To say that philosophers did not write about the morality of secession until the 1990s is only a slight exaggeration. Considerable work had been done on the related subject of revolution, of course, and the social unrest of the 1960s provoked a great deal of thinking about civil disobedience, but the paucity of viable secessionist movements on the geopolitical landscape resulted in almost no one studying the morality of state breaking. This changed dramatically with the end of the Cold War, however, when the dissolution of the Soviet Union exposed the lack of theoretical work on secession as an embarrassing...

For the past two centuries, state breaking has been the primary method of state making around the world. More than half the states currently represented at the UN emerged from the wreckage of colonial empires, the collapse of multinational federations, or the fission of existing states. The rate of state birth accelerated in the decades after the Second World War; the incidence of state death, whether through conquest, occupation, confederation, or dissolution, declined in the same period.¹

Whenever a new state is recognized as legitimately occupying territory formerly claimed by another state, a process of secession can be said to...

Akhil Reed Amar has written that “the legality or illegality of secession was probably the most serious constitutional question ever to arise in America.”¹ In relation to this “most serious constitutional question,” Cass Sunstein has asserted that “no serious scholar or politician now argues that a right to secede exists under American constitutional law.”² Laurence Tribe cites President Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address of March 4, 1861, as the “definitive articulation” of this view of Amar’s “most serious constitutional question.”³

That Lincoln firmly rejected the legality of the secession of the eleven Confederate States is clear. However, Lincoln never claimed...

Most of the normative debate on secession focuses on outlining the central ethical theories of secession, based on theories of state legitimacy, and applying these theories to determine whether and under what conditions these normative theories are satisfied. This sometimes also involves specifying the train of events that would generate conditions permitting secession. This approach is not very useful in understanding either the motivating element of secession or the discourse by nationalists (or secessionists), though it is useful in understanding the arguments of unionists—that is, those who want to keep the state united. It has also been useful in...

Among the complex sequence of events that led to the American Civil War, none was more important than the secession of South Carolina. On December 20, 1860, less than two months after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, delegates to the South Carolina convention voted unanimously to sever all ties with the Union. South Carolina’s action was the trigger for a disunion movement that swept across the Deep South in the opening months of 1861. By February 1, six more states—Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas—had joined the secessionist tide. By early April, the stage had...

Early in 1859, as the upstart Republican Party consolidated its electoral base across the North, Alfred Iverson of Georgia offered fellow U.S. senators an enticing vision of the southern future. “Sir, there is one path of safety for the institution of slavery in the South,” he explained, forecasting how the secession of the cotton states should be the first step towards a new proslavery Confederacy. Iverson confidently predicted how this new alliance would contain within itself “elements of more political power, national prosperity, social security, and individual happiness, than any nation of ancient or modern times.” Speaking on behalf of...

One of the most widely distributed Union propagandist pamphlets of the American Civil War was Charles Janeway Stillé’s How a Free People Conduct a Long War: A Chapter from English History. Stillé was born in Philadelphia in 1819; a lawyer before the Civil War, he joined the U.S. Sanitary Commission when war broke out and later published an official account of that body. Following Union general George B. McClellan’s costly but indecisive Peninsula Campaign of 1862, Stillé sought to boost flagging Union morale with the publication of a pamphlet that highlighted for the northern public the comparisons between the recent...

Ours is not the first attempt to consider “secession as an international phenomenon.” Secessionists in the American South and elsewhere did so themselves, reflecting on the international contexts of their movements and seizing on those comparisons that appeared to offer support.¹ For mid-nineteenth-century white southerners looking across the Atlantic, these were few and far between—not least because so many Europeans had by then come to view slavery, the basis of southern secessionism, as a barbaric relic of the past. However, the independence movements that sought to liberate peoples such as the Poles, the Irish, and the Hungarians from external...

In 1861, New York City writer and architect Frederick Law Olmsted tacked a plea to suppress southern secession onto a reissued account of his travels in the slave states. To make that case, Olmsted argued that slavery had retarded the American South’s economic and social progress. In the South, Olmsted wrote, “most of the people lived very poorly; that the proportion of men improving their condition was much less than in any Northern community; and that the natural resources of the land were strangely unused, or were used with poor economy.”¹ In making this charge Olmsted joined other supporters of...

The Texas Republic is one of the most celebrated cases of secessionism in the Americas. Texas remained viable and independent for nine full years, between 1836 and 1845, fending off repeated attempts by Mexico to reconquer it. During its existence Texas had all the attributes of a proper state: a functioning government, a constitution, effective control over its territory, and a very active international diplomacy. Even today Texans take pride in being heirs to a real nation (not a mere state) and are still moved by a national saga that starts with the settlement of American families in Mexican Texas...

Political secession is the scourge of postcolonial states, and although in this hemisphere it is most often associated with the ill-fated Confederate States of America, secession was endemic to nineteenth-century Latin America as well. Indeed, had nations adhered to the layout of late Bourbon and early national redistricting, continental Latin America might have coalesced into only six political entities: Chile, Peru, Brazil (with Uruguay), Mexico (including the five Central American states), New Granada (encompassing Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador), and Río de la Plata (with Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia). Instead, by 1840 the original groupings had splintered into sixteen, after which...

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, all European states have in one way or another been confronted with secession. But the ways in which they have experienced secession are extremely varied. In the case of the European Union (EU), a number of its members (France, Britain, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, and Germany) are former imperial powers, and the process of decolonizing their empires was oft en a violent one. Three European states (Ireland, Cyprus, and Malta) are former British colonies. Six of the ten states that joined the EU in 2004 are products of the dissolution of...

How does a group acquire the right to secede from an existing state? This is the central question that contemporary normative theorists of secession—including Christopher Wellman in this volume—address. The question I address in this chapter is quite different: can the use of military force in order to achieve or to prevent a secession be justified on moral grounds? Even if a group does have a right to secede, this does not necessarily imply that it is morally justified to use military force and to kill people in an attempt to secure secession or independence. Whether or not...

Any comparative consideration of secessionist movements should take into account the Soviet and post-Soviet experience. Although ethnopolitical mobilization did not occur in all Soviet republics or regions, the implosion of the Soviet empire produced the most successful wave of secessionism in modern times. Fifteen independent countries now exist in the post-Soviet space. The end of the Soviet Union, meanwhile, has not seen the end of separatist movements in post-Soviet states, as demonstrated by ongoing conflicts in Chechnya, Abkhazia, Transnistria, and Nagorno-Karabakh. The Soviet and post-Soviet experience therefore represents a wonderful opportunity for those interested in secessionist movements, offering as it...

Both the American Civil War and the Cold War were followed by a grimly waged “war of recollections.” The failures of 1865 and 1989 and the subsequent process of political unification mark the beginning of debates about the respective countries’ former double statehood and the citizens’ living conditions in the newly reunited societies, which have lasted to the present day. In both critical discussions about such patterns and in efforts to find alternative ways of perceiving past and present, the debates show a persistence of thinking within patterns of former enmity. One might expect ongoing disputes to mildly influence any...

At the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Kurdish parts of northern Iraq had enjoyed autonomy from Baghdad for some eleven years. In consequence, the possible secession of the Kurdish provinces (Dohuk, Arbil, Sulaymaniyya, and perhaps Ta’mim, which includes Kirkuk) to form an independent “Iraqi Kurdistan” was and still is very much on the political agenda, encouraged by the Kurdish provinces’ de facto separation from the rest of the country, the fact that the younger generation of Iraqi Kurds knows English better than Arabic, and of course the seemingly endless chaos in the rest of the...

Since the end of colonial rule, sub-Saharan Africa has been troubled by civil wars and other forms of organized violence. While these conflicts together suggest Africa is a continent in retreat, those particularly connected with secessionist demands have raised doubts about the nature and viability of the emergent postcolonial states. At present more than a dozen active secessionist movements are underway in Africa in Algeria, Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Comoros, the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Another flash spot of separatism is Nigeria, currently manifested in the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. There is also...

In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Abraham Lincoln’s stance on national unity during the U.S. Civil War has been summoned up by PRC officials, media, and elites in an effort to explain and legitimate their own response to those they disparage as “separatists” in Tibet and Taiwan.¹ The most prominent use of the U.S. Civil War trope, though, has emerged in PRC rhetoric about Taiwan—the subject of this chapter.

Beijing has framed its dispute about sovereignty over Taiwan as a battle between a small number of separatists on the island who seek to secede from China and an...