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A couple of months ago, @zeke5123 started a discussion about secession and the right to self-determination, and suggested that such a right was likely contingent, rather than absolute. In response, I wrote an analysis of the most famous writing on the topic of secession...and then posted it just after the following week's CW thread went live, which was very poor planning on my part. I hope the following is sufficiently interesting to justify a repost.
I've remarked before that I think the American Revolution should be more properly understood as an example of secession, not revolution. After all, the most famous document promulgating and defending the American position is the Declaration of Independence, and the choice of title is appropriate.
The part that comes before the famous "We hold these truths to be self-evident..." is the following:
This is a document about secession and self-determination. Next is the really famous bit (I'm adding numbers in brackets to highlight an internal list):
A clear statement of fundamental principles, but one key point later on is that Jefferson isn't claiming that these principles are a departure from English tradition, but that the Crown has been egregiously violating English tradition. The list doesn't end at three items:
"Alter or abolish" covers many potential approaches, from reform to secession to complete revolution. Which approach is justified in which cases?
This, I think, is the start of the answer to your question--the right of self-determination in terms of fully reforming/seceding/revolting must reach a threshold of severity in terms of provocation. The reasons matter, and the weight of tradition matters. "Light and transient causes" are not enough, and so:
When there is a longstanding pattern of abuse aimed at fundamental liberties, some variation of reform/secession/revolution is justified, and even morally compulsory. Note that Jefferson is not merely concerned with rejecting the old, abusive system, but also the necessity of replacing the old system with a new government that will properly "secure these rights." He is justifying a transition from a very bad system to a better system--tearing down the old and stopping at anarchy is not acceptable.
What follows is a bill of particulars, listing the offenses of the British Crown according to Jefferson, which amount to "a long train of abuses and usurpations...evinc[ing] a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism...." The details of this list are instructive, but outside the scope of this comment. After the list, Jefferson argues that the leadership of the American States has done its due diligence, and tried to fix the situation by attempts at reform, before proceeding to secession:
We have appealed to both the Crown and the British People for redress; neither provided it. As a result, we're walking away from this toxic relationship, but we're not going to kill your cat out of spite--we just want to go our own way. Note that Jefferson doesn't merely say that the behavior of the British Crown has been grievously bad, but that the American representatives have been particularly patient and prudent--there's an implied standard of conduct for the secessionists that continues in the final paragraph:
Jefferson wraps up with the final requirement for secessionists who are doing things correctly--you need to make your case. Not just that the suffered abuses have been so terrible, but also that you've tried lesser means and are only escalating when those means have failed, and that your judgment and restraint are being offered for consideration to both "the Supreme Judge of the world" and "the opinions of mankind." Are your reasons sufficient, or just "light and transient causes"? Do you have a plan for self-government, such that you can responsibly join the community of "Independent States"? Have you "Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms" and are you confident in the "rectitude of [y]our intentions"?
Any secessionist or revolutionary worth their salt will answer yes to those questions with confidence--such is human nature. But Jefferson clearly isn't claiming that 'we've investigated our own motives, and found them acceptable,' he's appealing to God and man to be his judges.
In my view, Jefferson adequately makes his case as to the justice of the American secession from Britain. I think other secessionary movements are a mixed bag--some meet the various thresholds of behavior and others do not. In this framework, there isn't an unfettered "right to self determination" by a given identifiable subgroup of a larger political unit, but extreme cases may present a duty to reform an abusive government, or seceed from it, or overthrow it.
I would say that secession is generally more justifiable when you are dominated by a group that hates you and wants to control you and have you live by their rules and likes the idea of dominating you. Giving them some level of autonomy and representativeness through the rulers listening to concerns can alienate this problem.
You can also have amiable divorces like the separations of Czechoslovakia into Czech republic and Slovakia. Neither group were tyranical against each other but they were drifting apart and separated.
In the case of the USA, the elephant in the room is also about the issue of power and being weaker if separated. Which is also the elephant in the room when it comes to American imperialists arguing about how Russia or China should be seperated in smaller states due to "freedom" or identifying the dominant current situation as excessively nationalistic or fascistic.
Larger blocks that are dominated by a certain center are going to be more powerful than divided ones. Of course, if the central force is going to act tyrannical then separation makes even more sense. You also see the opposition advancing the arguement against tyranny. There are even interesting historical examples such as the Athenians with their Delian league made of Greek city states, which was originally formed against the Persians but continued and was the coalition against Sparta in the Peloponesean war. The league was united when it was against a superior and external enemy in the Persians, but found itself in having some conflict within members after the Persians were defeated.
The Athenians also supported imperialism against non Delian leauge members that wanted to be independent. The imperialistic Athenians not only forced defeated countries to enter the league and pay tribute, but also forced them to be subservient and become democratic. There was also a quasi ethnic aspect to this with Athenians and most league members being Ionians. A sort of sub-ethnicity of the Greeks. While the Spartans and their allies of the Peloponesian league were to a greater extend comprised of Dorians and was made of oligarchies.
The Athenians grew more tyrannical against their supposed alliance making more demands of tribute. Eventually, the transformation of the leauge from a sort of alliance lead by Athens into an empire made it unpopular among the Greeks.
There was also the Boeotian league, another alliance of states and which eventually defeated the Peloponnesian league.
So we can see there is the threat of other groups enticing unity and alliances, and the danger of tyranny and being dominated by the stronger part of your own broader group, enticing separation. And human nature applied in groups does eventually lead to those, especially of a different group identity trying to push too far those others who are part of their alliance.
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It was a secession from the The British Empire combined with revolution that overthrew the monarchy and installed Republic as a form of government. And it is not without historical parallels - for instance 1848 is known as a year of revolutions but these were equally inspired by nationalism such as in Italy or Germany or Hungary or Poland where calling it as secessionist/independence struggle against empires of the day can be equally valid.
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This is the key to one of the two arguments I see made as to how America separating from England was legitimate, but no attempt to separate from America, past or future, can ever be legitimate. That is that when the Founding Fathers fought the War of Independence, they replaced the British system of government with a better one, but no attempt to break from America can ever produce a better government, because the system the Founders bequeathed us is the most perfect system of government that has ever existed or will ever exist.
Most commonly I encounter this from Mormons, who hold that the US Constitution is divinely inspired, but I also sometimes find non-Mormons who seem to hold it in just about the same level of reverence. It is, for them, a sacred document which can never fail, only be failed, etc.
(I'm reminded of a fight on Twitter between two groups of "American patriots" denouncing each other as vile traitors because, while they both agreed that — to put it in terms of the Westphalian nation-state that they did not, themselves, use — the "American Nation" and the "American State" are increasingly at odds, they very much disagreed as to which of those two should be defended from the other. The angriest denunciations came when one nation-defender replied to a state-defender's invocation of the Founding Fathers by pointing out that one such Father, in one of those "sacred" documents, said that "…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…" and that the person to whom he was replying had himself acknowledged that the government as currently instituted is increasingly "destructive of these ends" for many people. The replies (where not simply accusations of "treason" and oblique references to the punishment therefor) were very much of the above character: that such writings only apply to an "imperfect" government like 1776 British rule, but that if our perfect, divinely-ordained system has become injurious to the "Safety and Happiness" of some group of citizens, then that's a problem with those citizens, who should be rightly replaced by "better" people.)
(The other argument for legitimacy of American Independence but not other secession is a view that "voice" strictly dominates over "exit," so that separation is only legitimate in the total absence of democratic representation, and even the slightest democratic "voice" renders "exit" illegitimate. I did see once, when someone asserted this view online, another person pushed back by asking then, if early 20th century Britain had given India a single representative in the House of Commons, would this have then rendered Gandhi, Nehru, and the entire independence movement immoral? The first person did, in fact, "bite the bullet" and say that, yes, it would have.)
Isn’t the east response to this “The US failed the constitution; new partition of US will have the exact same constitution but actually follow it”
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My preferred argument on that point works out a bit differently. In my opinion, a more perfect system of government is unlikely to be achieved, but not axiomatically impossible. Further, "more perfect" would be measured in terms of both objectively produced effects and optimized fit for the given population--the best scheme of government for population A may not be the best scheme of government in every detail for population B, and the government best fit for population A may produce better or worse effects than the government best fit for population B. That said, trends would likely be observable.
Also, I think Jefferson's analysis applies outside the American context as well. Broadly speaking, I'd apply the same rubric to a secessionist movement in Quebec, or Scotland, or Spain. My inclination based on my current knowledge is that those movements do not have an adequate justification for secession, but that judgment is contingent on my understanding of current facts. A change in conditions or more information could conceivably change that view.
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I am strongly in favor of secession rights in principle, but as usual the real world is messy and complicated. In practice, if territory B secedes from territory A, territory B will then usually contain a subset of people who never wanted to secede from territory A to begin with but were overruled either through voting or through violence. The loyalists during the American Revolution, for example, who were sometimes violently persecuted. Or pro-Spanish-unity people in Catalonia. Etc.
One might also question the morality of, say, a territory that was a net benefactor of federal aid for years then seceding without making up for it by paying for what it had gained through its previous association with the rest of the country.
These are issues in which what is right and what is wrong is very complicated and reasonable people can disagree.
Certainly, though, the anti-secession argument against the US South during the Civil War has never made sense to me. The South was just doing the same thing that the 13 colonies had done 80 years ago. Yet it is pretty common in online arguing to see people say some version of "they were traitors who tried to break up the Union and they got what was coming to them". Which is just silly given how the US got started to begin with, unless the person making the argument is fine with also condemning the American Revolution, which they usually don't seem to do for some reason.
This is easy to game by manipulating numbers.
There's a classic example where Democrats claim that the government spends a lot on red states when the truth is one or more of general infrastructure used by nonresidents such as interstate highways, military bases that protect the nation rather than the state, blue inner city areas in red states that eat up expenditures, and blues who move to red states to retire so the expenditure and revenue get counted for different states.
It also runs into the problem of "benefits" that are harmful, that can't be rejected, or both. "We paid police to enforce all those drug laws against you. Society benefits when drug use is reduced. You didn't pay us back for those benefits when you seceded!"
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Well, yes, that's the argument that secession is never justified, which Jefferson rejects. What I'm claiming here is that the question isn't solvable at the meta level--you must engage with the object-level dispute concerning why this group wants to secede from the larger polity.
Jefferson's bill of particulars (the section that I skipped past, but is available in the link to the original) bears a remarkable and not-at-all-accidental similarity to the provisions of the Bill of Rights. When the early Americans were debating whether to ratify the Constitution, which would create a more centralized authority than that created by the Articles of Confederation, a common concern was avoiding the abuses of the previous system under the British Crown. Each of the first eight Amendments instructs the new federal government that it is not allowed to abuse the people in the following ways, which were all things that the Founders had suffered in living memory. The Bill of Rights isn't a random collection of priorities generated by philosophical musing, but a set of very practical, real-world concerns during that period.
At the object level, the American Revolution was about whether comprehensive and systemic violations of what later became the Bill of Rights was sufficient to justify secession.
Also at the object level, the American Civil War was about whether actual or potential violations of Southerners' right to own slaves was sufficient to justify secession.
If the argument above is correct, and justified secession is contingent on the object-level dispute, then I see no inconsistency in describing the secessionary movement that gave rise to the American Revolution as justified, and the secessionary movement that gave rise to the American Civil War as not justified. In my view, this is an easy call, though different people may form their own opinions as they wish.
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I guess I'll make the obligatory cynical post pointing out the fact that the Declaration of Independence wasn't really a legal document, but essentially just a very eloquently worded piece of Patriot propaganda, primarily meant to rally stateside on-the-fence loyalists and potential overseas allies over to the cause. It was not, as many now seem to want to interpret it, an actual good-faith attempt to justify their cause to the British government. (Basically an "open letter" to the crown. Most of the grievances were incredibly exaggerated, bordering on fabricated, which the actual British government would have realized; the drafters didn't care, because again, it wasn't actually intended for that audience.) I consider any deeper reading into the underlying philosophy behind the literal word of the Declaration to be peripheral to this fact; for example, I think Jefferson paints the colonies as having been "particularly patient and prudent" on the matter not because he truly believes in some kind of secessionist standard of conduct, but simply because it makes them look like the more reasonable party to outside observers.
They had their cause (independence from Britain) and their practical reasons, and worked the divine moral justifications out backwards from there, as in every cause that becomes a Just Cause (we see this all the time with their bastardized philosophical heirs today, as every issue suddenly becomes a Human Rights issue. Self-evident indeed). Just as the South did; it's not prominent nowadays for obvious reasons, buts there's plenty of equally eloquently written justification for secession by the moral and philosophical heavyweights of the Southern Cause. But they, of course, lost; the only real moral justification to the American Revolution, or secession, or whatever you want to call it, is the fact that they won the military conflict. If they lost, no one would be holding this document up as the benchmark for moral justification of secession.
All that said, I do believe that many of the founding fathers were probably in fact True Believers in some capacity; given how the USA turned out in the end, they were obviously right to believe they could do one better than the British in terms of governing the colonies.
Why can't both be true? It's both an objectively pretty reasonable set of conditions for secession and also a piece of propaganda for a particular side of a war that could plausibly be argued to be stretching the truth a bit. In fact, it's decently effective propaganda specifically because many people would consider it reasonable.
It's probably also worth considering that, at the time, basically every country in the world was a monarchy. So if you ever want any allies for a cause like theirs, it's very much in your interest to paint yourselves as having very reasonable objections to your specific king and definitely not any kind of general objection to the concept of monarchy. This is very much in contrast to the Marxist cause later on, which paints themselves as a danger to any regime that doesn't follow their ideology.
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At the risk of continuing beating a dead-horse I this along with several of the replies below illustrative of how the Left's domination of academia and the wider media discourse has effectively neutered our ability to understand or own history and discuss certain topics productively.
For instance, what does it even mean to claim that it "wasn't really a legal document" in this context? It should go without saying "that the Declaration of Independence wasn't really a legal document" because the Declaration of Independence was quite explicitly an illegal document. Those who wrote and signed it were literally risking their necks, and yet it was written and signed...
You say it was primarily about making the case to their fellow colonials and winning over potential allies to which I reply "and?". What of it?
I really do think this cut to the quick of one of fundamental differences between the right and left-wing approaches. To someone who's brain is naturally left-inclined/Rousseau-pilled "legitimacy" and "credibility" are things that are imposed. The legitimate government is "legitimate" because they have guns, money, titles, and official documents stamped by official men with official stamps and sealed with official seals. In contrast, to someone who's brain is naturally right-inclined/Hobbes-pilled "legitimacy" is something that is derived from willing submission, for all the talk of authoritarianism, a core component of Hobbes' thesis is that a legitimate authority is one that the people choose to follow. The King is "the King" not because he wears a crown but because people obey him, or to put it another way "Government via consent of the governed".
In this context such critiques of the Declaration of Independance can't help but ring a bit hollow, the continental congress doesn't need to convince Parlament (though that would certainly be nice and save both side a lot of blood and treasure) they need to convince their would-be followers and allies to back their claim to the proverbial throne.
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I, for one, have argued that public schools should have students read Thomas Hutchinson's "Strictures upon the Declaration" at some point in American History classes, to provide some 'balance.'
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Certainly, I agree.
I agree that the Declaration was not an attempt to persuade the British--either the Crown, Parliament, or the British people--but it did not claim to be that. As Jefferson himself explicitly notes in the Declaration itself, those appeals had already happened, and the colonists did not find the prior responses to be tolerable. The entire point of the Declaration is a statement that the colonists were past the point of making their case by petition, and intended to resort to force of arms instead.
However, as much as Jefferson's dramatic flair is clearly in play, I think an in-depth review of the period shows that the British abuses were real, pervasive, and relatively severe compared to the expectations of the average British citizen. It's trendy to be cynical about the motivations of the Founders; this cynicism is badly misplaced.
Some of those writers dodge the issue (others embrace it), but the central issue under dispute was slavery, full stop. Yes, there were absolutely other political disputes between the South, broadly, and the North or the West, but none of them held a candle to the central dispute over slavery. Take away slavery, and there would not have been a secessionary movement. It was both a necessary and sufficient cause of the Civil War.
Yes, the American colonists succeeded at seceeding, and the Confederacy did not; that's a fact of history. However, when we're evaluating other secessionary movements in different times and contexts, I think it's much more useful to realize that the American colonists were fighting for free expression, the right to self-defense, the sanctity of the home against intrusion, the rights of the accused and convicted, etc., while the Confederacy was fighting for the right to own slaves. If your modern movement bears more similarities to the first, then I will probably agree that it's justified; more like the second, and no.
I completely disagree. 'Justification' is an appeal to morality, and I reject the idea that successful efforts are justified, and failures are not. One who robs a bank and gets away unpunished is not morally justified in his theft.
I think I would at least partly disagree with this. In my view, the best description of the role of slavery in the Confederacy's secession is that it was the lynchpin that made the secession and war possible and dictated the way it would be fought. I don't think most of the people actually fighting would describe their cause as fighting for the right to own slaves, and I don't think it's the true cause of the war. I think the real cause is the cultural split that goes back before the founding of the country, as described by Abilon's Seed and Scott's piece on it. I've been meaning to write a longer piece on this idea, but consider - why were the borders of the Confederacy what they were? Why did these people decide to embrace a plantation slavery economy while those other people rejected it in favor of industrialization?
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I actually agree with you on disagreeing with myself on this, haha. I realize I phrased that very poorly such that it came off as a kind of "might makes right" appeal, which was not what I was trying to get at. I was more gesturing towards something like "history is written by the winners" and butchered it.
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What do you think were the actual primary motivations of the secessionist colonists?
It's not some secret history that the cause for secession was primarily sparked by economic grievances regarding taxation and trade, and from there grew into general grievances about British government overreach in the colonies. I'm not here implying there was some hidden primary motivation other than genuine economic and philosophical aversion to British rule, coupled with belief in the greater potential of a new system; like I said, these guys were true believers.
I'm just pushing back on the framing of the Declaration of Independence in particular as some benchmark for the justification of secession because, I guess to put it succinctly, and for lack of better term, it's kind of a puff piece.
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Reform, secession, and revolution seem like they're a continuum rather than being distinct categories. So I'm not sure the distinction matters very much. What you've said is similar to the Chinese concept of "mandate of heaven" - the ruler has unquestioned authority until it's clear he doesn't, then it's justified to depose him. And this all basically boils down to consensus and power.
I've been contemplating this topic over the last few weeks, that it seems like there's a common thread between cultural consensus, political coalitions, and right to determination that is at the root of all conflict between groups. I'll sketch it out here:
The thing that makes reasoning about right to determination so difficult is that so much of the current social organization is path-dependent and contingent on accidents. There's no objective standard for what's a legitimate government, a legitimate set of borders, a legitimate people, a legitimate set of laws, or a legitimate culture. It's all just power and coalitions. And yet each generation of bright young minds grows up swimming in the particulars of their society and believes it's all objectively legitimate.
P.S. I swear I read this post a day or two ago (with the preamble and all) - did you delete and repost?
Have you read Barrington Moore? He contends that the US Revolution wasn’t really a revolutionary as the elites day 0 were similar elites after the war.
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I agree that reform/secession/revolution describe something of a continuum of severity in approach, but I think there are practical breakpoints between them that create distinct concepts. In particular, successful secession usually results in at least two distinct polities where only one existed previously. In theory, the line between reform and revolution might be more fuzzy, though in practice I think most cases are readily classifiable. (One oddball case is the creation of the American Constitution, which I'd call a full revolution, not just reform, since the entire federal tier of government was rewritten in a way not authorized by the Articles of Confederation.) So I would not say that secession and revolution are basically the same--in the former but not the latter, the original form of government still exists, if over less land area.
Legitimacy is a central example of a concept that is socially constructed, which is certainly path-dependent and contingent, but not arbitrary. There are many arguments of one form or another that can shore up the legitimacy of an institution, but they are only effective to the extent that they are persuasive--people are perfectly free to disagree with and dismiss claims that they find insufficient.
You probably saw my comment in the AAQC thread a couple of days ago, where I mentioned this situation and linked to my original post. This is the only time I've reposted the analysis above.
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