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The Secession Conundrum – Through the Looking Glass - David Haljan: Constitutionalising Secession (Oxford/Portland: Hart Publishing2014), 429 pp., ISBN: 978-184-9464-376

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2015

Henri de Waele
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Type
Book Review Essay
Information
European Constitutional Law Review , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , December 2015 , pp. 609 - 616
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Professor of International and European Law, Radboud University Nijmegen; Guest Professor of European Institutional Law, University of Antwerp; Senior Fellow, Centre for European Integration Studies, University of Bonn.

References

1 Compare e.g. van Creveld, M., The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge University Press 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Held, D., Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford University Press 1995)Google Scholar.

2 On which, inter alia, Brölmann, C. and Vandamme, T. (eds.), Secession within the Union – Intersection Points of International and European Law (ACELG/ACIL, 2014)Google Scholar.

3 Haljan, Constitutionalising Secession, p. 14.

4 Ibid., p. 19-20.

5 Reference re Secession of Québec [1998] 2 S.C.R. 217.

6 Haljan, Constitutionalising Secession, p. 81.

7 Ibid., p. 382.

8 Ibid., p. 192.

9 Ibid., p. 298.

10 Somehow disconnected from, rather than antecedent to the formation of a system’s Grundnorm; even when Haljan does not adopt a rigid Kelsenian perspective, in accordance with that vocabulary he does repeatedly tag the break-up as a ‘revolution’. For his take on such a ‘transformative event’, see below.

11 See e.g. Buchanan, A.,Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumpter to Lithuania and Québec (Westview Press 1991)Google Scholar; Beran, H., ‘A Liberal Theory of Secession’, 32 Political Studies (1984) p. 21-31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wellman, C. H., A Theory of Succession: The Case for Political Self-determination (Cambridge University Press 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Among the recent monodisciplinary works are inter alia Walter, C. et al. (eds.), Self-determination and Secession in International Law (Oxford University Press 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and van den Driest, S. F., Remedial Secession: A Right to External Self-determination as a Remedy to Serious Injustices? (Intersentia 2013)Google Scholar.

13 Haljan, Constitutionalising Secession, respectively p. 113-115 and p. 165-179.

14 See e.g. Beran, H., The Consent Theory of Political Obligation (Croom Helm 1987)Google Scholar; Philpott, D., ‘Self-determination in Practice’, in M. Moore (ed.), National Self-determination and Secession (Oxford University Press 1998), p. 79-102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 See e.g. Buchanan, A., ‘The International Institutional Dimension of Secession’, in P. B. Lehning (ed.), Theories of Secession (Routledge 1998), p. 227Google Scholar; Birch, A., Nationalism and National Integration (Unwin Hyman 1989)Google Scholar.

16 Though the scepticism and hostility deserve mentioning that already the Wilsonian (Fourteen Points) pledge faced.

17 Haljan, , Constitutionalising Secession, respectively p. 122-123Google Scholar, 192-193 and 246-247.

18 Haljan, , Constitutionalising Secession, p. 247Google Scholar.

19 Ibid.

20 Vindicating the opinion of the Canadian Supreme Court (supra n. 5), which embraced a kindred ‘duty to negotiate’.

21 Haljan, , Constitutionalising Secession, p. 27Google Scholar.

22 Haljan, , Constitutionalising Secession, p. 295Google Scholar.

23 Cf. Norman, W., Negotiating Nationalism. Nation-Building, Federalism, and Secession in the Multinational State (Oxford University Press 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mancini, S., ‘Secession and Self-determination’, in M. Rosenfeld and A. Sajó (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press 2012), p. 481-499Google Scholar.

24 International Court of Justice, Accordance with International Law of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Respect of Kosovo, ICJ Reports 2010, p. 403.

25 Haljan, , Constitutionalising Secession, p. 381Google Scholar.

26 Regrettably failing to take on board, inter alia, the sterling recent work of van den Driest (supra n. 12).

27 Haljan, , Constitutionalising Secession, p. 389Google Scholar.

28 Featuring for instance sections entitled ‘The Hart of a Constitution’ and ‘Next Steps: Who’s the Boss?’.