On Independence

In and around the year 1776, many people living in the American colonies decided they wanted to get out from under the rule of the British Empire and form their own independent nation. Now, not all of them wanted this; from what I remember of AP U.S. History, it was about 40% "patriot," 20% "loyalist," and 40% neutral. Ultimately the pro-independence faction convinced the neutrals to more or less support them, and most of the loyalists fled to Canada, and the movement for independence was born. One military victory later, you had the United States of America.

In and around the year 1860, many people living in the American South decided they wanted to get out from under the U.S. federal government and form their own independent nation. Not all of them wanted this, but ultimately the forces supporting independence prevailed and the movement for independence was born. One military defeat later, and you still had the United States of America.

For most of the nation's entire history, many of the people of Canada who live in Quebec have felt that they don't like being under the rule of the Anglophone Canadian government. From time to time they try to get up a movement in favor of independence. So far it hasn't gotten very far, and we still have this thing called Canada.

How do we decide what the boundary lines separating countries ought to be? In the old days, which really means days that were more than 235 years ago from today, it was very simple, because nobody approached this question with anything like a good-faith approach. Governments were, first and foremost, military power centers, and they existed because they were powerful and they could, not for any better reason. Those governments worked out the boundaries between their territories by seeing, through repeated trial and error, how much territory they could claim ownership of and successfully defend militarily.

But in the two centuries after the Declaration of Independence, which (when not stealing nearly verbatim from John Locke) introduced to the world that there were causes for which a people could legitimately demand their independence, this idea of drawing our maps based solely on power and military success has fallen out of favor. Governments no longer exist because they have guns and can convince all the rest of us with their guns that they exist. Now, governments are "instituted among men" to secure various rights, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Now whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Now when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

So in this new political order, where governments are created by, consist of, and must govern for the people, how are we to approach the question of who should get to be their own country? This ultimately goes back to the same old question of unanimity. Early political theorists, especially Rousseau, struggled to figure out how it was okay to impose a law on someone that they didn't approve of; in other words, if a law was not unanimously approved, could you really enforce it? Yes, they decided, because the trick is to garner unanimous consent to the form of government. In doing so they consent to have decisions made according to that government's structure imposed upon them. If the government calls for sheer majoritarianism, then if 50%+1 of the people want a law, the other 50%-1 have to accept it.

But of course, we don't actually make any particular insistence on unanimous consent to the government itself. You can construct a lot of different ways to try to patch this together. Someone who immigrates to a country can be presumed to consent to that nation's government. You can try to make an argument that someone who consumes any public services is implicitly consenting to the government. Someone, possibly Rousseau, had what I thought was a very silly argument to try and infer the same kind of consent you can get for an immigrant for someone who is born into a country. Personally I think the easiest thing to infer consent from is voting: if you vote under a certain government you in essence forfeit your right to object to that government's rule over you. Maybe these criteria get us with fairly few people left who have any right to say they don't consent to their government, and I doubt there's much desire on anyone's part to exempt people who never vote and never consume government services from, say, the criminal codes.

But at the same time, my rule about voting = consent is a little bit harsh. Should a Quebecois who desires independence not be allowed to vote for the Bloc, expressing their political view in the Canadian parliament? I think the trick is that while someone who votes for Parliament loses the right, even theoretically, to object to Canadian laws being enforced against them, or the right to mount armed rebellion against the government of Canada, they don't forfeit the right to seek independence in a peaceful manner, accepting that until it is granted they live under Canadian rule. But, so what if they have the right to ask for independence? Should we give it to them?

But for one thing, we might just say, sure, why not, let anyone who wants to reject the established government do so. After all, we really want to get some kind of consent from all of the governed; if we can't get consent from somebody, shouldn't we just stop governing them? But the problem here is that there are also lots of really, really good practical reasons to want our governments to be geographically contiguous, exclusive, and complete, meaning that they control a certain well-defined territory, no other government controls that territory, and they govern everyone in that territory. Now, with multi-level government you can get a little bit of hand-waving about multiple governments in one area, but fundamentally it must be true that if you stick a pin down on a map you can say what laws apply there. Otherwise you could bump into someone on the sidewalk and not know what laws they're obeying, and the result would be massive chaos. So we want unanimity, but we also want geographic certitude. Having a hodge-podge of different legal codes governing different people scattered throughout Manhattan in no predictable pattern, and following each of them wherever they go, would just be impossible.

So, let's take Quebec as our model. If everyone in Quebec was fine with continuing as part of Canada, things would be easy. Likewise, if everyone in Quebec wanted independence things would also be easy: it would be appropriate to grant them independence, and if Canada did not do so it would be in pretty massive violation of appropriate standards in this area. As things currently stand, though, the assumption is that if 49.9% of Quebecois want independence we won't even think about giving it to them, but if 50.1% do then there should be lots of big important negotiations with the assumption that the end result is independence. But what if there's a Francophone core to Quebec where 75% of the people want independence? Should we give it to them? What if 60% of Quebec votes for independence, but there's a town where 80% want to stay part of Canada? Say it's "landlocked" within Quebec, not touching any of the rest of Canada. What if everyone in that town opposes independence? Could they secede from Quebec, and then get themselves admitted into Canada?

Once you start down the path of thinking that the lines between nations should be drawn based on what the people actually want, it becomes very hard to know how big an area has to be and how emphatically it wants to be its own nation before you let it. Obviously in practice we don't really do this very often, though the recent Sudanese referendum might be a shining example of this if things continue to go well. My personal idea of how to reduce the tension of these issues is to intertwine the governments of the world more closely, possibly creating a genuine federated global government. Then, everyone would live under the same highest level of government, and the borders between nations would be a little less emotionally and politically charged. There's been very little talk about secession from states since the U.S. formed, and even less since the 14th Amendment made our national government truly national. But at the same time, there could be. In other countries, like India, they redraw the boundaries of the provinces fairly frequently to satisfy the demands of the populace. If there were a federated global government, it might be slightly less of a big deal whether Quebec were represented there as part of Canada or as its own nation.

But I suppose getting all seven billion people on this planet to consent to a genuine world government is going to be pretty hard... After all, it is independence day.