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. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/10102 |
Date | 11 1900 |
Creators | Telford, Hamish |
Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
Format | 26022147 bytes, application/pdf |
Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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