1 Introduction
Secessions and unifications of peoples in countries are traditionally the stuff of analysis by historians and political scientists, recently though economists have made contributions. Alesina and Spolaore (2003) offer a pioneering economic analysis modeling the optimal size of nations. They do not however offer an explicit analysis of national expansion or contraction in historical time, implying only that an optimum will be reached. They do recognize, however, that ‘the actual dynamics of border formation are complex, and may include several interactions of variables and effects that are difficult or even impossible to capture in simplified equilibrium relationships’ (p. 9). This book discusses the crucial ‘interaction’ variables that condition the process of state-based secessions and formations by introducing a broader and more explicit model than heretofore. It is also worth noting that Blattman and Miguel (2010) point out that existing models of civil war are not well supported empirically. This could be because these models do not control for all of the relevant variables, twelve of which being identified in this book, and a change in any one of them could lead to the outbreak of war, or, if war is already going on, to its cessation. As we shall see, these same variables are relevant to both civil and international wars and, as will be shown, they are the drivers of war, secession, and tranquility—the ‘absence of war’.
The rational choice model developed here—which is new to the literature on state formation—is paired with many actual cases. This book is not just about theory, and nor is it only about history because theory, to be relevant, needs application and the telling of the story of a history needs a theoretical basis. In other words, this book tells historical ‘stories’ that have precise theoretical underpinnings. These ‘stories’ are about state-building and state-fracturing, driven mainly by internal events. As Table 1 records, since the end of World War II wars internal to states far outnumber wars between states, and this is why most attention will be paid to internal wars. Even so, a whole chapter using the same economic modeling approach as used in the rest of this book is devoted to a discussion of international wars.
Table 1
Ongoing conflicts: annual average per decade
Intrastate | Internationalized | Extrastate | Interstate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1940sa | 10 | 0b | 5 | 2 |
1950s | 9 | 0c | 5 | 1 |
1960s | 16 | 3 | 3 | 2 |
1970s | 24 | 4 | 1d | 3 |
1980s | 34 | 5 | 0 | 3 |
1990s | 39 | 4 | 0 | 1 |
2000s | 29 | 5 | 0 | 1 |
2010se | 30 | 12 | 0 | 1 |
The number and pattern of independent states has changed markedly over the last 200 years. According to a data set on the birth and death of states recorded in the International Systems Dataset (ISD), there are slightly fewer independent countries today than there were in 1816. Care is needed in defining what a state is especially in the early years because legally recognized international borders were not always defined. A ‘state’, according to Butcher and Griffiths (2020), is a geographic entity with a government that has internal control over its territory as well as formal control over its’ international relations.
The nineteenth century saw a sharp decline in the number of independent countries largely due to the spread of colonialism through Africa and Asia. According to the ISD, there were 211 independent states in 1816 falling to 58 prior to World War I. Thereafter the number of independent states, as measured by UN membership, rose to 193 in 2020. In both the pre- and post-World War I periods, state births and deaths occurred with, the earlier period, deaths being more frequent than births, while in the later period the opposite is true.
There were 51 United Nations members at inception in 1945, with only 29 of them being outside of the Western Hemisphere. There are several reasons for this growth in membership—the end of colonialism in the Asian subcontinent led to the early membership of India and Pakistan; in Africa south of the Sahara, 32 African countries joined in the eleven years up to 1968, with several more after that date as the colonial powers continued their withdrawals from that continent. In a few cases, the end of colonialism was preceded by serious violence but in many cases not at all. Indeed, Emerson (1965) commented on how little violence was involved at the end of colonialism. By contrast, the violent breakup of Yugoslavia led to the admission to the United Nations of three new independent states in 1992, with several more added to 2006—see Chapter 3. Sometimes two new UN members were created when an existing member split apart, as when Montenegro and Serbia were admitted as separate independent states in 2006 having had a single membership for some years prior to that; similarly, with Egypt and Syria that had formed the United Arab Republic during 1958–1961, and with Malaysia and Singapore in 1965. An example in the reverse direction is the combining into a single member of Yemen and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in 1990. In the Persian Gulf area, several states gained independence beginning in the 1950s a process running to 1971 with the ending of British Protectorate status. The first South East Asian state to join the UN was Thailand (then called Siam) in 1946, Burma in 1948, Malaysia in 1957, and many more thereafter.
The split or attempted split of a state can be a violent process as is indicated in Table 2 that records the incidence of ongoing state-based armed conflicts in 2018. Intrastate conflicts are between a government and an internal armed group—in 2018, there were 32 of these ongoing. Internationalized conflicts are also internal but with foreign troops participating—Afghanistan and Syria are prominent examples. Extra-state conflicts are between a govern...