Creating New States: Theory and Practice of Secession in the United States

Aleksander Pavković and Peter Radan
(Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, 277 pp)
This book offers a very useful addition to contemporary scholarship on secession. For an interested audience of non-experts, it covers the main relevant on-going debates on the definition of secession, on its causes, on the normative debate concerning the right to secession and on its legal aspects (both in national and international law). The didactic structure of the book and its chapters (with numerous boxes offering short case-studies and definitions of concepts) is an additional asset.

The authors also devote three chapters to more in-depth analyses of secessionist processes (both historical and more recent examples). Two chapters discuss respectively peaceful and violent cases of secession (and are each hence centred on what is for the author a crucial discriminant in judging cases of secession, namely violence). The third chapter, on the process of state dissolution in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, is equally interested in the issue, but is more concerned with the legal dimensions of secession (both internal, since these states included in their constitution a clause allowing secession, and the reactions of the international community).

The authors, however, also intend to offer their own contribution to the field. Their input intends to relate the use of violence to one of the most discussed items in recent scholarship on the issue, the normative theories on secession. The authors tend to be skeptical about most recent contributions on the debate, both of proponents of the choice-school and of the remedial school. They are in fact skeptical about the right to secession as such. They argue that normative assessments of secession, rather than focusing on the claims of the secessionist party, should be oriented towards the process. They argue for adopting a principle of no irreparable harm, ie no deaths and no forced evictions. In practice, this principle expresses the authors’ clear preference for non-violent secession. Their book certainly has the merit of drawing attention to the violence and discriminatory practices even in cases of secession that gained approval from the international community (both from a legal and normative perspective), like Bangladesh. The authors moreover emphasize the coercive dimension of many secessionist movements, even peaceful ones with a liberal profile. An interesting example is Norway’s breakaway from Sweden (1905): although the country displayed all the characteristics of a liberal democracy, the authors point out that the public debate within Norway hardly allowed for the expression and mobilization of anti-secessionist opinion.

The focus on the coercive dimension of secessionist processes is in itself highly laudable, and a useful corrective of the idealizing tendency in much of the literature on the issue. The authors nevertheless are not able to altogether avoid discussions on the right to secession, for example when they claim that ‘a unilateral secession may, in certain circumstances, be a justifiable remedy for the breach of the liberal principle of equal rights even by an otherwise democratic state’ (p 217). Their
discussion of the norms and values of the international community suggests in fact that these have created limited opportunities for such a right, especially through the Declaration of Friendly Relations of the UN General Assembly (1970) and that this document effectively impacted on decisions of the international community like the recognition of Bangladesh.
The book also devotes much attention to the causes of secession. In this field it mainly offers a good overview of the state of the art, but otherwise reflects the limited results of attempts to formulate general laws that explain the emergence of secessionist movements. More interesting is the concept of secessionist movement developed by the authors, which is suggestive but in need of further elaboration. They conceptualize it as something more like a social movement than a political party, and hence without a unitary structure. Their tendency to use the concept as if it corresponds with a political actor therefore seems problematic. To understand the dynamics of such movements, the authors obviously highlight their link with nationalism, but the dynamics of nationalism and the conditions in which it can become a carrier of secessionist mobilization certainly deserve more analysis. The authors are aware that nationalism and secessionism do not coincide — their list of secessionist movements certainly excludes many cases of subnational mobilization — but do not offer an explanation of how such a distinction can be drawn. The fact that secessionist movements can at some point decide to accept existent states, like the case of Atjeh seems to prove, certainly deserves more exploration.

The volume proposes some interesting insights concerning the discursive construction of legitimations of secession that deserve a more systematic development.

They draw for example attention to the rhetoric of distancing of the host state developed by secessionist movements, while pointing out that the word secession itself tends to remain taboo. How these rhetorics of distancing are developed is less clear. They argue on the one hand that secessionist movements are characterized by their ideological inclusiveness but at the same time associate these movements with the problematic concept of nationalist ideology. What is exactly meant by this concept remains imprecise, and how it translates into secessionist proposals remains unclear as well. A further study of the crossroads between identity construction and political ideologies is definitely necessary for a better understanding of the construction of consent for secessionist proposals.

Main source: Michel Huysseune
PROFESSOR VESALIUS COLLEGE AND SENIOR RESEARCHER
CENTRE FOR POLITICAL SCIENCE
VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT BRUSSEL/BELGIUM