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.
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.
“The whole development of
European integration has lowered the stakes for separation, because the
entities that emerge know they don’t have to be fully autonomous and
free-standing,” said Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on
Foreign Relations. “They know they’ll have access to a market of 500 million
people and some of the protections of the E.U.”
Heather Grabbe, who worked for
five years as a political adviser to the E.U.’s commissioner for enlargement,
agreed: “If you’re a small country in the E.U., like Malta or Luxembourg,
you’re likely to be overrepresented in Brussels compared to your size, so go
for it.” Now the Brussels director for the Open Society Institute, Ms. Grabbe
said the key variable for separatism is less a matter of money than of
historical grievance and language.
“A lot of the pressure is
about revisiting old settlements and defeats and agreements about who commits
what to central budgets,” she said. “But when it comes to the crunch, it’s not
about money but national myths — what kind of people we are, meta-narratives
and emotions: ‘Do we feel oppressed? Do we feel safe enough to leave?’ Ghosts
of history return, and while economics plays a role, in the end people vote
with their hearts.”
But the crisis has also
presented a real conundrum for regional leaders, because it has undermined the
attraction of the European Union. In Scotland, for example, there was an
assumption that if independent, it would join the bloc without a lot of fuss,
since Scots are already citizens of the European Union. (After all, some 20
million East Germans became members of the European Union overnight without
even having to whistle the anthem.) But would Scotland inherit the British “opt
out” from the euro, or, as a new E.U. state, would it have to commit to the
euro? And if so, who would be responsible for bailing out the Bank of Scotland,
if it came to that?
As euroskepticism rises in the
United Kingdom, these issues have come to bedevil Alex Salmond, the leader of
the Scottish National Party, whose slogan is “Scotland in Europe.” The 2014
referendum is supposedly timed to the 700th anniversary of a decisive episode
in the first war for Scottish independence, the Battle of Bannockburn.
TRADITIONALLY, the European
Union has been popular with the leaders of these regions, said Josef Janning,
director of studies at the European Policy Center. “They see strengthening the
power of Brussels as diminishing and relativizing national governments, a
process accelerated by the single market in Europe,” Mr. Janning said. Many of
them have formed regional groupings that bypass the central government —
Catalonia, along with Baden-Württemberg in Germany, Rhône-Alpes in France and
Lombardy in Italy, for example, are regional powerhouses that call themselves
“the four motors for Europe” and together have a bigger G.D.P. than Spain.
“But now,” Mr. Janning went on
to say, “comes the crisis,” which presents a dilemma for the regions, because
it also means a reconcentration of power by national capitals trying to cut the
national budget. “Now eyes are again on Madrid and Rome and Paris and Berlin,”
he said, “so regional opportunities are squeezed, and the affluent are made to
pay.”
While European leaders believe
the answer to the crisis is “more Europe,” which would ordinarily please
separatist regions, European voters and taxpayers are shaken, skeptical and
angry. Mr. Janning told me: “These regional entities and leaders need to be on
the right side of public sentiment and feel close to public opinion and
regional identity. So now they’re torn.”
The case of the Basques is a
good example. With the defeat of the independence army ETA, which announced the
“definitive cessation” of the armed struggle a year ago, the Basques are doing
well. They are watching Catalonia and Scotland carefully, but their level of
autonomy is already so high, with their own virtual embassies abroad and
control over their own taxes, unlike Catalonia, that independence can, to the
Basque public, seem destabilizing.
There are also larger
anxieties at play, as the frozen world of the cold war slowly melts. For nearly
half a century after World War II, until the Soviet collapse,
there were few if any border changes in Europe, east or west, with bizarre
outcroppings like Transnistria or Kaliningrad, or a divided Berlin paralyzed in
amber. The years that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the
Soviet Union were an effort, Ms. Grabbe noted, “to find a new normal.”
European (and NATO)
enlargement to the east was a major accomplishment, but it distorted the cores
of both organizations, especially the European Union. And now with the new
crisis of the euro, “Europe seems shakier, there’s so much anxiety,” Ms. Grabbe
said. “Some of these taboo questions,” she said, “are coming out again,” with
economic, legal and ethnic trouble re-emerging in the new states, like Hungary
and Romania, and new divisions in the old ones.
Mr. Leonard, of the European
Council on Foreign Relations, said he was recently in Barcelona, where Catalan
officials were obsessively asking him about Scotland. “Their knowledge of
internal Scottish affairs was much bigger than mine,” he said. “So it’s clear
they’re all watching and playing off one another.”
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