What does it mean to say a state has a right to exist? [View all]

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.

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