On the subject of referendums to break away from a nation:
The problem with this is that the breakaway province/area, on some level, belongs to the rest of the country.
Modern economies are extremely intertwined. If one province breaks away, the rest of the country suffers as a result. It's the same with corporations. You can't take your share of the corporation and just leave, it hurts everyone else in the corporation.
I'm a Texan. If Texas took up a referendum to break away from the U.S. and join Mexico, it'd be a cold day in hell before the U.S. would let them leave. If Mexico invaded Texas (just like Russian invaded the Crimea) to "protect ethnic Mexicans", the U.S. would blow the sh#t out of them, and rightfully so. Texas' economy is too big for them to do anything else. (Although I bet they'd let Mexico annex the Rio Grande Valley, simply because it doesn't really produce anything.)
The only reason that the UK permitted Scotland to hold that vote was that they decided that the opportunity costs of forcing Scotland to remain in the UK were greater than the costs of having them leave.
TheBog11 got a reaction from Aurelius in In another blow to transparency, Putin classifies peacetime Spetsnaz losses
