1 Buchanan, A., Secession (Boulder: Westview Press 1991), 49Google Scholar

2 Under international law, regions within the main body of a state have for some time been regarded differently from geographically separate territories, such as colonies. The ‘right of self-determination’ that international bodies such as the UN sometimes proclaim has only been taken to support independence movements in the latter case. In the case of a territorially compact state, it does not imply a right of secession for any part of the state, but the right of the population as a whole to determine its form of government. See Crawford, J., The Creation of States in International Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1979), esp. ch. 3Google Scholar.

3 Most fully in On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995). See also Miller, D., ‘In Defence of Nationality,’ Journal of Applied Philosophy 10 (1993) 3–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Gilbert, P. and Gregory, P., eds., Nations, Cultures and Markets (Aldershot: Avebury 1994)Google Scholar; Miller, D., ‘On Nationality,’ Nations and Nationalism 2 (1996, 409-21)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See Buchanan, Secession, ch. 4, and W. Norman, ‘Domesticating Secession’ (unpublished).

5 Buchanan, A., ‘Theories of Secession,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1997), 31–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 I have given a fuller account of nationality in On Nationality, ch. 2.

7 I have drawn here on the discussion of Catalonia in Keating, M., Nations Against the State: The New Politics of Nationalism in Quebec, Catalonia and Scotland (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1996), ch. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See Mcdowall, D., The Kurds: A Nation Denied (London: Minority Rights Group, 1992)Google Scholar; Kreyenbroek, P.G. and Sperl, S., eds., The Kurds: A Contemporary Overview (London: Routledge 1992)Google Scholar.

9 It should also be said that some Kurds have chosen the route of assimilation, forgoing their Kurdish identity in favour of a Turkish one. The important contrast with the Catalan case is that a Kurd in Turkey is more or less forced to make a choice between these two identities, whereas for a Catalan in Spain a hyphenated identity is easily available, and indeed a large majority of Catalans describe themselves in these terms (for instance as’ Equally Spanish and Catalan,’ ‘More Catalan than Spanish,’ etc.- see Keating, , Nations Against the State, 129-34Google Scholar).

10 Nor is it to say that secession is only justified when there is a sharp conflict of national identities: national groups may decide to separate by mutual consent, as the Norwegians and the Swedes did in 1905, and here the depth of the antagonism between them is largely irrelevant. I am considering the much more common case where the Xs wish to secede but the majority Ys oppose this.

11 See. for example, Nielsen, K., ‘Secession: the Case of Quebec,’ Journal of Applied Philosophy 10 (1993) 29–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gauthier, D., ‘Breaking Up: An Essay on Secession,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1994) 357-72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 According to Hillel Steiner, for instance, ‘since nations’ territories are aggregations of their members’ real estate holdings, the validity of their territorial claims rests on the validity of those land titles’ (Steiner, H., ‘Territorial Justice,’ in Caney, S., George, D., and Jones, P., eds., National Rights, International Obligations [Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1996], 146)Google Scholar.

13 Buchanan, , Secession, 107-14Google Scholar

14 If one group occupies the territory previously held by another, then, ceteris paribus, the strength of its claim to exercise authority will increase with time. At a certain point - impossible to specify exactly - it will have a stronger title than the original inhabitants. This may sound uncomfortably like a version of ‘might makes right,’ but I cannot see any reasonable alternative to the view that it is the occupation and transformation of territory which gives a people its title to that territory, from which it follows that the competing claims of the present and original inhabitants increase and diminish respectively with the passage of time.

15 This brings into play questions about distributive justice which I shall address later.

16 Though note the qualification recorded in f.n. 10 above.

17 Moore, Margaret argues for the relevance of numbers in ‘On National Self Determination,’ Political Studies 45 (1997), 900-13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in ‘Miller's Ode to National Homogeneity,’ Nations and Nationalism 2 (1996), 423-9. I am not sure, however, that she would endorse the criterion I am discussing in its crude form because she also speaks about ‘utilitarian calculations’ which suggests taking into account intensities of feeling as well as the sheer numbers who are satisfied or dissatisfied with a proposed boundary redrawing.

18 Horowitz, D.L., ‘Self-Determination: Politics, Philosophy, and Law,’ in Shapiro, I. and Kymlicka, W., eds., Nomos XXXIX: Ethnicity and Group Rights (New York: New York University Press 1997)Google Scholar

19 See, for instance, Philpott, D., ‘In Defense of Self-Determination,’ Ethics 105 (1994-95) 352-85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. ‘In a heterogeneous candidate territory, the decision [to secede] rests with the majority of the territory's inhabitants, with the qualification that under the new government, minority rights - including Kymlickan cultural right - sare guaranteed’ (380).

20 Perhaps the most interesting example of an exchange of this kind occurred between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s. Under the terms of a formal agreement between the two states, some 200,000 people of Greek descent living in Turkey were required to emigrate to Greece, and about 350,000 Turks were required to move from Greece to Turkey. Alongside the formal exchange, however, much larger numbers of Greeks - perhaps about one million - emigrated to Greece either voluntarily or as a result of Turkish oppression, and a further 100,000 Turks moved in the opposite direction. There is not a great deal of hard evidence about the overall impact of the transfer on the people who experienced it, but, focussing on the Greek side, the following four statements appear to be true. (1) Materially speaking the infrastructure and investment provided by the internationally-funded Refugee Settlement Commission allowed large numbers of immigrants to settle and flourish in their new places of residence. (2) The exchange appears also to have had a strongly positive effect on the overall economic prosperity and sense of national identity in Greece. (3) The refugees experienced psychological difficulties in adjusting to their forcible translation and continued to harbour hopes of a return to their birthplaces at least up until World War II. (4) Over the same period there were significant social divisions between natives and refugees in Greek towns and villages. To arrive at a balanced assessment, these pluses and minuses would need to be set against the likely fate of the minorities, particularly at the hands of the Turkish authorities, if the transfer had not occurred. For descriptions of the exchange, see Ladas, S.P., The Exchange of Minorities: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey (New York: Macmillan 1932)Google Scholar; Pentzopoulos, D., The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and its Impact upon Greece (Paris: Mouton 1962)Google Scholar; Petropulos, J. A., ‘The Compulsory Exchange of Populations: Greek-Turkish Peacemaking, 1922-1930,’ Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 2 (1976) 135-60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Including Buchanan, Secession, ch. 3; Gauthier, ‘Breaking Up: An Essay on Secession'; Wellman, C.H., ‘A Defense of Secession and Political Self-Determination,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (1995) 142-71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Buchanan, , Secession, 114 ffGoogle Scholar

23 I have set this argument out more fully in ‘The Limits of Cosmopolitan Justice,’ in Mapel, D.R. and Nardin, T., eds., The Constitution of International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar and in ‘Justice and Global Inequality’ in Hurrell, A. and Woods, N., eds., Inequality in World Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

24 These two grounds do not necessarily coincide, as the Scottish case illustrates. In recent years many Scots have felt that their public culture and sense of social justice is increasingly at odds with the Thatcherite ideas that have infected some parts of British central government and administration. On the other hand, Scotland has for some while been a net beneficiary of the British system of public finance, so it would be hard for Scots to claim that they are victims of discriminatory treatment.

25 There may be cases - blacks in America come to mind- in which groups suffer from injustice at the hands of the majority without having or developing a separate sense of national identity. But where a minority group is territorially concentrated, the experience of injustice has a strong tendency over time to foster such a separate identity, so that once again the cause of justice and the cause of national self-determination are fused.

26 Gauthier, ‘Breaking Up: An Essay on Secession,’ section III

27 Wellman, , ‘A Defense of Secession and Political Self-Determination,’ 161-2Google Scholar

28 So, for example, I think that the Slovenian secession from Yugoslavia could not be condemned on the grounds that it made the achievement of liberal democracy in Yugoslavia as a whole less likely. We ought indeed to try to promote liberal and democratic ideals externally, but I don't think that our duty in this respect is so strong as to oblige us to remain in political association with groups whose culture or identity we find uncongenial.