Europe and the challenge of peripheral nationalism

Abstract

At a time when the European Union is fighting to preserve its cohesion and prevent the exit of the eurozone by one of its Member States, another challenge is threatening its integrity: the rise of peripheral nationalism in several European regions, which are defending a specific, discrete identity of the Nation-State to which they belong and as a consequence their right to self-determination. The recent electoral successes and declarations made by several European regionalist political parties bear witness to this: whilst the Neo-Flemish Alliance (N-VA) achieved scores that varied between 20 to 30% in the local elections in Flanders on 4 th October 2012, pushed forward by its leader, Bart de Wever, as the Mayor of Anvers, Flanders' leading town; the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) won the elections on 21 st October in the parliament of the Basque Autonomous Community. In Catalonia, Artur Mas, the chair of the Generalitat and of the centre-right Catalan Nationalist Party - Convergencia i Unio (CiU) announced in September last to his people that he wanted to convene a referendum to give Catalonia a State in its own right 1. Although the score achieved in the early elections on 25th November 2012 were disappointing (CiU dropped from having 62 to 50 regional seats), other more radical leftwing and far left parties, campaigning for independence (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and Candidatura d'Unitat Popular) improved their results. In Scotland the British Prime Minister, David Cameron confirmed one of the campaign promises made by the Scottish National Party (SNP) giving the green-light to the organisation of a referendum on Scotland's independence in the autumn of 2014.