Institution Design and the Separatist Impulse: Quebec and the Antebellum American South

Abstract

Regional autonomy and separatist movements severely test the conflict management capacities of a nation's political system. Following Calhoun, a series of institutional arrangements and political practices which depart from majority rule decision making have been identified in the literature as contributing to the peaceful management of subcultural cleavages. Such arrangements provide minority subcultures with institutionalized means of self-protection and guarantees against stable unrepresentation and official cultural stigmatization. But, as Schattsneider pointed out, conflicts are best regulated before they start and institutional arrangements such as those above must be made before regional cleavages become too politicized. At a certain stage of conflict, peaceable partition may be the only solution. In Canada and the antebellum U.S., failure to set up "formal modes of sectional self protection" led to conflict regulation failure and the emergence of separatist movements in Quebec and the South. Without mechanisms of the type noted above and in the context of mass s politics, the machinery of national political parties and intersubcultural elite accommodation which had held regional cleavages in check simply proved inadequate.