This was not a referendum, nor even a proper opinion poll - just a partisan petition. The figure of 89% is completely meaningless. Both the Daily Mail, and this article, prefer to make their own political point (we hate government and taxes) rather than engage in real news reporting or analysis.
"We hate government and taxes" should be the proper Mises institute motto. I'm not convinced that taxing and revenue issues are a major reason countries secede (or choose to unite). Very often seceding states are actually getting more than they pay in taxes.
Usually a person supports secession because of perceived oppression. "Part of my taxes on average might go to another area" doesn't seem to be a major reason, unless you believe that territory is somehow making your life worse.
I can't speak for other secession movements, but I lived in Catalonia for two years and some of the loudest arguments for independence there were economic. The province has the highest standard of living in Spain. There was definitely a feeling of resentment, based on their perception that they were carrying a disproportionate percentage of the tax burden of trying to dig Spain out of its economic crisis.
Please ask your separatist friends if they would support independence from Spain if they carried a disproportionately small part of the tax burden. I'm guessing they still will.
I can say that they would. The movement towards independence has existed for a long time, and the national question of Catalonia has always been on the table, with several frustated democratic declarations of independence before the dictatorship and a constant reminder from the Catalan Parliament that the Catalan people won't ever give up their right to self determination. It's only recently, however, that the movement has become so big that most Catalans, including many that don't want independence, think that the only way to solve this is to hold a referendum and find out how many people actually want Catalonia to be independent.
While the economy is one of the factors that contributed to the current scenario, the main reason why many Catalans that believed that it was possible for Catalonia to develop adequately within Spain have changed their mind is that recently Spain (the Government, Congress and its Judiciary institutions) have directly attacked all the steps Catalonia was taking to try and feel integrated in Spain. As an example, the attacks to the Catalan educational system (the Spanish Minister of Education said that their purpose was to "spaniardize Catalan children") and to the new 2006 Statute of Autonomy, which brought hundreds of thousands to the streets in Barcelona.
At this point Catalans simply don't think that Spain wants to be a place where they can feel confortable, and the idea of being a normal country that can interact directly and in equality with all the other nations just seems right to most. Shouldn't all nations relate to each other in this way?
Is someone from Italy here, who can give his views on this?
Tried to understand what's going on and this looks more like some scammy online lottery cashing in on some diffuse dissenting and secessionist moods, getting overexposed by Russian foreign news channels than anything resembling a proper referendum.
It's nearly impossible to find some independent non-italian news-sources that not just reproduce the PR of the secessionists or RT "news".
[All following sources are Italian so google translate is your friend]
Found this video which seems to make fun of the foreign press thinking that good-who-knows-what happened in Italy (Like that guy who tries to sell the Trevi Fountain to some gullible American-Italian Tourist). [1]
This one is quite sceptic and seems to paint the picture of this just an embellished online poll, pompously relabeled as "referendum", run by a local businessmen, Gianluca Busato, with connections to some fringe secessionist parties. [2]
Even if this article written after the referendum ended strikes a different tone, the pictures and the crowd look quite orchestrated [3]
After all this whole issue says more about the sorry state of journalism than about the actual likelihood of the Veneto region seceding from Italy any time soon.
It's just some fringe movement organizing an online petition. Almost nobody in Italy had even heard of it until the foreign press (apparently the Telegraph from the UK) started spreading the "news".
The Daily Mail is not a reliable or trustworthy news source, please treat it as a right wing comic packed full of anti-europe, anti-immigration, xenophobic claptrap. It's the morning paper of a generation of colonial middle Englanders who'd love to see corporal punishment returned to our schools and anyone with the wrong coloured skin stopped and searched for, well, having the wrong colour of skin, or the wrong accent.
Here's Melanie Philips, one of the Mail's regulars, talking about Scotland and vilifying Scots for having the temerity to call a legal and planned referendum.
She bases this decision to have a referendum on the tired old "the Scots hate the English" trope. This person is way out of touch with the reasons why Scotland is deciding its future via the ballot box. Sadly she gets away with it unchallenged on non-UK current affairs programmes. If she were to try and pull this stunt off on a BBC broadcast such as Newsnight or Question Time, or on Sky News she'd be laughed out of the studio, even by English folks.
By the way, as the article mentions, Italy was almost never unified as a country in History. It's a VERY recent creation (just before WW1) and during more than 1000 years it was actually a jigsaw puzzle of small states. Germany has a longer History of federation, though.
EDIT: You can actually see this very clearly in the video showing the evolution of borders in Europe (that was shared last week on HN).
I think one of the lessons we'll take away from the 19th and 20th centuries is that just smashing some things together and calling it a "country" by fiat from people hundreds or thousands of miles away doesn't do anybody any good.
Self-determination breaks down just as easily. You get regions seceding from countries, but nothing stops cities from seceding from that region, or blocks seceding from that city, creating an ungovernable patchwork where everyone is a king trying to extort taxes from neighbors.
Permanently fixing borders based on a population's will at one moment assumes demographics are held constant for all time. (And how do you pick how large of a population gets to vote?) Re-voting every time anyone calls for a referendum destroys any certainty that the state will exist for more than ten years, and creates little wars of demography, where populations try to pack supporters into a territory for political control.
As you noted, borders drawn according to pure whimsy aren't much of a prize either.
All of these systems are basically terrible for different reasons.
Me neither, but this tends to lead into some very politically incorrect territory when you start analyzing why.
However, I'd be willing to try letting the artificially created countries break themselves back down into some smaller units, then letting themselves voluntarily reassemble at a later date if they see the advantages. While it's easy to forget, since it hasn't happened in my lifetime, and our Federal government keeps getting larger and getting more of the attention, but the United States really are the United States; there are procedures for voluntarily joining it. The EU is a larger organization that provides another model for voluntarily joining a larger union. I agree the initial states might break down quite small, but if there are sufficient advantages to reforming into larger units there are models for this. This has been a relatively peaceful process. (Though history suggests that some procedures for voluntarily and legally disassociating may be a good idea. That's certainly debatable at length, but I'm not sure the one-way door model is entirely the best idea, though I'd suggest it also ought to take a supermajority of some sort.)
The early unification movements were also liberal - they rebelled against tyrannical monarchs. There are of course some bad experience from nationalism, but it was also much better than the system it displaced - Absolutism. The new nation-states had constitutions that protected human rights, there was some representation and the new common languages were established by promoting literacy. Not all bad, I say.
No, this is different than conquest. Conquest is at least semi-stable, for various rather politically-incorrect reasons. I'm talking about a relatively recent phenomenon, where we arbitrarily jam countries together and expect them to work. Even the juice of democracy can't always hold these countries together.
(I think a democracy can only work when you've got shifting alliances that need to continually compete for the voters, as the stable democracies have. Most countries have lots of parties whose fortunes ebb and wane, the US does it slightly differently with its two major coalitions but the effect is the same as the coalitions positions have to shift over time to compete for the middle. When you've got ethnic blocks that vote in solid blocks for their ethnic candidate regardless of anything else, you don't have a functioning Democracy; you've got an Ethnocracy, disguised as a Democracy, and that's not the same thing.)
I agree, yet that's still the model for all the major developed nations around the world. Which is kind of depressing while there could be many more ways to make people participate in how things are run.
Countries that are only a century old aren't legitimate political entities?
(Germany's technically younger, by the way. Their Constitution was written in 1949, and arguably Germany became a new state after reunification in 1990. Does that mean it's okay for it to be dissolved again on a whim?)
>Germany's technically younger, by the way. Their Constitution was written in 1949, and arguably Germany became a new state after reunification in 1990. Does that mean it's okay for it to be dissolved again on a whim?
In short, and disregarding the loaded word "whim", yes I do. Do you not believe that people have the right to self-determination? If so, what is the cut off when a population no longer is eligible?
> Countries that are only a century old aren't legitimate political entities?
The concept of nation usually revolves around having a common cultural background. In less than a century, I'd argue there may still be significant differences in the fabric of the country, and what may have been true 100 years ago when they creating the State may not be true anymore (i.e. people may want to break free from it again).
> The concept of nation usually revolves around having a common cultural background.
Sure but the idea that "nations" ought to be coterminous with sovereign governments ("states") is a fairly novel one that's never been all that well followed (except that since it became popular, states have tried really hard to create the idea of a coterminous nation as a means of inspiring loyalty.)
How new a state is has no relation to whether the state corresponds to a nation; there's plenty of nations that have never had a state, and states that have been around a long time that don't correspond particularly well with a single nation.
> The article doesn't mention that it was an Internet vote with no legal value.
Even if it were NOT on Internet, it would not have any legal value as long as the Italian State does not recognize its validity. Which they would surely never agree to.
Their agenda is, in fact, written in capital letters at the top of the page. I'm startled to see this article being presented as news instead of opinion.
The effect of the EU being on a federal trajectory, albeit increasingly contested, is interesting here. The independence movement in Scotland, and I expect this applies to Catalonia and Venice, paints a picture of independence within the EU. Scottish nationalists regularly talk about moving away from the UK model and towards a Scandinavian model, which is probably not what the average reader of mises.org has in mind when they think about secession.
Of course it's very complex as it seems the weight of legal opinion is that Scotland will have to leave the EU if they leave the UK. There are a few legal academics that dispute that legal point but their case doesn't sound very convincing to me and the EU institutions have more or less said they will have to reapply. However Scotland does have the advantage of having a fairly good faith partner in the rest of the UK if they do leave. If the current disputes over the pound and the debt don't turn vicious then a huge stack of treaties being signed all in one day to make it all legal becomes imaginable. I think Barcelona-Madrid and Venice-Rome relations might take a somewhat different path.
"Of course it's very complex as it seems the weight of legal opinion is that Scotland will have to leave the EU if they leave the UK"
Citation please. Please stop recycling UK Mainstream Media "fag packet legal opinion" about whether Scotland would or would not have to leave the EU before being re-admitted via a lengthy application process.
And before you cite Barossa, that was one man's incorrect personal opinion. Thus far the EU has not ruled in any sort of legal way as to whether Article 48 (method of treaty amendment) or Article 49 (applications to join the EU) of the Treaty of Union would apply to Scotland.
Thus far the Scottish Government would like to use Article 48 rather than Article 49. Because there as never been a precedent of a new state seceding from an existing member state within the EU the whole position is untried.
edit: Disclosure, I am campaigning for Scottish Independence.
In the mid 90s∗, right after the fall of the wall and a general loss of interest in the European Union, the idea of a Europe of the Regions was being pushed. The vision was to transform the EU from a organization of European nation states into a heterogeneous federation a autonomous regions. Nationalism being superseded by Regionalism under an European umbrella giving regions with a strong identity of their own independence from their respective nation states.
I also has it's weaknesses: the ‘Europe of the Regions’ project has the same dangers of underestimating the continuing economic importance of the state, overestimating the coherence of most regions, and conceding too much ground to the dominant neo-liberal ideology which would weaken the state's intervention and redistributive capabilities. Indeed, in some richer regions (for example, in northern Italy), regionalisms have been partly motivated by opposition to transfers from themselves to despised poorer regions, and nationalism has no monopoly on supremacist racist attitudes. Contrary to the benign vision, some regionalisms can be very parochial, even xenophobic, as well as progressive – they are not inherently either one or the other. [1]
In contrast to that the current political climate seems to like to challenge the very idea of a unified Europe; the future is very unclear in every aspect.
I think that process is ultimately self-defeating though. If ethnicities/cultures/regions balkanize under a larger EU umbrella eventually the cohesiveness at the high level will break down. People need to be able to figure out how to get along.
"Campaigners say that the Rome government receives around 71 billion euros each year in tax from Venice - some 21 billion euros less than it gets back in investment and services." [0]
There does appear to be significant economical imbalance, however it would take blood being spilled before powers that be would let any kind of secession stand.
> it would take blood being spilled before powers that be would let any kind of secession stand.
It's difficult to understand what blood would be spilled within the EU. The UN constitutionally stands for the right to self-determination and that needs to be respected.
For now, that's difficult within the EU is because several states are in danger of losing their integrity: UK, Spain, Belgium, Italy, perhaps even Germany. No country wants to let the others split up because of the potential consequences for themselves, so they make political statements supporting the others (but not more than statements).
In the end, one properly official referendum falling on this side will force some fair rules of secession to be drawn up: I don't see any option but to respect these movements.
Given California gets about $0.80 per $1 of taxes sent to the Federal government back in terms of Federal spending, I can understand the Venetians in this desire.
I mean this in the most generous possible way: good luck and please go. One of the best possible outcomes for all Americans and humans would be the the breakup of the USA as it currently exists. California could probably get that party started in the best possible way.
As a native Californian, I'd love to break from the union more than the idiotic "6 Californias" currently scheduled for the next election. Yes there are differences in the state, but as a whole it is way more suited to be self sustaining than a lot of states sucking on the Federal largess.
"Six Californias" isn't scheduled for any election, its approved to begin gathering signatures for a petition to put it on the ballot -- and it would be on the ballot the election after next if it gets enough signatures.
You can't change the California state borders without getting the affected states' legislatures to also ratify the change, as well as Congress. Simply splitting California up would also require action by their legislature in addition to approval by Congress.
> Given that Obama recently declared all secession movements illegitimate (except those supported by the US Government, of course) it’s unknown how much support Venice can expect from the international community.
What? Obama is clearly off track here. The right to secede is in the American constitution from its very beginning. Any State in the US can decide to become independent if their population really wants to. Whether it makes sense is another story, but it certainly would not regarded as illegitimate.
There is nothing in the US constitution that actually allows secession. Some people try to imply a right to secede from the declaration of independence or from the history of the US (i.e., the revolutionary war) but there is not actual text in the US constitution that gives anyone the right to secede.
> There is nothing in the US constitution that actually allows secession
True, but there is nothing that forbids it either explicitly. And I could argue that from the History of the US, of how they were formed, and the Declaration of Independence, Secession is very much considered to be a cultural Right.
Even Lincoln said that:
> Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.
This is further observed by foreign observers such as Tocqueville after the US were established:
> The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States choose to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so, and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right.
The actual written Constitution has far more text about handling the cases of treason, rebellion, and domestic violence than it does about individual states seceding.
And if you would read the Declaration of Independence you'd see that the "tyranny test" (such as one was ever conceived in American jurisprudence) is very strict indeed. Even from the first days of the American Revolutionary War we were claiming that the government deserved a great deal of "benefit of the doubt" and that it would take a very severe set of circumstances to cast off a government.
There is nothing in the Constitution that forces a state to remain part of the United States. so... "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" Sounds like the gives the States the right to secede.
You are correct that there is nothing in the US Constitution that allows secession. Nor anything that disallows it. And the last time it was seriously tested in the 1860s, the results were pretty horrible (it's still the worst war in terms of casualties the US has ever had).
> The right to secede is in the American constitution from its very beginning. Any State in the US can decide to become independent if their population really wants to. Whether it makes sense is another story, but it certainly would not regarded as illegitimate.
I'm pretty sure Lincoln would argue with you there.
As I said below in another comment, Lincoln did not recognize the Right to secede, but that was heavily debated at the time of the Civil War (and still is). War does not make things Right by itself - it's just like forcing your view with a gun.
EDIT: this is directly from the Declaration of Independence:
> whenever any form of government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government
Is it a "precedent" if it happened once, 150 years ago? No current USA general would send troops against any area of the USA that held a proper referendum to secede. If one did, few current USA soldiers would follow such unlawful orders. We're more civilized than that, now.
I don't know, I think the opening of the Civil War could be replayed quite accurately in the modern-day America. The opening shots of the Civil War weren't Lincoln's troops firing on civilians in a random Rebel town, it was Rebel troops firing on a Union fortification which refused to evacuate.
I think this is exactly what would happen in the modern day.
"Proper" referendums don't include shooting. Certainly, violence against a military installation will be met with overwhelming violence in return. That's why we'll hold a referendum: to avoid all that. If the soldiers want to hang out in their base that happens to be stuck in the middle of Lesser Midwesternia, that's cool. If they get bored and go home, that will be cool too.
I'm not sure if it's a question of how civilized people are, but I get the feeling that the key reason why a certain number of people do not want Gun Control in the US, is precisely because they want to have access to weapons and resist, should the Federal Government turn tyrannic one day.
Yeah I've heard this explanation as well. It calls to mind Schneier's admonition against "movie plot threats". The reason to have firearms is not to counter any specific threat. We arm ourselves, rather, in order to respond effectively to a wide variety of potential situations. Among those, the "rogue federal government" threat isn't more than a rounding error, in the USA, for the foreseeable future.
Or at the very least, not do so unilaterally. It's possible to imagine adopting something like the Constitutional amendment procedures to allow the nation to "cast off" a state that wished to be independent.
But what is not going to happen is that a state gets to take it's ball and go home just because the nation had the sheer audacity to vote for the wrong President.
Which one are we talking about? Frankly, all the ones I've had the misfortune of living through, blur together for me. It's not like any of them have had any different policies. How could they, possibly?
If any area secedes, it might be because of "The President", but it won't be due to any particular one.
I believe this is a reference to Lincoln; the election of 1860 is frequently cited as one of the triggers for the secession of South Carolina shortly thereafter.
No. Montenegro seceded peacefully from Serbia. Czechoslovakia dissolved into two parts peacefully (no seceding, but close enough). Finland seceded peacefully from Russia. Amongst others...
pretty much all of these cases were "crumbling/dissolution of empire" or similar. I.e. an opportunity presented by dramatic shift in force balance when dominating force is weakened and thus couldn't stop the process. It wasn't a result of a process legitimate according to the laws at that moment in that geography. And that is exactly my point (it wasn't about peacefulness - if you have obviously prevailing force, the things have good chances to happen peacefully, like in case of Crimea :). It is always about force. Laws, like always, follow the force and legitimaze the separation after the fact.
Well the American States were BORN from the right to secede from the English Crown, and they clearly kept that Right in their constitution before of their very History on that matter.
In the eyes of the colonists the separation happened in London, not in the colonies. The fighting started because they wanted "their rights as Englishmen" and nothing more.
There's a reason the Declaration of Independence happened more than a year after the first spurts of military action (and was very controversial in the colonies even then).
No, the article is pretty clearly off track. Obama hardly said that all secession movements are illegitimate. He said that the secession vote in the Crimea was illegitimate.
Well, on what grounds would he say that it is illegitimate? The UN principles (ratified by the US as well) say that they recognize the Right of people to be governed by themselves. And this is the basis of the creation of many smaller countries after WW2.
"The available choices did not include keeping the status quo of Crimea and Sevastopol as they were at the moment the referendum was held. Many Western and Ukrainian commentators argued that both choices would result in de facto separation from Ukraine."
Under those principles, significant parts of Israel have the right to secede. Will the international community support the secession of East Jerusalem? So far as I can discern, the governing principles are more complex than just identifying a territory which will give majority support to a separation vote.
> the governing principles are more complex than just identifying a territory which will give majority support to a separation vote.
Certainly, I'm not saying it's simple. I'm just saying that it should not be called illegitimate, because even if it's not feasible technically speaking, it would still be legitimate based on UN principles.
Well there's no way that the writer would ever misrepresent Obama's position with a little hyperbole, is there. the article is of course referring to US condemnation of the sham vote in Crimea. Also, I would like you to show me where the Constitution talks about secession.
If you knew the history of this region (or at least last 20+ years) you'd not spent any effort typing the word "sham". Decorating the vote with all the bell and whistles that would supposedly make the vote "legitimate" (as if anything could make such a vote "legitimate" in the western eyes :) would change nothing in the vote's result, so Putin just didn't bother.
Don't get me wrong, i don't support the annexation. My point here is that trying to play the "sham" card leads nowhere in that situation because it is immaterial.
man, this is former USSR. Everybody understands the point of choice between 2 alternatives like:
"Yes, i want to be in Russia"
and
"No, i want to be in Russia"
and that point is that it doesn't matter. You come to the polls, you don't come to the polls - it wouldn't change anything, including the poll results to the 7th digit after the point :) (i'm not saying that this referendum results was cheating - it just happened that no need to cheat here, though Putin wouldn't have any issue with cheating if it was needed - again it just doesn't matter, 90% or whatever would be in any case) It just makes an overall gray routine just a little bit fun.
I see the point you're making, and I actually think that Crimea ought to be part of Russia if they want to. I feel like Putin overplayed his hand; if they'd stuck with the original notion of having a vote in late April or a bit later (so that there'd be time for both sides to campaign properly) then I think he'd have got the result he wanted anyway. Sending in unmarked troops and then playing dumb about where they got the Russian uniforms was a move less befitting a statesman than a cartoon villain. Not that he cares what I think of him :)
>Sending in unmarked troops and then playing dumb about where they got the Russian uniforms was a move less befitting a statesman than a cartoon villain. Not that he cares what I think of him :)
exactly. He plays for internal market. And internal audience eats him. 25 years ago, back in USSR, we laughed watching a criminal asking Arnold in Red Heat "Kakie vashi dokazatelstva?" (what are your evidences?) Western mentality is so logical, evidences-shmevidences :) Such an easy target for a showman in Russia performing for Russian audience...
The civil war was unlawful. Lincoln was against the secession and waged war against the States which were in their Right from the beginning. It's not because Lincoln's side won that it made it right.
The secessions were unlawful. After all, when the Northern states were compelled to return fugitive slaves to the South, that was done on the basis of text in the Constitution that was binding on all of the states (namely, about returning those fleeing from bondage to their masters).
In fact the Constitution included many regulations and prohibitions regarding the power of individual states, so it can't be claimed that the Constitution wasn't the ultimate arbiter of power within the federal framework of government.
So with that in mind a unilateral decision by a single state to change the Constitutional government for all of the states can hardly have been legal. And even the parts of the Constitution talking about the territorial integrity of a single state all include the clause the Congress must approve the change in addition to the state itself.
If a state really wanted to secede it would have to have come up with some legal procedure at the national level from which to even make that change possible. Probably by using the Constitutional Amendment process (which is, after all, the built-in designed mechanism for altering the federal framework of government).
A prisoner does not ask his warden for release. It would take enough hearts and minds to secede, and nothing else.
How it actually happens and whether or not different commenters find it "legal" will not matter. If I deny your jurisdiction and have the military force to defend myself, your laws do not apply to me.
> If I deny your jurisdiction and have the military force to defend myself, your laws do not apply to me.
Sure, this is how some sovereign states formed in the first place. But even these were made "legal" under international jurisprudence.
Don't confuse exercise of power with legal aspects though. It can certainly be against a nation's laws to secede, and secede anyways if you can prevent the state from effectively exercising power (e.g. Algeria in the 1950s). But that didn't make it "legal", either under domestic or international law.
Even in international law if you want to secede you have to form a separate state, have it exercise effective control over a territory, and do so long enough to have "enough" other nations recognize that control. If you can do that then it doesn't matter what your parent nation's domestic laws were, but until you can do that it's shaky legal ground indeed.
Citations please. Slavery is only mentioned twice in the Constitution, and then, it's Amendments 13 and 14 (passed after the end of the Civil War). Restrictions of power towards the several states is spelled out in Article I, section 10 (three paragraphs) and Article IV, with a clarification in Amendment X ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.").
There is nothing in the Constitution about secession (including the Amendments).
I'm surprised you managed to make it to Article IV without finding the citation which you seek. I'll quote Art. IV, §2:
"No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."
This clause was made null and void by the Thirteenth Amendment that you've mentioned, which further makes me wonder...
Anyways, the word "slavery" was deliberately not used by the Framers, as even at that time the concept was morally distasteful, so the Framers talked around the issue by referring to "Service" and "Party" instead of "slave" and "master".
You also missed the part in the Constitution where importation of slaves could not be forbidden until 1808 (Art. I, §9).
"The fine article", if you prefer. Don't be coy: the statement was obviously a political throwaway line, which needs no source, and is certainly to be expected from mises.org. (If it pissed you off, they win!) It is of course grossly unfair to the President, because there are numerous other areas that he has encouraged to secede.
A klaxon goes off in my head whenever I see phrases like "Italy is a made-up country." All countries are made-up. How else would they exist?
What's objectionable is when an outside empire comes in and says "You guys are all one country now." But that's not the case with Italy, or Europe in general, who are the ones who generally did that to others.
Some countries are more made up than others.
Most of the countries in Africa and the Middle East were not formed by popular movements for self determination, but rather the result of foreign (mostly West European) political considerations, the people living in many of those countries - in aggregate - have no common ground, they associate with some ethnic group that does not identify with the state and are often seriously opposed to their union with other ethnic groups (Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda are one extreme example of this; Sunnis, Shias and Christians in most Arab states are another).
Most European states are less made up than almost all non-European states, but Italy is much less a result of a group of people who chose to unite (or secede) than, say, the Balkan states in their current form.
Well, they're just conceptual entities, they don't actually exist in reality, like numbers. People make them up, other people confuse them reality, and then you have major problems, like nationalism.
Why don't more cities secede from their surrounding areas? For example, New York State takes so much more from New York City (in the form of taxes, mostly) than it gives back, and it prevents the city from things that are in its own interest (e.g., congestion pricing or a commuter tax).
So why didn't the city break away a long time ago?
If they tried to break away from the USA they would have the military knocking on their door. If they somehow managed to operate as an independent city like DC, they would lose the right to vote for senators and president.
Actually, I was thinking about why they don't become their own state. It seems to be completely in their own interest, except I think the US constitution forbids them from doing it without their parent state's permission.
I guess having free trade and free movement of people within the EU makes this kind of thing practical. I'm not sure Venice will happen but Scotland may.
