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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27735 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Below, there is a discussion of the civil war due to Robert E Lee statute being torn down. The other main event of the day is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I would say as a general matter the biggest supporters of Palestine in the US are progressives. Progressives also hate the confederacy.

Question is can you separate them? The south was arguing for their right of self determination? Of course, imbedded within that is they wanted to savagely deny that right to blacks held in chattel slavery. Likewise, the Palestinians claim the right of self determination but their stated intention is to kill the Israelis (from the river to the sea has a meaning).

So in both cases there is a legitimate claim to right of self determination. But that claim is bloodied by what those people would do with such right and at least in the confederacy context that “bad thing” was enough to invalidate their right to self determination.

My question then is whether the right to self determination is properly thought of as as a right? If so, it seems at best it is a contingent right. If it is a contingent right, what contingencies are unimportant enough to “trump” the right?

So in both cases there is a legitimate claim to right of self determination

Is there? The right to self-determination belongs to "peoples.". You are assuming that both Palestinians and southerners are/were "peoples", but what constitutes a "people" is the most contentious part of the right to self-determination. Not only are you skipping over the hard part, you are ascribing to progressives views (ie, re what constitutes a "people") that they might or might not hold. (And note that African-Americans in the antebellum South would also seem hold a claim to be a "people" under some views of what constitutes a "people.").

This is a real key issue that I haven't been able to get anyone to bite on when I raised it before. Exactly what are the features of a group with the right to claim territory and "self-determination"? Is it races? Ethnic groups? Language groups? Any group with the military muscle to make it stick? How long does how much of a group have to live in an area before they have a "right" to the land? How long does that "right" last after they leave?

Everyone acts like there is a set of good definitions and well-established international law here, but there just isn't.

Yeah, this is one of many reasons that I am dubious of the entire concept. Part of the problem is that the "answer" to the first question is that each "nation" has the right to self-determination, but a "nation" is largely self-defined. To quote Wikipedia:

Carl Darling Buck argued in a 1916 study, "Nationality is essentially subjective, an active sentiment of unity, within a fairly extensive group, a sentiment based upon real but diverse factors, political, geographical, physical, and social, any or all of which may be present in this or that case, but no one of which must be present in all cases."

And:

Nationalism is consequently seen an "invented tradition" in which shared sentiment provides a form of collective identity and binds individuals together in political solidarity. A nation's foundational "story" may be built around a combination of ethnic attributes, values and principles, and may be closely connected to narratives of belonging.

Re Israel/Palestine, a complication is that both have a legitimate claim to being nations, but want to locate their state in a particular place. Though afaik, there is no requirement that a nation have its state in a particular place (see, eg, past proposals to locate the Jewish state in places other than the Middle East).

From the point of view of the part of the modern left that generally favours secessionist movements, a big part of the answer is that they favour secessionist movements that appear to enjoy supermajority support among the inhabitants the seceding territory, or actually do enjoy a bare majority confirmed in a referendum. The progressive position on Scottish, Catalan, or Quebecois succession is that it is an appropriate matter for a referendum in Scotland/Catalunya/Quebec. In general, the view of progressives outside those places is that a "yes" vote is not per se a progressive cause, although holding a referendum that the British/Spanish/Canadian government doesn't want is one. In the case of secession of the West Bank and Gaza from being de facto part of Israel (i.e. a two-State solution), no such referendum is necessary because the result would be obvious.

"From the river to the sea" is a claim that the Israeli Jews are settler colonialists and not part of the "legitimate" population of the territory and that therefore a referendum that included them would be illegitimate - pre-GFA Sinn Fein took the same view about the Protestants in Northern Ireland, and supporters of Ukraine have made the argument about Russians who moved to Crimea post-invasion. This viewpoint used to be fashionable when the left was more sympathetic to ethno-nationalism, but in the current year nobody claims to support a United Ireland without a referendum, and the people chanting "from the river to the sea" are either confused about what this means or rabid anti-Semites.

Under this framework, the Confederate secession was illegitimate because the democratic consent of the inhabitants of the seceding territory was never secured. 40% of the Confederate population (including majorities in LA/MS/SC) were slaves or disenfranchised free blacks. And white support for secession was never close-enough to unanimous to argue that a 40% minority didn't need to be consulted.

Note that the democratic theory of secession is mostly relevant to cases where there are not large numbers of human beings being mistreated. The strongest argument for the existence of a Palestinian state is of the same type as the argument for the existence of Israel - that there are several million people whose fundamental rights will not be respected if they are ruled by people who hate them. The strongest argument against Confederate secession is the same as well - that the practical impact of the secession would be to violate the rights of human beings by enslaving them.

There's a strong practical case for military force.

It might be a bit circular in reasoning, but in practice it's the only thing that has ever bounded which groups get their own polity and which don't. Be nice until you can coordinate a sufficiently targeted and violent meanness.

I would say, in the absence of any overarching moral principle here, that any group that can maintain a military campaign against the military force of another group for some extended period of time (think generations, not years) is probably going to be a nation at some point. Groups too small or fractious to form, fuck and fund a military don't get on the board, and groups too weak or psychotic to fight other militaries haven't cleared the hump. To be violent and weak is simply to dig one's own grave.

Ok, but this seems to be a different sort of claim. First, you seem to be talking about who is going to be able to create their own state at some point, rather than what merits deeming a particular group to be a nation. Second, the key point of the right to self-determination is that it is a right, which is a claim that "might makes right" is illegitimate (what is the right to free speech, or the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, if not a claim that govt power to act is not relevant to determining how govt and the individual must interact with one another). And of course, the right to self-determination was quite consciously a repudiation of imperialism, which of course is perfectly justified under your formulation.

To be violent and weak is simply to dig one's own grave

Yes, but that is a peripheral issue. We are talking about what groups have the right to self-determination, which is a completely different question from what tactics should be employed in pursuit of that goal.

First, you seem to be talking about who is going to be able to create their own state at some point, rather than what merits deeming a particular group to be a nation.

Yeah, kind of. Having found the intellectual problem unsolvable, I have napkin-mathed the practicalities.

Perhaps definitions are in order? What do you mean by "nation" as distinct from "state"?

Well, the standard distinction (note that I am merely describing the standard usage rather than advocating for it. I think that nationalism (this one, not the vernacular synonym with patriotism) is a pernicious doctrine). This does a decent job re the distinction:

A State is an independent, sovereign government exercising control over a certain spatially defined and bounded area, whose borders are usually clearly defined and internationally recognized by other states. . . . A nation is a group of people who see themselves as a cohesive and coherent unit based on shared cultural or historical criteria.

Hence, the Kurds are arguably a nation. But they don't have a state. Ditto the Basques. Ditto the Uygyurs. Ditto the Catalans. Perhaps even the Walloons or the Quebecois.

A nation is a group of people who see themselves as a cohesive and coherent unit based on shared cultural or historical criteria.

This seems entirely too broad. Is a street gang a nation? A knitting circle? A hundred remaining members of a defunct native tribe? A thousand? In the context of our discussions this week, there's tens of millions, maybe a hundred million descendants that can look back to the Confederacy and the South more generally as a shared cultural and historic criteria. Are they a nation?

Tabling that for the moment, and assuming we have a solid definition for nationhood on this basis: Do nations have the collective right to own land, control that territory and engage in group violence to acquire/protect it? Is the "nation", however defined, the proper unit and scale of violent action? Is it the state? Individual?

The question as I see it is which level of human organization is recognized as the proper scale for violent conflict.

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