Metropolitanising small European stateless city-regionalised nations

ABSTRACT

This article introduces three small, European stateless nations that – invigorated by pervasive metropolitanisation phenomena – are increasingly shaping calls for devolution: Catalonia, the Basque Country and Scotland. These three nations are re-scaling their respective nation-states (Spain and the UK) in different ways: (i) being bolstered by their metropolitan hubs (Barcelona, Bilbao, and Glasgow) and (ii) generating a stateless ‘civic nationalism’ rooted in the metropolitan ‘right to decide’. Oppositional response to this ‘civic nationalism’ has re-emerged as state-centric ‘ethnic nationalism’. This article concludes that gaining or lacking metropolitan support for the ‘right to decide’ will establish the future directions of devolution debates.

KEYWORDS:

• City-regions
• civic nationalism
• devolution
• Europe
• metropolitanisation
• right to decide

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to Ronan Paddison and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful commentaries on an earlier version of the paper. Conversations with Tassilo Herrschel, Andy E. Jonas, and Martin Jones also helped me in thinking through certain items.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Igor Calzada, MBA, FeRSA, is a Lecturer, Research Fellow, and Policy Adviser in the Urban Transformations ESRC and in the Future of Cities Programmes at the University of Oxford and in the Institute for Future Cities at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. His research focusses on (i) benchmarking city-regions through processes of rescaling nation-states, devolution and pervasive metropolitanisation and (ii) comparing cases of smart cities in transition paying special attention to the techno-political implications of data and to the technological sovereignty. Outside academia he worked for a decade in the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation and was director of innovation in the Basque regional government in (Spain). Further information: http://www.igorcalzada.com/about.

ORCID

Igor Calzada http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4269-830X

Notes

1. We must employ the term BAC (Basque Autonomous Community), insofar as the Basque regional parliament represent only citizens of this administrative entity. The Basque Country encompasses a wider territorial dimension consisting of the BAC, CCN (Chartered Community of Navarre), and the NFBC (Northern French Basque Country) (Calzada, 2015).

Additional information

Funding

The author’s work was supported by the ESRC under the grant ‘Urban Transformations’; the RSA under grant ‘Smart City-Regional Governance for Sustainability’ Research Network; and the European Commission under the grant ‘H2020-SCC-01-2015-Smart Cities and Communities-691735-Replicate’.