Authority, Nationality, and Minorities: A Post-Razian View

Abstract

Joseph Raz proposes that identification with one’s community can provide a reason to identify with the community’s laws and government and, by extension, a reason to accept the putative legitimacy of the state’s authority. Building on Raz's theory, this paper considers how nationality figures in the legitimacy of political authority. I argue that reasons of nationality are indeed genuine normative reasons for accepting political authority, but their normative force is inconclusive. In particular, the normative force of nationality depends in part on the democratic credentials of the government and the law in question. Nevertheless, I go on to argue that nationality has special and sometimes decisive importance for political authority; nationality provides a particularly salient solution to the problem of the personal scope of authority, i.e the “boundary problem”, a problem that is logically prior to the operation of democratic procedures. This conclusion has important implications for nationally divided societies. In the absence of a common nationality, standard democratic procedures do not provide minority national groups with comparable access to the conditions for legitimate authority. Special counter-majoritarian measures for accommodating nationalist minorities (such as federalism or consociational democracy) can therefore be justified in so far as they might allow for more equitable access to those conditions.