More on Borders and Justice

by Jon Mandle on December 8, 2006

Thanks, Chris. And thanks to the people who contributed to the excellent comment thread. Let me try to continue the discussion by attempting to clarify what I had in mind in the passage that Chris quotes.


First, thinking about a hypothetical situation can be a perfectly reasonable and valuable analytic tool, even if there is no chance that it will actually be realized. It is no objection to considering the original position that we’ll never actually be there. (That said, I suspect that Chris is more impressed than I am by the force of hypothetical histories.)

Second, there is a question of whether it is permissible to have political authority held by multiple states, as opposed to either a single, global state, or no states at all – either anarchism or some other system, perhaps with authority dispersed on a non-territorial basis. My own view is that a system of multiple states can be just, although not on a traditional model of absolute state sovereignty. In other words, it is possible to have multiple legitimate states, but there is work to be done – some of which I attempt in the book – in determining what makes a state legitimate. (I should note that on my view, even if legitimate states exist there are duties of justice that extend to foreigners, but there are additional duties of justice owed to one’s fellow citizens.)

Given that possibility, there is then the question of how borders should be drawn between states. In other words, the question at this point is whether to draw them here rather than there – not, whether to draw them at all. Basically, I think this is pretty much a practical matter – they should be drawn in whatever way will result in the greatest likelihood of stable and just (or at least legitimate) states at peace with one another. Contrary to the views of some, there is no deep reason to have borders correspond to shared cultural, linguistic, religious, or racial divisions. There might be a shallow, pragmatic reason to draw them in one of those ways, but this will be because we believe that doing so will be more likely to generate stable and just societies.

And it’s here that I say that asking where borders should be drawn if there weren’t already any is a potentially dangerous way to think about the problem. This is because other pragmatic considerations operating at the same level won’t be visible from that hypothetical perspective. If we imagine away existing borders, it becomes too easy to imagine territories that are culturally, linguistically, religiously, or racially homogeneous. And to imagine drawing borders from this situation is to miss the very, very compelling pragmatic reasons – operating at the same level, so to speak – not to try to implement that ideal from where we are.

Again, things might be different if there were a deep reason of principle why members of a cultural group, say, had a right to their own state. But I don’t think there are deep reasons for that – only pragmatic ones, at best. And when we face actual decisions about whether to draw a new border – whether to allow a group to secede and establish a new state, for example – those considerations compete with many others arising from the specifics of that situation, including where the existing borders are and have been. So abstracting away from those historically-specific, pragmatic reasons makes it seem as though there’s a deep, principled reason for the one but not the other – and that’s what I think makes it a dangerous to ask where borders should be drawn from a hypothetical situation in which none already exist.

{ 11 comments }

1

Russell Arben Fox 12.08.06 at 11:39 am

“Basically, I think [the drawing of borders] is pretty much a practical matter–they should be drawn in whatever way will result in the greatest likelihood of stable and just (or at least legitimate) states at peace with one another. Contrary to the views of some, there is no deep reason to have borders correspond to shared cultural, linguistic, religious, or racial divisions. There might be a shallow, pragmatic reason to draw them in one of those ways, but this will be because we believe that doing so will be more likely to generate stable and just societies.”

Hmm. Well, I suppose I need to read your book, Jon, as I’ve yet to run across an argument like the above that I think makes good sense of the affective aspects of human being and living and thinking. To reduce the cultural, linguistic, religious, ethnic, and other historically embedded factors that nationalists and communitarians have regularly invoked and relied upon in the reifying and recognizing of their collective identities to secondary, “shallow” concerns which are justified only insofar as they may contribute to just and stable borders involves, among other things, a pretty significant leap from no particular place to a definition of “justice” which all these particular, bordered people will in fact accept. As Chris acknowledged on the other thread, “the identification and valuation of goods” like “justice” are not easily discerned absent these sort of more original problems.

(Of course, one possible responce is that the only reason I think so is that most prior human reasoning about justice or whatever has emerged out of such contexts, and so I am implicitly justifying, as you warn against, the existent of homogenously continuous cultures or territories of thought in making reference to this accident of history. But I think that downplays much that has been argued about recognition, identity, and moral evaluation in recent years.)

As before, I don’t want to say that I therefore think global justice is meaningless in the face of the subjectivity of nations, or will be meaningless until the human races achieves a fully postnational, cosmopolitan affectivity and sense of themselves. States are, after all, more than just placeholders for cultural/linguistic/etc. expressions; they are social and economic and political actors, and thus their borders can and should be assessed in terms of how they deliver or preserve or withhold broadly accepted international goods. (And those goods themselves become the building blocks to a greater international consciousness.) I just tend to suspect–speaking as one who hasn’t read your full argument yet–that your description of affective matters like language or religion as rather obviously shallow concerns when it comes to the drawing of borders leaps over a difficult subject a little too easily.

2

Matt 12.08.06 at 12:01 pm

Russell- You might want to look at Simone Keller’s paper “Patriotism as bad faith” from Ethics April 2005. I’d be interested to know what you think. He and Hobsbawm (in his book Nations and Nationalism since 1780) do a good job of showing how a lot of what’s said by nationalists is, frankly, false, and in turn tends to depend on believe a lot of false things. It’s not obvious to me that the idea of Justice and the better aproximations we’ve had to it come from nationalistic settings, and I don’t see how you’d get to lay claim to that w/o having to take the massive bloodshed and injustice from that, too.

3

Jon Mandle 12.08.06 at 12:09 pm

Thanks, Russell. “Shallow” may be misleading. My point is that groups that subjectively identify have no inherent right to form a state. But these identifications can often be immensely important in determining the feasibility of achieving just (or legitimate), peaceful states. They are also typically immensely complicated and are often tied up with actual histories. All of this is crucially relevant to assessing how borders should be drawn or re-drawn, and it is all missed by state-of-nature arguments.

4

abb1 12.08.06 at 12:31 pm

Isn’t it true that in most cases it is indeed the borders (and corresponding government practices and policies) that form the cultures, languages, religions, etc?

I once traveled in mountains of Ajaria (autonomous republic in Georgia) and I noticed that often churches in their villages looked kinda funny – sorta like half-church and half-mosque, so I asked them about their religion. So, they told me that the place was going from Georgia to Turkey to Georgia, back and forth so many times that they never had a chance to become true Christians or Muslims, they had to stay somewhere in between, always ready to switch. So, that became their religion – half-Christianity/half-Islam.

Existence determines consciousness.

5

Matt Kuzma 12.08.06 at 3:28 pm

I understand the purpose of such philosophical discussions, and I appreciate the meaning and knowledge that can come from these exercises. It’s good to think these things through to gain a better grasp on what we believe we ought to do, what we ought to work for. But I feel the need to point out that there will always be people with guns who don’t care whether your reasoning says their actions are legitimate or not – they’ll take what they feel they deserve.

It seems silly to say “this all seems rather academic” to someone in academia, but in some ways it feels like the elephant in the room. Legitimacy is largely a matter of practicality. Whether you can justify a state philosophically or not, it exists because men with guns defend it.

6

leederick 12.08.06 at 7:57 pm

“I think this is pretty much a practical matter… [Borders] should be drawn in whatever way will result in the greatest likelihood of stable and just (or at least legitimate) states at peace with one another.”

That seems really unsatisfactory to me.

Particular borders lead to peace because people’s thoughts mean particular borders lead to peace – but some of those thoughts may be held for really dubious reasons. The whole “well, whatever leads to peace” suggestion sounds like a dodge to me. We play along with everyone else’s ideas – however misbegotten – so they don’t start wars.

But is it really all just a mind-reading exercise like that? Isn’t the fundamental question on whether people’s particular views on wanting a border to be line A rather than line B (the reason they start these wars) justifiable or not? “Whatever leads to peace” basically just kicks that question into the long grass. The suggestion that we should place borders where won’t start wars is being put forward in a way that masks out the question of the reasons people start wars over border placement are good ones or bad ones.

7

Alex Gregory 12.09.06 at 3:18 am

A brief reply to Matt Kuzma (5):
There are no doubt some situations in which practical matters override the theoretical ones.

But there are also other issues which require answers to these fundamental questions. Small scale border disputes, disputes over secession, or disputes about whether we ought to support groups like the zapatistas. Many of these “real life” issues need their theoretical side resolved, and the truth for that theoretical side may well depend on more fundamental matters about the ways in which state borders ought to be drawn, and about the ways in which states can be justified at all.

8

Chris Bertram 12.09.06 at 6:50 am

Thanks for the clarification Jon. I guess I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said in this post. Certainly I agree that a system of states _can_ be just, that states owe more to their own citizens than to outsiders in some respects, and that there’s no good moral reason (though there may sometimes be good pragmatic ones) to redraw state borders to coincide with linguistic or ethnic division.

9

Jon Mandle 12.09.06 at 11:57 am

Chris – my post was an attempt to clarify the passage from the book. I’m not surprised you agree with the thoughts that were behind my “utopian” charge. But I think we still disagree about something. (That’s right – I can’t take ‘yes’ for an answer!)

It became clear in the discussion to your post that your concern was not with subjective identification but with the possibility of making a certain argument concerning compensation. Ultimately, the conclusion of this argument might be something like support for a global minimum income. I’m not unsympathetic to that conclusion, but I have doubts about whether a state-of-nature argument will be convincing. (We can save this disagreement for another post, but the problem isn’t that it is “utopian”.)

For me, a human rights argument – including a right to a minimum share of resources – is more convincing. However, such an argument may not get you all that you want, because it will not be so clear that it can establish a (strong) negative duty. But in the book, I express some more general doubts about the sharp division between negative and positive duties in an institutional context.

10

Tracy W 12.10.06 at 12:53 am

Ignoring human histories, could not there be an environmental reasoning behind the setting of boundaries?

Many issues of public policy are affected by the geography and environmental conditions of a country. For example, New Zealand is a set of islands so it is possible to try to keep new animal and plant species out of New Zealand in a way it is not possible to keep them out of a country sharing a continent with others. Biosecurity strikes me as a pure public good, but it doesn’t show up as an example in economics textbooks because it’s not a practical policy aim in Europe or an American nation.

And New Zealand’s environmental problems and opportunities are very different from Australia’s – for example in Oz possums are cute cuddly endangered creatures, in NZ they have looming green eyes and evil teeth and claws because they are a threat to our native forests and our agricultural industries.

Assuming that the leaders of a country are human and therefore have limited time to spend attending to any one thing, it makes sense for Australian environmental policy to be set separately from New Zealand environmental policy. Otherwise politicians would have to know more about the different environments than is practical.

Of course just because there is some logic behind NZ and Australia being different countries does not mean that all existing political boundaries are right from an environmental viewpoint. You should hear my uncle-in-law, a resident of Brisbane, on the stupidities of applying a building code written in Canberra to tropical north Queensland sometime.

On the other side, Malaysia is affected by Indonesia’s air pollution in a way that may be improved by borders.

An environmental approach appears to argue, based on my initial thoughts, for federalism – with building codes assigned to a much more local leven than air-pollution standards and monitoring.

Now this would take a lot of work to come up with a map of what political boundaries should be based on geographical features, but it’s a way of thinking about what state boundaries should be that is different from cultural boundaries.

11

Laleh 12.11.06 at 12:08 pm

What I am struck by is that in discussions of absolute sovereignty, often the differential of power between different states is ignored. Having partial sovereignty only means that the powerful states (such as the US) will have sovereignty, while their potential victims will not. To speak of hypotheticals without discussing disparities in international power in this instance is really dangerous.

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