The responses to my post on Victimology prompted me to think a bit more about the basis for claims to territory.

A Hobbesian cynic may say that the only basis for such claims is brute force. Those who can defend their territory have the ‘right’ to keep it, while those who cannot will lose it to those who are stronger.

However, in an age of terror, no state can reliably be defended by its inhabitants alone. International collective action is needed to defeat terrorism, and collective action requires shared aims and values. Since terrorism often arises from disputes over territory (Ireland, Palestine/Israel, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, the Basques, etc), it would contribute to effective international cooperation if there were agreement on general principles by which disputes over territory can be resolved.

It would be naïve to expect that the parties to such disputes themselves will be persuaded by rational arguments. But outsiders may take a more dispassionate view, and bring influence and pressure to bear. Such pressure will be more effective if it is united, and this is more likely to be achieved if there is an external consensus on the rights and wrongs of the issue....

I believe the only principle capable of gaining general acceptance for this purpose is the principle of self-determination. Roughly, this means that the composition and borders of independent territorial units should be decided by the wishes of the people living there. In some sense, the principle of self-determination is accepted, if only in lip-service, by all modern governments. It is incorporated in the UN Charter as one of the bases for the settlement of international disputes. More fundamentally, it is a democratic principle, and almost everyone (in theory) supports democracy.

Of course, the principle must not be interpreted in such a way as to prejudge the points at issue. For example, if the issue is whether an island (e.g. Britain, Ireland, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, or Timor) should be a single political unit, the question cannot be decided by the wishes of a majority of the inhabitants of the island as a whole, since this presupposes that the island is to be treated as a single political unit. If the question is whether Scotland should be an independent state within the island of Britain, it would be absurd to decide that question by a majority vote among all the people of Britain, as this would in effect give a veto to the English. As an Englishman I would cheerfully vote for the independence of Scotland, but I do not think it is any of my business. In such a case the principle of self-determination requires us to establish exactly what the inhabitants of the various parts of the territory wish to happen, and if they want different things to happen, to draw boundaries in such a way that as many people as possible are living under the territorial regime of their choice.

Apart from its consistency with the fundamental principle of democracy, the strongest point in favour of self-determination is the inadequacy of the alternatives. The main alternatives are:

Divine right

Some people believe they are entitled to occupy certain territory because God wishes them to have it. Needless to say, this will not be acceptable to anyone who does not share their religious belief.

Territorial integrity

In the 19th century and earlier, an important consideration in disputes over territory was the perceived need for strategically defensible frontiers, preferably marked by ‘natural’ boundaries such as seas, major rivers, or mountains. Whatever force this may once have had (and it should be set against the strategic weakness created by incorporating hostile minorities within the boundaries of the state, as e.g. in the pre-war Sudetenland), it no longer carries much weight in an age of air power. In any case, there is no need for ’defensible frontiers’ between friendly states. Much of the frontier between the USA and Canada is simply a line on a map.

Ancestral rights

The main alternative to self-determination is the belief in ancestral rights: that you are entitled to occupy territory if your ancestors did, even if you do not occupy it yourself. This is the source of many of the world’s most intractable disputes (Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland, Kashmir, the Balkans, etc.). Many of these disputes also have a religious aspect, but few of the disputing parties base their claim to territory overtly on religious grounds (apart from some ultra-orthodox Jews and extremist Hindus). Rather, they base their claims on the fact (or belief) that their ancestors (rather than they themselves) lived in the territory in question.

The objections to ancestral rights are both philosophical and practical. One philosophical objection is that the dead have no rights. Every ‘right’ is the correlative of an ‘obligation’, and no-one has obligations towards the dead. It may be argued that the dead somehow transmit their rights and obligations to their descendants, but this involves the idea of vicarious responsibility, which is ethically unsound: no-one can be responsible for the actions of those over whom they have no influence, which is usually the case with ancestors!

Even if it is accepted that the rights and obligations of dead ancestors can be transmitted to the living, any territorial rights of the ancestors themselves must ultimately be based on some other principle, such as possession by conquest or purchase (since there cannot be an infinite regress of ancestral rights). In a large majority of cases the original ancestors must have acquired possession of the territory by force, even if the details are conveniently shrouded in the mists of antiquity. So why should possession by ancestors count for more than possession by a current occupier?

The practical objections to ancestral rights are various. One is that we all have many ancestors, often from different parts of the world. Which of our ancestors do we take into account? And most territories have been occupied at different times by different people’s ancestors, so how do we choose between them? Do the oldest ancestors carry most weight, or the most recent? Or those who occupied the territory for longest? And it is often difficult to determine who the ancestors of a people are, as in Northern Ireland, where the Protestant population has a mixture of Irish, Scottish and English ancestry. (For a further objection to permanent ancestral rights see the Addendum below.)

So even if one accepts the principle of ancestral rights in the abstract (which I do not) there is little prospect of getting agreement to its application in any particular case. Undeniably, however, ancestral ‘rights’ and grievances have a strong emotional appeal (which was the point of my earlier post). There is probably an innate feeling of group solidarity, which can be extended by cultural symbolism to one’s biological or cultural ancestors. Ancestral grievances can also be cultivated as an excuse for one’s own failures and inadequacies. Those who cultivate their grievances will not give them up in a hurry, because they are central to their view of themselves and their place in the world. But this is not a reason for anyone else to accept them as a basis for territorial claims.

Admittedly, the principle of self-determination also has its problems. Sometimes concentrations of a particular ethnic group are scattered throughout a territory occupied by another group. There are practical reasons (such as police and security requirements) for preferring territorial units to be geographically continuous, and there may be a need to compromise between self-determination and administrative practicality.

A more serious difficulty is that giving self-determination only to the current occupants of territory could result in rewarding aggression. Here the principle of self-determination in its simplest form clashes with the principle that wrong-doers should not be allowed to keep the benefits of their wrong-doing. Suppose for example that the Chinese were to move ten million people temporarily into Tibet, then hold a referendum. The results would make a mockery of self-determination. Also, there are cases where people have been expelled from their homeland. To exclude them from decisions on the status of the territory they have been expelled from would be unacceptable. But I suggest that these difficulties could be met by a simple modification or refinement of the principle of self-determination: namely, that decisions should be taken by all (and only) the adults who were born in the territory concerned. This would automatically exclude recent invaders, and it would give a say in the decision to anyone who had been expelled (though not to their descendants). It would also exclude recent immigrants, which in general is reasonable. (An exception might be made for those who have acquired citizenship after passing appropriate tests.)

I will refrain from applying this approach to notorious current disputes, though in most cases the application is fairly obvious. But I will face one hypothetical challenge. Suppose that a majority of the people born in some substantial part of England, e.g. West Yorkshire, decided that they wished to set up an independent Islamic Republic. Would I accept this? My answer is that I would - then I would build a big wall around it!

Addendum

A further objection to the continuation of ancestral rights in perpetuity can be based on John Locke’s concept of property. According to Locke, entitlement to property arises only when we modify land or natural materials by working on them, so that they are mixed with our ‘labour’. Whatever philosophers may think of this, it is intuitively appealing, and I don’t know of any better justification for property rights. (‘Labour’ should be interpreted broadly as including skill, innovation, planning, thrift, and other contributions to economic value.) By analogy with an individual’s right to property, a people can be thought of as acquiring a right to territory by the individual and collective investment they put into buildings, infrastructure, land drainage and irrigation, etc.

But a corollary of this is that entitlement to territory diminishes over time if it is not constantly renewed by continuing ‘labour’. With rare exceptions (such as diamonds or works of art), the value of property declines over time due to wear and tear, natural decay, erosion, etc. The declining value of assets is recognised in accountancy by the concept of depreciation. A typical approach to depreciation of buildings and other fixed assets is to assume that their value is extinguished over a period of 40 years or so. This may be rather short for some public infrastructure assets (e.g. the Victorian drainage and water system in London has not yet reached the end of its useful life), but an average lifespan of between 40 and 100 years seems plausible. In any event, it cannot reasonably be argued that the investment by the ‘ancestors’ retains its value undiminished in perpetuity.

If this is the case, as soon as a people are expelled from a territory, the value of their ’entitlement’ will begin to decline, while the invaders will acquire an increasing entitlement as the value of their own investment increases. At some point there will be a crossover where the increasing accumulated investment of the newcomers exceeds the declining depreciated investment of the earlier inhabitants. Assuming an average asset lifetime of 40 to 100 years, the crossover point would come roughly 20 to 50 years after the occupation. This seems broadly consistent with the proposal to give the right to self-determination to all (and only) those adults born in the territory.