As someone who frequently ponders over what counts as a country and how it is that states exist, it is well worth examining the autonomy trap that nations fall into when it comes to dealing with separatist tendencies within their borders. By the time that separatist sentiment is recognized within a given state, though, it can often be hard to manage this effectively, since a great many states desire to centralize power, and this desire for central control inflames the separatist desire of minority regions who for one reason or another feel themselves to be highly disadvantaged and not properly developed or properly heard or attended to within the nation as a whole. There are any number of reasons why it is that certain regions feel themselves to be alien from the nation that they are a part of–ethnicity, language, religion, political culture, colonial history, social institutions, economic basis, and peripheral locations have all been reasons why certain regions have felt themselves to be out of place in a larger nation.

When an area feels themselves to be separate for whatever reason from the nation that they are a part of, one of the common steps that a nation will take to keep that area content is to make that area an autonomous area that has greater internal freedom than a normal incorporated province. Unfortunately, not all governments tend to fully understand the sort of freedom that autonomous regions want, and are unable to restrain themselves from seeking to dominate, exploit, and control such areas. Once an area has a taste for autonomy, it can be hard to reverse the process, and autonomous areas are prime candidates for becoming de facto and de jure states of their own, whether they have gained their autonomy through the passage of ordinary laws, through some sort of internationally recognized plebiscite or treaty structure, or through civil war. In seeking to determine the state of a given area, let us look at autonomy as ranging from a proposed autonomous area that recognizes an area as having some sort of danger, to an area that has at some point enjoyed autonomous status in the present or past, and thus has acquired a taste for freedom, to an area that is a de facto state that has demonstrated a clear desire for independence, as being the path along which a given region is towards independence.

Given that there are a lot of autonomous regions in the world, it would be worthwhile to look at them from a regional point of view, given that the supranational institutions of a region often highly influence the way in which areas are able to gain independence. Though the UN and some nations, like the United States, are generally involved frequently in the search for autonomy and eventual independence, frequently regional powers and their attitudes matter a lot when it comes to whether an area is able to gain de facto independence in the face of disapproval from the nation an area is legally a part of. To represent that regional flavor, let us begin with Europe, in large part because the status of areas has influenced my own travel plans for this summer and I will have some personal observations to make about some of these areas.

Let us begin our discussion by looking at the European states that do not have any autonomous areas at all: Andorra, Armenia, Austria, Belarus, Bulgaria. One thing that can be seen by this list is that nation without autonomous areas are often either too small to have such regions or they are not included as part of the structure of the state. It is not as if nations without autonomous areas are necessarily wealthier or more powerful as nations, but at least their internal unity may be said to be greater.

Although Albania has no autonomous regions today, it once had an autonomous area called Autonomous region of Northern Epirus, which was made up of a Greek population that sought to have freedom from Albania and was a contested region between the two nations of Greece and Albania. This autonomous region had a very short existence in 1914, and was briefly under Greek control after World War I, but since 1921 it has been a part of Albania, though it is one of many areas that demonstrates the instability of the Balkans. There had been, more briefly, another autonomous area of Korce during World War I as well.

Azerbaijan has a complicated situation of autonomous areas where it has one internally recognized autonomous area, the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, and one de facto state, the Republic of Artsakh, that are contested areas relating to the hostility between Armenia and Azerbaijan and demonstrative of the problems that Azerbaijan has had in achieving stability given the division of its people and lands as well as the presence of restive Armenians within its own borders. The Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic is nearly entirely Azerbaijani but its area is an exclave from the rest of Azerbaijan and access to the main part of the country has been difficult in the face of Armenian hostility. In contrast to this, there have been two full-scale wars fought since independence between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the autonomous and restive Armenian population in Artsakh that desires to be either free or united with Armenia, despite the unwillingness of Azerbiajan to let the territory and its people go. Besides these problems, Azerbaijan also has minorities in the Talysh and Lezgins for either autonomous or independent areas of their own.

One of the things that makes Belgium and its politics so complicated is that the entire country of Belgium can be said to be divided into autonomous areas as a result of the complicated federal structure of the country. Belgium is divided into four regions, and each of them presents difficulties for the fate of Belgium as a whole. The capital of Belgium, Brussels, is a largely French-speaking capital city in the Dutch-speaking area of Flanders and is technically a bilingual area and a major city for the European Union as a whole. The German-speaking community of Belgium consists of two separated areas in the Eastern part of Wallonia that desire equality with Wallonia and Flanders and have their own distinct political and linguistic identity as well as a tradition of anti-German efforts from the national government. Both Flanders and Wallonia have long struggled to govern as part of a coherent national whole, with the nation going years without an effective government before as a result of the inability of finding a suitable coalition between Walloon parties (dominated by socialists) and more conservative Flemish parties that desire greater autonomy or independence for Flanders. The result is that Belgium is an area whose unity as a nation is seriously in question despite its relative small size.

Ominously, Bosnia and Herzegovina has not only had a history full of violence in the civil war that raged in the area for years, but all three of its constituent populations have failed to unify over the course of the last thirty years or so as a state. The Republika Sprska, made up of Serbs, has long been discontented with their place within Bosnia & Herzegovina and is often viewed as considerably likely to either seek its own independence or to join with Serbia proper. A small region in between the two parts of the Serbian republic, the Brcko district, has considerable autonomy and has been considered as a rare example of multiethnic harmony in a region of the world where this cannot be taken for granted. There is also a separatist movement within the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina seeking for greater autonomy for the Croat community, and it is unclear whether this movement may lead to increased hostility within Bosnia as well as between Bosnia and its neighbors of Serbia and Croatia.