Well within Europe, country populations include:
Malta (404,962)
San Marino (29,615)
Liechtenstein ( 34,247)
Vatican City (783)
Andorra (71,822)
The figures come from wikipedia.
That’s what coalition governments are for and Belgium depends on them.
The smallest would be The Soverign Military Order of Malta…they’re a building in
Rome and have around 50 citizens.
This topic has been run through several times before. But it’s ridiculous to compare Northern labor practices with Southern slavery.
Not at all. There were many southern plantation owners who could fairly claim to treat their slaves more humanely than the factory and mine owners of the north treated their workers. In any case, the north was not fighting a moral crusade against slavery; it merely wanted to keep the southern states in the union. All that blithering about the poor slaves was basically just propaganda.
In the case of Scotland withdrawing from the UK, it would be interesting to see what would happen, because hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Scots work in England, and what would happen to all those holiday homes ?
So Scotland stays in the EU, then why would the rest of the UK wish to do so ?
If you think English withdrawal from the EU is unlikely, you have to remember that the political balance is such that our government would change from Labour to Conservative, and plenty of people supporting the Conservatives would seriously like us out of the EU. They might well succeed too.
The chance of England withdrawing from the EU is significant.
There would have to be some serious horsetrading between all the various parties involved, and you also have to remember that the UK today is a one of the major contributors to EU funding, take away that funding and the EU itself is in very serious difficulties, so much so that the EU redevelopment budget would probably collapse entirely as agreements made in treaties could not possibly be met.
That in turn would cause a split, probably along the lines of the former Scandinavian free trade zone, there is a very strong chance of another such zone being created, by those nations already concerned that the EU interferes too much with their legislature and sovereignty. There are nationalist movements with good credibility in several EU nations and once they have an example like this you can expect others to shout “me too”.
The liklehood is that we would get Scandinavian countries joining this and leaving the EU zone, and others would probably join them.
I would say that a secession of Scotland from the UK would actually have a significant risk of splitting the EU itself.
Ireland has been almost rebuilt on EU development grants and a lot of the credit for the ending of hostilities in Northern Ireland has to be down to the economic upturn there, imagine if the development were stopped for lack of those grants, other parts of Europe have put aside their differances in their own common interests, but that has also been supported by EU regional development aid.
Sure they could. Mine owners depended on laborers who chose to work there. Slave owners could use force. The latter is infinitely more reprehensible.
Furthermore, mine laborers weren’t chattels. They didn’t have to worry about having their children sold away from them. That’s why slaves tried to escape but no laborer ever tried to flee into slavery.
You still haven’t presented a compelling case that any mainland American group would have any serious ambitions to secede in the near future. What exactly does “Mexican-Americans” mean, geographically? The fact that Hispanics are heading towards majority status in California isn’t strong enough evidence; California still has a predominantly white power structure which depends on the even more predominantly white federal power structure, and a disproportionate number of those same Mexican-Americans depend on services which would not be possible without the federal government, not to mention an economy whose major force is the ability to export to other states. Consider agriculture, a field whose lowest ranks in California are dominated by Mexican-Americans; its profitability, and thus the number of jobs it can provide, would be hampered by secession.
This is an interesting point. I’d be even more interested to hear some of these examples. I’m not being sarcastic–can you give some examples, other than the Confederate secession? That would be a powerful argument against secession in general.
I have argued above that economic necessity is a legitimate reason for retaking a region that has seceded. Would you care to expand on why it is not?
Er, that and the fact that those children were not doomed to be slaves all their lives. And that they weren’t uprooted from their homes across the world and chosen to do the work solely because they were considered to be born intellectually inferior to other children. And that they weren’t automatically denied the ability to vote, own land, become literate, express themselves musically and artistically as adults, etc., etc.
The whole breakup of Yugoslavia is one example. That didn’t really go smoothly.
Slovenia did fine, and that could be used as an example of a fairly clean break.
The 50.1% California break makes the ASSumption that all Hispanics would work together. That is not a safe assumption to make, IMHO. A California secession would also probably result in multiple new nations (Bay Area, Central Valley, LA, San Diego, etc.).
Or take the partition of India. OK, over here and over there is Pakistan, and over there is India. Except millions of hindus were on the Pakistan side of the border, and millions of muslims were on the Indian side of the border.
So what happens? Millions of people had to abandon their homes and livelihoods and move across the border–some by “choice”, many others under the threat of violence if they stayed. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in ethnic violence. And there are still contested areas that are majority muslim and claimed by Pakistan but under the control of India, and India and Pakistan have fought a couple of wars since independence. And India still has a huge muslim minority. And then you’ve got the West Pakistan vs East Pakistan war. And now both India and Pakistan are nuclear powers, even if their number of warheads are very low and their delivery methods spotty.
Unless the rest of the UK’s (ROTUK) government became especially vindictive about Scottish secession the status of these people wouldn’t change a whole lot. A ROTUK outside the EU might have right of travel and residency for Scots in the ROTUK (and vice versa) like the Irish Free State and later Irish Republic had with the UK. With both countries still in the EU there would be no problem at all.
I do not know enough about Euroscepticism and anti-EU feeling in the ROTUK to address this properly but this is an interesting hypothesis. Is Scotland all that keeps the UK in the EU?
Again I’m too ignorant to address the issue of anti-EU feeling in other EU states but for example if ROTUK had a severe and serious economic downturn as a result of parting ways with the EU (leaving aside for a minute the fact that the UK is a huge contributor to the EU budget) then other nations might not be too keen to hop on the bandwagon. The UK is already accommodated within the EU so I can’t see how it would be impossible to keep the ROTUK in the union.
The EU development grants were one of several factors in Ireland’s economic success the last decade or more. Wikipedia has a list of others.
The peace process in Northern Ireland began in earnest in 1993 when the Celtic Tiger was barely nascent if at all visible yet. However as you say, the economic development of the Republic probably has been a significant factor in the later stages of the peace process.
Apart from the minor detail of the Ten-day war which would have been much much more serious if other Yugoslav states had not also been preparing for secession and that
Biafra, Bangladesh, Katanga, Trans-Dniestria, Eritrea, South Sudan, East Timor, Aceh, Yugoslavia, West Papua, etc. etc. didn’t play out so well. However in many cases it’s very hard to draw the line between a secessionist movement and a liberation or independence movement. If one wanted to push the definitions you could tag the breakup of the European Empires (or indeed any political grouping) as being the result of secessionism, which would be a bit silly. Something like the Partition of India is sort of half-way I guess, but in any case you get the idea - drawing lines on a map to say ‘this is ours and that is yours’ immediately leads to arguments about where the line goes and who should be on which side of it, even if there is agreement about the need for separation.
Actually seems there are rather a lot of them (List of active autonomist and secession movements).
There is also actually a rather large list of secession movements to break away from a state and form a new state that is still part of the US (List of U.S. state secession proposals).
Their chances of escaping crushing poverty were close to nil. Children as young as six, both boys and girls, worked ten hours a day six days a week underground and seldom saw the sun. Children who dawdled or worked too slowly were beaten with steel rods. Children in factories were often chained to the machines they operated. Their food, clothing, and shelter were often inferior to that of a plantation slave. They had no real opportunity for schooling, many of them died of ailments such as black lung before they reached their mid-teens, their families either fell apart under the pressure of extreme poverty or never really formed in the first place, most of them never acquired land, and their opportunities for “musical and artistic” expression were little or no better than those of a plantation slave. When they were injured or too sick or old to work any more, they were thrown out into the street to shift for themselves.
Say what you please, a white kid being worked to death in a coal mine is no better off than a black kid being worked to death in a sugar cane field.
And we’re dangerously close to hijacking the thread. Suffice it to say that white skin does not automatically mean privilege, liberal dogma to the contrary not withstanding.
Of course not. But the system (slavery) which allowed the black kid to be worked to death was orders of magnitude worse than the system which allowed the white kid to be worked to death (capitalism), because it afforded no opportunity for improvement.
People had to agree to work in coal mines. When kids worked there, their parents had to agree to let them work there. Yeah, there were times and places where the parents didn’t have much bargaining power–mostly in Europe, where a hereditary aristocracy owned all of the land, and in the postwar United States, when hordes of immigrants came from Europe. The children of those immigrants gained bargaining power and improved their lives within a generation, because they weren’t slaves.
Not “we”, “you”. You’re the one who introduced an asinine and irrelevant defense of slavery into a thread on secession.
Ah, it’s all about race, isn’t it? Black people didn’t have it so bad, because some free laborers, somewhere, had it worse. So what? Chattel slavery was a turd–permanent, hereditary, and based on force. You can’t polish it.
An Gadaí
Currently there are a total of 646 MPs in the British parliament.
Of those 59 are from Scottish constituencies and of those 39 are Labour whilst only one is Conservative, the remainder are Liberal Democrats, Scottish Nationalists etc.
Currently there are 356 Labour Mps in the UK,
Currently there are 198 Conservative MPs in the UK.
Historically, in the UK, the South tends toward Conservatives, and the North including Scotland tends toward Labour, as can be seen from this electoral map.
http://qwghlm.co.uk/projects/electionmap/
You can see that blue, the conservative colour tends to dominate in the South and in rural areas, and red dominates in the North and in cities.
When you look at the resulst of the last election, the Labour Party lost47 seats, and the Conservatives gained 36.
This is nowhere near a close election result, generally speaking, UK elections have been much closer affairs, and the Conservatives are regaining lost ground, the next election is expected to be very much closer, but Labour is still expected to win it.
Those 39 Labour seats in Scotland would be removed at a stroke if Scotland became independant, this is well within the numbers needed to swing parliament over from Labour to Conservative in the past.
If the Conservatives did win an election, they would be pretty strongly anti EU, indeed there is a good chance they will campaign on that ticket, and the loss of those Scottish seats would make a conservative win very much more likely.
Secession by Scotland would almost certainly be used to stoke the English nationalist fires, and the most likely party to do so would be the Conservatives.
If Scotland the remains in the EU, which it almost certainly would, its certain this would be used by the Conservatives as a campaigning tool to get out of the EU, and it would find favour with plenty of voters.
I would not like to bet on the outcome, would England stay in the EU, maybe, but maybe not, but its a given that if England did withdraw, the finances of the EU would collapse.
The secession by one small nation in the EU could have serious repercussions on all Europeans, in turn this would inevitably have an effect on the money markets and share markets worldwide.
But, that dodges my question. If ending slavery was the overriding goal of the north, why didn’t they first demand that Delaware and Maryland immediately outlaw slavery?
The north invaded the south because it was the agricultural breadbasket of the nation. The north controlled the factories and the railroads, while the south kept them fed. (That would prove to be the deciding factor in the end)
The north had been screwing the south for years by taxing items like cotton, tobacco, and sugar which only affected the southern states and had no effect on the northern industries. The “Tariff of Abominations” it was called and almost caused the war 30 years earlier.
Slavery was the number one issue. I will not dispute that. But it is also not in dispute, that in 1860, no politician had any serious notion of ending slavery where it already existed. In fact, President Buchanan proposed a series of amendments to the constitution, one of which stated that no amendment SHALL EVER be passed to outlaw slavery.
The south rejected these terms. Again, if slavery were the ONLY issue, then why would the south reject it?
We hear this over and over again–how could the war have been about slavery, when few northerners were attempting to abolish it? The very moderation of the North is used against it.
The answer, which should be obvious, is that for Northerners to disavow abolition wasn’t good enough for the white Southerner of the 1850’s. They were fanatically committed to slavery as a positive good and demanded that the federal government promote it and cease trying to contain it in any way at all. Southern Democrats walked out of the 1860 Democratic National Convention rather than accept a platform which failed to endorse a “slave code” by which the federal government would actively protect slavery in every federal territory.
The issue in every national conflict between 1848 and 1861, from the Wilmot Proviso to the Compromise of 1850 to the Kansas-Nebraska Act to Bleeding Kansas to the Dred Scott case to the Lincoln-Douglas debates to John Brown to the speakership controversy over Hinton Helper was SLAVERY, not tariffs.
As I said, slavery WAS the number one, but not the only issue.
And, as you admit, the south was right to disbelieve the north when it “disavowed abolition” considering what happened at the end of the war.
Right or wrong, the southern states were guaranteed at the Constitutional Convention that the states had a right to have legal slavery. Do we agree on that? Surely.
Then, agreeing on that, if the south thought (and rightfully so, as you point out) that the north was attempting to enroach upon that, then that would have been a violation of the agreement in 1787? Do we agree there?
If, say, South Carolina thought that by ratifying the constitution that they would NEVER have a right to secede, can we agree that they would not have ratified it?
If we agree, so far, and we should, then why shouldn’t the southern states have had a legal and moral right to secede?
Surely, slavery is wrong as viewed through our 2007 eyes, but it has been an historically accepted institution. We can no more condemn the south for slavery than we can condemn the UK for torture in the middle ages.