From Brexit to Texodus?
Britain’s rejection of the EU has re-energised Americans who want their states to go it alone.
The Brexit vote has armed campaigners across the Atlantic with fresh belief that they too can throw off the yoke of an outdated union that is holding them back: the United States of America.
From New England in the east to the Pacific coast in the west, American secessionist groups have reported a surge of interest in their cause after last week’s decision by the United Kingdom to break away from the European Union.
The biggest impact has been felt in Texas, where everything is supersized and brashly confident, including the separatist fringe. The hashtag ‘‘Texit’’ has been trending on social media, although one Twitter user, who perhaps takes the campaign less seriously than its organisers, suggested the biblically resonant ‘‘Texodus’’ instead.
After the Brexit results came in, Daniel Miller, president of the Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM), the main secessionist group, crowed: ‘‘The forces of fear have lost. It is now important for Texas to look to Brexit as an inspiration and an example that Texans can also take control of our destiny.
‘‘It is time for Texans to rally with us and fight for the right to become a self-governing nation.’’
He called on Greg Abbott, the state’s Republican governor, to schedule a referendum on independence, an idea that was defeated at the state Republican convention in May.
Nate Smith, the movewent’s executive director, said the campaign had been receiving ‘‘new supporters and volunteers at a pace like we have never seen’’.
The organisation, which claims to have more than 250,000 pledged votes in favour of secession, bills itself as both ‘‘the largest independence movement in the United States’’ and one of the largest in the world.
It has pretensions to the global stage, and in 2014 it sent a delegation to Moscow to establish pseudo-diplomatic ties with the Donetsk People’s Republic, the otherwise unrecognised rebel-held province of eastern Ukraine backed by the Kremlin in defiance of US and European sanctions.
Brexit has also fired the imagination of separatists in Vermont, where a secessionist movement, ‘‘It is time for Texans to rally with us and fight for the right to become a selfgoverning nation.’’ the Second Vermont Republic, reported a surge of inquiries last weekend, and in New Hampshire, where a gaggle of demonstrators met to back ‘‘NHexit’’.
In California, independence activist Louis Marinelli told The Washington Times that a similar burst of enthusiasm could be tracked under the Twitter hashtags #Calexit and #Caleavefornia.
But Texas is the barometer. Unlike most of America, the Lone Star State has a brief history as an independent nation to fall back on.
A revolutionary government of Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836, while the famous siege of the Alamo was under way. Although the Alamo mission fell days later, Texas won the war and secured its freedom as an independent republic.
It joined the Union, becoming the 28th state, nine years later, only to break away again for four years in the 1860s as part of the Confederacy in the Civil War.
The odds do not look good for the separatists, however – not least because there is no provision in national law that would allow a vote to happen.
In 2013 Jon Carson, director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, wrote a response to an online secession petition.
He said that America’s founding fathers enshrined in the US Constitution ‘‘the right to change our national government through the power of the ballot. But they did not provide a right to walk away from it’’.