No people and no part of a people shall be held against its will in a political association that it does not want. —LvM
Dear Subversives,
I am three days out from a move from Texas to South Carolina, and I’m reminded of a right I still have: to vote with my feet. This form of suffrage involves tradeoffs but demonstrates how decentralization can reduce exit costs. Smaller jurisdictions create more options, to be sure. But what if a community didn’t have to vote with its feet? What if separatism were baked into the law? The following excerpt on secession is from the great Ludwig von Mises.
I know the dark associations I risk evoking: a new South Carolinian advocating “secession” isn’t a great look, even in 2023. Self-determination is a term with which people tend to be more comfortable. Indeed, separatist movements worldwide—from the Basques to the Kurds—offer object lessons. In the US, our debt-riddled, top-heavy republic needs some sort of great breakup. That is, decentralization looks eminently reasonable right now, Civil War history notwithstanding. Now on to Mises…
The liberals of an earlier age thought that the peoples of the world were peaceable by nature and that only monarchs desire war in order to increase their power and wealth by the conquest of provinces. They believed, therefore, that to assure lasting peace it was sufficient to replace the rule of dynastic princes by governments dependent on the people. If a democratic republic finds that its existing boundaries, as shaped by the course of history before the transition to liberalism, no longer correspond to the political wishes of the people, they must be peacefully changed to conform to the results of a plebiscite expressing the people's will.
It must always be possible to shift the boundaries of the state if the will of the inhabitants of an area to attach themselves to a state other than the one to which they presently belong has made itself clearly known. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Russian Czars incorporated into their empire large areas whose population had never felt the desire to belong to the Russian state. Even if the Russian Empire had adopted a completely democratic constitution, the wishes of the inhabitants of these territories would not have been satisfied, because they simply did not desire to associate themselves in any bond of political union with the Russians. Their democratic demand was: freedom from the Russian Empire; the formation of an independent Poland, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, etc. The fact that these demands and similar ones on the part of other peoples (e.g., the Italians, the Germans in Schleswig-Holstein, the Slavs in the Hapsburg Empire) could be satisfied only by recourse to arms was the most important cause of all the wars that have been fought in Europe since the Congress of Vienna.
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, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars.
Our friends over at Handwaving Freakoutery created this four-republics map for the US, based loosely on research surrounding cultural patterns. Interestingly, these cultural patterns map pretty closely to college football conferences. He calls them “New Dixie, The Yankee Union, Communist Pacifica, and Cowboy Country.”
To call this right of self-determination the "right of self-determination of nations" is to misunderstand it. It is not the right of self-determination of a delimited national unit, but the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong. This misunderstanding is even more grievous when the expression "self-determination of nations" is taken to mean that a national state has the right to detach and incorporate into itself against the will of the inhabitants parts of the nation that belong to the territory of another state. It is in terms of the right of self-determination of nations understood in this sense that the Italian Fascists seek to justify their demand that the canton Tessin and parts of other cantons be detached from Switzerland and united to Italy, even though the inhabitants of these cantons have no such desire.
A similar position is taken by some of the advocates of Pan-Germanism in regard to German Switzerland and the Netherlands. However, the right of self-determination of which we speak is not the right of self-determination of nations, but rather the right of self-determination of the inhabitants of every territory large enough to form an independent administrative unit. If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done. This is impracticable only because of compelling technical considerations, which make it necessary that a region be governed as a single administrative unit and that the right of self-determination be restricted to the will of the majority of the inhabitants of areas large enough to count as territorial units in the administration of the country.
So far as the right of self-determination was given effect at all, and wherever it would have been permitted to take effect, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it led or would have led to the formation of states composed of a single nationality (i.e., people speaking the same language) and to the dissolution of states composed of several nationalities, but only as a consequence of the free choice of those entitled to participate in the plebiscite. The formation of states comprising all the members of a national group was the result of the exercise of the right of self-determination, not its purpose. If some members of a nation feel happier politically independent than as a part of a state composed of all the members of the same linguistic group, one may, of course, attempt to change their political ideas by persuasion in order to win them over to the principle of nationality, according to which all members of the same linguistic group should form a single, independent state.
If, however, one seeks to determine their political fate against their will by appealing to an alleged higher right of the nation, one violates the right of self-determination no less effectively than by practicing any other form of oppression.
Mises’s right of self-determination is not populism per se but works to the benefit of a people. It works against the benefit of the powerful, though, who operate according to calculi such as maximizing territory and tax revenues. Of course, the powerful also want to impose their values—The One True Way—on minority populations. So the powerful have always been and will always be hostile to Mises’s thesis.
Such is why something like a right of self-determination must animate the hearts of a people, and have that spirit reflected in fundamental law. This is one of many reasons we are launching the Constitution of Consent Contest on July 15.