Constitutional secession clauses

Abstract

Taking the view that constitutions are devices Whereby people coordinate to specific equilibria in circumstances that allow multiple equilibria, we show that a constitutional secession clause can serve as such a device and, therefore, that such a clause is more than an empty promise or an ineffectual threat. Employing a simple three-person recursive game, we establish that under certain conditions, this game possesses two equilibria--one in which a disadvantaged federal unit secedes and is not punished by the other units in the federation, and a second equilibrium in which this unit does not secede but is punished if it chooses to do so.JEL classification: D72. I. Constitutional CommitmentOf all the provisions that might be part of federation's constitution, perhaps none are more controversial than those that implicitly or explicitly deal with secession. The conventional wisdom is that allowing secession weakens a state. As Cuss Sunstein (1991:634) argues, a constitutional right to secede "would increase the risks of ethnic and factional struggle; reduce the prospects for compromise and deliberation in government; raise dramatically the stakes of day-to-day political decisions; introduce irrelevant and illegitimate considerations into these decisions; create dangers of blackmail, strategic behavior, and exploitation; and, most generally, endanger the prospects for long-terms self-governance." As alternative ways to accommodate the demands of political subunits that might not otherwise agree to form or join a federation, we should not be surprised, then, to see instead arguments that defend nullification or veto clauses (Calhoun 1853, Buchanan and TuUock 1962) or, as with Yeltsin's initial proposal for a Russian constitution, overrepresentation of specific federal units in the legislature (Izevstia, 30

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