8 The Secessionist Temptation

Secession: the word is frightening as it immediately calls forth images of the terrible conflict between the southern Confederates and the northern Federalists that tore the United States apart between 1861 and 1865, immortalized by David Griffith in his film The Birth of a Nation. In the Civil War, the first military confrontation in the age of the masses, families fought against families. Due to the closeness of those involved in the clash, it was one of extreme violence. It meant unbinding what had been brought together, dissociating those who had been bound together, separating fellow citizens. This dramatic precedent has nourished considerable wariness toward any secessionist movement, automatically perceived as warmongering. The very nature of the modern state, for which territory is the natural and obvious anchor, makes it a god that jealously guards each and every scrap of its territory. This exclusive conception contrasts with those in vogue in empires and traditional monarchies.

Empires were based on a blueprint for civilization with a universal dimension. They pursued an expansionist process that was by definition resistant to territorial stability and in particular to the demarcation of fixed borders. Empires were encompassed by limes or marches, dependent principalities that were all highly mobile areas of transition. Monarchies during the feudal era remained trapped in a perspective of succession in which estate and kingdom tended to blend into one, the monarch disposing of portions of territory at will. Even when the inalienability of the crown estate was established (as in France with the Edict of Moulins in 1566), crown property could be ceded voluntarily, by the system of appanage, for the needs of war, or by force, after a military defeat.

It is doubtful that either empires or traditional monarchies ever gave land up readily, but at the same time such cessions did not cause the deep trauma that they invariably do today for states embodying a national ideology. When they must relinquish territory (as France did with Alsace-Moselle after 1870), this severance affects that nation at its very heart, for in a way it reduces its materiality. For empires and monarchies, the civilizing mission and dynastic principle serve as the main modes of legitimation and considerably diminish the negative impact of territorial amputation.

Conversely, because territory is the central element of nation-state legitimacy, nation-states are basically conservative and are moved to anger whenever the sanctity of their borders is threatened. Their leaders on the other hand seem far less particular when it comes to carving up empires. In scarcely more than a century, between the proclamation of Greece’s independence in 1830 and the signing of peace treaties in 1920 in the wake of the First World War, the entire European continent east of a line running more or less from Bremen to Nice underwent unprecedented upheaval, with the emergence of a dozen new states.

Except for Italy and Germany, which achieved sovereignty in 1870 by a process of unification, all the other states created in this period came into being through the reverse process of breaking up two imperial structures, first the Ottoman Empire (Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania) and then Austria-Hungary (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia). The advent of these states was the result of clearly secessionist dynamics, as the aim was to break with the existing imperial order—to the point of bringing about the disappearance of a centuries-old state in the case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These separation processes, however, were looked upon with favor because they were undertaken in the name of peoples’ freedom from despotism, of the oriental variety in Istanbul and the Catholic variety in Vienna. The dismantling of these empires was done according to a revolutionary principle, the self-determination of peoples.

An defining cause for nineteenth-century national movements, themselves stimulated by the ideology of national sovereignty embodied by the French Revolution, the idea of self-determination signifies each people freely choosing its political status. Behind its apparent simplicity, this principle raises huge difficulties in implementation, the most fearsome due to the undefined nature of the notion of “a people”. As Ivor Jennings remarks regarding the principle of self-determination, “On the surface it seemed reasonable: let the people decide. It was in fact ridiculous because the people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people.”¹Close

Should it have objective characteristics (language, history, religion, etc.)? If so, the Chuvash of Russia, the Hausa of West Africa as well as the indigenous peoples of the Americas can claim the right to self-determination, which implies, one might remember, the prospect of forming an independent state. Favoring instead a subjective definition of people as a gathering of individuals united by the desire to share a common destiny, is it justifiable to grant the right of self-determination to the people of Fiji, Cape Verde or Monaco and deny it for the Kurds and the Tibetans?

To shed at least some of the ambiguity, rules had to be defined to specify which peoples were eligible to embark on a process of self-determination. This notion of self-determination was the brainchild of US President Woodrow Wilson, who pictured its achievement through the “principle of nationalities.” The aim was for peoples of Eastern Europe that could be identified by national criteria (language, history, etc.) to take their political destinies in hand. The new states were thus to correspond to peoples defined on an ethno-cultural basis. Wilson’s famous “Fourteen Points,” outlined in January 1918, left no doubt about this ethnic-based logic, as the reconstituted Polish state was to include “the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations” while “the frontiers of Italy should be drawn according to clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” That was of course easier said than done, because the commingling of populations made it impossible to draw clear and precise lines of demarcation between them to match state with nationality.

Applying the principle of national self-determination in such a patchwork of peoples carried huge dangers that Wilson’s own secretary of state, Robert Lansing, grasped immediately with remarkable prescience. In December 1918 he wrote in his diary, “There are certain phrases in the President’s ‘Fourteen Points’ which I am sure will cause trouble in the future because their meaning and application have not been thought out…. When the President talks of ‘self-determination’ what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community? Without a definite unit which is practical, application of this principle is dangerous to peace and stability… The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives.”²Close Events would tragically prove this analysis to be premonitory. The new states (Poland, Romania, etc.) would invoke self-determination to assert their national exclusivism in the face of minorities on their territories, as would those defeated in the Great War (Hungary, Germany) engaged in irredentist strategies to recover their lost “nationals.” Hitler’s shameless manipulation of the principle of self-determination to justify his expansionist policies so as to include in the Reich ethnic Germans in Austria and Sudetenland would lead the international community to revise its interpretation of the doctrine after 1945.

At first merely a political principle, it has become a confirmed right mentioned in the Charter of the United Nations as well as in international declarations and conventions. Even if the exact legal implications of this right are far from clear, it has become a basic tenet of international law. At the same time, the promotion of self-determination was accompanied by a redefinition of its beneficiaries. To avoid the destabilizing effect of Nazi Germany’s use of the principle in the lead-up to the Second World War, peoples’ right to decide their own future is no longer recognized for nations (in the ethno-cultural sense) following Wilsonian logic, but only for peoples who have been deprived of free self-determination by colonialism.

Only peoples colonized by Western powers (with whom Palestinians under Israeli occupation and the Blacks of South Africa have been assimilated) can, in the eyes of the law, legitimately shake free from what is considered foreign political domination and form an independent state.³Close People entitled to self-determination are defined on a strictly territorial basis. For instance, it was not the Baoulé, Agni and Bété peoples who were allowed the right to self-determination to free themselves from French colonization, but the people of Côte d’Ivoire; in other words, all the colony’s inhabitants. The principle of the sanctity of borders handed down from the colonial period is a natural consequence of the territorial definition of self-determination.

Between Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” and the development of the UN legal arsenal, the basis for application of the self-determination principle has in fact shifted from ethnic and cultural identities to territorial boundaries.⁴Close It should also be pointed out that in international law, overseas colonies are not part of the national territory of the state that administers them. Their accession to independence thus cannot be interpreted as secession; rather it implies the restoration of a sovereign political capacity that the colonial power had usurped.

Furthermore, the right to self-determination is valid for a single use only. Once it has come into effect within the framework of the colonial administrative boundaries, it cannot be legally claimed by peoples that are part of an independent state seeking their own self-emancipation. Thus the right to secession is not recognized within constituted states, and such states are entitled to defend their territorial integrity, by force if necessary. This interdict explains the failure of the attempted secessions of Katanga (1960–3) and Biafra (1967–70) after most of the world’s states refused to recognize them. Up until the early 1990s, the only victorious secession was that of East Pakistan in 1971, which owed its success to a particular geopolitical context (the province had been geographically separated from West Pakistan by 1,700 km since 1947) and specific political circumstances (Indian military support for the revolt).

The fact that international law opposes self-determination by secession⁵Close is not enough to quell separatist ambitions. These are expressed through violence the world over, in Senegalese Casamance, in the Kurdish regions of Turkey, in Corsica, and so on. The scenario is invariably the same: on one side are the separatists, who are involved in a strategy of armed struggle and/or terrorism, on the other is the state, which responds with crackdowns that are more or less subject to constitutional oversight and more rarely with offers to negotiate. It is not surprising that many secessionist movements involve armed clashes, as states are by nature fiercely determined to defend their sovereignty over the entire national territory.

Tipping into violence is in no way inevitable. Successful secessions exist: those that have been negotiated.

Domestic law rarely contains provisions for secession procedures because states live with the illusion that they will endure. How many constituent assemblies mention the nation’s perpetuity in the preambles to their constitutions, without even envisaging that it could one day come apart? Some federal constitutions exceptionally carry a clause specifying the mechanisms for exiting the federation. This was the case of the Brezhnev constitution of 1977, which enshrined the republics’ right to secede under certain conditions from the Soviet Union, defined as a multinational federal state. This right was of course purely theoretical in the age of communist totalitarianism, but its mere existence nevertheless lent legal legitimacy to the peaceful dissolution of the USSR in December 1991.

On the other hand, the invocation of this right by the four federated republics of Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia) to justify their exit from the federation was entirely debatable from a legal standpoint. While the preamble to the constitution of 1974 indeed mentioned “the right of each people to self-determination, including the right to secede,” this basic principle needs to be interpreted in light of the articles of the constitution. Article 5 unambiguously stipulates, “the borders of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia may not be altered without the consent of all the republics and autonomous provinces.” By exiting the federation unilaterally, the four republics could well claim political legitimacy (declaration of sovereignty of parliaments, people’s referendums in favor of independence) but certainly not legal justification.

The constitutional right to secede being an exception—today only Ethiopia and Saint Kitts and Nevis, an island state in the Caribbean, recognize this right—successful secession (smooth transition, good neighbor relations between successor states) will above all depend on the clear and unambiguous decision of all parties in favor of a peaceful negotiation process. While contractual secession processes are less frequent than those of a violent nature, they have a distinct advantage over the latter. They more easily achieve their objective, which is to split from the state. Whereas the Biafra rebellion was mercilessly crushed and many secessionist movements are sapped by an armed struggle that is as murderous as the outcome is uncertain,⁶Close some states have won independence without a drop of bloodshed.

In 1905, Norway put an end to the union it formed with Sweden in 1814 without meeting any opposition. A referendum in Norway nearly unanimously approved the breakup. The two governments subsequently negotiated the precise terms of the separation. Similarly, Iceland broke away from Denmark in 1944 after a referendum in which nearly 99% of voters approved the end of a union that had lasted for over five and a half centuries.

Referendum may theoretically seem to be a promising technique, as the people who supposedly want to secede are consulted democratically. When they come out overwhelmingly in favor of secession, as they did in the two Nordic countries, there are no grounds for dispute. Things are less clear when the issue is disputed, as it was in Montenegro. This former Yugoslav republic remained tied to Serbia when all the others had opted for independence. During the first decade of the 2000s, the separatist current gained strength, but it had a tough opponent to contend with. To settle the debate, the option of referendum was chosen, but the Montenegrin parliament, pressured by the European Union, passed a referendum law not only requiring that 50% of registered voters participate, but also that 55% of voters choose separation for it to take effect. In May 2006, 55.5% of voters answered “yes” to ending the union with Serbia.

Is it legitimate to require a qualified majority for secession, as was the case in Montenegro? I believe so, in that dissolution of the political bond in a state is a momentous decision in regard to which citizens should express their opinion clearly. The Canadian federal government adopted this stance by passing the Clarity Act in March 2000, following an opinion of the Supreme Court. Two principles stipulated in the law make it admissible: the clear wording of a question concerning secession and its scope, and the expression of a specific majority in favor of secession. These were included to avoid a repetition of the Quebec referendum of 1995, when in answer to the question of Quebec’s accession to sovereignty, combined with an offer of partnership with Canada, 49.4% had answered “yes” and 50.6% “no.”⁷Close

However, the way these principles are applied in law can hardly be deemed acceptable. The legislation leaves it up to the House of Commons in Ottawa to determine whether the referendum question is clear. In other words, the decision is placed in the hands of a political majority. It would have been ever so much more logical to entrust the power of such a verdict to a judicial authority such as the Supreme Court. Second, in the event a referendum is held, it is once again up to the House of Commons, following the vote, to decide whether a clear majority had expressed itself, but without the law stipulating what that entails. This amounts to giving the parliament the discretionary power of validating the outcome of a referendum, which hardly seems democratic.

With a proper framework, a referendum is a fully legitimate instrument of public consultation to conduct a peaceful secession or, more exceptionally, to endorse secession achieved by force of arms. A case in point can be found in South Sudan where, after a long armed struggle waged by the south against the north between 1983 and 2005, the peace agreement concluded in Nairobi made it possible to implement a staged process of dissociation that would lead to a referendum on self-determination for South Sudan. In January 2011, by an overwhelming majority, the South Sudanese chose independence, and in July of that year a new state came into being.

Yet there are equally cases in which the division of a state occurs smoothly by carefully circumventing the obstacle of referendum, as in Czechoslovakia. Unlike the fall of the communist regime in late 1989, accompanied by large-scale demonstrations, the country’s division into two independent states in January 1993 owed little to mass mobilization, as it was the work of political elites who negotiated the split, taking care to avoid consulting the citizenry. The population, moreover, would certainly have opposed dissolution of the Czechoslovakian federation. In June 1990, only 6% favored this option. Two years later, despite a context of growing political polarization, only 16% approved this choice.

Yet the breakup took place anyway, peacefully, within an extremely short lapse of time. Even if endless and fruitless constitutional debates on reforming the federation had begun in the spring of 1990, the division of the country did not become a likely prospect until the June 1992 elections. It was organized in the space of six months. This very short time frame may seem surprising, but the swiftness of the secession no doubt guaranteed its success.⁸Close

Divorce, even when amicable, inevitably ushers in a time of anxiety and change, as the two partners give up their present certainty—certain even with the attendant difficulties—for future uncertainty. To ward off these fears and prevent them from enduring, a quick separation is preferable so that the divorce proceedings do not drag on. It also avoids persistent tensions and repeated pressures.

This is precisely the scenario that was adopted in the case of Czechoslovakia, and the absence of the people’s direct involvement, as they were not consulted on the wisdom of the separation, undeniably helped make the procedure a smooth one. The federation’s citizens had moved for decades within a common public arena and some were understandably attached to it. It would have been democratically appropriate for them to be approached. At the same time, opening a vast public debate followed by a referendum, amid a totally paralyzed political situation at the federal level (government deadlock, President Havel’s resignation), would inevitably have blown the issues out of proportion, thus inflaming the situation. To prevent it from festering, the decision to put negotiations between the prime ministers of the two federated entities (Václav Klaus for the Czechs, Vladimír Mečiar for the Slovaks) on a fast track while observing the rules set out in the constitution—the federal parliament orchestrated its own demise by voting to dissolve the federation—proved to be the wisest solution.

Two essential factors facilitate secession by mutual consent. The first is a democratic-liberal context that encourages the search for negotiated compromises and precludes recourse to violence. In a state where repression is institutionalized and the ordinary form of government is authoritarian, it comes as no surprise that the state resorts to force to crush secessionist movements (Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against the Kurds, Marxist-Leninist Ethiopia against Eritrea). On the other hand, when a country’s political culture is firmly established on democratic foundations, there is theoretically no reason for secession not to be settled through negotiation, as are social conflicts and political disagreements. Imbued with a strong liberal tradition, Sweden took this route with Norway, and Denmark did the same with Iceland in 1944. Canada and Belgium are poised to continue in this vein in the event that Quebec and Flanders opt for separation.

This liberal legacy can be invoked only very indirectly in the case of Czechoslovakia, the successful separation of which was due to the second basic element: the gradual disintegration of the federal center, the only power that might have been in a position to stave off centrifugal tendencies. In the course of the two years leading up to the final split, the federal government had gradually grown weaker, whereas the power of the two federated republics became stronger. Symptomatic of this power shift was the growing influence of the Czech and the Slovak prime ministers—who would be the architects of separation—as the federal leaders watched their capacity for action shrink by the day. In a sense, the advent of two sovereign states in January 1993 was but the formalization of a dissociation of political spheres that was already well underway.

The growing deficiency of the political center was also a feature in the case of the Soviet Union and played a key role in the smooth division of the USSR into fifteen independent states. Viewed as a means to reform the socialist system and renew its effectiveness, perestroïka actually precipitated a wholesale crisis. It particularly kindled effervescence in the “peripheral nations,” especially in the Baltic states and in the Caucasus. But the final blow to the communist autocracy came from Russia’s return to front stage.

Far larger and more populated than all the other federated republics, Russia had the least autonomy in the Soviet system because many of “its” institutions (e.g. the Academy of Sciences, certain ministries, the Communist Party) were actually confounded with those of the federation in its entirety. By restoring Russia’s sovereignty in June 1990, the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, put an end to this anomaly, but as a result deprived the Soviet center of part of its institutional infrastructure. Soviet institutions were gradually drained of their substance, and when the center attempted to react, as in January 1991 when the Soviet special forces intervened in Latvia to put a stop to the republic’s independence movement, it was too late. The failed coup of August 1991, fomented by rearguard communists, put an end once and for all to any hope of preserving the Soviet empire. The center, once so powerful, had disintegrated, paving the way for the USSR’s gentle implosion. This retraction of the center is an essential element in explaining the peaceful nature of the crumbling of authoritarian states (or even their embarking on a democratic transition). Yugoslavia, however, provides a counter-example.

Here, too, the federation had been slipping into a crisis in the late 1980s, but unlike the USSR, where Russia, the centerpiece of the institutional framework, arose as an alternative to the Soviet center, Serbia did not choose to bypass or weaken the federal power. This was for two reasons.

First, the Serbs were overrepresented among the federal civil as well as military ruling elites. For utilitarian reasons, the Serbs thus had a strong attachment to the federation as a whole.⁹Close Second, among the constituent peoples of Yugoslavia, the Serb people was the most scattered throughout the national territory: 40% lived outside the Republic of Serbia. The Serbs thus viewed the federal state as the structure best suited to their situation of dispersal and considered the transformation of the federated republics into independent states to be a threat to the Serbian minorities beyond the Drina. Certain measures passed by Croatia (regarding the coat of arms, the language and the constitutional status of the Serbs) helped to sustain Serb anxieties that their president, Slobodan Milošević, was determined to exploit in his strategy of exacerbated nationalism. Far from leaving the federal center in a state of dereliction, the Serbs seized upon it as a means of combating centrifugal tendencies through war. The stage was set for the breakup of Tito’s Yugoslavia to be achieved by violent means. Yugoslavia fits the classical model of contested secessions in which the desire for separation of a segment of the state’s population meets with strong opposition.

Does that mean that unilateral secessions are necessarily debatable, even unlawful? Certainly not, and one line of argument in terms of ethics could provide useful insight into the discussion. Two distinct approaches have come to light.¹⁰Close For some, secession is an inalienable right belonging to any group in a given territory that is in a position to constitute a majority favoring separation from an established state. The right to secede is thus seen as a primary right that requires no justification whatsoever to be implemented. There is no need to invoke discrimination or a history of injustice. The group in question need not even claim a specific collective identity based on a common culture, language, or memory. The individuals that form such a group have the right to exit a given political association to form another in the name of their autonomy.

Many scholars challenge this ultraliberal conception and view secession instead solely as a remedial right that can only be exercised in a context of persistent iniquities. From this standpoint it emerges as a last resort when the political contract can abide no further revision. The philosopher Allen Buchanan, who has contributed extensively to renewing theoretical reflection on this issue, identified twelve arguments for the morality of secession, four of them truly decisive: systematically discriminatory resource allocation, flagrant political injustice (whether violation of political rights or the forced incorporation of a group into a state by annexation of its territory), serious threats to the group’s culture, and mortal threats to its physical survival.¹¹Close

Economicide, politicide, ethnocide, genocide: faced with these perils, any group has a moral right to secede. This more restrictive approach is, I believe, far more realistic than the previous one. Because any secession has momentous consequences (territorial alterations, establishment of new international boundaries, market splitting, redefinition of the contours of citizenship, etc.), and because many state breakups have been accompanied by massacres and violence, it is perfectly legitimate for such an event to take place within a carefully defined framework.

Secession should theoretically be implemented according to strict rules of procedure: prior negotiation of how to divide up state assets, public debt, guarantees for the minorities produced by secession; referendum, possibly with a qualified majority, if secession is disputed by the established state. But separation from the central state should also be justified by a particularly unfavorable political context. If such conditions are lacking, the risk of dissidence will be unduly multiplied, consequently having a destabilizing effect on the international system.

Secession is not the magic solution some invoke, saying that if two peoples cannot manage to live together, all they have to do is part ways for everything to fall back into place. In reality, implementing dissociation is not always simpler than organizing association. It first raises the tricky question of how to divide the states spawned by the disintegration of a single political entity. Where should the borders be drawn?

The Arbitration Commission on Yugoslavia presided by the French lawyer Robert Badinter, after recognizing that the country was in the process of breaking apart, concluded that the boundaries between the federated entities should become international borders.¹²Close The principle of the sanctity of borders adopted in the context of decolonization was thus extended to the disintegration of sovereign states. The rationale behind this reasoning by analogy is clear: to find a means of regulating self-determination to prevent the advent of new states from producing more border disputes. The fact remains that the widespread application of the sanctity principle is far from self-evident, for two main reasons.

The first is that internal administrative boundaries are ipso facto turned into international borders. Should boundaries deemed legitimate in the domestic legal order recognized by all retain such legitimacy when the encompassing state comes apart? When the original political compact that bound citizens together is broken, why should the internal territorial division necessarily be maintained? Should it not be renegotiated? These questions cannot be given a straightforward answer and a distinction must be made. When administrative boundaries match long-standing historical boundaries, they acquire a strong presumption of legitimacy. This is the case regarding the border between Slovakia and the Czech lands as well as between Croatia and its neighbors, except in Eastern Slavonia.

Things are different when the administrative boundaries were drawn for strategic purposes, as when Tito invented the Republic of Macedonia in 1945 to restrict Serbia’s territorial base. The same highly political logic prevailed in the Sovietization of Central Asia, the borders of which “[had] no rationality, whether geographic, economic or ethnic,” but instead abided by a very clear Machiavellian principle: to ensure that “none of the new republics is really viable on its own, and thus capable of independence.”¹³Close When borders are arbitrary and absurd to this extent, there is no reason why they should not be subject to a negotiated revision to make them consistent with a certain logic, whether in terms of function or of substance, taking into account historical factors, ethnic composition, and so on.

The second reason that application of the border sanctity principle to imploding states is debatable lies in an important theoretical contradiction. Progress toward secession generally is made in the name of a pre-political, historical-cultural identity. Claims to national self-determination of the Estonian, Slovenian or Armenian people are made because they are communities bound by a specific language, tradition and culture. Yet when it comes to defining the territorial basis of the nation, nationalist leaders readily put forward administrative boundaries, especially when these borders provide the state with a more comfortable territorial base.

Thus the Republic of Croatia was declared by virtue of “the millennial national identity of the Croatian nation,” but the state’s borders were not defined, to use Woodrow Wilson’s expression, “along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.” Instead, they simply coincided with the former boundaries of the Yugoslav republic. Its leaders invoked both national self-determination to justify separation from the common state and territorial self-determination to fix the borders of the breakaway state. Therein lay an inconsistency, which the rump state generally did not fail to point out when demanding that the borders be redrawn to include as many of its nationals as possible within its territory. If unable to achieve this end through mutual agreement, the state in question will resort to war without reservation.

This is precisely the route that Serbia went down by launching military operations—using the federal army—so that the Serb rebels in Krajina and Eastern Slavonia (Croatian regions bordering Bosnia) would wind up under Serbian authority. Seen from Belgrade, the aim was to impose Serb self-determination by force in these regions by uniting them to the motherland. The objective inevitably necessitated a radical and merciless conquest to bring about the ethnic homogenization of these territories, which involved the massacre and expulsion of Croats, the systematic destruction of villages, and so on. This tragic scenario was repeated with magnified violence in Bosnia due to the commingling of populations.¹⁴Close The conversion of internal boundaries into international borders in reality thus often proves to be a complex and painful process. It only happens smoothly if the secessionist state has strong ethnic homogeneity, in which case (in Slovenia, for instance) it can avoid both internal dissent fomented by the new national minorities and intervention by the rump state to protect them.

Slovenia, however, is exceptional, and most of the time new states are as multiethnic as the ones they broke away from, with the risk of provoking “secessions from secessions,” as was the case with the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. The temptation is then great to do away with the rebel minority, especially if its members themselves have taken part in blameworthy abuses. This is what happened with the Serbs in Krajina, driven to flee before the Croatian offensive of August 1995. However, even if mass population expulsions and displacements are not inevitable—the dramatic turn taken by the breakup of the Yugoslav federation owes much to the Serbian government’s cynical political exploitation of it—the sudden, almost overnight change in status that turns a former majority into a minority in the new political framework is a cause for apprehension that is not always unjustified as regards citizenship rights or access to employment.

To dissipate such fears, it is essential for the new state to grant specific rights to its minorities concerning the use of its language and a specific school system, for instance, and to energetically enforce them. The transformation is all the harder to accept if the new minority has a strong collective identity, such as the Serbs of Croatia, Orthodox Christians in a Catholic environment, who have always enjoyed considerable autonomy within the military borderlands (krajina), where they had been placed by the Habsburgs to protect the empire from the Turks.

That said, even if the conversion of internal boundaries into state borders has many serious drawbacks, it has one distinct advantage. It eliminates the need to draw a new border. Indeed, such an operation is never easy, even when it takes place in an atmosphere of good will. Where should the new frontier lie? If the criterion is ethnic, what cutoff point will be used to alter the border? Should there have been more than 75% of Serbs in the districts of Krajina for them to be united with Bosnia’s Serb entity? Or would more than 50% have been enough? What about the Croats and other groups in these areas? Would they have been satisfied with minority status? Is a population swap the answer? Dividing up a territory in an area where people have lived together and mixed for centuries is impossible to achieve without unleashing violence, as the Bosnian ordeal made clear.

The partition of British India in August 1947 on the basis of the Two-Nation theory (one for Muslims, the other with a Hindu majority) offers another dreadful illustration. The commission in charge of drawing the borders decided on the following rule: all regions in which the population was over 50% Muslim would become part of Pakistan. This meant dividing up in particular two large states: Bengal to the east and Punjab to the west. Bengal, which had a very strong cultural specificity, was divided, placing its major city, Calcutta, under Indian sovereignty and cutting it off totally from its rural hinterland, now East Pakistan.

The division of Punjab was far more dramatic, as it completely shattered the cohesion of a society based on the cohabitation of three communities: Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh. The consequences of this absurd decision are well known: nearly 15 million refugees in both directions; at least 500,000 dead, victims of systematic killings or of exhaustion during forced marches; incalculable damage and pillage of property; women raped, and so on.¹⁵Close If only this horrendous human price had been the end of it—but this was not the case. Partition, which literally involves the carving up of a territory and the vivisection of a social unit, often perpetuates two types of problems.

The first is due to the demonstration effect secession can have on newly independent states.¹⁶Close These are not born “pure and innocent.” They bear the stigmas of the original trauma. India, for instance, opted at first for an all-embracing definition of citizenship that included the Muslim minority (150 million strong today) that had not migrated to Pakistan. It thus chose to preserve the religious pluralism that had prevailed in British India. But this plan encountered increasing opposition from the Hindu nationalists¹⁷Close who in a way took hold of the two-nation theory initially advocated by the promoters of Pakistan, turning it against Indian Muslims: Pakistan, a Muslim state, now stands in opposition to a Hindu India.¹⁸Close

The feedback effect has been even more spectacular in the case of Pakistan. The new state was theoretically supposed to have a major asset in its “national” homogeneity, as the population was almost exclusively Muslim. Yet subsequent events showed that the idea of founding a nation on Islam was unrealistic. In 1971, East Pakistan, having a strong Bengali identity, seceded to create Bangladesh, but the domino effect did not stop there. Pakistan is still wrought by assertive regionalisms, even nationalisms (in Sindh, Balochistan, in Pashtun areas bordering Afghanistan), spurred by Punjabi domination of the state, as the Mohajirs (refugees who arrived with the 1947 partition) increasingly assert their own particularism.¹⁹Close Far from clarifying identity politics, partition merely further confused matters.

Similarly, after the disintegration of communist Yugoslavia, regionalism stirred in the formerly Italian peninsula of Istria in Croatia. At the same time, the new Republic of Yugoslavia,²⁰Close unable to marshal support for a federating political agenda, found itself battling not only very active Albanian nationalism in Kosovo but the rise of autonomist sentiment among the Vojvodina Hungarians and, more worrisome for Belgrade, the increasingly clear assertion of Montenegrin nationalism, which ended up engaging in a successful secession process.

The second substantial problem raised by non-negotiated partitions and secessions is the fact that they often transform what was initially a domestic conflict arising from ethnic, religious or community strife into a confrontation between states. This change in the nature of the conflict is rarely a good thing. Suffice it to evoke the muted hostility between India and Pakistan since 1948, which has already led to three wars and perpetuates nagging armed tensions in Kashmir, all against a backdrop of a furious arms race and the nuclearization of the subcontinent, with the attendant risks of escalation and regional destabilization inherent in such a situation. The danger level of the conflict is rising because the two national groups now each have a state, with all that that implies in terms of the capacity to mobilize resources.

In a context of general crisis, the breakup of a state tends to favor the militarization of national conflicts and their entrenchment. Developments within the former Yugoslavia offer a tangible illustration of this law while innovating with regard to one essential aspect. The wars in Yugoslavia in fact were not only accompanied by classical internationalization of the conflict, with each party seeking military and political support from outside backers. They also induced a mysterious, multifaceted actor, “the international community,” to intervene in various spheres (humanitarian, diplomatic, military, etc.) to guarantee the success of the national self-determination of peoples involved in dissociating themselves from a constituted state that was falling apart. That is the main point to be remembered here.

This attitude represents a radical change from the traditional stance taken by states, of great reluctance to back unilateral secession processes. While China and Russia resist such an evolution, Western states no longer have such scruples. It may be considered heartening to see it as a legitimate extension of the right to self-determination, which international law previously confined in large part to decolonization. Such newfound receptiveness, however, is offset by legal scruples that temper it, giving rise to increasing ambiguities and contradictions.

Thus, even though in Croatia’s case its decision to exit the Yugoslav federation flowed from the Croatian people’s desire for national emancipation, the “international community” officially recognized the right to self-determination for the people of the Republic of Croatia, in other words all citizens without distinction (Croats, Serbs, Muslims, Hungarians, etc.). The difference is an important one. First, it offered a means of skirting the fact that the largest minority, the Serbs (12%), who according to the Tito constitution were a constituent people of the republic on an equal footing with the Croats, rejected application of self-determination. Second, it took into account the previously mentioned concern for preserving Croatia’s territorial integrity. National self-determination (in this case, for the Croats) thus lurked behind abstract sovereignist rhetoric (allusion to the citizenry and the territory of the republic).

The same ambiguity also reigned for a long time over Kosovo. The war waged by NATO against Yugoslavia in 1999—of questionable legality to say the least, as it was conducted without UN approval—was justified at the time by NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, “as a moral duty… to stop an authoritarian regime from repressing its people in Europe at the end of the twentieth century.” This intervention, once again, was a first, as a sovereign state was deliberately attacked in the name of the duty to interfere, because of a domestic policy issue. Diehard defenders of national sovereignty sharply criticized such an evolution, the principle behind which I personally find rather positive. Too many states have invoked the alibi of sovereignty simply to be able to perpetrate massacres at will. From this standpoint, it is no bad thing that states (or rather, their rulers) should be aware that they no long enjoy absolute impunity, but can be held accountable for their criminal acts.

At the end of the war, an international protectorate was set up with both a military presence (Kosovo Force, or KFOR, a NATO multinational armed force) and a civil authority (United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, or UNMIK). Its mission was to engage a political process to determine the future status of Kosovo, taking into account the Rambouillet Accords of March 1999, rejected by the Serb party. The text provided for the establishment of “substantial autonomy for Kosovo,” which was to take into account Yugoslavia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Right from the start, the international community gave itself a mandate that was impossible to fulfill, for contradictions abound.

The first was logical in nature: how can one seriously invoke the magic words of “territorial integrity” regarding a country that has been bombarded for seventy-nine days and one of whose provinces is under a dual international protectorate? The second is political: even if military intervention was officially justified by the need to put a stop to Serb repression in Kosovo and the ensuing humanitarian catastrophe, it was also—and the Kosovars certainly interpreted it this way—an action in support of their long combat for self-determination.

Why was the Albanian population’s aspiration to independence not granted right away? Certainly so as not to challenge unilaterally the international borders of a recognized country, even if it was perpetrating “ethnic cleansing” and repeatedly massacring civilians, as was the case of Yugoslavia under Milošević. Yet this intangibility of international borders did not work toward preserving the federation built by Tito—even though, constitutionally, the external borders couldn’t be altered without consent of the constituent republics and autonomous provinces, thus making unilateral secession theoretically unlawful. The deadlock that gradually took hold of the federal institutions had probably made dissolution of the Yugoslav federation inevitable, but why recognize the right of peoples who had a republic, such as the Slovenes and the Croats, to shed a tattered federal bond and only half-heartedly grant it to the Albanians on the pretense that they merely had an autonomous province, even though its powers and rights were virtually identical to those of the six republics?²¹Close

Lastly, if the debate is posed in terms of a moral right to secession, the wait-and-see attitude of the “international community” becomes simply untenable. The fetish of border sanctity leads to a paradox. The right of self-determination is recognized for Macedonians, who have a republic and a language codified thanks to Tito, and who resigned themselves to independence in 1991 because the Yugoslav federation was breaking up—but it is haggled over for Kosovars who, since their incorporation into Serbia in 1912, have never stopped campaigning in the name of nationhood to denounce that move. Yet if there were a people that could indisputably claim an ethical right to secede, it is indeed the Albanian people of Kosovo. Economically impoverished by massive layoffs in the civil service administrations and business, its culture has been endangered by school closings and strict control over means of communication and its political rights systematically violated. As if that were not enough, the Serbian authorities have launched into increasingly fierce repression, then undertaken wide-scale ethnic cleansing.²²Close

In Kosovo, the international community invented “imitation” independence by making Kosovo look more and more like a sovereign state without it actually being one. The contradiction was untenable over the long term. Negotiations were held between the parties in 2006–7 in liaison with the Contact Group,²³Close under the auspices of the US secretary-general’s special envoy, the former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari. They came to naught, but the mediator nevertheless made his plan known, which drew the logical that the deadlock would endure. It was impossible to reintegrate Kosovo into Serbia, just as it could not be kept under international administration in the long term, and so the only realistic option left was independence under supervision.²⁴Close In February 2008, Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence.²⁵Close

This declaration officialized the province’s secession, but it will not have full effect unless the UN member states consider it legitimate. Recognition by third parties is decisive for any new state, because it is tantamount to recognition of sovereignty. In this regard, for the moment Kosovo has only obtained partial recognition (by 111 countries in May 2015), which does not make it eligible for a seat at the UN, as China and Russia still do not recognize Kosovo’s independence. Opponents to recognition include states that are viscerally attached to the principle of territorial integrity–many of them countries of the South—and those fearing that Kosovo could set a dangerous precedent justifying secessions in their own countries. The five EU states that have not recognized Kosovo (Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Romania, Slovakia) are in this category.

The mimetic effect of the Kosovo case should not be overstated, however. That the Kosovars obtained their own state does not mean that the Catalans or the Basques will follow suit.²⁶Close Political reason should simply lead to admitting that at certain moments, some peoples can no longer live together. Establishing a border between two independent states then becomes the only way to quell hatred. Exceptional situations require exceptional solutions, even if that means deviating from the dogma of border sanctity.²⁷Close

A contrario, that clearly means that the multiplication of states by division of existing political entities should not become the norm for settling national identity issues. Opposition to such a solution can be justified neither with the convenient taboo of sovereignty, too often used as an excuse to absolve reprehensible practices, nor by the concern to prevent an “anarchic” proliferation of states, which does not necessarily produce lasting instability.²⁸Close

Instead, such reluctance is based on one fundamental consideration: that the spread of national self-determination through the creation of independent states for the Basques, the Flemings, and so on leads to promoting sovereign entities with strong “ethnic cohesion” and a pronounced identity base narrowing the political arena. The trend is indisputable in all recent dissociation processes, whether peaceful or violent. The Czech state has thus become mono-national since its separation with Slovakia. The departure of Slovaks and Slovakian Hungarians was the final act in a half-century’s process of gradually removing all non-Czechs (Nazi extermination of the Jews, expulsion of the Germans from Sudetenland, transfer of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia to Ukraine in 1945). “Of the multinational Czechoslovakia in the interwar period, there is nothing left but a nation-state of Czechs, as if we had undertaken ethnic cleansing.”²⁹Close

In the former USSR, the advent of new states also hastened the phenomenon of “ethnic unmixing.” Russians of the Soviet empire left the peripheral republics (especially in the Caucasus and Central Asia) for Russia. The trend had begun some thirty years before with the emergence of a so-called indigenous national elite in the various republics, but it increased in scale after they achieved independence. While it is sometimes related to war, as in Georgia, and to the degradation of the economic situation, it more fundamentally flows from the consolidation of national states around the majority ethnic group. Even in cases where citizenship is granted liberally, as in Central Asia, state policies, starting with those promoting the use of the local language (Tajik, Uzbek, etc.) to the detriment of Russian, favor the group associated with the state and thus have helped to put members of these groups at the head of administration and business.³⁰Close

Unfortunately, ethnic disentanglement often takes on violent forms, as it did in former Yugoslavia, which has lost its multinational character and yielded largely homogenous national states (or para-state entities as in Bosnia). In Croatia, the only significant Serb minority left resides in Eastern Slavonia, while in Bosnia, where the populations commingled to a greater degree, ethnic cleansing achieved its aim and now the three areas (Serb, Croat, Muslim) are each 90% homogenous. As for Serbia proper, its internal cohesion has grown with the influx of Serb refugees from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. The latter has not escaped the process of homogenization, either. It was drained of half of its Albanian population during the NATO-instigated war. Serbs and Roma, subject to repeated acts of violence, also deserted it in large numbers, leaving it with a population that is 92% Albanian. The Serbs who have remained in Kosovo are confined either to the country’s north, in an area de facto attached to Serbia (around Mitrovica), or in isolated enclaves, protected by international forces. The international community’s ritual invocation of Kosovo’s multinational character is therefore wishful thinking, but at the same time it is a necessary illusion. Serbs, even if in small numbers, must remain in an independent Kosovo to “prove” that the allied intervention indeed took place in the name of a universalistic and moral conception of democracy and not to foster the creation of an ethnically homogenous Kosovo. Only Macedonia escaped both civil war and “ethnic normalization,” but there was serious alarm in 2001 with the development of an insurrection fueled by demands from the Albanian minority (at least 25% of the population). The crisis was defused by swift international diplomatic intervention, and a series of commitments were made to increase minority representation and rights: the number of Albanians within the state apparatus rose and Albanian was made an official language at the municipal level in towns with a large Albanian minority. Implementation of these reforms has nevertheless been slow and in many regards discord continues to smolder.

The tendency to seek congruence between a state and a historical community of culture has certain practical advantages, as democracy can more easily assert itself “by claiming to represent [a] body politic that takes the form of a community imagined as a national communion.”³¹Close If the government and the governed are alike, sharing the same general culture and language, they will thus share common ground, making it easier to establish democracy. At the same time, this law of similitude leads to an intolerable contraction of the political space, which is then no longer the locus of face-to-face deliberation and dialogue discussed by Hannah Arendt, but the locus of closed groups and identity. The duplication of homogenous states then causes confusion between political community and “natural” community, and in that regard it signals a profound regression of the political.

Carried to the extreme, such a process inevitably requires the total reorganization of Europe on the basis of an ethnic federalism, with states that are homogenous from the standpoint of language and culture. This agenda, which is promoted by the new regionalist right in German-speaking countries,³²Close would lead to a general ethnicization of international life that would be fundamentally anti-political. To avoid this danger, it seems far more desirable, insofar as it is possible, not to reduce people’s national claims to the need for a state. In other words, to accommodate national diversity, an alternative to the nation-state would have to be invented in order not to remain trapped by the rationale that every group mobilized around a national base should have a state, a perspective that sustains the trend toward the proliferation of states.