Self Determination, Secession, Empire... oh lord.
A long point on empire, government and secession
Empire and succession have been popular topics lately, with Ed West posting a nice article about empires and diversity, and Scott Alexander putting up two articles thinking about secession and self determination. I want to add a point particularly regarding self determination and secession, and how they relate to empire and economies of scale. This won’t be exhaustive; for more discussion I recommend American Secession by F.H. Buckley and When All Else Fails: The Ethics of Resistance to State Injustice by Jason Brennan, two books I read related to the topic over the past year or two that were pretty good. I like Jason Brennan in particular.
Recently, that is to say “in the middle of writing this” I wrote a brief explanation of economies and diseconomies of scale. I did this pretty much entirely so I could just link it here and not have a five page digression right in the middle. So here, I am linking it. Now let’s talk about empires, states and secession!
If I were to sketch out what I think is the standard, normal view of people regarding state breakups and self determination, it would be something like:
All the nations as they stand now seem about right. If people inside a state that I think is generally evil want to secede, that is good and we should support them. If people inside a state that I think is generally good want to secede, that is bad and we should generally consider them bad. People wanting to secede from a state is not itself evidence that a state is less good than I thought.
Yes, that is pretty sketchy. Note though that it does account for the very common observation that in the USA we consider the Revolutionary War wherein we seceded from the British Empire good and justified and a big step for human freedom, and the secession of the Confederacy from the Union to have been unethical and deserving of a massively destructive civil war to correct. The British living in America were our forefathers so they are pretty much by definition good, and besides the British Empire was all colonizey so that’s bad, so the US breaking away was good. The Confederacy wanted to keep having slaves so they were bad and the United States is good, so letting them leave would be bad.
This sketch also accounts for why you hear people argue that Russia invading Ukraine is fine because Ukraine only stopped being part of Russia in 1991, so it is practically the same place. No matter that it was part of the USSR then, and the status of the area before the end of WW2 was sort of all over the place. It further accounts for people who are all for Ukrainian independence being horrified that Britain voted to leave the European Union.
In other words, most people’s feelings about independency, self determination and state sovereignty are not founded on any sort of principles to be applied consistently, but based on status quo bias adjudicated by how they feel about the relevant actors. The Impartial Spectator need not apply here, nor any real effort to see if their feelings about the actors are justified. Yet we feel the need to strongly favor one side or the other, and reason with great motivation to support that.
Against this tendency, let’s address a few of the common issues and try to clear things up. Or stir up enough mud that we just give up and accept that we have no real idea and need to work on it more later. I dunno.
Argument 1: States are said to have self determination but individuals do not. This is problematic because a group having rights that the individuals do not doesn’t make sense.
Well… kind of? If you agree humans have the right to free association, that is they can join or leave groups as they see fit, then individuals have the right of self determination too. The breakdown happens somewhere between the individual level of “me and my stuff” and the state level of “us and all of our stuff, which may or may not all exist within this line we drew on a map.”
The problem here arises because governments do not govern people, they govern territories12. Sure you can be a citizen of a state and live outside the state, but while doing so you are subject to the rules of the state you are living in, not the state you are a citizen of. The state enforces its rules on those that live inside its territory, with very limited ability to enforce its rules on those outside, typically limited only to leveraging the interactions of outsiders with insiders to get outsiders to do what they want.
As such, the state acts as though it owns all the land within its borders, and allows people to exist there only if they follow its rules3. Under this model (which seems to be deeply implicit in people’s thinking) secession is a problem because it takes away the state’s property, i.e. its land, and makes a new state that owns it now. This would be analogous to me quitting my job and claiming my office and computer as my own.
Now, this quiet assumption of how things works makes perfect sense when you look at how states act and, even better, is literally true if we are living under the type of government that dominated for millennia: absolute monarchy4. For much of human history we had kings who started out as not kings but became so by getting a bunch of guys together and violently taking over a bunch of land. The newly crowned king then handed out that land to his loyal followers and allowed them to farm the land (or subcontract that out to peasants) in exchange for continued support and taxes. Critically, though, the king still owned all the land and could take it back if you displeased; his right to take the lives of his followers was much less absolute. Ruling a country meant that literally: you ruled the country, the land itself, and the people just happened to be there. Just as you only owned the deer when they were on your land, you only controlled the people so long as they were on it; deer and peasants who leave your land are outside your power.
This system paradoxically is perfectly stable so long as kingdoms are not perfectly stable. When there are lots of wars and kingdoms get broken up and kings replaced, it is pretty clear to everyone that the king owns this land because he and his buddies took it from someone else, and his buddies get to run it because they are the king’s buddies, and you get to farm it because the king’s buddies said you could, and don’t you forget it come tax time. You can no more secede from the state and keep your house and land than you can try to overthrow the king and become king yourself, for they are exactly the same thing.
The trouble for the system comes around when the kingdom has been stable for a few generations. Now you have a succession of kings and noble families that have lived on and controlled the same land for years, and the dynamics are very different than the days when the original king and his buddies took over. The nobles maybe don’t like the new king, or don’t get along with each other well. Maybe the new king is kind of a nutter, or just wants to pull dominance moves over the nobles and remind them he owns the land they have run for generations. In other words, people have developed ideas around the status quo of who owns what land that are different from “the king owns all of it and I just run it for him.5” Especially as people start thinking of themselves as a distinct nation from their neighbors they stop thinking about the kingdom as “the country the king owns” to “the country we live in, that we own whether or not we happen to be here at the moment or the king dies and we get a new one.” Why should some new crazy king get to reshuffle everyone’s privileges their family has enjoyed for centuries? He is a bad king! Get a new one! I should be king!
Machiavelli notes in The Prince that western style kingdoms tend to have lots of nobles that are individually very willing to betray their king to an outsider, but getting the nobles of a region to switch to your rule after you try to conquer the country is difficult because they have their own sense of ownership of the land. This is in contrast to eastern style satrapies where the local governors are only governors because the sultan, or whoever rules the country, installed them as such. The satraps will only rarely betray the sultan because they owe their position to him directly and have no other claims, but once the sultan is overthrown every satrap will quickly switch to support the conqueror because his goodwill is now their only claim.
The sultan and his satraps are more explicitly following the traditional model of the ruler owns the land, and everyone else just works there. In the west, for whatever reason, it became the norm for individuals to continue to own land regardless of the ruler, to have governments that do not necessarily own the land but individuals do. Presumably this developed as nobles and the church demanded some sort of due process to prevent the king just arbitrarily taking all their land away on a whim, and then it trickled down to apply to everyone. On the other hand it might have started more bottom up, with individual people owning land they worked and farmed, and getting so pissy about kings coming along and stealing it, and the kings and their buddies coming from the same culture of private ownership, that the kings and their buddies tolerated the dual system of “We own everything, but you can own it so long as you never forget that we actually own it. We have to know from whom taxes should be collected, in any case.” Probably a combination of the two.
This awkward gap only widened as we move into modernity. When the areas of non-direct state owned land all got claimed there was no where for people to live who didn’t want a king. Owning the land and owning the people started to look more and more the same, even as the institution of slavery and peasants tied to the land disappeared. Yet consider the third line of the Declaration of Independence (from Wikipedia):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Note that governments are things instituted among men. Where does the land the government controls come from then? Presumably the assumption is the men bring it with them, that is the land owners come together to form a government to secure the rights they already have. This is exactly the opposite of the normal pattern for starting governments, which was “take ownership of a bunch of land, and if people want to live there they need to do what you say.” By the time of the American Revolution the notion that the king doesn’t own everything by virtue of being king, but serves as king partially at the pleasure of Parliament, a council of nobles who actually own the land, was already established. Established enough that no one felt the need to point out that all the bad things the king did justified their taking his land for themselves, at least.
Forming a government was then an expression of free association of land owners. However, the notion that the rules the government makes applies to all people within the landowner’s collective land merged with the notion (instinct?) that the government actually owned all the land within its territory, and that was the source of its power, not just the consent of the governed. Our modern states formed by the governed and operating under justification that the enforcement of the rules is with the consent of the governed in fact behave as though they were formed by a guy and a bunch of his buddies violently taking control of a bunch of land, declaring one guy king who owns all the land and his buddies administrating the land doing so as his managers, and everyone who lives there can do what he says or get the hell out.
… What were we talking about again? Oh right, self determination! Right, the reason it seems that states have that right but individuals do not is not that individuals do not have it, but rather that states exercise self determination based on ownership of the land and the assumption that other people own land only because the state allows them to use it. The state owns the apartment building, and “your apartment” is owned by you only in the sense that you have certain rights to use and exclusion, but you can’t leave with it.
Are there counter examples? Well, sort of. David Friedman discusses a very interesting version from medieval Iceland in his book “Law’s Order.” Basically a lot of Norsemen got sick of having kings and went to Iceland and set up a government specifically without them. Individuals made allegiance pacts with lords but were free to switch or be denied. If a person had a conflict with another person under one lord, the lord acted as judge. If there was a conflict between people with different lords the lords got together to sort it out; lords who let their people cause problems got pushback from the other lords that might go so far as violence; lords who didn’t stand up for their people pretty quickly didn’t have people and stopped being lords. So while the government covered “people who live in Iceland” it was independent of the government or individuals owning land as a basis for exercising power, but rather focused on association. (It is a really good example, in a really good book. I am not doing it justice.6)
Anyway, the point is that if we care about individuals and their rights as a primary, with governments and states only having a right to exist insofar as they secure and protect those rights, our old and possibly instinctual model of governments ruling territory because they own it is always going to lead to problems with letting people leave the state without giving up their land, because from the state’s perspective they are stealing its land. That needn’t be the case, but we think of states in terms of land, not people, and so long as we do that we are going to have problems.
Argument 2: Small states a very inefficient compared to larger states. The economies of scale inherent in governance imply that a large region could effectively form a state but your street (or just you) cannot. We can thus reasonably support the breakup of large states but deny the breakup of smaller ones. People or regions do not have an absolute right to secede because that would imply every bit can secede down to the individual.
I have the obvious problem with this of “How do we determine if a state is large enough to be efficient?” followed closely by “Who gets to determine that?”
The less obvious problem I have is that this argument is based entirely and implicitly on economies of scale, and efficiency is a measure of output per unit input at root. What outputs are we measuring against what outputs is part of determining if a state is large enough to be efficient (and a VASTLY underestimated problem). The real problem the argument ignores is that economies of scale imply diseconomies of sale, that is if we are going to ask “How big is the minimum sized efficient state?” we need to ask “How big is the maximum sized efficient state?” In other words, if we are going to say “That state shouldn’t split because the pieces would be too small to be efficient” we also need to say “That state should split because it is too big to be efficient.” Funny, you almost never hear the second bit.
Empirically, however, smaller states have a much better track record than large ones, in terms of survival. There are quite a few city states still today, from Malta to Singapore, while all the large land empires broke apart during the 20th century. If you follow my model of empire where population is as important as land area, one can argue that China and India represent empires, and indeed many modern states rival ancient empires in terms of area and population, so some big states work, but most have broken apart under their own weight.
Yet, if you consider population to be a source of instability the same way land area is, we should expect more modern states to break apart. Most industrialized nations have very slow population growth, but they also have increasing urbanization. The effective distance between population centers is greater, islands of density with less in between, than it was when people were more evenly distributed.
That being the case, it is not at all obvious that the same efficiencies of scale that apply to a large agrarian society spotted with moderately sized urban areas apply equally well to massive urban populations with relatively sparse regions in between. Especially not when those cities have populations greater than many states of 60-70 years ago.
Further, many of the efficiencies people point to a not solely the province of large states, nor the inefficiencies limited to small.
Open markets and trade are often a virtue of large states, as people can trade easily with little cross border nonsense. Yet there is plenty of cross border nonsense in the USA between states, and free trade agreements are a thing between nation states. If your government wants to mess with trade, it is going to mess with trade no matter your size.
Self sufficiency is also brought up, but is a pointless argument. No state is entirely self sufficient, nor should it desire to be. Some states import food, some export. Some states import energy, some export. Some do both simultaneously. That is what trade is all about, and humans are at least as good at trading as they are at killing each other.
Speaking of which, military requirements are often cited, but many larger nations just barely have a military now, and many smaller nations are doing pretty well with their moderate military. Defensive alliances can go a long way here, as well as just not getting involved in foreign wars. The small size and relative military weakness of individual European countries has not necessitated them becoming one super state despite rivals like the USSR, USA and recently China.
At the very small scale, say less than a city, one might worry about being able to provide basic services. This is a bit odd though; how can a city of 10,000,000 provide services in a way better than 100 cities of 100,000? 1,000 cities of 10,000? Service provision industries don’t scale well, that is you expect to see many small firms instead of few large ones. Do large cities have better school districts than small ones? Pretty universally no… that’s why all the moderately wealthy people with kids either move to the suburbs or put their kids in private school. Better roads? Not that I have ever noticed. Police? DMV? There might be some cases where larger governments provide services better than smaller governments of the same type, but they are hard to come up with. One might also suggest that those services that fall under this category could better done by the private sector anyway, like the post office.
So… yea. If you are going to oppose a region’s secession from a state based on efficiency, consistency demands that you also support certain states’ break up into smaller entities based on efficiency. Once you define the criterion which you are using to measure efficiency you are logically obligated to apply it across the board to different states and recommend resizing. Perhaps that is why so few who use this argument go into detail about the criterion for efficiency they are basing their preferences on…
Where does that leave us? Maybe with more mud than clarity in the water, but I think two useful things come out.
Our thoughts about the state, government and individuals seem to be very surface level, and limited to an almost instinctual grasp of what states are, and how they relate to the individual. We humans need to do some serious thinking about that, and how it applies to changing governments.
The question of the optimal range of state size is a very open one, and we probably should be very careful before saying “That region shouldn’t be independent because it is too small.” Even beyond questions of who the hell are you to make that decisions, there is a wide range of state size that seem to work, and bigger is not always better and possibly a lot worse given the range of government outputs we might be concerned with.
We do a lot of justification for the status quo, with special cut outs for things we wish would change. We are humans, that’s what we do. We don’t only have to do that, and we probably should spend some more time coming up with consistent principles for when it is ok for people exit a government and set up their own. I expect we will see more of that in the near future, and our current heuristics probably won’t cut it.
My brain versions of both Mike Munger and Bryan Caplan just simultaneously screamed “THIS SHOULD BE ITS OWN ESSAY!” I am going to press on under the theory that having mental versions of Mike Munger and Bryan Caplan who yell at me is a sure sign of psychosis and therefore shouldn’t be trusted, but I might come back to this in more detail in a later essay.
Generally states no longer exile people and instead just imprison or execute them, but exiling actually makes a lot more sense if your claim to power is owning all the land everyone else lives on. That doesn’t require the state to have the right to dispose of your life, only to have the right to say “you can’t live here.”
Or something very close… roll with me here. There are many small deviations all over the world, but the fundamentals are the same.
Grotius discusses the various ways humans determine ownership of things, one of which is basically “I have been here using it forever.” Many animals display the same behavior, interestingly enough.
Come to think of it, Snowcrash addresses this sort of thing as well.
Self Determination, Secession, Empire... oh lord.
In re: "Our thoughts about the state, government and individuals seem to be very surface level, and limited to an almost instinctual grasp of what states are" - My theory is that most people think of states as being monarchies where by some accident of history the monarch happened to be replaced by a committee (of one kind or another).
Phrases about "consent of the governed" or "popular sovereignty" mean that there is some kind of lip service being paid to the fact that the committee who is doing the old king's job might have to answer for how they rule; but that's all internal, court-politics-level stuff -in terms of the way people think about their country as a whole, it is still more or less a monarchy (or at least wearing the monarchy's vestments) when it goes to dinner with the other countries.