Blocher and Gulati on Market for Sovereign Control

Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati have just posted a paper on "The Market for Sovereign Control." Cribbing now from their abstract:

Across the world, many regions are located in the wrong nations—wrong in the sense that the people of these regions believe they would be safer, happier, and wealthier if surrounded by different borders and governed by different leaders. These people might be able to improve their lot by voting out their current government or by emigrating, but those are imperfect solutions and are often unavailable to those who need them most. We ask whether the addition of a new tool—a market for sovereign control—could help ameliorate the bad government problem by facilitating welfare-enhancing border changes. The essential elements of this market are already in place, albeit in ways that under-protect principles like democratic accountability. We suggest ways to design a market so as to ameliorate those problems and improve the status quo.

You can download the full paper at ssrn.

Comments

[Gratis lån]

Great article.. It's always nice when you can not only be informed, but also entertained!

[confused by your post]

A couple of questions related to this Professor Brophy:

1. When do you expect Professors Blocher and Mito to be invited to present their paper to the United Nations in New York?

2. When do you expect UN members to commence plans for a multilateral treaty implementing the ideas in the paper?

As the authors of the papers allude, that whole Crimea thing could have been avoided if their ideas had been implemented earlier. Per the authors, Ukraine should have been forced to sell Crimea to Russian under pain of their new international law.

[Al Brophy]

Actually, given that Mitu Gulati -- one of the leading scholars and lawyers on sovereign debt -- is a co-author, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if this gets a lot of attention, including from the UN. As to your second question, I don't know as a treaty is necessary. The "sale" of territory is possible without it. One of their points is that nations can and probably ought to sell territory. Though they think it should be with the consent of the people in the territory.

[confused by your post]

The article proposes a radical new system to alter state sovereignty. Such system would require states to agree on the new framework and "rules" to implement it. Without these things, there can be no market for sovereign control and a sale of territory would be per the law of the jungle, just as it always has been.

Imagine if no international framework gets established but your understanding this article (that a country can "buy" part of another and without its consent while not violating international law) becomes widely accepted. Think about someone like Putin and how he would use this article for his own ends. Pity the Baltic states.

Back to reality though. This article is the kind of intellectually fun flight of fancy that law professors get to engage in. Self indulgent work. I'm certainly jealous of anyone who gets to do this for a living rather than grind out work for clients.

Like most law professors' writings nobody who matters will ever read or consider the ideas in this article. Its sole purpose is self promotion within the field and not any practical use or benefit to others.

[Al Brophy]

Here is a link to the Financial Times' article on Blocher and Gulati's article: http://www.ft.com/intl/fastft/272741/can-countries-peoples-sell-sovereignty