Dividing Divided States. Gregory F. Treverton

      Introduction

      In the early 1990s, the weary senior director for Europe on the U.S. National Security Council used to kid his colleagues by saying, “Why don’t you get going? I’ve presided over the creation of lots of new countries in my area over the last few years. What have you been doing in your areas?” The flood of new states set loose by the end of communism and the Soviet empire has slowed to a trickle, but it is a continuing trickle. The vote for independence in southern Sudan in January 2011 is the latest instance of a new state but surely not the last. The appendix presents a list of secessions since 1900.

       Framing Secession

      Secession is a region formally withdrawing from a state or federation to become a separate state. Some care with terms is in order: Formally, the seceding region is not a state until it is recognized as such by the international community, but since in all cases the seceding region aspired to be a state and was ultimately recognized as such, the book sometimes uses the term “seceding state” for regions withdrawing. The resulting states, both old and new, are regarded as the “successor states.” If a region seceded, the original state is referred to as the “continuing state,” a status that bears particularly on dividing national resources, like international memberships and assets. If the original state dissolves,