Secession The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law

Recently there has been a significant increase in the number of instances in which groups or regions have sought to secede from their current governments in order to estab-lish their own political entities. The most dramatic examples have occurred at the level of nation-states: the separation of Pakistan and Indian and, later, of Pakistan and Bangla-desh; the disintegration of Yugoslavia into parts defined by ethnic identities and religious beliefs; the fractionation of the former Soviet Union into numerous independent countries; the dissolution of Czechoslovakia into two independent republics; the two recent plebi-scites in the Province of Quebec, Canada, narrowly failing to approve breaking away from the other provinces of Canada to form an independent nation; the movement by those in the southern half of Sudan to secede from the northern half; the popular program of the Northern League, an Italian political party, to have the economically-successful depart-ments in the north of Italy secede from southern Italy so as to create an independent country called ÒPadaniaÓ; the separatist movement in the Basque region of Spain; and the recent plebiscites in Scotland and Wales to establish national parliaments, with limited powers, for the first time since the Act of Union of 1707. There are also examples to be found for the desire to secede from units of govern-ment other than nations: in November, 1993, the residents of Staten Island, one of the five boroughs that make up New York City, voted overwhelmingly to secede from New York City; representatives to the California General Assembly from the San Fernando Valley introduced a bill for that region to secede from the City of Los Angeles; in 1993 the citi-zens of Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, and Jacksonville Beach, Florida, voted to secede from the City of Jacksonville to found Ocean County; Long Island, Maine, voted on July 1, 1993, to secede from Portland, the largest city in Maine; the Texas panhandle wants to se-cede from the rest of Texas; the Oklahoma panhandle wants to secede from Oklahoma; an