Debate: Political Authority, Functionalism, and the Problem of Annexation

Deciding whether a state has political authority is arguably the most fundamental judgment we can make about its moral standing. When a state possesses legitimate authority, it has the exclusive right to govern the occupants of its territory. Even when its decisions are inefficient, irrational, or morally mistaken, its subjects are expected to comply with the legal order it establishes, and outsiders are expected to refrain from attempting to interfere with its internal affairs. A state that lacks authority, on the other hand, enjoys no such protection: provided there is an adequate justification for doing so, its subjects are permitted to actively resist attempts to enforce the law, and outsiders are permitted to intervene in order to reform or replace state institutions.1 Given these practical stakes, it's crucial to settle on a plausible account of the requirements for legitimate political authority that can guide our assessments of both nascent and established states. Recently, Alexander Motchoulski has developed a novel “hybrid” account of political authority2 that he claims is up to this task. This hybrid view, which combines elements from existing functionalist and fair-play accounts3, establishes the authority of particular states in two stages.4 In the first stage, we determine whether the state satisfies various functionalist criteria such as the consistent protection of basic rights, the maintenance of democratic institutions, and the reliable provision of essential public goods. If the state passes this test, we then examine whether the principle of fair play gives the territorially demarcated populations the state claims jurisdiction over reason to comply with its laws and support its institutions. This involves evaluating the goods provided by the state to see if they are either acceptable upon reflection or morally required. A good is acceptable if, given their interests, the recipients have reason to prefer acquiring the good plus a corresponding duty to reciprocate over not receiving this good at all. On the other hand, a good is morally required just in case the recipients have a moral duty to contribute to its provision regardless of whether the good is acceptable to them.5 If the aforementioned political goods meet either of these conditions, individuals benefiting from them have a duty to reciprocate the political cooperation of their co-citizens by obeying the laws of the state and doing their fair share to maintain its cooperative structure over time. It is this duty, owed by the citizens of a state to one another, that generates particularized relationships of authority between states and populations.6 According to Motchoulski, the primary attraction of his view is that, unlike orthodox functionalism, it is able to account for our beliefs that: (i) states generally lack authority over populations they incorporate through acts of non-consensual annexation or colonization, and (ii) historical injustices committed by the state will sometimes have an impact on its authority, but this impact can diminish or “fade” over time. Thus, by endorsing his view, functionalists can retain their basic normative commitments without running afoul of our intuitions about the boundaries of political authority.7 However, I argue that Motchoulski's view fails to deliver on this promise. Even if we accept his two-stage framework for assessing the authority of states, we cannot rule out the possibility that states can acquire legitimate authority over populations they unilaterally annex, nor can we reach reasonable judgments about when and how historical injustices undermine the authority of states. Having established this, I suggest that instead of looking for other ways to rehabilitate functionalism, we should accommodate our intuitions about these issues by endorsing a theory of political authority that recognizes the moral importance of collective self-determination. Cases where one state unilaterally annexes another pose a problem for orthodox functionalism because of the view's singular focus on whether candidates for political authority are performing various morally important tasks. Since functionalists contend that the adequate provision of basic political goods is sufficient to ground a claim to legitimate political authority, endorsing their view means accepting that, so long as they govern in a reasonably just manner, the annexing power has a right to govern its newly acquired territory. Yet, this strikes most of us as wrong. Intuitively, states cannot legitimately extend the boundaries of their authority this way, even if the annexation is bloodless and the annexing power does not violate anyone's individual rights.8 One of Motchoulski's central claims is that, by taking considerations of fair play into account when evaluating states, his version of functionalism is able to avoid this counterintuitive result. To develop this claim, he begins by demonstrating that the presence of pre-existing reciprocal duties among co-citizens is sufficient to make unilateral annexation wrong. As he contends, certain kinds of positive first-order duties, including duties of reciprocity, give rise to negative, second-order duties of non-interference. For example, if I have a reciprocity-based obligation to help my friend move between cities, my roommate has a corresponding obligation not to force me to stay in town by hiding my car keys because they believe my time would be better spent volunteering with them. By the same token, because co-citizens of a legitimate state owe reciprocal duties of political cooperation and compliance to each other, and unilateral annexation ostensibly interferes with the fulfillment of these duties, acts of annexation wrong the annexed individuals by violating a second-order duty that is owed to them. Having established this, Motchoulski then argues that when alternatives are available, benefits conferred through acts of wrongdoing clearly do not count as acceptable or morally required. And if the benefits of political cooperation are neither acceptable nor morally required from the newly annexed population's point of view, the annexing state cannot demand compliance or support from this population by appealing to the principle of fair play.9 Although Motchoulski's version of functionalism represents a major improvement over traditional accounts, I believe his response to the annexation objection ultimately fails. To see why, it's helpful to divide acts of unilateral annexation into two categories: total annexations and partial annexations. Total annexation occurs when State A forcibly claims authority over all of State B's territory and subsequently replaces all of B's political institutions with their own, effectively dismantling B as a political entity. By contrast, in cases of partial annexation State A forcibly claims authority over some of State B's territory and the corresponding residents, but leaves B intact as an independent state. In the remainder of this section, I will show that the hybrid functionalist/fair play account cannot reliably rule out the possibility of states obtaining political authority over their newly incorporated populations in either kind of case because both total and partial annexations can occur without interfering with existing duties of reciprocity. Starting with cases of total annexation, suppose that the United States successfully carries out a bloodless annexation of all of Canada and subsequently declares that all former Canadian citizens are now citizens of the United States with all the attendant rights and obligations. Instead of being covered by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, their rights are now protected by the Constitution. Instead of electing members of Parliament in Ottawa, they vote to send representatives to Congress in Washington DC, and so on. Could Canadians complain that this change interferes with their ability to discharge their ongoing reciprocal duties to each other? I think the answer is clearly "no". This change would, of course, alter the bundle of political and civil rights held by Canadians: the precise scope of their right to freedom of expression would change somewhat, as would the extent and content of their right to political participation, and so forth. However, for functionalists like Motchoulski, the political goods that citizens have a reciprocal obligation to provide—e.g. institutions that grant all individuals a degree of political power and legal protections that safeguard individuals against arbitrary interference in their private lives10—are not precisely specified rights or entitlements. Rather, they are generic goods that can be secured through a variety of distinct schemes of rights.11 So, as long as the scheme maintained by the United States does an adequate job of securing the relevant generic goods, following annexation individual Canadians would still be able to reciprocate the benefits provided to them by their co-citizens through obedience to the law and contributions to the institutions that provide them with essential services. The only difference is that this would now involve complying with US laws and supporting the US institutions they are collectively subject to. Here, Motchoulski might object that my argument misinterprets the content of the Canadians’ reciprocal political obligations. There are two versions of this objection worth considering, so I will address each in turn. The first version says that since individual Canadians had been benefiting from the protection of particular Canadian laws and the goods provided by particular Canadian institutions, the principle of fair play obligates them to comply with the same set of laws and support the same institutions going forward. Therefore, the kind of total annexation we are examining does in fact wrong the annexed population by interfering with their ability to discharge their duties of reciprocity. The problem with this version of the objection is that it seems implausibly restrictive to understand reciprocal political obligations in this way. Motchoulski's observation that the reciprocal benefit one returns must be “fitting and proportionate”12 only dictates the goods that one has a duty to contribute to and the level of contribution required; it does not directly determine the exact channels through which one must make this contribution. If I have a duty of reciprocity to contribute to the provision of good G for the benefit of population P, and I can make an equal and satisfactory contribution by donating to either organization X or organization Y, the people to whom I owe the duty have no grounds for complaint if I donate to X instead of Y, or vice versa; what matters is that a fair contribution to G is made. Likewise, the fact that my fellow citizens and I have reciprocity-based obligations to protect each other's rights and contribute to public goods does not entail that we must comply in perpetuity with the particular set of laws and institutions that previously structured our cooperation, provided that there are alternative arrangements that would serve this purpose just as well. If it did, any change to the legal and political institutions we are subject to would be considered pro tanto wrong on Motchoulski's view, even benign changes enacted through internal, democratic mechanisms with the full support of the community. This takes us to the second version of the objection. In response to the issue just raised, Motchoulski might point out that the goods commonly associated with political cooperation require stable, long-term coordination to achieve. Maintaining justice, for example, is only possible if my co-citizens and I reliably understand, and conform to, the legal norms and rules that govern our mutual interactions. If we frequently opt to ignore the law in favour of our own moral judgments, or if we are often unsure about what is legally permissible in our dealings with each other, it is practically inevitable that widespread rights violations will often occur. For this reason, although the principle of fair play does not obligate members of a political community to comply with the exact same set of laws and institutions over time, it does require them to settle on public rules for determining which laws and institutions they are collectively subject to and only cooperate through the laws and institutions selected via these rules. Otherwise, stable political coordination will be impossible to achieve, and the state will be unable to provide the goods that justify its rule in the first place. And if this is true, it seems to follow that the unilateral annexation of Canada by the United States does interfere with the ability of Canadians to fulfill their reciprocal political obligations insofar as it replaces the legal system chosen by them in accordance with their internal rules with a new, unfamiliar system that they had no role in choosing and may find more difficult to coordinate through. I find the main premise of this objection compelling. Political goods are clearly secured through stable coordination over time, and this fact no doubt plays some role in determining whether a particular set of institutions will facilitate the reciprocal provision of these goods. But it doesn't follow that a population can only fulfill their reciprocal political obligations through institutions selected via internal rules that they have agreed upon. Though admittedly the imposition of a new legal system from the outside can destabilize practices of political coordination by increasing the rate of intentional non-compliance with the law, or by triggering widespread uncertainly regarding what the law requires, there seem to be feasible measures that an annexing power could take to mitigate these risks. Concerns about large numbers of Canadians refusing to comply with US law could, for instance, be addressed by introducing additional incentives for compliance, while concerns regarding public knowledge of the law may be avoided by implementing a phased transition of the legal code and providing public announcements detailing the most important changes. Assuming they successfully implemented such measures, US institutions could in principle be just as effective at facilitating political cooperation as the Canadians’ former institutions were, and therefore the annexation of Canada by the United States would not necessarily interfere with the ability of Canadians to discharge their reciprocal political obligations. So, because the total annexation of a country can occur without violating the unique, second-order duty of non-interference that duties of reciprocity give rise to, Motchoulski's theory fails to explain why the goods provided by the annexing power are not a morally acceptable basis for duties of fair play in such cases. What about cases of partial annexation? At first glance, it might seem obvious that in these cases there is always interference with the annexed population's existing duties of reciprocity. For example, if the United States annexed the province of Alberta but left the rest of Canada intact, it is hard to see how Albertans could continue to provide their fellow (non-Albertan) Canadians with reciprocal benefits by maintaining a shared system of legal rights and contributing to public goods, since Albertans would no longer be subject to the same set of federal political institutions as the rest of Canada. However, given the distinctive structure of political reciprocity, I do not think that these changes necessarily interfere with individuals’ duties of fair play either. Most reciprocal exchanges have an asynchronous structure: A gives some good to B at T1, so B owes her an appropriate return that she provides later on at T2, then B provides A with some additional benefit at T3 that A reciprocates sometime later at T4, and so on for the duration of their relationship. But the kind of political reciprocity we are concerned with has a unique, synchronous structure. As Motchoulski in a a state of is where compliance with the law the duties they owe to their co-citizens and generates reciprocal duties to the law, which their co-citizens then discharge more or in an ongoing This difference is morally relevant because it the ways in which outsiders to these relationships can violate their second-order duties of non-interference. When two or more people are in an asynchronous of reciprocity, them so that they can no longer will often at one individual without a fair return for the benefits they provided and at one other from their reciprocal obligations. This does not seem to be the case when it to relationships synchronous political reciprocity, with our example, in the annexation it's of that Albertans have an obligation to their fellow Canadians to comply with Canadian federal law because they are from the legal compliance of their and their fellow Canadians in have an obligation to them to do the But at the that the annexation of Alberta is and Albertans are no longer subject to Canadian institutions, these duties of reciprocity are Albertans do not have any duties of reciprocity to Canadians by they an benefit to their fellow Canadians by complying with Canadian law for as long as they benefiting from the protection of their shared institutions. For the same reason, Canadians do not have any obligations to Albertans The of this is that while partial annexations do relationships of reciprocity, they do not necessarily interfere with anyone's ability to fulfill their existing political obligations. Motchoulski's argument fails to that partial annexations are wrong by that annexing generally lack political authority over their newly acquired and it is worth that Motchoulski could to this by out that, even if his particular account of the wrong of unilateral annexation is not his hybrid functionalist theory will still with our that states lack political authority over territory acquired through unilateral annexation as long as we can provide some account of why such annexations wrong However, I of this since I believe that the most of the wrong of unilateral annexation to the of collective and we this, we have reason to for as an independent for legitimate political I will return to this point in Having addressed Motchoulski's of the problem of unilateral annexation, I now to argue that, to what he his hybrid view fails to provide a plausible to the issue of historical that has long functionalist of political injustices pose a problem for functionalist to their exclusive focus on whether the state is doing an adequate job of its basic rights, these cannot account for the that a of into the a claim to authority over the of these injustices as as their the state may authority over these as the of these injustices over Motchoulski attempts to his version of functionalism with this by appealing to the that individuals only have a duty of reciprocity to comply with the if the benefits conferred by the state are acceptable to them. On his view, to the extent that the of such as and that previously incorporated into the state through annexation or maintain cooperative practices that duties of reciprocity that with the of the these are not required to accept the benefits conferred by the state. as previously if the political goods provided by the state are not acceptable or morally required from the point of view of a particular the state will lack authority over this Motchoulski that this of reliably our judgments about when injustices to on the political since the only retain a claim to for as long as they continue to in of cooperation, it is not that we believe that the of of but have long since been into and the benefits provided to them by their are now legitimately subject to the while this argument from duties may with our intuitions about historical in some it seems to in a version of Motchoulski's and case following annexation, the state to to the practices of political cooperation precisely so that they do not with the of the legal this is through but over time the state in the that they can legal mechanisms in order to the between the state and the This in a the continue to some in by they have effectively with their more practices of political cooperation that would with the legal obligations that on them. However, now them as full citizens with equal civil rights, the of from the state and share the long-term of their political I take it that, in this the do not have reciprocity-based political obligations to On the it seems to me that they are to the ongoing imposition of legal order and with their previously of political that Motchoulski's theory cannot this On his view, since the at some point with the political practices that with the authority of the their cannot reasonably the benefits of political cooperation they through institutions, and they are by the principle of fair play to comply with I think this is a against the hybrid functionalist Although I that there must be some which historical injustices no longer the of particular states, it seems morally to claim that a state can have authority over the of a people territory it forcibly annexed because the state so effective at this traditional political practices that, for the time their have but to into their political community. the so The of Motchoulski's hybrid theory is to provide an account of political authority that can address the problem and the problem of historical while basic functionalist In the I have that his view in to both of these the principle of fair play into the functionalist framework does us to explain why individuals have obligations to particular states. However, it does not functionalism to avoid the annexation nor does it provide us with a reasonable account of when injustices are no longer relevant to of state At this we could for other ways to functionalism from these But I think it is more to first the moral considerations that our to cases unilateral annexation and historical and then examine how these considerations should be into a theory of political and I believe our intuitions about these issues an of the moral of shared political and the associated in collective to what functionalist seem to the citizens and long-term of a state do not of as for whom is a means of securing individual rights and they often with and their as members of a community by a distinct of cooperation on their territory and maintained through of mutual In they see as being of a political individuals have a in a between this kind of shared political and the political institutions they are subject to. As members of a we more and when we are able to the laws that govern us because these laws have been by us in accordance with our shared commitments and But this in collective is when one country annexes Since this necessarily involves the imposition of a new political order by outsiders do not share their of political cooperation, following annexation the newly incorporated population will no longer be able to their in the political institutions that structure of their there is a in which unilateral annexation the population even in cases where it has no impact on their individual rights or duties of reciprocity. the presence of this wrong to justify our that states lack political authority over populations they I think it some kind of moral there is no reason why a population that has previously a political good like should be expected to settle for by the authority of new institutions that them this The moral at play seems when we our to the between historical and political If the of an annexed population maintain their as a distinct political and continue to a between this and the annexing institutions, they are no their to complain that their political their in collective Yet, it is clearly possible for this to be over time. In some this will be to these to with the annexing as are up and this new In the will retain their and the annexing state will ultimately make by implementing a of them to have a degree of political they find way, the is that individuals no longer the distinctive that political rule following unilateral annexation and acts of annexation no longer on the political This account of when and how historical injustices from the Motchoulski between cases the of a people territory example, the and cases the of a people subject to more historical injustices example, In the former set of we that injustices do not undermine the authority of the state because the of no longer as a distinct By contrast, in the set of cases it is often that the have maintained their as a distinct political people and their political and so we often believe that the claim to authority over them is unlike Motchoulski's view, it the in cases like the version of and in This is while practices of cooperation that with the state can be of a for their presence is not to ground a complaint against the authority on this that is is that the do in fact from a lack of between their and their political institutions, which by the Given the central role that the of collective plays in our moral judgments about these there is a case for an account of political authority that for as an independent for state that various other if the of is a wrong that, in cases of annexation, the state lacks political authority over the annexed population and their it to reason that if a state this in other ways its claim to authority should be as well. Motchoulski could that we instead incorporate the of into his hybrid framework by that political goods are only acceptable in the if they do not at the of this would then be able to account for our intuitions regarding unilateral annexation and historical and the developed in this would no longer a fundamental to his I think this would Motchoulski with a The of functionalism is to the view's singular focus on the role that states to play in securing a of political goods. By claims to authority in this functionalist provide an alternative for are of political to the of more or including the of collective we have been of functionalism often make a point of issues with collective as a for Thus, for example, the that the state as a for the of a or people is with a to while that political authority on whether the boundaries the of would the freedom of individuals by the ability of states to a I believe these issues can be for that do not it is appealing to instead functionalist when about a for obvious this is if we functionalism in a that up it to take the of collective into account So, while the structure of Motchoulski's account does to move in this doing so would with a view that is if not to its Having addressed this I think it's to that Motchoulski's hybrid cannot deliver on its that we do not to give up our intuitions about unilateral annexation and historical does this entail that we should the functionalist framework One could argue that while we have reason to for as an independent for legitimate political authority, this is only in cases where the population does in fact as a political people with a to be In other cases where the population a territory is so that even an people cannot be it seems reasonable to instead a functionalist point of view when assessing candidates for political authority, since our primary focus should be on that individual rights are it's important not to of the difference between this kind of view and endorsing functionalism as a theory of political Even in cases where it is appropriate to grant institutions authority on functionalist we should that, over time, the people subject to these institutions will to think of as a political with their own on should govern them. And when this we should be to our and demand that, going these institutions must the shared political of their subjects in order to retain their right to For helpful and on versions of this I would like to and an on this by a from the and of Canada. There are no of relevant to this The declares not for this relevant are in the

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