The season premiere of Battlestar Galactica has started me thinking about the ethical questions involved in collaboration. I don't really have any clear position on these, so this post is mostly just to get something written down as a first preliminary approach.
It's fairly common, I think, to make a distinction between 'State collaboration' and 'collaborationism'. Put very roughly, in State collaboration the basis of the collaboration is pragmatic and political (you collaborate in order to secure your political position or economic interests) whereas in collaborationism the basis is ideological (you collaborate either because you basically agree with the foreign ideology, or because you think that, despite disagreements, it is a valuable ally against some opposing ideology). The distinction is perhaps not comprehensive; there are low-level collaborations that are based on neither pragmatic nor ideological politics. It's also a purely political distinction, and while important, I think it probably can be set aside for the purposes of answering the serious question: When is collaboration with an occupying power wrong?
The question is not as straightforward as it might appear. The situation in which collaboration with an occupying power arises is extremely tangled. On the one hand, the occupied society has to survive in some way; some sort of rule of law, however basic, has to be maintained, and anarchy has to be avoided. On the other hand, it might at first seem that this requires at least occasional collaboration with the occupying power in maintaining order. Even when it is not as stark as this (and I suspect it rarely is ever quite that stark), occupation puts people in a very difficult position. Further, there's the case of subversive collaboration -- double agents who are able to assist the resistance precisely because of their participation in a collaborationist government.
And that's perhaps where the emphasis should be: collaboration under occupation is not an individual act; it's an act of government. If it were not an act of government it would simply be the political act of treason. Perhaps we should not talk about collaborators at all, instead preferring to talk about collaborating governments and the different ways in which people are oriented to that act of collaboration, with some people actively supporting it, others actively participating in it, others subverting it from within, and still others resisting it from without. Other forms of facilitating foreign influence in the country, even under collaborationist governments, should perhaps be regarded as different types of act altogether.
