Young Kosovars celebrate in downtown Pristina.
So let me get this straight: Serbia and Montenegro were all that remained of Yugoslovia after Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina seceded during the Balkan Wars of the '90s. Then Montenegro declared independence in 2006. Kosovo seceded from Serbia last Sunday, and now the northern region of Kosovo wants to secede and rejoin Serbia. I don't have a dog in this latest fight — or even understand it much — but if someone wants to quit the firm, it seems to me you ought to let him go. The tension arises, of course, because the ones eyeing the door usually want to take a pile of the firm's assets along with them. And you do have to question where this will end. Will some family named Knezevic decide it's time to secede from northern Kosovo? Will Bob, the Kenezvics' 17-year-old son who doesn't really talk to anyone at holiday dinners anymore, decide he wants to secede from the family? At some point you hit what scientists call the terminal unit — the smallest reducible component of any system — and this feels like it may be it.
Secession can often be a good idea. We'd all be eating Marmite and bangers for lunch if the United States hadn't opted out of the British Empire in 1776. But just as often it doesn't work, and with 192 current members of the United Nations and limited space for new flagpoles out front, I'd suggest it's time to close the books.
Consider Quebec: Separatists north of the border still agitate for a split from Canada, evidently believing that that now would be a great time to establish a Little France right next door to the United States, since Americans always react so happily to all things French — and what better tonic for a struggling global economy than another country that spends three-quarters of its work week threatening to go on strike and the remaining part walking off the job in a huff?
The mini-republics that the U.S.S.R. released like so many Tootsie Rolls from a piñata in the 1990s have not exactly turbocharged the Central Asian economy. And while Pakistan may have seemed like a nifty idea around the time they cut the ribbon, it's been plagued by troubles pretty much ever since — including the, uh, secession of Bangladesh in 1971.
Countries aren't the only geographical entities that try to secede, of course. Staten Island has made noises over the years about quitting New York City, an idea generally scuttled when residents realized that a lot of Manhattanites didn't know it was part of the club to begin with, and at least a few were confusing it with the little triangular island also named Staten at the southernmost tail of Argentina — which would at least explain why the ferry takes so long. Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley have similarly talked of seceding from greater Los Angeles, but the deal has repeatedly gotten hung up over merchandising rights.
Even new countries that do manage to get started face a load of problems, not the least being their flags. Consider how hard it is for the NFL to come up with a helmet logo for a new team that doesn't look like the trademark of the Altria Group or a symbol on a super hero's cape — and they've got only 32 franchises to worry about. The tricolor flag has been done to death. When you get to the point that Luxembourg and the Netherlands are both a horizontal red, white and blue, with the only difference being that Luxembourg's blue is lighter — a Pantone 299c pigment to be precise — you know you're running out of ideas. The Kosovars, being mostly Albanians whose desire is less for independence as much as to be part of a greater Albanian entity, wanted their flag to be double-headed black eagles on a red flag — the same as Albania. But mindful of multiculturalism and hoping to assuage the Serb minority, the West wouldn't allow it. Kosovo's new flag is thus a focus-group mishmash: a yellow Rorschach splot (the country's shape on the map, at least as long as the northern part sticks around) on a blue EU style flag with a few yellow stars. Want to guess which one the Kosovars will wave when their soccer team scores?
The danger in all this is not just what so much cartographic flux does to our maps, but what it does to our language. Must we live in a world with both a DMV and a DMZ? Did a globe with one Congo have to confuse things with two? And after I worked so hard when I was a kid remembering to call Russia the Soviet Union, was it really sporting to wait till I reached adulthood to tell me to forget it?
Some time ago, I ran across a grocery store on the east side of Manhattan that had that odd New York habit of including several names on the same awning, as if they could never quite figure out what to call the place. One of the names — I'm not kidding — was East Cheese. For the rest of the afternoon I worried that deep in the little store's past there had been a bloody war of secession from the autocratic West Cheese. Somewhere in the neighborhood, I feared, some disgruntled Curds might still lurk.