HOW DO PEACEFUL SECESSIONS HAPPEN

This study is a comparative survey of the political processes through which peaceful secession has taken place. The main focus is upon Singa pore-Malaysia, Austria-Hungary and Norway-Sweden, though some attentio n is paid to other cases, including Czechoslovakia. The object is to d erive, inductively, a set of empirical generalizations about the polit ics of the transition from a union or federation to two or more sovere ign states. The article presents 13 such generalizations. Each is disc ussed and shown to hold in the various cases. Together, they comprise the pattern of politics that characterizes instances of peaceful seces sion.