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Abstract
The past years have been eventful for secessionist movements in Europe and in particular in Scotland and Catalonia. Supporters and opponents of secession of both stateless nations considered their prospects for future EU membership as an important part of the campaigns leading to the referendums. The article’s aim is to explore whether international factors influence domestic support for secession. In order to answer this puzzle, an on-line survey experiment (n = 2408) was carried out in Catalonia and Scotland in which respondents were confronted with different scenarios concerning the EU membership of their hypothetical new state (inclusion or exclusion). Contrary to the general perception, the prospects of EU membership had only a limited effect on support for the creation of a sovereign state. Moreover, it was found that the impact was strongly mediated by the participants’ previous degree of nationalism and their attitudes with respect to the EU.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Guillem Vidal Lorda for valuable research assistance and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.
Notes
1. The exact transfer balances are a frequent matter of discussion in cases of secession, and the exact numbers depend heavily on the accounting methods applied. For example, according to the Spanish government the Catalan transfer imbalance with the Spanish state is about €8.5 billion, whereas the Catalan government talks about €11.1 or €15 billion (according to the method of calculation) (La Vanguardia Citation2014a). Finland, whose gross domestic product is roughly comparable to Catalonia, received in 2013 about €603 million less from the EU coffers than it had contributed to the budget (European Commission Citation2015).
2. A moderating variable specifies for whom or under what conditions a treatments works (Kraemer et al. Citation2002). For example, the relationship between the treatment about EU-inclusion/-exclusion and the dependent variable (support for secession) can be moderated by variables such as age, gender, degree of nationalism, etc. A mediating variable identifies possible mechanisms through which a treatment might have an impact on outcomes.
3. The lack of agreement on the Catalan referendum, also known as ‘citizen participation process on the political future of Catalonia’, led to its suspension by the Spanish Constitutional Court.
4. Needless to say, an obvious disadvantage to this sort of experiment is that a vignette is different from experiencing a real stimulus in everyday life and that the results obtained are estimates, which cannot be validated.
5. In the Catalan referendum, the voters were first supposed to answer a question: ‘Do you want Catalonia to become a state?’ In the affirmative case, the voters also had the opportunity to respond to the question ‘Do you want this state to be independent?’ So, in sum, the Catalan voters had three options: voting in favour of an independent state (Yes‒Yes); voting in favour of a state, which is not independent (Yes‒No), or voting against the entire idea of a Catalan state (No).
6. A small and very heterogeneous group of respondents choose the option ‘Other’.
7. In Spanish: A unilateral declaration of independence ‘condenaría (Cataluña) a vagar por el espacio sin reconocimiento y a quedar excluida de la Unión Europea por los siglos de los siglos’.
8. The exact question was ‘You would vote in favour of (against) independence. To what extent would membership of the EU influence your decision?’ The respondents could choose between the following options: (1) Nothing, (2) Almost nothing, (3) Some, (4) Quite a lot, and (5) A lot.