Secession
Secession
Secession is the act of withdrawing territory from a state and converting it into an independent state or joining it to another state. In the latter case, secession is combined with irredentism. Secession is a negative term, one that is more likely to be used by its opponents than its advocates. Supporters of secession prefer to describe themselves as struggling for something positive. For example, those who support Quebec’s secession from Canada describe themselves as “sovereigntists” or “independentists,” not as “secessionists.”
Secession can usefully be distinguished from three other terms with which it is often confused. First, it is not a synonym for “self-determination” but one form that a struggle for self-determination might take. Second, it is different, particularly in the minds of international lawyers, from “decolonization,” which involves the separation of a colony from its metropole, with a colony typically defined as a racially distinct territory separated from the metropole by saltwater and whose people do not enjoy metropolitan citizenship rights. Secession, by contrast, is seen as withdrawal from a state, with the territory involved usually a contiguous piece of the state’s territory or a nearby island. Third, secession is an act that is initiated and carried out by those who want a new state of their own. It should be distinguished, therefore, from “partition,” which implies the fresh division of a territory by an external (third-party) actor (O’Leary 2005). Irish nationalists sought the secession of Ireland from the United Kingdom, but the latter partitioned Ireland, as they later partitioned India and contributed to the partition of Palestine.
Secessions are generally attempted by minority nations that want their own state (or to be joined with another state), though Russia, with a significant majority of the state’s population, seceded from the Soviet Union. There is no prospect of immigrant ethnic groups, such as the Chinese community in British Columbia or the Koreans in California, seceding from their respective states, as these are not mobilized as nations. Nor is it foreordained that a minority nation will become secessionist. There is evidence that the timely accommodation of minority nations, involving territorial autonomy and, in the case of sizable minorities, inclusive power sharing (consociational) politics at the center, can reduce support for secession.
States almost invariably oppose secession. Many states explicitly rule it out in their constitutions. Some, such as Ukraine or Turkey, even make it impossible to change their constitutions to allow secession. In these cases, the unity of the state is a higher value than popular sovereignty. Americans need no reminders that states are often prepared to resist secession with considerable force, even if it costs many lives.
As international law is written by states, it is hardly surprising that its provisions on secession are very restrictive. International law recognizes a legal right of “peoples” to “self-determination,” but this right was intended to apply only to historic European colonies, that is, to acts of decolonization. It was developed, moreover, at a time when significant numbers of acts of decolonization had already occurred. The right is a “once-only” right, to be exercised at the point of decolonization, and does not extend to minority regions within colonies or to minority or majority regions that intersect colonial frontiers. Oddly, then, the international legal right to “self-determination” is built on the constructs of imperialists. Since World War II (1939–1945), there has been only one clear example of a successful, internationally recognized secession that was opposed by the state’s authorities, the case of Bangladesh, which seceded from Pakistan with India’s help in 1971. With one questionable exception, all other secessions have either been agreed to by central authorities (East Timor, Eritrea, the Czech Republic and Slovakia) or have been recognized after central authority had collapsed (the fifteen republics that seceded from the Soviet Union). The Soviet Union’s republics had the additional advantage of a constitutional right to secession. The questionable exception is Yugoslavia. The secessions of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina were opposed by Belgrade (Serbia and Montenegro), but the Badinter Commission nonetheless ruled that Yugoslavia was in “a state of dissolution.” To bolster its case, the commission also cited a clause in the Yugoslav constitution that gave its republics the right of secession.
The unwillingness of the states system to sanction secession is underlined by a number of “de facto secessions” (Bahcheli, Bartmann, and Srebrnik 2004). Here, secessionist authorities have failed to win recognition from other states even though they have succeeded in monopolizing the sovereign functions of government on their territory, often for years or even decades. These regions include Transnistria (Moldova), Nagorno-Karabakh (Azerbaijan), Somaliland (Somalia), the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (Cyprus), and Abkhazia and South Ossetia (Georgia). The strangest case of a de facto secession is Kosovo, which was liberated from Serbia’s control by an international military alliance in 1999. In spite of this, the international community has so far refused to recognize Kosovo’s independence. If it does, it is likely to do so in a way that does not set a precedent for others. It may help Kosovo’s case that, while it was not a full republic of the former Yugoslavia, it enjoyed equality with these republics within federal institutions and a similar level of autonomy. This may allow other states to argue that Kosovo is a special case, sufficiently like the full republics of the former Yugoslavia to enjoy similar rights.
While lawyers have debated the legal right to secession, philosophers have argued about the moral right. As liberals are committed to the idea of a legitimate state, it is difficult for them to rule out secession under any circumstances, although some suggest the priority should be to make the state legitimate, not to break it up. The two main liberal schools of thought on secession are based on “just-cause” and “choice” theories (Moore 1998). Just-cause theorists have traditionally taken a restrictive view of secession, arguing that a right to secede exists only when the state has been egregiously abusive. One of their most prominent representatives has recently offered a softer version of this: Minorities can secede if they are denied autonomy (Buchanan 2003). Choice theorists, using democratic arguments based on consent, analogize from marital to political divorce: Minorities should be able to leave if they want to and not just if they have been abused or not accommodated (e.g., Beran 1984).
Some scholars believe that states, particularly Western democracies like Canada and the United Kingdom, are becoming less resistant to secession and less likely to oppose it by force (Kymlicka 2001, pp. 387–393). In 1998, the Canadian Supreme Court established a process whereby a province can secede, providing there is clear support for breakup, and after negotiations with the federal authorities. The prime minister of the United Kingdom, John Major, opined in the early 1990s that Scotland could secede if it wanted to, and in the Belfast Agreement of 1998, London confirmed that Northern Ireland could join the Republic of Ireland, provided that this was approved by referendums in both jurisdictions. Ethiopia’s republics have also been given the right to secession, and recent peace settlements in Sudan and Papua New Guinea have extended this right to South Sudan and Bougainville, respectively. From the other side, one academic has argued that minorities, particularly in western Europe, are no longer as insistent on secession, provided they are given autonomy and are included in international (European Union) institutions (Keating 2001). Neither of these trends is universal. In most parts of the world, states are at least as insistent on maintaining unity as they ever were, and there are still many secessionist movements.
The record of secession as a method of conflict resolution has been mixed. In some cases, the transition from one state to two, or several, has been relatively smooth (Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Norway/Sweden). In other cases, breakup had disastrous consequences (Yugoslavia, with respect to Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, but so far not Slovenia or Macedonia). These contrasting cases suggest a straightforward point: Secessions that are opposed by the center and/or a significant community within the secessionist region are more likely to be violent (McGarry 1998).
SEE ALSO Borders; Confederate States of America; Conflict; Decolonization; Ethnicity; European Union; Partition; Quebecois Movement; Self-Determination; Sovereignty; U.S. Civil War
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bahcheli, T., B. Bartmann, and H. Srebrnik, eds. 2004. De Facto States: The Quest for Sovereignty. London: Frank Cass.
Beran. H. 1984. A Liberal Theory of Secession. Political Studies 32: 21–31.
Buchanan, A. 2003. Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations of International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keating, M. 2001. Nations Without States: The Accommodation of Nationalism in the New State Order. In Minority Nationalism and the Changing International Order, eds. Michael Keating and John McGarry, 19–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kymlicka, W. 2001. Reply and Conclusion. In Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported? Western Political Theory and Ethnic Relations in Eastern Europe, eds. W. Kymlicka and M. Opalski, 347–413. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McGarry, J. 1998. “Orphans of Secession”: National Pluralism in Secessionist Regions and Post-Secession States. In National Self-Determination and Secession, ed. Margaret Moore, 215–232. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moore, M. 1998. Introduction: The Self-Determination Principle and the Ethics of Secession. In National Self-Determination and Secession, ed. Margaret Moore, 1–13. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
O’Leary, B. 2004. Partition. In The Social Science Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., vol. 2, eds. A. Kuper and J. Kuper, 708–710. London: Routledge.
John McGarry