Over
the next several years, puppet regimes and states-in-name-only broke away from
Soviet domination and formed sovereign states. Some states which had completely
ceased to exist—such as the Baltic states—declared independence and became
states in the own right. In total, secession and decentralization in this era
brought about more than twenty newly independent states.
This period served as an important
reminder that human history is not, in fact, just a story of ever increasing
state power and centralization.
Since then, however, the world has seen
very few successful secession movements. A handful of new countries have come
into being over the past twenty years, such as East Timor and South Sudan. But
in spite of many efforts by separatists worldwide, there have been few changes
to the lines on the maps.
This has certainly been the case in Europe
and the Americas, where from Quebec to Scotland to Catalonia to Venice demands for
independence have been met with trepidation and sometimes outright threats
of violence from central governments.
This is
partly due to the fact state organizations—that is, the people who control
them—have little motivation to give up the benefits conferred by bigness.
States that control larger geographic areas and larger populations have greater
ability to project their power and get more power.
Greater
size means a larger frontier that can act as a physical buffer between the
state’s enemies and the state’s economic core. Physical size is also helpful in
terms of pursuing self-sufficiency in both energy production and agriculture.
More land means greater potential for resource extraction and acreage devoted
to food production. From the state’s perspective, these activities are good
things because they can be taxed or expropriated.
In terms of population size, state control
over larger populations means more human workers to tax, and, potentially, more
highly productive urban workers. Historically at least, larger populations
also provided personnel for military uses.
Thus, states that control large territories
and populations are able to directly control larger and more diverse economies
within their borders. This means more tax revenue, which in turn means greater
military capability. Naturally, state organizations are not inclined to
abandon these advantages lightly, even when secession movement express a desire
that they do so.
Why
States Sometimes Get Smaller
Sometimes,
though, states are forced to
contract in size and scope. This usually happens when the cost of maintaining
the status quo becomes higher than the cost of
allowing a region to gain autonomy.
Historically,
the cost of maintaining unity is raised through military means. Examples of
this tactic being successfully employed include the cases of the United States,
the Republic of Ireland, and some of the successor states of Yugoslavia.
But secession and decentralization have
also often been achieved through bloodless or near bloodless means. This was
the case in Iceland and throughout most of the post-Iron Curtain states.
Bloodless
secession movements, however, only occur when the parent state is weakened by
larger events beyond the secession movement itself. Iceland, for example,
seceded in 1944, when World War II ensured that Denmark was in no position to
object. The post-Soviet states seceded when the Soviet state had been rendered
impotent by decades of economic decline and (in 1991) a failed coup. Nor is it
a coincidence that India gained independence from the United Kingdom in the
years immediately following World War II. It is likely the UK could have held
on to India through military means indefinitely, but this would have come at a
very high cost to the British economy and standard of living.1
It is
possible to envision largely “amicable” separations. The model for this is
the separation of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand from the the United
Kingdom. But even in these cases, British control over these Commonwealth
states’ foreign policy was not totally abandoned until after World War II, when
the British state had been weakened by depression and war. Moreover, the
British state assumed that these newly independent states would remain highly
reliable geopolitical and economic allies indefinitely. Thus,
the geopolitical cost of separation was perceived to be low.
Mega-States
Are the Ideal State
In
cases where the seceding state is perceived to have differing cultural,
economic, or geopolitical interests—which is true of the overwhelming majority of cases—the parent state is, all else being equal,
likely to meet demands for secession with much hostility.
Although
liberal ideology has diminished the perception among much of the world’s
population that bigger is better, most government agents—who are by nature
decidedly illiberal—see things differently. For them, the
ideal state is most certainly a large state.
Those
who delight in the generous application of state violence have noticed that it
is not a coincidence the world’s most powerful states—e.g., the US, Russia,
China—are those that control large populations, large economic centers, and
large geographic areas with sizable frontiers. The combination of these three
factors in various configuration ensures that existential threats to the regime
are few and far between. Russia’s relatively small economy—only a fraction of
the size of Germany’s economy—is mitigated by its enormous geographical
frontiers. Its economy is nonetheless large enough to
maintain a nuclear arsenal. China’s per capita wealth is quite small, but
Chinese territory and the sheer size of its overall economy ensures protection
from foreign attack. The US’s enormous economy and its huge ocean frontiers
render it essentially immune to all existential threats other than
large-scale nuclear war.
Large
states such as these are limited only by the defensive capabilities of other
states, and by the threat of domestic unrest and resistance. As Ludwig von
Mises noted in Liberalism, states can take only as
much power as their populations are willing to give it. There are limits
to the public’s generosity.
Totalitarian
States Require Bigness
This
relationship between bigness and state power has been illustrated in the fact
totalitarian states are virtually always large states.
In
her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
examines a number of nontotalitarian dictatorships that sprang up in Europe
before the Second World War. These included (among others) the Baltic states,
Hungary, Portugal, and Romania. In many of these cases, Arendt contends the
regimes attempted to turn themselves into totalitarian
regimes, but failed. This
was largely due to their lack of size:
Although [totalitarian ideology] had served well enough to organize the
masses until the movement seized power, the absolute size of the country then
forced the would-be totalitarian ruler of masses into the more familiar
patterns of class or party dictatorship. The truth is that these countries
simply did not control enough human material to allow for total domination and
its inherent great losses in population. Without much hope for the conquest of
more heavily populated territories, the tyrants in these small countries were
forced into a certain old-fashioned moderation lest they lose whatever people
they had to rule. This is also why 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 would she have known a fully developed totalitarian
rulership.
Arendt
was not an economist, but had she been one, she might have noted that the
necessity of size is so central to totalitarian regimes because they are so
economically inefficient. Contrary to promises of machine-like efficiency made
by advocates of ever more powerful states, totalitarian states are absurdly
wasteful both in terms of capital and human life. The same is true—to varying
extents—for all regimes. But as the most
centrally-planned ones—whether totalitarian or not—quickly become economic
basket cases, large size is necessary. A smaller state would quickly exhaust
its capital and its population, and the regime would collapse. Size can provide
the appearance of sustainability for longer.
Cultural
factors cannot be ignored, however. Arendt concedes this process of collapse
can be drawn out longer in societies that are more ideologically tolerant of
it:
Conversely, the chances for
totalitarian rule are frighteningly good in the lands of traditional Oriental
despotism, in India and China…
That
region’s relative tolerance for despotism is enabled by local ideologies that
foster a “feeling of superfluousness,” which according to Arendt “has been
prevalent for centuries in the contempt for the value of human life.”
Continued
Movement toward Smaller States
Fortunately for humanity, the trend in
the world today is toward smaller states. As numerous scholars have noted, the
average number of states in the world is larger now than at any other time in
recent centuries. Moreover, the rise of global trade has lessened the benefits of
imperialism and expanding a state’s frontiers and population. As Mises
observed, freedom in trade negates the need for a state to acquire more of the
world’s wealth through militaristic or imperialistic methods. States often
still seek economic “self-sufficiency,” but the cost of this is so high, and
the benefits of open trade so enticing, that more states are willing to accept
trade as a substitute for “lebensraum.” This
can already be observed, as globalization has allowed small states to thrive,
and small states have even acted to force greater discipline on large states
through tax competition.
There are certainly exceptions to this.
Some small states, such as North Korea, have maintained an economically
isolationist and totalitarian stance—fueled both by internal paranoia and by
real perennial threats issued by its enemies (especially the US), in the case
of the latter. For the most part, however, the spread of markets (and promarket
ideology) has raised the opportunity cost of militaristic expansion from the
state’s perspective. If offered the chance to expand at low cost, though,
virtually all regimes would take the opportunity in a heartbeat. And this
is why we will likely continue to see regimes enthusiastically resist secession
within their own borders. States don’t have many opportunities to expand their
territories and populations. So they’re not about to sign off on secession
lightly. Nevertheless, new economic
realities, wars, and demographic shifts may certainly affect the equation
in coming years. And then we may again see a redrawing of maps of a sort not
seen since the end of the Cold War.
Note: The
views expressed on Mises.org are
not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.
Ryan W. McMaken is the editor of Mises Daily and The Austrian.
Send him mail.
