“Plainly the central idea of secession
is the essence of anarchy” –Abraham Lincoln
Note: It is Ed’il Fitri already.
And as I drift into –or should I say come out
of- the element of a post-Ramadan fiesta, I serve you this week views I have
expressed previously on the ‘secessionist right of a democratic minority’.
Enjoy it. IS a Union sacred and inviolable? Whether a constitutionally governed
nation is to exist in perpetuity, sacred and inviolable even by the existential
realities of irredeemable socio-cultural fault lines, is a matter for the
conjecture of the jurisprudence of law and of morality.
The question being: should a democratic
society be presumed immune –legally-speaking or morally so- even from the
rumbling dissent of self-determined minorities bent on opting out of the
union?Biafra-cartoon Or put another way: does a part of a constitutionally
governed nation- whether it be a state or a section comprising of states- have
a right to unilaterally seek, by whatever means, to opt out of that union and
to form another? Or the converse of that may be asked: should a President in a
constitutionally governed society be constrained by law or morality –or by
both- to allow a part secede from the territory he is legally elected to
govern? Will he be obligated –by the Constitution or by the unwritten universal
laws of nature, or by both- to fight to keep the union for which he was
inaugurated into office to preserve, protect and defend? These questions have
continued to agitate the minds of jurists and of political scientists and there
does not seem to be a single jurisprudential solution to the question of ethnic
or other classes of minorities and their presumed right to self-determination
or their duty of fidelity to an existing statehood to which they are fated by
the circumstances of socio-political history to belong. Willful self-assertion
Yet proponents of the ‘right’ of ‘might’ to willful self-assertion say that any
minority section of a constitutionally governed nation can secede from an
existing state it no longer desires to be part of, -if not by a constitutional
process, at the very worst by ‘force’. Or is ‘Might’ the only ‘Right’? Provided
a seceding minority has the ‘will’, the ‘grit’ and the ‘fighting power’ to
force its way out of the union; and provided thereafter it has the ‘might’ to
defend its new sovereignty, -either against the revolting anger of un-yielding
irredentists or against potentially emergent new rebellions from its very own.
But the reverse is also the case, that even as a MINORITY section of a
democratic entity has recourse to the moral justification of the use of force
to assert the inalienable right to self-determination, so does a democratic
MAJORITY of a constitutionally governed nation have legitimate recourse to the
use of force –if it can- to preserve the union. Thus, in actual fact the
question of who is right between the majority fighting to preserve the union
and the minority fighting to opt out of it, will simply be located in who is
able to assert both ‘will’ and ‘firepower’ and not necessarily in who has the
moral justification to so to do. It can thus be seen that any argument by an
existing political order in favour of the ‘right’ –legally or morally- to
preserve a union is always concurrent with the arrogation by it of the ‘right’
to deny the seceding party its presumed ‘right’ to opt out of the union. And
the reverse is equally the case, that secessionists, in arrogating to
themselves the presumed ‘right’ to willful self-determination, also tend to
deny the ‘right’ of the existing political order to fulfill its constitutional
obligation of preserving, protecting and defending the union. And so going by
the doctrine of the ‘right’ of ‘might’ to forceful secession, it can be said
that for the agitators of Biafra to secede from Nigeria, the section that they purport
to agitate for –namely the South-East- must not only be able to outgun, or at
the very least match the fire power of the existing political order, it must be
able, permanently, to sustain and enforce its breakaway. But going by the logic
of those who insist that in all circumstances only ‘right’ should be ‘might’,
no minority section of a constitutionally governed nation has the right to
force its way out of a legal union except by the leave of the majority in that
union through the due process of law and not on the sentiments of moral
considerations. The Lincoln perspective Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of
the United State of America provided an excellent jurisprudential justification
for the use of force to suppress any rumbling of undemocratic dissent that has
secession as its ultimate goal. According to that perspective no democratic
minority has a right under the law to secede from a union consecrated by the
Constitution. Lincoln came into office in 1861 by less than 40% of the popular
vote and the advent of a republican administration had already created
apprehension in some of the Southern states who feared the new President might
interfere with the institution of slavery -which had existed in those states.
In fact weeks before Lincoln’s inauguration seven of those states had already
threatened to secede from the 72-year old Union. This was in spite of the fact
that there was proof that although Lincoln opposed the extension of slavery
into western territories, he did not favour abolition either in those states
where it existed. It was therefore clear that the secessionists had ulterior
motives and were thus not to be pacified but confronted. And so Lincoln in his
inaugural speech was to inform a shaky nation with a divided army that he was ‘prepared
to fight a war to maintain the Union’. His argument being that ‘the right of a
‘democratic minority’ for self-determination cannot be exercised in override of
the right of a ‘democratic majority’ which is constitutionally legitimated to
preserve and to protect the Union. The Right of ‘Way’ and the Right of ‘Say’:
Lincoln, by the way, did not derogate the right of the ‘minority’ to dissent
–including its so called presumed right to seek to dismember the Union in order
to create its own; but he said that the exercise of that delicate species of
fundamental right was essentially lower in the hierarchy of rights than the
right of a ‘democratic majority’ to preserve the union. Thus side by side with
the right of a ‘democratic majority’, the right of a ‘democratic minority’ in
any constitutional democracy cannot and has never been any higher than the
passive extent allowed to it in the axiom which posits that ‘the minority has
only a say and the majority a way’. Constitutional checks and limitations Said Lincoln
in his Inaugural speech: “A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks
and limitations … is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects
it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism”. Nothing can be more
rational; especially given the systemic, concept-driven nature of today’s
organised societies whereby people have chosen, strictly to live by the
principle of the rule of the ‘majority’. To what avail will that principle of
‘majority rule’ be if any ‘minority’ component of a constitutional democracy,
at any time, and outside of the due democratic process, can choose to terminate
the Union or to permanently alter and impair its constitutionally-prescribed
configuration? President Lincoln had also used the ‘doctrine of perpetuity’ to
advance the argument that “in contemplation of universal law and of the
Constitution” the Union of the states that made up the United States was
“perpetual”; and that, that ‘perpetuity’ was necessarily implied even though it
was not expressly stated “in the fundamental law of all national governments”.
And to that extent Lincoln felt justified and constitutionally legitimated to
say to the secessionists of his days “no state upon its own mere motion can
lawfully get out of the Union”! Said German Philosopher and social theorists
Jurgen Habermas, “Being bound to the constitutional achievements and ideals of
their predecessors, future generations (in any state) remain un-free; for they
are denied the opportunity to found their own constitution”. An oath registered
in Heaven’: And although the Constitution, as Lincoln posited “contained no
prohibition of secession or enforcement language to preserve the Union”, it did
–like all other democratic constitutions- specify an oath of office mandating
the President “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”. And if so,
what can be more deserving of the President’s ‘preservation’, ‘protection’ and
‘defense’ -in a constitutional democracy- than the territorial integrity of the
State? And thus said experts that in the true interpretation of ‘sovereign
power’, “since the people had not vested the President with the authority to
fix the terms of separation”, Lincoln was right to make “war the inevitable
consequence of secession” and to declare himself “constitutionally unable to
stop it”. And as Lincoln himself eloquently said, whereas the secessionists had
“no oath registered in heaven to destroy” the union, he as President had “the
most solemn one to ‘preserve’, ‘protect’ and ‘defend it’.” The Lincoln inaugural
speech was the same in which he made the famous statement “This country, with
its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall
grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional
right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow
it.” The phrase ‘the people’ without doubt referred to the ‘majority’ -and not
a ‘minority’ of it. Peaceful referendum A minority can only hope to court the
understanding and cooperation of the ‘majority’ to cause the necessary due
democratic processes, which may lead to a peaceful referendum. But since
according to Lincoln, “Unanimity” on the one hand “is impossible” and “the rule
of a minority” on the other “is wholly inadmissible”, anarchy or despotism –as
he warned- would be “all that is left” if the rule of a ‘democratic majority’
was rejected. Said Lincoln, even in the hypothetical scenario that the United
States were ‘not a government proper’ but merely an association of states in
the nature of ‘contract’, that contract could not be “peaceably unmade by less
than all the parties who made it”; because, as he asked hypothetically, whereas
“One party to a contract may violate (or)… break it, does it not require ‘all’
to lawfully rescind it?”
POSTSCRIPT The right of the Igbo ‘minority’ or any
other ‘minority’ for that matter, to secede from a constitutionally governed
Nigeria must be located in the complex hyacinth of these jurisprudential
argument. And in all honesty it is a right concurrent with –if not inferior to-
the right of the democratic ‘majority’ to deny.
“Plainly the central
idea of secession is the essence of anarchy” –Abraham Lincoln
Note: It is Ed’il Fitri already. And as I drift into –or should I say
come out of- the element of a post-Ramadan fiesta, I serve you this week
views I have expressed previously on the ‘secessionist right of a
democratic minority’. Enjoy it.
IS a Union sacred and inviolable?
Whether a constitutionally governed nation is to exist in perpetuity,
sacred and inviolable even by the existential realities of irredeemable
socio-cultural fault lines, is a matter for the conjecture of the
jurisprudence of law and of morality. The question being: should a
democratic society be presumed immune –legally-speaking or morally so-
even from the rumbling dissent of self-determined minorities bent on
opting out of the union?Biafra-cartoon
Or put another way: does a part of a constitutionally governed nation-
whether it be a state or a section comprising of states- have a right to
unilaterally seek, by whatever means, to opt out of that union and to
form another? Or the converse of that may be asked: should a President
in a constitutionally governed society be constrained by law or morality
–or by both- to allow a part secede from the territory he is legally
elected to govern?
Will he be obligated –by the Constitution or by the unwritten universal
laws of nature, or by both- to fight to keep the union for which he was
inaugurated into office to preserve, protect and defend?
These questions have continued to agitate the minds of jurists and of
political scientists and there does not seem to be a single
jurisprudential solution to the question of ethnic or other classes of
minorities and their presumed right to self-determination or their duty
of fidelity to an existing statehood to which they are fated by the
circumstances of socio-political history to belong.
Willful self-assertion
Yet proponents of the ‘right’ of ‘might’ to willful self-assertion say
that any minority section of a constitutionally governed nation can
secede from an existing state it no longer desires to be part of, -if
not by a constitutional process, at the very worst by ‘force’.
Or is ‘Might’ the only ‘Right’? Provided a seceding minority has the
‘will’, the ‘grit’ and the ‘fighting power’ to force its way out of the
union; and provided thereafter it has the ‘might’ to defend its new
sovereignty, -either against the revolting anger of un-yielding
irredentists or against potentially emergent new rebellions from its
very own.
But the reverse is also the case, that even as a MINORITY section of a
democratic entity has recourse to the moral justification of the use of
force to assert the inalienable right to self-determination, so does a
democratic MAJORITY of a constitutionally governed nation have
legitimate recourse to the use of force –if it can- to preserve the
union. Thus, in actual fact the question of who is right between the
majority fighting to preserve the union and the minority fighting to opt
out of it, will simply be located in who is able to assert both ‘will’
and ‘firepower’ and not necessarily in who has the moral justification
to so to do.
It can thus be seen that any argument by an existing political order in
favour of the ‘right’ –legally or morally- to preserve a union is always
concurrent with the arrogation by it of the ‘right’ to deny the
seceding party its presumed ‘right’ to opt out of the union. And the
reverse is equally the case, that secessionists, in arrogating to
themselves the presumed ‘right’ to willful self-determination, also tend
to deny the ‘right’ of the existing political order to fulfill its
constitutional obligation of preserving, protecting and defending the
union.
And so going by the doctrine of the ‘right’ of ‘might’ to forceful
secession, it can be said that for the agitators of Biafra to secede
from Nigeria, the section that they purport to agitate for –namely the
South-East- must not only be able to outgun, or at the very least match
the fire power of the existing political order, it must be able,
permanently, to sustain and enforce its breakaway.
But going by the logic of those who insist that in all circumstances
only ‘right’ should be ‘might’, no minority section of a
constitutionally governed nation has the right to force its way out of a
legal union except by the leave of the majority in that union through
the due process of law and not on the sentiments of moral
considerations.
The Lincoln perspective
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United State of America
provided an excellent jurisprudential justification for the use of force
to suppress any rumbling of undemocratic dissent that has secession as
its ultimate goal. According to that perspective no democratic minority
has a right under the law to secede from a union consecrated by the
Constitution.
Lincoln came into office in 1861 by less than 40% of the popular vote
and the advent of a republican administration had already created
apprehension in some of the Southern states who feared the new President
might interfere with the institution of slavery -which had existed in
those states. In fact weeks before Lincoln’s inauguration seven of those
states had already threatened to secede from the 72-year old Union.
This was in spite of the fact that there was proof that although Lincoln
opposed the extension of slavery into western territories, he did not
favour abolition either in those states where it existed.
It was therefore clear that the secessionists had ulterior motives and
were thus not to be pacified but confronted. And so Lincoln in his
inaugural speech was to inform a shaky nation with a divided army that
he was ‘prepared to fight a war to maintain the Union’. His argument
being that ‘the right of a ‘democratic minority’ for self-determination
cannot be exercised in override of the right of a ‘democratic majority’
which is constitutionally legitimated to preserve and to protect the
Union.
The Right of ‘Way’ and the Right of ‘Say’: Lincoln, by the way, did not
derogate the right of the ‘minority’ to dissent –including its so
called presumed right to seek to dismember the Union in order to create
its own; but he said that the exercise of that delicate species of
fundamental right was essentially lower in the hierarchy of rights than
the right of a ‘democratic majority’ to preserve the union.
Thus side by side with the right of a ‘democratic majority’, the right
of a ‘democratic minority’ in any constitutional democracy cannot and
has never been any higher than the passive extent allowed to it in the
axiom which posits that ‘the minority has only a say and the majority a
way’.
Constitutional checks and limitations
Said Lincoln in his Inaugural speech: “A majority held in restraint by
constitutional checks and limitations … is the only true sovereign of a
free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to
despotism”.
Nothing can be more rational; especially given the systemic,
concept-driven nature of today’s organised societies whereby people have
chosen, strictly to live by the principle of the rule of the
‘majority’. To what avail will that principle of ‘majority rule’ be if
any ‘minority’ component of a constitutional democracy, at any time, and
outside of the due democratic process, can choose to terminate the
Union or to permanently alter and impair its constitutionally-prescribed
configuration?
President Lincoln had also used the ‘doctrine of perpetuity’ to advance
the argument that “in contemplation of universal law and of the
Constitution” the Union of the states that made up the United States was
“perpetual”; and that, that ‘perpetuity’ was necessarily implied even
though it was not expressly stated “in the fundamental law of all
national governments”.
And to that extent Lincoln felt justified and constitutionally
legitimated to say to the secessionists of his days “no state upon its
own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union”! Said German
Philosopher and social theorists Jurgen Habermas, “Being bound to the
constitutional achievements and ideals of their predecessors, future
generations (in any state) remain un-free; for they are denied the
opportunity to found their own constitution”.
An oath registered in Heaven’: And although the Constitution, as Lincoln
posited “contained no prohibition of secession or enforcement language
to preserve the Union”, it did –like all other democratic constitutions-
specify an oath of office mandating the President “to preserve, protect
and defend the Constitution”. And if so, what can be more deserving of
the President’s ‘preservation’, ‘protection’ and ‘defense’ -in a
constitutional democracy- than the territorial integrity of the State?
And thus said experts that in the true interpretation of ‘sovereign
power’, “since the people had not vested the President with the
authority to fix the terms of separation”, Lincoln was right to make
“war the inevitable consequence of secession” and to declare himself
“constitutionally unable to stop it”. And as Lincoln himself eloquently
said, whereas the secessionists had “no oath registered in heaven to
destroy” the union, he as President had “the most solemn one to
‘preserve’, ‘protect’ and ‘defend it’.”
The Lincoln inaugural speech was the same in which he made the famous
statement “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people
who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing
government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it
or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” The phrase
‘the people’ without doubt referred to the ‘majority’ -and not a
‘minority’ of it.
Peaceful referendum
A minority can only hope to court the understanding and cooperation of
the ‘majority’ to cause the necessary due democratic processes, which
may lead to a peaceful referendum. But since according to Lincoln,
“Unanimity” on the one hand “is impossible” and “the rule of a minority”
on the other “is wholly inadmissible”, anarchy or despotism –as he
warned- would be “all that is left” if the rule of a ‘democratic
majority’ was rejected.
Said Lincoln, even in the hypothetical scenario that the United States
were ‘not a government proper’ but merely an association of states in
the nature of ‘contract’, that contract could not be “peaceably unmade
by less than all the parties who made it”; because, as he asked
hypothetically, whereas “One party to a contract may violate (or)… break
it, does it not require ‘all’ to lawfully rescind it?”
POSTSCRIPT
The right of the Igbo ‘minority’ or any other ‘minority’ for that
matter, to secede from a constitutionally governed Nigeria must be
located in the complex hyacinth of these jurisprudential argument. And
in all honesty it is a right concurrent with –if not inferior to- the
right of the democratic ‘majority’ to deny.
Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/07/biafras-secessionist-right-revisited/
Read more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2016/07/biafras-secessionist-right-revisited/
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