Part III

In 1989 the idea of secession still seemed to be a dead end. The Civil Secessions had been snuffed out with the fall of Biafra in 1970. In its aftermath, the unitary and indivisible sovereign African state was enshrined. Even for those Long Wars being waged since the 1960s, there seemed little respite. While Ethiopia was tottering under the weight of its multiple insurgencies, the question remained whether the aftermath would be a reform or a secession even if any of them did succeed. For the Sudan, there was even less hope, as the central government retained the initiative and the recognition of the international community while the SPLA was fragmenting and its factions fighting amongst themselves.

However, a massive change in the international dynamics was on its way. While the Cold War had imposed a sort of stasis upon African states and their rulers, albeit with client rulers occasionally being replaced, by the end of the 1980s the Soviet Union found itself in an increasingly untenable situation. Facing economic stagnation, massive military spending, an unpopular and unwinnable war in Afghanistan, and increasing dissent to its rule, the USSR was no longer able to sustain its competition with the United States. Reforms had actually begun in 1985 under the new Secretary General of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev, noticing the economic weakness of the USSR, had tried to reform its political and economic structures, liberalizing its judiciary, its politburo, and its productive organs throughout the next five years.1

However, these changes would prove to be too late to save the weakened superpower. Nationalist movements pressed for more local autonomy now that they had more ability to express themselves within the political and economic spheres. Throughout the late 1980s the USSR’s satellite states increasingly expressed their independence, with protests throughout the Baltic States and the Caucasus, and even more central states such as Ukraine and Belorussia slowly breaking free from the grip of the Soviet Union. While these states were not necessarily seceding yet, their actions undermined the USSR as a global actor, weakening its ability to project power abroad while at the same time sparking an internal crisis. In response, Gorbachev’s government attempted to continue its internal and external reform, with the eventual goal of the conversion of the Soviet Union into a federation of independent republics. These reforms were met by the older power structures of the USSR with an attempted coup against Gorbachev, with Russian tanks rolling into Moscow in August 1991 to try and reimpose communist power over the increasingly liberal government.2

The coup failed due to the intervention of Moscow’s populace and the swift action of Boris Yeltsin, the reform-minded leader of the Russian national government, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Following its failure, the old order collapsed, with Yeltsin quickly accruing power and marginalizing Gorbachev and the Communist Party. Over the following year the old USSR was dismantled, with its dissolution officially completed in December of that year. However, this dismantling, while agreed upon by the major states within the USSR, had been occurring already for well over a year. With the turmoil within the USSR over the previous two years, new national governments had been proclaimed in Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, leading these previously independent states back into their own separate realms. In addition, new states declared their separation from the USSR, with ethnic populations that had been part of the Russian state since the nineteenth century now declaring their self-determination. Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Uzbekistan, and many other new states declared their right to exist and self-govern between August 1990 and December 1991. Although it had been unable to effectively project its influence for the previous several years, this final dissolution of the Soviet Union in a wave of secessions marked the end to the Cold War and the beginning of a new era not only for the global order but also seemingly for the concept of secession across the world.

The Acceptance of Secession and Nation-States

This new, post–Cold War era had several important ramifications for the nature of the state within the international order. The first half-decade of the 1990s saw the international political order upended, beginning in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet sphere. While the Cold War had continually enforced the immutable nature of the state, with the end of that conflict there were now questions about how a state should be formed and whether the postwar order was the proper configuration of states within Europe. With the victory of the United States and its capitalist allies in the long Cold War and the increasing fissures within the USSR’s territories, this state structure fractured. As noted, the former Soviet satellites declared their separation from the USSR and their eventual sovereignty. While previously it might have been understood that the Baltic states would be met with acceptance in the international community, the international welcome to the new states such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan was something that had not been seen before. In fact, not only were these emerging states granted almost unanimous international recognition, they were swiftly incorporated into the United Nations.

This process of secession and repartition found itself echoed across Eastern Europe as the old communist order disintegrated. The state of Czechoslovakia underwent what it referred to as the Velvet Divorce, partitioning itself into its previously constituent states, now named the Czech Republic and Slovakia, in 1993. More alarmingly, the polyglot state of Yugoslavia began to tear itself apart as its constituent Slavic populations fought for their own separation from the previous state. This led into a series of bloody conflicts that roiled throughout the late 1990s as the new separatist states broke themselves apart, with the violence only halting following the military intervention of both the United Nations and NATO. However, these interventions served only to halt the horrific violence, not to intervene and put the state back together.3 While there remained violent flare-ups until the early 2000s, the entire Balkans had reshaped themselves, with new states emerging from the shattered Yugoslav polity. In addition, following the cessation of the violence, these states were granted international recognition and were welcomed into the international community as independent sovereign bodies. By the year 2000, the former Eastern Bloc had seen the emergence of over a dozen new states, many of which had no historical antecedent or at best had thin histories of independence that were the product of romanticized legends.

Of course, what could not be ignored as well was the re-emergence of a previously frowned-upon basis for the creation of a new state: ethnicity. While civil states had been accepted since the end of the Second World War, new nation-states had been directly avoided. The conflation of nation with state had been explicitly denied within the international community, with ethnically plural states having been seen as the preferred form of political organization. However, the undercurrents of ethno-nationalism had survived even within the multi-ethnic states of Eastern Europe.4 In fact, during the long Cold War these ethnic differences were taken advantage of by the United States, who used the nationalism of the Soviet Bloc and even the USSR’s constituent states as an avenue to foment dissent and weaken their rival. With the dissolution of the USSR, and lacking any other directive force, these nations now looked to have their own states for their people: the Kazakhs wanted Kazakhstan, the Uzbeks wanted Uzbekistan, and the Georgians wanted their own Georgia. Given that, it is unsurprising that many of the new states recognized as new sovereign powers were in effect nation-states, formed around the national identities of a particular ethnic group.

The New Era in Africa

This breaking and remaking of states did not go unnoticed on the African continent. While at the end of the Cold War the idea of secession in Africa seemed an impossibility, this was partially based on the international order the Cold War had put in place over global politics. Since even before the decolonization of Africa, the international borders had been seemingly immutable. The United Nations had waged the first offensive military campaign in its history to prevent the secession of Katanga and the failure of the Congo. The Organization of African Unity had enshrined the principle of indivisible states in its very charter. While there had been some dissent from this stance in documents such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which enshrined self-determination in the signed draft of 1981, this remained fraught territory. Despite widespread support from its many African signatories, when secessionist groups such as Katanga were brought up, the idea of self-determination was often denied despite the plain meaning of the text.5

However, with the ending of the Cold War, it now appeared that the United Nations, and the United States as the sole remaining superpower, were both willing to countenance secession as an internationally acceptable phenomenon. This came into even starker focus with the initial negotiations between the new reform-minded regime in Ethiopia and its Eritrean allies.6 With secession now openly countenanced, secessionist-minded groups on the continent could now point not only to successful international secessions in this era of fluid statehood but also to possible successes in redrawing the borders that had been set at Berlin in 1885.

Even more notable on the continent was the new acceptance of nationality as not only an acceptable goal for a state but explicitly an acceptable end-state. On the European continent this resurgence of ethno-nationalism led to new nation-states, but admittedly this was not necessarily novel within the European order. Most Western European states had been formed almost explicitly as nation-states over the modern era, with at most small ethnic minorities remaining in Germany, France, or Italy following the long process of ethnic sorting and constructing identities. However, on the African continent there were few nation-states, with Somalia as the largest example, with Swaziland and Lesotho joining it through their own complex histories in southern Africa. Instead, the borders that had been drawn at the 1885 Berlin Conference were based on the political requirements of the colonizing European powers, completely ignoring any ethnic or national divisions within these new political units. Whole ethnic populations might be divided between two or even three states, such as the Kongo of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, and Angola; or the Somali, who spread across Somalia, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Conversely, it meant that very few states on the continent were ethnically homogenous, meaning that issues such as representation, governance, access to state resources, and even basic rights remained contested terrain for many ethnic groups following independence.

This continued contestation meant that many of these ethnic groups, whether simply a sole minority within a single African state or a group sprawling across several, had significant grievances against their host states. These grievances led to resistance against the state that ranged from avoidance of state taxes, smuggling within their ethnic group across borders, to even occasional military actions. The Kel Tamasheq and Bedan of the Sahara continued to trace their ancestral routes through the Sahara, maintaining economic connections across their nation, often in defiance of Saharan states such as Mali, Niger, and Algeria. On the other end of the scale were groups like the Western Somali Liberation Front, who waged lengthy guerrilla campaigns against Ethiopia in an attempt to rejoin their territories to Somalia. However, despite these acts of resistance and national solidarity, the monolithic state remained the sole avenue of access to legitimacy and its international benefits, and without control or at least effective access to the state these minority ethnic groups remained marginalized with little hope of overturning this order.7

New Era and Nation-States

However, beginning in 1991 with the acceptance of nation-states and specifically ethnic secession by the United States, the United Nations, and the international community following the end of the Cold War, new hope arose amongst marginalized ethnic groups. For those members of divided ethnic groups, the possibility of secession or irredentism offered chances to rewrite the political order their communities existed in, especially following years of neglect or even repression under the existing states of Africa. During these years such groups had often maintained a much stronger bond with their nation than with their state, and with this now an acceptable political outcome, the larger pressing questions about the role of the state in post–Cold War Africa grew in importance.8 Given this, it is unsurprising that the new wave of secessions that would take place in Africa would not necessarily have simply a political component but also an ethnic one, with marginalized subnational groups now pushing for a rewriting of the political order of Africa to allow them representation, if not entirely control, within a state of their own making.

Beyond the larger questions of secession and ethnic nationalism, the shifting international order would have another critical effect on the states of Africa. The Cold War dynamics had forced the globe into two opposing camps led by the superpowers of the USSR and the United States. These camps, containing a plethora of allies and proxies for the superpowers, essentially were subsidized and supported by their chosen hegemon, with the more prominent allies offering support to the emerging states of Africa and Asia as well. This led to substantial support for countries like Thailand and Iran from the United States and its allies while countries like Cuba and Ethiopia were offered substantial support by the Soviet Union and its compatriots. This support took many forms, from favourable trade deals to large-scale security cooperation, and was intended to maintain at least a balance of international power and perhaps even offer an advantage to the particular faction. The end result was the creation of two large, mutually opposing political poles that had achieved a rough political equilibrium throughout the postwar years.9

However, with the end of the Cold War this global construct was dismantled. The capitalist states led by the United States had achieved victory over their opponents, and the disappearance of the bipolar world forced a reimagining of the international dynamics. For those already developed states of North America and Europe, the strategic focus shifted from opposition to a communist opponent to the integration of the defeated developed powers into the global system and the fostering of democratic governance across the globe. The assumption made was that with the liberal democratic world order having proven triumphant, now the role of the United States as the sole superpower was to foster civil society, human rights, and representative government across the globe through either indirect or direct intervention.10 For those underdeveloped states of the world, no matter their alignment or lack thereof, this meant that the political, economic, and military support they had been receiving either disappeared completely or became contingent on a very different set of objectives than those they had been pursuing. This meant, in many cases, turmoil as the ruling elites who had maintained privileged positions either were overthrown or had to make radical changes in their political stances to fall in line with the new goals of the US-led global order.

These effects were especially notable in Africa, where the development of the state had been neglected throughout the colonial era and only hastily attempted in the 1950s. During the colonial era, the state structures that had been required were minimal. There were governors for colonies to deal with local legislative issues, courts to deal with legal challenges, and the police and military to help control the local populaces. Beyond this, the level of political infrastructure varied tremendously throughout the African colonies, with the British system often relying on traditional elites for local control while the French worked hard at a lengthy but ultimately limited program of assimilating the local population into French culture and values. However, no matter the system, the highest level of administration was still overwhelmingly in the hands of European colonial professionals. This attenuation of development was also almost universally paralleled in terms of economic infrastructure. The colonies had not been conceived of as self-sufficient markets or even regional trading partners; they had been understood as sources for raw materials and commodities and markets for completed products.11 States like Ghana and Uganda, both seen as relatively advanced politically by the mid-twentieth century, still had little manufacturing and instead produced cocoa, coffee, and other cash crops for the British market. This economic activity in turn shaped the infrastructure of the state, with railways, roads, canals, and telegraphs all being built not to integrate the colonies together but to route their goods to the nearest entrepot.

With the emergence of the African state into independence, these incomplete structures did not suddenly become whole. The ruling elite of the state instead inherited a political structure that had little capacity to do anything beyond continue its functions of extracting materials and importing the modern manufactured goods it needed. Economically this offered little chance to grow and integrate the public goods that most developed states already provided such as more expansive healthcare, education, and even local transportation.12 Those states that attempted to pursue these goals, notably Tanzania and Ghana, quickly found themselves deeply indebted or reliant on foreign aid.13 The result was essentially a state that had little capacity beyond the boundaries of its major cities and limited infrastructure network and little chance to improve upon that capacity. While the ruling elite could still determine the access to the outside world through their legitimacy as leadership of the state, they could do little to develop it, especially following the crash of commodity prices following the 1973 oil crisis.14

While the state had little capacity, it was exactly these connections to the global community that the ruling elites held that would allow the incomplete state to survive throughout the Cold War. With the fierce competition ongoing between the United States and the USSR, both superpowers or their stronger allies were more than willing to reach out to the African states in exchange for their raw commodities, their markets, and their strategic support. In return, the regimes that offered such access and support were given often massive political, military, and economic aid.15 This bargain existed for both of the great poles, with states such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, and Uganda each gaining significant support from the capitalist powers in Africa while countries like Ethiopia, Angola, and Uganda16 aligned themselves with the communist bloc. Even those countries that attempted to remain non-aligned often attempted to play the two camps off against one another to gain what material support they might from the superpowers to support their state. Regardless, throughout this period, the goods, services, and monetary aid offered by the Cold War powers often was the decisive factor in the functional capacity of the African state, which took on an increasingly authoritarian form.

However, with the end of the Cold War, the sources of support either disappeared or changed their priorities. For those states that had been aligned with the Soviet Bloc, such support, already having been drying up by the late 1980s, completely disappeared. For those that had aligned with the capitalist bloc, their patrons still existed, but with changed geopolitical goals. Now the staunch anti-communism that had served as reason enough to support strongmen like Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire and Ibrahim Babangida in Nigeria was no longer sufficient. In fact, the global community now wished to see the governments of Africa reformed and to become more representative and participatory, echoing the long-standing demands of many of these governments’ citizens.17 For the formerly communist-aligned governments, the withdrawal of support was disastrous; for the capitalist-aligned it forced a difficult choice upon the autocrats of Africa: reform or lose support. In either case, within the new world order, there was less focus on Africa’s states and less support to go around as the developing and democratizing world required assistance. The upshot was that these states now found their main source of economic, political, and military support cut off. Without this support, the African states saw a continued draining of their capacities. Countries like Mobutu’s Zaire, which had slowly been dismantled throughout the three decades of his kleptocratic rule, even lost the ability to effectively control the very borders that delineated their statehood.18

This combination of weak states, strong nations, and apparent willingness to redraw boundaries set up the next wave of African secessionist, separatist, and irredentist conflicts. With many states of Africa having never attained or sometimes even pursued the capacity to do more than exist, the subnational fractures within their borders deepened, especially as internal or even cross-border populations turned to their own communities to sustain themselves. Now, with those states having even less power to project their control over regions, these groups sought their own access to the benefits of statehood. For some, this meant a complete split from the state and an attempt to assert their own sovereignty and connection with the global community. For many others, it meant asserting local autonomy for their community while gaining access to the global networks that the sovereignty of their host state retained. Finally, for some this meant attempting to gather together an entire border-spanning community and either create their own ethnic state from multiple African states or separate from a state where they were the minority and joining a bordering one where they would be the majority and gain access to the global networks. However, despite some subnational groups gaining (or even retaining) their regional autonomy peacefully, in most instances these assertions of local control and rule were contested by force of arms.

These new assertions of local control would emerge as the new wave of secessions. These attempts at secession, separatism, and irredentism were driven by the understood new dynamics involving the state on the African continent. As such, they would feature distinct and direct appeals to the breaking up of states along ethnic lines, often driven by the long-held grievances of populations that had never effectively been served by the postcolonial state. However, while much of the context of the state had changed, there was little change in the dynamics of these conflicts. The simple declaration of a state would not be recognized by the international community, to which the weakened but still extant postcolonial states still had sole access. This meant that when these new efforts emerged, they followed the same operational and organizational structure that had allowed the Long Wars to achieve their gains: a long-term local guerrilla struggle that would see the local populace supporting a prolonged social transformation at the same time as a lengthy, low-intensity conflict. Given that there was even less opportunity for outside aid and support with the ending of the Cold War, the way of the insurgent seemed to be the only way to prosecute any political conflict against a host nation.19 This would be the playbook followed by the irredentists in Cabinda, the Casamance Separatists, and many other groups. In fact, many built upon earlier efforts that had blossomed before the end of the Cold War and either continued or renewed these efforts in the wake of the global realignment.

However, while these new or renewed efforts were not necessarily anything new on the continent, their opponents now faced very changed circumstances. Whereas in earlier struggles the state governments of Africa could likely call upon their patrons for the military aid they needed to suppress or defeat their internal opponents, this aid was no longer available. Beyond this, as noted, their general capacity as a state was diminished, including the lessening of their abilities to wage war, to police, to serve their populace, or even to defend their borders. The prolonged wars that the state governments had been able to prosecute were no longer tenable and in fact drained the increasingly thin resources and abilities of the state. In return, the increasingly open access to international markets meant that insurgencies could extract valuable resources and use them to fund their struggles, offering a capacity that earlier waves had not been able to take advantage of. With the states’ capacity weakened and armed fronts having new avenues of support, new approaches to the conflicts and the resolutions would be experimented with throughout these conflicts, with the questions of sovereignty, secession, separatism, and ethnic irredentism having to be negotiated within the larger context of shifting concepts of statehood and nationhood on the African continent.