Both the developed and developing world are experiencing, albeit often for different reasons, secessionist movements (Alberta, French Basque Country, Italian irredentism, Nagorno-Karabakh, Somaliland, Zapatista, etc.). Closely connected to the topical issue of secession, but underexplored, is state formation. Indeed, when successful, secession leads to the formation of a new state. Novel state formation is a process which can occur through a shift in the boundaries of another state -- i.e., through internal exit -- when certain exogenous circumstances are concurrently present (ecology, population density, institutional constraints, and limits to the broadcast of power).
The exogenous circumstances create a rent-seeking window that leads to two opposite economic forces putting pressure on state scope: the attempt of an existing state to maintain its population and the attempt of a subset of the state's population to form a new state. We intend to characterize these forces through a factually-grounded political economy approach to state formation through internal exit that allows the derivation of novel conditions for state boundary determination. The setting is southern Africa, circa 1500-1910, where autochthonous states formed by fission.
The project is thus mainly in the nature of an analytic narrative, which draws inspiration from southern Africa state formation. As such, we expect its insights to be valuable for other contexts too. Moreover, the project is closely connected to recent global populist movements that advocate closure of state boundaries. These are so-called nativist policies where competition for political support over tax rates is shifting toward competition for political support over the degree of economic openness of boundaries (e.g., Italy, UK). We anticipate our project to yield empirical implications for these and similar global challenges as well as topical policy lessons.
The state of the art would be enriched at least for the following five reasons. (1) We would propose a novel theory (and model) of internal exit that (2) would be historically and factually grounded, which (3) would still be in keeping with the state of the art's rational choice approach and which (4) would be applicable to more cases, both past and contemporary, and (5) would yield testable implications beyond the case study.
Our enrichment adds at least to five strands of literature, which to date have had little overlap.
Most obviously, we contribute to the literature on internal exit. Our proposed approach presents three main differences with the seminal Buchanan-Faith. The first difference regards territory. Buchanan-Faith envisions a scenario in which a community decides to provide its own public goods by declaring independence from an existing political unit. The community remains on its territory but changes political institutions. African internal exit occurs when people physically leave an existing state to found another on new territory.
The second difference lies with the initiator of internal exit. Buchanan-Faith hints that the initiator is your ordinary tax-paying citizen (a 'commoner'). The citizen's exit motive is the avoidance of an exploitative tax rate. Our internal exit initiator is not an ordinary citizen. She is, we saw, a member of the governing elite who pays taxes, but also partakes in revenue surplus sharing. She is not motivated to exit in order to avoid an exploitative tax rate. Rather, she is literally on the other side: she wishes to be the ruler of a new state to be able to extract a surplus share greater than the one she receives in the original state.
Third, we differ in predictions. The Buchanan-Faith model predicts that internal exit is improbable. Because the exiter is an ordinary citizen, exit can be directly prevented through a non-exploitative tax rate. However, our situation is more roundabout. There are three economic factors that determine whether or not a ruler is able to set an internal exit-proof tax rate: the surplus extracted, the ruler's surplus share, and the size of the elite.
Second, we add to the recent institutional literature about state formation by North, Wallis and Weingast (2009) (NWW). We differ from NWW when it comes to possible dynamics. NWW chiefly propose a transition argument to explain state formation. Simply put, the ideal-typical changes that a state is usually subject to originate from shifting traditional (based on personal) and rational (based on impersonal) relations. Yet if there are tussles for surplus shares among elite members that also destabilize the political status quo, then there could be civil war and revolution. NWW neglects that surplus tussles could also lead to internal exit where new state formation does not occur through transition, but through a state's splitting-up process.
Third, we connect to the African and southern Africa history literature, where internal exit is more commonly known as "fission" (e.g., Herbst 1990). This literature concludes that internal exit is both costless and common. In southern Africa, exit is not necessarily either (e.g., Omer-Cooper 1969).
Fourth, there are some differences, not necessarily all rival, with anthropology (Kopytoff 1989). We do not deny that the dynamics of state formation are influenced by social elements (e.g., deference, fear, loyalty, respect, stigma); and indeed we consider, dovetailing with the facts, social identification as central. Yet, we emphasize that internal exit revolves around an economic calculus: an elite member pondering about expected gains and losses in surplus shares.
The fifth and last related literature regards the efficient determination of state boundaries (e.g., Findlay 1996; Alesina and Spolaore 1997), which does not consider the contraction of state boundaries insignificant. But, unlike the proposed project, it focuses on the reverse issue: boundary expansion.
REFERENCES
Alesina, A. and E. Spolaore 1997. "On the Number and Size of Nations," Quarterly Journal of Economics 112: 1027-1056.
Findlay, R. 1996. "Towards a Model of Territorial Expansion and the Limits of Empire," in The Political Economy of Conflict and Appropriation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Herbst, J. 1990. "Migration, the Politics of Protest, and State Consolidation in Africa," African Affairs 89: 183-203.
Kopytoff, I. 1989. "The Internal African Frontier: The Making of African Political Culture," in The African Frontier, I. Kopytoff (ed). Indiana: Indiana University Press.
North, D. C., J. J. Wallis and B. R. Weingast 2009. Violence and Social Orders. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Omer-Cooper, J, 1969. "Aspects of Political Change in the Nineteenth-Century Mfecane," in African Societies in Southern Africa, L. Thompson (ed). London: Heinemann.
Wilson, M. 1969. "The Sotho, Venda, and Tsonga," in Oxford History of South Africa I. London: Oxford.