 We're going to talk about secession But from probably perspectives that you generally haven't heard about Before I've noticed that most of the discussion around secession has been Very focused just on the United States United States history With also no clear Discussion about what the the goals are how it how it works the potential benefits or disadvantages So we're going to look at a broader The theoretical and international view now this will include of course the United States in some cases But I want to cover some of these issues related to the session that are normally ignored as well as some of the pressing issues that rarely get addressed at all such as If you have a country split up what happens to the nuclear arsenal if that country is a nuclear country what happens? To the military defense situation those sorts of things that are usually ignored turns out we have historical precedence for these sorts of situations and Also, one of the things I want to communicate here is that there are many historical precedents of States breaking apart via secession in in the world in 1945. They're only about 80 countries now There are about 200 how do you get a bunch more countries out of 80 countries? It's through secession And that's what happened throughout the world since 1945 through a variety of periods that occurred especially Decolonization in Africa and in Asia and then after the breakup of the Soviet Union where he created 16 new countries all through secession movements and So how does that happen? What is the underlying ideology? let's look a little bit at that and just from my perspective Just so you know where I'm coming from ideologically I'm going to be generally talking about advantages or disadvantages of secession in terms of the Ideology that historically is known as liberalism many people now call it classical liberalism modern-day version might be libertarianism This is the idea that people have rights To life liberty and property and also a right will be discussing here called self-determination Which is the the right underlying secession that we see again and again in the literature related to the topic and so a lot of the theorists I'm going to be mentioning are coming from that perspective and Just be aware that when I use the term liberalism, I'm going to be referring to These people who are associated with the concept of laissez-faire free markets 19th century type liberalism free trade Which and I will not use the term the way that like modern talk show hosts use it when they say liberal They usually mean like a progressive or a social democrat. We're using it in the historical sense So don't be confused by that issue at all So really the place to start off here. I think is just to talk a little bit about the right of self-determination and Just to to give a sense of how this has been important and used by theorists over the time I'm going to start by quoting a Liberal a free market liberal economist named Ludwig von Mises. I'm from the Mises Institute he's an economist that we use significantly in our own research and Let's look at his book called liberalism from 1927 and what does he say about? the topic of secession and he favors it So he's writing in the 1920s in Europe and that's his perspective He's saying the right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means Whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village a whole district or a series of adjacent districts Makes it known by a freely conducted plebiscite that is a nationwide vote That they no longer wish to remain united to the state in which they belong at that time But wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves some other state their wishes are to be respected and complied So this is the idea of that. Okay, you've got people in a village or a region of a country They enter into a vote they vote for separation either to become a totally separate sovereign country or to join with some other country What Mises is saying is that the right of self-determination as imagined by the liberals of his time the 20s are mostly He's also thinking in terms of the 19th century in Europe That you then have to let this country have their right of self-determination and form their own country Now he didn't invent this idea, of course He's drawing upon currents that were already alive and well in Europe in the late 19th 20 Late 19th and early 20th century and if you look at historians and how they treat the issue of self-determination as a concept most of them dated back to the American Revolution and So the concept albeit not the phrase was already known In Mises's time in 19th century Europe in early 20th century as the force behind the American revolutionaries when the colonies seceded from the British Empire that is they broke off and Form their own sovereign country Historian David Armitage at Harvard describes United States war for independence as Essentially the practical and political starting point for modern ideas of self-determination what he means by modern is the last 200 years and While the philosophical roots of self-determination are often attributed attributed to Immanuel Kant The prototype for a real-life secession movement was found primarily in the American war for independence Armitage writes quote the notion now He's referring to the Declaration of Independence, which if you read it will declare to well Well note that a country a people has a right to break off and form their own government if they wish and Armitage says the notion that one people might find it necessary to dissolve its links with a larger polity That is that it might legitimately attempt to secede as Jefferson and the American Revolutionaries were attempting to do Was almost entirely unprecedented and barely accepted at the time of the American Revolution So Armitage very mainstream historian British-born teaching at Harvard Is saying that yeah, of course the American Revolutionary Revolution was a secession movement. It was a war to secede from a larger political entity Sometimes you will still see Anti-secessionists claim that the American war was not a war the American Revolution is not a war of secession I don't know where they come up with this idea the mainstream view is that it was a secessionist war of self-determination and The United States was successful obviously With that war and then that Established this idea of a natural right a moral right to self-determination that you can in fact break off From a larger country now as Armitage is saying that was rare That was a weird thing to be in favor of in the 18th century that wasn't how the thinking went especially among the imperial powers So the American success on this was then it's spread to Europe and to much of the rest of the world and to today Today Armitage points out the language found in the Declaration of Independence still shows up In other countries that seek self-determination Historically through their own secession movements of decolonization. It's found in Latin America and European Asian movements seeking their own Self-determination today And so by Mises's time. This was well established We could point that immediately following the American Revolution. We have Poland writing their own constitution in the 1790s clearly modeled somewhat on the American effort for self-determination because Poland at the time was trying to break free of The Prussians and the Russians and the Austrians who were basically taking Poland Cutting it up into smaller pieces and then ruling those portions from Vienna from Moscow from Berlin and so the Poles they wanted self-determination Also, and they were drawing upon the American success in those cases and certainly the the Polish Patriot today Ushkosiusko Who had fought in the American Revolution as a poll they came on over to fight in the war very familiar with the concepts In the Declaration of Independence, so he's transplanting as best he can American ideas of self-determination into Eastern Europe and We also find this prop up in other countries as well when the Hungarians attempted to separate from the Austrian Empire and Empire and assert their own self-determination Which they succeeded to some extent in the 1860s and and were able to get their own Total self-government under one common foreign policy within what came to be known as Austria-Hungary the dual monarchy That was a war of self-determination modeled largely on the American efforts as well And then we start to see the term by the mid 19th century start to Come into use the phrase self-determination. We find it first used in German In a very long compound words as the Germans tend to do And then the French we also see the French start to use the term by the 1860s And so of course by the time Mises is writing then this is a well-known concept Now the Marxists don't be confused because the Marxists like they often did with liberal exploitation theory and other liberal concepts at the time They co-opted the term and so Lenin used the term a lot To talk about to favor breakaway countries that were going to be socialist in nature Woodrow Wilson used it in his vision of Social democracy and so it's used in a variety of ways But the way that it was used by the American revolutionaries the Hungarians the Poles and Mises himself Was the idea was we have this natural right to ruling ourselves at the more local level And this is very important that we have the right to protect ourselves and to break away and break free and The United Nations Charter when it was created in the 1840s Explicitly endorsed this right a lot of that came out of what was brewing at the time In the issue of decolonization because it was after the war that you had colonies Under mostly the French and the British Attempting to break free of those imperial powers and what was interesting is that during the war yet? A lot of Europeans talking about self-determination to criticize the Nazis So Churchill was going on and on about self-determination and that and the Czechs have self-determination And the Nazis don't let them have that and Belgian self-determination when the war ended though Churchill changed his mind and when they say well, what about Africans don't they have self-determination also as I well you know The the Europeans get self-determination But not the Africans not the Asians because of course Churchill was a big imperialist wanted to preserve the British Empire But by then the cat was out of the bag and ideas of liberal self-determination were already expanding Throughout the world and so what you had during the 50s and 60s was a long period of decolonization Where a variety of countries? Kenya the Gold Coast which became Ghana Nigeria all these countries were seceding from the Western imperial powers and using the language of self-determination to do it And that's why the United Nations to this day Recognizes the right of self-determination now the debate today in the scholarship in the international discourse is Over under what conditions then you're allowed to have self-determination And you'll see that a lot then when you start looking at the journals the international relations journals The discussions at the United Nations about well, can this country secede can that country secede there's no agreement on Whether there's a right to unilateral Non-colonial Secession and that's usually what the debate is right now. There's never a debate over whether secession is is a right of some kind Everybody recognizes that because without a recognition of that right there can be no decolonization Which is something that the UN has always supported and So that's the fight we face now is really establishing in the international discourse a right to unilateral non-colonial secession and You see that unfold in many cases and we'll look at a lot of those cases here Often a critique is among the modern-day liberals libertarian types is that The the right is too inexact That it's a right of peoples not of individuals. What does that mean? And it doesn't work on the level of individual rights on that I would recommend checking out the work of Alan Buchanan Buchanan has done some excellent work from a theoretical point of view is really kind of the recognized expert in the philosophy field on the ethics of secession and How it works in terms of arguing the morality behind it and when it's permitted and when it's not and He says that look you can see this in a lot of rights that liberals support a lot of individual rights Because the fact is in practice these individual rights can really only be exercised in groups, right? You look at Jefferson. He's asserting a right to break off from the British Empire But that could really only be asserted Functionally and pragmatically as a group of people because individuals they can attempt to secede but it generally just it doesn't work So you can have individual rights that are expressed as a group right And that's just something to keep in the back of your mind as some of the underlying ethical issues behind Secession but we see over time then that this is carried on by the radical liberals throughout Western Europe and A name would be particularly important to say be Gustave de Molinari a French radical and Molinari also established the important issue that Secession goes all the way down in a sense as well. So it's not just an issue of oh gee this this country Like Ukraine for example, which we'll discuss in more detail later gets to secede because it was a pre-existing administrative unit Molinari was saying no, there's no reason why just a recognized subdivision of a country gets to secede And in the American context there would be a state, right? All too often discussion about secession in the United States is about oh does this state get to secede does that state? Molinari would say well, why just states? Why can't pieces of states break off? Why can't states? Form into larger pieces or regions or just a single city like Singapore, which is essentially just a city state that broke off from Malaysia Why can't these sorts of things happen? So the liberals generally have a much more fluid idea of secession as well It's not this real formalistic idea of well Just these certain pre-existing administrative units can do it. That's taking too rigid a view of it As most of the the radical liberals in favor of secession would tell you Now often the question is why do we need self determination? And the issue comes down to really the fact that it's very hard to exercise your rights When you're a permanent minority within any sort of polity and you can see how this works out We could just take a real simple example In 2018 for example And these are like not even big geopolitical issues. These are just issues that really highlight how when you're a permanent majority How do you exercise your rights to practice your religion or your cultural group? In 2018 legislators in Iceland proposed a ban on circumcision of boys. This is a controversial issue For supporters. This was a slam dunk, right? They you know, it's a form of child abuse to these people And there was no downside to the legislation banning it For some people in the minority however a ban on circumcision might bring lasting damage in terms of abuses against human rights against their culture their exercise of religion For example a ban on circumcision is a de facto ban on Judaism And it's certainly at least of the orthodox variety And so how do you address that issue, right? Circumcision is either legal or it's illegal It's there's not many like much room for compromise in there. Oh, we'll meet you in the middle on this issue The same might be said of abortion, right? It's either legal or it's illegal And so how do we deal with that? How do we create a polity where the rights of the minority or the majority Can can interact in such a way that we can guarantee they can all be respected And what the liberals realize is that there's not really an answer to that In many cases because even though a lot of liberals in the In the constitutionalist tradition. Oh, we can write a constitution that predicts Minority rights will have a court system and they'll stick up for the minorities But a lot of these liberals understood That in the longer term the might the majority wins out even in those cases because you can imagine for example All right, so we you have judges and they say oh, well, you know, we can't ban Judaism So we've just decided against the legislation and we're going to prevent that from happening But how do judges get a point? How to how does the judiciary form? Well, usually they're appointed and or elected in many cases by the majority So if you keep electing certain types of people over time, they're going to over time Appoint certain types of judges and then over time the judiciary as well as the legislature as well as the executive branch In this true in all countries, not just the american system reflect then the moral the culture of the majority And so there isn't really a way around that unless you have some way of the minorities just vetoing federal legislation Or the other alternative is for when you have minority groups concentrated in one area That they can break off and assert self-determination in some way And so that's the issue that these liberals are trying to address And mesas does this explicitly in a lot of his works Because mesas looks at in terms of it being from austria-hungary He was living in a world where there were lots of cultural and linguistic minorities. So in his day Austria-Hungary included it was dominated by the german speakers But there were also croats and there were hungarians was the largest minority group They spoke different languages. They in many cases practice different religions And they had different cultural background Now being dominated by the german elites They felt that they were not allowed to express their their rights And so they were always searching for ways that they could somehow break off and assert self-determination So mesas was very aware of this and being from central europe just saw this in a lot of other countries as well as where you had Majority linguistic group exercising its power over a minority group But of course, it doesn't have to be linguistic. It could be religious. It could be any number of things And so he didn't see a way around it either. He said that over the long term the majority ends up running things and that Uh Majority rules essentially when you're in the minority you view it as that's a form of conquest and colonialism really by other means So if you're a minority within a country and the majority Is constantly in control does not give you a chance really to veto their legislation or to share power in some way Some meaningful way that you might as well just be conquered by the majority that you might as well be second-class citizens And the way to address that in one of the most effective ways Is through secession there are ways like such as the hongarians attain Where they had total self rule with the exception of foreign policy And even then they weren't able to express their foreign policy views Uh as if in case they departed from vienna and from the german majority in terms of How they wanted their foreign policy to be but at least on most other things they were able to practice their religion and speak their language and Exercise their culture But in many cases, of course, you're not even allowed that you're not even allowed self rule except on foreign policy You're just simply expected to submit to the majority policy and what they think is best And that of course is the end means is right. That's essentially what colonialism is It doesn't have to be something that takes place across an ocean It can just be what the british did to the irish right right next door It can just be what the americans did to indian tribal groups right next door It can be what the americans did to the mexicans in parts of the southwest when they just started when they moved in And they conquered but it wasn't just political conquest It was also importing large numbers of anglo-saxons into new mexico and california And essentially relegating then the spanish-speaking Mexican cultural group to a permanent minority in those areas And so these things happen demographic changes happen And over time groups are relegated to a powerless situation So what if you then had a Enclave of this minority because people do tend to stick together geographically especially when they're When they see themselves as an oppressed minority They tend to congregate in certain places Shouldn't they be allowed then to have their own self rule within their area? And that's what these these liberals are trying to address is that issue? And that's why you need self determination they would argue Is that you need some way for these people to assert their own independence from the majority rule in the larger society? Because simply writing constitutions has been shown to not solve that problem It can ameliorate it to some extent It can help make it less bad and it can also put off the inevitable break the inevitable separation over time by essentially throwing a bone to the minority to convince them that okay, we have some of your interests in mind But the only way to change that to really assert any sort of rule is to change demographics And to somehow reproduce faster than the majority group, which does happen Or to simply secede and create your own area where you can exercise Self-determination and mesas was a democrat too. So he's assuming democracy Is something that works in many cases, but he's saying that Democracy reflects the will of the majority ultimately even with constitutions. So That doesn't solve the problem as we can see in a variety of cases and we'll look at that issue too of being a small cultural minority in proposals to Keep the Soviet Union together after it initially collapsed There were efforts to keep small cultural minorities like the Baltic countries and like the Ukrainians in the Soviet Union based on Oh, well, we're a democracy now. We'll let you vote but the These small post-soviet countries they didn't fall for they they knew they were just going to be horribly outnumbered by the russian So they broke off anyway, and we'll see how that works So we've established the the the general theoretical situation in terms of what is self-determination It's it's something that the liberals saw as a right and we can see this also in in liberal thinking from John Locke Who understood that countries? Especially ethnic minorities like the Greeks in the Ottoman Empire had a right to break off and assert Their own rights. So this goes way back to the 17th century and comes up to us today through this line Of thinking also has pragmatic benefits in that As Mises pointed out if you let these countries break off and have self-determination It also heads off civil wars Because if you keep forcing a minority group over and over again to adhere to the will of the majority that minority groups can end up turning to The weapons of the weak to use a phrase some political scientists will like terrorism bombings right like the irish had to use against the english because they couldn't stand up to the british military on any practical level and So you don't want that if you can avoid that you have to choose then between this this unhappy minority There might be a cause of violence out of desperation or just simply letting them go And so on a practical level the liberals thought Secession and self-determination was good simply because it avoided wars in many cases and that That has there's a lot to be said for that And I want to be clear also that just because you're a secessionist doesn't make you a liberal, right? There have been plenty of conservatives who have supported secession to protect the status quo To protect their own groups For example, I mean one of the most famous secessionists in american history, of course, is john c cal who right? Who is this confederate secessionist? It wasn't actually a very good secessionist in the sense that That was more his plan b. He had he really had more of an idea of a veto on federal policy But his plan b was well if we don't if we are relegated to a permanent minority We can get to the seat but not for liberal reasons because he limited secession strictly to the state governments All out of an idea of a legal compact So his right to secession extended only to the legal provisions of the u.s constitution He didn't accept that groups within the states could secede Or that a county could secede from a state for example because the constitution of the state didn't respect the The right to secede of a portion of the state So it was just a different constitution. So therefore since the legal provisions were different There was no right to secede so you can see the difference here, right? Is in one case it's drawing upon just a legal agreement and the legal language And a positivist legal view whereas in the true liberal view it's based on this deeper moral idea of self-determination So let's look at some of the the issues about states and and why they Why they might secede and if that can be a good thing So we've we've looked at the conceptual idea behind secession. Okay So all right on practical level. Is it ever good? Does it ever produce Anything good? Let's think Schematically about secession, right? So if you have a big country and a part of its secedes What are you left over with you left over with two smaller countries? Just by basic math um Now you can think about the the opposite of of the current world, right? We currently live in a world where a lot of secession has taken place as I noticed since 1945 There's 190 odd countries depending on how you count it. Maybe 200 And depending on how you define sovereignty sovereign country and So we have all of these countries So clearly we have a world where decentralization exists on some level, right? The the the status quo is hundreds of countries Each with a high degree of sovereignty the united states tends to Uh invade countries that the united states doesn't like and It it it throws its power around and violates sovereignty In many cases and so you could say that Well, obviously iraq doesn't have the same level of sovereignty as the united states does true enough But even now iraq still has a pretty high degree of sovereignty in compared to say a country that is a permanent colonial possession of another state And they certainly exercise sovereignty in domestic affairs in terms of There if you live within iraq you're subject to the state to the iraqi state And not to the american state Now so we can see this exists many different countries. So is that good? Do we want more countries? Do we want fewer countries? Do we want just a single global state? Maybe that's the way to protect rights? So we have to look at it in terms of those those two alternatives, right? Because many people will argue. Well, if you have a bunch of countries breaking off They'll go off and do their own thing and they might do things that we don't like they might Violate rights and we we can't let people do that Now, of course, many people have argued this over time the the colonialists argued this, right? Well, you can't let those africans rule themselves because they're barbarians and they'll kill each other And so we need to all keep them within our empire And that's the only way they'll learn civilization Uh, that's that's standard anti secessionist talk. Um, and you heard that a lot in the 50s and 60s So Somehow the world has managed to survive all of this Decolonization And also never talked about from the anti secessionist view is all the atrocities and massacres and violations of human rights that occur Within centralized states that refuse to be broken up And this will of course come into play when we're looking at the soviet union As well, but on a practical level What's good about small states? Well, of course part of the the The benefit of small states is that they exist more in a human scale And in the sense of that human beings are then more able to exit smaller states It's easier to exit a smaller state than a larger state and you can think of this in terms of Okay, let's imagine that Uh, we've got something like the united states and you decide you want to leave all right For whatever reason you got to leave. Well, what does that entail? Well in order to leave the united states in total You you've got two choices on the same continent Um, and both of those if you live somewhere in the middle of the united states, those are hundreds of miles away They they speak at least on the south side, right? You would have to learn a new language You would have to learn a new culture And that's a pretty high burden Countries they're often able in order to exercise a greater monopoly because It's difficult for people to leave Especially if the country's larger and has established A large unified cultural group that require you to learn a different culture and to move far and far away Which makes it harder for you to visit family The climate's different and those all may seem like minor issues nowadays But historically these are very important things in terms of understanding a new legal system In terms of understanding how the culture works in the language And so the bigger the country the harder it is to leave and we can just see this in the macro sense In many cases the smaller the country it becomes easier to leave and we can see that this actually at work Uh historically now in the american example, this is used all the time as a support for federalism in the sense that well We give some level of sovereignty to the states to have their own separate legal systems that function differently And we can see that in tax levels differ from state to state in the united states And if you're a person and you want to move across a border to a to a state that has Lower taxes people do that and they're increasingly doing it in the research from what we can see that people are increasingly Moving to parts of the country that they feel reflect their own Culture their own political ideology They're moving to lower tax areas. They're moving to areas that have different business opportunities and so on So we already see that used as an explanation of why you want decentralized governance But we can also see it when we're dealing with countries that are completely separate and sovereign And we see that explained Also in the empirical data as well, which we can look at now in a worst-case scenario big states Of course are always what states want Because of these reasons it makes it harder for people to leave and makes it easier for the state to Collect more taxes and makes it easier for the state to control more people and people are resources. You can make people work You can in a totalitarian system. You can enslave people And that's much harder to do when you're a small country And this is this is discussed in some of the research on totalitarianism, for example, hannah a rent A political scientist, which hopefully you're aware of She notes in a quote here She says that although totalitarian ideology had served well enough to organize the masses Until the the totalitarians took power in germany. So she's talking about nazi germany What she's saying is that germany never actually attained the size necessary to implement true totalitarian rule It had attempted it But that totalitarian in her totalitarianism in her view had only ever really been achieved in the soviet union And why because the soviet union was large enough She says Nazism up to the outbreak of the war and its expansion over europe lagged so far behind its russian counterpart In consistency and ruthlessness Even the german people were not numerous enough to allow for the full development of this newest form of government Only if germany had won the war which she have known a fully developed Totalitarian rulership. So that's the the opposite extreme side of things is that States they want unified large states because they can do the most damage and exert the most control and power As the soviet union being the model For that and it's not a coincidence that the sort of soviet style you totalitarianism that we see existed In a country that at one time was three times the size of the united states the ussr. It was huge it allowed its size allowed for totalitarianism to be fully employed and Imposed and a rent recognized that size was an important factor So a debilitating factor for states then is to reduce in size because it reduces the territory from which you can extract labor resources wealth and it also helps you Control the population and its movements And so what we see then is this crop up in terms of National liberation movements in modern times. We've already discussed a bit about decolonization and The other important event here was at the end of the civil war Or at the end of the soviet union what you see often are condemn nations of secession on grounds that oh it reflects nationalism and this was actually the The us's position at the end of the Cold War was the us opposed The secession of the Baltics Latvia Lithuania and Estonia it opposed the secession of ukraine Which now the us of course reversed its position now independent ukraine is of utmost importance according to the federal government But at the time in the early 1990s, they opposed it Why because they said it reflected extreme nationalism that it's going to cause destabilization europe that there's all going to be all these nationalist wars among these groups None of that happened, but that was the thinking at the time the thinking was we want countries unified into large democratic States that can then vote and exercise their rights that way But the the Baltic countries they did not like the russians on an ethnic level. They'd already been submitted to so many abuses That they were just going to break off. They broke off illegally. They were not this was not a legal process And they formed their own countries just when the soviet union was unable to respond And then the ukranians did the same thing They held a plebiscite just as mesas would have told them to They voted 90 plus percent for independence. They broke off and formed their own country And this was the second wave Decolonization if you will independence that occurred where secession was an important role and it caused many in the international community to admit that it was in fact an important issue And that it wasn't necessarily overseas colonies that were the only people that could be potentially eligible for secession Now they looked at it as self-determination even though it was condemned as ultra nationalism in many cases But it was really in many ways just a continuation of that jeppersonian Locky and tradition in terms of seceding in order to establish self-rule And it should be noted that this was in the face of an offered democratic constitution that Gorbachev at the time was working on a thing called the new union treaty We're rewriting the soviet constitution to be a multicultural democratic state now and hey baltics. Hey ukranians We're going to let you be part of our congress have votes function like a big united states of source They didn't go for it So Consider all of these different pieces when we're looking at secession right we need to look much beyond Just the the american experience on that and look at how has it been expressed internationally and how is it how has it been important over the last 70 80 years The opposite position of course is oh, we have to protect territorial integrity We have to let democracy do its thing. We can't just break off and form countries But most of the time the colonized groups haven't really been down with that It's usually the very powerful major states that don't want states Succeeding from the large say then you can see why right if the united states a scene is saying Oh, sure anybody can secede From the country then they're opening a door that they don't really want to open And so the western powers have always been kind of holding back in terms of yeah, it's okay for africans to secede But it's not okay for countries right next door to secede And that's an ongoing problem Because it's it's recognized that if you just give blanket approval to the concept of secession that endangers the legitimacy of existing large states Now historically we can see in the empirical evidence How this has been a good thing now historian Ralph Raco One of the senior fellows at our institute now late passed away, but he had a great article on the european miracle now This is the question of why did europe get rich? After the late middle ages Because if you were an alien a space alien and you were come down to planet earth In say the year 1000 and you would look around And you would say oh, well, there's a couple of pretty impressive civilizations here. There's the chinese There's the caliphates In the middle east these these are pretty rich places. They look like they got their act together Over there in the northwest. There's that europe place very backward rural. They obviously got nothing going on They'll never be anything special So you would if you had to bet your money you would have bet Oh, well clearly the rich part of the world 500 years from now is going to be The middle east or the east the wealthy part Or maybe even if you were going to include europe in that at all it would have been the the old eastern roman empire So what's now turkey eastern greece that sort of thing that was the rich part of the late roman empire The west was a backwater And yet by the 18th century Suddenly europe was extremely wealthy And then of course this only accelerated the 19th and 20th century Why was that? Well, there's a lot of research on this and the consensus among the many Is economic historians and political historians of the late middle ages The early modern period is that it was due to The fact that europe was so decentralized politically Because if you look at the east you look at the the chinese empire You look at the middle east states Which were much more centralized much more controlled from the center and you contrasted them with the west Where you had You had states states not even really functioning states. You had polities Like the holy roman empire, which was more than 1100 semi sovereign states you had of course The french kingdom you had the italian city states all small pieces So italy and germany didn't even exist at the time. They were all much smaller pieces You had of course, uh, england, which was a very small country at the time And you look at the the low countries the rine river up and down the rine dozens of different countries you could possibly live in and if you look at the the economic historical work of Economists like douglas north And they look and they see What's going on in this and You can draw upon you can draw some conclusions and see That no single political entity was able to control tax policy Was able to control the movements of peoples because the states were very weak They weren't able to unify the continent in any sort of way And it was even better in western europe in the sense that this was culturally unified in many cases So western europe in this period we're talking the high middle ages the late middle ages early modern period This was still where there was a common language Among educated people at least latin So you had the people who Really made the laws and the people who anyone was educated was a merchant and at some level of education They could communicate with people throughout the whole region the area that we would stay probably called christened them And so you could move around and still be within a pretty similar cultural milieu Right. It's catholicism in most places It's latin speaking or or languages that are similar. Obviously they had their own different dialects and by region But you can make do pretty well with the written language And this enabled people to move freely throughout the region, especially the people who had money the merchant classes The most productive people. So if you're a prince On one polity on the rine river and you decide to jack up Taxes by 50 percent. Well, your most productive people can simply move down the river To a neighboring area and take advantage of a neighboring prince who's yeah, sure come on in We'll offer you lower taxes. You want to build some productive Factories here you want to do Some good economic work. You want to bring your educated people down to our country instead of that country Please feel free Europe had that flexibility and we can see that in the work of Historian john bay schlair in his book the origins of capitalism And he says the quote the first condition for the maximization of economic efficiencies the liberation of civil society With respect to the state the expansion of capitalism owes its origins and raison d'etre To political anarchy what he means by political anarchy is the fact that europe was so divided politically There were so many choices so many different competing policies That according to bay schlair, this is a high degree of political anarchy into this day, right? If you take an international relations course You know that the word that we use to describe the international system is anarchy because there is no One super state that imposes a uniform law or imposes any sort of court system on the whole world It's a bunch of independent competing entities at the state level And the same thing was in europe except times 100 in terms of many small states competing with each other for the most productive people in these countries And just to add to some other observations along similar lines We could note the historian david landis a australian historian. I believe He says Private enterprise in the west possessing a social and political vitality without precedent or counterpart This varied needless to say from one part of europe to another And sometimes Adventitious events like war or a change of sovereign Produced a major alteration in the circumstances of the business classes on balance However, the place of private enterprise was secure And improving with time and this is apparent in the institutional arrangements That governed the getting and spending of wealth And this was according to these historians and douglas north Due to the fact that these states simply did not possess a lot of power to exert High taxation high regulation over these productive classes over wealth Because they simply didn't have the means to do so because people could so easily escape into neighboring countries And you weren't constrained also by linguistic realities, right? Not like now Like if you want to leave the united states and go to another rich country, you're probably going to have to learn another language That was not necessarily the case In much of western europe at the time Now in the modern era, we find that similar Realities exist as well. There have been especially after the collapse of the soviet union There was a revival in interest in small countries in the idea of Secession and what are the effects of it? And let's start just doing some empirical studies. Do small countries do okay economically and what they found was that? Yes, small countries can do very very well Remote small countries less so if you're way far away from Other wealthy countries and you're not anywhere where you can take advantage of streams of trade of flows of trade Then you could be problematic but even in africa, of course, which is at a much lower gdp per capita level The smaller countries tend to do better than the larger countries But this is of course, especially true in europe where you have Small countries look at all the the highest Per capita gdp countries in europe norway. It's got a population of five million people. It's the size of colorado Um, you've got uh, ireland is one of the highest gdp per capita. Also, I think about six million people Luxembourg Right a million people. It's even a microstate So a lot of these countries very very small and they tend to be the richest countries switzerland And norway are the richest countries in the world and luxembourg Far and away even richer than the united states the united states about four in terms of per capita gdp So obviously being a small country is not an impediment to wealth But we also note here that small countries tend to pursue wealth More aggressively through lower taxation and through less regulation and through more openness to migration and also openness to more business opportunities and in the research it is noted That small countries they tend to have lower taxes They tend to be more conservative. They use that term just to mean lower tax lower regulation And uh, you can see that in a lot of these post-soviet states The baltics have done amazingly well in terms of their they've now Far surpassed russia their foreign imperial master in terms of per capita gdp much richer now They've integrated well into the free trade world and by keeping their taxation levels low And it's notable that the larger states tend to pressure the smaller states into raising taxes Well, you'll see all a lot if you follow the news of it. They'll talk about tax normalization What this really means is raising taxes in every country because large countries they've got they tend to have higher tax Let rates than smaller countries. So the germans and the french They're mad that the irish and the hungarians and some other small countries have lower tax rates And what does that mean? It means corporations tend to move to those countries and take advantage of the essentially political arbitrage of sorts So, oh, it's not fair that these little countries have lower tax rates. So let's come up with a way to force them to raise their taxes So they're hard at work passing tax normalization schemes That say, well, if you're going to be a member of the eu If you're going to be part of the international community, you have to raise your taxes to a certain level So this is a backdoor attempt at political centralization But you can see how the natural impulse in many cases for small countries is to actually lower taxes And this is of course true for many of the smaller countries in the developing world as well We see this in the smaller countries in Africa and South Asia. They're More open to free trade. They're more interested in trade less interested in tariffs and protectionism They're not trying to protect themselves and isolate themselves. They're actually trying to integrate into the larger international world So, uh, we can see real practical benefits As well and the fact that the empirical evidence shows that small states Simply do well in many cases being small is not an impediment to well And uh, so you will see arguments saying well, you can't form smaller countries The you know, the reason the United States is large is because it's it's or the reason the United States is rich Is because it's large and has a big footprint in the international economy That doesn't hurt, but it's not a prerequisite for becoming a wealthy country by any means And the United States didn't get rich just by being big it got rich through its liberal economic policies Now so in the last, uh, 10 minutes or so Uh, some of the other issues that we need to talk about I think are stuff that people always bring up in terms of the geopolitical side Of things, okay, you'll hear this a lot fine. You could break up the United States into some smaller pieces and okay We recognize they could do okay uh, they would be fine in terms of Uh Getting companies to move there. They could reduce taxes people would be generally fine economically, but Won't just china invade all those countries then and conquer them or whatever your current bogeyman of the day is right In the old day if you had argued argued in favor of secession and say the 1980s They would have just said oh well then the sylvia union will invade the united states if it breaks up into say two or three or four Or 50 pieces so you can't can't ever do that because foreign countries will immediately invade and conquer the new smaller countries Uh now there's research in this field showing here that actually size is not really the determining factor in terms of military defense prowess and there's there's uh Some interesting theories behind this which you'll find in the international relations journals And the point that they make and I and I draw upon a lot of the research by a china guy No, a china expert guy writes about china named michael beckley And he's got a boat States even if china continues to ascend it's never it's not really going to catch up with the united states It's not really something the united states has to worry about Uh because china has boatloads of its own problems in terms of border disputes It's gdp per capita so much lower than the united states and that's a key factor What beckley notes along with some previous Researchers who are trying to calculate. What is the military prowess of a country? And it's not most of the time they will say oh, well, it's gdp Country that has high gdp obviously is more militarily power Why because it has all this access to resources so it can buy more tanks It can build more nukes airplanes and all that stuff, but beckley says It's really net wealth that's important because any big country with a all that's required to have big Total gdp is a large population and we can see this in india and china right these countries have very large gdps But it's mostly built on the fact that you have a very large number of people who are producing a relatively small gdp But if you add that all together you get a pretty big gdp however, that's not net gdp in the sense of it's not wealth because china even though it has very large total gdp Can't just convert all that into war making capability Why because the lower that your level of standard of living is the lower your per capita gdp is the more of your wealth has to go to basic subsistence So consider in the united states the standard of living is so high That the u.s. Government here could and i'm not saying this is a good thing that this is possible But the u.s. Government here could Simply mobilize during world war three and say okay, we're just going to start taxing the hell out of everybody and we are going to You know start a 80% tax on everything and it's all going to go to the war effort And most of what you produce now has to go to the war effort. You can't even keep it for yourself Now they could do that for a pretty long time before americans start starving today Because the american standard of living is so far above subsistence That you can really impoverish americans down considerably Before you get to the point of people just straight up dying from a lack of resources In a country like china you don't have nearly as much room to do that because the gdp Percavitas is a mere fraction of the american one something about 70 000 per capita gdp in the united states versus About 18 000 in china. So i mean that's a pretty big differential So you start reduce you're starting at 18 000 gdp per capita now you start taxing those people at 80 percent Well, you're pretty quick ending up with everybody back at subsistence level and now you've got a revolutionary situation on your hands Where you've got people starving whereas it's much you can as the u.s. Government you can exploit to the people And and and you know get blood from that stone for much longer From the americans because they have so much surplus wealth And that allows the that allows a rich country To make war to extend its war making power for much longer and in a much more concentrated and aggressive fashion And so this is a point that's feckley making and what he says really if you want to compare countries What you have to do is multiply so he has an equation essentially have to multiply per capita gdp By total gdp And if you do that then What you find is that the united states has about double the war making capability of china even in its present form Even though on a strict gdp basis they're equal or even you could argue that china's gdp is slightly higher Although those are probably based on bogus numbers So you can this also shows up in other places right and feckley notes Then in a number of cases if you just go on the gdp metric We have no explanation for why small countries keep beating big countries So for example the 19th century during the opium wars Britain repeatedly beat china in a number of wars even though china had a much larger gdp Than the united kingdom the united kingdom has never in fact had a gdp larger than china And yet of course dominated china for many decades also wouldn't explain why japan Dominated china over and over again in the 19th century and in the early 20th century On the on the strict gdp measure Israel is now and has always been the weakest country in the middle east which obviously isn't true Uh israel is a very powerful country and arguably the most powerful country in its region Why because it's so much richer than its neighbors Also by the strict gdp measure the soviet union was many times more powerful in the united states in the 1980s obviously not the case Now the cia was constantly saying that the the soviet union was very wealthy and everything was going great And it turned out they were completely wrong So wrong in fact that the senate floated some bills to uh End the cia in the 1980s because it turned out they were useless in terms of intelligence gathering About the soviet union. I was just so wrong about the wealth differential there So we cannot simply really calculate it On those on those grounds and what it turns out is if you want to be a militarily dominant country The the most foolproof way to do this is to become wealthy And of course you become wealthy through liberal economic policy And small being small and more nimble can also be a benefit there But it's also important to note that small countries of course enter into defense agreements all the time It's not like every every independent country is at war with every other independent country You see this sometimes when you talk about the us splitting into other pieces. Oh Well, if the us splits into two or more pieces, they're gonna immediately start fighting each other. Why? No explanation is given And how do you explain the fact that united states and canada have been a piece since 1815? For that's more than 200 years. How did they manage that? It wasn't just because canada's smaller and weaker because we have lots of cases of smaller and weaker countries next to more powerful countries that are at war anyway And so the canadians just for whatever reason they've decided not to insert terrorist cells into the united states Even though that's what we're told will happen if you have two sovereign countries That are next to each other And Especially in countries that speak the same language if the united states were to break up into two different countries We find ample evidence showing that countries that come from a similar cultural and legal background and they speak the same language They're almost always at peace with each other No, of course, the united states has been at peace with the united kingdom since 1815 Even though for most of that period the united kingdom was actually the more powerful country And then the two countries were about equal In the early to mid 20th century. Why weren't they at war? This is a great mystery if your belief is that Once countries are separated by international borders that they they resort to war frequently and they simply do not So that's important to keep in mind as well And then of course, there's just the fact that If the united states were to break up into smaller pieces like any other country Why couldn't they enter into some sort of defense pact? Right? This was of course the original vision For the united states Under the articles of confederation in the 1770s the united states was essentially a free trade zone And a military union a defense pact that was its primary function was the government of the united states, so Uh, they moved away from that But it was recognized that you can simply have countries that have similar cultural backgrounds Similar goals they enter into packs of a variety of independent countries that defend themselves So this idea that if the if the united states were to break up into a few different countries and the chinese would immediately invade Tampa Bay or boston And then the new republic of florida would think oh, thank you know, this is a great idea The the chinese are here now. Let's invade alabama. Let's invade massachusetts What is the scenario that would cause this to happen that would cause one half of the us to ally With the chinese everybody knows what would really happen if someone invaded canada We all know that the united states would immediately freak out and go to war with whatever whatever country invaded canada Uh, so why would especially if it's the russian So why would they suddenly be why would one the new united states part one Suddenly just throw up its hands and say oh, well Uh, the chinese invaded united states part two I guess there's nothing we can do about it. We know that really in practice These english speaking countries that have a common history would simply unite together Uh to fight off the invaders Now, of course, this is all just like fantasy land anyway The the idea that china has the capability to send a flotilla across the pacific ocean To invade california is just really not feasible It's kind of laughable really, but this is usually the Uh the explanation for why the united states can never be broken up is because foreign countries will immediately Invade and they usually mention china because that's the only country that they know could even Remotely feasibly be offered as a country that could attempt to pull that off And then Just to note is a final issue here on the issue of nuclear weapons That's often then brought up as a final clincher Well, you can't have that level of chaos happen because then nuclear war the nukes will start flying And i've actually seen this addressed a couple of times online And we are we again we have historical precedents for this and why it doesn't lead To fortunately world war three at the time the soviet union broke up And the ukranians declared independence ukraine then at the moment it became independent became the Country hosting the third largest nuclear stockpile in the world Because of course 40 percent or so of the soviet nukes were in ukraine when the soviet union was a country So suddenly ukraine is independent and there's thousands of nukes in ukraine, which is in its own independent country Well, why didn't world war three break out immediately? Why didn't ukraine and russian start nuking each other? Well, there's reasons for that is that there's nuclear weapons have a very strong deterrent power It's for the same reason nuclear war hasn't broken out at all since 1945 is deterrence works And so what we can see is what actually happened is that ukraine Decided to denuclearize Which didn't wasn't necessary And the united states had pressured it to do so just to get rid of your nukes The united states wants as few countries as possible to have nuclear weapons And so ukraine give it up and we'll give you some defense guarantees Of course the united states never lessens its own nuclear arsenal. It just wants everybody else to give up theirs And they succeeded in convincing the ukranians to give up theirs Now at the time a lot of people said this is a terrible idea for the ukranians If this is like 1994 if ukranians get rid of your nukes, russians will invade you someday And they're like nah, it's not don't worry about So I can guarantee you that the russians would not have invaded At least Kiev The russians might have invaded some borderlands in eastern ukraine as they did in 2022 But they certainly wouldn't have sent troops to try and topple the regime in Kiev Because it's when you do that that the nukes start flying But ukraine doesn't have nukes anymore. So they didn't have that capability now How did they actually denuclearize well at first they didn't at first they wanted to keep their nukes And we could see how something similar might unfold in the united states So what happened was is you got three of course you got a nuclear triad right you got ground-based nukes And those are the the toughest nut to to crack But you've also got nukes in planes and in submarines And not all countries have a nuclear triad, but the soviets did And so with that that's easy you you can just move the subs and the planes around and so really Wherever those planes and subs were when independence happened that country controls those subs and planes Um, so that was that was easy to see now the question on the the land-based nukes was slightly different um Because there were also the issue of launch codes and the fact that you had soviet troops in those bunkers Well, the problem ended up solving itself because the soviet state stopped paying those soviet soldiers in the bunkers and They so they came out of the bunkers and they went home because they weren't getting paid anymore I read one analysis online that said yeah, they The ukrainians were never able to address the fact of the the bunkers because the russians were just going to stay in there and maintain Control of the bunkers forever as if they were like those those japanese soldiers who remained on those like pacific islands for 30 years After the war with we're like hunting their own food and living in caves or something Well russians had nowhere near that level of commitment as soon as the the checks stopped coming They handed the bunkers over to the the ukrainians Now the ukrainians didn't have the launch codes But they were starting to rewrite their software so they could get the launch codes But they physically controlled the bunkers at that point because the russian soldiers left the ukrainians moved in took over the Bunkers and then the russians didn't have control of those nukes Anymore and yet it somehow all ended peacefully And so I would submit to you that that's not a deal breaker either on the issue of secession as well as we've got historical examples of A nuclear arms state breaking up into smaller pieces and Into smaller pieces where the majorities hated each other as you can see nowadays The ukrainian majority isn't a big fan of the russians. They have their own language. They have their own history They've been at war since 2014 not just in 2022 But the americans don't even have that cultural divide nowhere near what you see in eastern europe and so that's something just to keep in mind is that Uh, the the prospects for a peaceful solution to nuclear Decentralization, which is what would happen in case of secession actually much better In north america than what you saw in eastern europe. That was a much higher risk situation, which nevertheless ended peacefully So I mean, I think we can just wrap up there addressing some of those issues make leave time for some questions Um, so I've tried to address and I've got a book on this called breaking away Which you can find on you can get on on amazon if you want Which tries to address all these issues military issues Even issues of national debt that we have historical presidents for that as well that we can look at and really just thinking far beyond the american box In terms of secession thinking of it in terms of natural right of self-determination thinking in terms of Okay, how do minorities really protect their rights from a larger majority a larger colonial majority in many cases And then what are the practical effects as well can small countries make a go of it can small countries do well And then what about these sticky geopolitical situations that will unfold when you have a large powerful country break up into smaller pieces and So I've just tried to provide you with some of the starting point for a lot of this And of course in the book extensively footnoted You can see a lot of the journal articles and the books that that I used to look into some of the history of this And I would recommend if you're interested in the topic just explore some of the international relations journals that mostly address this You know if you went on j-store or something you just looked up self-determination and secession You'd get a lot of returns on that that would help look at this issue in more detail And provides I think some more clarity and thinking and what goes into this topic and some of the historical examples So thank you very much Oh We have a microphone for you. Hold on Thank you so much. Oh, you have a question. Okay, you then you okay Yes, so I actually come from my country a region where we've been trying to like, you know, they've been making attempts to proceed For like since 1960 or something. That's Nigeria So Is this the biapra region? Okay Thank you Yeah, the biapra. So what I think here is that every single thing I had about secession from you is more like looking at the national and international Um, but then come to the level of individuals, you know companies, you know secession presents a lot of uncertainty For you know businesses for families for individuals. How does this all fitting because um for us The biaphrams we are like, are we going to be better off with this or But hearing you secession actually pose a lot of promises But at this level of analysis, we really can't Fitting the level of uncertainty it presents So how does it like fit in? How do we get to? Get comfortable with this idea because we see a lot of things playing out. She's Nigerian as well, but um We see Like what you talked about the over time the judiciary will begin to reflect The culture of the logical Exactly what is happening. So we have a lot of uncertainty. How do we kind of like begin to um Understand and settle in into this Secession thing though, we know we may not have it soon, but certainly we would have it one day Yes, um I would say that the important factor there is to really the way that you can reduce uncertainty Looking at from other historical examples and the discussion the guided discussion We're doing tomorrow. We look at a journal article that looks at successful secession situations probably in your situation the most applicable is Uh, Singapore when it broke off from Malaysia Um, this was in my understanding. I'm no expert on Africa But I understand also is that Biafra tends to be one of the wealthier parts of Nigeria also, right? So that would also Be synonymous to the Singapore situation where you're taking a smaller wealthier part of a country and breaking off uh The work that was done usually to try and minimize the Uncertainty was to work with Other countries so that before secession came You had certain relationships in place that that let you know that you were going to have existing trading partners and other parts of the world that you could then Take advantage of in terms of uh external capital coming in and replacing the lost capital From the national government that you're leaving behind Right because the national government always they're extracting wealth Especially when you're the wealthier part of the country, right? They're extracting your wealth spreading it around And there's always a difficult transition there where you got to break off And get you're never going to get back that wealth that was extracted But you've got to rebuild to a certain extent your own institutions But to do that you're probably going to require foreign capital and certainly foreign trade And I think in most cases There's now you can never eliminate the uncertainty But I think in most of those cases they they did their homework ahead of time in the sense of They had already opened negotiations with a variety of members in the international community To get buy-in So by the time this is ceded there were already other countries ready to Recognize them as independent countries to open trade and all of that sort of thing So it is extremely hard to engage in unilateral secession without already some major international partners And I that seems to be the only way to really do that And that could be very difficult