Secession
Secession means the attempt by some region in a political system to become
independent of the rest of the state and rule itself as an autonomous nation.
Numerous civil wars have been fought over attempted secession moves, for
example the American Civil War when the southern states declared themselves
a new nation as the Confederate States of America and fought for their
independence. More recently secessionist moves in the largely artificial post-
colonial countries of Africa have led to civil war, most notoriously in the horn
of Africa, the former Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the
Congo) and Nigeria. Secessionist movements are much more likely in federal
or confederal states, partly because by their very nature they keep alive the idea
and symbolism of autonomy, partly because their very existence as a federation
is precisely because of the existence of internal ethnic or social divisions, and
partly because they seldom have a lengthy history of unity sufficient to
overcome separatist tendencies.
Though attractive, where a region has a strong sense of local identity or of
shared interests that conflict with the rest of the society, secession seldom
succeeds. Almost nowhere is the idea of secession seen as legitimate, though
there are exceptions, notably in the 1936 ‘Stalin’ constitution of the Soviet
Union where the right to secede was formally granted to all constituent
republics. Ironically this right was not carried over into the more liberal
1977 constitution, so that the genuine desire to secede expressed by the
constituent republics in the early 1990s was technically no longer legal, and
rapidly led to the complete break-up of the Union. Secession demands have
been, and may be expected to continue to be, intense in much of Eastern
Europe, because the national boundaries drawn up after the two world wars, as
for example in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, both of which fragmented in
the 1990s, largely imposed unity on disparate historical and cultural entities,
and in parts of the former Soviet Union, where republican boundaries often
bore little relevance to demographic realities, particularly after the often forced
movements of population during the tsarist and communist periods. It may not
technically be correct to refer to the split of Czechoslovakia into the Czech and
the Slovak Republics in this way because it was done by agreement, but it is
clear that the alternative would have been outright secession by the Slovaks.
Second Ballot
The second ballotvoting systemis a modification of the simple plurality
method and requires that candidates secure an overall majority of votes (that is,
50% + 1) before they can be elected. Thus in France, for example, after a first
ballot for the National Assembly a second ballot is held in those constituencies
where no candidate had achieved an overall majority, and in which candidates
Secession