Redrawing of French “Régions” to Buoy Right-Wing Normans but Stoke Breton, Basque, and Savoyard Anger

There is a world of difference between France’s new Socialist president, François Hollande, and his rightward-tilting, law-and-order predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.  But there is one thing at least that both seem to agree on: Hollande decided this month to revisit plans developed under Sarkozy to reduce the number of France’s constituent régions.  Hollande would like to see 15 régions, down from the current 22 (not counting overseas régions in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean, which make for a total of 27).

Hollande takes aim at anyone expressing regional pride

To redraw the map, Sarkozy, in 2008, had commissioned Édouard Balladur, a fellow conservative who had been François Mitterand’s prime minister in the 1990s, to proposes reforms to France’s governmental structures.  Though Hollande has not yet said how he wants the 15 régions to be organized, his party’s backing of the number 15 suggests a close hewing to the Balladur proposal.

Édouard Balladur and Nicolas Sarkozy cooking up reforms (careful—Bretons can read lips!).

It should be said here that France’s régions are not a big deal in the way that Italy’s or Spain’s regions are.  Many Spanish and Italian regions have devolved legislatures, even fully autonomous status.  France, on the other hand, is one of the most centralized states in the Western democratic world.  The départements—tiny collectivities much like counties in the United States—are the most significant level of local government, but the régions have no legislative authority but merely spend some education and infrastructure funds in accordance with decisions made at higher levels of government.  These régions were created only in 1982.  The original 40 or so provinces of pre-revolutionary France corresponded in many cases to strong regional and ethnic identities, but when, in the 1790s, the French nobility was abolished, so were the various duchies and other petty monarchies they governed.  The départements were designed specifically to be small enough to prevent regional identities from asserting themselves.  The Napoleonic interregna were similarly hostile to anything that challenged a centralized French national identity.

The French Republic, let us recall, has one of the worst records on the treatment of minorities of any Western democracy.  The French Revolution practically invented modern nationalist chauvinism as we know it, and the government doesn’t let their minorities forget it.  Official recognition of any minority language is constitutionally forbidden.  Breton and Basque citizens of the republic still recall being savagely beaten in state-run schools for uttering a mere word of their native languages.  France has some of the free world’s most restrictive laws against wearing religious clothing—laws blatantly crafted to punish and marginalize the country’s Muslims and Jews.  Gypsies are routinely rousted from their encampments by police thugs before being deported, with a brutality that alarms human-rights organizations.  And the openly racist National Front (Front nationale, or F.N.) political party is stronger in France than equivalent anti-immigrant hate parties in any other western European country.  France, as we all know, is a nice place to live—but really only if you’re French.  (See recent articles from this blog on sectarian frictions in Sarkozy’s France and on equivalent abuses in Québécois nationalism in Canada (plus a follow-up).)

Sarkozy goose-stepped his way into the hearts of French xenophobe voters.

When the régions were created in 1982, some pre-revolutionary provinces, such as Franche-Comté, Alsace, Lorraine, Brittany, and Burgundy, were reincarnated as régions, while others were not: Normandy was now split between Upper Normandy and Lower Normandy, while Poitou was absorbed into a larger region, Languedoc and Roussillon were merged, and others, like Anjou, Lyonnais, and Marche were left buried.  In 2010, activists in Picardy had to raise a stink to avoid the abolition of their region altogether.

The French régions as they are today

No scheme pleases everybody, but top-down schemes, which characterize the way nearly everything of this sort is done in France, please fewest of all, and the Balladur map, if implemented, will be not much of an exception.  Here is what the Balladur plan would look like:

First, the winners.  Normans were the most vocally disenfranchised—or, let’s say, explicitly not re-enfranchised—by the 1982 reforms.  Surely this has something to do with the Second World War.  Normans, after all—snug against Flanders and across the English Channel from Britain—speak a dialect full of Scandinavian and other Germanic idioms and feel a particular kinship with England.  Every English schoolboy knows that his kingdom’s history only truly picks up the pace with the Norman Conquest of 1066.  Queen Elizabeth II, as monarch, holds also the ceremonial title Duchess of Normandy, signifying her suzerainty over the crown dominions of Jersey and Guernsey—the only remaining places where the old Norman language is spoken—while the right-wing English Democrats party, which seeks England’s exit from the United Kingdom (discussed recently in this blog), waves the triple-lion flag of Normandy at its rallies.  Then, in the 1960s, France’s greater economic integration with Germany as founding members of the European Common Market (precursor to today’s European Union) disgruntled Norman nationalists in France, who felt their ties with the U.K. (which did not join until 1973) weakened in favor of ties with the much less well liked Germans to their southeast.  Most Normans, like most Scandinavians, had reacted coolly to Nazi Germany’s attempt to woo them during the war as “fellow Aryans.”  But Normans were more specifically anti-German than anti-fascist: the radical Norman Movement (Mouvement normand) of the 1960s, had a distinctly right-wing tilt which emphasized their Teutonicness, if not specifically Germanness (much like the way in which northern Italy’s right-wing Northern League (Lega Nord) clings to the attenuated historical “Nordicness” of the Lombard people).  The movement’s leader, Didier Patte, was convicted in the 1970s of running guns to Breton terrorists (more on the Bretons below).  Surely, in 1982, Normandy was left partitioned as a way of ensuring that a distinctly un-French regional identity did not rise again.

Likewise with Alsace–Lorraine, an even more culturally Germanic part of France which has spent about as much time under German dominion as under French in the modern period.  They were left as two regions, Alsace and Lorraine, perhaps for fear that uniting them as Alsace–Lorraine would reawaken proud memories of the short-lived Republic of Alsace–Lorraine, a Soviet-sympathizing workers’s state which existed for 12 defiant days in 1918 in the chaos of the end of the First World War.  The Balladur plan would reunify both Normandy and Alsace–Lorraine.  After all, the war was far in the past now, and, after all, it was important for Sarkozy to court the votes of supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Nazi-sympathizing founder of the National Front.  Indeed, Alsace First! (Alsace d’abord! / Elsaß zuerst!), the main Alsatian nationalist party (Lotharingians have always felt more French than Alsatians), has itself come under criticism for being far too right-wing and anti-immigrant.

Completely ignored in the Balladur plan are the interests of the Basque people of Pyrenées-Atlantique département in the région of Aquitania and of the small number of Catalans in Provence–Alpes–Côte d’Azur région on the Mediterranean.  Clearly, the French government regards these ethnic groups’ ties with larger and more autonomous communities of radical separatist kindred just over the border in Spain to be a security threat.  The terrorist group Basque Homeland and Freedom (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA) has been a major force mostly in Spain but has killed innocent people in France as well, while the Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, or E.R.C.) political party is the king-making junior partner in the fragile ruling separatist coalition in Spain’s autonomous region of Catalonia, seeking not only full independence for Catalonia but reunification with the “Northern Catalonia” region just over the Pyrenees in France.  So no surprises there in the Balladur map, though it might not be wise to take up this issue in 2014 as both Catalan and Basque nationalism in Spain are cresting as never before, threatening to unravel the kingdom itself.

Members of the Basque nationalist group ETA.  Something tells me they’re not moderates.

Savoy is another problem area.  It used to be a powerful independent duchy, with a capital at Turin and territory that included a large swath including what are now southeastern France, northwestern Italy, and much of francophone Switzerland, Savoy was always at least as Italian as it was French.  It became part of the Kingdom of Sicily in 1714, then was taken over by France after the Revolution, then given to the Kingdom of Sardinia after Napoleon’s fall in 1815, then retaken by Napoleon III in 1860, which modern Savoyard nationalists still call an illegal, secret deal.  In fact, when the Kingdom of Italy was established soon after, the House of Savoy became the royal family of all Italy.  Even today, residents of the two French départements of Savoie and Haute-Savoie, abutting Italy and Switzerland, speak a group of Frenchish–Italianish dialects which are sometimes called a separate language, Arpitan.  This is also spoken in Geneva and in Italy’s fully autonomous francophone region, Val d’Aosta, just over the border in the Alps, where there is a popular movement to reunify with their kindred in an independent Savoy Republic.  Savoyard nationalism is very active in French Savoy itself.  Not only is there a Savoy Region Movement (Mouvement Région Savoie, or M.R.S.), which seeks a separate région of Savoy, but there is also a political party called I Believe in the Savoy Region! (La Région Savoie, j’y crois!), which wants a fully autonomous Savoy with a devolved autonomous parliament—in addition to the Savoyard League (Ligue savoisienne), which has set up a provisional government-in-exile in Geneva.  A poll in 2000 found a quarter of respondents in the two Savoy départements wanting to be an independent state, while a full half wanted an autonomous region.  In 2010, 48% of Savoyards liked the idea of Savoie and Haute-Savoie becoming Swiss cantons, and a whopping 43.7% of all Swiss and 55.9% of French-speaking Swiss agreed.  In that Swiss survey, the question also included the annexation of Franch–Comté, a région to the north, along the Swiss–French–German border which would also, incidentally, be obliterated in the Balladur plan and merged with Burgundy.  Why Hollande wants to kick awake the sleeping giant of Savoyard nationalism by producing yet another map that denies their existence and keep them barricaded from the Italian and Swiss citizens they regard as kindred is beyond me.

Savoyard nationalists protest at a Swiss border crossing

The most anger, however, over the Balladur plan has been generated in Brittany, where the Balladur suggestion of attaching Pays-de-la-Loire région’s Loire-Atlantique département to Brittany has been popular, but not at all the suggestion of merging Brittany with all of Pays-de-la-Loire into a single region.  This is regarded, quite rightly, as designed to dilute Breton regional identity and make the establishment of a Breton autonomous region even less likely than it already is.  (And it is unlikely; France doesn’t “do” autonomous regions.)  The nationalist Breton Democratic Union (Union Démocratique Bretonne, or U.D.B.), a left-wing, sometimes radically left-wing party, has been especially forceful on this point.

This is a bad time to alienate Breton nationalists.  At a time when Scotland is planning a referendum on independence for later this year, Welsh and Cornish nationalism (see my recent article) are becoming more strident, and even the Celtic nation of Galicia is only agreeing to stay within the Kingdom of Spain because the current Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy Brey, is himself Galician—at such a time, this is not when you want to needlessly piss off a bunch of radical Celts when you could just as well leave things be.  But the insular mindset of French nationalism chauvinism sort of doesn’t even “get” what regional and ethnic pride are; why, after all, would anyone want to not be French?  As the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy unravel all around them, François Hollande may be the next European leader to get a rough lesson in what the new European ethnoscape is shaping up to be.  Good luck with that map-redrawing business, Monsieur Président.  Tell us how it works out for you.

[You can read more about Bretons, Basques, and other separatist and new-nation movements, both famous and obscure, in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Is Ossetian Reunification Just Russian Irredentism by Another Name?

When the Soviet empire collapsed in the great events of 1989-91, it meant that East and West Germany could become one and that Yemen and South Yemen could reunify, and it made the reunification of North and South Korea seem imminent too (though it turns out that could take a while).  But one much smaller Eurasian nation found, once the dust had settled, that they were now divided as they had not been for centuries: Ossetia.  Now that Ossetians are talking reunification, it may turn out to be a far more complicated business than it has been in Germany, Yemen, or even Korea.

Properly speaking, Ossetia was already divided during the Soviet period.  North Ossetia was the North Ossetian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (R.S.F.S.R.), while South Ossetia was the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast, part of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic.  But both the the R.S.F.S.R. and Georgian S.S.R. were, in turn, constituent republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), and anything called “federal” or “autonomous” in the U.S.S.R. was a polite fiction in a party dictator ruled from the center.  For better or for worse, Ossetia was united.

Yeltsin and Putin

When Moscow lots its satellite republics, Russia’s new president, Boris Yeltsin, told the new Russian Federation’s constituent republics to “take on as much autonomy as you can stand” (an offer later scaled back in the First Chechen War and then permanent rescinded by Yeltsin’s authoritarian successor, Vladimir Putin).  Like other republics within what was left of Russia, North Ossetia (now called the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania—the Alans being the Medieval ancestors of modern Ossetes), declared itself “sovereign,” though not independent, in 1990 and then negotiated what it hoped were more autonomous terms by signing on to the Russian Federation treaty.

South Ossetia’s official seal

But the Republic of Georgia, in its transition to democracy, was less generous.  A separatist uprising in South Ossetia in 1989 was crushed by independent Georgia’s first president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who crushed the uprising, abolished South Ossetia’s status as an autonomous republic, and blamed the uprising on the Mikhail Gorbachev and the Kremlin.  This led to a civil war, in which 100,000 South Ossetians fled to North Ossetia, which in turned sparked a conflict between North Ossetia and the Ingushetian part of the neighboring Chechen-Ingush Republic over whether displaced South Ossetians should settle in areas of North Ossetia that Josef Stalin (himself a Georgian from very near South Ossetia) had ethnically cleansed of Ingush in 1944.  (And that led to the break-up of the Chechen-Ingush Republic into Chechnya and Ingushetia—which is a story for another day).  Discontent in Georgia over Gamsakhurdia’s thuggishness led to a 1991 coup d’état, after which the new leader, Eduard Shevardnadze, signed a treaty with South Ossetia—and with another similarly rebellious republic within Georgia, Abkhazia—that essentially granted the two parts of Georgia de facto independence.  Georgians were angry about expulsions of ethnic Georgians from Abkhazia and South Ossetia—though not as mad as Gamsakhurdia had been, since most Georgians kicked out of Abkhazia had been his fellow Mingrelians, who form a proudly distinct branch of the Georgian ethnic group.  (Shevardnadze was also from Mingrelia, but was not militant about it.)  For the most part, Shevardnadze—Gorbachev’s former foreign minister—did not want a fight with Russia and did not want an unending civil war.

Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze

Shevardnadze’s successor, Mikheil Saakashvili, was less tolerant of secessionism.  He started with the low-hanging fruit—in 2004 reabsorbing Adjara, a mostly Muslim and culturally Turkified autonomous enclave in Georgia’s southeast, which had also grabbed a form of (undeclared) de facto independence.  Then, in 2008, he took the plunge and tried to retake South Ossetia once and for all.  He miscalculated, reckoning that Putin would not dare to directly militarily take on a state that was so friendly with the United States: apart from the Baltic States, Georgia has been the most Western-friendly and in particular American-embraced of the Soviet successor states.  But Putin did invade, and the U.S., which had no formal defense agreement with Georgia, stayed out of it.  Attacking Abkhazia by sea and South Ossetia via mountain passes from North Ossetia, the Russian military succeeded in keeping the two republics free of Georgian control and then underlined the success by granting them recognition as independent states.  Four countries have followed suit, notably Nicaragua and Venezuela (as a way of pissing off the U.S.) and Nauru and Tuvalu, two South Pacific microstates eager for Russian development funds.  (The larger Republic of Vanuatu, in the Pacific, toyed with the idea, then decided not to hop on board with the charade (as reported on at the time in this blog).)  Also, of course, South Ossetia and Abkhazia exchange ambassadors with one another and are also recognized diplomatically by two other post-Soviet puppet states: Transnistria, within Moldova, and Armenia’s puppet state in western Azerbaijan, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.

Mikheil Saakashvili chose war with Russia, and lost.

Nominally independent, Abkhazia and South Ossetia today are in reality puppet states of Putin’s Russia.  Both republics use the ruble and are defended by Russian troops and—as is also the case with Transnistria—Russia supplies the two republics with their infrastructure and the financial backing that allows them to survive.  In 2012 elections, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, more than 90% of whose residents hold Russian passports in addition to their mostly useless local ones, came out more strongly for Putin than any republic within Russia other than the beaten and cowed Chechen Republic.  Next month in Sochi, Abkhazia and South Ossetia will not send their own Olympic teams (Olympic officials would not allow it anyway) but will instead compete as Russians (as reported on recently in this blog).

Russian troops invading South Ossetia in 2008

Not much happens in the two republics that is not approved by the Kremlin.  When Alla Dzhioyeva, perceived to be an insufficiently pro-Moscow candidate who was critical of the sitting president, clearly won the South Ossetian presidential election in November 2011 (reported on at the time in this blog), the incumbent régime annulled the results citing supposed voting irregularities and then, when she tried to take office anyway, police thugs broke into her office the day before her planned defiant “inauguration” and beat her within an inch of her life.  On the morning of the day of the beating, Russian authorities blocked the one mountain pass leading into South Ossetia for supposed safety reasons and “accidentally” switched off the entire country’s Internet.  By the time Dzhioyeva got out of the hospital, a Kremlin-approved stooge was in place as the new president.  Such is life in Putinworld.

Alla Dzhioyeva in 2011

But politics in the Caucasus are ever-shifting.  When, in 2012, a new South Ossetian president, Leonid Tibilov, took over, he appointed Dzhioyeva deputy prime minister, a post she still holds.  And now, the man who lost the 2011 to Dzhioyeva, Anatoliy Bibilov, is a major figure in the opposition.  He won the first round in 2011 before losing to Dzhioyeva in the run-off, so in a sense he, too, feels like someone cheated out of power by the current rulers.  The political party Bibilov heads, One Ossetia (Yedinaya Osetiya), has lately taken up the cause of reunifying Ossetia, which had also been a long-term goal featured in his 2011 presidential campaign (one not shared by Dzhioyeva).

The snow leopard, the national animal of both Ossetias,
features prominently in the iconography of the reunification movement.

Reunification is something both Ossetias have in the past more or less ruled out.  South Ossetia’s “ambassador” to Russia, Dmitry Medoyev (not to be confused with Russia’s prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev)—whose function is in actuality less like an ambassador and more like Putin’s appointed “Minister for Running the South Ossetian Puppet State”—has said that South Ossetia has its own sovereignty and constitution and has no intention of merging with Russia.  Meanwhile, North Ossetia–Alania’s president, Taymuraz Mamsurov, has said, “North Ossetia is a part of Russia.  The issue is more about joining Russia, than a merger.  However, we, Russian citizens, know that Russia needs no new territories.  There is no interest for Russia to get new lands.”  President Mamsurov, a close ally and appointee of Putin’s who took power without ever running for office, thinks Ossetian unification is an “historical inevitability” in the long term, but does not expect it to come about in his lifetime.  He has in fact in the past accused the West of “Jesuitical plans” to unite the Ossetias as a way of absorbing both Georgia and a unified Ossetian republic into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—suggesting a rather hallucinatory mindset given the West’s reluctance to help Georgia when push comes to shove and an implicit but clear and firm policy by NATO not to provoke Russia so far as to try to get Georgia to join (even though many Georgians would like nothing better).  Another factor may be North Ossetia’s status as the only majority-Christian republic in the volatile North Caucasus, a region wracked by fundamentalist Islamist insurgent violence.  Some Russians may see it as a necessary Christian bulwark within the North Caucasus; others may see those sectarian divisions as a potential for future destabilizing conflict.

There is not much daylight been North Ossetia’s President Taymuraz Mamsurov and Vladimir Putin

Bibilov, a military officer and South Ossetia’s former Minister for Emergency Situations (I’m not making that up), is proposing a referendum in South Ossetia—ideally in North Ossetia too—in order to see if Ossetians want to reunify, either within Russia or as an independent state.  Some observers feel that this is a political ploy, that Bibilov, as an opposition leader, is tapping into a popular yearning among the South Ossetian public but one that politicians on either side of the Caucasus ridge realize is a non-starter.  Nor is President Tibilov immune to the temptation to play to public opinion on the question.  Though he officially takes the position of South Ossetian independence with ever closer ties to Russia, he was quoted saying to reporters in July 2012, “The Ossetians are one people and should live in a single state within the Russian Federation.  And if this comes about under my rule, I shall consider that I have fulfilled the mission entrusted to me.”  But would he go so far as to act against the wishes of Medoyev and Putin?  Probably not.  Bibilov has quoted Tibilov’s off-the-cuff comments on the issue back to him angrily, but Tibilov firmly opposes such a referendum.

Anatoliy Bibilov (flags on his desk are South Ossetian and Russian)

As for North Ossetian public opinion, it is hard to say.  But it is difficult to imagine anyone in North Ossetia wishing that instead of their current position as a formal republic in the Russian Federation, they would rather be citizens of a quasi-official puppet state regarded by nearly the whole rest of the world as a sham nation run by criminals.  But an annexation of North Ossetia–Alania by South Ossetia would have a perverse logic to it.  For Russia to formally “surrender” a territory to a client state would put the international community in the position of floundering for a coherent position on North Ossetia’s status: happy to see Russia shrink even by a little, Western countries would be unable to recognize the territorial loss without also recognizing South Ossetia as a real country.

Fighters in 2008 waving the flag of South Ossetia, which is also the flag of North Ossetia–Alania

The other alternative, making South Ossetia part of a reunified Republic of Ossetia–Alania within the Russian Federation, would have the effect—desired by no one—of making Russian rule over a chunk of territory the world mostly regards as Georgian even more official.  Not that the international community would offer any concrete challenges, but why should Putin invite more diplomatic isolation at a time when his human-rights record is already under hard scrutiny in the weeks running up to Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, just west of the Caucasus region?  After all, the very reason Putin is choosing the puppet-state approach is to enjoy the best of both worlds: recapturing two large chunks of a colony (Georgia) Russian nationalists were sorry to lose, while preserving a shred of plausible denial in the matter (though Putin’s smeary fingerprints are of course all over every facet of South Ossetian and Abkhazian political life).

Youths waving Abkhazian, South Ossetian, and Russian flags

The Georgian government has not responded to the referendum proposals but would be right to suspect that reunification would be, if it came about, a way for Moscow to tie make its de facto conquest of Georgian territory a de jure conquest as well.  But if anything Georgia is gradually getting used to the idea that the two republics have been lost.  As of January 1st, Georgia renamed its Ministry of Reintegration—the portfolio for recapturing Abkhazia and South Ossetia; it is now called the Ministry for Reconciliation and Civic Equality.  The new name seems to say, “Okay, we accept that you are separate countries, but treat your ethnic Georgian minorities well, maybe even let some expelled Georgians return, please?”  (Or, as Henny Youngman would say, “Now, take my Mingrelians.  Please, take my Mingrelians!”)  The ministry’s job also covers matters such as Adjara and the ethnic Armenian and ethnic Meskhetian Turkish peoples’ interests in the Samtskhe–Javakheti province bordering Turkey and Armenia.

“Take my Mingrelians—please!”
Georgia’s president, Giorgi Margvelashvili (right), with his former prime minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili.

Bibilov now says that the One Ossetia party will hold a conference of North and South Ossetian activists next month in Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, with the aim of crafting a “small-scale plebiscite” in South Ossetia that would “destroy the existing taboo” on talk of reunification.  But he had better be careful.  Some political taboos serve to keep the lid on a box of demons.  South Ossetia and Abkhazia are frozen conflicts and, as with the Cold War, the good thing about frozen conflicts is that people don’t kill each other.  Thaw out the ice, and who knows what will happen.

This is the flag some Georgian nationalists would like
for a South Ossetia reabsorbed someday by Georgia

[You can read more about South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and other separatist movements both famous and obscure in my new book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas just published by Litwin Books under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar.  The book, which contains 46 maps and 554 flags (or, more accurately, 554 flag images), is available for order now on Amazon.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even if you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook and see this special announcement for more information on the book.]

Northern Californian Voters Torn between “State” or “Republic” of Jefferson

There is a new wrinkle in the heavily Tea-Party-inflected, right-wing “State of Jefferson” secession movement in northern California and southern Oregon, which this blog has been watching closely (see related articles here, here, here, here, here, here, and in my annual survey of “10 Separatist Movements to Watch” for 2014).  The board of supervisors of Siskiyou County, California, certified on January 14th that enough signatures have been gathered for a further proposal beyond the statehood measure already destined for this June’s ballot (statehood, that is, for Siskiyou and whichever other counties might wish to join; Tehama County, to be the south, will also be putting it to voters this year).  A second proposal will now be offered, allowing Siskiyouans to vote on another measure providing for a “Republic of Jefferson.”

An early State of Jefferson map, from 1941

The media have been calling the new proposal, crafted by one Athony Intiso, the “Jefferson Republic Territory” initiative, but what appears to be the movement’s website calls it simply the Republic of Jefferson or Jefferson Republic.  Earlier, Intiso did seem to have entertained the idea of establishing Jefferson as a territory, apparently under the strange impression that the U.S. Congress would not need to approve the creation of a territory as it would a state.  (Currently there are four organized U.S. territories: Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and two commonwealth territories: Puerto Rico and the North Mariana Islands.  Yes, Congress had to create them too.)  Intiso’s Jefferson Action Committee (J.A.C.) has also uploaded a document called “Constitutional Initiative Process,” which describes the idea behind the Republic.  It is vague, and at points self-contradictory, but bear with me.

Anthony Intiso, third from left, with the original design for the State of Jefferson flag,
with its allusion to a “double cross” by city-slickers in Salem and Sacramento ...

The new entity called Republic of Jefferson is to remain a part of California and a part of the United States.  Its area of administration is to be coextensive with Siskiyou County, but it will not in itself be a territory and thus will not need the blessing of superordinate levels of government in order to govern.  It will not interfere with the governing functions of the U.S., the State of California, or Siskiyou County.  It will derive its mandate directly from “the people,” and “the people” will run the Republic.  In this respect, it will be in accordance with provisions for direct democracy which the Republic’s proponents regard as guaranteed by the U.S. and California constitutions; the Republic in this sense will be truer to the spirit and letter of those constitutions than the current administering entities are.  (This is where the Second Amendment, never far from the minds of Jeffersonians, enters the discussion in a major way.)  Intiso claims that it is “in the Constitution that Congress is to guarantee every state in the union a republic form of government.  It says it right in there, and they haven’t done it.  So we’re trying to get back to making Congress to guarantee that form of government.  A true representative form of government”—and here Intiso displays something typical of Tea Party activists: a wildly eccentric, uninformed, and confabulatory notion of what the word republic means.

... though Tea Party iconography has lately been slipping
into versions of the seal used in northern California too

After approval by the voters of Siskiyou County, the J.A.C. intends the Republic of Jefferson to begin carrying out its government functions, including the guaranteeing of gun rights and local control of education, promotion of the agricultural way of life and job creation through logging and mining, and also the establishment of Republic of Jefferson courts, police, and a reserve bank minting a Jeffersonian currency (commodity-backed, naturally—not like, you know, the current fake U.S. currency!).

This, of course, seems to me the point at which the new entity will indeed, in fact, be interfering with the authority of federal, state, and county governments.  The J.A.C. website insists that this is not a secession or a separation, such as the 51st state envisioned by Mark Baird’s Jefferson Declaration Committee (J.D.C.), with its ballot measure.  (Intiso is treasurer of a local organization of which Baird is vice-president, the Siskiyou County Water Users Association.)  The best description for it might be the establishment of an autonomous, sovereign entity within the existing levels of government.  In fact, as I pointed out in an earlier blog post when Jeffersonians first raised this idea, it resembles nothing so much as the kind of embedded, non-state sovereignty granted to indigenous people in the U.S. and Canada—exactly the kind of “special rights” and “special treatment” that people of the Tea Party persuasion usually decry loudly when it is non-white people being treated “preferentially.”  For after all, how could a Republic of Jefferson administration govern within Siskiyou County without replacing existing governments unless some people were to come under the new Republic’s administration while some will not?  Or maybe, as is more likely, such things have not even been thought through all that well.

The new Jefferson Republic flag which has been appearing online.

In any case, the June 2014 ballot will offer Siskiyou voters two choices: statehood for Jefferson or, um, this other confusing autonomy thingie.  In fact, statehood proponents are already crying foul over the Republic plan, which they claim will only confuse voters.  To my mind, however, they are mainly worried the appearance of two measures will split the crazy vote, thus ensuring defeat for both proposals.

Meanwhile, an activist named Mike Rodriguez has begun gathering signatures online (among other places, at a TeaParty.org web page) for a “Declaration of Independence” of the “Free State of Jefferson,” which aims to secede from California and Oregon but not from the U.S.  Rodriguez, some digging suggests, is the Parks and Recreation Administrator for Mt. Shasta, a town in Siskiyou County, but he doesn’t mention that in his petition (after all—city parks? sounds like socialism!).  Instead, he identifies himself only as chairman of the Shasta Reform Party and the North State Reform Party—though if you search for those organizations online you will find references to them nowhere other than the online petition itself.  Rodriguez lists as Jefferson counties the original 1941 counties—Curry, Jackson, Josephine, and Klamath in Oregon, plus Siskiyou, Modoc, Del Norte, Trinity, and Lassen in California—as well as two extra California counties often included in Jefferson proposals over the years, Shasta and Humboldt.

Mike Rodriguez, freedom fighter

The Jeffersonian field is getting crowded.  Will too many kooks spoil the broth?

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with a forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  Look for it some time in 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.]

Middle East Update: Al-Sham Islamic State Takes Form, West Kurdish Constitution, New Rights for Christians, Turkmens

The redrawing of the map of the Middle East continued apace this past week, following the takeover of Fallujah and part of Ramadi in western Iraq’s Anbar province by a radical Islamist group affiliated with al-Qaeda.  Turkmens, Christians, and Kurds are all scrambling for pieces of the territorial pie as Syria and Iraq both spin out of control and into anarchy.

Anbar
First, the radical Sunnis.  The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), an outgrowth of last decade’s al-Qaeda in Iraq (a.k.a. Islamic State of Iraq, or I.S.I.) militia (which itself grew out of the al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan), had for months been building up its strength in the power vacuum of Syria’s civil war, mostly at the expense of the far more moderate, Western-backed, but utterly disorganized and fractious Sunni rebel network known as the Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.).  Then, on January 3rd (as reported at the time in this blog), ISIS fighters entirely took over Fallujah, a major city in Sunni-Arab-dominated Anbar province in western Iraq, about a half hour’s drive from the western outskirts of Baghdad.  ISIS fighters have held on there, but have been a bit less successful in taking over the smaller city of Ramadi, Anbar’s capital.  Fallujah was the scene of two of the fiercest battles in the United States’ war in Iraq, in 2004, with U.S. and Iraqi-government forces trying to quell a radical Sunni insurgency.  Things look similar now, except that the U.S. is gone, and the Islamists are winning (never mind that Sunni radicals would never have gained a foothold if the U.S. hadn’t invaded in the first place).  Fallujah is probably the city with the strongest anti-Shiite sentiment, and most of that anger is directed at the Shi’a Arabs who have run Iraq since the Sunni (but fiercely secularist) dictator Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003 and the 65%-or-so Shi’a majority came to power in the ensuing elections.  Now, as Shiite bombs are feared soon to rain down on Fallujah, the prejudices of ordinary Sunni people in the city are hardening.  The Iraqi government is reportedly planning on keeping its assault—once it gets up the nerve to launch it in earnest—away from civilian areas for this very reason, but it won’t take much for any moves by Baghdad to feel like an anti-Sunni massacre to those in Fallujah.  The tribal Sunni militias in Anbar which the U.S. had tried to cultivate as partners to the new Shiite-led government—with partial success—seem now to be siding mostly with ISIS.

Ongoing chaos in Fallujah

ISIS has declared Fallujah to be an independent Islamic state.  Whether that state is something called the Islamic State of Fallujah, or whether it is presumed to be the kernel of an emerging Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham is something which may slowly become apparent.  Perhaps the ISIS warlord in Fallujah, Abu Waheeb, is improvising as he goes along.  (Al-Sham means, roughly, the Levant, i.e. Syria and Lebanon; some news sources are calling ISIS “ISIL,” for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and some are saying, inaccurately, that ISIS stands for Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—but they all refer to the same group.)  Much will depend on whether control of all or some of Anbar can be consolidated and whether that territory can be linked up with ISIS’s “liberated” territory in eastern Syria.  Which brings us to ...

Fallujah this week

North-central Syria’s heartland
Late last year, ISIS began capturing small towns in northern Iraq, mostly along the border with Turkey, in Syria’s Kurdish region.  The first of these was Azaz (as reported at the time in this blog), and others followed.  But by December ISIS was exceeding all expectations, capturing smaller towns in the far east along the Iraqi border and in the far west, in the Alawite (Shiite) Arab heartland of Latakia province.  Its biggest prize, however, has been ar-Raqqah, a provincial capital in north-central Syria.  Ar-Raqqah province borders Turkey and includes Kurdish areas, but its capital is on the Euphrates, which flows from ar-Raqqah to Ramadi and Fallujah in Iraq.

The B.B.C.’s most recent map of different areas of rebel control in Syria

But is ISIS going to capture the entire upper Euphrates and build a coherent territory in the way that the Kurds have?  Maybe not.  The al-Nusra Front, the loosely organized Syrian-based component of ISIS, is apparently seeing some defections, with individual militias deciding that the former I.S.I. units with whom they formed ISIS last year are foreigners who are too radical for them, and maybe even worse than the embattled Alawite dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad.  This is partly because of ISIS’s governing style, which involves sweeping into town, executing a few “infidels” and “traitors” in the town square, and then dispatching armed morality patrols to enforce shari’a (Islamic law).  What had become, by late last year, a three-way battle in Aleppo, ar-Raqqah, al-Hasakah, and Deir ez-Zor provinces among Assad’s government forces, the F.S.A., and al-Nusra may soon become a four-way battle among the government, the F.S.A., al-Nusra, and ISIS.  No, wait, five-way—since Kurdish militias (more on them below) are also vying for control of al-Hasakah city and parts of Aleppo.

These new twists put Western backers like Turkey and the U.S. in a quandary.  They know whom they want to win in Iraq, but in Syria it’s not so simple.  It was bad, and embarrassing, enough, when various forms of aid sent in the direction of the F.S.A. ended up in al-Nusra hands, but now the West may need to calculate that it’s worth backing al-Nusra for a little while—you know, just a little while—until ISIS is brought under control.  Sounds like a bad idea: help bad guys because they’re helping you fight worse guys depends a lot on fallible judgments as to who is bad or worse, and it can have an effect called “blowback.”  After all, that’s how the Taliban and al-Qaeda came to power in Afghanistan in the first place.  As for the Syrian opposition’s other “Western” backers, Saudi Arabia, well, for them strengthening al-Nusra might not even be a difficult choice.  Many of them are Saudis anyway, and have the tacit blessing of the royal family.  Look for a serious, perhaps permanent falling out between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia over how to handle Syria.

An image circulating in ISIS circles shows the nascent Islamic state
in Anbar and Syria as part of an eventual global Caliphate.
Hey, wait a minute—gulp!—is that Vienna?

Syrian Kurdistan
Things are a little bit more stable in the far north of Syria, along the border with Turkey, as the de facto self-governing Western Kurdistan Autonomous Region formed last year in liberated pockets along the border was in November 2013 rechristened Rojava (which simply means “western” in Kurdish) and was given specific contours and a formal (unrecognized) government (as reported at the time in this blog).  This past week, the Rojava government started filling in the details of its supposedly federal-style internal structure, with separate autonomous entities for Kurds, Christians, and Arab Muslims.  On January 6th, the Rojava’s governing Western Kurdistan Constituent Assembly unveiled a new constitution, which specifies the three autonomous subdivisions and confirms that the new state will be official multilingual, with state business conducted in Kurdish, Arabic, and Syriac (i.e. the variety of Aramaic—the language spoken by Jesus—which is in use today in the Syriac, Chaldean, and Assyrian communities of Middle Eastern Christians).  Other statements out of Rojava have also referred to equal rights for the Turkmen and even Chechen minorities.

The Western Kurdistan Constituent Assembly speaks to the public

This may have something to do with the fact that, to both Turkey’s consternation and that of the Kurdistan Regional Government (K.R.G.) in neighboring Iraq, Rojava is being run by the Democratic Union Party (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, or P.Y.D.), a group linked to Turkey’s outlawed, traditionally-Marxist-Leninist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or P.K.K.) and antagonistic to the K.R.G. government.  In Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, Kurds vie for control of the Kurdish-populated penumbra outside the official autonomous region, in places like Mosul, Kirkuk, and the Nineveh Plains that are also regarded as homelands for the Turkmen and Assyrian people, who naturally want their own autonomous regions.  Are the Rojava Kurds competing with the K.R.G. for the loyalties of the region’s smaller minorities?  If so, this could get much messier.

Northern Iraq
Meanwhile, perhaps as a direct response to the developments in Rojava, the Iraqi parliament in Baghdad voted on January 8th to make Turkmen, Syriac, and Assyrian national languages alongside the existing official languages, Arabic and Kurdish.  (There is a lot of variation in how to name the modern Aramaic languages; some use the terms Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac interchangeably, or use one term as including the other two, or name the same language differently depending on which self-identified ethnic or sectarian group is using it.)  Meanwhile, Turkmen leaders in areas hard-hit by terrorist violence said this week that they were forming popular defense committees along the lines of those formed by Kurds in Syria.

Some Turkmens’ rather optimistic vision
of an autonomous region or independent state to be called Türkmeneli

Things change in the region almost daily.  Springtime of Nations will do its best to stay on top of developments and keep you informed.

[For those who are wondering, yes, this blog is tied in with my forthcoming book, a sort of encyclopedic atlas to be published by Auslander and Fox under the title Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements, Independence Struggles, Breakaway Republics, Rebel Provinces, Pseudostates, Puppet States, Tribal Fiefdoms, Micronations, and Do-It-Yourself Countries, from Chiapas to Chechnya and Tibet to Texas.  The book is now in the layout phase and should be on shelves, and available on Amazon, by early fall 2014.  I will be keeping readers posted of further publication news.  Meanwhile, please “like” the book (even though you haven’t read it yet) on Facebook.]