I guess the Serbs didn’t take the news of Kosovo’s “supervised independence” all that well, eh?
The Venn diagram above is one that’s been going around the web recently. It purports to explain the overlapping and intersecting identifications of people and places in the United Kingdom — for example, how you can be a Scotsman and a Briton at the same time. When Americans call people “British” they generally mean “English”, but while all Englishmen are British, not all Britons are Englishmen. Get it? Devolution is a big deal in the United Kingdom these days, as we’ve discussed here before. This recent article in The Guardian by journalist Iain McWhirter goes so far as to assert that the dissolution of the U.K. back into its constituent parts is now “inevitable”. The success of the SNP in wresting away political authority from Westminster is serving as a model for similar actions in Wales and Northern Ireland, and McWhirter argues that perhaps the best that London can hope for is some sort of federal system.
In the 1990s, the Soviet Union fell apart without a lot of effort once the Communist Party lost control in Moscow. While Russia and Byelorussia eventually kissed and made up, the rest of the nations that re-asserted themselves as independent states have moved on. Some, most notably the Baltic trio of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, quickly re-aligned with the West. Others simply replaced the brutal Soviet government with their own brutal dictatorships, and even the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine has not completely reformed that country’s government. The tiny country of Georgia was one of the first to shed the Soviet yoke, but they have struggled with Russia for years because Georgia controls access to valuable ports and oil. Now the Georgian government has to deal with a breakaway minority of its own — Abkhazia (via). Abkhazia borders on the Black Sea, which is why the Russian government has kept a hand in this particular conflict. As the linked article states, the Kosovo declaration puts Georgia and the EU in a tough spot with regard to recognizing Abkhazia.
You may or may not recall this from late last year: the Native American tribes that collective are known as the Lakota have declared their independence from the United States and renounced all U.S. claims to their territory, which covers portions of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana. As with the situations in Kosovo and Abkhazia, the stakes of other nations recognizing the validity of this claim to nationhood are pretty high but have been so low-balled by the U.S. government as to be almost meaningless.
But the Lakota are not the only ones talking about declaring independence. There’s an active secession movement in Vermont. Vermont was briefly an independent republic prior to becoming a state, and so the secessionists would call their country the “Second Vermont Republic”. That article also mentions in passing some secessionist groups in the Pacific Northwest, Texas (big surprise), and even California. And those are the ones who AREN’T the loonie gun-toting wackjobs!
The, of course, there’s that whole Red State Vs. Blue State thing:
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