The  Problem  of  Nationality

A further problem is raised by the claim that nations are morally important. In emphasizing the moral importance of national boundaries, Miller is sceptical about global principles of justice. According to Miller’s approach individual duties are necessarily derivative from the duties of the nation because of the importance of national self-determination and the special responsibilities between fellow nationals.

However, as climate change is a global problem, it does not seem fair that an individual should contribute less to climate costs simply because of his nationality when there are others in less fortunate positions who are required to pay higher costs due to their nationality. Furthermore, as Harris’s argument claims, it is important to consider all of the actors that are causally contributing to climate change on a large scale if we are to prevent dangerous climate change. Miller might reply that the rich who live in poor countries only have duties of distributive justice to their fellow nationals. These duties will be more or less expansive depending on the principles of distributive justice accepted in that particular society, but nations should be allowed to distribute duties within their own boundaries.

In this section I will claim that the national boundaries are not as important as Miller claims. I will first show that nationalism can accept some duties of global responsibility when human rights are at stake. Second, I will show that individual climate duties are

not inconsistent with nationalist claims of special duties to compatriots, and need not undermine a nation’s right to self-determination. Third, I will claim that Miller’s

assertion that individuals can only feel affinity to fellow nationals is unfounded. Fourth, I will make the claim that in some cases, the importance of national self-determination might be best served by some degree of individual duties. Finally, I will claim that these arguments have shown that the arguments about the importance of national boundaries are simply misplaced in the case of climate change duties.

First, Miller acknowledges that the global community has a responsibility when human rights are at stake:

‘Protecting human rights is not just a matter of each state protecting the rights of its own citizens, even though this is one of its primary functions and (arguably) a condition of its legitimacy. For various reasons that I will come to shortly, making human rights protection purely an internal responsibility of states is not going to be effective in many cases. So the wider responsibility falls on that rather elusive entity ‘the world

community’’¹²⁹.

As we saw in Chapter One, there is good reason to talk of human rights violations when we discuss the harms that climate change is likely to cause if global emissions are not reduced urgently. There are good reasons for thinking that the scope of climate duties must extend beyond nation-states, since climate change has the potential to impact the lives of individuals all over the world. Miller’s assertion that human rights cannot be effectively protected if each state is concerned only with its internal functioning might seem to lend support to the argument for global climate duties. This first claim shows that nationalism is not entirely unresponsive to the idea of certain duties of the

international community.

However, Miller thinks that the responsibility of the global community to protect human rights from the threat of climate change should still be borne in the first instance by nation-states. In Miller’s view, individual duties would call for a system of global equality of opportunity, which would not respect national self-determination. He states:

‘What can justice mean in a world made up of culturally distinct communities each enjoying some degree of political autonomy? It cannot require that everyone

everywhere must enjoy the same bundle of freedoms, opportunities, and resources—a view that I shall refer to as global equality of opportunity. It cannot require this

because people in different communities will want to have these advantages distributed

129 David Miller, ‘The Responsibility to Protect Human Rights’ in Lukas H. Meyer (ed), Legitimacy, Justice and Public International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 232.

in different ways. In particular, they will attach different relative weights to different components of the bundle.’¹³⁰

Miller’s position is that a global scheme of egalitarian distributive justice could not work since those in different nations have different preferences for their particular balance of goods. So, whilst the first point has shown that nationalism can accept duties that are not decided entirely by the nation-state in certain situations where human rights are at risk, Miller wishes to claim that these global responsibilities would still best be served by national duties.

In response to this I will make a second argument, highlighting the difference between an entirely global system of distributive justice, and a system in which individuals can bear climate duties according to their personal situation. Miller’s concerns about global equality of opportunity are unfounded in relation to individual climate duties. Such duties do not require a commitment to global equality of opportunity, and can be supported without denying the claim that individuals have special responsibilities to fellow nationals.¹³¹ For example, due to the fact that states currently function separately and have national accounts and budgets for many services, compatriots are required to pay their taxes in order for the state to run properly. This is an example of a special duty that cannot currently be met by individuals in other states in the current global set-up.

But it does not mean that there cannot be some duties that expand beyond national boundaries. The argument for individual climate duties requires only that the better off in poor countries pay a fair share of the costs of climate change, and does not make any broader claims about distribution of opportunities. So, the argument that individual duties would require a system of global equality of opportunity that does not respect national self-determination is unfounded in the case of climate duties. As such, this aspect of the argument for nationalism does not threaten the idea of individual climate duties.

A third argument contests Miller’s assertion that acceptability is a key issue in implementing individual climate duties:

‘Climate-change policies can be successfully implemented only if there is general consent to their introduction [and so] allowing nations to map their own route within

130 David Miller, ‘National Responsibility and International Justice’, in Deen K. Chatterjee (ed), The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004):

125 131 Caney, International Distributive Justice, 981.

the constraints on emissions set internationally not only respects their rights of self-determination but is likely to produce a higher level of compliance in the long run.’¹³² Miller’s argument is that individuals identify with their national boundaries and so will be unwilling to enter into distributive agreements that expand beyond the nation-state.

He argues:

‘Any view holding that people can make claims on one another that go beyond simple non-interference - must presuppose a background set of social relationships against which claims of this sort would appear legitimate […] We can only expect [people] to consent to institutions that enforce the preferred distribution if they regard themselves as bound to the beneficiaries by strong ties of community.’¹³³

The nation is the largest type of community that can fulfil these criteria according to Miller, and therefore global duties of justice between individuals are unrealistic since people would not consent to such principles outside of their nation. In Miller’s account national boundaries represent the limits beyond which interpersonal affinities are non-existent.

However, we might argue that Miller’s assumption that people are emotionally bound to their national boundaries in an unalterable way is too quick. As Beitz argues, people’s affinity to certain groups is not ‘static’, and is indeed changeable over time.¹³⁴ He states:

It is a commonplace that the size of the circle of affinity is historically variable and that, under favorable institutional and cultural circumstances, the range of sympathetic concern can extend well beyond those with whom people share any particular ascriptive characteristics … The modern multicultural state would be inconceivable if this were not true … If motivational capacities are variable and subject to change with the development of institutions and cultures, then it gets things backward to assume any particular limitations on these capacities in the structure of a political theory.¹³⁵

We might therefore expect Beitz to respond to Miller’s nationalist approach by arguing that the claim that individuals will only agree to enter into systems of distribution with fellow nationals is an assumption that is not consistent with the potential for change in human behaviour that we have seen throughout history. Therefore, to limit our

conceptions of the scope of justice in this way is too restrictive since it does not allow for the possibility of changing institutional structures which may very well have an impact on the affinity individuals feel towards other individuals. For example, the fact that individuals can affect other individuals by way of affecting the climate may well

132 Miller, ‘Global Justice and Climate Change’, 122.

133 David Miller, ‘In What Sense must Socialism be Communitarian?’ Social Philosophy and Policy, 6:2 (1989): 59.

134 Simon Caney, ‘International Distributive Justice’, Political Studies, 49 (2001): 981.

135 Charles R. Beitz, ‘Rawls’s Law of Peoples’, Ethics, 110:4 (2000): 683

give rise to more expansive ideas of institutional structures. We might say that Miller takes the wrong starting point. He mistakenly takes the existing status quo to be evidence of human affinity to compatriots. Instead, we should consider the possibility that, inversely, this feeling may have been developed following the implementation of the current status quo, and therefore other conceptions of distributive schemes may well be possible.

So, I have so far shown that: (1) Miller’s nationalism is sensitive to the fact that

protecting human rights might sometimes require duties of the international community.

I have shown that two of his reasons for claiming that the nation-state is the right actor to delegate these duties is undermined since: (2) individual climate duties do not require a denial of the nationalist claim of special duties between co-nationals, and do not necessitate the kind of global equality of opportunity against which Miller protests; and (3) Miller’s claim that individuals will not accept responsibilities to those outside of their nation is unfounded.

A fourth argument might be suggested that would support some individual duties, from a nationalist perspective. It might be argued that national sovereignty is itself threatened by climate change. As climate change is a global problem, the emissions of foreign actors can affect the risk of human rights harms domestically. We might say that climate change itself is capable of encroaching on a state’s sovereignty since the harms that affect the citizens of one nation-state may have been caused by actions of foreign actors.

Therefore, protecting a nation’s right to self-determination might well depend on mitigating climate change. In extreme cases, the harms of climate change might include the disappearance of the land on which a nation lives, thereby seriously jeopardizing its ability to continue to exist as a self-determining nation. In this sense, the idea of

reciprocity to which Miller appeals may entail nations being best able to protect the human rights of their own compatriots as well as those in the wider world by entering into a global agreement in which all have the duty to mitigate against climate change, regardless of the average responsibility of the state in which they live. As Parks and Roberts argue:

‘The notion of the nation-state contributing to, being vulnerable to, and responding to climate change may obscure important intra-country distinctions. Many developing

nations now have a sizeable middle class that affects and is affected by warming of the Earth’s atmosphere much differently to the rest of [their] society’.¹³⁶

Harris argues that ‘there will be no hope of averting climate catastrophe’ without requiring the new consumers in the developing world to bear climate duties.¹³⁷ If this is the case, then it may be that the best way to protect the human rights of fellow nationals is to support a system that would require these rich individuals in poor countries to bear climate duties. As such, the special duties individuals have to fellow nationals, might require them to support individual duties, since this might be the only way to protect the rights of their fellow nationals not to suffer from dangerous climate change.

We might further reconcile Miller’s argument with that of Harris’s by adopting the approach suggested in Baer et al’s Greenhouse Development Rights Framework. In their approach, state-level duties are calculated not on state averages but based upon the aggregate of responsibility and capacity held by individuals within the state.¹³⁸ In other words, it is the individual actors that bear primacy in determining the weight of duties of a state, rather than the state average that is indifferent to high emitting individuals within developing states. So, national self-determination is not affected, but the duties of a nation-state are proportional to the number of affluent actors within the state and not a state average. This would still rely on the acceptance of some degree of global duties, but could be a bridge to garner acceptance from a wider theoretical audience whilst remaining true to the claim that all emissions must be regulated. This option might be the most readily accepted in the current state-led system, as it would still allow nation-states to distribute responsibility according to their own domestic systems of distribution. However, this approach relies on nation-states differentiating fairly between the different situations of their citizens. There is no guarantee that the

individuals with the most responsibility or capacity would end up paying their fair share of the costs. As such, this approach is an improvement from the current state-led system in which responsibility is determined by state averages, but it cannot ensure that the actors with the greatest capacity or responsibility are the ones that end up paying their fair share of the costs.

Nationalism can support the claim that there may be global duties where human rights are at stake. I have claimed that the argument made by nationalism that individuals have special duties to compatriots is not inconsistent with the claim that individuals might

136 Harris, World Ethics and Climate Change: From International to Global Justice, 114.

137 Harris, ‘Inviting People to Climate Parties’, 310.

138 Baer et al, ‘The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework’.

also have climate duties, since this does not require expanding national schemes of distributive justice to the global level, but simply recognizing that there are certain duties which individuals everywhere must adhere to. In this sense, nationalism can be consistent with the idea that there may be some individual duties that exist on a global scale. The ability of a nation-state to self-determine may well be jeopardized if

dangerous climate change is not mitigated, so if multi-actor duties are likely to be the most successful at preventing this as well as protecting human rights, then nationalism itself may well be able to support some degree of global individual duties. Indeed, as the Greenhouse Development Rights approach suggests, there may be ways of keeping national self-determination whilst also accurately dividing responsibility based on the aggregate responsibility of individuals within a nation. However, the discussion has shown that the arguments for nationalism do not provide us with a legitimate reason to believe that individual duties for a global problem should be determined by nationality.