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37 Ariz. L. Rev. 65 (1995)
Secession, Democracy and Distributive Justice

handle is hein.journals/arz37 and id is 81 raw text is: SECESSION, DEMOCRACY AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE Thomas Christiano* Allen Buchanan has argued forcefully over the years for a presumption in international law against recognizing the legitimacy of secession. This presumption may be overcome, he says, in circumstances of severe and regular violations of human rights, previous unjust annexation of territory and discriminatory redistribution. By this he has in mind that a state implements taxation schemes or regulatory policies or economic programs that systematically work to the disadvantage of some groups while benefitting others, in morally arbitrary ways. With regard to this last Buchanan worries that a principle of international law that recognizes the legitimacy of federalist decentralization and secession as means for avoiding discriminatory redistribution raises the danger that wealthy parts of states will attempt to separate off from larger and poorer states in order to avoid redistribution of their wealth to the poorer parts. The wealthy may claim that any redistribution by the state of their wealth to the poor constitutes discriminatory redistribution. Such claims are often motivated by the desire of the haves within such states to separate off from the have nots in order to avoid any redistribution. This, he says, is in violation of their duties of justice to the have nots. Furthermore, it seems to imply a conception of the state as not committed to distributive justice. Part of the function of the state, he thinks, is to ensure a proper distribution of material goods such that the haves will sometimes have to redistribute some of their wealth to the have nots. The options of federalism and secession, he says, threaten to open the question: Why should states be organized on any other basis than mutual advantage?2 In my view however the problems which Buchanan worries about here are really twofold. One is whether distributive justice requires redistribution of wealth; a second concerns the proper roles of the state and the international community in guaranteeing distributive justice. When we pry these issues apart, we can see that in fact Buchanan's worry may point more clearly to a problem with his thesis that discriminatory redistribution ought to be an internationally recognized ground for legitimate secession or federalist decentralization. In the first part of my comments, I want to discuss two different conceptions of the role of the state in guaranteeing distributive justice. I will * Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona. I would like to thank Allen Buchanan for helpful discussion on an earlier draft of this paper. 1. ALLEN BUCHANAN, SECESSION: THE MORALITY OF POLITICAL DiVORCE FROM FORT SUMTER TO LITHUANIA AND QUEBEC 40 (1991); see also Allen Buchanan, Federalism, Secession and the Morality of Inclusion, 37 ARIZ. L. REV. 53 (1995). 2. Buchanan, supra note 1, at 58-59.

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