I usually agree with Norman Geras but I think he goes a little wrong here on “rights” and individuals vs. groups.
Groups may also have rights, otherwise we should not be able to speak meaningfully of nations having the right to self-determination.
Norman is declaring that we must acknowledge that groups have rights because if we didn’t, “nations” would have no right of self-determination. But this begs the question. Do “nations” have a “right” to self-determination? Suppose I don’t think they do. (In fact, I don’t.) Then I am not compelled to acknowledge that groups have rights. Norman assumes that nations have a right to self-determination but advances no argument for this.
It seems to me that people want there to be a “right of self-determination” that adheres to nations; they want it an awful lot. It sounds nice. But wanting doesn’t make it so. If you take rights seriously, a supposed “right of self-determination” that supposedly adheres to some blob of people called a “nation” (whatever that is?) is incoherent and breaks down upon inspection. Indeed, let us see where Norman’s assumption of such a right leads him:
The right of nations to self-determination is a case in point. The right of the Palestinians to a state of their own and the right of the Jews to a state of their own includes an entitlement to some territory; but this is, irreducibly, a group right. Individual Israelis and Palestinians don’t each have a right to a ‘bit of a state’ that then gets aggregated with all the other rights to other ‘bits of a state’ into one overall right to a whole state (and territory).
This incoherent explanation is a perfect illustration of why the wished-for “right to self-determination” makes no sense. Norman is perfectly correct that no individual Israelis, Palestinians, nor Americans nor French nor anyone else, has such a thing as a “right to a bit of a state”. Whence then comes a “right to self-determination” for a “nation”, if we can’t sum up the rights of the individuals making up that nation?
Norman’s solution is that it is a “group right” that is simply “irreducible”. Well, that’s easy to say, but what does it mean?
To which groups belong this irreducible “right”? If “the Palestinians” have the “right” to “self-determination”, do “the Kurds”? What about “the Basques”? What about “the Cajuns”? What about “the Northern Californians”? In each case, why or why not? One suspects Norman would have to answer on a case-by-case basis, and that his answers would not be consistent. Which is precisely what I’m saying: the notion of “group rights” is incoherent.
Rights (if they exist) belong to individuals, not groups.
UPDATE 3/14: Much to my surprise (and delight), Geras has responded in a characteristically well-stated manner. His most apt observation is that in my post where I complain about an unsupported assertion (or easy assumption, as Norman clarifies) of a right to national self-determination, I too have made my assertion baldly (that rights belong to individuals, not groups). Partially this is because I was cut off by real-life & had to finish the post - I intended to write more. But in fact, I’m not sure I could add much to it: I’m not equipped to argue that “rights” exist at all from first principles (as I’m not even sure that they do). However, like Geras I make the convenient assumption that my 0.1 readers would agree that individuals, if nobody else, have rights, and so there you are.
The main purpose of my post was to deny the existence of “group rights” that include a right to self-determination. My argument for this was and is that it (even if “rights” exist and belong to individuals), an “irreducible” “group right” such as self-determination is incoherent and cannot be consistently defined (let alone applied!) in an understandable way. Norman gives a counterexample of a group right that certainly exists (the right of a university to hold property). But this is not a counterexample at all, it is simply a summed individual right. If the group known as a “university” has the right to hold and dispose of property, it is usually as a corporation or similar legal entity. But corporations do not have any “rights” over and above the sum of the rights of their shareholders. If a corporation can hold property, enter into contracts, etc., this is precisely because the members of that corporation - individuals - have the right to do those things. The shareholders could vote to or otherwise influence the board to dispose of the property one way or another - in other words, exercise their property rights in a precisely analogous way to how they exercise property rights as individuals. So the right of a university to hold property is analyzable into the constituent rights of individuals who make up that corporation to do so, if “members” means shareholders (admittedly, I am not sure what Geras means by a “member” of a university). In any event, there is no significant ‘extra’/emergent group right that universiities or corporations or other such legally-acknowledged groups have that is not also, at the same time, a right of the individuals who constitute it. This at least makes it possible to argue for this sort of group right as following directly from individuals’ rights (assuming the latter exist).
But the problem with this example is that it is completely unlike a situation where a bloc of people in a geographic area form a nation-state (and others are supposedly compelled to accede) because they, being a ‘nation’ or a ‘people’, have the supposed right of self-determination. Doing this necessarily involves (1) seizure and forcible defense of territory, and (2) one way or another installing into power a subgroup of the supposed ‘nation’ of people (”the goverment”) to monopolize force over the territory and the majority of people in it.
Now, individuals banded together may in some circumstances perhaps be understood to have the right to do something like #1 as part of their right to self-defense and property - it would depend on the situation. But there is no conceivable argument that I can see for the existence of a “right” for any of the individuals involved to engage in #2.
Of course, Geras would not argue with this, because the right of self-determination is “irreducible” but still a right. However, I think the fact that it is irreducible is a strong argument against it being a right at all. At least, if it is a right, arguing for this would require something over and above the usual arguments advanced for individual rights, with which (again) I assume most of my 0.1 readers would agree. I have seen no good argument for it however, and as I observed, Geras advanced none. As he says, out of convenience he made the (correct) assumption that most of his readers would find the right of self-determination unobjectionable. The point of my post was that most people are wrong and that the “right of self-determination” ought to be examined more carefully, not assumed to exist out of convenience or because it is desired.