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Abstract
This paper argues that the Scottish National Party and the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie have recently made an instrumental case for independence that runs counter to traditional principled notions of external self-determination as an end in itself, as well as to remedial arguments based on claims of victimisation, alien rule and lack of recognition. They thus represent an important novelty in the history of nationalist discourse. More in detail, the peculiarity of their rhetoric lies in the use of functional arguments concerning the economic and social consequences of external self-determination in terms of competitiveness, well-being, the delivery of social services, good governance and better democracy, as well as in the acceptance of a gradualist approach to independence. The paper then presents an explanation for the adoption of these rhetorical strategies based on three sets of factors: normative, institutional and electoral.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks André Liebich and the anonymous reviewers of Ethnopolitics for their useful comments on earlier drafts.
Notes
1. This however had unintended consequences, as Wilson mainly deemed self-determination as limited to its internal dimension of a ‘right to democracy’ (Liebich, Citation2003, p. 461).
2. For a discussion of the validity of the analysis of a limited number of particular cases for hypotheses generation, see Gerring (Citation2007).
3. One could read indeed that
as things are, Scotland is a more complete serf or satellite of England than Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Roumania [sic] are of the USSR. She is almost the last satellite left under English control and England is making the most out of it. (SNP, Citation1968, p. 4)
4. Analysing the evolution of Scottish nationalist ideology between 1948 and the mid-1970s, Farbey, Mitchell, and Webb (Citation1980, p. 420) argued that: ‘the advent of North Sea oil revenues in the early 1970s meant the end of serious discussion about economic, trade, or financial matters. On the face of it, North Sea oil was the panacea for Scottish ills; there was nothing that could not be done with the enormous revenues’.
5. This is confirmed by Maxwell (Citation2009, pp. 122–123) who also agrees with Farbey et al. that oil was seen as the trump card that would solve all problems.
6. Here, but also in previous texts published since the late 1990s (Salmond, Citation1998, p. 3, Citation2003, pp. 40–41; SNP, Citation1999a, p. 9, Citation2002), Salmond made reference to the economic model of the ‘Laffer curve’. This has been noticed also by Lynch (Citation2002, p. 211) and Hassan (Citation2009, p. 5), who pointed out how it signalled a move to a more neo-liberal approach to economic policy.
7. Hassan (Citation2011) has suggested that the positive message on independence—based on the works of Martin Seligman—was embraced after Salmond's return to the leadership in 2004. While this might be true for the party's canvassing techniques, the idea of the positive message was already present in its discourse since the mid-1990s. For instance, in a speech delivered in 1993, Salmond openly suggested shifting the focus of the campaign from blaming the others to showing to the citizens ‘the positive benefits of independence and to foster and develop confidence that we can all meet and match the challenges and opportunities that independence will bring’ (Salmond, Citation1993, p. 39).
8. Here, a difference can be noticed with regard to the SNP in that both subscribe to the idea that small nations perform better in the global economy, but, while the SNP has attributed this to their higher ‘social cohesion’, the N-VA has referred to the concept of ‘heterogeneity costs’. Yet, in the Alliance's propaganda, there is no mention of ‘ethnic homogeneity’. Furthermore, the party argued that heterogeneity derived from the fact that Belgium would be the ‘sum of two different democracies’ (Flemish and Walloon). The N-VA has also, at least formally, shown an open stand towards (legal) immigration, supported policies of integration (mainly through compulsory subsidised language courses) and taken distance from the xenophobic positions of the Vlaams Belang.
9. In an interview given to the German newspaper Der Spiegel in 2010, De Wever said that Wallonia had a right to receive some transfers from Flanders, but this money should not turn into a drip and added ‘like drugs for a junkie’. Although he did not clearly say that the Walloons were subsidy junkies, the association could be easily made.
10. On this, see Delcorps (Citation2012).
11. For more details on the BHV issue see: Sinardet, Citation2010. It should be noted that the Court did not impose the split, but only demanded the correction of the situation, which could have been achieved in other ways.
12. While the authors use the expression encompassing community, the criteria that they list in order for a group to qualify as such clearly point to nations as the best fit.
13. Importantly, the instrumental character of the right also implies a subjective dimension, whereby ‘the members of a group are best placed to judge whether their group's prosperity will be jeopardized if it does not enjoy political independence’ (Margalit & Raz, Citation1990, p. 457).
14. Salmond (Citation1993, p. 40) himself did not blame the decision on the British Parliament but rather argued that ‘when offered the opportunity to claim more self-government [Scotland A/N] responded with a decisive “don't know”’.
15. The federation is in fact bipolar, because the German community accounts only for 0.7% of the total population, and asymmetric, as the Flemish community and region were merged in 1980.