Democratically, of course. But saying that is only a start to answering a complicated and difficult question.

And it’s an urgent question, because recently there has been an increase in the number of movements for national self-determination and secession. Worldwide, between 1994-2017, I found 55 referendums registered, from Catalonia to Scotland, New Zealand to the Falklands, from Quebec to Iraqi Kurdistan. Most involved not full independence but rather a change in the political status of a state, or a separation or an integration of territory within an existing state. Whether such votes make sure that every voice is heard and ease difficult changes, or whether the votes tip countries towards more conflict and even violence, depends a great deal on the process around separation, and how democratic it truly is.

There are long-standing rules and processes for splitting up. The right to self-determination, as a collective right of peoples, is enshrined in all kinds of international covenants. But such secessions, or decisions to combine with another state or seek a different status internationally, cannot be unilateral under current international law. There must be a process.

There are, surprisingly, three possible methods to reconfigure one’s state—of which a referendum, or popular vote, is one, but is not required. The other two methods for applying the right of self-determination, as outlined by the International Court of Justice, include the election of an assembly of representatives entitled to such a decision, or a decision by the General Assembly of the United Nations.

As a scholar living in South Tyrol, a part of Northern Italy with a strong independence movement, I’ve made a study of self-determination efforts around the world. And I’ve become convinced that popular referendums should be a requirement when it comes to enshrining the constitution of a new sovereign state, or beginning secession or integration within a state. Referendums should also be required for changes in the political status of part of a state’s territory (such as autonomy or other forms of power sharing).

Popular votes offer a chance for participation to each legal inhabitant of a concerned area, making the plan that arises democratic, representative, and legitimate enough to have force.

But a referendum in and of itself is no guarantee of legitimacy. The world has seen many informal referendums organized in a unilateral way, outside of democratic negotiation and unregulated by constitutional processes. Territorial entities that seek to secede this way almost never gain international recognition, and they can sow international conflict as well.

For the nations of the world, the question is how to hold such votes in ways that produce accurate results that have legitimacy and don’t provoke deeper conflict or war. This is a tricky business, since most independent countries in their constitutions do not allow the right for secession of a part of their territory and thus do not provide for the right to hold referendums on such issues.

International law also doesn’t offer much in the way of specific guidance about how to hold such referendums. And the details can be complicated, in part because international law has been designed to recognize conflicting interests. The most important United Nations covenants, such as the Friendly Relations Act of 1970, recognize both the right of states to defend the integrity of their territory and the right to self-determination of peoples within an existing state.

Since 1994, many of the calls for self-determination have come from inside Europe, and their outcomes demonstrate the potential and perils of these movements. Currently, there are movements afoot in South Tyrol, in Flanders (now part of Belgium), in Greenland (Denmark), in the Basque Country, in the Republika Srpska of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the eastern part of Ukraine (Donbass), and in Catalonia.

Troublingly, in three European regions, secession has de facto already happened, but not by constitutional methods, but rather with violent means with military support from neighboring countries or “kin states”: Northern Cyprus in 1974, now the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, in Transnistria in 1994, formerly a part of Moldova, and in 2014 in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, part of the Ukraine, later annexed by Russia after the March 2014 referendum on self-determination, an illegal act in terms of constitutional and international law.

De facto it also happened in the so-called People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine, a still-open conflict. In the 1990s, two formerly autonomous regions of Georgia split away (South Ossetia and Abkhazia), and also the area now known as Artsakh split from Azerbaijan. Of course, all those entities held referendums—many of dubious democratic quality—recording huge majorities in favor of secession. But all of those self-declared republics failed to gain international recognition.

All these bad examples should not sour us on the power of a democratic referendum. Such votes can be done well. Take Scotland and its vote on independence from the United Kingdom in 2014. The process there demonstrated democratic maturity and gave the verdict legitimacy. One lesson is that democratic negotiation may be more important than law or precedent when it comes to constructing such a popular vote.

The British government, after negotiations and consultations with the Scottish government and Parliament, agreed to hold a popular referendum on the sovereignty of Scotland, although no U.K. constitutional law provides for such a right of a member country of the U.K.

In September 2014, 55.3 percent of Scottish voters rejected the option of secession. That verdict didn’t end the controversy entirely—after the Brexit vote in June 2016, the Scottish National Party announced it would push for a new referendum on independence—but the healthy debate settled the question for a time, and left participants on both sides satisfied with the vote. (You may wonder about Brexit, but I don’t consider it here because it belongs in a different category, since it is about an entire country leaving a union based on politics and trade.)

The first step to a democratic vote is establishing a procedure for it. Creating processes that have time to be established, and providing time for consideration, can reduce the risks of such votes. Take the recent November 4, 2018 vote in New Caledonia on self-determination. New Caledonia, in Oceania, is one of the autonomous overseas territories of France. The vote was conducted under a 1998 accord, called Nouméa, that gave New Caledonia the right to decide freely whether to keep being a part of France as an autonomous entity or become an independent country. So, when the vote was conducted 20 years later, there were no questions about its legitimacy. Other French overseas territories also had used the means of referendums to determine their political status. This fall, New Caledonians voted against independence in a peaceful, legitimate vote.

But without procedure, you may have conflict, even in a democratic society.

Some countries bar such votes, causing themselves considerable trouble. The Spanish Constitution, for example, does not allow its autonomous communities to hold referendums on secession; unlike in the U.K., the constitution stresses the indivisibility of the state and considers democratic efforts for self-determination of smaller nations inside Spain as attacks on the legal constitutional order or even as acts of rebellion. For this reason, the nation’s Supreme Court banned the Basque Country in 2008 from holding a referendum on declaring a different political status; and, as a result, conflict on that subject remains.

And in 2017, after the referendum on independence of Catalonia, the president and the government of Catalonia were persecuted under penal law for having organized such a referendum. While a slight majority of Catalan voters voted yes to independence, and the independence movement was peaceful and democratic, there was no mutually agreed process. And so the result was declared illegal and invalid by Madrid. Protests followed, and the conflict became more serious. Sooner or later a new referendum will need to be held that is fair and correct under constitutional and international law—as the Catalans have this fundamental right and deserve this democratic opportunity. The 2014 referendum in Scotland may serve as a shining example.

Ultimately, studying how states acquire self-determination has led me to a simple, but slightly paradoxical conclusion: The best path to splitting up your country begins with coming together to agree on the rules of a referendum.

That’s because the kind of procedure established for self-determination sets the course for future relationships—both between the independence-seeking territory and the state it seeks to leave, and between those two entities and the rest of the world.

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Who governed Orkney then? We don’t know. Who governs Orkney now? We still don’t know. But some clarity could come this month with a referendum that will impact the lives of the 23,000 people who inhabit these 70 islands. On September 18, the voters of Scotland–all residents older than 16 years–will decide whether to become an independent country or remain within the United Kingdom.

The question is a complicated one, and it is being debated in not only Scotland but also around the world. The question is even more complicated in the case of Orkney, where sovereignty has been an open question since the beginning of European society here more than 5,000 years ago.

Orkney lies in the sea north of the Scottish mainland, between Scotland and Norway. This strategic position has given the Orkney people both opportunities and challenges. Over the ages, the archipelago has been occupied by Nordic Vikings, Norwegian kings, and Scottish monarchs. In 1707, it was attached to the United Kingdom along with Scotland.

During the two world wars, the British military used Orkney as their main naval base; the remains of sunken warships can still be seen today along the coastlines of Orkney. More recently, the region’s enormous natural resource–including fish, gas, oil, and new opportunities to generate electricity from wind and tidal flows–have given rise to a great deal of interest in Orkney.

“The fertile land and mild climate offered (and still offer) a perfect setting for people to settle, meet, and develop,” explained the historian David Murdoch, who makes his living by showing the archipelago to foreigners from Scotland and beyond. When I arrived on the tiny airfield to report on Orkney for the Swiss Broadcasting Company, the first landmark outside the airport in Kirkwall, the main city of Orkney, was a large sign with three big letters:“Y-E-S.”

A “yes” vote in the September referendum would mean independence for Scotland, but it’s not clear if that would mean more independence for Orkney. Sovereignty has a difficult history here. When Scotland—after a successful popular vote back in 1997—achieved more autonomy within the United Kingdom, Orkney’s regional powers were reduced. And Orkney’s regional powers weren’t much to begin with, the U.K. being one of Europe’s most centralized polities.

Orkney is hoping for a reversal—and more sovereignty. The question is whether an independent Scotland will produce that result.

“We need to be taken much more seriously,” stresses the island’s Prime Minister Steven Heddle as he welcomes me at the Orkney Islands Council’s headquarters in Kirkwall. The Council governs all of Orkney. “While we contribute a lot to the wealth of Scotland and the U.K., we have very little possibility to decide our own local affairs,” said Heddle, who would like to see the development of a strong democracy across Orkney, including what he calls the “features of true direct democracy.”

Together with his leadership colleagues in other parts of Orkney—Shetland and the Hebridean islands—Heddle has used the ongoing referendum process on Scottish independence to open negotiations with the governments in both Edinburgh and London about autonomy for Orkney, irrespective of the outcome of the referendum. Those negotiations have yet to produce a clear plan, but both the Scottish government and the central U.K. administration in London have promised to give more power to the people of Orkney.

While Steven Heddle doesn’t want to reveal his voting preference in September, his wife Donna Heddle is a strong advocate of an independent Scotland. “This will finally give us the right to have a government of our own,” she said, noting that successive Tory governments in London had no support at all from the people in either Scotland or Orkney.

Scotland and Britain aren’t the only options for Orkney. Norway retains a pull here. Donna Heddle, a professor and head of the Centre for Nordic Studies in Kirkwall, sees the Nordic countries as natural allies for Scotland and Orkney: “We have much more in common with Norway and Iceland than with England or Ireland.”

Donna Heddle envisions an independent Scotland with an oil-funded Nordic-style welfare state that would allow Orkney to become an autonomous part of the U.K. She can also imagine a future with an independent Scotland in which Orkney has a status similar to that of the Faroe or Åland islands—two other archipelagos further north that belong to Denmark and Finland, respectively, and possess far-reaching lawmaking powers.

Not everyone agrees with the many Orcadians on the Scottish independence question. But no matter how people here vote on September 18, their desire for their sovereignty is unmistakable. The question is: What path will get the islands there?

“There are really no good reasons as to why we should vote ‘yes’ on September 18,” said Charles Tait, a photographer and writer, whom I met in the windy harbor of Kirkwall. “We do not need a revolution in the relationship to the U.K., but a continuous evolution on our path to greater autonomy.”

The post Who Should Rule These Scottish Islands? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s right, all our fears of bloody, clash-of-civilizations strife notwithstanding, Scotland’s peaceful Independence Movement from within could be a more powerful blow to the West than anything coming from the outside. The movement, which Scottish journalist Neal Ascherson has called “an instinct, rather than a formed idea,” is on the verge of putting secession from the United Kingdom on the Scottish ballot as early as 2014.

With any luck, however, Britain’s campaign to keep the U.K. together will hold clues for other jittery Western nations on how to shore up their own fraying centers.

That campaign began in earnest two weeks ago in Edinburgh, where British Prime Minister David Cameron delivered an emotional appeal to Scots not to abandon the idea of greater Britain. The address–which sought to capture hearts as well as minds–was in sharp contrast to the rigid, decidedly ungenerous speech Cameron gave a year ago this month at the Munich Security Conference.

In Munich, Cameron argued that British multiculturalism bred homegrown terrorism. He proposed steeping newcomers, especially young Muslims caught between cultures, in a “muscular liberalism,” in Western values of “freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex, or sexuality.” It’s this constellation of political ideals, he argued, that provide “a clear sense of national identity that is open to everyone.”

Cameron’s conclusions were nothing if not logical. But that’s what made them so maddeningly incomplete. The ideals and freedoms that Cameron claimed could conquer the “rootlessness” among some British Muslims–and extremism–hardly constitute firm roots. That’s because traditional political liberalism is essentially a collection of abstract ideas, and, when push comes to shove, abstractions simply aren’t as effective as bloodlines and religious ritual when it comes to bringing people together. As worthy as they are, ideals don’t keep diverse groups of people together without the aid of some sort of emotional glue, something on the order of kinship.

Of course, Americans like to think it’s our values that put the unum in our pluribus. But U.S. national unity was built as much by wars, external and internal enemies, and the defense of whiteness as an ethnic identity as it was by shared belief in our core political values.

Exalted ideals notwithstanding, Western democracies have historically fallen back on whatever tribal, religious, or ethnic solidarity they could drum up to solidify their identities.

Fortunately, somewhere along the road to Edinburgh, Cameron dropped his haughty tone and thought it wise to endear himself to the folks who might pull out of the union. Sure, the prime minister checked off the economic benefits of remaining part of the United Kingdom. (He threw a jab when he acknowledged Scotland could survive on its own since “there are plenty of small, independent national states of similar size or even smaller.”) But he also refused to reduce the United Kingdom to “the lowest common denominator” or “some sort of deal.”

Yes, Cameron said, the U.K. was about shared values, but it was also a “precious thing” that nurtured people in an increasingly risky and atomized world. “Whether in Edinburgh or London,” he said, “the United Kingdom is a warm and stable home that billions elsewhere envy.” In his first salvo in the effort to hold onto Scotland, Cameron had injected love into the practice of nation-building.

For the past decade, many Westerners have found perverse comfort in scapegoating fifth-column foreigners for our fraying social bonds. Here in the U.S., in a paranoid effort to safeguard Judeo-Christian values, more than a dozen states are considering outlawing aspects of Sharia law, as if creeping Islamism were the divisive threat in places like Oklahoma. But the possibility of an independent Scotland calls our attention to a much more plausible and uncomfortable truth: that Western nations are losing the confidence of their native-born populations and imploding from within.

Britain’s campaign against Scottish independence will not be targeted solely to Scots. It will also invariably include an aspect of internal reappraisal for Brits in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Likewise, while the U.K. could easily survive without Scotland, even a peaceful divorce from a 300-year-old partner would stir a crisis in confidence.

Odd as it sounds, Americans, intensely divided as we are along cultural and ideological lines, can only envy the situation the Brits are in. Stripped of a foreign menace to distract–or unite–them, Britons will have to sit down and evaluate the meaning and value of their country, their union. They’ll have the opportunity to calmly appraise what it is that ties them altogether. And, finally, like an old married couple who’ve seen happier days, they’ll get to ask each other, point blank, in their “warm and stable home,” whether there’s enough love there to keep them together.

Gregory Rodriguez is founding director of Zócalo Public Square and executive director of the Center for Social Cohesion at Arizona State University.

*Photo courtesy of ConvenienceStoreGourmet.

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