if there was we’d have to acknowledge the right of those successionist yahoos who want to true some random county in Montana into AnCapistan to legalize child marriage… every group of 10 or more people who are unhappy with their government has some universal right to form their own little country. If we did the whole world would be a patchwork of micro-nations the size of Rhode Island.

Yeah but those aren’t a people.

Now if you ask me to define “What’s a people? What’s a nation?” I can’t give you a cut-and-dried definition that will fit all cases. If you want to say ten people are a nation it’s a clichéd old schoolground argument (parodied in Ulysses: “A nation is the same people living in the same place. —By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.”) but use common sense. Catalonia has a language and hundreds of years of history. The Kurds have a language and thousands of years of history. Ten people in a township isn’t comparable.