The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the politics of separatism in multinational federations.
Switzerland, Canada, and India are investigated in detail. Switzerland is a multinational federation
that has not experienced a separatist movement for more than one hundred and fifty years. In
Canada, there is a significant separatist movement in the province of Quebec. India has experienced
a number of violent secessionist crises in a number of states over the past two decades. The cases
thus exhibit a range in the dependent variable (presence or absence of secessionist movements).
This study adopts a legal-institutional approach to the problem of secession in multinational
federations. This approach marries the classical understanding of federalism as a system of
government with divided sovereignty to the more recent state-society and new institutional
approaches in political science. Federalism is operationalized around three core institutions:
constitutions, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and party systems. These three institutions are
situated as the independent variables in the study. The dissertation argues that the institutional
structure of federalism is a critical determinant of stability or instability (the presence or absence of
secessionism) in multinational federations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10102 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Telford, Hamish |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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