Secessionism and Separatism in Europe and Asia

To Have a State of One's Own

Jean-Pierre Cabestan, Aleksandar Pavković

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136205866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The boundaries between secessionism and separatism are often blurred, and in many cases study of secessionism encompasses that of separatism and vice versa. Recognising this inherent relationship, this book provides a comparative survey of recent attempts at secession and separatist movements from across Europe and Asia, and assesses the responses of the respective host governments. The essays address two main questions which arise from the relationship between state governments and secessionist movements: first, how secessionist or separatist movements gather support and mobilize their target populations and second, how central political authorities respond to the challenges that secessionist or separatist movements pose to their capacity to control the country. With political analysis of recent cases ranging from the Balkans, the USSR, the UK and the Basque Country, to Sri Lanka, Burma, China, Tibet and Taiwan, the authors identify both similarities and differences in the processes and outcomes of secessionist and separatist movements across the two distinct regions.

This volume will be an invaluable resource for those who wish to understand the dynamics of secessionist movements and as such will appeal to students and scholars of Asian and European politics, comparative politics, international relations and conflict studies. It will also be helpful to practitioners and policy-makers who wish to understand and contribute to the resolution of such conflicts.

1 Sovereignty, national self-determination and secession

Reflections on state-making and breaking in Asia and Europe

James Mayall

A glance at any historical atlas will reveal that the political map of the world has been transformed many times over the centuries. Even the most ancient states such as China or Morocco, whose core identity has been preserved for millennia, seldom if ever occupy exactly the same territory as when they were first established. In most parts of the world, and at most times, the main driver of territorial fusion has been conquest, often reinforced by dynastic marriage and/or commercial exchange. Conversely, the main driver of territorial fission has been imperial decline, often accelerated by geo-political opportunism. By this, I simply mean that insurgencies have sometimes succeeded when the rebels against established authority were either supported by a powerful neighbour as a neutral buffer between themselves and a rival empire, or were able to play off two powerful neighbours against one another, or exploit their control over high mountain passes or strategic choke points, in order to preserve their independence. There was a time, for example, before it became a Japanese prefecture, when the island kingdom of Okinawa maintained at least quasi independence under the simultaneous protection of China and Japan.¹

This prehistory has some relevance to the modern discussion of secession, but not much. A successful secession is a very rare event but, in the contemporary world, it results in a change in the political and territorial map just as it did in the past following an imperial conquest or the disintegration of an established empire. But the similarity ceases at this point. The key distinction between the pre-modern world of imperial rivalry and the nationalist era that began with the American and French revolutions is that whereas, in the former, territory was ceded, sometimes voluntarily, more often under duress, in the latter, it is theoretically meant to reflect an act of self-(se)cession, in other words of self-determination. It was only after the universal claims of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen had spread throughout international society that the idea of a legally grounded international order based on self-determining nation-states gradually emerged. There are those who claim that, in an age of globalization, this idea is now an anachronism, but if so, all that one can say is that it has proved an exceptionally tenacious idea, which shows few signs of loosening its hold on the popular imagination anywhere.

This tenacity is a mixed blessing. Once the national idea had taken hold, the tension – and sometimes open conflict – between different conceptions of justice and order, and power and law, became unavoidable. How were the national idea – and the invitation to secession that the principle of self-determination seemed to invoke – to be accommodated within international society?

I will attempt to answer this question by first looking briefly at how the principle of national self-determination has been accommodated within traditional international society, in theory and practice, before examining whether there have been any significant changes since the end of the Cold War. As we are currently witnessing, however tentatively, the beginnings of a shift in world power from west to east, I will conclude by considering whether there are major regional, cultural and ideational variations in how separatism and secession are understood, which may lead to further changes in theory and practice in the years ahead.

National self-determination and international society

Traditional international society was largely composed of dynastic sovereign states. The patrimony of the rulers – and with it the borders of their states – could be changed as the result of the fortunes of war or the construction of dynastic alliances through marriage, and consequently, by the acquisition of territory through inheritance. Think, for example, of the way in which the Normans swallowed England in the eleventh century and so laid the basis for the subsequent claims of the English crown to large parts of what is modernday France. Or of the transfer of Quebec to the British crown under Article IV of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, transforming what these days we would be likely to think of as a wrong into a right, in other words a legal entitlement.

During the transition from the ancien regime to the nationalist era, territory was sometimes also bought and sold, as in the American purchases of Louisiana from France in 1803, Florida from Spain in 1819 and Alaska from Russia in 1867. In November 2008, the President of the Maldives, Mohammed Nasheed, revived this idea by suggesting that he intended to build up a sovereign wealth fund to purchase land, elsewhere in the region, to resettle the population in the event of his country being submerged by rising sea levels. It is not impossible but seems unlikely that he will find a willing seller. Neither India nor Sri Lanka, the two countries to which he referred, has a tradition of ceding territory. A transaction of this kind would breach the modern norm, which emerged as a result of the elevation of the principle of national self-determination after 1919, namely the sacralization of national territory.

Some authors have argued that the quest for self-determination need not involve territory and therefore does not automatically have to lead to an attempt to secede (Guibernau 1999; Bishai 2007). On this view, their aspirations can be achieved either by affording them full citizenship rights or by granting them a special status under the host state’s constitution. It is also true that, in an era of globalization, people have been widely dispersed around the world, so that large minority communities have grown up, which may identify as much if not more with their country of origin than with their host country.

The issue of divided loyalties and the fears on the part of the majority population that they are harbouring a dangerous fifth column in their midst can have potentially serious international implications – think, for example, of the American and Canadian internment camps for Japanese during World War Two or, more recently, the fears that western countries may have provided a safe haven for jihadist terrorists from where they can plot their destruction. That the decentralized order of territorially defined sovereign states is coming under strain as a result of such developments is undeniable. But in a sense both the attempt to find non-territorial definitions of self-determination and the ability of opponents of the international order to operate away from their own homelands provides evidence of the tenacity of the traditional system rather than its eclipse. In a world where national territory has been sacralized, practical accommodations can be achieved, if the circumstances are propitious, but it remains virtually impossible to deal with these problems at the level of diplomatic theory or international law.

Why this should be so may become clearer if we briefly review the history of international society since the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. The traditional conception of international society as a society of sovereigns not peoples survived, dented but more or less intact, until World War One. Since 1919, international society has ostensibly been based on the principle of popular sovereignty. The collapse of the European dynastic empires and of the Ottoman empire dealt a mortal blow to the dynastic principle. It was no longer possible to defend the state as a private possession of particular individuals or families. But if prescription was out, consent had to be in: ownership of the state, in other words, had to be transferred to the people. The difficulty in effecting this transfer arose because, in the last analysis, only individuals can give or withhold consent. Yet men and women are social creatures. Which, therefore, are the appropriate collective selves, whose right to self-determination must be recognized as the basis of the new political order?

The answer to this question would be straightforward if – as most nationalists believe – the identity of the nation was self-evident. They almost invariably invoke particular historical myths and theories to justify their own claims and denigrate those of their secessionist opponents. Once in power, they generally use the school curriculum – and their monopoly over the symbols of nationhood – to construct a national culture that will both justify and run congruently with state boundaries. Sometimes they succeed; sometimes they fail, and for reasons that ultimately remain mysterious. But either way, the reality is that, although the doctrine of nationalism is clear – that is that the world is divided into nations and that consequently international society should be composed of nation-states – national identity itself is a deeply contested concept.

Two broad accounts of national identity are on offer. Primordialists maintain that the national map of the world was laid down a very long time ago, even if very few these days cling to the belief that it accurately reflects the natural world and remains essentially unchanged since the beginning of time (Smith 1983, 1987). In contrast, except in a few anomalous or at least unexplained cases, modernists see the nation as only recently invented, imagined or constructed, dating only from the American and French Revolutions (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983, 1997). Neither primordialists nor modernists generally pay much attention to the international implications of their theoretical accounts of the rise and spread of nationalism. To the extent that they consider the issue at all, they mostly adopt a realist approach to international relations. But although they pay little attention to legal or normative questions, implicit in their arguments is the recognition that political identity is a contingent matter. This is the crucial point. What is contingent cannot be settled by rational argument or a democratic vote. For political argument to take place, boundaries must be in place, but they lie behind or beyond such argument all the same.

Democrats, who generally still insist, as they did after 1919, that the recognition of any new state should be preceded by a plebiscite or popular vote, have difficulty in accepting this unpalatable truth. In the contemporary context, it is not difficult to understand why. After 1945, strenuous efforts were made to outlaw the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy, let alone the right of conquest. So how were new states to come into existence? A plebiscite or referendum seemed an obvious prerequisite. But, as Ivor Jennings famously put it in 1956, ‘on the surface it seemed reasonable: let the people decide. It was in practice ridiculous because the people cannot decide until someone decides who are the people’ (Jennings 1956, 56).

In the intervening 55 years, very little progress has been made in finding a way out of this logical impasse. Nor do I believe that one is likely to be found in the near future. Indeed, it seems likely that no general or theoretical solution to the problem is available at all, although the Australian political theorist, Harry Beran, would not agree with me. A major practical difficulty that arises in most secessionist conflicts concerns the presence of trapped minorities that prefer the status quo ante to the proposed new state. There are numerous examples of this phenomenon, but the refusal of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to accept that they should be incorporated in Georgia is a vivid and topical example. Beran maintains that a right of secessionist self-determination should be conceded if, and only if, the authorities of the new would-be state are prepared to grant a similar right to any subordinate group within their territory, and so on ad infinitum. Practical considerations would, he believes, call a halt to the process of fragmentation at a reasonably early stage (Beran 1984). It is an elegant solution but not one, I suspect, that is likely to appeal to any but the most enthusiastic advocates of permanent revolution.

So what to do? The answers to this question have been largely practical rather than theoretical. The extent to which the Wilsonian vision of a world made safe for democracy and self-determination would challenge, rather than support, the traditional Westphalian international order became evident immediately after World War One. The gruesome consequences of the demands for ethnic and organic democracy in much of Europe, however, were eventually submerged by World War Two and the territorial stabilization imposed on Europe by the Cold War division. As a result, in the part of the world where both nationalism and the doctrine of national self-determination had their origins, the question was effectively ignored for a generation.

Beyond Europe, this strategy was not available, partly because of the damage that the war had inflicted on both the reputation and the material power of the European imperial states; partly because of the strength of anticolonial nationalism that increasingly challenged the attempt to restore the pre-war order; and partly because of the unholy alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union in support of the dismemberment of the European empires. The official position, to which all the major powers had signed up at San Francisco, was contained in Articles 1 and 55 of the UN Charter, which affirmed the right of all peoples to self-determination. But as we have already seen, this formula was notoriously question begging. The practical answer that gradually emerged, therefore, was to equate the right of self-determination with decolonization, a once and for all event, tied in time and space to the withdrawal of European power.

Around the edges of their inheritance, some colonial successor states consolidated their territory without suffering serious international consequences: thus India swallowed Hyderabad and Goa, Indonesia, West Irian, and then, in 1974, East Timor, and China, Tibet.² The Chinese absorption of Tibet was a decidedly pre-modern form of conquest, which the outside world was nonetheless able to digest, partly because no power was prepared to contemplate going to war over Tibet, but also because it had never been formally part of the British or any other empire (see also Chapter 12). The British had exercised influence over Tibet but had not challenged Chinese claims of suzerainty, a position inherited in 1947 by the government of India and endorsed, however reluctantly, by the United States. Nonetheless, throughout the Cold War, there was widespread antipathy to opening up the domestic political arrangements of sovereign states to outside scrutiny, and even more to any suggestion that the right of self-determination could be claimed by dissatisfied groups in existing states or colonies still awaiting independence.

Paradoxically, it was the expansion of international society to include most of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s that sealed the fate of all but the most persistent secessionists. Prior to independence, African nationalists had frequently denounced the ‘Balkanization’ of Africa by the European powers. At the Berlin Conference in 1884, the Europeans had partitioned the continent among themselves without paying much attention to geographical, historical or ethnic considerations. The map of Africa, nationalists argued, needed to be redrawn to reflect these realities and African interests. But how? They were no more able to answer this regional question than international society as a whole was able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate national selves. With hindsight, it is completely unsurprising that African governments, once independent, quickly became the most ardent defenders of the territorial status quo. When Tom Mboya, Kenya’s first Foreign Minister, was asked about the rights of the Somali, the majority population in Kenya’s northeast province, he replied that they could exercise their right of self-determination any time they wanted – all they had to do was to walk across the border into Somalia (Castagno 1964).

The decision to restrict the right of self-determination to European colonies could not finally dispose of the secessionist challenge to international order, even from the point of view of a legal positivist. This was because, in many parts of the world, not only had populations been divided between different colonial jurisdict...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Secession and separatism from a comparative perspective: an introduction
• 1 Sovereignty, national self-determination and secession: reflections on state-making and breaking in Asia and Europe
• Part I Europe
• Part II Asia
• Index