Can federations expel member states? On the political theory of expulsion
| Published date | 01 February 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1755088218801041 |
| Author | Eva Marlene Hausteiner |
| Date | 01 February 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088218801041
Journal of International Political Theory
2020, Vol. 16(1) 47 –67
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1755088218801041
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Can federations expel
member states? On the
political theory of expulsion
Eva Marlene Hausteiner
University of Bonn, Germany
Abstract
When, if at all, can a federal political order expel a member state against its will? In political
theory, expulsion has—unlike the scenario of secession as voluntary separation—so
far received no systematic attention; an omission that is reinforced by the paucity of
historical precedent. However, current debates around the potential disintegration
of the European Union show that expulsion, as a theoretical and political possibility,
deserves a more careful analysis. The article sets out to consider a route toward
theorizing expulsion in systematic and realist terms. It outlines possible motivational
constellations, feasibility constraints, legitimacy issues, as well as procedural dimensions.
The resulting claim—that expulsion may be feasible in some circumstances but that its
legitimacy is bound to remain contested—is applied to the case of the European Union.
Keywords
European Union, expulsion, federalism, disintegration, secession
Introduction: Why expulsion?
When Singapore gained its independence, Lee Kuan Yew cried. The Prime Minister’s
public tears, shed on 9 August 1965, were historically unique: Yew cried because
Singapore’s separation from Malaysia did not occur voluntarily. Less than 2 years after the
post-colonial merger and amid ongoing political and ethnic conflicts (Bari, 2008: 159),
the federal government had pressured Yew into signing a definitive “separation agree-
ment” (Boyce, 1998a). At the time, the Malaysian government tried to maintain that exit
had been voluntary, calling the process “detachment,” “separation,” or “breakaway”
(Boyce, 1998b). Nonetheless, Singapore may be the only state to have ever been expelled
Corresponding author:
Eva Marlene Hausteiner, Department of Political Science and Sociology, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelm-
Universität Bonn, Lennéstr. 25, 53113 Bonn, Germany.
Email: evahausteiner@uni-bonn.de
801041IPT0010.1177/1755088218801041Journal of International Political TheoryHausteiner
research-article2018
Article
48 Journal of International Political Theory 16(1)
from a federal state against its will.1 The belief that the disintegration of the federation
was voluntary, that Singapore seceded rather than being expelled, persists to this day—
and it is, as I want to show in this article, symptomatic of a more deep-seated conceptual
issue.
Expulsion is the separation of a territory and its population from an existing terri-
torial order against the will of the former. As the mirror image of secession, expulsion
transforms the relationship between two territorial political orders: domestic union is
transformed—unilaterally—into international coexistence. Although political scien-
tists and theorists have extensively examined the dynamics of federal and multina-
tional polities—the ways in which complex orders can be formed, changed, or
dissolved, and how these processes relate to the international realm—they have
largely disregarded such a scenario of involuntary separation.
This omission is surprising as well as problematic, because tensions within complex
political arrangements raise issues central to federalism and the complicated interrelation
between domestic and international membership. How does a federation ensure its own
stability once it is established, and who has the authority to fundamentally change the
political order? This question is particularly salient since attempts to remedy ethnic ten-
sion through new federalization are currently on the rise, and with them come new form
of internal conflict.2 In the European Union (EU), for instance—an arrangement blurring
the lines between domestic and international order—the question of how to address the
democratic backsliding within several member states has recently arisen with unexpected
force. Shortly after Britain announced its intention to voluntarily exit the union, com-
mentators explicitly weighed the possibility—or entertained the fantasy—of expelling of
Poland or Hungary. The tensions over Hungary’s domestic erosion of rule of law esca-
lated to the point that Luxembourg’s foreign minister Jean Asselborn demanded that it
should “be excluded temporarily or forever from the EU,”3 despite the legal impossibil-
ity of such a move under the current treaty system. Unlike the cases of Malaysia and
Singapore, the outcome of this conflict is as of yet undecided, raising questions about the
nature of expulsion—its underlying motivations, its feasibility, and its implications.
This article argues that the phenomenon of expulsion not only warrants systematic
reflection but that under rare circumstances, it is a feasible political option—specifically
in loose federal constellations transcending classical statehood, which have hitherto
played only a minor role in the study of federalism. Accordingly, the next section begins
by outlining the ways in which involuntary exit has been disregarded in political theory
and especially in accounts of federalism, and argues why this omission is problematic.
The “Motivations, constraints, outcomes” section then lays out a possible route toward
theorizing expulsion in systematic and realist terms, emphasizing motivations, constraints,
and procedural design as decisive factors for the likelihood and the effect of expulsion in
a setting of federation. Expulsion is shown to be feasible under some circumstances,
although its legitimacy is bound to remain contested. A final section will then apply this
resulting to a specific case, namely, the aforementioned tensions within the EU.
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