9.3.3: Self-Determination and Constructed Identities

Self-Determination

These referenda represent the robust displays of the power and logic of democracy, and naturally, the United States fully supported both the Scots and the Quebecois’ right to decide their fates, though the US officially campaigned against independence in both cases. Rarely do separatist movements proceed in an orderly and democratic fashion. Often it’s difficult to ascertain exactly when a group has a legitimate claim to exercise exclusive rights over territory. In principle, Americans (and American foreign policy) support the right to self-determination, which is defined as the right of each ethnicity or nationality to control the political system within the territory where they live. Indeed, the United States itself was born of a rebellion by separatists living in a peripheral region of the British Empire. American colonists’ rallying cry for self-determination was “no taxation without representation”. Just as the War for Independence reminds Americans why we should support the right to self-determination, the Civil War reminds us that we have had our own problems with separatist movements. The American Civil War was essentially an effort by separatists in the slaveholding southern states to break from the northern states. Unionists in the North sometimes called the conflict, “The War to Preserve the Union”. Some southerners were apt to call it, “The War of Northern Aggression”.

Figure: Montreal, Canada. The French-only stop sign is evidence of Francophone nationalism among the Quebecois who fear Anglicization of their culture.

Constructed Identities

Separatist movements do not always arise from perceived differences in identity. Often the driving force behind separatist movements are economic, but those who would lead a group to rebel rarely admit this basic fact. The American Civil War was less a fight over identity as it was over control over rules governing economics, slavery, and cultural norms. Both sides of the conflict identified as American, but Southerners believed control should be local, and most Northerners believed that some control over some issues (e.g., slavery) should be centralized.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about civil wars and separatist movements is that often those who suffer the most, gain the least once the fighting breaks out. As was the case in the American Civil War, the vast majority of soldiers from the South owned no slaves, and actually stood to gain from wage competition in the labor market upon emancipation. It was the elite Southerners who needed slavery to maintain their power. So why do people without much to fight for become willing to die for a cause that harms their personal interest?

Perhaps the answer lies in the ability of people in power to effectively manipulate the thoughts and emotions of certain segments of a population. Populist politicians (TV & radio personalities, newspaper columnists, etc.) often convince aggrieved people that their suffering has been caused by unfair treatment by another group. Sometimes, these arguments are legitimate and can be supported by fact. Sometimes there is insufficient evidence to justify nationalist aggrievement, rebellion or secession.

It is often nearly impossible to determine exactly whose interests a secessionist group represents. Sometimes, secession movements are led by a small political elite that claims the right to represent a larger majority. However, the elite may not be representative of the majority of the people, and their motives may be strictly personal (wealth, power). This is why the United States’ foreign policy experts find questions of self-determination especially perplexing. Our government has yet to embrace a consistent response to the demands of groups who desire to control their own territory. In some cases, the US has supported the rights of subnational groups to create a new country. For example, the Clinton administration largely supported the dissolution of Yugoslavia into multiple new countries. Each of the seven new countries is probably worse off today than they would have been had they just worked out their differences and continued to live together peacefully. However, in the 1990s, driven by nationalist fervor, age-old ethnic animosities were dug up by power-crazed politicians, war broke out and Yugoslavia broke apart.

Figure Static Map of Yugoslavia in 1989. Click to see animated loop of the dissolution of the country over a period of 20 years.

The region where Yugoslavia once existed is known as the Balkan Peninsula. The mountainous terrain, and legacy of repeated, but incomplete invasions have left the region a patchwork of national identities based on a myriad of religious, linguistic and ethnic/racialized identities. So frequent have been nationalist conflicts in this region that political geographers use the derogatory term Balkanization to refer to the process of territorial fragmentation of a region into multiple hostile micro-national states.

The fear of Balkanization seems to prompt leaders in the US to occasionally work against separatist efforts. Take for example, the Kurdish people, an ethnic minority living in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. The Kurds have a language, history, and identity separate from the Iraqis, Iranians and the Turks with whom they share space. Kurdish nationalists argue that there should be a new nation-state called Kurdistan. It would seem the Kurds have a legitimate argument, and there have been numerous Kurdish insurrections over the years. Each time though, Kurdish rebellions have been met with violence by the governments of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, or Iran. The US government supported some degree of Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, particularly in the wake of the Gulf and Iraq Wars fought between the US and Iraq, but the support has been inconsistent. The US has not supported Kurdish rights for those living in Turkey, presumably because Turkey is a strategic ally of the US. In 2019, Donald Trump withdrew support for Kurdish troops fighting in Syria in yet another display of inconsistent support for Kurdish interests in the region.

Secessionist movements have also cropped up from time to time within US states, particularly geographically expansive ones. California has reputedly been the subject of over 200 proposals, several of them serious, to divide it into multiple new states. The most persistent calls for secession come from the northernmost counties of California who feel politically isolated and culturally different from other Californians, especially the urban, diverse, and politically liberal people of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento. Some people living near the California-Oregon border want to break away and form a new state to be Jefferson.

Generally, secession movements are fraught with danger for the secessionists. In most cases, a break-away unit of territory would result in a smaller economic base. Small countries often suffer from smaller economies of scale as well as a host of associated issues, not the least of which is a lack of local control in the face of the economic competition of the country from whom “independence” was won.

Figure Map depicting one of several proposals to render California into multiple states

There are others who might argue that secession benefits an especially productive or efficient local economy. Several separatist groups in Northern Italy argue that the rest of Italy is a burdensome drag on the local resources and industry. They may have a case. Economists disagreed about the economic prospects for an independent Quebec and Scotland. For some, however, economic loss may be a welcome cost to bear in exchange for freedom from religious or ethnic oppression.