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Secession: A Comparative Analytical Framework*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
Abstract
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- Type
- Field Analysis/Orientations de la Science Politique
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 107 - 134
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1981
References
1 See, for example, University of London Institute of Commonwealth Studies, The Politics of Separatism, Collected Seminar Papers, 19 (1976)Google Scholar; Nafziger, E. Wayne and Richter, William L.,“Biafra and Bangladesh: The Political Economy of Secessionist Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 13 (1976), 91–109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Esman, Milton J. (ed.), Ethnic Conflict in the Western World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Rowat, Donald C. (ed.), The Referendum and Separation Elsewhere: Implications for Quebec (Ottawa: Department of Political Science, Carleton University, 1978)Google Scholar; and Buchheit, Lee C., Secession: The Legitimacy of Self-Determination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.
2 Peter Lyon, “Separatism and Secession in the Malaysian Realm, 1948–65,” University of London Institute of Commonwealth Studies, The Politics of Separatism, 69.
3 Buchheit, Secession, 1–42.
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8 It may be argued that, in some instances, so little integrative activity has occurred that loyalties cannot be said to be “withdrawn” because they never developed in the first place. Cases of new but rapidly failing federations (West Indies, Central African, Mali) come to mind. Similarly, in cases where a regional group opts to secede rather than to continue to belong to a state at the time of colonial emancipation (South Moluccans, Nagas, Katangans), it may be that loyalties to a new central regime have never existed. Nevertheless, such cases can be viewed as secessionist in so far as in each a territorially-defined group sought formal withdrawal from a political authority on the basis of a claim to independent sovereign status.
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52 Lijphart has recently shown that consociation and federation are overlapping concepts and argues that federal systems where ethnicity is territorially based can be consociational (Switzerland) or employ certain consociational devices (Canada, India, Nigeria). Although both systems are seen as accommodating the tensions between the segments of a plural society within a single sovereign state, the case is not made that either is proof against secession. Lijphart, Arend, “Consociation and Federation: Conceptual and Empirical Links,” this Journal 12 (1979), 499–515Google Scholar.
53 Esman, Ethnic Conflict in the Western World, 389.
54 In a study not of secession but of general systemic change, Flanagan includes as accelerators economic shocks (inflation, depression, natural disasters), policy outputs such as government blunders, performance failures, repressive actions, expropriations, or executions, and other dramatic events, such as assassinations, riots, or defeats in foreign wars. Flanagan, Scott C., “Models and Methods of Analysis,” in Almond, Gabriel A., Flanagan, Scott C. and Mundt, Robert J. (eds.), Crisis, Choice and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 65Google Scholar.
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61 There are, as well, a few cases of bet-hedging where foreign governments lend aid in various forms to both sides in a secessionist struggle, as France did during the Nigerian civil war. See Stremlau, John J., The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 224–44. Foreign governments and other international actors may also attempt to mediate a secessionist dispute, as in the case of the British government's and the Organization of African Unity's attempts to mediate the Nigerian-Biafran struggleGoogle Scholar.
62 Buchheit, Secession, 216–49.
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