The Group Rights Objection to World Government Answered

In discussions around world government, it is a commonly heard objection that superseding national authority would entail a violation of national groups’ rights, which is seen by communitarians as an unacceptable deal-breaker for global unity. Even thinkers who advocate a limited world government try their best to reconcile the two, and give the impression of preserving groups’ rights. But why should world government be considered secondary to the premise of group rights at all? I will flip the approach of methodological nationalism, and evaluate whether we should have group rights and to what extent they are compatible with world government.

The first question to ask when dealing with group rights is: why define rights at the level of an arbitrary subset of humanity at all? Either they should be defined at the humanity level as universal rights, or at the individual level as specific protections. Anything in the middle warrants a detailed justification as to why a particularistic notion of rights is needed, and why is it applicable to that specific group or type of group only, a notion which has not yet been adequately justified for identity groups like nations.

The sort of identity groups for which group rights are asserted are in many ways different from other forms of association where group rights might exist. First, identities are (in almost all cases) not a free choice of individuals. For the most part, they are hereditary and allocated by society. Second, an identity group is not well-defined but is an abstract category, and does not have fixed boundaries. Third, there is a false continuity assumed between members of the group in the past, present, and future, regardless of whether they had any other connection. Hence it is not fair to argue that identity groups can have the same rights as other forms of human association, such as corporations or civil society organizations. A more apt comparison would be: Consider how it would be for all people with the zodiac sign Scorpio to collectively own a patch of the earth’s territory. If that seems absurd, it is the same abstraction that makes other identities’ rights claims untenable.

For if a group’s claim to rights is derived from the individuals themselves, why not simply have individual rights? Providing rights at a group level leaves minorities within the group at risk of tyranny, violating their individual rights, for no group ever forms a perfectly unified interest. And if group rights are to be sourced from some other source of legitimacy besides the individuals (which does not seem to make sense, for what is a group without its individuals?), then there is no connection to individual rights at all. Group identities are only one aspect of an individual’s existence (Fed. 14), so all individual rights cannot be transferred to the group.

Moreover it is groups themselves which are responsible for many of the violations of individual rights. So many nations are perfectly happy to sacrifice the individual good or even throw away the lives of people for their own interests. As Hobbes points out, this undermines the basis of any potential social contract involving the individual giving up their rights to a state. Group rights can hardly be justified on the premise that they arise from or enable individual rights, when they are often opposed to them.

The whole national order is built on the foundation of nations recognizing each other as legitimate entities and their claim to state status. Yet legitimacy cannot come from recognition by other groups of the same kind and in the same situation; when viewed collectively this is nations being judges in their own case. Any such recognition is not externally or universally valid, but only within the interactions of these groups. Suppose six poachers go into the forest and recognize each other’s hunts as being rightful. Does that justify the hunt for the rest of the world? Perhaps in the case that they were collectively exhaustive, as nations today. But what about the animal itself? It can hardly be considered legitimate for it to be killed based on the hunters’ mutual recognition. For nations to have the supreme role they have today, with full control over government, there must be found a universal source of their legitimacy, not only mutual recognition.

As highlighted in Fed. 13, it is not possible to have any demarcation of humanity based on group identities that is perfect or even decently optimal. There will always be people mismatched since humanity is not divided in a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive manner by these identities. And to provide rights at a group level, instead of for individuals or humanity, necessarily disadvantages the misfits of classification based on any group. They may have to face the tyranny of the group’s imposition (Fed. 16), yet have no recourse beyond the group because they are considered to have rights as part of the group.

At the core of group rights as a justification of national sovereignty is the premise of self-determination—that groups have a right to determine their own affairs through having their own state and not being subordinated to any other entity. But one wonders how much of the national system actually did follow this principle? For many nations there was never such a process; rather they simply followed the boundaries of the states that preceded them, and use this premise only to justify the historical coincidence of the present boundaries. In other nations (such as post-colonial ones), again there was no true self-determination by the people but the establishment of the nation-state was driven mostly by a few nationalist leaders or revolutionaries. Arguably in both cases there may have been popular support, but can we say that true self-determination was exercised? How many nations ever had a founding referendum?

Even today there are plenty of groups which invoke self-determination for separatism, but these are hardly entertained. And the fate of new micronations—their lack of recognition and at times their forceful suppression—demonstrates that self-determination is merely a post-justification of nation-states. The concept of self-determination itself arose long after state sovereignty, more to provide an excuse for the nations that already came to exist than actually facilitate group rights. No group really is given this right, except for those which are pre-existing and got established by political events.

Self-determination as it is applied in the world today is a very hypocritical concept, being ‘granted’ to very few groups and denied to many others. Yet if self-determination is a right, it must apply to every group or to none. If nations deserve the privilege of forming a political community, then so do Sagittarians, vegans, Harry Potter fans, early risers, and people born in October. One may question the relevance of these identities and claim that only nations are suitable and salient enough to form the basis for a state, yet it is not hard to come up with all-encompassing narratives of the kind used by nationalists for these groups either. In the way nationalists believe that the nation is the foundation of political and social community, astrologers can say that the zodiac determines every aspect of life. One is no more a myth than the other.

And with self-determination one must therefore be prepared to accept the secession claims of any Tom, Dick, and Harry, until the world is broken into millions of fragments. Pushed to the logical extreme, we get individualist anarchy. The right to self-determination is a tradeoff with association in a large community. As the size increases, there is less scope for group autonomy within a larger state. But this is more than outweighed by the functional utility of a larger association, which explains why we have consolidated into nations thus far. And by taking that to the next level with world unity, we will have to ditch group sovereign self-determination in favour of a universal union of all.

In political theory, self-determination serves as the central justification for national sovereignty, because if groups are to determine their own affairs they require the political independence to do so and cannot be subordinated (although some of the literature on limited world government does question this). But the potential claim of every group to self-determination undermines the basis for political sovereignty, since it is impossible to provide sovereignty to every association that demands it. Just as every other group in humanity is not sovereign but subordinated to authority, nations must go the same way under a world government.

When self-determination is treated as an absolute principle, and backed up by national sovereignty, what safeguard is there against a group conducting horrific actions internally? History has seen enough such instances, such as Nazism or the Rwandan genocide. In the absence of any intervention, even the worst actions of groups within the population would go unstopped. Absolute self-determination offers no protection to individuals who find themselves at the mercy of groups’ unchecked will. If humans are to have any security from this happening, then self-determination must be checked. Checking self-determination directly implies abrogation of national sovereignty.

And with self-determination also comes the expectation that other groups should ‘take care’ of themselves, and that their problems are theirs alone to handle. This breaks down any cosmopolitan solidarity that humans may have, replacing it with an indifferent national alienation. If self-determination is realized, what is to become of those people suffering under conflict, poverty, natural disasters, failed states, and the like? The national order today has little to bring to these people. Whatever relief efforts are made today only happen because of some underlying cosmopolitanism in all of us, which overcomes the apathy of identities towards outsiders. But in an entirely self-determinant world, one can only imagine the scale of humanitarian catastrophes that will go ignored.

Self-determination is indeed no absolute virtue for society. This is actually quite well-recognized, since most other groups of humanity do not have the same privileges and powers as nations. No other type of group has the power, for example, to restrict its members’ mobility, draft its members to fight for it, or reject the rule of law above them. But there is nothing inherently different about nations from other groups that makes their claims to power any more justified. Either the potential claims of every group must be entertained, which brings anarchy as argued earlier, or nations must come under the rule of law like every other group.

Even if self-determination were accepted, it applies only as a right to a group’s social affairs, since that is the only domain where it would be sensible to consider such a right. It has no bearing whatsoever on such things as territory and natural resources, where considerations of group differences do not belong. Nor would any national differences justify sovereignty in decision-making when it comes to global matters such as the environment or pandemics. Thus self-determination cannot by itself be the sole principle on which the world order is based. There are major ‘holes’ that it leaves in global governance which necessitate a world-level government.

And what is so special about the particular nation-states or identities of today that they should be preserved, when throughout history identities and states have come and gone? Surely no nationalist or communitarian will shed any tears over the demise of the Roman Empire. Just as the end of these past states or groups did not diminish the character of humanity, neither would the end of the nations of now. Present nation-states have no claim to permanence as such, regardless of their rhetoric asserting their existence as a primordial entity, and also would have no claim to preservation under a world government.

One central argument for self-determination, and group rights in general, is based on the premise of subjectivity – that groups have their own standards and values, and so must have the ability to determine their own affairs and protect their own ways. It is argued that unlike sub-national differences, subjectivity between nations is so strong that it rules out the possibility of a universal order based on shared principles. Yet, as argued in Fed. 13, this applies even more to the individual level, since individuals differ much more than aggregate groups. This means the focus should be much more on individual rights and protections. The premise of group subjectivity having been refuted in Fed. 13, communitarians now need to justify why groups should have their own rights at all.

Even when it may be justified for decisions to be made based on group characteristics, there is no guarantee that nations are the best basis to do so. For example, it makes a lot more sense for driving side to be based on being left- or right-handed rather than nationality. In practice it is hardly practical to accommodate all of these group-based considerations for public policy, given the parallel need for standardization and uniformity. That is, however, no justification to make that distinction based on nationality where it is irrelevant.

Self-determination and sovereignty might make sense in a world where nations are completely disconnected from each other. But in an interconnected world, decisions or actions taken by one nation can have far-reaching effects beyond their borders. Economic policy, trade barriers, sanctions, and pollution are only a few examples of this kind of activity. How do nations have a right to be sovereign in such instances? These are clearly not cases of group self-determination anymore. Previous literature on global democracy has considered the ‘all-affected principle’, meaning that all people which are affected by a decision should have a say in making that decision. For policies with worldwide consequences, this necessitates a global government.

When nations undertake actions that affect others, this is an imposition of their will that violates the others’ claimed rights to self-determination. National sovereignty is not necessarily an enabler of group rights; rather it also inhibits it by enabling the bullying and pressuring of one group by another. Note that this problem does not arise for non-identity groups, because they are mostly well-regulated by the law, which restricts their actions to facilitate a productive society. National groups, in the name of sovereignty as a right, resist being brought under authority, but even ensuring group rights requires abrogation of their sovereignty. For justice in group rights there needs to be an authority over and separate from these groups, taking the form of a world government when it comes to national identities.

There shall, of course, still be protection of reasonable group rights in all spheres under the premise of group self-regarding freedom, but this shall be subject to the law and the hierarchy of rights. What will end is those political rights that confer sovereign status to groups. Beyond reasonable rights subject to the law, groups have no further claim to special political status and to be sovereign. And in establishing a world government, there is thus no ‘infringement’ of group rights taking place. If sovereignty is considered a ‘right’, then it is one which we should happily trample upon and eliminate in favour of global authority.