Nationalism and Global Justice: David Miller and His Critics by Helder de Schutter & Ronald Tinnevelt

Author:Helder de Schutter & Ronald Tinnevelt [Schutter, Helder de & Tinnevelt, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317996972
Goodreads: 20859915
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

National responsibility and state responsibility

Although the two models focus on collective responsibility, Miller is primarily interested in a special case, namely national responsibility. He explicitly distinguishes national responsibility from state-responsibility and gives three considerations on why he thinks this distinction is helpful. The first is that if we only focus on state responsibility as distinguished from national responsibility, it ‘becomes difficult to show how individual people can share in the responsibility to compensate those whom the state they belong to has harmed, whereas if we treat states as acting on behalf of nations, such collective responsibility will be easier to establish’ (p. 112). Secondly, nations and states do not always converge, and national responsibility – apart from state-responsibility – is relevant in the case of a stateless nation whose quest for self-determination leads it to a terror campaign against the people from which it seeks to separate. A third reason is that we may want to hold nations responsible for actions performed by states that no longer exist, for example the continuing responsibility of the German people for acts carried out by the Nazi regime that was destroyed and replaced in 1945 (pp. 105–106).

Miller characterizes a nation as a community of people who share an identity and a public culture, who recognize special obligations to one another, value their continued association, and who aspire to be politically self-determining (pp. 118–120). States are characterized in terms of a formal organization in institutions like governments, legislatures and parliaments. So the question that Miller wants to answer is whether peoples, characterized by a shared identity and culture, apart from the formalized structure of states, can be held responsible for current or past harms. Although state responsibility ‘might seem easier to establish’, Miller argues that ‘judgments of national responsibility are more basic than judgments of state responsibility’ (p. 105).

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