What are the merits and demerits of political secession?
Would you approve of a mechanism for secession being introduced into the governing framework of nations around the world?
No.
Sovereign nationhood has a great deal of inertia. There have been very few successful instances in the past century of any region seceding from an established nation.
Merits are self determination. Demerits are that in a world of powerful nations self determination is impossible without the consent of the powerful.
Why not?
Seems to me that’s more a demerit of the powerful, not of the concept of secession.
Secession from what, by whom?
We live in the world we do. Not the world that we wish for.
Agreed.
Au contraire, mon frere. Over a dozen countries split from the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia broke into a half dozen parts. The Czech Republic and Slovakia used to be one. East Timor, Eritrea, and South Sudan were not on the map when I started memorizing the world’s countries in third grade.
Overall, if a nation is beset with bad government, corruption, authoritarianism, or racism from the top, secession is a way for some people to escape. Whether it’s truly practical will depend on the details of any given situation.
From a large political entity by a smaller political entity. You know, like the UK from the EU or Texas from the US.
Other examples, in the more distant past, but also within the last 100 years, are the Republic of Ireland, the two Koreas, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the countries that were part of the Ottoman Empire.
And I forgot Singapore.
Overall, I think nations should have a legal procedure to allow parts of the nation to secede.
There are certainly potential problems. But the analogy I’d use is a divorce; if a couple (or even one member in the couple) really wants to end the marriage, nobody is benefiting in the long run by forcing them to stay in the marriage.
Heck, you can count most of the nations in Africa and a good part of Asia as well. There’s only a thin line separating secession from declaring your independence.
Good point. I think secession might be the means of fixing what is widely regarded as America’s broken political system.
Secession is hardly likely to accomplish that.
You’d need to do your secession on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, maybe even house-by-house. All the houses where live “Liberals” and all the houses where live “Conservatives” would have to mutually secede from each other.
I disagree. At some point further secession county from state, city from county, etc leads to unviable states. Furthermore, the territory can be valuable regardless of the wishes of the inhabitants.
I really doubt that secession would be an improvement. Our political system isn’t broken and what problems it has aren’t generally regional.
Who would impose such a framework? Great Britian isn’t likely to accept rules set down by the US, and vice versa. Nor should they.
I don’t think it has to be done on a micro level. Rural America is very different than urban and costal regions of the nation. Much of the resentment of rural America comes from the sense that they are ruled by people far away and of an essentially different culture.
If the nation split so that the rural, conservative and religious portions of the nation governed themselves, allowing the urban, liberal and secular portions to do the same, there would be less resentment and less gridlock.