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When do you think a group of people are justified in seceding from their larger nation state? I generally lean towards that people generally should be allowed to have self-determination, but there are lots of complicating factors. Like imagine a county of Alphastan, majority Alphstani, which has one province which is 60% Betlish and 40% Alphstani. If that province wants to secede, when would that be permissible? What would be acceptable actions from the Betlish population if the Alphstani majority would doing things like oppressing their language in federal schools? What should the Alphstani reaction be if they had reason to believe that, if the province did secede, they'd start oppressing the Alphstani minority there? What if Alphstanis used to have a majority in that province, but then their hostile neighbor of Betland started sending settlers in as a preemptive move to try to annex that province?
All those scenarios aren't particularly important in and of themselves, I just want to have a better framework of when I should be supporting independence movements vs not. One area in particular that divides me in real life is Crimea- from what I understand, that area probably really would prefer to be part of Russia than Ukraine. But that's only after Russia has taken the region by force and increased the number of Russians living there.
Never. If you can't be in the country you love, love the country you're in. It's great when it happened, historically, and we shouldn't go back on them; but it's always violent.
In addition to other examples /u/theory mentioned, Quebec almost seceded from Canada. I think it's entirely possible that Texas or California could secede if their populations actually wanted to, and do it peacefully.
@theory @Felagund
None of those examples really mean a lot. Slovakia and Czechia never really separated, they never instituted a hard border by which a citizen of one could not travel to or work in the other, and within just a few years of independence they both acceded to the EU and lost the most important points of sovereignty anyway. This is the Epcot Nationalism common in EU countries I've talked about before: once you take out the possibility of borders that prevent travel, the possibility of different regulatory regimes, the possibility of war, and smooth out most of the differences in values (ie both are subject to EU regulations and pressure on "Human Rights") well...what's the difference anyway other than linguistic choices in street signage?
The Baltic countries separated peacefully, perhaps, for now. Russia has repeatedly accused all the former USSR states of oppressing Russian speakers, which I'd qualify as state violence (being forced to abandon one's native language or accept second class status). And the story isn't written yet on the Baltics anyway: Ukraine and Georgia were countries that could be listed as separating peacefully, right up until they couldn't.
Norway and Sweden were never one country, they operated in a personal union as separate constitutional democracies with the same monarch.
They were further apart than they will be as EU and NATO member states.
I'm not sure which examples we're talking about from the British Empire. India separated peacefully, but partition resulted in immense, tragic, and ongoing violence. Uganda and Rhodesia separated pretty peacefully, but would later engage in a great deal of violence against ethnic minorities perceived as colonizers, which would not have occurred without independence. I'd probably spot you Canada, New Zealand, Australia; but to a lesser extent they suffer from the EU problem: those countries remained in the Bretton Woods system and allied militarily with their former Colonial masters within the American alliance system. The process Moreover, those countries were never unitary parts of the British polity, they were colonies. They always had a separate legal existence as countries, who simply acknowledged the same monarch.
I continue to contend that separating states must result in violence. If not between the two states, then within the states against the people who don't "fit" the new border to forcibly alter or expel them. We should be seeking to achieve universal standards of human rights for minorities, not to properly sort them to avoid their existence as minorities.
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Texas’s support for secession is either 1 or 2 thirds depending on how the question is written, which points to a large swing voter group that could swing hard behind secession in the right climate.
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Independence of Slovakia from Czechia, Montenegro from Serbia, Norway from Sweden were all peaceful and caused no casualties.
And the Baltic states from the USSR, a whole lot of places from the British Empire, and more.
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