Splitsville

Quebec tried and occasionally thinks about it now and again. Catalonians dreams about it. Scotland is voting on it. Kurds seem to want it. Even non-ISIS Iraqi Sunnis yearn for it. Ethnic Russians seem willing to die for it in Ukraine. Boko Haram is moving towards it in Nigeria. The Islamic State seems to have done it… so far. Sudan did it. The Soviet Union was forced into it and now its Moscow center seems to want to undo it. As economic times get tough, as ethnic groups feel unrepresented and at the whim of unsympathetic “others,” there is a circle-the-wagons mentality that pits clearly defined “separateness” against the larger geographical whole that surrounds them.

It’s easy to focus on where the efforts are violent and bloody, but peaceful efforts are rising or have risen even in Europe and North America. Where minorities are not strong enough to dominate the bigger unit, they are increasingly opting for bugging out and creating a new smaller state reflective of their perceived needs.

The peaceful groundswell in Western Europe seems almost an irrelevant side show, but the ramifications of these potential changes are huge. The vote in Scotland looms, and apparently, voting works in the UK. Not the same conditions in Spain: “Hundreds of thousands of Catalans [thronged] the streets of Barcelona on [September 11^th] to demand the right to vote on a split from Spain, with their ambitions boosted by an independence referendum scheduled for [September 18^th] in Scotland… About half a million Catalans have signed up to dress in red and yellow, the colours of the Catalan flag, to form a ‘V’ for ‘vote,’ organisers say, a show of support for the perceived right to decide on a status separate from Spain…

“Catalonia is a wealthy region in Spain's northeast with its own language and culture. Its long-standing independence movement has grown significantly over the last decade, exacerbated by Spain's economic crisis and what many see as a deaf-ears tactic by the Spanish government in Madrid… The Catalan regional government, which like other Spanish regions has a large degree of autonomy, has called a referendum on Nov. 9 over whether to separate. But the Madrid government says the vote is illegal and cannot go ahead.” Reuters, September 11^th.

And if Scotland is able to secede, what currency does it use? Is it a part of the European Union or does it have to make that decision anew? How bound is it to international treaties signed by the U.K.? Does it have to adopt a legal system with appellate courts that don’t yet exist? What is the status of the monarchy? What right does it have to military forces (Northern Scotland is the UK’s biggest naval base)? What is its obligation to national debt? And little things? What happens to the BBC? Lots of questions with few clear answers.

As we look at these trends, it’s easy to pretend “that’s them and their problem, but it would never happen here,” but then the Civil War tells us that given enough internal polarization, indeed it can and it has. I’ll go one step further and suggest that if Americans cannot get on the same page and act like one nation, it may be inevitable, made infinitely worse with the proliferation of guns and a vast horde of Americans believing that they have a constitutional right to use those guns to defend their perception of “American values.”

And for a legal secession to occur, a local U.S. region cannot unilaterally withdraw without the consent of the whole in an extremely complex process that literally requires amending the Constitution… suggesting that any break-up will occur on an entirely different and probably violent level. It’s hard to see macro-trends when you are living among them, but sometimes we need to try and see what is happening all around us at part of a bigger reality.

 I’m Peter Dekom, and if we love our country enough, we need to seek out a new common bond and a bigger commitment to the United States of America… or risk losing it.