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Neo-Kantian theories of self-determination: a critique

Abstract Neo-Kantian political theories, such as those developed by Jeremy Waldron and Anna Stilz, aim to provide an account of state legitimacy and territorial boundaries that avoids the problems faced by rival nationalist theories. Immanuel Kant’s own theory of the state appears to be biased towards the status quo, and therefore has difficulty in explaining what is wrong with rights-respecting colonialism or the annexation of one state by another. Two possible ways forward are explored. One involves making state legitimacy conditional on meeting more stringent standards of distributive justice. The other involves appealing to the idea of a self-determining ‘people’. However the latter must avoid collapsing into either a version of nationalism (if the ‘people’ are identified in cultural terms) or a form of voluntarism (if the ‘people’ are required subjectively to ‘affirm’ the regime that governs them). Thus neo-Kantian theories cannot deliver a plausible account of self-determination without, like Kant himself, tacitly invoking political identities of the kind that they seek to repudiate.