Secessionists....All Talk

Independence movements are on the march in many Western countries, but the secessionists who have been making news in the US since last month's election are not, realistically, going anywhere. Americans are, in fact, unusually keen on sticking together.

The USA appears to be a divided country, polarized in a cultural civil war between the blue and red bits on a map. Unlike almost all of their Western counterparts, however, Americans appear remarkably happy to stay together despite their differences.

While separatist parties are thriving in Canada and Europe, recent bids to take individual states out of the union have only served to demonstrate just how little appetite there is for this kind of politics in the US. We recently wrote about a series of petitions being posted on the White House website calling for each of the 50 states to be allowed to secede.

So far Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Missouri, Tennessee, North Carolina, Alabama, Oklahoma and Ohio have all attracted more than 25,000 names apiece - entitling them an official response from the administration. In the context of the US population of 312 million, however, the numbers involved are minuscule.

Some 700,000 people in total are estimated to have signed so far - around 0.2% of all Americans. Even Texas's 118,000 signatures - the most of any state - represent less than 0.5% of its inhabitants.
These tiny figures actually set Americans apart from their counterparts in other major Western countries.

Scotland, Catalonia and Quebec are all governed by parties seeking a referendum on independence. European nations such as Italy, France and Belgium all contain flourishing constituent nations demanding independence. Nor is the trend confined to the West. The USA's Cold War rival, the USSR, fragmented into no fewer than 15 different states upon its collapse some of which also contain smaller national groups eager to break away. China, meanwhile, has its own nationalist movements in Tibet and Xingjiang.

The US is in an entirely different situation. Even those who backed the petitions were most likely acting purely out of frustration with the presidential election result, believes Neil Caren, assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, who has carried out research on the signatories.
"My reading would be that even among the people who signed these petitions, probably a majority wouldn't actually want secession," he says.
"It's like saying you'll move to Canada - it's about how you express your dissatisfaction in the immediate aftermath of the election."

Obviously, the states where the petitions have attracted the most support are all among those which most favoured the defeated Mitt Romney over President Obama. But any serious breakaway movement would be hampered by the memory it would resurrect of one of the most traumatic periods in American history - namely the civil war, which cost around 750,000 lives after the southern Confederate states declared independence in 1861.

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln explored one of the most painful eras of US history

"First of all, they had a rather big secession and that cost more lives than all the other American wars put together," says Professor Anatol Lieven,  author of America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism.
"The 1860s sent a pretty ferocious message about what would happen if you tried to secede."
In addition, Lieven argues, the civil war established a popular association between secession and support for slavery which tarnished it for the vast majority.

Indeed, there appears to be more chance of the nation growing rather than shrinking. In November, voters in Puerto Rico, currently a US territory, supported a non-binding referendum to become a full US state. Occasionally, however, mainstream politicians have flirted with separatist rhetoric - and, perhaps significantly, they have tended to come from Texas, which was an independent republic from 1836 to 1846.

In response to the White House petitions, Congressman Ron Paul said secession was "a deeply American principle". And in 2009, the state's governor Rick Perry said Texas was "a stand-alone nation" which was "kind of thinking about" its right to leave the union - though he subsequently disavowed support for independence.

Other minor breakaway movements have attracted fleeting attention. Sarah Palin's husband Todd was a member of the Alaskan Independence Party for some years, while a left-leaning group called the Second Vermont Republic generated some publicity during the early 2000s as it sought independence for the New England state.

There were more serious autonomist movements in times gone by. Native Americans resisted colonization and assimilation. There were demands for New England to secede during the war of 1812. And an insurgency by pro-Mexican forces in the border areas was crushed in 1915. For the most part, however, such sentiments have left ordinary Americans unmoved.
This, after all, is a country where children commonly begin their school day by declaring a pledge of allegiance to "one nation under God, indivisible".

Additionally, assurance in the superiority of the American system of government is instilled from an early age, Lieven says. This belief in the constitution and the nation's founding principles is one of the US's key unifying factors. The constitution provides considerable autonomy to each state and this too discourages divisiveness.
While the states and the federal government may have come into conflict from time to time - most notably during the civil war and the civil rights reforms of the 1960s - the constitution has helped to prevent friction between parts of the nation with different governing philosophies.

Significant, too, is the fact that America is a place waves of incomers have aspired to settle and assimilate, believes Eric Zuelow, professor of history at the University of New England.
"That immigrant experience is built into the national mythology. It's about the mythology of the melting pot," he says.
Indeed, he adds, minority and ethnic groups tend to have spread out and intermixed sufficiently to prevent any linguistic or cultural equivalents of Quebec emerging.

Red state versus blue state, north state versus south....neither is remotely significant enough to threaten the union. In fact, it's a truth Americans appear to hold self-evident.

Declarations of independence

• Between 1777 to 1791, Vermont was an independent republic
• Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836. It was a sovereign nation until 1846 when it joined the United States
• The California republic lasted 26 days in 1846 after breaking away from Mexico before it was annexed by the US
• In 1861, the Confederate States of America was declared, initially comprising South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas - Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina joined soon after, as did the Confederate Territory of Arizona. Factions from Missouri and Kentucky were also represented in the Confederacy. But Lincoln's Union Army achieved victory in 1865
• Hawaii was a kingdom from 1810 to 1893 and a republic from 1894 to 1898. It was then a US territory until it achieved statehood in 1959.