Secession or Dissolution

The Scottish Government published its White Paper on the Independence Referendum today, so the phoney war is finally over and we can start to debate seriously. Very few people are going to make their decision based on issues in international law, but there are some fascinating questions. For instance, if the referendum decision is for independence, the manner in which Scotland would legally constitute itself is not clear. There is no legally defined mechanism for secession from the Union. The Acts of Union (in British and Irish Parliaments) 1801, creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, were never repealed, merely amended, in the UK and were only repealed in the Irish parliament in 1962 and 1983 respectively, long after Ireland had declared a republic and left the commonwealth (1948). The British response to that was the Ireland Act of 1949, which effectively decided to treat citizens of the Republic of Ireland as if they were still UK subjects (which is why I get to vote here in referenda and don't need a passport to enter the UK). So while the Republic of Ireland effectively seceded from the Union, it did so, in a legal sense, so incrementally that it didn't establish a precedent.

So if the Scots do decide on independence does that mean they secede from the union or does that mean that the union is dissolved? Since the constitutive documents of the union are all based on the 1707 settlement (explicitly cited in the 1800 negotiations which established that the Irish Parliament had enough constitutional authority to dissolve itself, but not enough to negotiate a new treaty of union), can a United Kingdom legally exist if one of the constituting parties pulls out of it? Wales would still remain attached to the Crown and the English Parliament come what may since the incorporation of Wales long precedes the Union, but all other dependencies of the Crown of England would need to renegotiate their relationship to the English Parliament. There are quite a few entities, such as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, that are already subject to the Crown of England but not part of the United Kingdom, so there is domestic precedent for complicated constitutional machinery.

Oddly enough, if the legal situation was dissolution this would make the European issue much easier. Europe has already established that it recognises the entities consequent to a dissolution (Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia) as successor states, so both Scotland and whatever constituted itself out of subsequent negotiations between Northern Ireland and England would be automatically members of the EU. The contrast would be with the Soviet Union. When it dissolved only the Russian Federation was recognised as its successor state and the other republics were new states, but the consequence was that it assumed all the debt of the Soviet Union. So either dissolution or secession have downsides from the perspective of England and Northern Ireland.

If we get to the point where Scotland, England and Northern Ireland are negotiating Scottish Independence, public international law is going to constrain all parties in interesting and possibly unpredictable ways. The domestic constitutional stuff could get interesting too. If there is a dissolution, given the 1707 union was an incorporating union and the Scottish Constitutional tradition was not continued, does the Kingdom of Scotland revert to the forms of 1707?

Finance, Communication and Co-­‐ordination in Eighteenth-­‐Century Empires

Finance, Communication and Co-­‐ordination in Eighteenth-­‐Century Empires

A workshop sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Dundee, July 5-­‐6, River Rooms, Ninth Floor, Tower Building, Nethergate.

The workshop will be the first of a series that have as their goal specifying the objects of global history. Global history has not been successfully separated from world history. World history is a well defined field, the study of the species from a high level of abstraction, but global history, the study of the phenomena that have global effect, is not at all the same thing. There is another meaning of world history as the history of peoples outside the Atlantic basin, but while intrinsically interesting it poses no new intellectual challenge. Nor is global history usefully defined as the study of the emergence of globalisation. The teleology built into that conceptualisation excludes the dynamics of global history, which are not uni-directional, and ignores some the most interesting questions in global history, such as given we have many cultures why do we have only one science?

The objects of study in global history are the phenomena that co-ordinate behaviour across space and time, that create the possibility of acting in a way that has global significance. The most interesting ones are those that are implicitly, rather than explicitly, global. These include objects and categories such as information, money, facts, rights, data, or debt. Institutions normatively regulated by such ideas have local effect but global scope. The early-modern period, and in particular the eighteenth century, marks the fascinating moment when structures and norms with genuinely global force emerged, when, for instance, nosological systems that ideally could be extended to categorise the whole of natural history began to have regulatory force on communities involved in the interrogation of nature. After Linnaeus natural scientists, even those critical of his categorisations, formed part of a global community.

The fiscal systems of the eighteenth century sea-going empires were a set of laboratories from which the elements of a global financial system emerged.  Those systems were far more than methods of extraction to support the costs of military competition; they were sophisticated and diverse means of communicating and co-ordinating behaviour. By the end of the eighteenth century fiscal systems were even being instrumentalised as a means of pursuing imperial goals and shaping behaviour, most notably in Hamilton's plan to constitute a new nation through a national debt. There is also a rich literature that reflected on the problems and possibilities offered by the fiscal systems of the empires. Imperial fiscal systems interacted in surprising ways; some financial instruments and forms of public credit were traded and used to transfer wealth in unforeseen ways. For instance the finance to support General Wolfe's campaign in Canada in the Seven Years War was moved through Irish banking networks, Catholic and Protestant, co-ordinated by the Nesbitt house from London.

Paper-­‐givers and commentators include William Summerhill (UCLA), Steve Pincus (Yale), Alan Forrest (York), Carl Wennerlind (Barnard), Claire Priest (Yale Law School), Sophus Reinert (Harvard Business School), Daniel Carey (UC Galway), Ivar McGrath (UC Dublin), Philipp Roessner (Manchester), William Deringer (Columbia).
The workshop will include a series of graduate student roundtables and the organisers encourage interested graduate students to attend. Pre-­‐registration is essential as space is limited.

Please contact Professor James Livesey (jlivesey@dundee.ac.uk) or Dr Nicola Cowmeadow (n.cowmeadow@dundee.ac.uk) 

The Politics of the Passion

This year Holy Week falls alongside  Passover and the cycle of readings falls on Luke's Gospel, so on Sunday we had Luke's version of the Passion. Every year at Easter something new strikes me and as it happens I've been teaching about revolutionary journees and the status and nature of the event so this year Luke's historian's understanding of politics drew my attention. Luke does a great job of illustrating how everything gets out of hand very quickly for everyone. From Peter's point of view and that of the other disciples the rush of events is overwhelming. There you are on Thursday night at a seder with your friends and by Friday afternoon your best friend is being crucified. So of course you lie about your relationship to him as events are unfolding. At no point could any reasonable person think that this is going to end with a judicial murder, and this way you get to hang about and see what is going on, until it has gone so far that nothing you do makes any difference. Herod and Pilate do what good politicians do when all the options are bad. They have a huge public order problem so they play for time and when they have no other option they embrace the lesser evil, killing an innocent man, to avoid the greater of a revolt. Luke, it appears, was Greek and so he has less insight into the motivations of Judas or the Temple priests, but it doesn't take that much of an effort of the imagination to see Judas the Sicarii trying to provoke Jesus to act like a true Messiah and restore the Kingdom, or the priests desperate to sustain the Temple worship in a very difficult situation. And the Temple authorities were right that the situation was unstable and potentially catastrophic. The Temple would be destroyed not that long after the Jesus incident. The grace notes, like the women allowed to stand at the foot of the cross, or Joseph of Arimethea being give permission to take the body, ring true to an event whose momentum has pushed to murder, but has now receded, leaving the participants unsure of what they have just done.

Seen through Luke's eyes there are no pantomime villains in the history. It is a true tragedy, where everyone does the best they can, at least by their own lights. However the outcomes, read in any secular way, are all disasterous. Judas's suicide is only the beginning of the appalling political consequences. Worse are the centuries of hostilities between Christians and Jews expressed in the most odious anti-semitism only latterly overcome. The Temple, Judea and the Empire eventually fall.

It seems to me even if you are not a Christian and do not see these events as a narrative of redemption Luke's account carries a telling critique of "Machiavellian" or 'Hobbesian" separation of political ethics from morality. All the acts of "saving evil"backfire. The illusion of a political cunning operating outside our understanding of what is demanded by justice is exactly that, an illusion. The acts of calculation are as disasterous for individuals as they are for the collective. Judas ends up in despair, Peter never recovers from his sense of guilt, Pilate has to give up any idea he had that he represents law. The message here is that willing it so does not make our actions good, that moral good is intrinsic. And it seems to me that a lot of the interesting political questions lie right there, where intuitions of moral imperatives meet the demands of the liberal polity.