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

For decades, when American readers have encountered the topics of secession and political decentralization, the discussion has generally been confined to a narrow range of topics around the American Civil War, American constitutional law, and race relations in America.

This book barely mentions any of those things.

Rather, Breaking Away differs from countless other books on secession and decentralization in that it considers examples and benefits of secession and radical decentralization in a much broader historical, geographical, and theoretical context. That is, this book isn’t necessarily for Americans at all, but for anyone interested in how issues of secession and decentralization come up again and again worldwide as communities of human beings seek self-determination, freedom, and economic prosperity. An examination of these topics also necessitates a look at small states which often only exist because they have successfully resisted efforts at political centralization, or have been formed from successful secession movements of the past. Small states are often the success stories.

Fortunately, scholars in recent decades have begun to focus in greater detail on secession, decentralization, and small states. For many decades, the study of states has focused overwhelmingly on large states and great powers. “State-building” has long been of central interest to many scholars. But the processes of breaking states apart—secession and decentralization—have commanded far less attention.

With this book, I hope to draw upon these new trends in scholarship and expand the typical discussion over secession and decentralization into a larger context. I also present these strategies in terms of general principles that transcend any single nation’s history and experience. From local conflicts over social policy to post-colonial secession movements, we can find countless ways in which secession and decentralization have been at the center of national liberation movements and efforts to limit the prerogatives of powerful states.

This book is not intended for academics, however, and in fact has its genesis in many short articles written for a non-academic audience. As such, this book suffers the shortcomings of collections of articles in that some material may be covered more than once here and there, and introductions and conclusions may at times seem abrupt. The up side to this, of course, is that the reader will likely find many of the chapters easy to read in a short amount of time. Moreover, in many places, I have merged chapters and taken steps to create an easier flow.

The book is composed of three sections. The first section looks at numerous historical examples of secession and decentralization as a tactic in dividing up sovereign states into smaller and totally independent states. I also examine the moral, political and practical cases—that is, not the constitutional or legal cases—to be made in favor of secession and decentralization. The second section looks at how democratic government institutions function better at a smaller and more localized level. The third section looks at some examples of political decentralization in American history, but with a focus on more obscure examples now largely forgotten or misremembered.

Although there is a philosophical component to this book, it is not primarily theoretical in nature. Rather, it focuses on historical examples and analysis of how secession and decentralization manifest themselves and can be used as tools in the real world. Taken all together, it is my hope that the reader will come away with a better understanding of how political decentralization continues to be relevant, useful, and important in the modern world.

The transformation of vague ideas into the present book was the product of many opportunities and suggestions that came from friends and colleagues. Central to it all is the fact I have been given the opportunity to write at length on these topics for a period of years, and that has been made possible by the tireless work of Lew Rockwell and Jeff Deist in keeping the Mises Institute a place where this sort of research can take place. I’m also thankful for the help and encouragement of my colleagues Tho Bishop and Judy Thommesen who have encouraged me and made the project seem more manageable. The most important factor of all has been my wife and my four children who have been instrumental in forcing me to repeatedly evaluate the ideas here on a practical level. Jessica has always been a source of tireless support and helping to raise four children tends to make one think often of whether or not one’s ideas are of any use in making the world a better place in the future. I hope some of the ideas here can help this in some small way.

—Ryan McMaken
Denver, Colorado
June 2022