Impact turns + answers – bfhmrs russia War Good

AT: Secession !

Conflicts won’t escalate – limiting factors maintain stability.

More skeptical observers maintain that measures of local autonomy and regional integration successfully quell calls for separation. Since the onset of local autonomy in Spain’s Basque Country, the mass movement for secession led by ETA, the armed Basque separatist movement, has slowed to a trickle. Khanna explains that, counter-intuitively, “[concessions of autonomy] are often used as mechanisms to ensure some kind of federal union,” exemplified by the cases of Quebec and the Basque Country. Furthermore, integrating forces might overwhelm the interests of local and ethnic separatists. Jerry Muller, professor of history at Catholic University, contends that “insofar as the European Union takes over the function of the traditional nation-state, it diminishes the ongoing attraction of separating from the nation-state.” To the credit of his argument, not a single state has seceded from an E.U. member nation since the organization’s inception. Economics of Changes Beyond the role of power in secession debates, the issue of economics looms large. In a financial sense, the separation of a polity into two amounts to the separation of one market into two. Indeed, Muller notes that “many issues of ethnic tension,” the raison d’être of most secessionist movements, “have to do with the flow of various revenue streams.” The critical importance of resource sharing in the mediation of secessionist conflicts rings truest in the developing world. In newly minted South Sudan, set to declare official independence in July, secession has succeeded “on the understanding that [petroleum] revenue streams to the South will continue to flow to the North,” Mueller claims. In the case of Iraqi Kurdistan, a lack of consensus over the sharing of oil revenues has hamstrung efforts toward full sovereignty.