What does it mean to say a state has a right to exist?

[Celerity]

Since states are founded on violence and expulsion, their existence is always bound up in thorny questions about justice

https://aeon.co/essays/what-exactly-does-it-mean-to-say-a-state-has-a-right-to-exist


Celebrating the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa; Pretoria, 1994. Photo by Paul Weinberg/Panos



Demands to recognise the ‘right of a state to exist’ ring from op-ed pages to US Congressional committee rooms. This demand is most frequently encountered in the context of Israel and the framing of its wars with Palestinians and other regional forces. The rhetorical force of the question is obvious. If Israel is facing a challenge to its very ‘right to exist’ from its enemies, then criticism of Israel’s military actions must remain muted and qualified. This framing also implies a premise that existing states have a presumptive right to exist, or that to deny the right of state X or Y to exist is morally repugnant because it implies not the juridical dissolution of a state but the destruction of the people living within it.

This framing can feel like pure political rhetoric not meant to entertain a serious response or debate. It is meant to preempt any actual public debate over the past and present of Israel/Palestine. However, the demand to recognise a state’s right to exist raises a real but overlooked philosophical question: what exactly does it mean to say that a state has a right to exist? Note that the statement ‘state X has a right to exist’ is not synonymous with the statement ‘the citizens of state X have the following rights’ – to life, to civil and human rights, to cultural flourishing. The assertion locates the possession of a right in the state itself and, moreover, it stresses the right not to derivative authority (to tax, to enforce laws, to control borders) but to the prior right to exist per se. Is this a coherent claim to be pressed on behalf of any state?



States come into and pass out of existence all the time. Here is an incomplete list of states that have existed since the Second World War that no longer exist: Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, South Yemen, South Vietnam, West and East Germany, and the United Arab Republic. The further back in time we go, the more defunct states we find: the Third Reich, the Ottoman Empire, Prussia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Holy Roman Empire, and so on. Other states still exist under the same name but have contracted and no longer rule the same territory (for example, Pakistan, Sudan).

So if ‘state X has a right to exist’ means that ‘if state X existed and then no longer existed, there has been some wrong done to state X’ then it follows that there is some wrong or injustice done to those states in question in that they no longer exist. I suspect few today would hold that the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or the United Arab Republic entailed a violation of the right of those states per se to exist. The idea that states are entities or persons with rights to exist separate from the rights of persons living within those states seems untenable. States often come in and out of existence with no wrong being done to the people in question per se. It thus follows that to question the right of state X qua state X to exist is not necessarily morally repugnant.

snip

[multigraincracker]

1. Like all words, they are symbols, not things.

If I brought you two bags of dirt taken from different sides of a boarder, how can you explain the difference? There is none
Just Imagine.

[Beastly Boy]

2. The logic advanced in the article is absurd, and the article itself is a useless exercise in academic self-gratification

Invoking the right to exist by any state is merely a pushback against any denials of the de-facto existence of that state. It is self-evident by the virtue of a state having a territory, a minimally stable government, and the means to insure possession of both. There are no further requirements .

A claim by a state to a right to exist, therefore, is not a legal concept. It is a warning to anyone who denies that right, and a reminder that there are consequences to their denials.

In a quick devaluation of this universal maxim into singling Israel out, the author's proposition, "If Israel is facing a challenge to its very ‘right to exist’ from its enemies, then criticism of Israel’s military actions must remain muted and qualified" is a strawman argument. No, criticism of Israel's military actions in self-defense is irrelevant to either a cause or an underlying consequence of Israel's military actions. It may only have some validity (not in principle but in detail) as to the methods used in Israel's defense of its right.

Only these methods, with references to underlying legal bases, are legitimate targets for criticism. By no means can these details be used to undermine the right of self-defense itself. And in any of these attempts to criticize, overlooking the causes and the extent of a threat that prompted the invocation of this maxim makes these attempts suspect from the outset.

[Celerity]

3. no

[Beastly Boy]

4. The extent of your explanation is self evident. The only approprate response to it is, obviously, "Yes".

[Celerity]

5. no

[Beastly Boy]

6. Yes. And with that, my participation in this nonsense ends. But feel free to continue it as monologue.

Good bye.

[creon]

7. does not make very much sense.

The right of a nation to exist is operational.