Democratic Secession from a Multinational State *

When Woodrow Wilson advanced the principle of self-determination in a series of speeches in 1918–19, his assumption seemed to be that acknowledging the claims of self-determination was a simple corollary of respect for democracy. Contemporary secessionists, and many who write and theorize about secession, share Wilson’s intuition about this. It is widely claimed that a ‘people’ has the right to determine democratically its own political status, so long as any change is peaceful and orderly, consistent with standard liberal rights, and does not involve any unjust taking of territory or unfair terms of separation. Whatever the considerations are that count in favor of making decisions democratically in