CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Thomas Mason |
|---|---|
| Title | State Responsibility For Historical Injustice |
| Summary | Past states have committed injustices and then ceased to exist, leaving their victims hurt without means of being compensated. This can trap these populations in a state of perpetual victimhood. It is also unintuitive that states should be able to dodge responsibility by disappearing and reforming. For example, modern Germany should not be able to dodge the responsibility of its forbearers, such as East Germany and the German Empire. Nevertheless, there is no easy way of attaching modern Germany to older Germany without relying on subjective markers such as language and culture. These subjective models require states to recognise the injustices of their past, but they are insufficient for compensating victims. Alternative models of state responsibility focus on the incorporation of the state. The responsibility for an act is carried through the state’s institutions. While objective, successor states are naturally different institutions and therefore not responsible for the actions of the forbearing state. Theories that attempt to bridge this gap generally weaken the objectivity of the model or conclude the successor state may not be responsible. This paper argues that by rethinking historical injustice as a duty rather than debt, it is possible to bridge the gap without violating either. Historical injustice is compared with similar issues in the climate change literature to demonstrate how this is the strongest model for overcoming the limitations of corporate state responsibility. Cosmopolitan justice is appropriate and provides many advantages for historical injustice. |
| Supervisor | Miklosi, Zoltan |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/mason_thomas.pdf |
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