Secession And The Modern State

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Emphasis mine.
SECESSION AND THE MODERN STATE

Donald W. Livingston, PhD.
Department of Philosophy
Emory University
December 1996

Secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy....
(Lord Acton to Robert E. Lee, November 4, 1866)


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The idea of a modern unitary state goes back to the philosophers of the seventeenth century, but its first appearance in the world was the work of the French Revolution. The unitary French republic has since been the model for would-be modern states throughout the world, including the United States after 1865. The modern state was said to be one and indivisible, and so was conceived from the start as a state from which secession was impossible. From 1790 until 1990 there were only a few cases of successful peaceful secession. Belgium seceded from the Netherlands in 1830; Norway from Sweden in 1905; and Singapore from the Malaysian Federation in 1965. All were negotiated peacefully. But suddenly after 1990, the number of successful peaceful secessions surged. Fifteen republics seceded from the Soviet Union. A Czech and a Slovak republic were created out of Czechoslovakia through secession. With the exception of the secession of Eritrea from Ethiopia, all the successful secessions since 1990 occurred without violent resistance from the respective central governments. This was true even of Yugoslavia. There was only half-hearted resistance to the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from the central government, then dominated by Serbia. the present conflict is over the Serbian enclaves in Bosnia and Croatia who are not allowed to secede and join Serbia.

It is paradoxical and demands explanation why peaceful secession by referendum should have occurred in so-called totalitarian communist states whereas in western liberal states, during a period of two hundred years (1790-1990), there have been only two cases of peaceful secession, but a great number of cases in which secession attempts were brutally defeated by the central government. Unhappily the Confederacy did not have the Communist Party under Gorbachev to negotiate with; and mercifully the Soviet Republics did not have to negotiate with the Republican Party under Lincoln. As far as I can determine, the United States since 1865has initially resisted or failed to support every secession attempt in the world except the secession of Panama from Columbia which it engineered as a means of constructing the Panama Canal. The United States was among the last to recognize the seceding states of the Soviet Union. It did not recognize the secession of Slovenia and Croatia (as had a number of European states), and it persisted, long after it was unreasonable, to think of Yugoslavia as a unitary state. A top Croatian leader, responding to Secretary of State James Baker's arrogant and dark warning against secession, observed that Baker could not free himself from the "American tradition of demonizing the phenomenon of secession. He didn't have an ear for our proposal to establish a union of sovereign states."1 This should not be surprising from a regime whose founding father is not the secessionist George Washington or Thomas Jefferson but the violent suppressor of secession Abraham Lincoln.

Today there are secession and devolution movements of all kinds occurring throughout the world. Indeed, political economists estimate that no more than twenty-five states in the United Nations are free of secessionist or territorial disputes.2 And there are also many secession movements that stop short of claiming national sovereignty. The Eskimos and Cree Indians of Northern Quebec have gained new rights and territory. In January of 1992, twenty-seven northern counties of California introduced into the State legislature a plan to secede from California and form the fifty-first state. Staten Island recently voted to secede from New York, and Coconut Grove voted to secede from Miami.

How are we to understand the deeper philosophical implications of this new and apparently growing respect for secession and devolution? Richard Weaver wrote a famous book entitled Ideas Have Consequences, and indeed they do. In what follows I would like to examine the consequences of an idea framed by the great political philosophers of the modern era; such thinkers as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, Mill, and Marx. The idea in question is that of a modern unitary state. For two centuries we have been living out the consequences of that idea. And if I am not mistaken, we are witnessing, if not the disintegration of the modern state, at least the most radical challenge to it ever posed.
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Nowhere has this confusion between secession and revolution led to greater moral mischief than in the practice of describing the break with Britain in 1776 as the American Revolution The act of the British colonists was simply and solely an act of secession. It was neither whiggish, nor Lockean, nor Jacobin revolution. The colonists did not seek to overthrow the British government. Commons, Lords, and Crown were to remain exactly as before. They wished simply to limit its jurisdiction over the territory they occupied.
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The people of France were the first to suffer the horrors of modern totalitarian revolution at the hands of their own government; the people of the South would be second. From a perspective located in time after the French Revolution and after the European revolutions of 1848, Lincoln read the Jacobin meaning of equality into the Declaration of Independence, transforming by an act of philosophical alchemy, what was a legal brief addressed to a forum of international law justifying secession into a perpetual project of social and political transformation-a project that in principle, cannot be realized and would increase the scope of evil if it could be. Many Americans identify with the Lincolnian myth of the Declaration and are, consequently, burdened with a morally corrupting metaphysical guilt about inequality. I say because it is always morally corrupting to attempt to do or claim to have done what is impossible. Lincolnian Americans stand morally disarmed today before the charge leveled by our new egalitarians (there will always be a new form of egalitarianism) that America is a racist, sexist, classist, homophobic society and that massive transfers of power must be placed in the hands of the central government to effect the total transformation of society. They fail to see that every society that has every existed, including those that have achieved the highest level of human flourishing, have been (by today's impossible standards) racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic. The result of this self-imposed moral ignorance has been the progressive disintegration of the social fabric of the United States.
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So it is a miscategorization to describe the break with Britain in 1776 as the American Revolution. Likewise, it can only lead to moral confusion to describe the conflict arising from the secession of eleven contiguous American States in 1861 as the Civil War. The primordial meaning of the expression "civil war" is the English Civil War. That was a conflict between two factions seeking to control the same government of a state. The Confederates, however, were not seeking to control the central government of the United States; rather, they were seceding from that government. Consequently, there was no American Civil War.
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The modern state is not a fated existence; it is a human artifact only two hundred years old. And it no longer has the authority it once had. The secession and devolution movements in the world today, along with the demonstrated viability of small states, raises new and exciting possibilities. Americans have not rejected these possibilities; they simply have never occurred to them. The reason is that they are still under the spell of the centralized modern state founded in the Lincoln myth. Ours is the uphill task of refuting that myth both as an historical account of the American polity and as a moral and philosophical account of the best form of political association. That form is and has always been some form of federative polity with the right of secession. Its primal symbol is the Exodus from Egypt. And, as Mel Bradford has taught us, we must refute also the blasphemous puritan ideology of the Lincoln myth which pretends to speak the speech of God and, in the Cromwellian "Battle Hymn of the Republic," teaches slaying and laying waste in the name of the Lord. The Union was not in 1861 and is not now the last best hope on earth. We must teach Americans to lay down their tools, stop building the Tower of Babel, and return to their respective homes. For as the poet said:

Those who in fields Elysian would dwell,
Do but extend the boundaries of Hell.30

I've been told that my lack of higher education is a determent, so I've brought in a PHD's article for edification and comment.
 
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