Margaret Moore (2)

It was interesting to read this groundbreaking philosophical book about political territories, but I wasn't very satisfied with the theory itself. The author aims to give moral justification for legitimate occupation of territories. The justification she comes up with is, in short, that the state can legitimately occupy a territory if is acting as a vehicle of self-determination for a human group.

In chapters 4 and 5, the author discusses how her theory differs from the limited number of theories of territory that others have put forth. This was the most interesting part of the book because it provides a nice overview of this scattered literature. Her criticism of earlier theories certainly makes some sense.

However, once the author tries to put her own theory to work on real world cases, its flaws quickly become evident. She recognizes that there are a number of complex real-world situations where the relationships between a unitary human group, a state and its territory are weaker and more muddled than her ideal theory assumes. She therefore discusses contested areas, secession, wrongful taking of land, natural resources, immigration and the state's right to use force against non-citizens.

It's good that she takes on these difficult and controversial cases directly, but it is striking to notice how useless her theory becomes in this discussion. The value she gains from it for adjudicating real-world conflicts is virtually zero. She seems to deliberately avoid taking sides, but what use is a theory of territorial justice if it cannot say which party in a conflict has moral right on its side?

The underlying problem is that the author's theory is far too simple to have any explanatory value. Indeed, calling it a theory is overly flattering because it contains just a couple of loose moral postulates without any grounding in social theory. Of course, a general problem in applying moral philosophy to the real world is that disagreements and immorality usually vitiate the prescriptions of the philosophers. This does not make moral philosophy meaningless, but it does require that moral theory be linked in some way to legal theory and existing legal practice before it can gain practical value.

This link to legal theory and practice is missing in this book, for obvious reasons. Territories are a matter of international law, and no institutions with the authority to enforce international law exist at the present time. Nevertheless, I would have liked to see the author develop some ideas about how a hypothetical international authority could put her theory of territory to practice in resolving territorial conflicts. Even if such an argument would be speculative, it still would have given more food for thought than the current discussions.

All in all, this is high quality scholarship but the subject matter is a bit too complicated and resistant to moral ideals to be dealt with this easily.… (more)