This article is adapted from a lecture presented on August 3, 2024 at Mises University 2024 in Auburn, Alabama.
The full name of this talk is “Self-Determination, Imperialism, and Secession: 3 Sides of the Same Coin.” So, I abuse the metaphor a bit, be we might also say that self-determination and secession—and self-determination’s opposite, imperialism—are three ways of looking at the same object.
The defense of self-determination is well-established within the so-called “classical” liberal tradition, and so let’s start with Ludwig von Mises, who understood liberalism well.
In his 1927 book Liberalism, Mises took a strict and expansive view in favor of self-determination. Specifically, he noted that respect for the right of self-determination required states to allow the separation of new polities via secession. He writes:
The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time … their wishes are to be respected and complied with.
Put another way, secession is the means or tool by which self-determination is expressed and preserved in real world politics. The two concepts go hand in hand.
Where does Mises get this idea of self-determination? He was drawing upon currents of thought alive and well in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Origins in the American Revolution
The concept of self-determination—albeit not the phrase—was already well-known as the driving force behind the American revolutionaries when the colonies seceded from the British Empire in the 1770s. Historian David Armitage describes the United States’ war for independence as essentially the practical and political starting point for modern ideas of self-determination. While the philosophical roots of self-determination are often attributed to Immanuel Kant, the prototype for a real-life secession movement was found in the American war for independence. Referring to Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Armitage writes: “The notion that ‘one People’ might find it ‘necessary’ to dissolve its links with a larger polity—that is, that it might legitimately attempt to secede . . . was almost entirely unprecedented and barely accepted at the time of the American Revolution.”
The success of the United States in asserting a right of self-determination provoked similar movements in Europe and Latin America in the decades following American independence. For instance, Armitage notes that “language for self-determination” found in the Declaration of Independence would show up repeatedly with Latin American, European, and Asian movements seeking political independence.
In the Declaration, Jefferson was, of course drawing heavily on the thought of John Locke who himself recognized a right to self-determination secured through secession. But not as explicitly as Jefferson does. According to political scientist Lee Ward, Locke “had a highly developed right of revolution analogous to a remedial right of secession.” Based, in part, on “property rights of a conquered people.” Locke, for example, recognized that that Greeks within the Ottoman empire possessed a right to secede to defend themselves and their property against their Turkish overlords. That is, the Greeks had a right to self-determination.
Locke did fear where all this was leading if some sort of limitation was not put on who could assert a right to self-determination.
Locke suggested that only groups with size, institutions, and cohesion substantial enough to form their own legislatures could exercise a right to secession and political self-determination. Even here, however, Locke is not overly rigid. That is, there remains within Locke’s formulation the potential for a wide variety of communities to assert independence and self-determination. Ward notes that in Locke’s thinking “[t]he claim that legislative power can never revert to individuals does not preclude the possibility that one community within a larger society can assume legislative power.” From this power then flows a right to secession and self-determination.
Jefferson adopts a more flexible attitude than Locke, and assumed that new secession movements in America would arise in the future. He never expressed much concern with the details of which groups would secede or with what institutions. Jefferson supported efforts that would mitigate the need for secession as a means to realizing self-determination.
The Idea Spreads to Europe
In Europe, the concept spread in the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. For example, self-determination was a central theme in Poland’s fight in 1794 to fully separate from the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian states. Poland’s leading separatist was Tadeusz Kościuszko, who had been an officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution and who was quite familiar with the Declaration of Independence. As historian Victor Kattan notes, Kościuszko was pushing for self-determination well before the concept entered the common lexicon in Europe.
Mises, who was well-versed in Polish history, was likely aware of this. Mises would have been even more familiar with the battles over self-determination that raged across Habsburg lands a generation before his birth. Chief among these was Hungary’s attempt to secede from the Austrian empire in 1848. These conflicts were very much couched in terms of self-determination.
By the 1870s, the phrase “self-determination” appears to have been increasingly common—especially in the German language. The German form of the phrase shows up among Czech parliamentarians of the Austrian Imperial Council in 1870. It is also found in French writings at least as early as 1862. It is notable that in the English version of Mises’s Liberalism that we now all read—a translation by Ralph Raico—that Raico translates the relevant German phrase as “self-determination.”
Self-determination via secession also gained support among French radical liberals Gustave de Molinari and Charles Dunoyer. Indeed, it is with Molinari that we see what is perhaps the first explicit endorsement of more or less top-to-bottom secession with what Molinari called a “double right of secession.” The idea here is that the commune can secede from the province, and the province can secede from the central state. That is, self-determination is in no way limited to any large recognized political entity, ethnicity, or religious group.
Here we see a similar view to that which Mises took about 40 years later. The right to self-determination, expressed and secured through a plebiscite, extends all the way down to even the smallest political entity.
Murray Rothbard, a disciple of both Mises and Molinari, unsurprisingly adopted a very flexible view on self-determination via secession. Rothbard wrote in 1969:
Secession is a crucial part of the libertarian philosophy: that every state be allowed to secede from the nation, every sub-state from the state, every neighborhood from the city, and, logically, every individual or group from the neighborhood.
This view of secession and self-determination should not be confused with limited or distorted views of “self-determination” offered by some other secessionists.
For example, the Hungarian nationalists in 1848 wanted self-determination for themselves within the Austrian Empire, but denied the same to other ethnic groups like the Croatians and Slovenians.
Another example is the American secessionists of the nineteenth century who denied a general right to self-determination. Theorists like John C. Calhoun, for example, did not allow for secession for any group other than state governments. Rothbard pointed out the inconsistency and the lack of any general theory of self-determination underlying this position.
Needless to say, these views fell far short of the sort of self-determination supported by Mises or Molinari or Rothbard.
By the early twentieth century, self-determination was not just a phrase used by liberals like Mises. The term was also used —although with far more cynical intent—by the likes of Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, neither of whom were Jeffersonian liberals, of course.
Lenin used self-determination as a tool against what he saw as capitalist imperialism. Woodrow Wilson used the term for purposes of realpolitik—that is, to justify breaking off pieces of Austria and Germany following the First World War. It is notable that Wilson did not grant self-determination to Germans enclaves in countries with non-German majorities, however.
The United Nations and Self-Determination
Bizarrely, there are many American political commentators today—including even many so-called libertarians—who attempt to designate modern efforts at secession and self-determination as some kind of rightwing or reactionary strategy.
This would likely be news to the authors of the United Nations Charter which explicitly lists a right of self-determination—and therefore the right to political separation via secession— among the basic rights it enumerates.
Self-determination is a well-established right across the political spectrum, and at this point the debate over self-determination is only a debate over when and where this right may be invoked.
When the charter was adopted in 1945, colonial powers such as Britain and France were reluctant to approve any broad interpretation of the concept of self-determination. Winston Churchill, after years of denouncing Germans for violating self-determination rights in Europe, turned around and insisted that the concept did not apply to Africans. Eventually, however, many colonies managed to use the UN Charter’s words on self-determination to justify secession from their colonial masters.
In response, many UN member states insisted that self-determination via “unilateral secession” only applies to colonial subjects of an obvious nature—i.e., people in places like Kenya and Nigeria. “Noncolonial” subjects, the thinking went, did not have the same rights of secession and self-determination. The basis for this distinction between colonial and noncolonial secession has always been murky, however, largely because there is no undisputed definition of what regions or populations are “colonial” in nature. The definition of this status has at times become so arbitrary that one criterion has been whether or not the colony and the metropole are separated by a body of salt water. A dividing line of mere fresh water, or a desert or a mountain range, wouldn’t count. This conveniently denies Australian aborigines, North American Indians, and Siberian natives the right of self-determination. Moreover, member states of the UN have frequently insisted that self-determination can only be invoked as “remedial self-determination” in cases of major violations of human rights such as genocide. That is, secession can only be resorted to as a remedy for rights violations in extremis.
Of course what qualifies as “in extremis” has never been established. There is no agreement over how many abuses must be endured at the hands of an imperial government before a remedial right of secession can be invoked. There is no agreement over the means by which public support for separation can be asserted. Nor is there agreement over what constitutes colonial subjugation.
What is not in dispute, however, is that a right to self-determination via secession exists, and that secession is justified in at least some cases. Thus, the current borders of the world’s sovereign states are therefore neither sacrosanct nor perpetual.
On the other hand, and not surprisingly, the status quo powers tend to only grudgingly accept a right to self-determination, and even then only for some people suffering outrageous war crimes. Unfortunately, this position essentially means that the right of self-determination for victims of regime abuse are not recognized so long as the state’s crimes fall short of outright genocide, slavery, and similar crimes.
Since the 1940s, the concept of self-determination in international law has broadened—although nowhere near Mises’s interpretation. For example, the UN’s 1970 “Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States” explicitly expands self-determination beyond colonial subjects. The declaration predictably lists colonial subjugation as a justification for secession, but A careful reading of this section also leads one to conclude that those states that lose the support of “the whole people”—whether in a colonial relationship or otherwise—can legitimize the dismemberment of the state.
Moreover, the declaration’s language may further open the door to legitimizing the use of secession to address violations of self- determination “in moderato.” That is, international law discourse increasingly recognizes that secession need not be justified only by war crimes and genocide.
What constitutes “serious injustices,” of course, remains a matter of debate, as is the “acceptable” means of obtaining and enforcing this separation. The Misesian approach would be what philosopher Allan Buchanan calls the “pure plebiscite theory” of the right to secede. According to Buchanan the theory proposes that “any group that can constitute a majority (or, on some accounts, a ‘substantial’ majority) in favor of secession within a portion of the state has the right to secede.” This approach has indeed been used to establish political support and legitimacy for secession movements in many cases over the past century. Modern examples include Iceland in 1944, Malta in 1964, Slovenia in 1990. One might also include here Norway’s secession from Sweden in 1905. Yet plebiscites are not always used, as the examples of the American Revolution and the post-Soviet Baltic states make clear.
Limiting the Scope of Self-Determination
As to the question of when self-determination can be enjoyed and exercised, we might appropriate an old joke about socialism and say that “self-determination is like food in a socialist state. Not everybody gets some.“
And why doesn’t everyone get some? Because existing polities—states in the modern world—are not inclined to reduce their own power by granting self-determination to separatists.
Consequently, we observe that although radical liberals like Rothbard maintain that self-determination is an individual right, in the real world, it is exceptionally rare that an individual ever has the means to demand and secure self-determination on his own. The realities of life on planet earth requires some sort of collective action to secure these rights. As Allen Buchanan has observed, however, the fact that secession movements seeking self-determination are often brought about by groups of people does not mean self-determination cannot be an individual right.
For Buchanan, John Locke’s right of revolution falls into this category as well. It is an individual right generally exercised by groups. So, when Jefferson writes that “one people” can “dissolve the political bands” between polities, he’s not saying this right is a communal right only. Buchanan suggests that both revolution and secession in pursuit of self-determination should be “understood as the right of persons subject to a political authority to defend themselves from serious injustices” (emphasis added).
Even in a world where political leaders admit on a theoretical level that a right to self-determination exists, political leaders seek to manufacture many reasons why self-determination must not be allowed.
Essentially, nearly all reasons given for this boils down to various types of paternalism, colonialism, and imperialism.
This is easy to see both in nineteenth century colonialist rhetoric, but also in modern-day centralist rhetoric that denies self-determination to those labeled as “backward” or as not sufficiently enlightened to be allowed self-determination.
Self-Determination is Denied through “Humanitarian” Imperialism and Colonialism
It is important to keep in mind that the opposite of self-determination is imperial subjugation. As Locke, Jefferson, Mises, and many others state, to be held within a polity against your will is to be subject to a type of colonial rule. Thus, to deny self-determination and its realization through secession, is to embrace imperialism and colonialism.
Modern imperialists deny this, of course, and think themselves humanitarians who only want to protect human rights by maintaining their enlightened despotism over others.
We see this in how so-called humanitarianism remains a common excuse for imperialist centralization of power.
Preventing human rights violations, and Spreading civilization in general has long been used as an excuse for state-building through colonialism and imperialism—that is, through political centralization. This idea dates back at least to early Spanish and colonial efforts in the New World, and the rationale was initially employed as just one of many.
The importance of the conquest-spreads-civilization claim increased, however, as liberalism gained ground in Europe in the nineteenth century. Liberals were more skeptical of the benefits of imperialism. So, in this period, as political scientist Lea Ypi notes: “During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the purpose of colonial rule was declared to be the ‘civilizing mission’ of the West to educate barbarian peoples.” The implied conclusion was that it was necessary that the European rulers “take over [the natives’] administration, and set up new officers and governors on their behalf, or even give them new masters, so long as this could be proved to be in their interest.”
That last caveat would become important to late colonial rationales: colonial rule was said to be in the interests of the natives themselves, who were incapable of proper and legitimate self-government. The British adopted these Spanish notions as their own in later centuries, and by the nineteenth century, we find John Stuart Mill claiming that “barbarians” were the be denied self-determination for their own good.
Today, the same thinking takes the form of support for humanitarian intervention both internationally and domestically. Just as the traditional imperialists assumed the residents of the colonies were too backward to be capable of enlightened self-government, modern opponents of a broad application of self-determination rights assume that central governments still must serve as enforcers of human rights across the globe.
The old imperialist mentality still prevails: political independence must be opposed in the name of protecting human rights.
Not surprisingly, by the way, the old radical liberals who broadly supported self-determination didn’t fall for this imperialist humanitrain ruse.
Indeed, many classical liberals—such as the great Richard Cobden—have long denied that such policies were ever worth it. Ludwig von Mises was a typical liberal in this regard when he wrote in the 1920s:
No chapter of history is steeped further in blood than the history of colonialism. Blood was shed uselessly and senselessly. Flourishing lands were laid waste; whole peoples destroyed and exterminated. All this can in no way be extenuated or justified. The dominion of Europeans in Africa and in important parts of Asia is absolute. It stands in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism and democracy, and there can be no doubt that we must strive for its abolition.
It is also notable that Mises wasn’t fooled by the claim that the imperialists are spreading peace and civilization. Mises writes:
Attempts have been made to extenuate and gloss over the true motive of colonial policy with the excuse that its sole object was to make it possible for primitive peoples to share in the blessings of European civilization.
The fact that modern humanitarian interventions often end in bloodbaths and poverty for the local populations —as in Iraq and other countries that have fallen victim to American humanitarian interventions in recent decades—reminds us of what results from denying self-determination. When we add up the human cost of the Scramble for Africa, American westward expansion, the Russian conquest of Siberia, the French annexation of Algeria, and the long march of the British empire, it is hardly evident that this was all “worth it” to bring enlightenment to the provincials. In fact, Western imperialism has largely functioned to create animosity against the West.
The humanitarian excuse for increasing regime power over retrograde locals has domestic applications as well. In the United States today, we often see the humanitarian excuse applied to deny self-determination to state and local governments. We are often told that only the central government in Washington is qualified to make final rulings—via the Supreme Court—as to what constitutes the “correct” interpretation of human rights. Local interpretations are considered suspect, and null and void if in conflict with the value of the metropole. (This reasoning differs little from a pith-helmet wearing British imperialist of old droning on about the white man’s burden.) Humanitarianism is similarly invoked whenever secession is mentioned as a means of protecting self-determination for some groups. Self-determination cannot be tolerated, many anti-secessionists tell us, because we have the Supreme Court and the White House to impose “humanitarian” and enlightened rule in all parts of the country. Those state legislatures or city councils who choose not to rule in line with the rulings of the Washington elite have rendered themselves threats to human rights, and thus have given up their right to self-government.
Indeed, vehement opposition to self-determination for separatists and decentralists remains plentiful. Among the writers of the pundit class, any number of arguments are used to claim that self-determination for out-of-power minority groups is not desirable or moral.
The centralizing elites in these cases insist that self-determination for separatists cannot be tolerated because its advocates are racists and fascist barbarians and cannot be trusted with self-government. Here’s a representative example of this line of thinking from MSNBC’s Joy Reid commenting on what would happen if people who don’t agree with her are able to obtain self-determination via so-called national divorce:
Today, roughly half of African Americans still live in the 11 Southern states that comprised the Confederacy, and so if this national divorce happened, they would be trapped in an apartheid hellscape of a new country with zero health care, crappy public schools, barely a right to vote, and a full return to ownership by someone else of their bodies — except this time it wouldn’t just be Black women, it would be all women.
Social democrats aren’t the only ones who embrace this line of thinking, however. This same rhetoric is employed by some libertarians. For example, Zach Weissmueller at Reason magazine writes:
In post-divorce America, California would have freer rein to confiscate guns. Florida lawmakers could shrug off the First Amendment and ban “offensive” speech. Cops everywhere wouldn’t need to concern themselves about violating citizens’ constitutional rights.
In both the social-democratic and the libertarian views shown here, the argument is essentially that if any region of the country is allowed to separate from Washington’s control, then the breakaway region will immediately set to work violating human rights. The conclusion we are supposed to draw is that support for self-determination amounts to support for slavery, gun bans, censorship, and a police state. By this way of thinking, it is assumed that the regime in Washington, DC is a reliable defender of human rights. This latter claim is a naïve view, to say the least.
Leftists and the libertarians differ in which human rights are put at risk by the spread of self-determination, but in both cases the arguments amount to this: without coercion and enforcement from the enlightened central government, state and local governments in the United States are simply too prone to tyranny and mismanagement. If allowed independent and localized government, those people over there might adopt policies I disagree with. Therefore, they must be subjugated to a central government with policies I prefer.” Therefore, no self-determination allowed.
We have words for this sort of thinking: imperialism and colonialism. Indeed, the assumption that potential separatists must be forced to submit to more “enlightened” government from the center—for the locals’ own good—is standard colonialist propaganda. It is essentially what European and American imperialists were saying 200 years ago to justify continuation of their respective governments’ efforts as conquerors and imperial metropoles. After all, most people living in the conquered colonial territories had their own ideas about government, culture, and natural rights. Many of these ideas were objectionable to the sensibilities of the elites back in the capital cities such as London, Paris, Moscow, and Washington, DC. Thus, the American regime regarded the Indian tribes as barbarians.
Why It’s Critical to Define Aspiring Separatists as Inferiors Unfit for Self-Government
Philosopher Uma Narayan has identified these tactics as core to the effort to centralize and enhance political power over populations deemed unfit for political independence. To consolidate the metropole’s rule, it becomes necessary, Narayan notes, to employ “stereotypes about the negative and inferior status” of the people in the conquered provinces and to “construct the colonized as childish and inferior subjects...” Thus, imperialists employed words like “savage,” “barbarian,” “backward,” and “patriarchal” to describe the conquered populations and support the claim that the colonial territories required enlightened rule from the central state.
In more recent decades, new terms are employed including ”undemocratic,” “misogynist,” racist, “gun nut,” or “redneck.”
An additional tactic is to insist that any attempt at self-government by the conquered population would not just be unenlightened, but downright illegitimate. For instance, as Ypi has shown, imperial states have employed a “legitimate-state theory” under which local claims to territorial rights are made “conditional upon the satisfaction of a number of internal and external conditions.” That is, the metropole insists it cannot allow self-determination unless it is satisfied that the population seeking self-determination will set up political institutions that are to the liking of the central state. Similarly, colonialists might employ what John Ladd calls the “doctrine of moral disqualification.” This doctrine is employed when the in-group—in this case the central state’s ruling class—defines “the other” or out-group as moral inferiors, and whose backward ways disqualify them from “full membership in the moral community.” More importantly, as Eric Reitan puts it, those deemed to be outside the moral community “may thus be treated in ways that would never be permitted” to members of the moral in-group.
No matter how exactly it is phrased, the message from opponents of self-determination is clear: separatists must not be allowed to leave peacefully because they are either unwilling or incapable of legitimate or moral self-government. Rather, these separatists require the central regime to ensure the administration of enlightened and orderly government. It’s an old claim with a long pedigree among the imperialists of old.
