Posted on 12/17/2019 5:27:26 AM PST by Kaslin
Fresh from his triumphal "Get Brexit Done!" campaign, Prime Minister Boris Johnson anticipates a swift secession from the European Union.
But if Britain secedes from the EU, warns Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland will secede from the United Kingdom.
Northern Ireland, which voted in 2016 to remain in the EU, could follow Scotland out of Britain, leaving her with "Little England" and Wales.
Not going to happen, says Boris. His government will not allow a second referendum on Scottish independence.
Yet the Scottish National Party won 48 of Scotland's 59 seats in Parliament, and Sturgeon calls this a mandate for a new vote to secede:
"If (Boris) thinks ... saying no is the end of the matter then he is going to find himself completely and utterly wrong. ... You cannot hold Scotland in the union against its will."
She has a point. If a majority of Scots wish to secede, how does a democratic Great Britain indefinitely deny them the right of self-determination?
Is Scotland fated to become for Britain what Catalonia is to Spain?
Where does this phenomenon, this continuing unraveling of old and proliferation of new nations, this epidemic of secessionism, end?
The most recent population explosion of new nations began three decades ago, when 15 republics of the USSR became independent nations. Soon, several of the 15 began to unravel further.
Transnistria seceded from Moldova. South Ossetia and Abkhazia seceded from Georgia. Chechnya sought to break free of Russia, only to be crushed. Since 2015, the Donbass has sought to secede from Ukraine.
When Josip Tito's Yugoslavia collapsed, six "nations" seceded from Belgrade.
When did secessionism begin? The Americans started it all.
The first great secessionist cause was the Revolution, when the 13 American colonies declared and won independence from the British crown.
It is solemnly declared today that our Revolution was about ideas, such as the equality of all men. But the author of the Declaration did not believe in equality.
Jefferson was a Virginia plantation owner, some of whose slaves were with him in Philadelphia. He described Native Americans in the Declaration as "merciless Indian Savages." The British are fraternally called "brethren" with whom we share "ties of a common kindred," but who have been "deaf to the voice of consanguinity."
I.e, our cousins have been deaf to the call of our common blood.
John Jay, in Federalist 2, before the Constitution was even ratified, spoke of the elements that formed the nation -- "one connected country to one united people ... descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion ... similar in their manners and customs."
A second secessionist movement, six decades later, created a second American nation. Texans under Sam Houston rose up and ripped that vast province away from its young mother country, Mexico.
The third secessionist movement united 11 states that sought to create a new confederated nation outside the Union, as the revolutionary generation had created a new nation outside of Britain.
In the 19th century, a dozen new nations were created by Latin American secessionists of the Spanish and Portuguese empires who emulated the example of the Americans of 1776.
After 1945, colonies of the British, French, Portuguese and Belgian empires seceded to produce a baby boom of new nations whose most common characteristic seems to be that all receive foreign aid and all have seats in the U.N. General Assembly.
If the secessionism epidemic is to someday expire, then its causes will have to be addressed. And what are they?
Secessionism appears rooted principally in issues of national identity -- ethnicity, religion, race, language, culture and "the mystic chords of memory" -- most of which Jay identified as both uniting Americans and separating us from our British "brethren."
Yet these issues of identity appear not to be receding but rising in the Caucasus, Middle East, Africa and South Asia.
The Kurds, the Palestinians, the Baluch and many more seek their own nations. Taiwan's secession is not recognized by China. The secession of Russian-speaking Donbass is not recognized by a U.S.-armed Ukraine, or by us.
As more and more people identify themselves by who they are, and are not, secessions of people from each other will continue.
These are not inconsequential matters. In 1939, the question of whether 300,000 Germans in a Polish-controlled city, Danzig, should be restored to German rule led to the worst war in the history of the world.
The peace of mankind in the 21st century may well depend upon our ability to accommodate this inexorable secessionist drive to some degree.
In June 1945, the U.N. had 50 members. It begins 2020 with 193.
Last week, Bougainville, a South Pacific island cluster of Papua New Guinea, voted 98%, in a nonbinding referendum for independence, to become the world's newest nation. Papua New Guinea won its own independence from Australia when Gerald Ford was president.
And the beat goes on.
Same with Catalonia. More trouble than they're worth.
Mankind is a tribal species and we want to live among our own. That is simply reality.
If you can’t beat ‘em, quit. Look for CA to try to secede if Trump wins in 2020.
I also scratch my head at what is going on with the Scots. You have people who are [supposedly] uber proud of their Scottish heritage & culture. Yet they want EU control and open borders. It simply does not compute.
He says that like it’s a bad thing....
The Globalists are pushing hard for one world government. Meanwhile, the number of countries increases. People want sovereignty.
The media talks about the EU and globalism like an inevitable force that everyone supports. I think the opposite is true.
The desire to secede stems from one problem that pervades politics anywhere and everywhere; That is that central governments feed their power growth on the backs of all of it’s constituent parts. It’s true if your in Scotland and London grows at your expense, and it’s true if your in South Ossetia and Georgia grows at your expense, and it’s true if you are in Monticello and Indianapolis gets bigger on your backs. It’s not just about freedom and self-determination, although those are very powerful motivators. Sometimes it’s just about being liberated from an exploitative structure of governance.
“secessionist drive”
No, the problem is the drive of government in its desire to expand its power and authority over people. The secessionist “drive” is a REaction to that government over-reach.
There’s no reason to secede from a government that’s not always in your face and trying to run your day to day life while picking most of your pocket.
Limited government is what precludes secession.
The threat of secession is the only way to hold accountable a small ‘r’ republican form of government.
As Pat Buchanan has pointed out, national borders are cultural barriers. With the diverging cultures in the United States, it is only a matter of time before coastal areas secede and form an EU-like entity, themselves.
Please let that happen!!!
The secessionist action taking place is an outward manifestation of the inherent human desire to live in a community of shared human traits. It is a knife driven through the heart of world globalists and a testament to the driving force of country sovereignty. When one steps back and observes how the world was originally ordered into countries (communities), you see the natural dynamic at work. Trying to turn the world into a ‘one world village’ is an anathema to this most basic of human desires. Call it nationalism if you will, but it is a very real desire to belong to a common community with similar belief systems and human traits.
With the diverging cultures in the United States, it is only a matter of time before coastal areas secede and form an EU-like entity, themselves.
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Good.
Although the outcome is inevitable and more a question of how long it will take. Eventually they will not be happy just having the largest ports, and the isolation of their service and broker-centric economies will correct because they wont have nearly the natural resources as well as many other commodities they had before and wont like the prices and they will attempt to stifle, deal, and block foreign trade and try to get leverage in their trade deals with non-coastal US. When that doesn’t work they will use heavy handed tactics to start ‘annexing’ valuable territories, borders will get closed, skirmishes will happen, and war will break out.
Yeah. My understanding is first, Johnson has to allow a referendum of Scotland.
Second, if Scotland secedes after the UK leaves the EU, they will have to apply for membership as a new member. Spain has promised to veto that application because they don’t want the same thing to happen in Basque and Catalonia.
Their lust for socialism overrides any sense of independence or sovereignty. Stop all forms of foreign aid. Let the various “secessionist” countries attempt to survive on their own.
“Scottish”
There’s a high concentration of commie mentality in scotland so they see the EU as more like them.
I think Scottish universities were some of the first to embrace the Marxist mentality. The IRA guy, Connolly, who was one of the leaders in the Easter Rising that led to partitioned Ireland went to school there and picked up those commie habits.
From him onward, the IRA was as much about socialism as it was about Irish independence.
Nations are never meant to expand forever. Eventually the ability of the state to maintain itself based on founding principals, when expanded to gigantic proportions, gets corrupted by regionalism, and factionalism and becomes impossible as expediency wins out, leading to general exploitation of one region in order to placate the one with more people or the loudest voices.
Happened to Rome, The Persian Empire, the British Empire, the USSR.
Modern travel and communication only slows the inevitable. The U.S., U.K., and Australia are unique in that we had traditions, language, and freedoms that made our nations so tight that the idea of a breakup was odious. But corruption, regionalism, and creeping tyranny always maintain the momentum to disunion. Canada is about to get hit with this because it enshrined regionalism into their laws, and exploited the west to pay off their largest city, and the French-Canadians. The U.K. is likely next, with the U.S. a bit further off if nothing changes, with Australia safe for a while.
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