Has there ever been an independence movement with the goal to split off an underperforming part of a nation?

Question

There have been many independence movements in history. The Wikipedia category of independence movements alone lists 145 articles about mostly distinct independence / seperationist / liberation movements.

It seems that all of these movements have one thing in common: They involve some group of people who want to split off from another group, for religious, economic, etc. reasons, with the other group denying the split.

Has there ever been a case where the reverse scenario happened? Was there a group of people who wanted some other group of people to split off, and the other group refused? Perhaps a country with a couple wealthy states who want to get rid of some poor, underperforming state?

Answer 1

An example I could think of is Singapore. The country became independent from Malaysia after the Malaysian Parliament voted to expel Singapore, due to a combination of racial, economic and political tensions (Wikipedia has a relatively informative article regarding this). This came two years after a union was formed between Malaysia and Singapore (both Singapore and Malaysia were British colonies before). From the country's Library Board:

On 9 August 1965, Singapore separated from Malaysia to become an independent and sovereign state.³ The separation was the result of deep political and economic differences between the ruling parties of Singapore and Malaysia,³ which created communal tensions that resulted in racial riots in July and September 1964.³

[ ... ]

Although all signs were pointing to trouble, very few were prepared for the dramatic end to Singapore’s union with Malaysia.

From the BBC:

In 1965, Singapore was forced to leave the Malaysian Federation. Manjit remembers seeing the prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, cry during an interview. "We'd go to our neighbours' house and watch TV and we saw him crying and we didn't know why."

It was a traumatic beginning to independence. Many believed Singapore could not survive on its own. But with huge hopes for the future, Singapore began to build the infrastructure that would transform the city.

At that time, Singapore was one of the "poorest countries in the world" and its transformation to its current success has sometimes been dubbed the "Singapore miracle".

From The Huffington Post:

When Singapore was expelled from Malaysia in 1965 and thrust into an unwanted independence, it was a typical Third World country. Its per capita income of $500 was the same as Ghana’s then. It was not desperately poor, but it had malnutrition.

Answer 2

If exaggerated slightly, Denmark "wants to" "get rid of" Greenland.

In reality, Denmark would be fine with Greenland's independence, in case they ever wanted it. The problem is that 78% of Greenlanders are opposed to independence, if it means a fall in living standards. Currently Greenland's economy relies on fishery, tourism and a substantial annual block grant from the Danish state. It is expensive for Denmark to have Greenland, so most likely there are people in Denmark who want Greenland's independence for that reason, but they are too polite of a nation to express it publicly like that.

Answer 3

If I understand the question correctly, Italy's Lega Nord might fit the bill. The modern incarnation had become the kind of right-wing populist party that's rising across the Western world. But, as its name suggests, it's original mission was to split rich northern Italy from the much poorer south, in order to stop tax revenue from the former flowing into the latter.

As Wikipedia put it:

The LN advocates the transformation of Italy into a federal state, fiscal federalism, regionalism and greater regional autonomy, especially for northern regions. At times, the party has advocated the secession of the North, referred to as "Padania", and consequently Padanian nationalism.

Lega Nord has long maintained an anti-southern Italian stance. Party members have been known to oppose large-scale southern Italian migration to northern Italian cities, stereotyping southern Italians as welfare abusers, criminals and detrimental to Northern society. Party members have often attributed Italy's economic stagnation and the disparity of the North-South divide in the Italian economy to supposed negative characteristics of the southern Italians, such as lack of education, laziness, or criminality.

Answer 4

Has there ever been a case where the reverse scenario happened? Was there a group of people who wanted some other group of people to split off, and the other group refused?

Tokelau has refused to split from New Zealand multiple times when pressed to do so.

Tokelau is a dependent territory of New Zealand near Samoa, inherited as a colony from the UK. Tokelauans are New Zealand citizens, and New Zealand retains the power to legislate for it, though it is in practice locally self-governing. This is a different situation to Niue and the Cook Islands, which are fully self-governing independent states that New Zealand has no power to govern but which retain some constitutional links and citizenship.

The United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization's list of "Non-Self-Governing Territories" that it urges to be decolonised includes Tokelau, and New Zealand as the controlling power. New Zealand wishes to be removed from that list of colonial powers, and has pressed Tokelau to become independent in the same way that Niue and the Cook Islands did decades earlier.

In 2006, there was a referendum held in Tokelau under the auspices of the United Nations decolonisation process, which rejected the option. That result was unexpected and unwelcome by the New Zealand government, and the next year there was a second referendum on the same topic, which also rejected it. One caveat to these is that under the standard UN process for these votes, the threshold to pass was 2/3, and in both cases a simple majority did vote in favour, but short of the requisite bar.

I'm not sure whether you'd count this or not: it's not a popular "reverse-independence" movement, but an abstract push driven by elite governing actors; most people in New Zealand are probably not aware of Tokelau's status at all. Nor is it pushing out an underperforming territory, since Tokelau would retain all support it currently receives and it's unlikely to be any cheaper in free association. It is, however, a case of "a group of people who want some other group of people to split off, and the other group refused", actively, by voting against it repeatedly.

Answer 5

The dissolution of Czechoslovakia was somewhat like this. Though not a coherent political movement, opinions to "let the Slovaks go" were present in the Czech Republic, and it culminated by basically the Czech politicians deciding to dismantle the federation.

Answer 6

In Belgium, there is the Flemish Movement. Belgium is split in two areas, very roughly speaking it is Flanders in the North and Wallonia in the South. Wallonia is the economically poorer part nowadays, but the Flemish Movement already started when this was not the case and when Flanders was over-ruled by the rich South:

In the 19th century, the area began to industrialize, mainly along the so-called sillon industriel. It was the first fully industrialized area in continental Europe,[12] and Wallonia was the second industrial power in the world, in proportion to its population and its territory, after the United Kingdom.[17]

And:

Wallonia is rich in iron and coal, and these resources and related industries have played an important role in its history.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallonia

Nowadays, after the decay of the mining industry, Wallonia has become the weaker part of the economy, and the old resentments are still there: in addition to the new costs of the South.

In recent history, the Flemish Movement has increasingly grown amid the 2007-11 Belgian political crisis and its aftermath.[1][2][3] Since 2010, the separatist N-VA party has been the biggest polled in Flanders,[4] while Vlaams Belang, has become the second largest in the 2019 federal and regional elections.[5]

In the last decade, Belgium was at the threshold of partition. Still, partition of Belgium has its own wikipedia entry more for historical reasons. That is why it does not fully count as an answer here: since this movement has already grown the most when Flanders was the underperforming part, and the underperformance of Wallonia is likely not the main reason for the power of the separatist N-VA party or 2019 Vlaams Belang, but history. The clearest reason seems to be written in these lines about the start of the Flemish Movement:

French was the only official language of Belgium until 1898, even though Flanders was and still is predominantly Dutch-speaking. The government's long refusal to acknowledge Dutch as an official language led to hostilities between Flanders and the French-speaking bourgeoisie who held both political and economic power. These hostilities gave rise to the Flemish movement, which began as a literary and cultural organization, but later became a political movement that called for legal recognition of Dutch and for social emancipation of the Flemish people.

That Flemish movement was obviously a reaction to the Walloon Movement starting in 1880:

The Walloon movement arose in the 19th century along with the language disputes; French-speakers sought the preservation of the French language and culture as the defining creed of the country.

Of course, the Walloon economic "underperformance" of today will still play a role, therefore this post, but it does not fully fit.

Answer 7

Not a popular movement, but in 1866, Prussia fought a war against Austria to expel it from Germany (of which it was [kind of] a part then).

Answer 8

Not sure if this counts, because it's not at a national level, but: During WWII, the US federal government purchased a small portion of land in a town near me (Randolph, NJ) to provide housing for workers for nearby war industry efforts.

A few years after the end of the war, with the area now housing both war industry workers and veterans, Randolph voted to split it off into a separate town (Victory Gardens, NJ), despite the overwhelming majority of votes from that area (483 out of 513) being cast in favor of staying as a part of Randolph. The pro-split side explicitly argued based on economic and political reasons for kicking the others out: Randolph is a pretty well-to-do town, whereas Victory Gardens is not, and Victory Gardens was heavily Democratic whereas Randolph was heavily Republican.

Answer 9

Logically speaking, there is no difference in the two cases you present. It is just a matter of definition.

Splitting off part X while your are outside of X is equivalent to splitting off the complement of X (in regards to the country you are in), which you reside in.

For example, let's say Germany wants to get rid of Berlin because it is underperforming. Now this is equivalent to us saying that Germany wants independence for not-Berlin (given Germany as the outside boundary).

Answer 10

There is one example I can think of. First, the Lega Nord (Northern League), a right wing party in Italy, at times advocated the independence of the north of Italy, and which it called Padania, from what they said was the under-performing south. It was established in 1991 as a federation of six regional parties from the north and the north-central of Italy. I'm not sure if it still advocates such a policy - but I rather doubt it.

Another possibility may be after the reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall. I know the vast majority of West Germans were not happy with the burden of integrating the under-performing East Germany. It would be surprising if some minor party had not attempted to make political hay out of this by advocating independence.