In 1975, the Upper Peninsula’s bid to become the state of Superior was narrowly defeated in the Michigan legislature. Proponents also wanted to pull northern Wisconsin counties into the proposed 51st state. Nowadays, the Superior movement sputters like a snowmobile low on gas, driven by Tea Party extremists with affinities for a loose confederacy of militia, radical libertarians and racists seeking to peel off parts of the U.S. into self-governing enclaves free of the hated Washington “Zionist Occupied Government” and other bugaboos.
Superior receives due mention in an entertaining and informative work of encyclopedic scope, Christopher F. Roth’s Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar (Litwin Books). The author covers the globe and finds discontentment with set borders and the established order everywhere he turns.
Especially in what pundits and economists are pleased to call “developed nations,” bids for secession are often publicity stunts drawing attention to neglect by national or regional governments. Sometimes, as when a pair of back-country Republican legislators recently called for statehood for Chicago, it’s a raised middle finger screaming “Get out!” And yet, a number of groups from Aryan to black separatists have operated as quasi-states on remote tracts of private property, unofficially tolerated until misbehavior brings down the blunt force of authority. As for America’s “Organic Constitutionalists” who reject all constitutional amendments after the Bill of Rights, Roth notes that it doesn’t “slip their minds that this would strike out amendments abolishing slavery and giving women the vote.”
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In other parts of the world, secessionists are not on the fringe but are hammering at the gates. Until 2009, the Tamil minority of Sri Lanka fought a bloody civil war to carve a separate country from the island nation. In the ’80s, Sikh nationalists assassinated India’s prime minister and waged terrorism in a bid for an independent Khalistan. After the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in a Western Europe-U.S. campaign, the unintended consequence was Libya’s collapse into feuding regions.
Given the artificial nature of African boundaries, little surprise that some ethnic groups, such as the Tuareg of the southern Sahara, are fighting to create new nations that spill across existing frontiers. Other ethnicities have been hard pressed to coexist within the same nations. Many still call for reasserting Biafra’s independence from Nigeria or Katanga’s from the Congo.
Europe has not been spared from the urge to break up established nations. Scottish nationalists, although narrowly defeated in the 2014 referendum, remain restive. Spain’s Catalonian nationalists are determined to gain independence; Belgium is barely hanging together in some accounts as the Flemings and Walloons threaten to split.
Roth writes about these issues with humor, astute analysis and a skeptical sense of fairness. Of the wave of new nations born or stillborn from dying empires at the end of World War I, he comments on “the self-determination of nations that Europeans and Americans had not fully expected to show up to the party.” Lots of unhappy ethnic groups left the Paris peace conference empty handed but full of dreams that continue to haunt world politics a century later.
