Debating the Right to Secede: Normative Theories of Secession

This paper provides an overview and critique of the main literature on normative theories of secession. Normative justifications are an integral part of both the practice and the study of secession. Secessionists employ normative arguments to give legitimacy to their cause, while scholars seek to understand through the development of normative theories various aspects of secession, such as, its causes, its legitimacy, and its legality. One central aspect of normative theories of secession is the question of who has the right to secede, from a theoretical and, most of the times, moral point of view. This paper presents the most prominent normative theories of secession, classified in remedial theories, choice theories, national theories, and alternative normative theories providing a theoretical background for this volume. It appraises them and concludes with a critique. Normative theories suffer from the same ultimate limitation: in the absence of a supreme authority to regulate, assign and enforce a right to secession normative justifications will remain in the realm of theoretical debate. Hence, normative theories have engaged in a futile exercise to construct and justify an unenforceable right.