Murray N. Rothbard, “National Liberation” (orig. 1974)

This short polemical essay uses the Northern Ireland crisis to restate a libertarian case for national self-determination. Rothbard’s central thesis is that opposition to existing states does not require indifference to liberation movements; on the contrary, libertarians should support the breakup of imperial rule when a subject people seeks release from conquest, occupation, and cultural suppression.

The recent rioting and virtual civil war in Northern Ireland points out, both for libertarians and for the world at large, the vital importance of pushing for and attaining the goal of national liberation for all oppressed people.

The essay first addresses Rothbard’s own political camp. He argues that anarchists and libertarians often confuse national liberation with statist nationalism, thereby unintentionally defending existing imperial states. His historical example is the Russian anarchists’ refusal to support Ukrainian and White Russian independence in 1918, a refusal he presents as both strategically disastrous and morally inconsistent because it aligned them against Lenin’s Brest-Litovsk settlement and, in effect, with Great Russian imperial possession.

Yet, all too many anarchists and libertarians mistakenly scorn the idea of national liberation and independence as simply setting up more nation-states; they tragically do not realize that, taking this stand, they become in the concrete, objective supporters of the bloated, imperialistic nation-states of today.

Rothbard then abstracts the issue through the fictional case of Ruritania and Walldavia. If one state conquers and holds part of another people’s territory, the passage of time does not erase the original aggression. The relevant libertarian question is not whether the liberation movement has a perfect political philosophy, but whether it seeks to end imperial domination.

It seems clear to me that Libertarians are bound to give this liberation movement their ardent support.

This produces the essay’s key conceptual distinction: “nationalism” is not one thing. Rothbard separates aggressive nationalism, which rationalizes conquest and empire, from liberatory nationalism, which resists domination. The distinction lets him endorse national liberation without endorsing every nationalist state project.

Nationalism is not a unitary, monolithic phenomenon. If it is aggressive, we should oppose it; if liberatory, we should favor it.

From there, Rothbard attacks the doctrine of fixed international borders. He sees “collective security” rhetoric as a way of sanctifying boundaries created by previous aggression. For him, justice requires looking behind the map to the coercive history that made it.

One of the great swindles behind the idea of “collective security against aggression,” as spread by the “internationalist” interventionists of the 1920s and ever since, is that this requires us to regard as sacred all of the national boundaries which have been often imposed by aggression in the first place.

The final section applies the argument to Ireland. Rothbard grants that Irish Catholics have the stronger historical claim because Protestant settlement was bound up with English conquest and dispossession, but he does not simply endorse a unitary Irish state. Since precise restitution to heirs is probably impossible, he proposes a territorial self-determination solution: Catholic-majority districts assigned to Northern Ireland after World War I should join the South.

Specifically, over half of the territory of Northern Ireland has a majority of Catholics and should revert immediately to the South: this includes Western Derry (including Derry City), all of Tyrone and Fermanagh, southern Armagh and southern Down.

The relevance of the essay lies in this fusion of libertarian anti-statism with anti-imperial self-determination. Rothbard’s method is neither abstract pacifism nor automatic defense of existing sovereignty; it is a property-and-aggression analysis transferred to political geography. His proposed redrawing of Northern Ireland would not eliminate all injustice, especially in Belfast, but he presents it as a concrete reduction of oppression and conflict.

In this way, the libertarian solution—of applying national self-determination and removing imperial oppression—would at the same time bring about justice and solve the immediate utilitarian question.