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Now
On December 13, a French-language television
station in Belgium reported that the Flemish-speaking region
of Flanders had declared its independence, spelling the end of
Belgium as a nation-state. With pictures of the King and Queen
fleeing the country and of trucks blocked at the new border,
the report appeared authentic enough for the newspaper Le
Soir to announce the next day that "Belgium Died Last
Night." As it turns out, the report on the secession of
Flanders was a hoax, and the uproar over the spoof revealed the
sensitivity of Belgians to the possibility of the breakup of
this fragile union of 10 million people.
It seems safe to say that citizens
of the United States are not similarly fearful that their union
of 230 years will soon disintegrate. However, a group of about
three dozen activists that met in early November in Burlington,
Vermont, hopes to change that. A few days before the elections
that would return the Democrats to control in the Congress, this
group was neither assessing the state of various campaigns nor
prognosticating the close races. On the shores of Lake Champlain,
the participants in the first North American Secessionist Convention
were hoping to start a national movement that would eventually
make such elections irrelevant.
If you thought the cause of
secession in the U.S. died with the surrender of Lee to Grant
at Appomattox, you might be surprised to know that there are
at least two dozen secessionist and separatist groups in the
U.S. In that sense the meeting was more an attempt at cooperation
than creation. Organized by the Middlebury
Institute, a sort of secessionist "think tank"
headed by the writer Kirkpatrick Sale, the convention assembled
representatives from nine separate secessionist organizations,
as well members of several groups who do not have secession as
an explicit goal but who considered themselves fellow travelers.
A handful of academic observers and journalists (including a
reporter from the New York Times who is doing a series
on offbeat Americans) rounded out the audience.
According to the conventional
political categories, this was an odd collection of organizations,
with the spokesperson for the environmentally-minded Cascadian
Independence Project (incorporating Oregon, Washington and British
Columbia) sitting next to the delegate from the fiercely libertarian
Republic of New Hampshire, and the representatives of a Hawaiian
sovereignty group sitting across from the Southern nationalists
in the League of the South and next to the anti-corporate Second
Vermont Republic. But this group aligned not on a left-right
political continuum but rather a top-bottom axis. In spite of
the ideological differences, there was unanimity in the room
regarding the diagnosis of the problem and its most effective
treatment.
The problem? In short, the
American Empire. The delegates virtually all wanted to smash
the Empire and bring an end to the suffering it causes at home
and abroad. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was repeatedly
condemned, and no praise was forthcoming for George W. Bush or
any other politician (except for the candidates of the Alaskan
Independence Party, the only political party in the room). In
fact, several of the participants expressed the fear that the
U.S. was heading toward fascism. As Ian Baldwin, publisher of
Vermont Commons, the newspaper of the Second Vermont Republic,
put it: "We are decentralists, and we are up against a monster."
For this group, the most effective way to resist the Empire was
to simply withdraw from it, chip away at its geographic foundation.
Secession was seen as a way to restore democracy and promote
freedom through reducing the scale (in both the senses of spatial
scope and size) of government.
A related problem for the participants
was what they saw as the economic evisceration of local communities.
If big government played the role of the villain at this convention,
big corporations received equal billing as its evil twin. Many
deplored the effects of transnational corporations on local communities,
and a disgust with the influence of corporations in the political
system inspired the activism of several of those at the table.
Rather than protecting its citizens from corporate predation,
the delegates felt that the U.S. government was assisting corporations
in draining the economic vitality out of their communities. For
Diana Licht, a Cambridge, Mass., resident and member of the populist
(but not secessionist) Alliance for Democracy, her interest in
secession was about "wanting to find a boundary within which
you can protect yourself from intrusion." If the U.S. government
is not able to protect communities from intrusion by the multinationals,
the boundaries must be redrawn to a more manageable scale.
Just as it would help restore
democracy, secession was presented as a way to promote the economic
health of communities over the bottom line of corporations. While
Franklin Sanders of the League of the South admitted that when
most people hear about secession "they think you're offering
them an economic atomic bomb," many of the participants
emphasized their belief that true, long-term prosperity can only
be had by nurturing economic activity at the local level. To
further this agenda, the development of local and alternative
currencies (such as the well-known Ithaca Hours) was promoted
as a way to achieve economic independence from the federal government.
The unity on these points was
strong, and the meeting's collegiality was threatened only once,
perhaps predictably during the presentation of the League of
the South. The League's board members indicated that they wanted
to build a "liberty-based society" in a reconstituted
Confederate States of America, and several in the room wondered
what that would mean for non-whites in the C.S.A. When Sale asked
pointedly about the issue of race, Donald Kennedy (co-author
of The South Was Right!) replied that one cannot be for
liberty and discriminate against your neighbor. (It should perhaps
be pointed out that aside from the Hawaiians the other groups
at the table were certainly not paragons of diversity.) When
an observer from Vermont said that he "just wanted to point
out the contradiction in your interest in state sovereignty and
your denial of personal sovereignty to women and homosexuals,"
one of the potential fault lines of the gathering came to the
fore. Probably sensing that the Southerners had not convinced
everyone at the table of their good intentions, Kennedy later
implored the group to focus on their common goals and not let
their ideological differences divide them: "We are about
liberty and home rule let's defeat the empire!"
As clear as they were about
the advantages (and indeed necessity) of secession, the participants
were also frank about the challenges facing them. The association
in the public mind of the idea of secession with the Confederacy,
slavery, and war is a major obstacle for the movement, and they
are well aware of this. Baldwin acknowledged that for many, "secession
sounds like a racist plot." SVR's Rob Williams argued that
activists need to find ways to make the idea of secession "sophisticated
and sexy." Beyond its legitimacy, even the very legality
of secession needs to be argued by these groups and their allies
in think tanks such as the Middlebury Institute and Abbeville
Institute. In support of the legality of secession, several participants
pointed out that decades before the Southern states seceded,
New England was actively considering such a move. Given that
Americans tend to think that the secession question was settled
by the Civil War, American separatists clearly have their work
cut out for them.
Given the marginal status of
the idea of secession within American public discourse, one of
the most important achievements of the convention would be enhanced
credibility for these groups. Isolated secessionist organizations
are easier to ignore than a national movement that can boast
representatives in just about every corner of the U.S. (and I
mean corner literally it seems that the coastal and border
regions consider secession more of a geographic option than the
interior states). Groups like the League of the South and Confederate
Legion in particular have everything to gain by being associated
with a secessionist alliance that includes Vermonters and Hawaiians,
Oregonians and Alaskans. The League is clearly one of the most
organized secessionist groups in the country, but their embrace
of the Confederacy and defense of "Southern heritage"
is a potential liability for the rest of the movement. Anything
that strengthens the association of secession with the Confederate
battle flag only amplifies the obstacles facing secessionists
as they work to overcome the already considerable stigma attached
to their cause (the event even featured the singing of the Southern
nationalist anthem "Bonnie Blue Flag" led by
a League of the South member from Connecticut, of all places).
Whether this movement will
have much to sing about in the future remains to be seen. Because
of the unique historical baggage this issue has in the U.S.,
the secessionists face odds that are likely more daunting than
those confronting similar movements in other countries. But they
are convinced that freedom and prosperity in the future will
only be achieved through the disuniting of the United States.
It seems as though practically every politician runs on the promise
of reform, but if Americans tire of such empty promises and finally
conclude that reforming the beast is hopeless, the ranks of the
secessionists in this country may swell. In the words of Donald
Livingston of Emory University, who is a member of SVR and a
founder of the Abbeville Institute (citing the Institute's motto):
"divided we stand, united we fall."
Dave Jansson is a professor of geography at Vassar
College in Poughkeepsie, NY.
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