The paper contributes to the debate of the Swedish welfare state by re-examining the view of freedom underlying the design of this welfare model. The point of departure is two interpretations by Bo Rothstein and Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, which both describe advancement of individual autonomy as the ultimate point of the model. The paper argues that these readings are overly liberal in the sense that they exaggerate the importance of individualism and autonomy. The view of freedom that shaped the Swedish welfare state was not liberal, and individual autonomy was not the overriding goal for the founders of the model. Instead, the view is best described as quasi-republican and nondomination based. It was mostly a result of semi-Marxist ideas about capitalist power and exploitation that lingered on in the ideology of the Swedish social democratic party, the SAP, in the 1930s and 1940s. During the first decades of the 1900s, the SAP gradually revised these ideas in a domination-based direction. It was the outcome of this process that more than anything else gave the impetus to the design of the Swedish welfare state.

The EU's Prodi doctrine stipulates that a new state formed through secession from an EU member state will be treated as a third party vis-a-vis the Union. This article engages with debates on secessionism, self-determination, and democracy in the EU to discuss what the doctrine entails for the democratic legitimacy of the EU. We argue that the doctrine is only compatible with one source of political legitimacy that the EU partly depends on, the state consent model. However, it is not compatible with the voluntary association model which is a moral basis that is increasingly relevant for a supranational union of democratic states. The prevalent practice of organizing referendums on EU accession shows that securing popular support is today an important feature of the politics of legitimacy in the EU. We illustrate our argument with the case of Catalonia and contrast it with cases from the history of European integration.

The predominant practice for enfranchisement in referendums on state secession only grants a vote to residents of the secessionist unit, while referendums on urban secession are often all-inclusive, in the sense of enfranchising all residents of the municipality challenged by secessionism. This paper examines the justifiability of a more exclusive practice at the state level from two principles for delimiting the demos, namely the all-affected principle and the all-subjected principle. The argument of the paper is that both these principles typically sanction an all-inclusive demos at both these levels of government. However, such a demos would carry a considerable risk of majority domination of a separatist minority at the state level, a risk that is much lower at the municipal level. The paper claims this to be a conclusive argument against applying these principles on referendums on state secession and thus for retaining our current enfranchisement practices.

The past decades have witnessed an upsurge for a 'plebiscitary' variety of secessionism that primarily is motivated by the strong will for independence that a separatist minority gives voice to in a referendum. In this paper, I examine the answers that four approaches to secession offer to what the democratic way of meeting this form of secessionism would be. I make two points. The first is that our understandings of what would be democratic in this context are determined by our understandings of legitimacy. There is actually no objectively most democratic way to approach plebiscitary secessionism. There are only more or less adequate ways of using democracy from the point of view of legitimacy. My second point is that the legitimacy of a state's authority normally presupposes that the subjects of a state have a possibility to exit their state by way of secession. The adequate use of democracy in cases of plebiscitary secessionism is therefore to treat secession as form of exit and to design an independence referendum as a scan of the choice of the exit option.

Secessions that are justified by rectificatory justice — that is, by the fact that they rectify a previous unjust incorporation into another state — very often seem to confront us with a moral dilemma when it comes to the delimitation of the initial citizenry. In non-rectificatory secessions, all legal residents of a seceding unit have legitimate expectations to retain the equal citizenship status that they possessed in the old state. This means that the unconditional inclusion of all inhabitants becomes a requirement of justice. However, what justice requires in the delimitation of the initial citizenry seems more uncertain if the seceding unit has first been unjustly incorporated into another state and then also subjected to settlement of new residents from the incorporating state during the period of incorporation. This is the situation that the Baltic States faced in 1991 and — to some extent — that East Timor experienced in 2002. Moreover, it is a situation that Palestine, Tibet, and Western Sahara would also face if those political units would become independent states in the future. The question called forth in these cases is if justice really requires the unconditional inclusion of all legal residents in the initial citizenry or if the rectification of the injustice does not, in fact, require the exclusion of the settlers.

The dissertation investigates the problematique of justice involved in the distribution of initial membership in post-Soviet Estonia. The inquiry includes both an interpretation of the prevailing moral arguments and a normative discussion of what a just solution that takes both arguments into consideration would look like. The former, interpretive part is based on the claim that the best reading of the Estonian membership dilemma is made against the backdrop of just war theory. The Estonian, 'restorationist' argument proceeds from the claim that Estonia is a victim of an unjust war, a Soviet aggression. The aggression involved occupation and annexation of Estonia in 1940 and forcible colonization during the years of Soviet rule. The aggression is claimed by the restorationists to have decisive consequences for the status that different inhabitants in post-Soviet Estonia should be granted. Persons who were citizens prior to the aggression and their descendants are claimed to be legal and legitimate citizens. Those persons who migrated to Estonia during Soviet rule and their descendants are considered illegal and illegitimate immigrants who possess no right to unconditional membership. Instead they must apply for conditioned residence permits and be naturalized as citizens if they want to become members.

The moral argument of the non-citizens should similarly be seen in the light of just war theory. The fact that the majority of the non-citizens obtained their equal citizenship rights in Estonia innocently - in good faith, through forced labor migration or by the fate of being born there - makes exclusion from unconditional, initial membership arbitrary. In an analogy to the restorationist just war argument, it is claimed that non-citizens are innocently punished for the crimes of the Soviet state. They take on the shape of the innocent civilian victims of an unjust war, the violation of whom is also unjust. Both the arguments of the restorationists and the non-citizens must be considered tenable and legitimate. Hence the just solution that is recommended in the book takes both arguments into consideration. This solution would involve restoration of the citizenship of the pre-Soviet citizenry and their descendants. It would also involve a right to option of unconditional, initial membership for the great majority of the Soviet era migrants and their descendants who have obtained their membership rights innocently. Furthermore, the Estonian membership issue is illustrative of a general, moral dilemma of delimiting membership in new or restored states. The moral principles concerning the right of violated nations to restore their national rights and their citizenry and the right of innocent individuals to acquire initial membership rights unconditionally should therefore be able to guide a just solution of other, similar cases as well.