A tale of two independence movements: how do citizens encounter issues of international law and democratic theory?

Abstract

Foreign policy events, including secessionism and independence movements, become objectified for most citizens through media coverage. Accordingly, I look at the coverage of Kosovo’s and Scotland’s bids for independence in the two top national newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Scholarship in international law, democratic theory, and comparative politics might have valuable insights on independence processes, but it is the media frames inspired by these strands of theoretical literature that shape public opinion and/or reflect policy-makers’ preferences (and biases) in the foreign policy arena. I find that print media can engage in theoretically sophisticated coverage of secessionist movements, which often echoes scholarly insights derived from the relevant academic literature. The two European case studies show consistent application of tropes and frames that one would find in the academic publications on the subject. Yet these cases also illustrate profound differences in media framing not reducible to objective legal and political differences between the two events. US foreign policy considerations also appear to play a role in explaining variance in media frames.

Keywords:

• independence movements
• secessionist referenda
• international law
• democratic theory
• media framing
• Scotland
• Kosovo

Acknowledgements

The author is very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers whose careful reading and suggestions made this article significantly better.

Notes

1. Notwithstanding preceding discussion about broader similarities and more nuanced and numerous differences between Kosovo and Scotland, should other recent independence movements be considered? Adding more (either similar or different) case studies might not fundamentally change the overall premise of this analysis (that the media as a source of public opinion might contain more quality information on foreign policy issues than we give them credit for) or its conclusions. Two cases give us reasonable data to test the proposition that media might matter more (or in different ways) as a source of foreign policy than previously suggested. Moreover, only these two cases allow us to look at both international law AND democratic theory/empirical democratization frames.

2. The existence of stable frames goes beyond the possibility of the investigator interjecting his or her own disciplinary concepts (biases) into journalistic discourse. One might suspect that journalists are simply expressing observations that we, as scholars, then reformulate into the jargon of our own particular disciplines. In other words, do we ourselves “reframe” what we read in the newspapers? Numerous content analytic studies, starting with Holsti’s (1969) classic, indicate that investigative integrity can be maintained by adherence to preselected content analytic categories and textual indicators one looks for in the data sample. Importantly, researchers are interested in how journalists (and published experts) present news stories, not in how their own disciplinary insights might be teased out of the news. The analysis section of this article demonstrates original journalistic and (infrequent) expert output, not simply the repackaging of disciplinary jargon.

3. Both cases discussed in this article represent examples of external right of self-determination, since in both cases the borders of parent-states would be (or were) redrawn.

4. Popular expressions of majority will, even if it results in secession, are inherently democratic, but might be self-destructive for the national principles of unity, political membership, identity, and involatility of borders, particularly in post-World War II Europe (Freeman 1999, 358; Buchanan 2003; Banai 2013).

5. These forms include political decentralization, federalism, con-federalism, and other mechanisms of power-sharing, a domestic politics argument parallel to the international law discussions of internal right of self-determination.

6. Laurence Whitehead’s (2001) helpful notion of “contagion,” an international aspect of democratization, may be as easily applied to secessionist movements.

7. Indeed, I have included all possible journalistic and expert input, since my research question dealt with the sources of public opinion regarding secessionist movements. Therefore, expert opinion pieces and letters by prominent jurists, academics, ambassadors, politicians, statesmen, and other opinion-makers were included in the sample, along with regular newspaper articles written by the staff of The New York Times and The Washington Post, since both types of printed materials contain relevant frames and serve as determinants of public opinion. In fact, many regular articles on foreign policy in general and secessionist movements in particular do quote experts; so including direct communication from experts simply echoed the content of the standard articles. In contrast, analyzing regular people’s letters to the editor would, in essence, have conflated my dependent (public opinion) and independent (its determinants, including the media frames) variables. The emphasis of this article is on the context in which public opinion on secessionist movements is being formed, not on documenting public opinion itself through qualitative data of that sort (readers’ letters to the editor). Such letters were also exceedingly rare (two in the entire sample), as foreign policy issues, military actions notwithstanding, are rarely salient enough to compel ordinary citizens to voice their opinions.