book is intended as a guide to those interested in policy formulation on secession—students and practitioners alike. Secession involves not just the states and regions immediately concerned. Neighboring states may have been affected by spillover conflict and surely will harbor some refugees. The ripples of those spillovers may reach other states as well. States outside the region, like the United States, may feel their security concerns are invoked, and, in any case, they will be looked to as sources of aid and perhaps honest brokering. International organizations will also be important in those roles, and the international financial institutions are likely to be quite directly involved in negotiations over assets and liabilities.
The book does not reach judgments on whether or when secession is a good idea. Nor does it treat many of the issues in international law surrounding secession, such as recognition of new states, about which there is a vast literature. Rather, the policy premise of the book is that if secession is going to happen, better that it be done well—and that doing it well is likely to be facilitated by an awareness that other secessions have confronted similar issues and an understanding of how they handled them.
Still, secessions arise from a stew of nationalism, ideology, long-simmering conflict, artificial borders, changed geopolitical circumstances, and money. States secede for several reasons, all of which will continue to impel secessions. And plainly, how secessions come about will matter when it comes to making policy decisions. Most of the secession cases we draw on were, like Sudan, the result of long-festering dissatisfaction on the part of groups defined by some combination of ethnicity, nationalism, and religion, groups trapped in states whose borders had been drawn pretty arbitrarily by empires, colonial powers, or federations—ranging from the Austro-Hungarian, Soviet, and Ottoman Empires to the European colonial powers.1
In only several of the cases we analyze did the secessionists fight on their way to independence, as was the case in Sudan, though in many violence was touched off by the secession itself—most brutally in Bosnia’s ethnic cleansing. In numbers, by far the most secessions in the last quarter century issued from the slow collapse of an artificial multinational empire or federation—the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.
Perhaps because so many of the secessions were due to the demise of the Soviet empire, many scholars emphasize money as critical. For one, “few regions have the structural requirements for the development of a secessionist movement,” which seems, in Africa, truer of the resulting state than of the secessionist movement.2 Another scholar argues that “separatism results from varying mixes of sheer economic interest and group apprehension.”3 Supporting this argument, one study found that secession movements within the Soviet Union were most strongly motivated by economic concerns, while another argued that “it is the richest, rather than the poorest, ethnic regions which are the most eager to secede since they have the most to lose should they be exploited by other groups that control the state.”4
One synthesis analyzes secession movements through a cost-benefit analysis lens that does capture some of the ideological underpinnings of secessionism as a type of “membership benefit.” This approach moves beyond the arguments that focus almost exclusively on economics. It provides a way to include material considerations in the analysis but takes into account the passions of ideology and nationalism that arise in secessionist cases.5
Some of the seceding states—the Baltics, Croatia, Slovenia—did so on powerful economic grounds. However, others, mostly in Africa but also including Bosnia, impoverished themselves in the name of identity or ideology, though they sometimes thought they would be better off after independence. South Sudan’s leaders made that argument, however unwisely.
In the end, how well a secession goes also depends on a number of factors beyond the seceding region’s control. The amicability of the parting plainly is crucial (though resting too much on the assumption that comity will continue can also be dangerous, as it was for Ethiopia and Eritrea). And it did seem the case for many of the issues we examined that richer (or more powerful) states in any secession were both better able to prepare for separation and more able to set the terms of that separation. Some of these wider issues are picked up in the concluding chapter.
The book’s premise is that secessions will continue to occur. A betting person probably would look hardest at Africa, where so many artificial borders remain. Europe is also an interesting case. The European Union in the 2010s is in parlous condition. Yet if it holds together, even as a free trade area and not a currency zone, it could provide economic incentive to secession. Within Europe, Catalonia doesn’t need Spain, nor perhaps does Dutch-speaking Flanders need Belgium.
The book’s purpose is to learn tentative lessons about how dividing states have handled the particulars in their own divorces, from oil and water to security, citizenship, and assets. That purpose is a humble one. The more we dug into the cases, the clearer it became that no one previous experience could provide an easy template for future secessions. Nor can the lessons be more than suggestive, for the number of cases relevant to any given issue is limited. But even though every circumstance has its own particularities, some understanding of the way previous secessions handled the array of issues that most seceding states are likely to confront can help serve as an antidote to the feeling that the problems are entirely new. If the previous cases do not offer pat prescriptions, they do offer lessons to consider along the way, both suggestive and cautionary.
The cases and issue analyses that compose this book were prepared over three years for Humanity United as part of a kind of Track II—nonofficial—diplomatic effort in the run-up to the vote on secession by South Sudan in January 2011. We found, however, that most of the lessons had relevance far beyond Sudan, and the materials have been “de-Sudanized” to make them useful to other regions contemplating secession. While much of the Sudan-specific material has been omitted, Sudan is a kind of background case throughout. That is especially the case for the chapter on citizenship and the concluding chapter, both of which use the Sudan case to illustrate more general questions, like the sequence and timing in which issues should be handled.
One issue that didn’t arise in Sudan and thus is not treated here is borders. The African Union estimates that fewer than a quarter of Africa’s borders are delimited and demarcated, so borders are an issue for all African states, not just seceding ones.6 Whether undefined borders become a crucial issue in secession will turn on whether something of value, like oil or water, lies along an undefined border. That was not the case for Sudan. Rather, for the Sudanese and surely for other secessions, what was an issue was rather defined border regions, like Abyei, that contained people divided in their loyalties.
Note on Method, and Guide to Chapters
The next eight chapters present cases and cross-cutting issue analyses for the core issues that many seceding states are likely to have to address; they arose in Sudan, but some set is likely to arise in any secession. Those issues are grouped loosely in three clusters—people, natural resources, and state or national resources. The first cluster includes citizenship, refugees, and security, and what are called “pastoralists,” people who regularly move in pursuit of water and grazing land but who, after secession, may find that their traditional movements now cross newly etched international borders. The second includes oil and infrastructure, and water, while the third comprises assets and liabilities, and currency and financial arrangements.
The people issues begin with citizenship, the subject of Chapter 1, a highly sensitive issue, perhaps the core one over which the parties have argued, even fought. For this issue, it seemed less helpful to have full case studies than to lay out the range of issues involved in citizenship and the variety of arrangements states have conceived to deal with it, along with some case examples.
Division is virtually certain to produce refugees, who are almost always vulnerable and thus dependent on some means of security. Displaced persons sometimes are rendered stateless and are at risk of becoming bargaining chips in a broader conflict between old and new countries—the subjects of Chapter 2.