Peoples and Secession

ABSTRACT Kai Nielson (Secession: The Case of Quebec, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Volume 10, No. 1), as did Allen Buchanan in Secession (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), discusses secession on an analogy with no-fault divorce. Both these writers fail to distinguish between what it is to be a person and what it is to be a people, where peoples are the items that secede. The issue of what constitutes a people is thus crucial to the theory of secession (for similar reasons to those that made it crucial to seventeenth century debate about the right of resistance to the monarch). It is also the of persons a people is often the fact that they are a particular racial group that has suffered unfair discrimination from the prevailing government or that they came to live where they do live by virtue of incidents that affect the justice of their relations with that government. Issues of justice thus enter the matter of the people's identity in a way that rules out the justifiability of unilateral no-fault secession.