Can't wait for Catalonian football league. Camp Nou was draped in Catalonia flag during the Barcelona vs Real Madrid "El Clásico", 7 October 2012.

Richer regions want to redraw the map

The crisis is reviving old historical and economic quarrels between rich regions with a strong sense of identity and central governments. But as the latest example of Catalonia shows, the question is whether the EU encourages stability or secessionist tendencies.

Published on 8 October 2012 at 13:47
Can't wait for Catalonian football league. Camp Nou was draped in Catalonia flag during the Barcelona vs Real Madrid "El Clásico", 7 October 2012.

Catalonia may be the catalyst for a renewed wave of separatism in the European Union, with Scotland and Flanders not far behind. The great paradox of the European Union, which is built on the concept of shared sovereignty, is that it lowers the stakes for regions to push for independence.

While a post-national European Union may be emerging out of the euro zone crisis, with a drive for more fiscal union and more centralized control over national budgets and banks, the crisis has accelerated calls for independence from member countries’ richer regions, angry at having to finance poorer neighbors.

Artur Mas, the Catalan president, recently shook Spain and the markets with a call for early regional elections and promised a referendum on independence from Spain, although Madrid considers it illegal. Scotland is planning an independence referendum for the autumn of 2014. The Flemish in Flanders have achieved nearly total autonomy, both administrative and linguistic, but still resent what they consider to be the holdover hegemony of the French-speakers of Wallonia and the Brussels elite, emotions that will be on display in provincial and communal elections Oct. 14.

There are countless things that hold unhappy countries, like marriages, together — shared history, shared wars, shared children, shared enemies. But the economic crisis in the European Union is also highlighting old grievances.

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Many in Catalonia and Flanders, for example, argue that they pay significantly more into the national treasury than they receive, even as national governments cut public services. In this sense, the regional argument is the euro zone argument writ small, as richer northern countries like Germany, Finland and Austria complain that their comparative wealth and success are being drained to keep countries like Greece, Portugal and Spain afloat.

The crisis has also produced a loss of confidence in traditional leadership, with voters punishing incumbents and mainstream political parties. That has helped more atavistic nationalist parties, like the National Front in France and Golden Dawn in Greece. But in separatist regions, the same disaffection tends to favor parties advocating independence.

Opinion

Euro project has strengthened “tribalism”

In an article on growing regionalist impulses in Spain, Italy and Germany, Peter Coy, the economics editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, points out that

... many of the nations of Europe have been nations for only the briefest of times. For most of history they were rivalrous territories, kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and city-states. They were bound by language and culture—and riven by tribalism.

European unity, the article continues —

… depends on the unity of nations, which is in short supply. In Italy, the popular and sometimes-secessionist Northern League political party complains that wealthy northern regions like Lombardy and Piedmont are being bled by the south—the Mezzogiorno. In Germany on Aug. 30, a former weekly newspaper editor named Wilfried Scharnagl called for the independence of Bavaria, which joined the German Empire in 1871 but kept (for a while) its own king, army, and postal service.

For Coy, part of the blame lies with the euro project, a brainchild of “cosmopolitan elites … who regarded themselves as Europeans first” —

The elites got out ahead of their own people, who were less “European” then and even less so today. In a survey conducted last May by the European Union, 63 percent of Spaniards said they felt very attached to their city, town, or village. Only 49 percent felt very attached to their country—and only 10 percent felt so toward the EU. Spaniards’ local allegiances have intensified since 2010, while their national and continental attachments have weakened.

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