All theories of the right to secede either understand the right as a remedial right only or also recognize a primary right to secede. By a right in this context is meant a general, not a special, right (one generated through promising, contract, or some special relationship). Remedial Right Only Theories assert that a group has a general right to secede if and only if it has suffered certain injustices, for which secession is the appropriate remedy of last resort.1 Different (...) Remedial Right Only Theories identify different injustices as warranting the remedy of secession. (shrink)

Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition.” An Essay by Charles Taylor with commentary by Amy Gutmann, editor, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf.

This chapter takes issue with a common argument linking democracy, understood as popular sovereignty, and rights to secession. Buchanan argues that the justifications for democracy and for recognizing a group's right to secede are quite distinct, and that a commitment to democracy is consistent with a constrained stance on secession.

No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the “melting-pot.” The tendency... has been for the national clusters of immigrants, as they became more and more firmly established and more and more prosperous to cultivate more and more assiduously the literatures and cultural traditions of their homelands. Assimilation, in other words, instead of washing out the memories of Europe, made them more and more intensely real. Just as these clusters became (...) more and more objectively American, did they become more and more German or Scandinavian or Bohemian or Polish.... [This] is not, however, to admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal has been broad or narrow—whether perhaps the time has not come to assert a higher ideal than the “melting pot.”... We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that American shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling class, descendent of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decide that America shall be made. Randolph Bourne (1916/1977, 248ff). (shrink)

This chapter defends the moral right of national communities to self‐determination, but examines the problems involved in institutionalizing such a right, and the problem of perverse consequences in exercising the right.