The morality of secession

To say that philosophers did not write about the morality of secession until the 1990s is only a slight exaggeration. Considerable work had been done on the related subject of revolution, of course, and the social unrest of the 1960s provoked a great deal of thinking about civil disobedience, but the paucity of viable secessionist movements on the geopolitical landscape resulted in almost no one studying the morality of state breaking. This changed dramatically with the end of the Cold War, however, when the dissolution of the Soviet Union exposed the lack of theoretical work on secession as an embarrassing lacuna in political theory. Allen Buchanan did more than anyone else to fill this void with his landmark 1991 book, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec.1 Buchanan has subsequently expanded on and revised his views, and the literature within political philosophy on this subject is largely a reaction to his seminal work. This essay provides an overview of the morality of secession before engaging with some of Buchanans most recent work on this subject. In particular, after defending a relatively permissive right to secede, I argue that Buchanan has overestimated the case against reforming international law to allow for primary rights to secede.