Global Capital & Power

Wood

 * The nation state for the provision of law regulation/enforcement, infrastructure, and social provision of workers (industrial reserve army)
 * Global capital, no less than ‘national’ capital, relies on nation-states to maintain local conditions favourable to accumulation, as well as to help it navigate the global economy. Globalisation’ is characterised less by the decline of the nation-state than by a growing contradiction between the global scope of capital and its persistent need for more local and national forms of ‘extra-economic’ support, a growing disparity between its economic reach and its political grasp.
 * Unlike other systems of exploitation, in which appropriating classes or states extract surplus-labour from producers by direct coercion, capitalist exploitation is characterised by a division of labour between the ‘economic’ moment of appropriation and the ‘extra-economic’ or ‘political’ moment of coercion.
 * Capital is not only uniquely driven to extend its economic reach, but also uniquely able to do so
 * The economic imperatives of capitalism are always in need of support by extra-economic powers of regulation and coercion, to create and sustain the conditions of accumulation and maintain the system of capitalist property.
 * In fact, capitalism, in some ways more than any other social form, needs politically-organised and legally-defined stability, regularity, and predictability in its social arrangements.
 * To stabilise its constitutive social relations – between capital and labour, or capital and other capitals – capitalism is especially reliant on legally-defined and politically-authorised regularities. Business-transactions at every level require consistency and reliable enforcement, in contractual relations, monetary standards, exchanges of property.
 * Throughout all the various phases or ‘régimes’ of capitalism, there has been one over-arching pattern: not the decline, but, on the contrary, the persistence and even the proliferation of the nation-state.
 * If anything, the universalisation of capitalism has also meant, or at least been accompanied by, the universalisation of the nation-state
 * The internationalisation of capital has been accompanied by the universalisation of capital’s original political form
 * New transnational institutions have certainly emerged, they have not so much displaced the nation-state, as given it new roles – in fact, in some cases, new instruments and powers.
 * Much of what goes under the name of globalisation consists of national states carrying out policies to promote the international competitiveness’ of their own national economies, to maintain or restore profitability to domestic capital, to promote the free movement of capital while controlling the movements of labour, typically by confining it within national boundaries, or at least strictly controlling its movements to coincide with the needs of capital, and always by subjecting it to disciplines enforced by nation-states.
 * Nowhere is the nexus of global capital and nationstate more obvious than in the degree to which transnational organisations of capital like the IMF not only serve as the instru ments of dominant states, but also depend on subordinate states as the conduit of globalisation
 * The global economy is constituted by regional blocs of unevenly developed and hierarchically organised national economies and nation-states.
 * Nor has European integration transcended the contradictory logic of uneven development or the national exclusiveness that follows from it. In fact, the Union has brought into sharper relief the hierarchy of national economies.
 * National classes are likely to persist precisely because global integration itself, whatever else it may mean, has meant intensified competition among national capitals.
 * Globalisation has, certainly, been marked by a withdrawal of the state from its social-welfare and ameliorative functions; and, for many observers, this has, perhaps more than anything else, created an impression of the state’s decline.
 * Even while labour-movements and forces on the Left have been in retreat, with so-called social-democratic governments joining in the neoliberal assault, at least a minimal ‘safety-net’ of social provision has proved to be an essential condition of economic success and social stability in advanced-capitalist countries.
 * At the same time, developing countries that may in the past have been able to rely more on traditional supports, such as extended families and village-communities, have been under pressure to shift at least some of these functions to the state, as the process of ‘development’ and the commodification of life have destroyed or weakened old social networks
 * The very fact that ‘globalisation’ has extended capital’s purely economic powers far beyond the range of any single nation-state means that global capital requires many nation-states to perform the administrative and coercive functions that sustain the system of property and provide the kind of day-to-day regularity, predictability, and legal order that capitalism needs more than any other social form.
 * The link between imperialism and capitalism is far from clear. Only in Britain was that wealth converted into industrial capital. We cannot get very far in explaining the rise of capitalism by invoking the contribution of imperialism to ‘primitive accumulation’ or, indeed, by attributing to it any decisive role in the origin of capitalism.
 * Spain, the dominant early colonial power and the leader in ‘primitive accumulation’ of the classical kind, which amassed huge wealth, especially from South-American mines, and was well endowed with ‘capital’ in the simple sense of wealth, did not develop in a capitalist direction. Instead, it expended its massive colonial wealth in essentially feudal pursuits, especially war as a means of extra-economic appropriation, and the construction of its Habsburg empire in Europe.
 * So why was colonialism associated with capitalism in one case and not another.
 * Much, if not everything, depended on the social-property relations at home in the imperial power, the particular conditions of systemic reproduction associated with those property-relations, and the particular economic processes set in motion by them. The wealth amassed from colonial exploitation may have contributed substantially to further development, even if it was not a necessary precondition of the origin of capitalism.
 * In precapitalist societies, appropriation – whether just to meet the material needs of society or to enhance the wealth of exploiters – took, so to speak, an absolute form: squeezing more out of direct producers, rather than enhancing the productivity of labour. That is to say, as a general rule, precapitalist exploitation took place by ‘extra-economic’ means, by means of direct coercion, using military, political, and juridical powers to extract surpluses from direct producers who typically remained in possession of the means of production.
 * As for trade in these societies, it generally took the form of profit on alienation, buying cheap and selling dear, typically in separate markets, depending more on extra-economic advantages of various kinds than on competitive production
 * Imperialism had to do with the location of capitalism in a world that was not – and probably never would be – fully, or even predominantly, capitalist.
 * After the Second World War, we've had an age in which economic competition overtook military rivalry among the major capitalist powers. The main axis of military and geo-political conflict would run not between capitalist powers, but between the capitalist and the developed non-capitalist world
 * Without seeking outright territorial expansion, the USA nevertheless became the world’s most powerful military force, with a highly militarised economy. It was during this time that the purpose of military power shifted decisively away from the relatively well defined goals of imperial expansion and inter-imperialist rivalry to the open-ended objective of policing the world in the interests of (US) capital.
 * The USA emerged from the Second World-War as the strongest economic and military power, and took command of a new imperialism governed by economic imperatives and administered by a system of multiple states
 * Capitalist imperialism eventually became almost entirely a matter of economic domination, in which market-imperatives, manipulated by the dominant capitalist powers, were made to do the work no longer done by imperial states or colonial settlers. It is a distinctive and essential characteristic of capitalist imperialism that its economic reach far exceeds its direct political and military grasp. This sharply differentiates it from earlier forms of imperialism, which depended directly on such extra-economic powers, with territorial empires that could reach only as far as the capacity of their direct coercive powers to impose their rule
 * Once subordinate powers are made vulnerable to economic imperatives and the ‘laws’ of the market, direct rule by imperial states is no longer required to impose the will of capital
 * Market-imperatives may reach far beyond the power of any single state, but these imperatives themselves must be enforced by coercive extra-economic power. Neither the imposition of economic imperatives, nor the everyday social order demanded by capital accumulation and the operations of the market, can be achieved without the help of coercive powers much more local and territorially limited than the economic reach of capital. That is why, paradoxically, the more purely economic empire has become, the more the nation-state has proliferated.
 * Globalisation, the economic imperialism of capital taken to its logical conclusion, has, paradoxically, required a new doctrine of extra-economic, and especially military, coercion
 * Since even US military power cannot be everywhere at once, the only option is to demonstrate, by frequent displays of military force, that it can go anywhere at any time, and do great damage. It is this endless possibility of war that imperial capital needs in order to sustain its hegemony over the global system of multiple states.
 * An endless empire which has no boundaries, even no territory, requires war without end. An invisible empire requires infinite war, and a new doctrine of war to justify it.
 * Dangers to the US hegemony emanating from the nation state include: absence of an orderly/predictable state, so-called rogue-states outside of US influence, and too strong capitalist competitors. War with major capitalist competitors, while it can never be ruled out, is likely to be self-defeating, destroying not only competition, but markets and investment-opportunities at the same time. Imperial dominance in a global capitalist economy requires a delicate and contradictory balance between suppressing competition and maintaining conditions in competing economies that generate markets and profit. This is one of the most fundamental contradictions of the new world-order.
 * Imperial hegemony in the world of global capitalism, then, means controlling rival economies and states without going to war with them. At the same time, the new military doctrine is based on the assumption that military power is an indispensable tool in maintaining the critical balance, even if its application in controlling major competitors must be indirect.
 * In contrast to Harvey (who assumes that capital also needs a political/territorial expansion), Wood argues that the USA is the first truly capitalist empire, precisely because it is the first imperial hegemon to possess the kind of economic power needed to dispense with territorial ambitions and to sustain its hegemony through the economic imperatives of capitalism, though this has been accompanied by new ‘extra-economic’ – especially military – requirements.
 * We have to acknowledge the specificities of capitalism and its particular form of appropriation, as distinct from other social formations: property itself is not ‘politically constituted’ and appropriation takes place by ‘economic’ means.
 * Extra-economic power would, certainly, be treated as essential to capital-accumulation, but its principal functions would be the imposition, maintenance and enforcement of social property-relations conducive to the exertion of economic power; the creation of a predictable social and administrative order of the kind that capitalism needs more than any other social form; and, in general, the provision of conditions congenial to accumulation.
 * The more global the economy has become, the more economic circuits have been organised by territorial states and inter-state relations; and capital has come to rely more than ever on territorial states to install and enforce the conditions of accumulation on a global scale.

Universalization of capital
for work, as we have seen. The inducement to sell their labor power is imposed on workers by their economic situation. When they offer to work for an employer, however, what they agree to is the simple fact o f work for a stipulated period of time. The intensity and dexterity of that work cannot be specified. This goal - of maximizing labor intensity to reduce unit production cost - is imposed on the capitalist by the demands of competition. For the employer, profit maximization is the primary motive, as well as the goal, of his activity. For workers, the firms profitability is a second-order concern, accepted only because it is a condition for the fulfillment of their primary goal, which is to secure their material welfare. The economic uncertainty generated by rising productivity (one worker now produces more, so a few can be laid off) merely adds to the workers’ list of reasons to resist the demand for greater effort/work intensity across Europe were still heavily dependent on low-wage, labor-intensive production, and therefore had much to lose from an enfranchised and organized working class
 * Coercion is not necessary for the labor process (since we have wage-labor) but very well for creating the environment for capital
 * That the bourgeoisie’s willingness to base its rule on popular consent was itself an expression of a deeper force, namely capital’s universalizing tendency.
 * Guhas doubts about capitals universalization rest on a very specific understanding of what is being universalized—he takes it to be the spread of ideological hegemony, narrowly defined. For Guha, the main evidence for incomplete universalization is that the bourgeoisie does not base its rule on the consent of the governed
 * Another of the putative indices of failed bourgeois hegemony: the persistence of certain kinds of power relations, which Subalternist theorists see as different from bourgeois forms of power, and thus see as more evidence of the stalled universalizing drive.
 * The evidence suggests that capital does show a consistent universalizing tendency, just not in the manner understood by Guha.
 * The phenomenon Guha takes to be symptomatic of a stalled universalizing drive by capital—the existence of a distinct subaltern domain, with its own idiom, embedded in antiquated power relations, and with its own political culture—is quite consistent with the universalizing process, but only if this process is redefined.
 * Chakrarbarty affirms Guhas thesis concerning the bourgeoisies failure to base its rule on the consent of the governed, quoting approvingly Guhas verdict that “vast areas in the life and consciousness of the people escaped any kind of ‘bourgeois hegemony’.” He also agrees that the failure to hegemonize was itself a symptom of the universalizing dynamic coming to a halt.
 * Chakrarbarty also emphasizes the failure, in capital’s bid for supremacy, to transform relations of power
 * The peculiarity of Indian modernity was that its capitalism left intact the political domain of subaltern groups and the forms of power peculiar to it, in which elites exercised “direct and explicit subordination” of the lower orders often involving the use of physical coercion
 * Guha and Chakrabarty are united in their view that colonial capitalism, even in its most developed form, produces distinctive forms of power.
 * Guha's point is that the global history of capitalism need not produce everywhere the same history of power
 * Guhas analysis] fundamentally pluralizes the history o f power in global modernity and separates it from any universalist narratives of capital. Subaltern historiography questions the assumption that capitalism necessarily brings bourgeois relations of power to a position of hegemony
 * This was capitalism but without capitalist hierarchies, a capitalist dominance without a hegemonic capitalist culture—or, in Guha’s famous term, ‘dominance without hegemony.’
 * In capitalism, surplus extraction does not have to depend on outright coercion. Employers can rely instead on the “silent compulsion of economic relations,” to use Marx’s famous formulation.
 * Direct coercion fades away, and power is then exercised through the impersonal force of structural pressures. Rather than appearing as their direct oppressors, capitalists can present themselves as the workers’ benefactors. The system turns out to be perfectly compatible with formal equality in the political realm, even as the bourgeoisie exercises economic dominance.
 * For Chakrabarty, colonial power was NOT nonbourgeois because formal equality and impersonal power relations appear as the quintessential forms of capitalist power - which is incompatible with the Indian variant of power (coercion)
 * Chakrabarty seems to suggest that these European Marxist theories construe every form of power as an expression of capital
 * So capital in India failed to implant its own form of domination—through impersonal means—and also failed to generate a genuine political community under its hegemony. This is why Marxist theory as a “metanarrative” loses relevance for India: Marxist theory is the child of European reality. It presumes that history unfolds in a certain way—the bourgeoisie is born; it recognizes its interests; it overthrows the traditional order, imposes its own vision of society, creates a viable nation, and exercises power through formal and impersonal means. Since this did not happen in India, Marxist theory—and its liberal cousin—must be replaced by theory attuned to Indian realities and freed of European assumptions. This is how Europe is to be provincialized.
 * A specifically postcolonial capitalism demands specifically postcolonial categories. Chakrabarty’s argument is that what makes Indian capitalism generate such forms of power is its specifically colonial character
 * Two pillars support Chakrabartys conclusion that Western categories must be abandoned for new, indigenous ones: the claim that the bourgeoisie did not establish its ideological hegemony in the form of rule by consent, and the claim that it did not displace older power relations with its own
 * Two distinct elements associated with the universalizing tendency—the “self-expansion of capital” on one side, and its attendant political and cultural transformations on the other. Capital's self-expansion, for Marx, referred to both a micro- and a macro-level phenomenon. At the macro level, it referred to the tendency of capitalism as a system to expand its zone of operation—to find new markets, to create new ones if needed by displacing existing economic forms, to reach into every part of the world and incorporate it into a world market.
 * As capital expands its geographical zone of operation, it also expands the size of its units, its scale of production, the baseline size of operations for market entrants, and so forth. The system not only widens, it deepens.
 * Capital is driven to expand because of mechanisms internal to its reproduction; that capitalists are driven to expand simply by virtue of being capitalists—not Because of their personal idiosyncrasies, or their ideological predilections, or their cultural background. The agents who run firms in a fully monetized economy do not need any inducements to accumulate capital other than those generated by their structural location
 * What capitalism universalizes, then, is a particular strategy of economic reproduction. It compels economic units to focus single-mindedly on accumulating ever more capital. Economic managers internalize it as their goal because it is built into the structural location of being a capitalist; it is not something capitalists have to be convinced to do. Wherever capitalism goes, so too does this imperative.
 * For Guha, insofar as the capitalist class does not base its rule on consent, it can be said to have abandoned its universalizing drive
 * By Chibber's criteria, the universalizing process is under way if agents’ reproductive strategies shift toward market dependence
 * Yet while it is correct to insist that the labor-extraction process in capitalism does not rest solely on interpersonal domination, it does not follow that interpersonal domination becomes redundant. In fact, it occupies a central place in capitalist economies. What changes, is its location in the production process.
 * In feudalism, the actual work effort—the labor process, in which peasants grow and attend to the crops—is essentially under the peasant’s control. The lord exercises little or no authority over the peasant in this dimension. Force is thus mobilized outside the labor process, not within it. In capitalism, the employer does not have to compel the worker to offer his labor services. This is taken care of by the worker’s economic circumstances. But once the laborer appears at the work site, the employer has to mobilize some degree of authority or power in order to extract the needed labor effort from him. There is a need for the exercise of interpersonal domination, but its locus has shifted from outside the labor process, as was the case in feudalism, to within it
 * Two basic reasons for the capitalist to wield a measure of personal authority over his workers, whether he is located in an advanced or a colonial economy:
 * The first has to do with employers’ compulsion to extract maximum labor effort from employees. Capitalists need not compel workers to show up
 * To prevent countervailing forces/unions etc. Capitalists must thus wield some degree of authority over their employees in the labor process. This is why, in capitalism, the place of coercion shifts from outside the labor process to within it. Employers have to institutionalize direct authority on the shop floor, or within the office, as an intrinsic component of work organization. One of the chief means of ensuring that employees remain weak in their bargaining position is to heighten the divisions between them. Where employers find that labor is already riven with caste, cultural, or ethnic divisions, they can and often do find ways of using these divisions to their advantage.
 * Social divisions do not have to be invented by capital: often they already exist within the population as it is proletarianized and absorbed into the labor process.
 * But divide-and-conquer need not be an artifact of transitional societies. It is also built into the fabric of more developed incarnations of capitalism. One source of division in the working class, even in the advanced world, is the unceasing competition for jobs.
 * The traditional instrument for reducing uncertainty and increasing security has been reliance on familial and social networks, which tend to be ethnically or racially homogenous. The result of this reliance on networks is that it hardens lines of divisions within the working class, simply as a result of competition in the labor market. Workers coalesce around their racial or ethnic identities, as these identities become a means for enhancing their material security. Employers therefore do not have to create social hierarchies as a conscious strategy—they find the hierarchies already constructed through the reproduction of capitalism itself.
 * Capitalism creates a situation of scarcity for the resource 'employment/labor' and mobilizes social divisions to fight for this scarce resource
 * The main such source of power is the structural advantage he wields over his workers—the fact that he can deprive them of their livelihood. The fear of being sacked is perhaps the main inducement felt by workers to submit to his authority and his demands. Employers are therefore wary of measures that decrease their workers dependence on their waged work—hence business groups’ often intense resentment of the decommodification of sundry goods by the welfare state.
 * Employers try to establish their authority over workers also outside the production process (in the political, social, cultural realm). This is why the bourgeois revolutions in Europe yielded a political nation that was in fact a bourgeois oligarchy. The established capitalist class in England and the emerging capitalists in France both had a direct interest in a social order in which they could use their political dominance to intensify their power on the shop floor. This ambition is what drove their hostility to the laboring classes’ demands for universal suffrage, the legalization of trade unions
 * Capitalists’ resistance to political liberalization was in part occasioned by the fact that, even into the mid-nineteenth century, manufacturers
 * Chibber: What is universalized under the rule of capital is not the drive for a consensual and encompassing political order, but rather the compulsions of market dependence. For capital, this amounts to a compulsion to produce in order to sell—production for exchange value, not for use. This, in its turn, makes it rational for capitalists to seek political power over their workforce—both at the microlevel on the shop floor, and in broader political institutions outside the production process. My account leads to the prediction that, far from seeking to accommodate the ambitions of the subaltern classes, capital should view their independence with suspicion; instead of fighting for a liberal political order, as Guha would have it, a universalizing capital ought to prefer a narrower, more exclusionary regime.
 * The peculiarities of the Subcontinent—and much of the postcolonial world—are not generated by capital’s having failed in its drive, but of its having acted on that drive.
 * Even if we allow that the kind of power exercised by capital in the East is different from that in the West, they can both be explained as instances of capitalist dynamics. They express capitalists’ different responses to different settings.
 * Chakrabarty's claim was twofold: that capitals failure to universalize, the bourgeoisies inability to attain hegemony, produced forms of power and authority that are inconsistent with the logic of capital. Hence his call to “pluralize” the analysis of power. The second claim was that such noncapitalist forms of power resist scrutiny through the lens of Marxian categories.

Sovereignty

 * Mearsheimer's offensive realism: international anarchy, offensive military capacity, never know others' intentions, survival as ultimate goal, states as rational actors → fear, self-help, power maximization;
 * Beitz' reasons to be skeptical about international morality: cultural relativism, overriding national interest
 * What is the thing that creates a demand for morality at home (domestically) and does it pertain to the international?
 * Hobbes is the archetype individualist: the state is just the assembly; the incentives are very different for states vs. individuals in the state of nature (kings never get killed, individuals can); Hobbes: in the state of nature, people are sovereigns, not states
 * Domestic sovereignty – actual control over a state exercised by an authority organized within this state
 * Interdependence sovereignty – control over transborder flows; actual control of movement across state's borders, assuming the borders exist
 * International legal sovereignty – formal recognition by other sovereign states; Is a state recognized by other states? Is it accepted as a juridical equal? Are its representatives entitled to diplomatic immunity? Can it be a member of international organizations? Can its representatives enter into agreements with other entities?
 * Westphalian sovereignty – autonomy from invasion; lack of other authority over state other than the domestic authority (examples of such other authorities could be a non-domestic church, a non-domestic political organization, or any other external agent); Westphalian sovereignty is violated when external actors influence or determine domestic authority structures; while coercion, intervention, is inconsistent with international legal as well as Westphalian sovereignty, voluntary actions by rulers, invitations, do not violate international legal sovereignty although they do transgress Westphalian sovereignty
 * Sovereignty as something between individuals and the state vs. sovereignty as some institutional matter
 * Conventions & contracts (voluntary): the status quo is not worse
 * Coercion & imposition (involuntary): the status quo is no option/worse
 * Organized hypocracy: sovereignty is a fiction, states just don't intervene because it's not in their interest or they don't have the capabilities
 * Stilz: Why do we have to support (our) the state?
 * Each individual has a basic claim to external freedom
 * Each individual has a general, coercible duty to respect external freedom of others
 * Individuals cannot do this if they interpret and enforce their own right unilaterally
 * The only way to do this is through a omnilateral arbiter, a state
 * If the state does so, individuals have a duty to comply with it, because this is the only way to fulfill their basic duty to respect others individual freedom

Territory

 * Legitimacy (of a state) is based on a claim to it. A drug cartel that rules over a territory does not claim to be the legitimate ruler

The nationalist theory

 * A nation bases its right on formative ties between the group and a particular territory.
 * The nationalist theory holds that the state derives its territorial rights from the prior collective right of a nation to that territory. A nation is a group defined by cultural characteristics that its members believe themselves to share, including language, traditions, or a common public culture, combined with an aspiration to political self-determination. On the nationalist view, a state has a right to a territory if (a) the nation it represents has a prior right to the land in these areas and (b) the state is properly authorized by that nation.
 * The identity argument claims that the fact that a territory is central to the identity of a cultural nation provides a strong reason for granting that group rights over the territory.
 * Settlement, as nationalists understand it, involves not just residence on a territory—simply “being present” there—but rather the construction of a physical infrastructure that reshapes the landscape. By creating this infrastructure, settlers add value to the land - i.e. on Lockean grounds that settlers have an ownership claim to territories to which they have added value since they have a prior claim to own their labor, and this labor has been fixed in the infrastructure they have built.
 * Conventional liberal theories of jurisdiction often rely on a purely functionalist account of state authority. A functionalist account can establish that there are benefits involved in state control of territory because states are necessary to enforce justice, define property rights, and provide public goods. But the functionalist has a more difficult time establishing why France should control the particular territory of France
 * However, the labor mixing is done by individuals - so why collective ownership? Besides, settlement theorists do not explain how labor mixing confers jurisdictional rights over an entire territory as opposed to only those plots of land which I used

The legitimate state theory

 * On this view, states have territorial rights because their jurisdiction serves the interests of their subjects.
 * On the legitimate state theory, a state’s claim to territory is rightful if and only if
 * 1) the state effectively implements a system of law defining and enforcing rights, especially property rights, on a territory
 * 2) its subjects have a legitimate claim to occupy that territory
 * 3) that system of law “rules in the name of the people,” by protecting basic rights and granting the people a voice in defining them
 * 4) the state is not a usurper.
 * They agree with nationalist theorists that states can only claim territorial rights as representatives of the peoples that they govern
 * The state represents the people when it enacts legislation in the public interest and grants the people a voice in determining this legislation. The state’s claims to territory are thus not independent of how well it does at representing its people: as we shall explain further below, a state only has a claim to territory if it meets a basic threshold for being a legitimate representative of its people
 * The first contrast with nationalist theories is that the legitimate state view does not generally require that the state be authorized or consented to by the people in order to have jurisdiction over territory - the state as a guardian but not necessarily appointed
 * The state's title to perform these functions derives, not from the consent of its citizens but from its capacity to act in their name
 * The collective body of the people is not grounded in being of the same culture but in being subject to the same state institution and by participating together in shaping these institutions → the state instead defines the citizenry that is subject to it.
 * The reason why states are the proper possessors of territorial jurisdiction, in my view, is that they are necessary to provide a unitary and public interpretation of the rights of individuals and to enforce these rights in a way that is consistent with those individuals’ continued freedom and independence from one another.
 * Since we have a basic duty to respect others’ independence, and since the state is a necessary instrument for fulfilling that duty (or else unilateral interpretation of laws?), we do not have to consent to the state in order to be bound by it.
 * The state’s territorial jurisdiction is tied to its citizens’ claim to a stable legal residence: only if its citizens have a right to be where they are does the state that represents them have legitimate jurisdiction over the territory they occupy.
 * Occupancy Rights: A person has a right to occupy a territory if (1) he resides there now or has previously done so; (2) legal residence within that territory is fundamental to the integrity of his structure of personal relationships, goals, and pursuits; and (3) his connection to that particular territory was formed through no fault of his own
 * The principle behind the refined view of occupancy, then, is that each person has a claim to stable legal residence in any state in whose territory he resides (for the long term) through no fault of his own, and he ought to be treated by that state as an equal citizen and provided the basic rights and opportunities necessary to framing and revising his life plans. Where this claim is met, the wrong of displacement is superseded. Where it is not met, the right of return on the part of the displaced population continues in force (however, that does not give them the right to expel the descendants of settlers but rather a right to be readmitted to the territory and granted equal citizenship there)
 * The same applies to the property of the dispelled: A state that rests on past dispossession ought to make reparation to the dispossessed population
 * Nations are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain territorial rights

Resources for collective self-determination

 * Collective self-determination is morally valuable; to have collective self-determination, nations need territory; legitimate claims to territory by nations are necessarily based on the direct connection the nation has with a specific territory such as a shared history, tradition, religion and other sources that explicate the connection of a nation with a specific territory -> therefore claims to territory legitimate if and only if they are based on collective self-determination
 * Sovereignty (i.e. about the sovereign) and self-determination don't always go together. In international law we take self-determination takes priority over sovereignty