical question about secession is about which of these secessionists movements is justified. In other words: who has a right to secede? Traditionally there have been three main answers. The first is that mistreated groups have a right to secede: if you are facing genocide or some other deep injustice, you can have your own state. The second is that nations have a right to secede: groups that share a history, language, religion, culture, and other sorts of uniting features have a right to their own state, perhaps in their traditional homeland. The third is that practically any group that can successfully run a state has a right to a state, so long as they’re the majority in the territory they wish to secede in.
To this traditional trifecta I add a fourth theory (in my forthcoming article “A Cosmopolitan Instrumentalist Theory of Secession”): cosmopolitan instrumentalism. For this theory, you first pick your favorite theory of cosmopolitan justice. Cosmopolitanism is an approach to global justice according to which everyone matters equally. Consequently, state borders have no fundamental normative significance. I don’t owe anything special to my co-nationals merely in virtue of sharing a state with them. Given this, cosmopolitans tend to support things like strong international redistributive justice duties, open borders or something close to it, and similar rearrangements of the political landscape.
The cosmopolitan instrumentalist theory of secession says that a group has a right to secede if secession would promote cosmopolitan justice: otherwise, they do not. For instance, if Californian secession would lead to free movement between California and Mexico, and if this would improve the lives of many people, so much so that Californian secession ultimately promoted cosmopolitan justice, then according to cosmopolitan instrumentalism, California has a right to secede. Similarly, if, say, Quebec’s secession would lead to less justice, perhaps because the indigenous First Nation inhabitants of Quebec would end up less well-off and on the scale of global cosmopolitan justice this would not be counterbalanced by anything else, then Quebec would not have a right to secede.
Cosmopolitan instrumentalism, I argue, does better than the competing theories, and it can avoid some objections that you may be considering right now, like the objection that there is no practical way to decide whether some given secession will or will not further cosmopolitan justice.
There is also lots of room for expanding on the cosmopolitan instrumentalist approach which I hope to pursue in the future. For instance, I take cosmopolitan instrumentalism to be an heir to a tradition including thinkers like Bentham and Comte according to which philosophy’s job was to turn intractable normative questions into social scientific ones on which we could make progress. Once we decide on a theory of cosmopolitan justice, cosmopolitan instrumentalism turns the question of the right to secede into one that the political scientist can (at least in principle) answer. I don’t think philosophy should try to divest itself of every question, but I do think that in a lot of cases in politics, the empirical details of any given case are of so much importance that armchair philosophizing cannot really hope to solve questions like whether some given case of secession is justified.
Another area for future study is what we should say about the territorial aspect of secession, which has been largely neglected by many of the classic theorists. What exactly is the connection between the group (which is made of people) and the territory (which is made of land) when it comes to secession?
Finally, one interesting feature of some secessionists movements, like the Khalistan movement, is that they are partially supported by outsiders, like Indians residing in Canada. Is it possible to have a right to secede from a place you do not currently occupy? Questions like this are interesting for anyone thinking about secession, and cosmopolitan instrumentalism, I believe, is well-poised to resolve them.
The paper can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12509