Yemen has been home to secessionist sentiment ever since its reunification following the Cold War in 1990.  See Chris Roth for more background here and here.  Now it is deteriorating. The Shia Houthi rebels of the north have made large gains in the last few weeks, claiming most of Taiz, the country’s third largest city.  Saudi Arabia has entered the fray, leading a sizable coalition of states and raining airstrikes down all over the place in an effort to slow the Houthis and their Iranian influence.  The U.S, a Saudi ally and supporter of the besieged Yemeni government is contributing logistics and surveillance for the strikes, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the civilian death toll is spiking.  Houthi rebels have nonetheless seized the presidential palace in Aden despite this.  The Saudis are now airdropping in weapons to anti-Houthi forces, which may or may not turn them back from Yemen’s second-largest hub.  Speculation on Saudi ground troops is running rampant.  Plus, the NYT is debating if “Yemen is America’s Fight“, so you know things have gotten bad enough that we can start to contemplate another unwinnable drawn out world-police war.

It’s worth noting that the Islamic State, previously thought to be inactive here, also came into the picture when suicide bombings that killed over 140 people in Houthi-dominated areas were claimed by an I.S. loyal group.  So to the extent the U.S. gets involved in Yemen, it will be cooperating with Saudi Arabia (explicitly) and Islamic State (implicitly) against Houthi rebels (explicitly) and Iran (implicitly) while simultaneously  cooperating with Iran against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.  Do I have that right?  A confusing region is getting more confusing.   Cue all the updated “The Middle East Explained in XYZ # of Chart” infographics.  Better yet, don’t.

Iraq is claiming victory in Tikrit over Islamic State

Catalonia round-up:  Podemos: friend or foe?  /  Agreement on an independence roadmap / On the Catalan and Irish languages

Did the promise of more power to Scotland affect their referendum?

Moldova’s autonomous region elected a pro-Russian governor.

Brief look at Novorossiya’s role in Ukraine

The Chechen proxy war in Ukraine

Trouble between Armenia and Azerbaijan over a disputed separatist region

Young Kosovars are leaving; police are arresting their smugglers.

Devolution (and murder) in Mozambique.  Details on the bill here

Singapore‘s independence “accident.”

Xi Jinping:  “The separatist forces of ‘Taiwan independence’ and their activities threaten national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”  The Economist on the countries’ relationship.

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Data visualization: % of global population living under various polities over time

The time New England colonized Kansas

The internet’s first anarchist:

Barlow’s 846-word text, published online in February 1996, begins with a bold rebuke of traditional sovereign powers: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

Micronations in pictures

Arctic private cities & implications for other-planet colonization

During their chat, Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel were asked about private cities.

Thiel:  If you could give me a convincing way it could work for $50 million instead of $50 billion, I’d be interested.   & Cowen:  I tend to favor larger political units and to think that human freedom will be found by the wealth and diversity within larger political units, giving people pockets.  I’m not sure we will ever have a bottom-down creation of a lot of micro-units which compete very intensely and, through exit, give people true liberty.  I’m more optimistic about the larger political unit vision.

Georgism and proprietary cities

Decentralization as free-market federalism

NYT Magazine article for open borders

PanAm Post roundup:  iNation founders on bringing competition to government services / Against a gold standard for bitcoin / On the U.S. – Mexico border

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Should Alberta ditch Canada for the U.S.?

Alberta as an independent country doesn’t solve a huge number of problems. If it left Canada, its currency goes through the roof because all it has is oil exports, and that would drive agriculture out of business. It would be a one-horse economy in a very short time.

Seceding to the U.S. becomes the only political and economic option. If you do that, the inflation issue goes away, the tax problem goes away, the security problem goes away. Alberta gets everything it says it wants out of Canada within the first year of joining the U.S.

On Hawaiian sovereignty.

L.A. Times overview of the Southern Tier N.Y. secession threat over fracking: “It’s hard for them to accept that the line on the map makes such a huge difference“

Short and sweet: The time has come for 51

(Image sources 1 & 2)

Bruce Thornton over at The Hoover Institution says the European Union’s days are numbered.  Among the culprits are demographics, excessive regulation, monolithic monetary policy, welfare statism, secularism, multiculturalism, and rising nationalism, some of which are certainly intertwined.  As he correctly points out, this list is mostly well understood – but perhaps the “perfect storm” view of it all is not.  Pat Buchanan summarizes the piece as well.  Here’s Thornton:

Nor over the last century have the various substitutes for Christianity managed to fill the void. Political religions like communism and fascism failed bloodily, leaving behind mountains of corpses. Nor has secular social democracy, with its utopian ideals, provided people with a transcendent principle that justifies sacrifice for the greater good, or even gives people a reason to reproduce. A shared commitment to leisure, a short workweek, and a generous social safety net is nothing worth killing or dying for. Neither is the vague idea of a transnational E.U. ruled by unaccountable Eurocrats in Brussels and Strasbourg.

More important, from its beginning, the idea of the E.U. depended on the denigration of patriotism and national pride, for these were seen as the road to the exclusionary, blood-and-soil nationalism that fed Nazism and fascism. Yet all peoples are the product of a particular culture, language, mores, histories, traditions, and landscapes. The “postmodern” abstract E.U. ideal of transcending such parochial identities was destined to collide with the real cultural differences between European nations.

Don’t miss Chris Roth’s 10 separatist movements to watch in 2015.  It’s quite good.  A few excerpts below.  On Catalonia (#9):

Don’t let last month’s anticlimactic referendum fool you: Spain is fragmenting, and disappointment over what happened—and especially what didn’t—in November will only deepen the cracks.  Catalans are just looking for the next vehicle for their frustration and impatience.

And East Turkestan (#8):

Uyghurs do, if they play it right, have the capacity to make Xinjiang ungovernable.  It’s possible a truly general uprising would result in a bloodbath that would make the Tiananmen Square massacre look like nothing.  But if it happens in the context of a general unraveling of Chinese unity—with separatist sentiment on the rise in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Tibet as well—then anything can happen.

Go read his Kurdistan (#1) comments for yourself – not to be missed.

Cleanest data yet proving Crimeans are very happy with Russian annexation via the Christian Science Monitor.  Putin celebrated the 1-year anniversary by more extensively integrating the separatist South Ossetia region of Georgia.  Russia beat back Georgia in 2008 in their defense, recognizes it as an independent state, and shovels it plenty of cash.  None of this is lost on their President:

Mr. Tibilov remarked that Wednesday marked a year since Russia annexed Crimea. “We welcomed that step from the first day. South Ossetia welcomes all political steps that Russia’s leadership makes.” (WSJ)

Georgia’s other separatist region, Abkhazia, signed a treaty with Russia a few months ago as well, which this blog linked to at the time.  Both come in at #4 in Roth’s 2015 list, where he calls them “puppet states” and says they have both “openly asked to be annexed by Russia.”

Despite its geographic size, South Ossetia only holds about 50,000 people.  Here is the wikipedia entry and below is a map of the region as well as their coat of arms.

Related: how nervous does Putin make Estonia?

Why countries that recognize Palestine turn their back on Kosovo. (Hint: It’s America). Interesting read, although I’m not sure how the parties in question don’t also make use of “righteous indignation” in various ways.  Anyways, the gist:

This ultimately renders humanitarian appeals for recognition in Kosovo and Palestine (and Abkhazia, and eastern Ukraine, and Kurdistan) rather dishonest. The nations in question, the actual people vying for self-determination, are championed by their respective supporters as suffering nobly under the yoke of amoral oppressors. To the pro-Kosovo faction, big-bad Russia and little-bad Serbia impede international recognition for the sake of being bad. To the pro-Palestine crowd, big-bad America and little-bad Israel deny Palestinian sovereignty within the same, moralistic, black-and-white framework.

All parties seem to use righteous indignation to their political advantage; except, of course, the parties with the most tangible stakes: the Kosovars and Palestinians. They are minimized to little more than chess pieces—pawns, in fact, the most disposable of chess pieces—buffeted between elite players in the great game of 21st century realpolitik. A game that, for these would-be states, offers no discernible prize.

A Robin Hanson reading of this might conclude secession isn’t (always) about independence.  Related: Iranian propaganda in Kosovo and Netanyahu backs off his pre-election vow of no Palestinian statehood

A majority (52%) of Germans now want Greece out of the Eurozone.  That’s 11 points higher than two weeks earlier.

Is a Scottish exit inevitable?

Icelandic President: “Independence in itself can never be a negative.”

The Dutch government must compensate the families of Indonesian men it summarily executed in that country’s war for independence in the 1940s

Good stats are hard to come by, but violence in Xinjiang / East Turkestan seems to be on the rise.

Hong Kong in disarray

China defending its South China Sea activity

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Both Lake and Lassen Counties voted 3-2 to place the State of Jefferson on their general ballots. A dissenting Lassen county supervisor prefers to take aim at a 1964 Supreme Court Decision instead.

Lew Rockwell invokes Lysander Spooner and Frank Chodorov to beat back anti-secessionist “regime libertarians”, and closes with this:

 Secession is not a popular idea among the political and media classes in America, to be sure, and regime libertarians may roll their eyes at it, but a recent poll found about a quarter of Americans sympathetic to the idea, despite the ceaseless barrage of nationalist propaganda emitted from all sides. A result like this confirms what we already suspected: that a substantial chunk of the public is willing to entertain unconventional thoughts. And that’s all to the good. Conventional American thoughts are war, centralization, redistribution, and inflation. The most unconventional thought in America today is liberty.

Lengthy City Journal piece on California’s founding that opens with a bang:

The founding of California was an adventure, an epic, a tragicomedy, a conquest, and a window into America’s soul. It was a creation ex nihilo that reveals the roots of society, the establishment of justice, and the very nature of man. “All our brutal passions were here to have full sweep, and all our moral strength, all our courage, our patience, our docility, and our social skill were to contend with these passions,” native son Josiah Royce wrote of his motherland in 1886.  Philosophers have long extrapolated from existing states, of whose origins the precise details are lost, just how political life comes into being. In California, there is no need to speculate. It happened only yesterday, every noble act and sordid deed alike recorded.

Came across a recent internet poll asking if Upstate NY should secede.  Comment # 8 is worth a look, highlighting the usual rural / urban policy mismatch.

South Miami is looking for help splitting Florida up.

Crying secession in Maine

The Republic of Oregon – 1840-1870

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Assimilation is an issue of scale and polycentrism can help.  (very relevant to Thornton’s EU piece.)

Alex Tabarrok and Shruti Rajagopalan in the NYT with an op-ed on private cities.  See also his chat with Russ Roberts on this topic.

The Economist is optimistic on the American Latino demographic.

For an open Mexican border, sans citizenship

The marginal cases argument for open immigration

March 16th was Open Borders Day and an Open Borders Manifesto was written up.  Here is their link round-up from the day.

Small countries in need of cash are selling rights to citizenship. Programs in Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta will have EU-wide ramifications.

Anarcho-capitalists in Cuba

Seasteading might get its own reality show.

(Image sources 1, 2, 3 and 4)

Apologies for any paywalled links, I’ve tried to double-up sources where that occurs.

Local law enforcement teamed up with the FBI to raid a meeting of The Republic of Texas, a group that believes they never legally joined the union. More here.  And a RT documentary on the group from last year:

 

A group of Southern Tier towns in New York are threatening secession due to their state’s fracking ban.  The Economist picked up the story in its last issue:

The Southern Tier used to be called the “Valley of Opportunity”, with companies like IBM employing thousands. But the area’s big employers left or downsized long ago. The economy is stagnant, with houses for sale everywhere. Windsor cannot afford a police department. Even its funeral homes are long gone. Meanwhile, just yards away in Pennsylvania, Great Bend is thriving. The neighbours have new cars, freshly painted houses and jobs, and all from shale.

In Oregon, a petition to split off East Portland was shot down and “would need to be rewritten.”

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Independence movements are alive and well across Europe, according to Peter Geoghegan at The Irish Times:

European borders have shifted only a handful of times over the last two decades: the dissolution of Serbia and Montenegro; Kosovan independence in 2008; Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year. But the boundaries are unlikely to remain so static.

In Belgium, the divide between French-speaking Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders has long stymied attempts to foster national unity. The largest party in the whole of Belgium is the nationalist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA). The N-VA has previously called for the more prosperous Flanders to leave the Francophone south. With the European Commission in Brussels, the break-up would have EU-wide ramifications.

Independence movements are riding high elsewhere on the continent. At nationalist gatherings from Edinburgh to Barcelona over the last 18 months, I have met gaggles of people carrying the Venetian flag. Last year, 89 per cent of Venetians voted for independence in an online petition.

Spain’s highest court ruled that the Catalan vote in November was unconstitutional, not surprisingly.

Elsewhere in Spain, in a negative development for Podemos, the Catalan Ciudadanos party is rising rapidly. The anti-independence party has already polled at over 18% by some tallies.

As the chances of Grexit recede, will Brexit be the new focus for the EU?

Lithuanians are worried Putin will turn his annexing eye to the Baltics next.  A very interesting Foreign Affairs article explains. The government has diversified energy dependency away from Russia and is attempting to bring back conscription.  Here’s a more in-depth take.

Is autonomous Somaliland making any progress towards formal independence?  Officials are looking to capitalize on its relative stability by attracting tourists.

China is staying busy in the South China Sea.

Rand Paul boldly calls for a Kurdish state.

Secessionist support is enough to get you arrested in Malaysia.

Honduran ZEDEs, debated.

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Patri Friedman likens progressivism to the second law of thermodynamics, which is not a complement:

One of the things life has taught me this decade is the importance of exclusion and boundaries, which are highly relevant to this metaphor. A thermodynamic system with poor borders (less insulation), will have greater thermal conductivity. It may do more work initially, but it will also move at maximum speed towards that final resting state where all energy is evenly distributed. Such a state is peaceful in precisely the same way as death; for without flows of energy, there can be no life (in vivo or in silico – as no computation is possible). I suppose those who think human extinction is fair or just will consider this the state of ultimate fairness. I don’t particularly care for that final solution.

So if you even care about life existing – let alone the infinite diversity possible therein – then (contra Caplan), boundaries (such as national borders) are an absolute necessity. No differences, no energy flow, no (thermodynamic) work, no life. As in the stars, so on the earth: romance flows from polarity; trade from comparative advantage; thermodynamic work from heat differences; evolution from variation; economic competition from competing alternatives. All progress is driven by differences; so to erase differences is (counter-eponymously) to end progress.

Can devolving more power to major cities save fragile states?  The case of Nigeria.

Will Venezuela be the next Ukraine?

Tyler Cowen on where to head if you’d like to vote with your feet.

Status quo bias as the main barrier to border flexibility.

(Image source)