Socio-Political Identity, Associative Benefits, and the Fair-Play Theory of Political Obligation

All fair-play theories of political obligation aspire to articulate a version of the principle of fair-play that can (i) justify most citizens’ political obligations understood as a particularized moral bond with their state, but that (ii) does not imply that cooperative practices can impose fair-play obligations on outsiders against their will simply by foisting benefits upon them (i.e., the foisting objection). The negative aim of this dissertation is to show that the most prominent voluntarist and non-voluntarist fair-play theories in the literature cannot achieve (i) and (ii) simultaneously; that their favored version of the principle of fair-play faces a dilemma in which it either reintroduces a version of the foisting objection in which states can unilaterally impose political obligations upon outsiders by foisting benefits across borders, or it can resist the foisting objection only at the expense of its ability to justify the political obligations of most citizens, especially (but not only) non-resident citizens and resident citizens of both non-contiguous and contiguous-but-peripheral provinces. The positive aim of this dissertation is twofold. First, I articulate and defend the Social Identity View (SIV), according to which citizens’ fair-play-based political obligations arise, standardly, from ‘associative’ political benefits (APBs), i.e., benefits linked essentially to citizens’ self-identities as members of polities characterized by historical narratives of political identity that citizens value non-instrumentally. Second, I argue that SIV is uniquely situated to escape the previously mentioned dilemma. I show, first, that most citizens voluntarily accept APBs, including non-resident citizens and resident citizens of non-contiguous and contiguous-but-peripheral provinces; second, that because APBs are tied uniquely to their self-identities, only (resident and non-resident) citizens (can) receive and (thus) accept them. Finally, I show that SIV can explain why states cannot impose political obligations on outsiders by foisting benefits across borders: they, unlike most citizens, do not self-identify with it, but instead experience it as an alien, occupying force, and thus (can) neither receive nor accept APBs.