Abstract

Historically, liberal political philosophy has had much to say about who is entitled to nationhood. But it has had rather less to say about how to determine the legitimate territorial boundaries of nations and even less to say about what some such nations, so situated, might owe to others. The object of this paper is to show that the foundational principles of liberalism can generate reasonably determinate solutions to these problems. That is, the very same set of basic rights that liberalism ascribes to all persons is itself sufficient to determine which nations they are members of where those nations’ legitimate legal jurisdictions are located, and what amounts of wealth they each owe or are owed by other nations.