By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The New Price of Statehood

Statehood is a precious commodity. After a burst of creation following the Soviet Union’s collapse, only three new countries have been recognized in the last 30 years - East Timor, in 2002, Montenegro, in 2006, and South Sudan, in 2011. There have been plenty of other attempts in that interval. But most have been stymied by the principle of territorial integrity, which prioritizes fixed borders even in cases of state failure and makes the path to legal independence long and uncertain.

But in the last few years, this norm has grown weaker. In February 2022, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine designed to wipe the country off the map. Initially met with shock and horror, the idea of the Russian conquest of Ukraine has since been normalized by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has called for letting Moscow keep some of this land. Trump has also threatened to annex Canada, as well as Greenland, which is an autonomous region of Denmark. Just how serious he is remains to be seen. But the upshot is clear: the United States, the most powerful country in the world, no longer views territorial integrity as an important element of the global order.

For some secessionist groups, this is certainly good news. Independence movements no longer must prove that their cause is just or essential. Instead, they may simply need to align with powerful countries, especially in strategically important areas. Trump’s preference for personal diplomacy could also help separatists, provided that they have charismatic leaders who can sidestep cumbersome institutional diplomacy and court the American president himself.

Yet Trump’s rejection of international norms is a double-edged sword. These norms constrain separatists and deter governmental repression. They also give secessionists a way to make their claims. Independence movements typically justify their existence using the language of human rights and self-determination, which Trump disregards. Rather, this U.S. president favors strong, brutal rulers over fledgling upstarts. He has aligned himself with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who have used killings and other kinds of violence to suppress Kurdish and Chechen secessionists, respectively. Trump does not care about impoverished separatists if they cannot provide him with immediate rewards.

For independence movements, the era of Trump is thus one of both opportunity and danger. There are fewer restraints and fewer protections. For groups he sees as strategically useful (or favors for some other reason), the path to statehood will become more straightforward. But for those that Trump sees as strategically useless, he will either change nothing or make life more difficult. In a system where recognition depends on leverage rather than law, more movements could try their luck at gaining independence. But without consistent norms or protections, success will remain rare and failure will become more dangerous. More breakaway regions may receive some form of recognition, but it would be weak and partial, contingent on whether their leaders can keep aiding more powerful states. And the world as a whole will experience more bloodshed, as both governments and separatists, unencumbered by global sanctions or normative restrictions, become more assertive.

President of East Timor

 

Sovereignty For Sale

Trump is hardly the first modern American president to ignore norms around territorial integrity when they become inconvenient. But Trump is the first in decades to disregard the idea altogether. Ukrainians “may be Russian someday, or they may not be Russian someday,” Trump said in February. He has repeatedly called the U.S.-Canadian border an “artificially drawn line.”

These remarks are bad news for the people of Ukraine and Canada, who have made it clear that they do not want to join Russia or the United States, respectively. But if Trump’s realpolitik approach takes hold, secessionist entities might find it easier to gain legitimacy by aligning with the United States or other great powers. Movements in valuable locations, such as Kurdish separatists in oil-rich Iraq or the leadership of Somaliland (which is already functionally independent, and located in the geographically important Horn of Africa), might secure U.S. recognition and support if they advance Washington’s aims. Separatists in Greenland who seek independence from Denmark, or in New Caledonia who seek independence from France, could garner support from the United States or another great power if they can promise trade routes, military bases, or access to their resources.

In Trump’s world, secessionists may also be able to succeed - or at least gain traction - through diplomacy. Typically, separatists are disadvantaged in talks because they are cut off from the kinds of formal institutional channels through which diplomacy normally flows. But Trump routinely disregards this standard operating procedure. Instead, he prefers personal diplomacy, such as his 2018 discussions with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. That means that charismatic separatist leaders could curry favor with the U.S. president by appealing to him directly.

Trump’s world, however, will hardly guarantee more success for secessionists. The president has loosened constraints on independence movements, but his preference for strongmen and centralized control creates new obstacles. Trump tends to favor aggressive national leaders who project power, not upstart rebels or subnational challengers. This makes him more likely to support existing regimes over separatist fragments, so long as the regime supports him. During Trump’s first term, for example, Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of the Biafra separatist movement in Nigeria, issued a personal plea to the U.S. president, citing Trump’s support for Brexit as proof of his belief in self-determination. Yet there is no evidence that Trump responded, either publicly or privately, to Kanu’s appeals. The U.S. government treated Biafra, which is of little strategic value to the United States, as an internal Nigerian matter, as it had for decades.

Biafra is hardly alone. Despite rhetorical nods to sovereignty, the Trump administration has shown little interest in backing most independence movements, like those of the Kurds throughout the Middle East, or the Catalans, in Spain. In October 2019, Trump even ordered the withdrawal of U.S. troops from northern Syria, effectively abandoning the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and allowing Turkey to launch a military operation against them. The move drew bipartisan criticism as a destabilizing betrayal of a reliable partner, and Trump ultimately agreed to keep U.S. troops in Syria (where they remain). But it still showed Trump’s willingness to prioritize regional power politics over friendly secessionists.

More generally, Trump’s geopolitical vision favors stable spheres of influence, where great powers set the rules. A world of breakaway regions undermines the principle of control that undergirds this Mafia-style view of order. So do the standard pro-secession arguments, which are couched in the language of human rights, minority rights, historic injustice, and self-determination. Trump, in other words, may tolerate secession if it serves a purpose. But he is unlikely to encourage it as a principle.

 

Identity Crisis

Because Trump’s order has mixed consequences for separatists, it will not yield a single outcome for their movements. Instead, it will reconfigure the terrain on which they operate. Secession will become a geopolitical transaction, not a legal or moral claim.

This change, however, will have some predictable results. The few successful secessionist movements of the last three decades were largely the result of ethical claims, as well as intensive organization. But now, separatist success will largely depend on whether the movement serves the interests of a dominant power, not on its legitimacy or efficacy. Secessionism, in turn, could cease to function as a tool of imperial resistance and instead become a tool of empire itself—a means for great powers to project influence or engage in proxy conflict (as Russia has already done by propping up breakaway regions in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine).

As independence movements sense new openings in a weakened international order, there may still be an uptick in separatist attempts. But that hardly means that there will be more successes. Recognition will remain rare, both because great-power interests often conflict and because home states, less constrained by norms or economic restrictions, will be empowered to crush separatist uprisings before they gain ground. Instead of new full-blown states, partial recognition cases might become more common, such as Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, Palestine, and Western Sahara. Such recognition, for example, could soon extend to Catalonia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Somaliland, and breakaway parts of Libya and Syria. For places that are already functionally independent, a transactional global order might open new diplomatic venues or economic channels that bring them closer to official recognition—provided, of course, that they can offer strategic value like basing rights or resource access. For regions that lack de facto independence, success will now hinge even less on legal or moral claims.

In this newly contingent and chaotic world, separatist-related violence will also become more frequent. In part, that will simply be the product of renewed separatist attempts. But breakaway regions could also launch more violent attacks, encouraged by their newfound patrons and the diminished consequences of breaking international law. Incumbents, likewise, will feel more empowered to use violence to quash independence movements. The global institutions that traditionally restrain both secessionist overreach and heavy-handed repression are losing their power to constrain either. The EU once played a central role in restraining violence between Serbia and Kosovo, for example, using accession talks as leverage to encourage cooperation. The UN helped limit violence in East Timor and South Sudan by providing peacekeeping forces. But ultimately, these institutions derive their power from the support of member countries, which is weakening. Trump, for his part, has repeatedly attacked both bodies and cut U.S. funding for the U.N.’s peacekeeping missions.

 

 

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