Ed West

Ed West is a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture. He is @edwestonline on Twitter.

If Kosovo can legally secede from Serbia, what's to stop Mexifornia leaving the United States?

 

By Ed West World Last updated: July 25th, 2010

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If Kosovo can unilaterally secede from a sovereign state quite legally, as the World Court has now ruled, where does it leave the rest of the world's unstable multi-ethnic states?

What about Iraq, for instance, where the Kurdish region in the north has been self-ruling for 20 years? The Kurds are the largest nation without a state, and certainly deserve one.

And if the Kurds broke away, then what about the minorities within the minority region? The meta-minorities. A small portion of south-west Kurdistan is populated with a slight majority of Assyrian Christians, who would rather some form of autonomy to protect their ancient culture from certain extinction. Can they form their own micro-state?

What about South Africa and its 20 or so ethnic groups? What about the rest of that continent, a hodgepodge of artificially created states, which agreed some time ago not to question these false European-made boundaries to prevent continuing all-out war. It would be a cartographer's nightmare, and we'd have to build a new UN assembly the size of Wembley stadium, while qualifying rounds for the World Cup would take decades.

And, as someone I follow on Twitter pointed out, what if a Hispanic-majority California voted to secede from the United States? What justification could the US government then use to stop them? Because the black, white and Asian minorities won't like it? Tell that to the Serbs, buddy.

The Mexicans have a greater historic claim to California than the Albanians do to Kosovo, which until the last quarter of the 19th century had a Serbian majority. Even into the 1980s it had a substantial Serbian minority, and its decline was not entirely down to the higher Albanian birth rate. There was some intimidation and ethnic cleansing involved, and even in 1999, when Bill Clinton and Tony Blair embarked on their war, both sides were at it. That the Serbs were doing it worse was for the same reason, as P J O'Rourke once said, that a dog licks his balls – because they could.

Having said that, and in light of the way that Europe had shamefully stood aside during Bosnia, Blair was morally justified in intervening. It is all the more admirable because, as in the case of Iraq (which Blair had been lobbying Clinton to invade long before Bush and 9/11), it was largely unpopular.

Many British people were not just isolationist in 1999 but actively hostile to the idea of taking the side of the Albanians against the Serbs, and not just because of religious solidarity. Most Brits rather admire the Serbs, and even their fondness for drunken violence, football hooliganism and obscene swear swords about the sexual peccadilloes of other peoples' mothers only endears them more. They're less keen on the Albanians, it has to be said, a feeling not improved by the subsequent appearance of many Kosovan refugees in Britain after the war ("Kosovan" is still a generic ethnic slur to any eastern European, and always meant as an insult).

But you can't portion up the world according to national popularity contests, otherwise the English would be lucky to hang on to the Isle of Wight, the rest of the country being handed over to the Irish Republic. It seems obviously fair that the Albanians should get most of Kosovo, based on current and recent demographic realties, but not all of it.

The Serbs will rightly feel bitter about all this – but perhaps a few years they'll get their revenge by being the first country to recognise La República de Mexifornia.

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