The Political Economy of Secession

Beyond Individual Exit

In a recent essay, I explained that the right to exit is often given great importance in liberal thought. In some cases, it is almost as if nothing else matters than the guarantee that individuals can —in principle or effectively— exit a group, a community, or a society. The idea is that the right to exit implies that no individual can be coerced into a political arrangement without their consent. For some authors like Robert Nozick or Chandran Kukathas, the right to exit is both necessary and sufficient for a society to count as liberal. Whatever one may think about this claim (I dispute it in the aforementioned essay), the right to exit is generally discussed at the level of individuals, as an “individual” right. However, how does it translate when it is considered as a collective prerogative? In this essay, I consider whether and how this right can be turned into an argument for the permissibility of secession.

As I said, the right to exit is generally viewed as one of the fundamental freedoms in a liberal perspective. It is constitutive of “negative liberty,” i.e., the rights and liberties that protect individuals from the interference of others. Interestingly, its importance is also sometimes emphasized in other political traditions, such as (neo-) Republicanism, as a protection against domination. The case for the significance of the right to exit from a republican perspective is especially made by the political philosopher Robert S. Taylor in his book Exit Left.[1] Taylor makes the interesting and plausible claim that the ability to exit that is typical of market relations is also the best way to make sure that individuals are not subjected to the arbitrary will of the most powerful.[2] Exit is therefore a centerpiece of political freedom as conceived from a republican point of view.

Part of Taylor’s argument is that a real right to exit is likely to give more weight to people’s “voice,” appealing to Albert Hirschmann’s famous distinction. The possibility of leaving a political community makes one’s demands, claims, and complaints more likely to be heard and satisfied because they have at their disposal a credible threat in case they are ignored. The analogy with market relations is clear. In the same way that sellers are incentivized to listen to their customers because they know that the latter can easily look elsewhere for what they are searching for, political leaders who are aware that dissatisfied citizens can migrate will be less tempted to ignore their demands and even less to disregard their rights.

The analogy doesn’t work perfectly, and a large part of Taylor’s book consists of qualifying it. For instance, Taylor acknowledges that increasing the possibility of exit may, at least initially, harm the poorest and less favored members of the political community, “because the most advantaged will then leave and no longer raise their voices against abuse.”[3] That’s why the right to exit must be as effective as possible so that everybody, not only the most favored, can benefit from it. All in all, however, there are solid reasons to think that the best way to realize the republican ideal of non-domination is to organize a healthy political competition in what could take the shape of a federal system with autonomous political units offering different “menus” of public goods and legislation and between which resources and individuals are (effectively) free to circulate.[4]

Interestingly, while Taylor is fairly optimistic about the possibility of organizing and implementing this kind of federalism at the infra-national level, he doesn’t view it as a model for the national level:[5]

“At the level of national politics especially, where the economic model’s policy framework of resourced exit and enhanced competition must be created and maintained, there is simply no substitute for voice, for the tricky business of political entrepreneurship and coalition building in a democratic system. Moreover, given the high cost of international migration, inter alia, the economic model is unlikely to have much relevance to the national state”

The argument has intuitive plausibility. The higher the (material and psychological) costs of exit, the less effective the right to exit is likely to be and the less likely it is to generate the required incentives to harness political power. Now, we can respond that the difficulty here comes from the fact that exit is uniquely seen as an individual right. As I noted at the beginning, we may also interpret it as a collective prerogative. In this case, the right to exit turns into something more contentious: the right to secede.

A poster from a 1900 secessionist exhibition

There are different forms of secession, but here I will focus on what is generally taken as secession in the classic sense: a group in a portion of a territory of a state attempts to create a new state (or any other kind of political association) on the very same territory.[6] The right to secede in this classic sense is not exactly the mere collectivist version of the individual right to exit. There are at least three significant differences. First, the group that secedes remains on the same territory, de facto amputating the original state from part of its territorial sovereignty. In contrast, most of the discussions of the individual right to exit assume that individuals are free to move to a different jurisdiction, which most often entails geographical mobility. Second, secession entails the creation of a new political association, most often a state, that will de facto interact with the preexisting state. This is different from individual exit where it is supposed that individuals move to another preexisting political association. Third, secession requires a collective choice made by a group of persons, with the very likely possibility that this choice is not unanimous. Quite the contrary, the right to exit entirely depends on one’s consent, as it is an individual choice.[7]

These differences explain why the right to secede is far more controversial than the right to exit and the more general right to associate and disassociate. However, it remains to see if these differences really justify such diverging stances. Let’s start by considering possible virtues of secession. In a recently published article in the journal Constitutional Political Economy, Bahar Leventoglu, Georg Vanberg, and Alessandra Wagoner provide a formal argument showing that the introduction of a right to secede favors mutually advantageous federal arrangements that would not be agreed on without such a right.[8] The general idea is as follows. When several political associations agree to form a (federal) state, more or less predictable political imbalances are likely to emerge, favoring some political units over others. This creates a risk of political domination that may block the agreement to form a state, even though all parties could potentially benefit from it. The introduction of a right to secede in the constitution of the state will lessen this risk by creating a credible threat to exit in case the strongest political associations of the federation take advantage of the imbalances.

This is not merely a theoretical fantasy. The authors document the Burmese and Ethiopian examples where, in both cases, the constitution formally creating the state includes a right to unilateral secession. The argument closely parallels the rationale for the individual right to exit and can be endorsed either from a liberal or republican perspective. A possible response is that it only applies for federal states that are effectively the result of a formal constitutional agreement among preexisting political associations (e.g., the European Union), not to states whose historical origins don’t seem to proceed from such agreement (e.g., France) or go back too far in time. However, the argument is typically a “contractualist” one: the fact that it would have been rational for individuals to agree over a constitution including a right to secede is sufficient to justify such a right.

Now, as I said, the right to secede has specificities that make it non-reducible to a collectivist version of the individual right to exit. The main issue here is precisely its collectivist nature. It has at least two implications. First, the effectiveness of the right to secede depends on the ability of a group to solve a collective action problem. The group must find a way or another to make a collective decision, which can be costly and considerably undermine its exercise. Second, unless the decision to secede is unanimous, some individuals will be coerced into seceding from the prevailing state against their will. This individual cost can be lessened if the newly created state effectively provides an individual right to exit, but even in this case, individuals who would like to move to the territory under the sovereignty of the original state may be barred from doing so by the latter.

Individuals anticipating this risk may not want to grant a right to secede, when put into the contractualist framework I’ve just discussed. Constitutionally protected individual rights are likely to be more effective in guaranteeing individuals’ freedom, both in the liberal (negative) and republican sense. However, the most serious problem is elsewhere. In my essay on the right to exit, I noticed possible objections to the individual right to exit. First, communities and political associations are not fully independent, and their choices generate spillover effects. Second, the possibility of exit can undermine the pursuit of values and ideals. These objections hold in the case of the right to secede and are likely to be more significant. From an economic perspective, we can interpret them in terms of network externalities. If a state lets one of its political subgroups secede, this is likely to generate high costs to all other subgroups, in part due to the diseconomies of scale that are produced by the secession. In some cases, it can trigger a domino effect. Once a subgroup has seceded, the “calculus of consent” of a second group can be affected and make secession more appealing for it. If this second group secedes in turn, secession may become the best response for a third group, and so on, leading to the decomposition of the state.

A change of perspective is likely to amplify this mechanism. The right to secede may be viewed by a large majority as taboo, even if formally allowed. Because of that, social norms and values may lead individuals and political associations to ignore its existence. However, once talks of secession start, and even more if secession effectively occurs, the taboo is gone. This increases the chance that the domino effect is triggered.

All this militates against granting the right to secede to groups of individuals. On the other hand, one of the main practical barriers to the exercise of the (individual) right to exit is the significance of opportunity costs that this entails. When you leave your country, you give up a lot of benefits provided by public goods, some of them purely material (e.g., infrastructures) others at least partially related to cultural considerations (e.g., benefits that come from the fact of interacting with people of the same culture and speaking the same language as you). The very same network externalities that may make secession unattractive from a state point of view are also an impediment to the right of exit. Interpreted as a collective form of exit, secession considerably lessens the opportunity costs for individuals.

Once this is put in the balance, the case for the right to secede is uncertain. The justification of the individual right to exit is less straightforward, but in some cases, the right to secede may be a condition for the effective possibility of individual exit.

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[1] Robert S. Taylor, Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2017).

[2] A significant difference between the republican and the libertarian versions of the right to exit is that, in the former, the right must be effectively enforced, while libertarians are satisfied with a merely formal possibility to disassociate from groups and communities. Most liberals would side with republicans rather than libertarians on this, as I explain in my previous essay.

[3] Taylor, Exit Left, p. 15.

[4] On the supply side, Taylor defends a form of fiscal federalism very similar to the one endorsed by liberal philosophers and economists, such as James Buchanan.

[5] Taylor, Exit Left, p. 107-8.

[6] For this and other forms of secession, see Allen Buchanan’s entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Allen Buchanan and Elizabeth Levinson, “Secession,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Winter 2021 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/secession/.

[7] Of course, state authorities can force an individual to leave the territory over which their sovereignty extends. In this case, however, it cannot be said that the individual is exercising their right to exit.

[8] Bahar Leventoglu, Georg Vanberg, and Alessandra Waggoner, “Federalism, Political Imbalance, and the Right to Secession,” Constitutional Political Economy 36, no. 1 (March 1, 2025): 26–43.