On Recession and Secession

Foreign Policy is out with a superb online special feature titled “Who Won the Great Recession?”, featuring a diverse cast of eleven pieces with such esteemed bylines as Slavoj Zizek, Joseph Nye, and Tyler Cowen. And while there’s no shortage of soft-power indulgence in the lineup (McDonald’s; Hollywood; Cheapskates, Pessimists & Food Trucks), where the mini-series shines is in doing what Foreign Policy does best: foreign policy.
Joshua Keating’s “These 7 Countries” is a quick and dirty, data-packed survey of the few countries that can be soundly identified as better off now than they were four years ago—in the author’s estimation, South Korea, Poland, Canada, Sweden, Indonesia, Turkey, and Mexico. Yet despite Keating’s diverse portfolio, there is nary a BRIC in sight. Half a decade of recession has instead born out something much closer to Jack Goldstone’s “Rise of the TIMBIs“, a scenario in which “Turkey, India, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia…form more than just a cute acronym. They all share favorable demographics and democracy and are already large economies. Their GDPs combined have already surpassed that of China and will be much faster growing in the coming decades. Their combination of booming labor forces and political openness points to rapid increases in human capital and innovation that will propel these regional powers into global powers in the near future.”
Equally uncanny is the overlap between Keating’s list of recession-era winners and those in Foreign Affairs‘ landmark 1996 article, “Pivotal States and U.S. Strategy“. Writing at a moment when unipolar triumphalism was all the rage in American international relations thought, Chase, Hill, and Kennedy identified Mexico, Turkey, and Indonesia as the strategic pivots of their respective regions: economically ascendant powers with ambiguous civilizational and geopolitical identities. As Mexico continues on its path to Latin American economic ascendancy (set to surpass Brazil on many metrics, despite the ravages of the drug war), Turkey dictates an independent course in the Middle East, and Indonesia grows to outpace the United States as the world’s second-largest democracy (and largest Muslim-majority nation), it’s worth recognizing “Pivotal States” for its remarkable prescience.
One thing I was disappointed to see missing from the Foreign Policy feature, however: secessionism. Although few adjustments to the global map have been made since the early 1990s (notable exceptions being independence for East Timor, Montenegro, South Sudan, and nominally speaking, Kosovo), the great recession has shaken both regional sovereignty arrangements and the territorial integrity of long-standing states rich and poor. Apart from the culmination of Alex Salmond’s national crusade in the form of Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum, Catalonia and Bavaria seem on the unlikely cusp of political showdowns over separation from Spain and Germany, respectively.
Miffed by their disproportionate contributions to irresponsible politicians in London, Madrid, and Berlin, these wealthy constituent-regions have turned toward ethnohistorical particularism in search of a way out of recession’s clutches. And while I wouldn’t count on a redrawing of Europe’s early modern borders any time soon, it’s quite likely that would-be secessionists will play a bigger role in determining the political conversation than most are willing to recognize. As they’ve demonstrated before, wealthy states will make as many concessions as they can in order to maintain territorial integrity—lest they come to know that disintegration isn’t just the province of failed states like Mali, Syria, and Sudan. They can thank the recession for that.