Greens and the nation: Is small beautiful?

Abstract

Despite their distrust of big and centralised political units, their stance in favour of minorities and diversity, Greens do not skip the national issue but reimagine it with a bottom-up and plural perspective under the form of regionalism. This article first study how ecologist theoreticians have defined different regionalist approaches, notably bioregionalism, ecoregionalism and econationalism, which became the basis of the Green approach on the national issue in Western Europe as early as the 1970s. Then, the paper comparatively focusses on Europe Ecology – The Greens Brittany and on the Scottish Green Party, assessing their analysis on their territory: whereas the first defend the project of an autonomous Brittany, the second is actively involved in favour of the independence of Scotland. In analysing the regionalism of the Greens, the article demonstrates that the green stance on the nation is not “identitarian” or “patriotic” but “cognitive”: it is devoid of nostalgia but on the contrary a tool for a multicultural and democratic Europe.