Instrument contra Human End: Self‐determination as a Right to Protect Power
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12650 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Author | Chia‐Ming Chen |
Instrument contra Human End: Self-
determination as a Right to Protect Power
Chia-Ming Chen
Academia Sinica
Abstract
The paper theorizes a general political-social condition of stateless peoples, which is particularly manifested in East Asia, where
traditional empires and peoples have been broken apart by imperialism, nation-states, Japanese invasion, communist revolu-
tions and the Cold War. Based upon such observation, the paper develops a political account of people, self-determination
and intervention. It argues against the two current major accounts, primary right theories and remedial right only theories. Both
accounts fail to speak to the political-social reality faced by stateless peoples. To develop its thesis, the paper pursues two
questions: Who should be recognized as a people among stateless groups? When does such a people acquire the right of
self-determination that legitimizes intervention? For the first question, the paper draws upon Iris M. Young’s concept of social
group and Hannah Arendt’s notion of power to elaborate a ‘power’account of people. A right of self-determination is under-
stood as a people’s right to international protection of their self-protective power. The paper then expounds a Lockean condi-
tion that triggers the right of intervention to protect that power. It briefly uses the cases of the Rohingya and Hong Kong to
illustrate its argument.
Policy Implications
•The right of political self-determination should not be only a right of remedy to relieve massive violations of human
rights.
•A people or nation should be recognized by the international society when a large and stable number of members act
together to pursue a body politic for struggling against their structural vulnerabilities brought about by international and
transnational social structures.
•A people acquires a political right of self-determination when its capability of acting together is threatened by a state’s
impending use of massive violence.
•Such right is associated with an international society’s right of intervention to counter the violence and maintain the
integrity of power struggles.
In 2014, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong people
swarmed into the streets to protest Beijing’s decision on the
method for electing the polity’s chief executive. In the first
couple of days, there was a widespread anxiety that China
would send its troops across the border and suppress the
movement with tanks and guns. If China’s troops start cross-
ing the border, does international society have a right to
intervene for protecting the Hong Kong people? If there is
such a right, when does the international society acquire
that right? What is the legitimate purpose to intervene?
The prevailing response in the current literature is the
right of humanitarian intervention triggered by massive vio-
lation of human rights. But, to borrow our wise philosopher,
John Locke’s phrase, is ‘the state of mankind’so miserable
that our remedy is ‘rather mockery than relief’? This paper
ponders on the issue by revisiting the theory of self-deter-
mination and provides a moral justification for a more effec-
tive response. Opening with the case of Hong Kong is not
arbitrary because the paper intends to theorize a general
political-social condition of stateless peoples, which is partic-
ularly manifested in East Asia. For more than 100 years in
this region, traditional empires and peoples have been bro-
ken apart by European imperialism, Romanticist nation-
states, Japanese invasions in World War II, communist revo-
lutions and the Cold War.
The two current major strands of thoughts that justify
self-determination are primary right theories and remedial
right only theories. Allen Buchanan well elucidates this dis-
tinction (Buchanan, 1997): theorists of primary right maintain
that a certain group of people, as long as some basic condi-
tions are satisfied, have a prima facie right to self-determina-
tion in the absence of injustices. By contrast, remedial right
only theorists advocate that a people has a right to self-
determination, specifically, a right to succession, only when
it has suffered serious injustices, and self-determination is a
remedy of last resort to cure the injustices.
This essay argues that both camps fail to speak to the
political-social reality faced by the self-determining groups
striving against their international and transnational struc-
tural conditions. The paper draws upon Iris M. Young’s con-
cept of social group and Hannah Arendt’s notion of power
to make sense of those groups’arduous civic efforts to
Global Policy (2019) 10:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12650 ©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 1 . February 2019 137
Special Section Article
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