Shades of solidarity: Comparing Scottish and Flemish responses to Catalonia

ABSTRACT

On 1 October 2017, Catalans went to the polls to vote on independence. Catalan independentists called for international, particularly European, support. EU leaders remained wary, but representatives of Europe’s sub-state nationalist parties flocked to Barcelona to express their solidarity. In this article, we show that the Scottish National Party’s support was both less cohesive and less intense than the more assertive expression of solidarity from the Flemish Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie. We consider party interactions in the European context through the lens of transnational solidarity. We find that solidarity is refracted through intra-party dynamics, domestic policy debates, and the historical trajectories of parties in the European context. Existing international relationships provide arenas for interaction, but ultimately domestic opportunities conditioned parties’ responses to the Catalan referendum. This meaningful, albeit contingent, solidarity between sub-state nationalists is worthy of exploration in the context of ongoing Catalan and Scottish independence processes.

KEYWORDS:

• Nationalism
• secession
• transnational activism
• solidarity
• Catalonia

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the helpful feedback of two anonymous referees and the editors of Regional and Federal Studies. We would also like to thank the members of the Territorial Politics Research Group at the University of Edinburgh and Dr. Daniel Cetrà for their feedback on this article at different stages.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We use the term ‘sub-state nationalist and regionalist’ to indicate the wider group of parties including those advocating for full independence and those seeking further sub-state autonomy. When discussing the three parties at the centre of this article, we will use ‘nationalist’ as these parties all advocate full independence of their sub-state region.

2 EFA works ‘for self-determination, for A Europe of the Peoples, for Peace and Linguistic justice, for a sustainable planet, for more gender equality and social justice’ (‘Who We Are,’ e-f-a.org).