Leaving Europe, leaving Spain: comparing secessionism from and within the European Union

Abstract

Are secessionisms from and within the EU comparable? What motivates them and to what extent do they pose similar challenges to EU territorial governance? This article addresses these questions by comparing the framing of the British Leave campaign and the Catalan independence movement. Drawing on the FraTerr database and method, the analysis suggests that secessionism from the EU and secessionism within the EU are different political phenomena despite sharing an emphasis on sovereignty and the common goal of breaking-up from an existing polity. Secessionism from the EU is primarily a call for the recovery of lost sovereignty and of classical functions of the state such as border control. Secessionism within the EU invokes sovereignty as the right to external self-determination and adds narratives around a better future and greater democratic quality and social justice. These two types of secessionism pose different challenges to EU territorial governance because the first entails a full rejection of the European project while the latter calls for a review of European multi-level governance.

Keywords:

• Secession
• nationalism
• self-determination
• Catalonia
• Brexit

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the editors of this special issue (Waltraud Schelkle, Anna Kyriazi, Argyrios Altiparmakis, and Joe Ganderson) for inviting us to participate in the Workshop Agenda for Brexit, in Milan on 5 April 2022, and to all workshop participants for their valuable comments. The authors are also thankful to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments and suggestions. The authors would also like to express their gratitude to the participants of the ECPR Joint Session panel Secessionism and secession: between theory and practice, held online on 22 April 2022, for their helpful remarks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We place return in brackets to signal that we find the term inaccurate. Nationalism scholars are at pains to stress that nationalism never went away. It remains the modern source of political legitimacy (Greenfeld 1992) and the principle structuring our political order. It is, however, a ‘thin’ ideology that easily goes underground and becomes ‘banal’ and taken-for-granted when it is not challenged (Billig 1995). What we are witnessing is, rather, a re-emergence of explicit, specific forms of nationalism.

2. This is not to say that all secessionist parties have the same stance around immigration, as the cases of South Tyrol or Flanders clearly show. The focus here is on whether immigration is used to promote secession and in what way.

3. See: ‘The Catalan Syndrome’. Available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/piketty/2017/11/14/the-catalan-syndrom/ (accessed 10 March 2022).

4. Of course, economic grievances may be advanced to support secession by relatively rich regions (or states vis-à-vis the EU) but also by relatively poor regions (or states vis-à-vis the EU), as exemplified by Hechter’s work on internal colonialism (1977). The differences between the two are, however, beyond the scope of this article.

5. In fact, Hobolt found an overlapping between losers of globalization (Teney  et al. 2014) and pro-Leave voters as relatively ‘less-educated, poorer and older voters, and those who expressed concerns about immigration and multi-culturalism’ (Hobolt 2016). This evidence has not been found among Catalan independence supporters.

6. We followed the FraTer methodology for coding the Brexit documents. This methodology includes the key procedures for: (1) splitting sentences into quasi-sentences to deal with instances where multiple frames or demands exist; (2) applying the right codes; (3) ensuring that all members of the team are on the same page by undertaking intercoder-reliability tests, and intra-coder reliability tests.

7. See: Johnson, Boris (2016) The Liberal Cosmopolitan Case to Vote Leave, May 9, London. Accessible at http://www.voteleavetakecontrol.org/boris_johnson_the_liberal_cosmopolitan_case_to_vote_leave.html (accessed 10 March 2022).

8. The document was entitled ‘Let Catalans vote’ (Òmnium Cultural, 2017).

9. It must be noted that, along with the increased electoral success of the Republican Left, the Catalan political debate has been impregnated with the ‘republican’ jargon. The FraTerr database does not capture exclusively republican codes, but the Quality frame, capturing references to the democratic quality of the polity contains these discourses in Catalan secessionist actors.

10. Although, recently, since the 2017 events and the state response, some Eurosceptic voices have been articulated around the lack of concern of EU institutions regarding political and civil rights. See for example: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/eurocrisispress/2017/11/17/four-graphs-about-catalonia-and-citizens-attitudes-towards-the-eu/ (accessed 10 March 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This research has received funding from the Beatriu de Pinós – MSCA-COFUND EU Programme under grant number 2020 BP 00242.

Notes on contributors

Marc Sanjaume-Calvet

Marc Sanjaume-Calvet is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at Pompeu Fabra University and Coordinator of the Political Theory Research Group (GRTP). His research focuses on secessionism, self-determination, federalism and democracy. He has published in numerous journals including Journal of Politics, Party Politics, Nations and Nationalism among others. He has edited the book (with Prof. Requejo) Defensive Federalism: Protecting Territorial Minorities from the ‘Tyranny of the Majority’ (2023, Routledge). [[email protected]]

Daniel Cetrà

Daniel Cetrà is a Beatriu de Pinós Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institutions and Political Economy Research Group (IPERG) of the University of Barcelona. His research focuses on nationalism, territorial politics and language politics. He has published in numerous journals including the Journal of Common Market Studies and Territory, Politics, Governance. His books include Nationalism, Liberalism and Language in Catalonia and Flanders (2019, Palgrave) and State and Majority Nationalism in Plurinational States (2023, Routledge). ­[[email protected]]

Núria Franco-Guillén

Núria Franco-Guillén is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Aberystwyth University. She specialises in territorial politics in general with a focus on political parties and secession movements, immigration politics and deliberative democracy. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Political Studies, Regional and Federal Studies, Ethnicities, or Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. [[email protected]]