It is not easy to start a new state. The earth’s surface is already divided up. A new state implies territory taken from an existing one. For good reason, states prefer this not to happen. Not wanting their own borders challenged, states defend international law that sets them in stone. Even during decolonization in Africa and Asia, the often-arbitrary outlines of colonies usually retained their shape as new nations. Demands from minorities seeking self-determination were ignored or suppressed, and the international community agreed. Cartography was destiny.
In the 1990s, these assumptions collapsed. The dissolution of the Soviet bloc yielded a raft of new and reestablished nations, scrambling the contours of Europe. The red mass of the USSR on the map at my middle school sprouted a bloom of new republics at its edges; the oblong of Yugoslavia was in pieces by the time I left high school. Czechoslovakia underwent mitosis. The breakup of socialist Europe seemed to open Pandora’s box. The spirit of nation-making was afoot. New movements agitated for their own right to secede: Catalans in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium, Tamils in Sri Lanka. In my own country, the province of Quebec came within a percentage point of voting to leave Canada.
When I was fifteen, my family was living in Vanuatu, a tiny island nation between Fiji and Australia. The Chinese and the Americans jockeyed for influence there, donating Toyota trucks to local health projects and building infrastructure. This was not so much humanitarianism as a testament to what a seat in the United Nations meant. Vanuatu was a nation of under two hundred thousand people and only a few thousand square miles, and it had only been independent since 1980—but it had the same vote in the General Assembly as a world superpower. Japan lobbied tiny Pacific nations for their support to continue commercial whaling, China to build support for its material and strategic interests. In the 1990s, the UN granted seats to tiny nations long excluded: Andorra, San Marino, Monaco, and Liechtenstein.
Most people saw this wave of nations through the lens of politics—some worried about resurgent “neo-nationalism.” Market radicals saw it through the lens of capitalism—and were happy with what they saw. Each state spawned by secession was a new jurisdiction, a start-up territory that might offer itself as a refuge for flight capital or a site of unregulated business or research. Micronations were zones, bound spaces of legal difference small enough to stage economic experiments. They were also what the science-fiction author Neal Stephenson called phyles—voluntary gatherings of like-minded residents. Secession was a way to subdivide the earth and bring new territories into the bustling marketplace of global competition. To some, neo-nationalism could be the harbinger of a coming golden age of social sorting defined by ever-shrinking jurisdictions.
In the United States, two groups formed an alliance in response to this moment of geopolitical churn: market radicals seeking passage to a capitalist polity beyond democracy and neo-Confederates seeking to resurrect the Old South. They wove together principles of decentralized capitalist competition and racial homogeneity and dreamed of Bantustans of choice—Grand Apartheid from below. Though their immediate goal failed, their vision of laissez-faire segregation lived on. For them, secession was the path to a world that was socially divided but economically integrated—separate but global.