On September 25, 2017, 92.73 percent of those voting in Iraqi Kurdistan’s referendum backed independence, a demand well beyond autonomy or enhanced federalism. The margin was not manufactured by a one-party state suppressing the opposition; the referendum had international observers, real enthusiasm and the weight of a population that had waited for this moment across three generations of dispossession and violence.
Three weeks later, Iraqi forces backed by Iranian-supported militias retook Kirkuk. They did it in hours. Within six weeks of the vote, the Kurdistan Regional Government had lost roughly 40 percent of the territory it held and control of the Kirkuk oil fields that supplied a large share of its oil exports. Baghdad had shut the region’s airports to international flights, Iran had closed its airspace and then its border crossings, and Turkey had threatened to close the border and cut the oil pipeline. Israel was the only UN member state to endorse the vote; no government recognised its result, and no independent state was ever declared. The KRG’s president, Masoud Barzani, stepped down. Kurdish peshmerga fighters, who had held Kirkuk since the collapse of the Iraqi Army in 2014, pulled back largely without the war their referendum had implicitly threatened. A near-unanimous vote had left the map exactly as it was, for reasons that lay outside the ballot box, in the forces that decide whether a state comes apart.
The Puzzle of Permanence
The map of sovereign states looks like a natural feature of the world, but it is a political settlement, historically contingent and far younger than it appears. The United Nations had roughly 50 members in 1945. It has 193 today. But the growth of that number is unevenly distributed across time. Almost all of it came in two waves: decolonisation, which ran roughly from the late 1950s through the 1970s and produced the majority of today’s African and Asian states, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1993, which brought twelve former Soviet republics and the first tranche of former Yugoslav republics into the UN.
Since the early 1990s, the pace has slowed to almost nothing. Eritrea separated from Ethiopia in 1993, after a referendum that followed the end of a thirty-year war in 1991. East Timor achieved independence from Indonesia in 2002 after a referendum and a period of UN administration, following Indonesia’s withdrawal under international pressure. Montenegro voted to separate from the Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2006, becoming independent with 55.5 percent of the vote, barely above the 55 percent threshold set by the EU. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, though its recognition remains contested; its presidency counted 121 recognising countries in August 2026, a figure Serbia disputes by claiming withdrawals. The count falls short of the full complement and notably excludes Russia, China, Spain and India, while Serbia actively pursues a de-recognition campaign that has had partial success. South Sudan separated from Sudan in 2011, becoming the 193rd UN member, and promptly descended into a civil war that within three years made it one of the world’s most fragile states.
That makes five notable cases in roughly thirty years, leaving aside the negotiated Czechoslovak split discussed below. They range from decolonisation to negotiated union-separation to contested unilateral declaration; none was clean, and several were catastrophic for the populations involved. The map has barely moved, and the stability is not accidental. The Westphalian norm of territorial integrity, the idea that existing borders are presumptively legitimate regardless of what lies inside them, is the active preference of virtually every existing state, because almost every state has a minority, a contested border or a region that has at some point wanted to leave. China’s objection to Kosovo is really about China, and Russia’s, after 2014, even more so about Russia. The norm is maintained by a coalition of interest that cuts across every other political division.
One distinction needs setting out first. De facto dissolution, the breakdown of central authority across a territory, is not the same thing as de jure dissolution, the formal creation of new sovereign states with recognised borders and, in all but the most contested cases, UN seats. Libya since 2014 has had multiple competing governments and no effective central authority over most of its territory. Syria was, between 2014 and 2019, simultaneously governed by the Assad regime, ISIS, the Syrian Democratic Forces, and Turkish-backed factions: four different political orders on one territory. These are human catastrophes, but they are not what this article examines. De facto fragmentation can coexist indefinitely with formal sovereignty, because the international community maintains the fiction of unified statehood even when the reality has collapsed; recognising successor entities would require deciding who gets what, and no one wants to make that decision. This article concerns the narrower and rarer phenomenon: formal dissolution or secession, producing new states with internationally recognised borders and, usually, seats at the UN.
The difference between a failed state and a dissolved state
When analysts describe Libya or Somalia as "failed states," they mean something precise: the central government has lost its monopoly on violence, its administrative capacity, or both. What they do not mean is that Libya has ceased to be Libya in international law. The Libyan state still holds a UN seat, still signs treaties through whichever government manages to represent it in a given year, and still has its embassies. The fiction of sovereignty is maintained because the costs of abandoning it are higher than the costs of maintaining it: recognition disputes, territorial claims, refugee flows, and above all the precedent effects on every other fragile state.
De facto dissolution is far more common and far more stable than de jure dissolution. A state can function as a fiction for decades. Yugoslavia's federal institutions kept working for roughly a decade after Tito's death in 1980 while the unity they stood for wore thin. The question of which states might formally dissolve is therefore a question about a much rarer and more demanding threshold.The Four Forces
Popular desire alone does not dissolve a state. Four forces hold a state together, and it comes apart when the decisive ones fail at once, which they almost never do.
The first force is elite coordination. States are maintained by their governing classes, whatever their populations think of them, because those classes have aligned interests in the continued existence of the state apparatus, its revenues, its patronage networks, its international standing. When elites defect from that alignment, deciding that the current state no longer serves their interests better than an alternative arrangement, dissolution becomes possible in a way it was not before. This force is the most volatile of the four, because elite calculations can change rapidly. The Soviet collapse of 1991 was, above all, an elite defection: republic-level communist party leaders concluded that independent statehood served their interests better than continued membership in the union, and acted accordingly. Gorbachev misjudged whether he could keep their loyalty, and the speed of collapse startled most of those who had been modelling the USSR’s stability.
The second force is external guarantors — the presence of outside powers or institutions with a stake in the state’s continued existence and the capacity to enforce that stake. The United States played that role in Iraq until its military withdrawal in September 2026. In Belgium it is the European Union’s institutional framework, which makes Belgian dissolution an awkward problem for every EU member state that benefits from Brussels’s function as the bloc’s administrative capital. Bosnia has international supervision, embodied in the Office of the High Representative created by the Dayton Agreement.
The third force is the absence of a viable successor arrangement, which works as a brake. Even when elites want to dissolve a state and no external power is preventing them, dissolution requires some answer to the question of what comes next. Who controls disputed territories? How are debts divided? What currency does the successor state use? The Kurdistan referendum failed partly because the Kirkuk question had no agreed answer, and Kirkuk was the economic and symbolic heart of the Kurdish claim. Any arrangement that excluded Kirkuk left a Kurdish state economically precarious; any arrangement that included it was unacceptable to Baghdad and to the Iranian-backed militias with their own interests in the region.
The fourth force is popular inertia, and it matters least of the four. The Czechoslovak dissolution of January 1, 1993 was accomplished by elite agreement between Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar, despite polling that showed only about a third of Czechs and the same proportion of Slovaks favoured division. The Velvet Divorce happened anyway, without a referendum, because the two dominant political figures decided it should. Popular inertia shapes the political costs of elite decisions, but it does not, by itself, prevent dissolution when the other three forces have failed.
These four forces do not operate independently. In Yugoslavia they failed together, within roughly two years: Milošević’s manipulation of the constitutional structure of the federation destroyed elite coordination at the federal level; the end of the Cold War removed the external pressure that had held Yugoslavia together since Tito’s 1948 break with Stalin, and with it the West’s strategic interest in a united Yugoslavia; the successor arrangements were imposed by war rather than negotiated; and popular sentiment in Slovenia and Croatia had long since moved toward independence.
Yugoslavia: how a federation fails
Slobodan Milošević wanted Serbian dominance, and he manipulated the constitutional architecture of the Yugoslav federation in ways that left Slovenian and Croatian elites little reason to stay. By installing loyalists in the formally autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, and in Montenegro, he controlled four of the eight votes in the federal presidency, enough to block any decision, and effectively converted a collective governance arrangement into an instrument of Serbian control. Slovenian and Croatian leaders chose to leave.
The end of the Cold War, itself a product of the USSR's internal crisis, removed the external constraint that had operated since Tito's 1948 break with Stalin, when fear of Soviet pressure held Yugoslavia's elites together and gave the West a stake in the federation's survival. Germany's announcement in December 1991 that it would recognise Croatia and Slovenia, followed by formal European Community recognition in January 1992, accelerated the international legitimation of dissolution before any negotiated successor arrangements had been established. In the view of its critics, it also hardened the war already under way in Croatia and hastened the one in Bosnia.Belgium — The State That Never Agreed to Be One
Belgium was born of an 1830 revolt against Dutch rule, and the great powers turned it into a solution to a diplomatic problem. Meeting in London, they wanted a neutral buffer between France and the Netherlands; they recognised the new state, accepted a German prince, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, as its elected king in 1831, and guaranteed its neutrality in 1839. The population inside the border spoke French in the south and Dutch in the north (a small German-speaking eastern strip was added only in 1920), and the arrangement was held together initially by Catholic conservatism, subsequently by the industrial wealth concentrated in Wallonia’s coal and steel sector, and eventually by a federal constitution so elaborately engineered that it reads like a peace treaty.
The engineering is extensive. Flanders accounts for roughly 58 percent of the population, Wallonia for roughly 31 percent, and the Brussels-Capital Region for roughly 11 percent — an officially bilingual, majority French-speaking enclave surrounded by Flemish territory. Article 99 of the Belgian Constitution requires equal numbers of French-speaking and Dutch-speaking ministers in the Council, with the Prime Minister explicitly excepted. Flemish and Walloon media operate in largely separate spheres, producing electorates with different pictures of political reality. Federal elections produce entirely different results in the two communities: N-VA, a Flemish confederalist party, fielded lists across Wallonia in 2024 and won no seats there; the Parti Socialiste, Wallonia’s leading party until the liberal MR overtook it that year, has no meaningful presence in Flanders. Belgian voters do not choose between the same parties, and the federal government is assembled from the wreckage afterward.
That assembly process has historically been protracted. Belgium went 541 days without a new federal government in 2010 and 2011, a world record for the longest time without a government in peacetime. The 2024 elections produced another impasse, eventually resolved when Bart De Wever, leader of the N-VA and a committed advocate of confederal reform, was sworn in as Prime Minister in February 2025. De Wever’s government required a cross-community coalition, itself the most visible demonstration of elite coordination at work: the mechanism that forces Flemish and Walloon political elites into the same governing arrangement, regardless of how different their electorates have become.
The economic asymmetry underlying Belgian politics reversed during the post-war decades. Flanders, once the poorer agricultural region, modernised into a high-productivity export economy while Wallonia’s coal and steel industries collapsed. The result is a substantial transfer flow from Flemish taxpayers toward Wallonia, with Brussels a net contributor as well. The precise figures are contested between Belgian political factions, but the direction of the flow is not seriously disputed. Flemish resentment of this transfer is real and politically effective: N-VA and Vlaams Belang together held 44 of the 150 seats in the Chamber of Representatives after the 2024 elections, with nearly half the Flemish vote between them. The bloc spans confederalists seeking radical decentralisation and nationalists seeking outright independence, united by the transfer grievance even where divided on the end goal.
Belgium is nowhere near breaking up. Elite coordination has consistently favoured governing federally rather than splitting. De Wever’s N-VA still names an independent Flemish republic as its goal in its statutes, but De Wever himself has said that if confederalism works, independence is no longer necessary. Confederalism, in N-VA’s version, would hand nearly all powers to Flanders and Wallonia, which would then decide what they still run together; it is the most ambitious Flemish agenda, and De Wever presents it as an alternative to a split. The external guarantor is, in Belgium’s case, among the strongest in the world: Brussels is the administrative capital of the EU and NATO’s headquarters, home to tens of thousands of EU civil servants. The EU’s institutional interest in Belgian territorial integrity goes beyond diplomatic custom. Popular sentiment, even among the Flemish constituency most sympathetic to independence, runs predominantly toward greater autonomy rather than a clean break.
The obstacle that makes dissolution impracticable is Brussels itself. The city is majority French-speaking but geographically encircled by Flanders. Any dissolution of Belgium would require deciding whether Brussels belongs to Flanders, to Wallonia, to an independent city-state, or to the EU. None of these options is acceptable to the party that doesn’t get it. Flanders would not accept losing Brussels; Wallonia does not even border it; an EU city-state has no precedent and no obvious legal mechanism. De Wever’s premiership is best understood as a managed pressure valve: his coalition agreement defers any new division of federal and regional powers until after the 2029 elections, while seeking to extract the maximum concession available within the federal framework in the meantime, because the exit from that framework is blocked.
The Brussels problem
About 81 percent of Brussels residents speak French well, against roughly 22 percent who speak Dutch well, yet the Brussels-Capital Region, a region in its own right, is entirely surrounded by the Flemish Region, and Belgium hosts more than 37,000 EU employees, most of them in the capital. It is simultaneously dependent on the EU institutions for a significant portion of its economic vitality and contested between the two Belgian communities for symbolic and administrative ownership.Bosnia — The State That Technically Doesn’t Govern Itself
The Dayton Agreement, signed in Paris in December 1995, ended a war that had killed approximately 100,000 people and produced what was then the largest displacement in Europe since 1945, a record overtaken only by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. What it created in place of that war was a state only in a loose sense. Bosnia and Herzegovina under Dayton is two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina on roughly 51 percent of the territory and Republika Srpska on roughly 49 percent, plus the Brčko District, a self-governing unit formally shared by both entities that sits astride the narrow corridor linking the eastern and western halves of Republika Srpska. The district’s international supervisor suspended the exercise of his functions in 2012 but retains his authority and could resume them. The state-level government has limited competencies: foreign affairs, customs and monetary policy under the constitution, plus a single army and a shared indirect-tax authority that outside pressure added in the mid-2000s. The list of things Sarajevo controls is shorter than the list of things Brussels controls in the Belgian federal system, and Belgium is itself considered an unusually decentralised state.
The Office of the High Representative, established in 1995, holds what are called Bonn Powers, named for the 1997 conference at which they were formalised. They allow the High Representative to impose legislation and remove officials without democratic accountability to any Bosnian constituency. Such powers belong to a supervised territory, maintained because the parties to the Dayton Agreement could not produce functional governance from within. The OHR’s budget for 2026-2027 is just under six million euros, a figure that tells you something about the scale of the operation but also about how little it would take for its funders in the Peace Implementation Council to starve the institutional architecture preventing Bosnia’s further disintegration. The OHR exists because Bosnia does not fully govern itself, and it is the main civilian mechanism slowing the consequences of that failure. The military backstop is EUFOR Althea, the EU force that has held a UN Security Council mandate since 2004 to help keep Bosnia safe and secure.
The crisis of the past few years has centred on Milorad Dodik. As president of Republika Srpska, he spent years constructing a political project aimed at either merging RS with Serbia or extracting it from Bosnian jurisdiction entirely. In February 2025 he was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison and a six-year ban from office for defying decisions of the High Representative; the prison term was later converted to a fine, he lost the RS presidency, and Bosnia’s Constitutional Court rejected his final appeal in November 2025. His SNSD had pushed laws through the RS National Assembly barring state-level judicial and police institutions from operating in Republika Srpska; under international pressure the assembly repealed them in October 2025, and Washington lifted its sanctions on Dodik days later. Dodik still leads the SNSD, whose candidates won the RS presidency in a snap election in late 2025 and again in the October 2026 general election. Whatever Dodik’s personal position outside office, the project he built no longer depends on him: the RS political establishment remains committed to maximum separation.
More of what holds a state together has failed in Bosnia than in any other case examined here. The RS leadership coordinates on getting out of Bosnia, not on governing it; its horizon is merger with Serbia, or separation sufficient to render the Bosnian state nominal. The external guarantors are the biggest variable: the EU’s accession process, which granted Bosnia candidate status in December 2022 and agreed in March 2024 to open accession negotiations, has yet to hold the first intergovernmental conference that would start them, its credibility as a carrot depending on political will that neither Bosnian leaders nor EU member states have consistently demonstrated. The US position under the current administration introduces further uncertainty: Washington lifted its sanctions on Dodik and his allies in October 2025. The OHR itself, the most tangible instrument of external governance, has been openly defied, and since Christian Schmidt’s resignation in 2026 it has been run by an acting High Representative while the American and European members of the Peace Implementation Council disagree over his successor.
The third force, the successor arrangement, is what makes Bosnia different from Belgium. Republika Srpska’s secession has a relatively clear territorial logic: the entities already exist, their boundary line drawn at Dayton, the RS already possessing its own government, police force, and administrative structure. The great exception is Brčko, which belongs to both entities and to neither alone, and which sits on the corridor holding the RS’s two halves together; any partition would first have to settle who gets it. The economic consequences are real but not obviously prohibitive. Dayton gives neither entity a right to secede, and the constitution can be changed only by amendment; what the RS has is the map, and no other case in this article has one so legible.
The 30th anniversary of Dayton in 2025 produced a Security Council Presidential Statement that expressed collective concern but provided no mechanism of enforcement. Bosnia remains nominally sovereign but internationally supervised and internally contested, and it is moving toward a crisis point whose timing depends on whether EU accession delivers enough incentive to make continued Bosnian statehood attractive to RS elites before the OHR’s authority erodes beyond recovery.
The Croat question
Bosnia is frequently discussed as if its internal tensions were only Bosniak-Serb and, distantly, federal-RS, but there is a third. Croats constitute roughly 15 percent of Bosnia's population and have their own longstanding grievance: they argue that the current electoral system effectively merges their political representation with that of Bosniaks within the Federation entity, diluting their distinctively Croat political voice. The demand for a third entity, a distinctly Croat administrative territory within Bosnia, has been a recurring feature of Croat political discourse since Dayton.
Croatia's EU membership gives the Croat question an outside patron, as Serbia's own EU candidacy does for the Serb one, though in a different configuration. A triangular dissolution (RS toward Serbia, Croat entity toward Croatia, rump Bosniak state internationally supervised) is not an imminent scenario, but it is the direction in which each community's separate interest points, inside an architecture designed to stop any of them from following it.Iraq — The State Held Up From Outside
Iraq’s danger is of a different kind. Where Bosnia’s lines are already drawn, Iraq carries the heaviest load of stresses at once, with more ways to fail and more at stake if those failures compound.
The muhasasa system, the power-sharing arrangement under which the Prime Minister is Shia Arab, the President is Kurdish and the Speaker of the Council of Representatives is Sunni Arab, is the governing logic of the Iraqi state. It emerged from the post-2003 settlement as a practical compromise and acquired the status of constitutional convention. Its effect is to institutionalise communal identity as the primary axis of political competition: Cabinet negotiations, budget disputes and appointments are all read through the lens of which community they benefit. Unlike Belgium’s Article 99, which operates within a state where both communities accept the underlying federal framework, the muhasasa system operates among communities whose basic orientation toward the Iraqi state is itself contested. Shia Arab parties are divided between those integrated into the political system and those whose primary loyalty is to Tehran. Sunni Arabs make up roughly a fifth to a quarter of the population by survey estimates; Iraq’s 2024 census, the first nationwide count since 1987, deliberately recorded neither ethnicity nor sect. They have been the most systematically marginalised community since 2003, and the grievances that drove recruitment into al-Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS were left unresolved by ISIS’s territorial defeat. Kurdish parties participate in Baghdad’s government while maintaining autonomous governance in the north and, as 2017 demonstrated, nursing long-term independence ambitions.
Return to that referendum: it was a calculated gamble that the four forces had aligned favourably. Kurdish elites read the moment (ISIS driven out of Mosul, Baghdad weak, Western sympathies after years of peshmerga partnership) as the closest alignment they were likely to see, and they misjudged the external guarantors. The United States refused to endorse the referendum, Turkey and Iran lined up behind Baghdad, and Baghdad itself moved faster than the Kurds expected. Kirkuk fell on October 16, 2017, within hours, and the economic arithmetic was immediate: the two Kirkuk fields of Bai Hassan and Avana alone had produced more than a third of the oil the region exported. The Kurdish leadership chose accommodation because they had measured the cost of the alternative. Three of the four forces held even though popular sentiment had swung decisively toward independence: elite defection from Baghdad was incomplete, external guarantors actively opposed the vote, and the Kirkuk problem made any viable successor arrangement economically marginal, while Baghdad’s military response was swift enough to pre-empt any consolidation.
Oil supplies roughly 90 percent of Iraq’s government revenue. Oil is what Baghdad uses to maintain the patronage networks that bind the communities to the central state: public sector salaries, infrastructure spending, the financial transfers that make the muhasasa system function as something other than pure coercion. But oil dependency means that any significant revenue shock, whether a price collapse, an infrastructure failure or a successful regional secession, could rapidly unwind the financial basis of communal accommodation.
The US military presence in Iraq, maintained at a residual force level after the defeat of ISIS, was for years the most concrete external guarantee. Under a two-phase plan announced in September 2024, US forces left the federal Iraqi bases between mid-2025 and January 2026, and the last troops departed Erbil on September 30, 2026, ending the coalition’s military mission; the counter-ISIS task force is now headquartered in Jordan. The political pressure from Iranian-aligned factions inside Iraq’s parliamentary system was sustained and effective, and the final months of the drawdown played out under repeated attacks on US bases in the Kurdish north after the US-Israeli war on Iran began in February 2026. The open question now is whether the Iraqi state can absorb its absence without elite defection from the muhasasa arrangements that presence helped underwrite.
The November 2025 elections produced an official turnout of 56.11 percent of registered voters. Measured against all Iraqis over 18, the way the Iraqi pollster Munqith Dagher counts it, the figure is about 41 percent, or about 38.5 percent once invalid ballots are excluded. A political class chosen by only 38 to 41 percent of the adult population, divided along communal lines, operating through an explicitly communal power-sharing arrangement, and now without the US military presence that once backstopped it, does not command deep reserves of institutional loyalty.
The Sunni dimension is the one most easily overlooked. Post-2003, Sunni Arabs lost the political dominance they had held under the Baathist system and their proportional share of the state’s economic resources simultaneously. De-Baathification and the dissolution of the army fell hardest on them, pushing large numbers out of the military, the civil service and the universities at a stroke. In Iraq, ISIS fed on Sunni Arab political grievance as much as on its jihadist theology, and it provided governance (taxation, courts, basic security) where many Sunni Arabs saw no Iraqi state they could trust. The territorial collapse of the ISIS proto-state did not resolve the underlying governance failure. Mosul and the surrounding Sunni Arab areas elected a provincial council again in December 2023, which chose a Sunni governor, but reconstruction money and security still run through Baghdad, and the patronage resources needed to rebuild trust in the state are allocated through communal bargaining that systematically underweights Sunni interests.
ISIS 2014-2017: the partial dissolution no one wanted to name
At its territorial peak in 2014, ISIS governed a swath of Iraq that Baghdad's military later put at 40 percent of the country, a figure independent area-based estimates cut sharply, and a substantial portion of Syria. It ran taxation systems and courts, managed infrastructure and even minted its own gold and silver coins. It was, by most functional definitions, a state, one that had dissolved the Iraqi and Syrian state authority over a large contiguous territory and replaced it with its own.
The international community declined to treat it as such, but that reluctance obscures the fact that de facto dissolution happened to Iraq once already, within living memory and in response to specifically political failures. The question for the next fifty years is whether those failures have been addressed or merely interrupted.The Comparative Controls — Quebec and Catalonia
Any account of why states break up should also explain why most do not. Quebec and Catalonia make good tests: both have substantial separatist movements, significant recent polling data, and the kind of visible political energy that can look, from outside, like imminent dissolution.
In Quebec, beyond the sovereigntist movement itself, elite coordination around independence is weak: Quebec’s business community has been consistently anti-separatist, calculating that CUSMA membership and US market access depend on continued Canadian federalism. The Clarity Act of 2000, passed after the razor-thin 1995 referendum result of 49.4 percent Yes, lets the House of Commons rule on whether a referendum question and the resulting majority are clear, and bars Ottawa from negotiating secession if they are not, though it has never been tested against an actual independence majority. The successor arrangement problems are acute: an independent Quebec would need to negotiate currency arrangements, trade agreements and, most complicatedly, the position of the northern Cree and Inuit territories, which have consistently indicated they would not follow a Quebec independence vote into separation from Canada.
Elite politics has shifted: on October 5, 2026, the Parti Québécois won Quebec’s general election and will form a minority government under Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, who has promised a third sovereignty referendum during his mandate — though not while Donald Trump remains in the White House. Popular support has not followed: support for sovereignty stood at 27 percent in September 2026, about three in ten once undecided respondents are set aside, far short of the near-majority of 1995. The young are the movement’s hope and its disappointment: in the summer of 2025, 47 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds would vote Yes in a referendum; by September 2026, on the same kind of question, the figure for that age group was 34 percent. The Trump factor cuts both ways: US economic pressure fed a wave of Canadian patriotism in 2025, and it is also the reason the PQ has ruled out any vote before Trump leaves office in January 2029.
In Catalonia, the 2017 unilateral declaration of independence shows what happens when dissolution is attempted without those conditions. The movement in 2017 had strong street mobilisation and a pro-independence bloc that controlled the Generalitat. Its economic elite did not come along: in the weeks around the October 1 referendum and the declaration, Catalonia’s two biggest banks moved their registered offices to Valencia and Alicante, Gas Natural moved its legal seat to Madrid, and thousands of other companies began procedures to move theirs elsewhere in Spain. Nor were there external guarantors; the EU made clear it would not recognise an independent Catalonia and that Spanish constitutional processes took precedence. And the successor arrangement, a Catalan Republic that would need to re-apply for EU membership it had never held as a separate state and whose currency arrangements were entirely unresolved, was not viable. Article 155 of the Spanish constitution authorised direct rule, which was imposed.
The subsequent years have been unkind to Catalan independence politics. In March 2025 support for independence fell to 37.6 percent, the lowest since the regular barometer began asking the question, although it recovered to 45 percent by July 2026, its highest level since early 2020. The youth cohort, once the movement’s most reliable support base, has moved markedly: around half of 18-to-24-year-olds backed independence a decade ago, but by 2025 only about 27 percent named it as their preferred arrangement for Catalonia. The pro-independence bloc won only 61 of 135 seats in the May 2024 Catalan parliamentary elections, falling short of the 68 seats needed for a majority.
Neither Quebec nor Catalonia meets the conditions for dissolution. The external guarantors are stable, and elite coordination around independence is fragmented in Catalonia and, outside the newly elected Parti Québécois, weak in Quebec.
What the Next Fifty Years Require
Dissolution, when it happens, moves faster than observers expect. Yugoslavia went from functioning federal state to full-scale war in roughly two years. Czechoslovakia dissolved by elite agreement in a matter of months, with only about a third of the population in each republic in favour; a decision taken by elites can move with a speed that leaves no time for course correction. Several Soviet republics that declared independence in 1991, those of Central Asia among them, had voted overwhelmingly to preserve the union that March.
Bosnia has the highest formal secession risk of any state examined here. Union with Serbia is the long-standing project of the RS’s dominant party, which kept its hold on the RS presidency in October 2026. The Dayton framework has been openly defied, even if the RS assembly retreated in October 2025 by repealing its laws against state institutions. The OHR’s authority is contested, its leadership in interim hands, and its budget trivial relative to the political forces arrayed against it. EU integration, with EUFOR’s peacekeepers behind it, remains the primary external guarantor, but its credibility depends on political will that has proved subject to transactional pressure. The Dodik conviction and the Constitutional Court’s November 2025 ruling upholding the political ban confirm that the formal legal mechanisms of the Bosnian state remain functional, and also that the RS political establishment is willing to treat those mechanisms as irrelevant. The question for the next fifteen to twenty years is whether stalled EU accession combined with weakened OHR authority erodes outside support below the threshold needed to hold the Dayton equilibrium.
Iraq presents the most severe structural fragility of any case examined, but formal partition faces the Kirkuk problem, which has no Bosnia-equivalent solution. Kirkuk is disputed between Kurds and Arabs, central to the finances of any Kurdish state, and the precise point at which the 2017 referendum collapsed. A notional Sunni Arab state in central Iraq would lack oil revenues; an independent Kurdistan without Kirkuk would begin life short of the oil income it had counted on; a Shia Arab state in the south would control the majority of revenues but not the territory. The US military withdrawal, completed in September 2026, has removed the most concrete external guarantor; the muhasasa system turns every cross-communal decision into a communal bargain; and the legitimacy deficit revealed by the 2025 election turnout data suggests the political basis of communal accommodation is narrowing. Whether a future oil revenue shock triggers elite defection from muhasasa arrangements is the central question for Iraq’s next fifty years.
De Wever’s government operates within the federal framework rather than seeking to exit it, and defers any new division of powers until after 2029. With no answer to the Brussels question acceptable to all parties, the impasse makes Belgian dissolution impracticable and keeps it off the near-term horizon.
Quebec and Catalonia are not near-term candidates, even with a sovereigntist party newly elected to govern Quebec. Their successor arrangements face problems that no political movement has solved: currency and treaty access in Quebec, EU membership and financial system integration in Catalonia. Neither movement polls a majority.
What none of this can predict is the triggering event. The four forces show which states are heading toward the failure of several at once; they cannot say what will tip one over, or when. Yugoslavia’s proximate trigger was Milošević’s constitutional manipulation; the structural preconditions had been building for a decade. The Soviet Union’s proximate trigger was a failed coup attempt; Gorbachev’s authority had been eroding for years. Iraq’s proximate trigger might be an oil price collapse or the first serious test of the state’s cohesion now that US forces have gone. Bosnia’s might be a provocative RS action that exhausts the international community’s patience — or a reduction in international attention sufficient for the architecture to stop being maintained.
The forces that have preserved the map since 2017 (US military presence, EU integration, Dayton architecture) were never permanent fixtures, and in Iraq the first of them has already gone. They are political choices, kept up by money and strategic attention and exposed to the same transactional pressures that decided the Kurdish referendum. In 2017 the Kurds had the votes but not the United States, the European Union, Turkey, Iran or Baghdad, and the referendum failed with three forces intact. In Iraq, one of those outside powers has since packed up and left. In Bosnia, the Americans and Europeans who keep the Dayton architecture running cannot agree on who should run it.
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Media
Key Sources and References
ADST (Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training). “Brčko District: Reflections From U.S. Diplomats.” [Dayton 51/49 territorial split; Brčko and the Posavina corridor.] https://adst.org/brcko/
Al Jazeera. “Iraqi forces plan takeover of Kurdish region’s borders.” September 29, 2017. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/9/29/iraqi-forces-plan-takeover-of-kurdish-regions-borders
Al Jazeera. “Masoud Barzani to step down as KRG president.” October 29, 2017. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/10/29/masoud-barzani-to-step-down-as-krg-president
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