Brexit Contagion? NO!

I got into a twitter conversation with a Canadian columnist about the implications of Brexit for Quebec/Canada.  My short answer: t'ain't none.  Or, damned little.  Why? Mostly because much of my early work (and more recent stuff)  points against political movements changing significantly due to observing events elsewhere.

Brexit is akin to secession, but secessionism is not contagious.  Politicians and publics respond most strongly to the domestic political conditions that they live with and provide incentives.  If a piece of a federation leaves, then sure, that affects the various actors within that federation.  So, secessionism was contagious within Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.  BUT outsiders who are not impacted directly can learn both positive and negative lessons, and they will tend to learn those that reinforce their existing preferences--confirmation base and cognitive closure have a huge impact here. 

For example, the Quebec separatists were following the Scottish referendum very closely until the Scots said nay.  Then the Quebec separatists basically forgot that the whole thing happened.  The lessons Quebec and Canada learned from Montenegro's secession proves the power of confirmation bias.

Quebec separatists: wow, Montenegro had a vote and voila, independent!
Canada: Hey, 55% as a threshold for legitimate referendum. 
Quebec: huh? I can't hear you.

To be sure, if the UK leaves the EU, then, yes, Scotland will leave the UK.  Things were close enough last time, and the Scots are mostly fans of the EU.  What will this mean for Quebec?  Not much.  Quebec separatism is moribund for a reason.  Ok, many reasons: the Quebeckers have gotten most of what they wanted, the Rest of Canada has learned not to poke at the beast by avoiding constitutional discussions, and the Prime Minister happens to be a Quebecker.  While that last bit is no guarantee, Quebeckers are less upset with the federation now than they were under Harper, and they were not that mobilized then either.  Oh, and it is both a cause and consequence of the weak state of Quebec separatism that the Parti Quebecois is so incredibly lame right now.

There are plenty of good reasons to oppose Brexit,* but spawning separatism in Canada is not one of them.

* My favorites are: massive economic changes that are poorly understood, the magical thinking of the Brexit folks, and, oh yes, that much of the Brexit movement is driven by the same blend of ignorance and xenophobia as the Trump campaign.

The Kurdish Complications

Now that Canada has decided to continue to train and support the Kurds in Iraq along with the Iraqi government, the question of the future of the Kurds is being questioned.  Indeed, yesterday, I received a phone call from a magazine in Kurdistan asking me about referendums and why some secessionist movements get to become states and others do not.  My short answer: "fair ain't got nothing to do with it" which could probably use a bit of nuance.  This is not just a Canadian issue but one for all of the countries intervening (or not intervening) in Iraq and Syria.

The one thing I do know and am very confident about is this: vulnerability to secession does not deter other countries from recognizing an independent Kurdish state.  Sorry, I know this is the conventional wisdom (as presented in this piece), but the conventional wisdom has always been wrong and always will be wrong.  How do I know that?  Well, see my first book, see this article, and this one, too.  Perhaps notice which countries recognized Kosovo (hint: Canada).  Oh, and check out Russia's foreign policy, given that it is vulnerable to secession yet have been sponsoring separatists frequently and enthusiastically.  And yes, countries can be irredentist even as they face separatist movements at home.

Canada, as the story linked above indicates, that despite arming and training Iraq's Kurds, wants these Kurds to stay in Iraq.  Why?  Two primary reasons: a) Turkey is an ally, and Turkey fears that an independent Kurdistan in Iraq and/or Syria would strengthen the Kurdish separatists in Turkey;* b) most solutions to the Iraq political problems need the Kurds.  Sure, there are folks who advocate partition of Iraq into three hunks of territory, but partition is never as easy or as beneficial as the advocates argue.   Having the Kurds in along with the Sunnis to balance the Shiites might just be key ingredients in some shot of power-sharing deal.  Of course, that is hard when the Shiites have been pretty committed to crushing the Sunnis (which is why the Sunnis have chosen the less bad alternative of ISIS).  But in the long run, Iraq will need a political solution that is not just handing over the largest part of it to Iran to the Shiites.

*  While I am a committed skeptic about how contagious ethnic conflict can be, one of the few ways that ethnic conflict travels is among ethnic kin who are separatist.  See also this.

So, Canada is aiding a group but not promoting its eventual aims.  Not that new, but definitely tricky.  The article from the National Post makes clear that Canada has been clear to all sides about its stance.  Which is the same stance as the rest of the coalition.

Of course, there is another Kurdish problem: we are sinking resources into training the Kurds, but their aims (other than independence) are quite limited.  They don't want to fight to win territory that they cannot keep.  And the downside of being the most reliable force in the region is that they have won most of the territory they claim.  It is not clear that they can do much more to push ISIS back into Syria.  Oops.

But that is why I keep calling this region the land of lousy policy alternatives.  As for the Kurds, I do feel for them in a big way.  They have been betrayed many times before.  This time, we are being honest and using them for what we see as the greater good.  And they are using us for their interests.  As always, the hard part in these interventions is figuring out how to align the interests of those who live there with those of the interveners.

The Other Side of Ethnic Domino Theory

I have been railing for days weeks months years about how a successful secessionist effort in one place does not increase the chances of another elsewhere [unless they are in the same country to begin with].  Perhaps I am irrelevant as folks continued to argue and worry about the effect of a Yes vote in Scotland would be on potential or actual secessionist movements in Europe and even beyond.

Maybe it is my confirmation bias at work, but I am pretty sure it is the conformation bias of others that matters here.  After all, how could Scotland move towards secession when the example of Quebec demonstrated that secession was out of fashion.  The last provincial election showed that Quebecker were tired of referenda talk, as once that issue came up, the Parti Quebecois dropped and flopped in the polls. Did that negative lesson spread to Scotland?  Maybe so, as Scotland failed to reach 50% Yes.  Failed by a good bit.

Yet this morning we still have the Catalans saying they are going ahead with their vote.  I certainly expect a different outcome, as the Catalans face a much less friendly bargaining partner in the Spanish government.  I would bet on Yes there.  The key here as always is not the processes elsewhere that demonstrate something but the domestic politics, the domestic dynamics that shape the real and likely and perceived benefits and costs of independence. 

People thought that Arab Spring was contagious.  Well, protest of authoritarian, corrupt rule was.  But the outcomes?  Not so much.  Only Tunisia became a democracy.  Libya had a civil war.  Syria has a civil war.  Egypt has had two coups with a pretty unattractive but yet democratically elected government briefly in between.  Bahrain?  Successful repression.  And on and on. 

People seek massive political change for many reasons.  The dynamics elsewhere can suggest strategies and tactics, but they do not shape interests.  Social mobilization is hard, so one really has to make the case that the situation in place x matters for people in place x and that independence might solve more problems than it will cause.  This is hard to do in democracies since most advanced democracies give minorities multiple ways to access the political system.  Which is why that Washington Post list of eight places as Next is pretty foolish.  Sure, Catalans but they are the exception that proves the rule.  They face a government that has limited their autonomy.  The Flemish?  Might be a Czechoslovakian case of agreeing to disagree. 

The rest of the list is pretty weak--yes, there are separatist groups in the places but mere existence is different from success.  The Scottish Nationalist Party compares well to the rest of these in terms of size, experience, organization and the rest yet it fell short, quite short.

I would like to see the folks who yammer about the ethnic domino theory to now come out and argue that this means that there will be less separatism in Europe.  They will not.  I will not.  But in my case, it is because I take seriously how self-centered nationalist movements are. 

Beware of Contagion? Or Beware of Those Wary of Contagion?

Nice, flashy title for a piece on whether there will be more separatism in Europe this summer: "if at first you don't secede."  It raises all kinds of fears about Europe blowing apart as each country facing a separatist movement might suddenly disintegrate.

To be clear, the situations in most of Europe versus Ukraine are not so much apples and oranges but apples and bear-savaged campgrounds.  Huh?  Separatism is not spreading from Crimea to Donetsk via some kind of learning process.  No, it is spreading within one country (a point I made long ago when other stuff seemed contagious) and not via a learning process or any kind of osmosis but via separate and distinct interventions by an outside power--that would be Russia.

So, the political processes that have caused irredentism in Crimea (or aimed at Crimea) and something akin to it in Eastern Ukraine are entirely irrelevant for the Scots, the Basques, the Bretons, and so on.  The funny thing about the list of suspects in the piece is that it ignores the recent developments that push in the opposite direction.  Quebec's recent provincial election might not mean that the sovereignty movement is dead, but it sure as hell is not on the march towards independence.  Scotland?  Sure, it has a referendum coming up, but the no side is ahead, and just gained another key ally--comedians uber alles.

The article goes on and on, listing a bunch of potential separatist movements and actual ones as well, regardless of how serious their prospects are. 

The question is less absurd than it sounds. Just look at that foundering transnational project, the European Union. The bitter irony is that one of the only things uniting the 28 public opinions in the fledgling superstate is their common resentment of their common project. The telegenic figurehead of the U.K. Independence Party, Nigel Farage, is but one of a new generation of populist politicians across the continent, all popular insofar as they rail against "Brussels" -- that symbol of the wasteful, undemocratic, and bureaucratic European behemoth that threatens to crush each member country's uniqueness.

I hate to compare the US to the EU because one is a country and the other is not, but folks have been running against Washington, DC for as long as anyone can remember.  Yet the US has managed to stick around.  The EU? Yes, there is lots of friction, but that happens amid and after a Great Recession.  The only real threat to leave is the UK's, and I am not sure how realistic that is these days.  But neither the US, nor the EU, nor the rest of Europe are what the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were in the late 1980s and early 1990s: authoritarian systems built on the suddenly fragile ideology that promised "full employment" and fell short.  

Some of the European Union's most vocal opponents scoffingly compare it to the Soviet Union and eagerly anticipate its similar fate. The implosion of the European Union could prove to be just as much of a Pandora's box of secessionisms as the end of the Soviet Union is still proving to be: today in eastern Ukraine, tomorrow perhaps in France, Spain, and Italy. 

So, the conclusion of this piece is to support the wild speculation that is the favored stance of Europe's fringe?  I am tempted to Lloyd Bentsen this Dan Quayle: I have met Pandora's Box, I have written about Pandora's Box, my friend, this Europe is no Pandora's Box.   But that is a dated and insulting reference, so I shall refrain.

Again, there are good reasons to be concerned about what Russia is doing in its neighbors.  There is also good reason to ponder each separatist movement in the rest of Europe, but each is almost entirely driven by domestic political dynamics--of the group and of the country in which they reside.  Unless Russia starts sending its little green men to Scotland, to Venice and to wherever else, there will be limited inspiration and contagion from East to West this summer.

Internationally Irrelevant: The Limited Reach of Scotland’s Precedent Setting

There have long been fears that a successful secessionist effort will encourage other potential secessionists, potentially causing a domino effect.  These fears are over-wrought.  The reality is that each secessionist movement is driven by domestic dynamics, and the examples set elsewhere are almost entirely irrelevant.  Whatever happens in Scotland next year will only matter in Scotland and in the rest of the United Kingdom.  Whether the vote is for or against independence, it will not matter much to the rest of the world. 

Why?  For two reasons: there are always multiple lessons to be learned, so people tend to learn the lessons they want; and nearly all politics is local.  We also have some scholarship that suggests that separatism is “contagious” under very limited circumstances. Let me explain.

In the aftermath of the nearly simultaneous disintegrations of Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, there was some thought that separatism was akin to a contagious disease spreading across Europe.  The problem is that each “domino” presented both positive and negative lessons to those thinking about separatism elsewhere.  When Yugoslavia broke apart, it could have encouraged potential secessionist movements or discouraged them, depending on whether such groups viewed themselves as being akin to Slovenia or to Bosnia.  When the Soviet Union disintegrated, it could have prompted more separatism if those elsewhere viewed themselves as being in a similar situation as Estonia, but perhaps not so much if they felt more similar to Azerbaijan. 

The political psychological dynamic at play here is confirmation bias.  Reality will produce all kinds of things to observe, and people will tend to observe those dynamics and those lessons that reinforce their existing attitudes.  Americans, for instance, are still arguing over the lessons to learn from Vietnam, with some arguing that the US used too little force and others arguing it used too much. 

A more direct comparison and more recent example is the discourse that developed in Canada in the aftermath of Montenegro’s referendum in 2006.  Quebec separatists were impressed at the ability of Montenegro to hold a referendum and then become independent once the threshold was exceeded, without prolonged bargaining with the rump state—a unilateral declaration of independence.  Canadian federalists, on the other hand, noticed that the threshold was set at 55% rather than the 50% + one that had been the standard in past Quebec referendums. 

The first key point here is this: whatever the outcome in Scotland is, it will be read by those elsewhere in ways that confirm their attitudes.  If Scotland does not become independence, motivated secessionists will indicate how Scotland is not a relevant or comparable case.  If Scotland does become independent, then those opposing secession elsewhere will argue Scotland is a special case that does not a set a precedent. 

The second point is that secessionism is largely driven by domestic politics.  Whatever happens in Scotland, potential separatists in other countries will be motivated by more immediate concerns: can their group gain access to power via elections?  Is power decentralized?  Is their group oppressed?  Can separatism be used to outflank other parties?  The apparent spread of secessionism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s was not because one outbreak causing others, but that the advent of political competition provided politicians running for office in sub-state units—the various Soviet Socialist Republics, Slovenia, Croatia and the others—with incentives to play towards narrower audiences.  The first elections were at the sub-national level, which meant that more homogeneous audiences were the electorates that mattered, leading to a focus on ethnic nationalist concerns. 

The separatists beyond Scotland will have more or less support and will be more or less motivated not by the outcome in Scotland but by the people they seek to mobilize and represent.  The local conditions matter the most.  The only place where Scotland’s independence could affect the interests of potential separatists is the United Kingdom.  What would the departure of Scotland mean for the balance of power within the UK?  This is far less clear than the departure of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia.  Will Wales feel at greater risk of tyranny of the majority from the English in a Scotland-less United Kingdom? 

To be clear, there is one mechanism that causes secession in one spot to reverberate elsewhere, but it is absent in this case.  Studies have shown that when a group is separatist in more than one country, the activity and the outcomes in one country may matter in other places that group resides.  For instance, when Kosovo became independent (de facto in 1999), that had ramifications for other places where Albanians resides—especially Macedonia.  If the Kurds in Iraq become independent, that will have implications for the Kurds in Turkey, Syria and elsewhere.  However, there are no similar groups of Scots in other countries that might become more separatist in the aftermath of a successful referendum.

In sum, while the referendum will be quite important for Scotland and for the United Kingdom, it will have a minimal impact beyond.  Worries about precedents are exaggerated as local politics triumphs over the ebbs and flows of secessionism elsewhere. So, the Scots should vote based on what it means for Scotland, and outsiders should be concerned only insofar as independence would affect their interests in Scotland. 

Contrasting and Contesting 2nd and 3rd Order Effects

The events this past week in Algeria plus Mali's civil war have made it clear that (despite my first publications) stuff does spread.  Arab Spring not only spread across boundaries (well, sort of), but fed dynamics that have caused conflict to spread throughout the region.  The Libyan intervention fostered the flow of arms and people to Mali.

The questions this is currently raising are: did the Obama administration and others know that their actions would cause such second order consequences (side effects)?  Should they have acted in 2011 to stop Qaddafi's attack on his people?  The answers are: probably and probably.  That is, the various folks probably did consider a bit that acting in Libya would have effects on the neighborhood--both positive and negative.  We are noticing the negative ones.  Perhaps positive ones might include restraint by some but not all threatened autocrats (this impact is probably lessened by the selective support for some autocrats--Bahrain, Saudi Arabia).  It is not clear that not acting in Libya would have been better than the current status quo.  Mass killings in Benghazi would have also had second and third order effects--refugee flows to Egypt and Algeria (not to mention more to increasingly xenophobic Europe), and so on.

The reality is that the Western governments were reacting to Arab Spring, not causing it, so the choices were quite limited: (A) support dictator x, (B) stand aside, (C) help depose dictator x.  The policies have been inconsistent, with some of a, some of b and some of c. We do know that in the past that choosing A has consequences sometimes decades later (Argo!).  Each of these choices has second and third order effects that may or may not outweigh the initial policy.

My favorite example, of course, is when the US invaded Iraq, it achieved its goal as narrowly defined as toppling Hussein.  The second and third order effects included undermining the effort in Afghanistan, undermining the American economy, weakening the US standing in the world, and empowering Iran.  Now those are some knowable, anticipated consequences that could have been avoided.  Of course, we do not know how the world would have been different otherwise.  Would Libya have given up its chemical weapons or would have faced a Syria in Libya?  Not sure.

But the point is that the Bush Administration, which I admittedly love to pick on, had more choices and could have taken more seriously the possible downsides of invading Iraq.  The Obama administration was faced with allowing a humanitarian disaster to occur on the edge of Europe (which matters more, of course, since Europe cares more about refugee flows that affect it) and with allies putting significant pressure to do something.  Could they have done a better job in limiting the flow of arms and people beyond Libya?  Not so sure.  Our efforts at controlling borders has been lousy in places where we have 100k troops (Afghanistan).  And the US was involved in trying to strengthen the Mali government's ability to deal with armed extremists.  It didn't work out too well.

What this really demonstrates are two uncomfortable realities: that American power is and always has been limited--the US cannot just impose its preferences upon the world--it cannot always get what it wants or needs; and that governments are often faced with lousy choices and picking the least lousy is very hard.