the ruling party, in a vote last Sunday, got clobbered. Polls still show secessionist leaders with a healthy majority — but locally, various parties fell into sniping, and the secession forces now look like anything but a united front.
7. Get the world behind you
Of recent secessions, South Sudan’s successful effort had the advantage of moral certainty in a way America’s secession would struggle to match. After decades of religious and ethnic friction, the north/south rupture finally became realistic when the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir on human rights charges in 2009. It’s hard to argue against secession from a butcher.
The same region had seen a previous secession two decades before, when Eritrea broke from Ethiopia in 1993. In that case, again, a consensus of international bodies, including a U.N. vote of confidence, proved key.
Most radically, when East Timor broke from Indonesia in 1999, via a UN-brokered referendum, Australian troops had to arrive and put down a violent reaction by Indonesian military and militias against Timorese civilians.
An effort directly opposed to secession, Puerto Rico’s mutterings about joining the Union as the 51st state, also seems to lack much international outreach. It regularly stalls.
8. Be prepared to get a new job
Secession isn’t just a public matter, and it disrupts business. In the Sudans, home of some major oil fields, pipeline issues have dogged the split. Even without Catalunya, Spain would still be a 40 million-plus-person market, and Catalunya would be a fifth of that.
In the U.S., secession would in part mean secession from favored access to the U.S. market. Should North Carolina secede, Bank of America would either need to leave its headquarters in Charlotte, laying off a ton of people as it did so – or change its name, rewrite its loans, renegotiate its tax relationships, and rethink its debt commitments. (A shortcut might be to just run its CEO for president of New Carolina.)
9. Avoid violence
Kosovo’s secession against overwhelming odds suggests that virtually anyone with enough pluck and determination can defend his or her tribe, and hold on long enough for help to arrive – if it’s coming. On the other hand, Kosovo remains a militarized zone more than a decade after independence from Serbia, and it doesn’t seem likely to be “independent” in the sense of self-reliance any time soon. (Spain, by the way, pulled out of the NATO peacekeeping mission a few years back, uncomfortable backing a secession amid its own troubles.)
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