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Following the 1998 vote on secession in Nevis, the Observer notedthat the voting pattern was along party lines, that areas of NRP strength were less likely to support the referendum than were CCM strongholds. Although this appeared to be the case, it begs the question of why this pattern occurred. In this paper, I demonstrate the extent to which the pattern persisted by comparing voting of the secession issue with the results of the 2000 Federal Election. I then examine the differential support for secession in light of other situations in the Eastern Caribbean in recent times.
Key words: secession, political inclusion, unitary state, referendum
Background to Secession
In August 1998 the voters of Nevis casted ballots to decide whether or not to remain in a unitary state with their sister island of St. Kitts. The issue of the political yoking of the two islands had occasioned long-standing disaffection on the part of Nevisians, especially since the first election in the state under universal adult suffrage in 1952. Successive political movements in Nevis had denounced the arrangement, a product of the two islands' colonial history (Midgett 2004).
In 1970, the Nevis Reformation Party (NRP) was formed and campaigned for a decade on a secessionist platform. When they were eclipsed in local elections by the Concerned Citizens' Movement (CCM) in 1992, their successors inherited the mantle of Nevisian resistance to political inclusion in the unitary state and putative domination from a government sited in Basseterre.
Throughout the history of this uneasy political accommodation, Nevisian opposition has repeatedly surfaced. St. Kitts-based political parties have only rarely been able to enlist Nevisian support, ultimately abandoning the effort. In 1977 the NRP organised a plebiscite on secession, which, although it carried no legal weight, received 4193 votes in favor and only 14 against the proposition. At each point of constitutional change or proposed new status-the 1958 West Indies Federation, 1963-64 Eastern Caribbean Federation, 1980 independence-Nevisians resisted inclusion with St. Kitts. Given this history, most observers expected that the 1998 vote would achieve the two-thirds majority necessary for Nevis to separate from St. Kitts. To the surprise of many, however, the vote for secession failed to attain the two-thirds support necessary to effect the constitutional change when only 61.7...