Green nationalism. Climate action and environmentalism in left nationalist parties

ABSTRACT

Climate change is arguably the single most important political issue in the world today. As yet, however, there has been little research on the relationship between climate change and nationalism. In this contribution we investigate the possible existence of a ‘green nationalism’ among progressive and social democratic sub-state nationalist parties in minority nations. We identify an uncharted rhetorical and ideological continuity between how climate issues are perceived and championed among minority nations across time. This is a clear instance of ‘frame bridging’, where seemingly disparate policy elements are combined and reinforce one another. We show how sub-state political actors actively seek to use this link with climate-related environmental issues to bridge policy issues. We conclude by cautioning that it is unclear whether this sub-state ‘green nationalism’ might survive an ascent to statehood, in which state-building and other forms of realpolitik might trump and eclipse environmental concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• frame analysis
• green nationalism
• regionalism
• ethnopolitics
• political parties

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For a deeper discussion of ‘progressive’ minority nationalist parties, see Keating 1996, 2001, Lynch 2003, Guibernau 2013b, Conversi and Jeram 2017.

2. There was only a small number of mostly circumstantial (casual) mentions of climate change, according to the following distribution: Nations and Nationalism: eight mentions (including a roundtable, book reviews and an introductory piece); Ethnopolitics: three mentions (one political theory article, two case studies); Nationalism and Ethnic Politics: three mentions (all case studies); Ethnicities: two mentions (both theoretical articles); Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: two mentions (including an article dating back to 2009). We found no mention of the geo-historical concept of the Anthropocene, nor any of its more controversial derivates such as Capitalocene (Moore 2017) or similar neologisms, despite the fact that these have been introduced and debated in nearly all the social sciences.

3. For a wider discussion of frames, see Johnston and Noakes 2005.

4. For a discussion of how different political actors frame similar issues with regard to nationalism and climate change, see Jóhannesson 2005.

5. For a description of the previous links between Catalanism and environmentalism, see Marshall 1996.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (ES) [HAR2014-53974-P].