Who'll Be First to Break Up? Canada or USA?
It's been well documented that the social malaise that accompanies economic downturns allows radical groups and fringe parties to expand their sphere of influence and power.
Quebec could separate from Canada, perhaps.
If things get really bad democracy can become destabilised.
I didn't even consider the idea of the USA breaking up, though, until I read an article about such a prediction in The Wall Street Journal today.
A Russian academic is predicting that the USA's economic troubles, particularly its massive indebtedness to other countries (esp. China), will lead it to a Second American Civil War and break up of the country into four separate entities. What's more he's talking about this happening in 2010!
The prediction comes from Igor Panarin who is a former KGB analyst and dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. So perhaps a little bit of wishful thinking is going on here. But the fact that such theories are even being given credibility in the mainstream US media does show what, to borrow a Chretienism, "nervous nellies" we have become of late.
The chances of this happening are mightily slim. But for what it's worth, he's saying that the USA will break up into:
(1) A Californian Republic - the West Coast states under Chinese influence
(2) A Texas Republic - Southern states under Mexican influence
(3) Atlantic America - the Eastern States (NY, DC) come under the European Union
(4) The Central North American Republic - Canada nabs 15 Northern and Mid-West states from Ohio to Colorado.
(5) Russia gets Alaska
(6) Hawaii goes to Japan or China