States, territory and utopianism

The first few pages of Jacob Levy’s book make a nice jumping off point for a mini-lecture in response to “that’s just the way the world is.” Everyone assumes that some things about the human condition cannot be changed, and some things can, but we often go with our gut here and don’t think this through (we being professional political philosophers as well as our students). Furthermore, we ought to interrogate *why* we but certain things in the category of unchangable and others in the category of changable. It’s our sense of the weight of history and the tendencies of human nature, of course, but both those things are hopelessly bound up by ideology.

On the substance of your point, I agree. I think sometimes there’s a fear that if we conclude that a particular arrangement, power structure, etc is both unchangable and unjustifiable, we’ll be too depressed or debilitated to go on, or our efforts to make normative sense of our world will have failed.

I can’t speak for Jon, but part of what I’ve understood by the idea of a ‘realistic utopia’ (the contrast case with the ‘pejoritive’ sense of utopia here) is that there should be plausible steps to get to that point that do not involve major rights violations. I can’t find the exact passage your’re refering to right now [p. 89, sorry missed that out. CB] but in the context of nationalism and secession the point seems to be that the idea that each nation should have its own state is a dangerous fantasy, one that will necessarily involve at least serious subordination and almost certainly ethnic cleansing, as we’ve seen from pretty much every attempt to do this. Given this, it’s utopian to spend time talking about how the world might be in some ideal way since there’s no morally acceptable way to get there. (I don’t find the nationalist ideal very attractive, myself.) Of course the world could have developed differently so that states didn’t play an important role. I think it’s hard to imagine what that world is like, and that those who present a modestly well worked and positive picture of it (Kropotkin, for example) tend to leave out a lot of bad parts. But, that seems to be a ship that has sailed. Even if we move to a post-state future (the desirability of which is surely worth talking about) the burden will be on those desiring it to show that this can be reached without major rights violations. (Obviously I don’t mean this as a full defense of a position, just a sketch of why Jon’s remark sounds pretty reasonable to me.)

We have states now but they aren’t a permanent feature of the human condition in the way that some psychological or physiological facts plausibly are.

At the risk of being pedantic a second time, I think for clarity you should distinguish between something being a permanent feature of the human condition and it being a necessary feature of it. Perhaps we shall always have states (either for pragmatic reasons or, as Matt suggests, because of moral considerations) but nevertheless things might have been otherwise. IMO this counterfactual claim is enough to produce a need that their existence be justified.

…each nation should have its own state…

What does the word ‘nation’ mean? To me it’s the name of the state issued your passport. If there’s a different definition, I’d like to see it.

State is just an administrative division necessary (as long as it is necessary) for the purpose of governing. I don’t see any metaphysical significance here.

Matt wrote:

” there should be plausible steps to get to that point that do not involve major rights violations.”

Do states meet the criterion of not involving major rights violations in their creation? Usually, it seems to involve wars, civil wars, conquests, sometimes genocide. By that standard, it would seem to be a wash between states and perjoritive utopias.

For example, the United States was founded on the blood of the Indians. For the United States to achieve the control of its territory normally considered a necessary condition of “statehood”, it’s hard to see how it could have been otherwise. Is it possible to hold that the existence of the US is justified, but the massive slaughter, displacement, and impoverishment of the Indians is not?

Chris said, “But the territorial aspect of the state means that what is beneficial to insiders is often at the expense of others.” Obviously we’re not going to solve major problems of political philosophy in the comments section of a blog post, but I’d worry about the “at the expense of” clause here. Many things we do set back the interests of others but don’t wrong them. In such cases its not clear that owe any compensation or anything else. So, even if ‘outsiders’ have their interests set back by not having access to everything that ‘insiders’ have, its not clear that they have been wronged by this. Given the space and time I have I can’t and won’t give a defense of the claim that borders as such don’t wrong those kept out, at least in many cases. (There are important exceptions.) But, that seems a plausible view to me. That’s true even if many states in fact do engage in activities that don’t just set back the interests of outsiders but actively wrong them.

States were the historical settings in which the social conditions of justice were first approximated. More precisely, they were, almost by definition, the reification of the abstract communities in which the principles of social justice were first tried. Inasmuch, they seem to me justified. Of course, if one accepts this criteria, it follows that their actions and current existence are only morally justified if they can be shown to ensure or promote the conditions of justice.

z: “States were the historical settings in which the social conditions of justice were first approximated.

I’ll buy that weak thesis, stated in the passive voice, but …

z: “More precisely, they were, almost by definition, the reification of the abstract communities in which the principles of social justice were first tried.”

Not too sure about this as a historical claim: I think Tilly is right to draw the analogy between statemaking and organized crime: early states were more like protection rackets, not the institutional embodiment of self-defining communities (the construction of which almost always came after the nasty realities of state-making, a la Peasants into Frenchmen, etc).

But I feel the force of the justificatory claim, as a standalone thesis.

Loren, you are of course right. Blog comments are too short for subtleties. States originated in organized crimes having little to do with anything like social justice. And they did follow through with brutal state-making policies. This later process, though, can be reasonably interpreted as the reification of abstract communities I alluded to before. Reification of abstract communities is not something pretty, for sure. Anyway, again, this is too complex an issue for a blog comment, maybe agreeing on the weak thesis is good enough for the discussion here.

What a strange discussion. Seems to me that our very presence on an internet discussion board is possible because of the economic development which would have been impossible without the existence of states. Perhaps those pondering the ramifications of the non-existence of states would care to take a trip to Iraq, Somalia or Congo and see for themselves.

iain: “I’ve worried for a while at coming up with a definition of “nation”. The best I can do is “a bunch of people who regard themselves as a nation”. I’d be grateful for a more elegant definition.”

As Matt notes, there’s a vast literature here. Benedict Anderson offers probably the most pithy and elegant formulation of your definition: a nation is an imagined community.

Why pick on the US of A?

Why not mention New Zealand? Or australia?
Or Japan’s expropriation of Ainu land?
Or China’s rape of Tibet? Or England’s
unlawful rule in Scotland and Wales
sustained by military occupation?
What about Russia’s ruthless explotation
of Chechnya? Or SAUDI Arabia? My goodness
a whole land conquered and then ruled by
a single family.

Chris,

I guess that first I’d ask who the ‘I’ in the account is. Who is this person who could move across a line at one point and now cannot? Without knowing that I cannot say whether the person is wronged. But surely the way you describe the situation can’t be one you’d generally allow, since we can set up a story like that that makes pretty much any action by a state illegitimate. I don’t suspect you’re an anarchist and I generally don’t find them worth arguing with. So rather, we have a person who wants to cross the boundary of an already existing state and is told she cannot. Does this wrong her? Again, I’d want to know more about the situation but I’d say we have no reason to assume before hand that it does. I’d agree with whomever mentioned above that, in the modern world at least, the state is the vehicle of justice- that the best chance we have for achieving justice involves having states. I would also claim (I can’t hope to give an argument here, of course) that there are good reasons to give states a pretty fair amount of control over their borders- these range from need (often it will be impossible to undertake any decent planning if a state cannot control its borders) to the fact that these are democratically made decisions. Now, I would require some pretty significant limits on the discretion a state has. The most obvious case is that refugees must be given refuge. As for the outsider’s right to associate with insiders, that can usually be met with something less than a right to membership or an indefinite stay. I’d want the default position to be that access for temporary visits should be easy and that the state in question should have to have a legitimate reason for refusal. But, since at least the core of that interest can be met without offering permanent admittance then permanent admittance isn’t required. Obviously this isn’t much more than a sketch of a view, but it seems a reasonable one to me. I don’t think it works well to say that there was a time, say, 100 years ago, when immigration was not really a legal issue, since that seems pretty closely (when you read the history of changes in immigration law) to be connected to what the world was like 100 years ago, in particular to the ways in which it was significantly less just. (Would Canada still have universal health care if Americans could go and get as much Canadian health care as they wanted when they wanted while still paying only US taxes? I’d guess not.) Anyway, this is already a lot longer than a blog comment ought to be so I hope it’s some help in making the view not seem crazy.

Thanks, Matt.

Matt: “I guess that first I’d ask who the ‘I’ in the account is. Who is this person who could move across a line at one point and now cannot? Without knowing that I cannot say whether the person is wronged….”

Avery: “I have a number of concerns with this formulation. One is that it treats the ‘line’–and by extension, the two places divided by the line–as existing prior to any act of line-drawing, place-making, etc. Populations make places, and by making places, make themselves, and vice-versa….[W]e do indeed need a moral theory to address the question of when/how this place-making and other-excluding can be done in a legitimate way. But I would suggest that such a moral theory can’t be reached by imagining a state of nature, or through any means of primarily distributive justice, because there is no way to fix the goods to be distributed (land, places) independently of the beneficiaries of this distribution (people, persons, communities, nations, whatever)–and, vice-versa, no way to specify the recipients without mentioning the distributive currency.”

I just want to say that I think Matt and Avery are basically saying the same thing here, and both are making excellent sense. It is not the identity trumps any and all thinking about the justice of states and borders. But it is the case that identity–including national identity–is going to be fundamental to a great many of the terms by which one can even begin to think about what it is that is taken to be just about any possible distribution of states and borders.

I don’t see what all the hullabaloo is all about? States? Simple. Mountains and rivers. I fail to see how the natural fact of geography is unequal to the natural evolution of history, which in this case being “Freedom”, in all its glory. A state is a cohesive geographic unit encompassing an identifiable history. Nothing more. But most certainly, not a thing less.

I remember reading Anderson’s book almost a decade and a half ago. Memory says not too impressed. More rationalisation than justification, though I may be confusing it with some other book. A trait found in many post WWII authors on politics. A desperate attempt to uphold the results of that era as “fair”. Even that is alright. It is the notion that no other option had existed or even could have, that is highly amusing.

The outsiders receive (or at least should be able to) similar benefits inside their own administrative units (states), according to their own aspirations. The emphasis, IMO, should not be on this highly controversial idea of compensation, but on respecting autonomy, sovereignty, non-intervention.

Should outsiders find enough common ground with the insiders, they always have an option to merge, like the EU or UAE or UAR.

e) a government that is sovereign within the territory

chris: “it is surely wrong to say that the issues of valuation are almost completely intractable and then to draw the conclusion that the appropriate level of compensation is … zero. In the case of many existing borders there may be all kinds of ways to think about valuing the lost opportunities of the excluded wrt to particular jurisdictions and about compensatory schemes.”

That seems right to me, but the trick is to move from acknowledging that “zero” is itself a controversial claim (that supposes some sort of implicit answer to the intractability problem), to justifiable claims about how to make the problem tractable.

One possible approach: claims about the meaning and moral significance of boundaries and the places therein seem to me to fall within public reason, and so demand justifications of a particular sort.

Place is inextricably bound up with, but not quite the same thing as, geographic territory. A rough gloss: places are meaningful spaces, inviting explanation and argument, and justification, relating to the substance and moral significance of those meanings. The construction of places is almost always importantly a public (although not always overtly political) process in which coercion is implicated, so public reasons seem appropriate.

Now that isn’t a substantive solution to the sorts of issues at stake between Chris, Matt, and Avery, but it is a way of approaching those issues that would put (one hopes) reasonable constraints on the sorts of claims that could be made about, say, appropriate compensation across, versus the moral weight of particular attachments within, given borders.

Whether the content and demands of wide public reason simply mirror those we associate with the public reason of particular communities, including liberal democracies (supposing we even agree on that), is, of course, a vexing question, so perhaps not much is gained by framing questions of territory and boundaries in this way? Or this may simply be an explicit statement of something rather obvious, but at least in my reading, place-related demands are rarely expressed as public reasons, and I think they often ought to be.

On nations as imagined communities: there’s a lot of explanation and argument in Anderson’s book, as Russell points out. I don’t suggest we hijack Chris’s thread to draw out those nuances. All the same, it is a bit jarring to see the idea dismissed so readily without some respect for what is, for all its faults and controversies, a fascinating and engaging book.

Also, Anderson is not justifying the existence of, or any particular claims by, existing “nations.” The “imagined communities” definition is drawn from an explanatory thesis about the conditions necessary for a particular sort of imagined community — the nation — to emerge as we find them in modern times.

I’m sure Anderson’s book is wonderful, the idea deserves respect and all that. I was responding to #6 upthread, sorry I neglected to reference.

“More precisely, they were, almost by definition, the reification of the abstract communities in which the principles of social justice were first tried.”

That’s hilarious. States are highly evolved protection rackets. At present, as originally, the greatest good you buy with your taxes is that the state you’re paying them to doesn’t attack you. The second greatest is that other states don’t attack you. (Aren’t allowed to muscle into the first state’s territory.) All else is window-dressing used in the power plays of the people trying to control states.

To be sure, parasites often evolve into symbiotes, but the modern state has a heck of a long way to go before that will have taken place.

I almost hate to say it but I largely agree w/ abb1 here in his remark in 41 above- outsiders get the benefit of their own state. Now, maybe you say that this state isn’t so good. Well, maybe not, but here I’d go back to my earlier distinction between rights and interests. It might be against your interests to keep you from coming to some particular state but that doen’t mean it’s a violation of your rights (it doesn’t wrong you.) All sorts of things set back people’s interests w/o wronging them and this just seems to be one more example. Now, what if the people who want to move have a state that doesn’t protect their interests? Well, the theory has to be set w/in a theory of global (or, as I’d prefer, international) jutice, of course. So, states have a duty to help other states form well-ordered societies. Sometimes people comming from a non well-ordered state are refugees and must be given admission. Sometimes they are not refugees but otherwise need immediate help and that should be given. Is this “compensation”? If that’s what Steiner means than maybe he and I agree, but when I read his paper I must say that I thought it was typical left-libertarian nonsense, frankly. Now, I’d rather have a world with fewer immigration barriers- I think it would be more interesting, more prosperous, and more just. But Chris, do you really think you’ve not just had your interests set back, but have been wronged, and are owed compensation, if you’d like to move to Norway and Norway says no? That, to me, sounds like the crazy idea that I can’t understand. But it seem that for your view to get off the ground you have to assume you have a right to move where ever you want, just because you want to, and I really don’t see any reason to think that’s the case at all- it seems like a magical view of rights to me. (I tend to think that left-libertarians have such a magical view, which is one of many reasons I don’t find it an attractive position.)

I’m not sure we disagree still, abb1. One thing that tends to annoy me about most discussions of immigration by philosophers is that it’s too abstract. Such discussions almost always, for example, ignore that the vast majority of migration in western countries is for family reunification. I’d argue that states have a duty of justice to require such migration, though I’d want to say that the duty is owed most clearly to the people who are already members of the state in quesiton, that such people have a right to have at least their close family members join them. How close they must be isn’t something I can say and I’m not sure it has a context independent answer. Friends are a harder case, since it’s possible to be friends with someone from a long way away in a way that it’s not possible to be a family. But, friends also don’t need permanent admission for friendship to go on and that’s where most of the real debate is over immigration. And, as I’d mentioned above, I think that states should, at least under normal conditions, have to state a valid reason to refuse a temporary visa and that if they do not this is usually unjust.

Chris,
This is, I suppose, why I don’t think blog comments are a good way to do political philosophy. Of course the view I want to defend it more complex than it can be put here. One thing I’m assuming is that a state’s obligations to its members are different from those it has to non-members. So, limiting emigration is different from limiting immigration, in a way somewhat similar to how limiting leaving a club is different from limiting joining one. Now, clubs are obviously different from states and the analogy isn’t perfect, but its along the same lines. (I think some limitations on emigration, in a few cases, might be defensible- if a state pays for someone to study medicine it might be defensible for that state to require a certain number of years of service in it, for example.) But surely you don’t believe that any time we limit anyone’s freedom we violate their rights, unless by freedom you mean the ability to do what one has the right to do, perhaps. But I think your view requires that strong view and it’s not one I find at all persuasive. And, the final example you give is also not at all on point- how is that related to the question of immigration at all? It’s obviously not, and I’ve not said anything that relates to that point. I don’t think it’s useful to go back and forth like this here anymore since we’re unable to get clear on what we are debating. I hope that doesn’t seem like a personal slight, since I don’t mean it as such, but rather that this format just isn’t that great for serious discussion. I keep having to deal with objections that clearly are not consequences of what I claim unless you attribute a lot more to me than I say, for example.

Brett in 8 and Chris in 11: I’m with Brett here. Antarctica is res communis by treaty, though the territorial claims by states have been appropriately frozen rather than withdrawn. But the extension of sovereignty over the oceans by coastal states is a live issue. Even more fragile is the UN’s principle that outer space is “the province of all mankind”. Possible Klingon reservations about this hubristic claim may be ignored by policymakers, but not those of the Pentagon which is determined to militarize near-earth space for one national state, the USA. I don’t think territorial claims to near-earth space or the Moon are hypothetical.

Lemuel (59): 1. “What’s the difference between a state and a family, for this purpose?”

1. a) If I exclude you from my family by fence or bolted door, well, we do have a right to some privacy on our premises and in our bedrooms. Whereas, if I exclude you from California with a whopping big fence across the desert…. I exclude you from visiting friends, relatives, employers, employees, etc., on whose premises you may well be quite welcome.

Few claim the right of society to tell me who can visit my home from Nevada, but many claim a say in who from Baja can stay for a while in my extra room or help me learn Spanish while we cook breakfast. Why?

Doesn’t it seem uncomfortable to you that the richer and whiter you are the more likely you are to have free passage to the four corners of the world?

1. b) Alternatively, suppose we were just a big, big family. I am not too comfortable with my mother-in-law and her second cousin trying to decide who can visit the home established by my wife and myself, are you? Shouldn’t she try hard to limit her notions of who should visit to her own domicile? And if she worries that my visitors will somehow be a threat to her, so then it should be about that issue….. not keeping people out en mass.

Lemuel (59) : 2. “Why is it assumed that the losers in state formation are those excluded? It’s easy to think of examples where someone would be worse off becasue of the border they ended up inside of…”

2. Sometimes your rights have been infringed, but you end up with a better result. The cop stopped you unfairly….just ten minutes before you were going to have a deadly auto accident. It’s still a bad stop.

Most humans still can’t afford a car to be stopped in….. and you seem to not notice how many are sacrificing enormously to get to places where their kids will be able to have options like the ones your kids and mine take for granted. We are using fences on human beings….do we really NEED to? .

I’m not sure, pqow, if when you say, “For example, in the USA people in general have an obligation to (a) not harm me in specific ways (b) help me (directly or indirectly) when I am being harmed by others, and to prevent the harm from taking place.” you mean a moral or a legal obligation. I suspect you mean legal since otherwise the “in the USA” is odd. (maybe you just mean, ‘outside the state of nature’ or something, in which case it’s not so odd but isn’t clear, either.) But, at least in the vast majority of cases, in the USA it’s not the case that people have a legal obligation to help others when they are being harmed by 3rd parties or to prevent the harm from taking place. (In a few cases there might be liability in tort, but not in general.) This is a way that the US differs (perhaps for the worse) from many European countries.

uhm, Chris, your moral arguments aside, which I don’t find very convincing, have you for one moment thought about the feasibility of your proposal?

Chris says that uncompensated exclusions boil down to nothing but: “expressions of interest backed by force.” Excellent.

Would you then also say that governments can’t rightfully exclude the goods these travellers would like to ship to their new home? Or must they leave their stuff behind?

novakant: “Since the chances for the implementation of any of the ideas you have posited are exactly zero and you refuse to commit to any practical solutions apart from tacitly supporting illegal immigration as a means of undermining the perceived injustice of immigration policies, I have to doubt your seriousness in this matter.”

To quote a famous fictional archeologist: “now you’re just getting nasty.”

Not to get all hippie lovechild or “future fantastic” or anything, but couldn’t a smug realist have said exactly the same thing a century or so ago about arguments for extending the suffrage to women? or several decades back about legal provisions for same sex benefits guarantees and state-sanctioned civil unions?

The question of seriousness thus has no obvious answer here, in my judgement, at least not on the basis you’re providing, novakant. I’m inclined give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

To those who found this discussion insufficiently scholastic, or insufficiently practical, I’d like to say that I thought this was a very good post (even if it did contain a couple of “typos”…)

@55,
not imaginary, but imagined. A functioning national state (Iraq an OK example for you?) must have a plurality of the population imagining themselves to be primarily members of the said nation rather than members of something else, and acting accordingly. A bit like religion. Gods do not exist, but believers do.
@63,
the funny thing about this Norwegian fjord example is that well into the 19th century the borders of Norway and Russia in Lappland were undemarcated and local people crossed the disputed territories at will. The eventual demarcation of borders and enforcement of border controls was catastrophic for some the Russian Lapps (IIRC) as they lost access to vital pastures.

Lurker,
nation-state (like Iraq) is not imagined, it’s real, it has borders, it has census, you can make a list of all its members; being an Iraqi is not like religion at all – as opposed to those metaphysical ‘imagined communities’ discussed upthread. Imagined, imaginary – what’s the difference.

So, I don’t agree that members of a nation (state) necessarily have to (let alone ‘must’) imagine themselves to be primarily members of their nation. They are members, that’s a fact; while them being, say, Kurds or Arabs – that is a bit like religion.

Lurker, even though we see churches on almost every corner and the believers are in the billions and religions affect us all in various ways, I understand it’s not considered particularly controversial (especially among intellectuals) to say that there is no god. So, why should it sound radical if I say that there are no nations in the metaphysical sense? It’s the same thing. Also, there are no little green men in the flying saucer up in the sky.

@80,
That’s just what I meant by the comparison to religion. The kind of nations that romantic nationalists believe in do not exist and never did, any more than gods or little green men. But if enough people believe in something, the belief is a real thing and has real effects, you can’t just ignore it. You seem to take the existence of the state and that people will obey and even defend it for granted. The Bosnians or the Lebanese can’t do that.
People will believe in something. Questioning our assumptions is not that rewarding. The most you can hope for is a better class of belief, a uniter not a divider.