Breaking Away: The Case for Secession, Radical Decentralization, and Smaller Polities

In 2018, legislators in Iceland proposed a ban on circumcision of boys. For supporters this was a slam-dunk. Supporters viewed circumcision as a form a child abuse, and there was no down side to the legislation.1

For some people in the minority, however, a ban on circumcision might bring lasting damage in terms of abuses against human rights. For example, a ban on circumcision is a de facto ban on Judaism, at least of the orthodox variety.

This fact is not enough to deter some supporters of the circumcision ban, and the Icelandic legislation “insists the ‘rights of the child’ always exceed the ‘right of the parents to give their children guidance when it comes to religion’.”

Iceland is not alone in considering laws that pit the majority against the allegedly barbaric practices of a minority group.2 In the Netherlands, for example, animal rights activists are hard at work trying to outlaw kosher and halal meats.3  Meanwhile, in Quebec, lawmakers have prohibited the use of head coverings by—presumably Muslim—women in certain public places.4

Nor is the circumcision debate limited to Iceland. Male circumcision has been on shaky legal ground in Germany in recent years where a court banned the practice in 2012.5 Perhaps recognizing that banning Judaism could look bad for modern German claims of “tolerance,” lawmakers intervened to allow the practice again.

For the subjects of this regulation, the activities being targeted are no mere preferences. They touch on fundamental values, and they present a clear conflict with other value systems. In cases such as these, where there is no apparent room for compromise, whose values ought to prevail?

Democracy Doesn’t Settle Cultural Disputes

Throughout most of the West, of course, we’re all taught from an early age that democracy will allow everything to work itself out. The parties in conflict will enter into “dialogue,” will arrive at a “compromise” and then everyone will be happy and at peace in the end.

But, that’s not how it works in real life. While there are some areas for compromise that can be found around the edges of issues such as moral values and ethnic identity, the fact is that in the end, kosher meats are either legal or they’re not. Circumcision is either legal or it’s not. Abortion is either legal or it’s not. Transgender “transition” surgeries for children are either legal or they’re not.

After all, if one group of people believe that a 3-month-old fetus is a parasite that has trespassed against the mother, those people are going to find little room for compromise with a group of people who think the same fetus is a person deserving legal protection.

Similar dynamics are present in cases involving animal rights, circumcision, and headscarves. One side thinks that their side is the only acceptable option for virtuous, well-adjusted people. “Virtue,” of course, can be defined any number of ways. Some are so blinded by their cultural biases, in fact, that they even conclude that no “civilized” person could possibly believe that, say, circumcision is anything other than a barbaric practice. Those who continue to believe in such things, it is believed, must therefore be forced “into the 21st century” by the coercive power of the state. Their religious beliefs, as Hillary Clinton demanded in 2015, “have to be changed.”6

In any case, democracy offers no solution in addressing profound cultural differences among the residents of a single political jurisdiction. When populations with sharply differing world views must exist under a single regime, voting resolves nothing, and one side will ultimately impose its preferred policies on the other side. Noncompliance will bring down the full weight of the law, the police, and all the coercive institutions the state frequently employs. Most likely, the majority will end up winning, and the minority will ultimately be powerless to resist.

These problems also exist under all types of regimes, including authoritarian, non-democratic regimes. But anti-democrats often freely admit that the state is using force to support one side over the other. Democrats, on the other hand, often prefer to indulge in comforting fictions, and politely refrain from acknowledging that democracies can just as often produce disgruntled minority groups locked out of power by the majority.

In these cases, the only just and peaceful answer lies in dividing political jurisdictions in such a way that minority groups can separate themselves from the majority and thus attain a greater level of self-government and self-determination.

Majority Rule:  Conquest and Colonialism by Other Means

In his work on nationalism, Ludwig von Mises examined the fundamental problem that arises when various groups with different value systems live under a single unitary state. Even when there are certain theoretical guarantees for minority groups, the political reality is that groups with minority beliefs are at the mercy of the majority. This is true in matters of conflicting ethnic groups and religions, but is also applicable to any number of groups with conflicting values.

Joseph Salerno sums up Mises’s thought:

Mises maintains that two or more “nations” cannot peacefully coexist under a unitary democratic government. National minorities in a democracy are “completely politically powerless” because they have no chance of peacefully influencing the majority linguistic group. The latter represents “a cultural circle that is closed” to minority nationalities and whose political ideas are “thought, spoken, and written in a language that they do not understand.” Even where proportional representation prevails, the national minority “still remains excluded from collaboration in political life.” According to Mises, because the minority has no prospect of one day attaining power, the activity of its representatives “remains limited from the beginning to fruitless criticism…that…can lead to no political goal.” Thus, concludes Mises, even if the member of the minority nation, “according to the letter of the law, be a citizen with full rights…in truth he is politically without rights, a second-class citizen, a pariah.”

Mises characterizes majority rule as a form of colonialism from the point of view of the minority nation in a polyglot territory: “[It] signifies something quite different here than in nationally uniform territories; here, for a part of the people, it is not popular rule but foreign rule.” Peaceful liberal nationalism therefore is inevitably stifled in polyglot territories governed by a unitary state, because, Mises argues, “democracy seems like oppression to the minority. Where only the choice is open oneself to suppress or be suppressed, one easily decides for the former.” Thus, for Mises, democracy means the same thing for the minority as “subjugation under the rule of others.”7

Those on the winning side, of course, don’t see any problem here. What the minority thinks of as “oppression” is really—according to the winners—just “modernization,” “progress,” “decency,” “common sense,” or simply “the will of the majority.” The fact that the enforcement of that will of the majority is founded on state violence is of little concern.

The Solution: Secession and Decentralization

Historically, however, local autonomy and local self-governance has long been used by regimes for purposes of calming ethnic tensions, preventing rebellions, or encouraging economic development. Confederations like Switzerland explicitly employ a decentralized structure so as to avoid conflict between religious and linguistic groups. This tradition of self-government goes far deeper into European culture, however. For example, during the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, residents of towns in Europe were frequently granted self-government separate from the surrounding populations and districts ruled directly by the monarch or by local nobles. This was done in recognition of the fact that the populations in the towns had interests quite different from those in the countryside. The recognition of this separateness of the towns was reflected in so-called “German Town Law.” These separate legal codes—also known as Magdeburg law or Lübeck law—provided for self-governance in matters of local economic regulation and all the usual ordinances associated with municipal governments. So long as these cities paid their taxes and did not pose a geopolitical threat to the dominant princes, they were left alone. Often, this self-governance also took on an ethnic and linguistic color as many of these towns were populated largely by ethnic Germans living in regions populated largely by other ethnic groups.

Similar arrangements were also often enjoyed by Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the Early Modern period. Jewish communities, known as kehilot, generally were granted self-government, and a national parliament of these communities—the Va’ad Arba’ Aratzot—met to address the needs of the Jewish communities at large. (Notably, as the Polish state went into decline and gave way to Russian, Austrian, and Prussian dominance, these self-governing Jewish communities were reined in.)

The tolerance extended to these minority groups was not necessarily granted out of enlightened motives, of course. These were a recognition by many princes and rulers that self-government helped to neutralize conflict between majorities and minorities. Moreover, given that many regimes were more geared toward addressing wars and other geopolitical concerns, it was often best to simply allow many domestic groups the option of self-governance so long as these groups were not problematic for international relations.

Unfortunately, the prudence and tolerance that undergirds this line of thinking has been lost in much of the modern political world, and it is now generally accepted that the modern democratic state must apply universal policy across an entire national population. Mises, who was clearly knowledgeable about the history of central and eastern Europe, likely was well aware of the longer tradition of local self-governance, and saw its benefits.  

Mises—who was himself a democrat—understood that democratic elections offered no real solution to the problem of political minorities. For Mises, populations—regardless of whether they live within a democratic system or not—must not be forced into states where they will never be able to exercise self-determination due to the presence of a more powerful majority. On a practical level then, populations in regions, cities, and villages within existing states must be free to form their own states if need be, or join other states with friendlier majorities.

Mises explicitly recognized the benefits of this in maintaining the peace. In Liberalism, he writes that if “the inhabitants of a particular territory” seeks to leave one political jurisdiction and join another—or just remain independent—“their wishes are to be respected and complied with. This is the only feasible and effective way of preventing revolutions and civil and international wars” (emphasis added).8

According to Mises, without this option of peaceful separation, the permanent minority—should it wish to advance any efforts at self-determination—is left with few choices in the long run other than violent separation or rebellion. Additionally, in order to accommodate the realities of constantly-changing populations, borders and boundaries must change over time in order to minimize the number of people within minority populations with little to no say in national governments controlled by hostile majorities.

In Mises’s vision, there is no perfect solution. There will always be some minority groups that are at odds with the ruling majority. But, when states are smaller, more numerous, and more diverse in terms of policy, communities and individuals stand a better chance of finding a state in which their values match up with the majority.  Large unitary states, however, offer exactly the opposite: less choice, less diversity, and fewer chances to exercise self-determination.

• 1Tom Embury-Dennis, “Iceland MPs propose ban on circumcision of boys,” Independent, February 1, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/iceland-circumcision-ban-boys-islam-judaism-religion-medical- reasons-muslim-jewish-a8188701.html.
• 2Catholic News Service, “Some Chinese Catholics see restrictions as new religion rules take effect,” National Catholic Reporter, February 8, 2018, https://www.ncronline.org/news/world/some-chinese-catholics-see-restrictions-new-religion-rules-take-effect. Chinese communist officials have taken this a step further by banning children from churches and taking other measures to “restric[t] children from joining Christian groups and attending religious activities.”
• 3Nina Siegal, “New Slaughtering Rules Pit Dutch Religious Freedoms Against Animal Rights,” The New York Times, December 31, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/world/europe/netherlands-kosher-halal-animal- rights.html.
• 4Vipal Monga, “Quebec’s Law on Facial Veils Fuels Fierce Debate,” The Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/quebecs-law-on- facial-veils-fuels-fierce-debate-1516876200.
• 5Raphael Ahren, “Three months after circumcision ban, German government to legalize rite,” The Times of Israel, October 2012, https://www.timesofisrael.com/three-months-after-local-court-banned-circumcisions-german-government- to-legalize-rite/.
• 6Susan Jones, “Clinton: ‘Deep-Seated Cultural Codes, Religious Beliefs…Have to Be Changed’,” CNSNews, April 27, 2015, https://cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/clinton-deep-seated-cultural-codes-religious-beliefshave-be-changed. According to Clinton: “Yes, we’ve cut the maternal mortality rate in half, but far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth. All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice, not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.”
• 7Joseph T. Salerno, “Mises on Nationalism, the Right of Self-Determination, and the Problem of Immigration,” Mises Wire, March 28, 2017, https://mises.org/wire/mises-nationalism-right-self-determination-and-problem-immigration.
• 8Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: A Socio-Economic Exposition (Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1962), p. 109.