The countries most likely to dissolve in the next 50 years

On September 25, 2017, 92.73 percent of Iraqi Kurds voted for independence. Not autonomy. Not enhanced federalism. Independence. The margin was not produced by a one-party state suppressing the opposition; the referendum had international observers, it had genuine enthusiasm, it had the weight of a population that had waited for this moment across three generations of dispossession and violence. Ninety-two point seven three percent.

Three weeks later, Iraqi forces backed by Iranian-commanded militias retook Kirkuk. They did it in hours. Within six weeks of the vote, the Kurdistan Regional Government had lost roughly 40 percent of its territory, lost control of oil infrastructure that had supplied the majority of its export revenues, and Iran had closed its land crossings while Turkey shut its airspace and threatened wider economic measures. Not a single UN member state recognised the new republic. The KRG’s president, Masoud Barzani, resigned. Kurdish peshmerga fighters, who had held Kirkuk since the collapse of the Iraqi Army in 2014, pulled back without the war their referendum had implicitly threatened.

If 92.73 percent is not enough, what would be? The question is not rhetorical. It is the actual problem — the one this article is trying to answer.

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The Puzzle of Permanence

The map of sovereign states looks like a natural feature of the world. It is not. 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 badly distributed across time. Almost all of it came in two concentrated 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 added fifteen Soviet successor states and the first tranche of former Yugoslav republics.

Since the early 1990s, the pace has slowed to almost nothing. Eritrea separated from Ethiopia in 1993, ending a thirty-year war. 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 by a margin that barely cleared the required threshold — 55.5 percent, against a requirement of 55 percent set by the EU (Britannica). Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, though its recognition remains contested; as of December 2025, 110 UN member states have recognised it (Wikipedia, “International recognition of Kosovo,” December 19, 2025) — not the full complement, and notably not Russia, China, Spain, or India, with Serbia actively pursuing a de-recognition campaign that has had partial success. South Sudan separated from Sudan in 2011 — independence on July 9, UN admission on July 14, becoming the 193rd member — and promptly descended into a civil war that made it one of the world’s most fragile states within three years.

Five cases in roughly thirty years — varying in character, from decolonisation to negotiated union-separation to contested unilateral declaration, none of them clean, several of them catastrophic for the populations involved. The map has been extraordinarily stable, 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 not merely an international custom. It is the active preference of virtually every existing state, because every existing state has a minority somewhere, a contested border somewhere, a region that has at some point wanted to leave. China’s position on Kosovo is not about Kosovo. Russia’s post-2014 position on Kosovo is especially not about Kosovo. The norm is maintained by a coalition of interest that cuts across every other political division.

There is also a distinction worth establishing at the outset. 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 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 — effectively four different political orders on one territory. These are profound 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, producing new states with seats at the UN and internationally recognised borders.

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. It still signs treaties (through whichever government manages to represent it in a given year). Its embassies still exist. 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, paradoxically, far more common and far more stable than de jure dissolution. A state can function as a fiction for decades. Yugoslavia functioned as a fiction for roughly fifteen years after Tito’s death. The question this article addresses — which states might formally dissolve — is therefore a question about a much rarer and more demanding threshold.

The Four Forces

The Kurdistan referendum’s failure points toward the real question, which is not about public opinion at all. Dissolution does not happen when populations want it. It happens when four distinct forces fail simultaneously — and they almost never do.

The first force is elite coordination. States are not maintained by their populations; they are maintained by their governing classes, who 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 — when the leaders of a governing class decide that the current state no longer serves their interests better than an alternative arrangement — dissolution becomes structurally 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 between 1991 and 1993 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’s miscalculations about whether he could maintain their loyalty were catastrophic, and the speed of collapse startled everyone 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 in Iraq. The European Union’s institutional framework in Belgium, which makes Belgian dissolution an awkward problem for every EU member state that benefits from Brussels’s function as the bloc’s administrative capital. The UN mandate in Bosnia, embodied in the Office of the High Representative. External guarantors do not need to be benevolent; they need to have interests, and those interests need to be backed by leverage.

The third force is the absence of a viable successor arrangement — not an active prop but a structural 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 not a minor detail; it was the economic and symbolic heart of the Kurdish claim. Any arrangement that excluded Kirkuk was economically unviable; 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 — the least important of the four, counterintuitive as that is. The Czechoslovak dissolution of January 1, 1993 was accomplished by elite agreement — the decision of Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar — despite polling that showed roughly 36 to 37 percent of Czechs and the same proportion of Slovaks actually favoured division. Paul Wilson, writing in the New York Review of Books on December 17, 1992, cited data from the Institute for the Study of Public Opinion in Prague showing that approximately one-third of the population in each republic supported dissolution. 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. Yugoslavia between 1990 and 1991 is the master case of simultaneous multi-force failure: Milošević’s manipulation of the constitutional structure of the federation destroyed elite coordination at the federal level; the Soviet Union’s strategic interest in maintaining Yugoslav integrity evaporated with the USSR’s own internal collapse; the successor arrangements were imposed by war rather than negotiated; and popular sentiment in Slovenia and Croatia had long since moved toward independence. No single failure caused Yugoslavia to dissolve. All four forces failed together, in the space of roughly two years.

Yugoslavia: the master case

Slobodan Milošević did not simply want Serbian dominance. He manipulated the constitutional architecture of the Yugoslav federation in ways that made continued cohabitation structurally irrational for Slovenian and Croatian elites. By using the votes of Kosovo and Vojvodina — both formally autonomous provinces — to produce a Serbian bloc majority in the federal presidency, he effectively converted a collective governance arrangement into an instrument of Serbian control. Slovenian and Croatian leaders faced a choice between accepting this and leaving; they left. The Soviet Union’s withdrawal as strategic guarantor of Yugoslav integrity — itself a product of the USSR’s internal crisis — removed the external constraint that had operated since 1948. 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, contributing directly to the subsequent wars in Bosnia and Croatia. The sequence matters: it was not sentiment that dissolved Yugoslavia, but institutional failure cascading through all four structural constraints in rapid succession.

Belgium — The State That Never Agreed to Be One

Belgium was created in 1830 as a solution to a diplomatic problem. The great powers needed a buffer state between France and the Netherlands; they drew a border, installed a German prince as king, and declared the matter settled. The population inside the border spoke French in the south, Dutch in the north, and German in a small eastern strip, 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 less like a political document than 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 — a 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 entirely separate spheres, producing electorates with genuinely different pictures of political reality. Federal elections produce entirely different results in the two communities: N-VA, a Flemish confederalist party, does not run candidates in Wallonia; the Parti Socialiste, dominant in Wallonia, 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 federal government in 2010 and 2011, a world record for a functioning democracy — verified by Guinness World Records. 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 on February 3, 2025. De Wever’s government required a cross-community coalition, which is itself the most visible demonstration of elite coordination operating: 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 and Brussels — the precise figure is contested between Belgian political factions and should be treated as such, but the directional reality is not seriously disputed. Flemish resentment of this transfer is genuine and politically effective: N-VA and Vlaams Belang together held 44 of the 150 seats in the Chamber of Representatives after the 2024 elections (N-VA: 24 seats; Vlaams Belang: 20 seats, per IPU Parline and official Belgian election results), with the combined Flemish vote for the two parties running at approximately 46 percent — a bloc that spans confederalists seeking radical decentralisation and nationalists seeking outright independence, united by the transfer grievance even where divided on the end goal.

Belgian dissolution is structurally constrained rather than imminent. Elite coordination has consistently favoured governing federally rather than splitting — De Wever himself is a confederalist, not an independence advocate, and the distinction matters. Confederalism means radical decentralisation within a maintained federal framework; it is the most ambitious Flemish agenda, but it is not dissolution. The external guarantor force 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 approximately 30,000 to 40,000 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 structural obstacle that makes dissolution essentially unpracticable 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 could not economically absorb it; an EU city-state has no precedent and no obvious legal mechanism. De Wever’s confederal reform agenda for 2025-2029 is best understood as a managed pressure valve — an attempt to extract the maximum political concession available within the federal framework, precisely because the exit from that framework is blocked.

The Brussels problem

Brussels is approximately 80 percent French-speaking in daily use (brussels.info), yet it sits entirely within the Flemish region of Belgium and is home to approximately 30,000 to 40,000 EU civil servants (a figure that is approximate — the institutions do not publish a single consolidated headcount). 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. Any dissolution scenario must answer the Brussels question before it can proceed, and no answer is politically acceptable to all parties. The city functions as a veto on dissolution — not because anyone designed it that way, but because its geographic and demographic situation makes it a problem with no solution that doesn’t create a worse problem. An independent Brussels, a Flemish Brussels, a Walloon Brussels, and a European Brussels each generate objections that the other parties are not willing to swallow. Belgium, in this sense, cannot dissolve without first solving a puzzle that has no solution.

Bosnia — The State That Technically Doesn’t Govern Itself

The Dayton Agreement, signed ceremonially in Paris on December 14, 1995, ended a war that had killed approximately 100,000 people and produced the largest refugee displacement in Europe since 1945. What it created in place of that war was not, strictly speaking, a state. Bosnia and Herzegovina under Dayton is two entities — the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, covering roughly 51 percent of the territory, and Republika Srpska, covering roughly 49 percent (Dayton Agreement, Annex 2; European Parliament documentation) — plus the Brčko District, a self-governing region under international supervision that functions as a territorial corridor connecting the two halves of Republika Srpska across a sliver of territory that neither entity controls. The state-level government has extremely limited competencies. Foreign affairs, customs, monetary policy — 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 — which allow the High Representative to impose legislation and remove officials without democratic accountability to any Bosnian constituency. This is not a normal feature of a sovereign state. It is the feature of a supervised territory, maintained because the parties to the Dayton Agreement could not produce functional governance from within. The OHR’s budget for 2025-2026 is €5,857,618 — a figure that tells you something about the scale of the operation but also about how little it would take to defund the institutional architecture preventing Bosnia’s further disintegration. The OHR exists because Bosnia does not fully govern itself. Its continued existence is both evidence of that failure and the primary mechanism slowing the consequences.

The current crisis has a name: Milorad Dodik. The president of Republika Srpska spent years constructing a political project aimed at either merging RS with Serbia or extracting it from Bosnian jurisdiction entirely. On February 26, 2025, he was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison and a six-year political ban for defying the OHR’s authority — the prison sentence subsequently converted to a fine under Bosnian statutory procedure, the political ban upheld by Bosnia’s Constitutional Court on November 4, 2025. The SNSD — his party — passed legislation in the RS National Assembly prohibiting central state authorities from operating in Republika Srpska. Whatever Dodik’s personal position outside office, the institutional trajectory he set in motion has its own momentum: the RS political establishment has oriented itself toward separation, and that orientation does not depend on any individual remaining in place.

The preserving forces fail more completely in Bosnia than in any other case examined here. RS elite coordination is oriented not toward governing Bosnia but toward extracting from it — the leadership’s horizon is merger with Serbia, or separation sufficient to render the Bosnian state nominal. The external guarantor force is the most significant variable: the EU’s accession process, which granted Bosnia candidate status on December 15, 2022 (European Council decision), remains stalled, its credibility as a carrot depending entirely on political will that EU member states have not consistently demonstrated. The US position under the current administration introduces further uncertainty. The OHR itself, the most tangible instrument of external governance, is openly defied and operates on a budget that could disappear without public notice.

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 boundaries internationally arbitrated, the RS already possessing its own government, police force, and administrative structure. The economic consequences are real but not obviously prohibitive. The exit path from Bosnia is the most clearly mapped of any dissolution scenario considered in this article. That is exactly why Bosnia has the highest formal secession risk.

The 30th anniversary of Dayton in 2025 produced a Security Council Presidential Statement: collective concern, no mechanism of enforcement. Bosnia is in limbo — nominally sovereign, internationally supervised, internally contested, 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 it has two internal tensions — Bosniak-Serb and, distantly, federal-RS. It has three. 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 external vector that the Serb dimension also has via Serbia’s own EU candidacy, but 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 logical endpoint of three communities each pursuing its own interest within an architecture designed to prevent any of them from doing so successfully.

Iraq — The State That Requires External Architecture to Remain a State

Iraq’s danger is structurally different from Bosnia’s. Bosnia presents the clearest formal secession path of any case examined here — entities mapped, boundaries arbitrated, administrative structures separate. Iraq presents the most severe concentration of simultaneous structural stresses, the greatest number of failure modes, and the largest potential consequences if those modes compound. These are different categories. Conflating them produces wrong predictions.

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: every Cabinet negotiation is communal, every budget dispute is communal, every appointment is read through the lens of which community it benefits. 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 — roughly 15 to 20 percent of the population, with no census since 1987 — have been the most systematically marginalised since 2003, the grievances that drove recruitment into al-Qaeda in Iraq and later ISIS 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. The KRG’s 92.73 percent vote was not a miscalculation; it was a gamble that the four forces had aligned favourably. Kurdish elites read the moment — ISIS defeated, Baghdad weak, Western sympathies after years of peshmerga partnership — as the closest alignment they were likely to see. They were wrong about the external guarantors: the United States refused to endorse the referendum, Turkey and Iran coordinated — Iran closing land crossings, Turkey halting flights and threatening economic embargo — and Baghdad moved faster than anyone expected. Kirkuk fell on October 15, 2017, within hours, and the economic arithmetic was immediate: the KRG lost oil fields supplying roughly half its export revenues. The Kurdish leadership chose accommodation because they had measured the cost of the alternative. The four forces had operated simultaneously: elite defection from Baghdad was incomplete, external guarantors actively opposed the vote, the Kirkuk problem made any viable successor arrangement economically marginal, and Baghdad’s military response was swift enough to pre-empt any consolidation.

Iraq’s oil revenues account for over 90 percent of government revenue (IMF 2025 Article IV Consultation places the figure at approximately 93 percent). 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 — price collapse, infrastructure failure, successful regional secession — could rapidly unwind the financial basis of communal accommodation. The glue and the vulnerability are the same substance.

The US military presence in Iraq — maintained at a residual force level through the period following the defeat of ISIS — is the most concrete expression of the external guarantor force. A two-phase transition plan announced on September 27, 2024 reduces that presence through September 2025 and into 2026. The political pressure from within Iraq’s parliamentary system, driven by Iranian-aligned factions, has been sustained and effective. The question is not whether the US presence will decline but whether the Iraqi state can absorb that decline without elite defection from the muhasasa arrangements that US presence has helped underwrite.

The November 2025 elections produced an official turnout of 56.07 percent — 12,003,143 votes cast out of 21,404,291 registered. Munqith Dagher, writing for the Washington Institute, provides the more meaningful denominator: relative to all Iraqis over 18, the figure is approximately 41 percent; excluding invalid ballots, approximately 38.5 percent. A government with effective support from 38 to 41 percent of its adult population, divided along communal lines, operating through an explicitly communal power-sharing arrangement, and dependent on declining external military support, is not a government that commands deep reserves of institutional loyalty.

The Sunni dimension is the most consistently underweighted in Western analysis. 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. The de-Baathification programme removed them from the military, the civil service, and the educational institutions in a single sweep. ISIS was not primarily a theological project; it was, in its Iraqi dimension, a Sunni Arab political movement that provided governance — taxation, courts, basic security — in the absence of an Iraqi state that any Sunni Arab had reason to trust. The territorial collapse of the ISIS proto-state did not resolve the underlying governance failure. Mosul and the surrounding Sunni Arab areas are now administered by a central government the local population did not choose and does not substantially trust, and the patronage resources needed to build that trust 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 approximately 40 percent of Iraq’s territory and a substantial portion of Syria (Wilson Center, “Timeline: the Rise, Spread, and Fall of the Islamic State”). It ran taxation systems. It operated courts. It issued its own currency in some areas. It managed infrastructure. 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, for obvious reasons, but the analytical evasion has costs: it 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

The framework is only useful if it correctly identifies lower-risk cases as well as higher-risk ones. Quebec and Catalonia are the sharpest available 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.

Quebec first. 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 (S.C. 2000, c. 26, assented to June 29, 2000), passed after the razor-thin 1995 referendum result of 49.4 percent Yes, gives Ottawa a veto on the process before it can produce a binding result — though it has never been tested against an actual independence majority and its practical operation remains untested. 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. Popular support stands at 31 percent in the Léger poll of September 2025, down from the 49.4 percent that nearly succeeded in 1995. A CROP poll from July-August 2025 shows 56 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds supporting independence — but generational sentiment shifts more slowly than structural forces, and those structural forces all operate against independence. The Trump factor paradoxically suppressed separatist sentiment in 2025, as Canadian nationalism produced a counterreaction to US economic pressure that cut across the usual federal-provincial divide. The structural forces operate regardless of which way the polling runs.

Catalonia is the more instructive case because the 2017 unilateral declaration of independence provides actual evidence of what happens when dissolution is attempted without the structural conditions. The movement in 2017 had strong street mobilisation and a pro-independence bloc that controlled the Generalitat. It did not have elite coordination that extended to the economic sector: within days of the UDI, Catalan financial institutions and major corporations moved their legal headquarters to Madrid. It did not have 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. The CEO barometer of March 2025 showed 37.6 percent support for independence — the lowest figure recorded since the CEO’s barometer surveys began, with the trend showing no sign of reversing. The youth cohort, once the movement’s most reliable support base, has moved markedly: from approximately 47 percent among 18-to-24-year-olds around 2013 to 27 percent by 2025. The pro-independence bloc won only 61 of 135 seats in the May 2024 Catalan parliamentary elections — losing its majority for the first time since 1980 (NPR, May 13, 2024) — partly because ERC and Junts competed as separate lists rather than as a unified bloc, but also because the underlying electoral terrain has shifted.

The framework’s verdict on both cases is not close: neither Quebec nor Catalonia meets the structural conditions for dissolution. The external guarantors are stable. The successor arrangements face acute unresolved problems. Elite coordination around independence is fragmented in Catalonia and weak in Quebec. The polls, to the extent they show declining support, are consistent with this reading. Both cases confirm that sentiment is the least decisive variable.

What the Next Fifty Years Actually Require

The framework reveals something counterintuitive about timing. 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 one-third of the population in each republic in favour — the mechanism is elite decision, not popular mandate, and it can move with a speed that leaves no time for course correction. The Soviet republics that declared independence in 1991 had, in many cases, shown no meaningful independence polling even a year before. A state can accumulate stress for decades and fail in months.

Bosnia has the highest formal secession risk of any state examined here. The exit path is the clearest of any dissolution scenario: the entities already exist, their boundaries internationally arbitrated, their administrative structures already separate, RS elite orientation toward Serbia not a fringe position but the governing policy of the dominant party in the entity. The Dayton framework is openly defied. The OHR’s authority is contested and its budget trivial relative to the political forces arrayed against it. EU integration 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 — but they also confirm that the RS political establishment is willing to treat those mechanisms as irrelevant. Unlike Belgium, where the Brussels problem makes dissolution unpracticable, Bosnia’s entity structure makes the exit path unusually clear. The question for the next fifteen to twenty years is whether stalled EU accession combined with weakened OHR authority erodes the external guarantor force 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, economically essential to any viable 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 is economically marginal; a Shia Arab state in the south would control the majority of revenues but not the territory. The exit paths from Iraq are harder to operationalise than Bosnia’s, not because the stresses are fewer but because the territorial logic is messier. The US withdrawal trajectory removes the external guarantor incrementally; the muhasasa system makes cross-communal governance structurally irrational; and the legitimacy deficit revealed by the 2025 election turnout data suggests the financial 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.

Belgium is structurally constrained. De Wever’s confederal reform agenda operates within the federal framework rather than seeking to exit it. The Brussels impasse makes dissolution unpracticable: no answer to the Brussels question is acceptable to all parties. Belgian dissolution is not a near-term risk.

Quebec and Catalonia are not near-term candidates. External guarantors are stable. Successor arrangements face unresolved problems — currency and treaty access in Quebec, EU membership and financial system integration in Catalonia — that no political movement has solved. Elite coordination around independence is fragmented in Catalonia and weak in Quebec. The polling figures, where they are declining, confirm the structural reading.

What the framework cannot predict is the triggering event. Structural analysis identifies which configurations are heading toward simultaneous multi-force failure; it cannot specify when a political assassination, a constitutional crisis, or a sudden reversal of external guarantor interest will crystallise that failure into actual dissolution. 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 a rapid US withdrawal. Bosnia’s might be a provocative RS action that exhausts the international community’s patience — or simply 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 — are not fixed features of the landscape. They are political choices, maintained by institutional investment and strategic will, both of which are subject to the same transactional pressures that shaped the outcome of the Kurdish referendum. On September 25, 2017, the Kurds had 92.73 percent. They did not have the United States, the European Union, Turkey, Iran, or Baghdad. Seen through the framework, the result was never in doubt: four forces intact, one vote irrelevant. The question for Bosnia and Iraq over the next fifty years is whether those forces will remain intact — not whether populations will want dissolution, since populations wanting it has never been sufficient, but whether the elites, the guarantors, the successor arrangements, and the structural brakes will hold in the places where they are visibly weakening. In Bosnia, the exit path is mapped and the architecture is fraying. In Iraq, the stresses are more numerous and the map is harder to draw. Neither trajectory resolves itself.

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Wichtige Quellen und Referenzen

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

Al Jazeera. “Bosnia’s top court upholds political ban on Bosnian Serb leader Dodik.” November 4, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/4/bosnias-top-court-upholds-political-ban-on-bosnian-serb-leader-dodik

Balkan Insight. “Bosnian Serb Leader Dodik Convicted of Defying International Official.” February 26, 2025. https://balkaninsight.com/2025/02/26/bosnian-serb-leader-dodik-convicted-of-defying-international-official/

Balkan Insight. “Bosnian Court Commutes Milorad Dodik’s Jail Sentence to a Fine.” August 12, 2025. https://balkaninsight.com/2025/08/12/bosnian-court-commutes-milorad-dodiks-jail-sentence-to-a-fine/

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