The “Who”: Is it Possible to Democratically Determine the Demos Entitle to Succession?

Abstract

Democratic theories of secession claim that when a group of people expresses a preference for secession, such willingness (with some practical restrictions) suffices to ground a democratic right to secede – so not only nations, or encompassing cultural groups, are entitled to secede. Democratic theories of secession, it is claimed, provide a democratic way to deal not only with secession itself, but also to identify which groups are eligible to secede, namely those people who express the will to be independent. This paper is devoted to show that the democratic arguments invoked to identify which groups are eligible to secede, despite their initial appeal, are flawed. I argue that this is ultimately due to the inability of these theories to democratically determine the demos entitled to secession. This critique to democratic theories of secession, though explicitly mentioned by a few authors, has not been previously developed by anyone. This is the aim of this article. My conclusion will be that a group’s willingness to secede, while normatively relevant, does not guarantee a unilateral right to secede.