Centralization and democratic backsliding: a spark for secessionist movements?

Across the globe, democratic backsliding is reshaping the relationship between state power and territorial autonomy. As executives consolidate authority and institutional checks erode, processes of political centralization increasingly constrain regional and minority self-government. This paper examines how the interplay between democratic regression and recentralization can serve as catalysts for secessionist mobilization. It investigates the hypothesis that democratic erosion transforms the meaning of secessionism itself: as guarantees of pluralism and self-rule decline, regional movements reframe autonomy and independence as symbolic resistance to a central power perceived as illegitimate. The paper develops this argument through a comparative study of Italy, the United States, and Ethiopia, three formally federal or quasi-federal systems that have experienced rising centralization and varying degrees of democratic stress. Despite their stark differences in regime type and political trajectory, each case reveals how erosion of democratic norms reshapes center–periphery relations and provides fertile ground for renewed secessionist or autonomist discourse. In Italy, asymmetric autonomy meets growing executive concentration and populist tendencies. Recent crises have fueled the rationale for recentralization of fiscal and administrative powers by the central government, reviving autonomy claims in Lombardy and Veneto and reaffirming South Tyrol’s distinctiveness. Here, secessionist aspirations have traditionally remained marginal, periodically resurfacing with varying intensity, yet they continue to shape the province’s political discourse within a constitutional and democratic framework. In the United States, long viewed as a model of democratic federalism, polarization and institutional erosion have likewise heightened tensions between the federal center and major regional actors. Expanding federal authority and deepening partisan divides have spurred “soft secessionist” initiatives such as Texit or Calexit. While lacking realistic prospects of independence, these movements express deeper anxieties about representation, pluralism, and the legitimacy of central governance, revealing how democratic fatigue can reactivate discourses of regional self-determination even within consolidated democracies. In Ethiopia, by contrast, democratic backsliding has taken an overtly authoritarian form. The central government’s recentralization dismantled the country’s ethnofederal balance, sparking the Tigray conflict and the near-fracture of the Ethiopian state. This case illustrates the extreme end of the spectrum: when centralization is combined with the collapse of democratic accountability, secessionist aspirations evolve into violent confrontation. By juxtaposing these three cases, the paper explores both the institutional and cultural-symbolic dimensions of self-determination under democratic strain. It explores whether secessionist and autonomy movements reinterpret themselves in response to increasing centralization, framing their claims in terms of democratic principles to contest authoritarian tendencies at the center. The result is a spectrum of outcomes ranging from a symbolic or discursive dissent in the United States, through constitutional mediated regionalism in Italy, to violent secessionist conflict in Ethiopia. The paper bridges cases from the Global North and South and links institutional dynamics with identity-based narratives. It explores whether secessionist rhetoric gains traction as a response to perceived democratic fatigue and institutional drift. The final goal is to test the hypothesis that centralization and democratic backsliding foster secessionist movements, allowing them to reframe their discourse and gain public support as a reaction to these dynamics.