"Dividing the National Map" (Library of Congress)The Case for Exit Rights Federalism
(stock.adobe.com)What Makes Civil Wars Different
'The Last Argument of Kings' (Creative Commons 3.0/Wikimedia Commons)“An indestructible Union composed of indestructible States?”
Will Spain Splinter?
After months of secessionist agitation in Catalonia, Spain’s government has called for fresh regional elections to be held on December 21. With Catalonia deeply divided, and with most of the ruling coalition’s political leadership in jail or in exile, this promises to be the most politically charged vote in Spain’s recent constitutional memory.
Catalonia: Secession, Constitution, and Liberty
Three flags fluttering together on a windy day: the flag of the European Union, the ancient flag of Catalonia and the starry unofficial flag symbolizing the desire of Catalans for secesion from Spain.
Catalonia has entered a critical phase in its attempt to secede from Spain, a process initiated by the regional government and parliament back in 2013. Secession in a Western European country in the 21st century necessarily draws attention. People all over the world feel that type of sympathy often induced by revolutionary movements in distant countries. But this is not a repetition of what we saw in the 18th, 19th, or 20th centuries. This is more complex.
Making Jefferson Safe for the Historians
Washington, DC - Jefferson MemorialRice University’s John Boles was for many years (1983-2013) editor of The Journal of Southern History, which after The Journal of American History is the most-cited scholarly journal in the field of American history. In that position, he had substantial influence on, besides being substantially influenced by, the shape of the field today. Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty comes as a kind of valedictory. As in his earlier work, Boles is self-consciously guided in writing it by recent developments in academic historiography. Contemporary politics make themselves felt in his story of the Master of Monticello, too. A full one-volume account has long…
Compromising the Nature of the Union
first edition of S. A. Mitchell Jr.’s 1860 map of Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Missouri Kansas and Nebrasa.The Framers of the Constitution recognized that in a country as extensive as the United States, compromise between partisan groups was the price of Union. The zone of acceptable compromise had constantly to be calculated and reconsidered because Americans put the Constitution to practical use by using it as a partisan instrument to win substantive policy conflicts.
The Spunk of Albion
Blake's image of Albion from his A Large Book of DesignsYou may have noticed that not much is said in this space about what goes on in other countries. It’s not that I don’t have opinions; it’s just I don’t imagine mine are worth much. I conspicuously didn’t take a stand on Brexit. It seemed to me there was a good case to be made for Britain’s leaving the European Union and a good case to be made for its staying in. I thought I’d leave it up to them. If I were British, I would have been more psyched up about the whole thing.
The outcome surprised me, because the past history of secessionist movements—such as Quebec and Scotland—has been of a petering out at the end. Just enough people get all prudent and make a safe choice. Not only that, all the factions of the respectably British cognitive elite—top politicians, public intellectuals, the business leaders, celebrities, the unions, and so forth—advocated making the Progressive choice. “Progressive” here means stay the course when it comes to evolving beyond the nation-state in the direction of larger and more cosmopolitan unions. We aspire to be citizens of the world, politics being that pathology that we shed as we move, as Tyler Cowen puts it, from being brutish to being nice.
Should We Party Like It’s 1938?
In further demonstration that this is a forum for vigorous debate among friends: I strenuously disagree with Brother McGinnis’s post on Scottish independence. As usual he gets the analytics right: no matter how the vote turns out, it will embolden independence movements elsewhere. John is also right in suggesting that the EU has by design and institutional logic fostered such movements. It has done so by design (for example, through regional transfer payments) on the theory that anything that is bad for nation-states must therefore be good for the EU’s federalism project. It has done so by logic because the overall umbrella of free trade (by and large) reduces the expected price of secession. They’ve come a long way. There’s no longer a point in obsessing over a Belgium without a functional government because there is no longer a reason to have a Belgium in the first place.
