Referendums and Ethnic Conflict

3. Secession and Partition

C h a p t e r 3 Secession and Partition As long as our world is made up of national groups which aspire to self-governance and to territorial sovereignty, ours will be a world of sovereign states and secessions from them. —Pavkovic and Radan (2007: 256) ‘‘Secession,’’ according to Aleksandar Pavkovic and Peter Radan, is a ‘‘process of withdrawal of a territory and its population from an existing state and the creation of a new state on that territory’’ (Pavkovic and Radan 2007: 1). Needless to say, secession is a process of far-reaching and irreversible consequences. Once undertaken, the process of a political divorce between two groups sharing the same territory is a one-way street—one that often has a violent aftermath. No countries that have split up, or from which one part has seceded, have become unified. There are not political equivalents of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (who famously remarried ), though Yemen came close (and pace Germany).1 Because of the farreaching and irreversible character of secessions, it is—in an era of popular sovereignty—natural that such changes are expected to be ratified by the voters. John Stuart Mill—writing in Considerations on Representative Government —was an early and perhaps unwitting exponent of this view, when he stressed that ‘‘where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government. . . . This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed’’ (Mill 1980: 234). In other words, the people—the citizens of a particular territory— should have the final say due to the magnitude and irreversibility of the decision. But does the decision to hold referendums on independence 48 Chapter 3 follow this ideal, or are referendums more likely to be the result of tactical considerations as suggested by the competition proximity model? Like in the other chapters discussed in this book, a case can be made for the view that referendums on independence followed a rational, selfinterested , logic rather than an idealistic one. Applying once again the competition proximity model, it is—as it will be argued in this chapter— possible, for example to see the decision to hold a referendum on independence for Bosnia-Herzegovina as an example of this model in practice. The Bosnian leadership faced competition—and a military threat—from stronger actors within the Yugoslav Federation, in particular Serbia. However the Bosnians also knew that there was support for independence among a majority of those living in the state (Bringa 1993). In other words, and once again using the formal language, (Im  Pi)2 was perceived to be small and C was perceived to be large, and it was rational to hold a referendum. Whether the model works as neatly in other places and whether it is supported by statistical evidence across cases are matters that will be considered here. For a while, especially in the 1970s and the 1980s, it seemed that this kind of referendum had become a thing of the past. In the words of an international lawyer, ‘‘The notion that the right of self-determination embraces a legitimate claim to independent statehood seemed to have fallen into desuetude with a decolonisation process.’’2 This can no longer be said. After the deluge of referendums at the beginning of the 1990s and more recently the referendums in Montenegro (2006) and Southern Sudan (2011), self-determination referendums are back in business. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is a matter of taste, and it should be said at the outset that no two secession referendums are the same. Sometimes these plebiscites lead to hostilities, and other times they are resolved amicably. This is an issue we examine in this chapter. But before we do so we need to determine when such referendums are held at all. The Comparative Study of Secessions There have been many different referendums on secession. This is one of the problems for the social scientist who deals with generalizations. For it is, on the face of it, difficult to compare the Latvian referendum in 1991, the referendum in French Guinea in 1958, and the plebiscite in Iceland in Secession and Partition 49 1945. Add to these examples the case of Southern Sudan in 2011 and the picture seems blurred, messy, and downright confusing...