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In international law, unilateral declarations of independence are generally frowned upon, since preservation of territory is one of the few things that the countries of the world universally agree on. Declaring independence or supporting such a declaration is seen as a hostile act, that may easily lead to war. Money is often an important factor, with control of important resources such as ports, oil fields or strategic towns or geographic features leading to dispute. If a government has extemely large debts to other organisations, there will be international pressure for these debts to be taken over by successor governments, even if the original governmental organisation is disbanded.

Many states have come into being through an act of UDI. The legality of a UDI is often the subject of debate and unsurprisingly the previous government typically asserts that a UDI is illegal. Often, international bodies and other countries decline at first to accept the legitimacy of the declared state and its government. If the declared state becomes a functioning entity, it may gain diplomatic recognition over time and a form of backdated legitimacy. Not all such declarations result in actual states and those governments that do result from UDIs do not always survive and are often rivaled by the previous government. A significant number of unilaterally declared governments collapse or otherwise give way, with control returning to the previous government or shifting to a new follow-on government.

Many declarations of independence including those for Texas (now part of the United States of America), Rhodesia, and Vietnam have been modeled on the United States Declaration of Independence.

1 Examples of UDIs

• The first known formal declaration of independence was the Declaration of Arbroath in which Scottish leaders declared Scotland's independence from England on behalf of the Scottish people in 1320.

• The Oath of Abjuration or Plakkaat of Verlatinghe of July 26, 1581, was the formal declaration of independence of the northern Low Countries of their king Philip IIPhilip II of Spain ( May 21, 1527 September 13, 1598), King of Spain (r. 1556- 1598), Naples and Sicily (r. 1554- 1558), and Portugal, Philip II, the self-proclaimed leader of the Counter-Reformation, assumed the throne in 1556 with a great deal of potent.

• The United States Declaration of Independence was made by 13 of Britain's American colonies in 1776. In 1778, the Treaty of Alliance and the Treaty of Amity and Commerce were signed by the United States and FranceThe French Republic or France ( French: Republique francaise or France is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents. signaling the first official recognition of the new country. The Kingdom of Great BritainThe United Kingdom of Great Britain was created by the merger of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England in 1707 (see Act of Union 1707). A single parliament and government, based in Westminster in London, ran the entire kingdom. They had shared a monarch si formally recognized the new country following the Treaty of ParisThe Treaty of Paris of 1783 signed on September 3, 1783, formally ended the American Revolutionary War between the Kingdom of Great Britain and her North American Colonies. Great Britain signed ancillary treaties with France and Spain as the Treaties of V in 1783.

• BrazilThis article is about Brazil, the country. For other article subjects named Brazil see Brazil (disambiguation). The Federative Republic of Brazil Republica Federativa do Brasil in Portuguese) is the largest and most populous country in South America. was declared independent from Portugal on September 7th, 1822 by then-regent Pedro de Bragança e Bourbon, who was then crowned emperor Peter I of Brazil.

• Texas declared its independence from Mexico in 1836, as the Republic of Texas, with the Texas Declaration of Independence .

• The Irish Republic was declared by Dáil Éireann in 1919; it never received international recognition, was rivaled by the administration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War, and was ultimately superseded by the Irish Free State.

• Iceland unilaterally declared its independence from Denmark (following a plebiscite of the local population) on June 17, 1944. The Danish King Christian X (whose country was occupied by the Nazis at the time) had urged Iceland to wait until the end of the war before making any such move but otherwise did nothing to prevent it (and was unable to do so in any case).

• Indonesia declared independence from the Netherlands on August 17, 1945, which was soon recognized by the United States and Australia, but not by the Netherlands until 1949.

• Katanga, a former a province of Belgian Congo, broke away with a UDI in 1960, when Congo was granted its independence. The attempted break away ended by the implementation of a UN supervised National Conciliation Plan in January 1963.

• Rhodesia ( Ian Smith's white minority government) declared UDI from the United Kingdom in 1965. Few states accepted its legitimacy. The UDI Rhodesian state was ultimately replaced under the Lancaster House Agreement by a restored British regime under a governor, Lord Soames. Within a short time, a new much more-widely recognized independent state, Zimbabwe, came into existence.

• Guinea Bissau, formerly Portuguese Guinea, declared independence from Portugal in 1973, which was recognized by many countries, before Portugal formally granted independence in 1974.

• East Timor, formerly Portuguese Timor, declared independence from Portugal on November 28, 1975, which was recognized by several Communist and Third World countries including the People's Republic of China, but not by neighboring Australia, Portugal or by Indonesia, which invaded on December 7, 1975, and annexed it as its '27th province' on July 17, 1976.

• The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was proclaimed in Northern Cyprus, in 1983. The area had been occupied by Turkish forces since a Turkish invasion in 1974 and has only received international recognition from Turkey.

• The Palestinian Liberation Organization unilaterally proclaimed the State of Palestine in 1988. The PLO had no control of any territory at the time.

• The State of Israel issued a declaration of independence on May 14, 1948.

• Other nations, or aspiring nations, which have made formal declarations of independence, include the Netherlands ( Dutch Declaration of Independence from Spain, 1581), and New Zealand ( Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand, 1835, a declaration of independence of the Maori tribes).

Recent self-declared states also include Chechnya, Somaliland, and Somaliland's neighbor, Puntland.