London Review of Books, <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n11/ande01_.html" title="London Review of Books">Stand-Off in Taiwan</a> by UCLA professor <a href="http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/anderson/" title="UCLA History Faculty">Perry Anderson</a>:

<quote>At the same time, this right [to self-determination] has always encountered a limit. Where a nation-state was already constituted, rather than still to be created, self-determination has been systematically rejected. In such cases, the right typically reverses into a taboo. For ideologically speaking, what is then at stake is not 'self-determination', but 'secession'. This is the Lincolnian moment. Its historical record is virtually as uniform as its Wilsonian or Leninist opposites. The American Civil War with its 600,000 dead - the largest military-industrial massacre of the 19th century - was fought to suppress the separation, approved by unimpeachable democratic majorities, of the Confederacy from the Union. Since the Second World War, the same bloody campaigns against break-outs from the nation-state have been fought again and again, with comparable results. Such has been, in Nigeria, the fate of Biafra; in Russia, of Chechnya; in Turkey, of Kurdistan; in India, of Nagaland; in Sri Lanka, of Tamil Eelam; in Spain, of the Basque country. No standard nation-state has so far ever allowed the detachment from its territory of a breakaway community.</quote>

He covers near exceptions in the next paragraph.  It's also interesting that this comes from a British journal; would an American publication be as friendly to an article that frankly admits the questionable legitimacy of the American Revolution and makes reference to <q>the killing-fields of Lincolnism</q>?