fissiparous

adj

1. Factious, tending to break into pieces.

   “That nation, inescapably, is Germany, the largest, richest, most important, perhaps most admirable and certainly most pivotal nation in the European Union, the nation around which a flourishing Europe will always centre and the nation upon which a fissiparous Europe always risks foundering.”

   “There is no panacea. Iraq is a destroyed and fissiparous country.”

   “Like empires, world orders grow old, fissiparous, complacent and grumpy — despite the Champagne, the thrill is gone.”

2. Causing division or fragmenting something.

   “fissiparous tendencies”

   “Was he impressed with the cohesion of the Christians among themselves, and by the contrast thus offered to the fissiparous tendencies of his feudal polity?”

   “The sea was such a link in the case of Greece and her city colonies enabling her (no hostile power having command of the Mediterranean) to maintain connexion with her foreign colonies, in spite of the fissiparous influence of her physical configuration on the mainland.”

   “The term, which means having the quality of reproducing by splitting, was first used in the national context by the founding Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who warned that “fissiparous tendencies” might someday shatter the Indian union.”

   “After ­spending 1,000 words establishing that he's the only person in Britain who refers to ­Massive Attack as "the Massives", he ­finally let fly with the what-did-you-have-for-lunch-mate-dictionary-­pudding? stuff he had presumably been employed for: "The Massives have always had a certain fissiparous approach to their work as an ensemble" and so on.”

3. Of cells that reproduce through fission, splitting into two.

   “Reproduction may be divided into two main classes, namely, sexual and asexual. The latter is effected in many ways—by the formation of buds of various kinds, and by fissiparous generation, that is by spontaneous or artificial division.”