The Montreal Gazette  |  August 30, 1997

WHERE TO DRAW THE LINE

History provides abundant examples of partition and secession, but few rules govern national breakup

By Eric Siblin

Observers of Canada's national-unity scene were sent scurrying for their atlases recently when Stephane Dion came up with a geopolitical zinger for Quebec separatists: the Comoros Islands.      Dion, the federal minister of intergovernmental affairs, invoked the tropical archipelago off the coast of Madagascar as an example of secession triggering partition.      When the four Comoros islands voted in a 1974 referendum to separate from France, one of the quartet opted to remain part of France. The three others seceded while the island of Mayotte, population 100,000, stayed with the mother country.      The example was obscure, but Dion's message was clear: don't get too attached to the current borders of Quebec if the province narrowly votes to secede.      This week, a bombastic letter war moved on to Slovenia, with Dion and Quebec Deputy Premier Bernard Landry crossing swords over whether seceding territories require the consent of their central governments.      According to Landry, Slovenia easily gained international recognition when it parted company with Yugoslavia - one such example out of 50 countries, he argued. Not so, Dion countered yesterday: Slovenia gained recognition only after a clear referendum question, a 95.7 per cent referendum result and an international consensus that Yugoslavia no longer existed.      “I am at your disposal,” Dion said, “to talk about the 49 other cases of international recognition you had in mind.”      And so it goes. The debate over the ground rules for Quebec separation has the players rummaging through the historical record for compelling evidence.      “Both sides will tend to pick examples that suit their position,” says Ronald Watts, professor emeritus of political studies at Queen's University. “But there are no rigid rules for secession provided by history and politics. The one thing we can say is that the unit boundaries during secession are not necessarily forever. Whether or not that's desirable is another question.”      Pinpointing examples of secession and partition means wading through a swampy terrain of concepts that overlap, clash, and mean different things to different observers.      The lexicon itself - which now contains fighting words like secession and partition, as opposed to the mamby-pamby terminology of sovereignty and territorial integrity - reflects a hardening resolve in the federal government.      The definitions are largely dependent on where borders are drawn. Secession usually occurs along existing frontiers, those delineating state or provincial lines. Partition takes place when those lines are in turn rejigged.      In the case of the former Yugoslavia, the speedy unraveling that began in 1990 was secession at work, primarily along the lines of provincial borders. But when Bosnia-Herzegovina attempted secession from Yugoslavia, it was partitioned to make way for the Serb and Croat breakaway regions within its borders.      The recent history of partition falls into two main categories: violent or velvet.      Until the current decade — which has seen an explosion of new colours, if not shapes, on the erstwhile Soviet map — non-violent secessionist movements were extremely rare. Among the handful of such cases were Belgium's secession from the Netherlands in 1830 and the divorce between Norway and Sweden in 1905.      The more numerous violent scenarios played themselves out in places like Ireland (1920), India-Pakistan (1947) and Bangladesh (1971), where secession turned out to be partition. In such instances, violence bloodied the seceding terrain.      In India, the movement of about 12 million refugees and sectarian violence accompanied partition. As in Ireland, it sowed the seeds for future woes. The road to Bangladesh's secession from Pakistan was paved with civil war, foreign intervention and another 9.5 million refugees.      A more peaceful model of partition-secession picked up speed after 1991 with the implosion of the Soviet Union, leaving more than a dozen states in its wake, mostly without violence.      On the Soviet outskirts, the amicable split of Czechoslovakia, on New Year's Eve 1992, was trumpeted as a high-minded lesson in civilized breakup.      In the current exchange of letters between Quebec City and Ottawa, Landry referred to Slovakia as a key precedent for Quebec separation because Canada recognized the territorial integrity of the new Slovak state, and in a democratically dubious situation in which not even a referendum was held.      “Do you think,” asked the deputy premier, “that Quebecers have fewer rights than the citizens of eastern Europe?”      Yet the differences between the Czechoslovakian “velvet divorce” and the situation in Canada are conspicuous. The Czech-Slovak split was relatively smooth because it involved a bipolar state with each unit seceding and the federal government simply fizzling out of existence.      “It was like: 'I take the piano, you take the VCR' - there was no dispute,” observes Thomas Spira, editor of the Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism. “The provincial borders simply became international borders.”      It was smooth, but not uncomplicated. The two new states had to renegotiate 2,800 documents that regulated relationships with other countries, divvy up assets and debts, reorganize postal, transport, telecommunications and other public services. The democratic basis for the split has been questioned. And at least one group of citizens, the Hungarian minority of more than half a million, remains discontent about its place in the new Slovak state.      At the bloodier end of the spectrum lies the former Yugoslavia, an inescapable lesson in the pitfalls of partition. When Bosnia-Herzegovina sought independent status (as did the other components of disintegrating Yugoslavia: Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Montenegro), the result was an ethnically driven civil war.      The Serb and Croat inhabitants, each comprising about 30 per cent of the demographic mix, resisted the notion of coexisting in a state with Bosnia's Muslim population. A three-way civil war ensued, with the rump Yugoslavian government aiding its Serbian brethren.      “There was wholesale ethnic cleansing on all sides,” Spira says. “All three sides exterminated each other.”      Bosnia did not have a monopoly on ethnic cleansing. When Croatia declared its independence in 1991, Belgrade seized one-third of Croatia's territory; at least 10,000 Croats died in the conflict and more than 200,000 Serbs were driven from Croatia as refugees. “The patterns of settlement in Europe have never been geometrically convenient,” write Matthew Horsman and Andrew Marshall in After the Nation-State (HarperCollins, 1994). “Ethnic minorities are not just scattered, but often scattered village by village, street by street, farmhouse by farmhouse, as in the confused battleground of Bosnia.      “Where individuals conflict with the principle of nationhood, it is individuals who must load up the handcart and leave.”      The lack of ethnic homogeneity has got under the skin of nearly all the republics of the former U.S.S.R., with Armenia, Moldova and Georgia experiencing violent confrontation.      Consider the case of Ukraine, which itself has a tortuous history of partition. The newly independent state faced increasing problems with three main separatist movements among the ethnic minorities in the country: the Russian population of the Crimea; the Ruthenians in Transcarpathia; and the Romanians of Bukovyna.      In a 1991 referendum, Crimea, with a population of about 90 per cent Russian-speakers, voted with a 54.2-per-cent majority in favour of independence from Ukraine. But after Ukraine threatened an economic blockade, the independence declaration was rescinded.      Tension and fears of military conflict have simmered. In a novel act of defiance, the Crimean leadership announced in 1994 that the peninsula would henceforth follow Moscow time, which is one hour ahead of Kiev. A year later, the Ukrainian government disarmed the Crimean presidential guard and closed the Crimean parliament.      Moscow's policies in Ukraine have been cautious, with a view toward drawing the whole of Ukraine back into the Russian orbit. That's kept the situation in check.      The fortunes of partition are often boosted by a friendly neighbour with firepower, as in the case of India's military intervention on behalf of Bangladesh or the partition of Virginia in 1863 during the American Civil War.      The partition of Virginia was forged by pre-existing divisions in the crucible of civil war. A slave-holding state, Virginia was forced to decide whether to throw its lot in with the Union or the Confederacy.      There were two opposing visions and political interests within Virginia, roughly divided between the eastern and western counties of the state. The east was based on a slave-holding economy; the west represented small farms and nascent industrialization. The western counties also resented the distribution of political power at the legislature, which favoured the eastern areas.      After Virginian delegates to a special convention opted to secede from the union in 1861, the western counties split off and set up a state within the state — West Virginia — while the Civil War was raging. Abraham Lincoln immediately recognized the western entity as the legitimate government of Virginia. Interestingly, partitionedVirginia was racked by less violence than were places like Missouri and Kentucky during the war. “It was a less bloody affair in part because such a relatively neat partition happened,” says Melvin Ely, professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.      But even in Virginia, where a natural divide was suggested by the Allegheny Mountains, the precise trajectory of the new border was less than obvious. “It was fuzzy,” says Ely. “It was real hit and miss in terms of exactly where the border ran.”      The geometry of borders rarely satisfies all occupants. The 1976 UN Covenant on Civic and Political Rights recognizes that self-determination does not necessarily involve the redrawing of international frontiers, but might instead be satisfied by some form of power or political autonomy.      Such a “prudent position” makes sense, Malcolm Anderson writes in Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World (Polity Press, 1996), because only about 10 per cent of the members of the UN are ethnically homogeneous.      “If every nation or ethnic group were to assert the right to statehood, the international system would be destabilized.”      Exactly how far can the domino effect of self-determination go? History provides abundant examples, but no answers.      “It is a slippery road,” Spira says. “Some things cannot be prevented. It is like a runaway train.”