Understanding the resurgence of regional nationalism in Europe: an exploration through poor regions
General ambition
Since the middle of the 2010s, the functioning of consolidated democracies has been disrupted in many countries, including those thought to be the most mature and stable. Particularly from the 2010s onwards, populism has been the yardstick by which the phenomenon has often been judged, as government parties or their ordinary registers of expression have declined: Brexit in the UK, the Trump presidency in the USA, the rise of currents labelled as such on the right in continental Europe, both in the East (led by Hungary and Poland) and in the West, with France participating in particular with the Rassemblement National. The same term has also been used on the left, with the breakthrough of Podemos in Spain and even more so of Syriza in Greece, or in the face of more difficult-to-identify movements, such as the 5 Star Movement in Italy.
The extensive international literature on these phenomena has largely focused on the relatively conventional study of national politics at the level of the states in question. The present research is an original attempt to investigate a neglected dimension of this recomposition, by taking into account the territorial variation of this process of questioning the foundations of democratic political systems, on a European scale. Indeed, in many parts of the continent, we are witnessing the resurgence of a phenomenon labelled in very different ways in the
literature, and which we refer to here as regional nationalism. It refers to the existence of movements which, from regions within a given national state, contest the latter by making cultural, economic and politico-administrative demands for greater autonomy or even
independence. These actors form a clearly distinct political family.
The phenomenon itself is not new, having appeared in Europe at the end of the 19th century. However, in terms of intensity, it has not been constant: first prominent in the pre-war period, then enjoying widespread popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, it then tended to regress, surviving here only in a limited number of regions where it was sometimes violent (notably in the Basque Country and Northern Ireland), and more often expressing itself there only in minority or even marginal movements. Now, however, a whole series of states find themselves confronted with a visible revival of the phenomenon, sometimes concretized in the streets and above all at the ballot box, likely to go so far as to call into question long-standing national unities (in the UK, through the rise of the Scottish National Party; in Spain, through Catalonia, with the radicalization of the moderate nationalist current formerly represented by Convergencia i Unió). Without reaching such intensity, France itself, not only overseas but also in mainland France, has not been spared, to the point where recent echoes have even reached the national press.
In the context of the exploratory project submitted here, and for the basic reasons described in the second section, we propose to focus on two main regional cases: Corsica and Sardinia. These two regional cases have the advantage of being familiar to us, since we had long ago studied the modalities of stato-national settlement between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century - in short, the "Frenchization" of Corsica and the "Italianization" of Sardinia [Roux 2014]. On the other hand, the context that these islands represent today has, since then, been radically transformed: regional nationalism, then a minority or even marginal [Roux 2006, 2011], has become, against expectations, a majority and a force of government. How can we understand such a turnaround in these territories? What lessons can we draw, beyond these specific cases chosen for their own sake, about the recompositions of democratic systems underway?
Themes and questions addressed
As a political science project, the present one is at the crossroads of several of its active, structuring and complementary branches in the analysis of the functioning and mutations of democracies: that of nationalism, but including territorially a component relating to the processes of decentralization; that of political parties
; that of mobilizations and social movements, including questions of political violence; and finally that of the attitudes and political behavior of citizens, with an electoral component. The project submitted here claims to be original in two respects, enabling it to critically surpass existing literature on several points
.
Its first ambition is to understand the resurgence of a phenomenon that appeared to have fallen into relative disuse. We hypothesize that this process can be understood in the context of the phenomenon of wear and tear of representative democracies, led by government parties. In the cases that
interest us, there are two main reasons for our selection of cases (limited to two, so as to be manageable for the duration of a relatively short project): little studied in the literature, they nonetheless illustrate the resurgence of regional nationalism in Europe. Once continuously in regional opposition to regional
executives long controlled by the republican right, Corsican nationalist parties have seen a rise in electoral power, gaining a strong relative majority and control of the executive council in 2015, a resounding historic victory in 2017 and a refocused success for the autonomist Femu a
Corsica formation in 2021. In Sardinia, the historic autonomist party (the Partito Sardo d'Azione), powerful on the eve of Fascism, had become generally residual in the post-war period in a region long controlled by the former Christian Democracy and then, from the 1990s onwards, by the large center-left and center-right groupings led, respectively, by the Democratic Party and Forza Italia : Now, however, the autonomist party has been able to lead a coalition to take the reins of regional government in 2019. To date, the two political leaders of these islands, the President of the Corsican Executive Council, Gilles Simeoni, and the President of the Sardinian Regional Junta, Christian Solinas, belong to regional nationalist formations. The exploration will thus fill a structural empirical gap in the literature.
This first contribution is at the service of a second originality that draws on a specific bias in the selection of sites. In the midst of a generally scant international literature (and even more scanty in France), the research focused on a limited number of enduring and salient cases that had in common
to emanate from prosperous European regions [Paquin 2001, Keating 2001, Aguilera de Prat 2002, Duerr 2015, Caron 2016, Cetrà 2019] : typically, those of Scotland, the Basque Country, Catalonia, Belgian Flanders and Northern Italy, weary of contributing to national solidarity, attracted attention because they could claim
forms of autonomy or independence that might seem economically viable and nurture a "nationalism of the rich" [Dalle Mulle 2018]. With Corsica and Sardinia, our strategy here is the opposite: we are faced with two regions where contestation is being reborn from poor regions, largely dependent on the public support provided by the state they are contesting, and which might seem to have more to lose than to gain by distancing themselves from it. How can we understand this paradox? Corsica, which has had a special status since 1982, has seen its powers strengthened and regrouped within the newly-established Collectivité de Corse in 2018. Sardinia, a region with special status since 1948, also saw some of its prerogatives strengthened with the federally-inspired reform of 2001. How is it possible to understand that the
autonomist or independentist contestation is gaining strength at a time when decentralization mechanisms, which were supposed to respond to historical regionalist demands, have increased? In other words, why do regions that are both more dependent and more decentralized than others become the site of such territorial contestation?
Our exploration is thus likely to offer substantial critical contributions to the literature.
In short, the project aims to understand surprising mobilizations that reappear in areas where we might least expect them, to assess whether they bring about the change they claim to, and in this way to grasp how democracies also change through territory and not just through the vicissitudes of national politics.
Methodology and approach
The approach is based on two pillars, each of which comprises a deliverable setting out a basic objective, which is then broken down into sub-objectives:
- deliverable 1: contexts. The unprecedented vigour of regional nationalist mobilization in our fields raises the question of its dynamics: a phenomenon with ancient roots but generally weak over the long term and vigorous in the recent period requires 1° (sub-delivery 1.1) to trace the cyclical dynamics of the process over the long term in order to analyze the explanatory factors and situate (sub-delivery 1.2) the context of institutional accommodation (historical process of decentralization). This is an important point, as it will enable us to assess the extent to which older claims have been "recycled" or, on the contrary, innovated. This work will be carried out on the basis of targeted documentary and archival research on site - the dissemination of works relating to these regions being largely concentrated locally -, reconstitution of the normative framework and
its evolutions, and interviews with the key players embodying State-region relations in order to appreciate, beyond the legal framework, the problematic knots between these two levels; - deliverable 2: mobilizations. In this dimension, the aim is to characterize the ideological content (subdeliverable 2.1) conveyed in the recent context around three structuring dimensions in the discourse of this political family (culture, economy, politics) through a collection of electoral manifestos, partisan
press and interviews with activists of the organizations in question. It is particularly important here to situate mobilization strategies in distinct arenas (partisan, movements, associations, unions, etc.). Within this mission lies a potential originality: that of
assessing the extent to which, in a context of environmental crisis that is now structural, the actors in question have been likely to develop a line of the "eco-nationalist" type [Margules 2021] or "green" nationalism [Posocco & Watson 2022] that combines regionalist discourse and the environmental cause
, so as to grasp how these actors shape in their own way the issues linked to the current climate crisis and its consequences. From this point of view, island environments offer specific ecosystems that are in need of special protection, but which, in the Mediterranean, are under threat from over-frequentation by tourists and the maintenance or establishment of military infrastructures. Thanks to the territorial disengagement at work here, the possibility of opening up the understanding of current environmental mobilizations beyond the established ecologist formations appears. This is likely to pave the way for a future exploration of public action in this field. At the same time, this deliverable will include a second section (sub-deliverable 2.2) on
electoral performance and institutional insertion, so as to grasp, on the one hand, the sources of support in public opinion, based on research into available survey data and, on the other hand, the way in which these actors behave when they become elected representatives conducting a policy rather than opponents criticizing it. This will provide the opportunity for a preliminary exploration of the type of measures that are prioritized: this exploration will enable us to develop our thinking on the relevance of a subsequent, systematized exploration of
territorial governance schemes, if necessary reduced to certain specific sectors such as the environment.
The timetable, spread over 18 months between mid-2024 and the end of 2025, will follow the order of the deliverables, organizing first of all in-depth work devoted to document collection of various types (national archives relating to regional cases - hence the inclusion of missions to the capitals, Paris and Rome -, regional documentation from university libraries and local institutions (Corsican Assembly, Sardinian Regional Council), set against the refinement of the literature review (so as to put the regional cases into perspective with other European cases, in order to grasp their similarities or specificities). This first stage (months 1 to 7) will enable the exact identification of the questions that will feed the
series of interviews (spread over months 8 to 14) with the players (organization leaders and activists). The final part will conclude the exploratory project (months 15 to 18) with the drafting and dissemination of the initial results, in line with disciplinary practice, first in the form of papers presented at international
and national conferences, then as articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Basically, our ambition is to break the academic silence at national level and contribute to international research.
Impact and potential spin-offs
The deliverables set out in the method and timetable outlined above should enable two types of scientific results to take shape: an unprecedented empirical contribution on largely neglected cases, an innovative interpretation of a too-often ignored "nationalism of the poor", and a stimulating exploration of the links between nationalism and environmentalism.
Given the originality of the cases and the critical scope they are likely to represent, we are convinced that they are likely to pave the way under the best possible conditions for more ambitious research that could then be financed as part of an ANR project and then as part of a Horizon
Europe-type project. The consolidation of the state of the art, the in situ exploration of the field and the publication of a series of first results will be likely to offer credit to such a request, which will then suppose to widen, within a more articulated organizational framework, the palette of studied cases and to enrich the collaborative network allowing such a
project. This project, which falls within the scope of one of the laboratory's major themes ("Political Territories") and is likely to have strong links with the "Environment" theme, is conceived as a prelude to a structural orientation of our research agenda for the years to come, through a return to former fields.
Scaling up the project will require the identification of a larger number of European cases with comparable characteristics (economic weakness, presence of decentralization mechanisms), and whose coverage will be based on the construction of an internationalized research team including young local researchers.