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Crisis and Nationalisms – The Rise of Separatist Agitation in Europe
By WSWS*, 30 October 2012 - Recent months have seen one example after another of gains for parties advocating the creation of new, small states in Spain, Belgium, Italy, Scotland and elsewhere in Europe.
**Photo: Palau de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona, HQs of regional government: Credit: Mutari | Wikimedia Common
The growth in support for such tendencies has been fuelled by the savage cuts and austerity measures being imposed by central governments on the instructions of the troika—the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund—at the behest of the banks and global speculators.
But the exploitation of legitimate social grievances does not mean that the political beneficiaries represent the interests of the broad masses who are being exploited.
Bourgeois, Upper-middle Class Layers
All of the parties championing separatism speak for bourgeois and upper-middle class layers that have concluded the relative wealth of their regions will allow them a more privileged existence—provided they too seek membership in the European Union and faithfully do the bidding of the banks and corporations in waging attacks on the working class.
The most prominent separatist movements have all emerged within their respective countries’ more prosperous regions.
All call for an end to the subsidisation of poorer regions through central taxation and advocate local control of valuable assets. None of this is altered by fairly transparent efforts to project a left face in the case of some of the larger nationalist organisations and a plethora of pseudo-left tendencies that trail in their wake.
Spain
In Spain, the two most powerful movements are centered in the Basque and Catalan regions. The first is one of Spain’s richest regions in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and the second is the richest region overall.
Last month, 1.5 million Catalans marched in Barcelona to call for a separate state under the banner of “a new nation in Europe”. The regional government has dutifully implemented every demand for austerity made for the past two years, but still finds itself with a record debt of 44 billion euros and a credit rating reduced to junk status.
The leader of the dominant Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union), Artur Mas, is advancing a referendum on independence by calling the distribution of burdens within Spain “unfair and disloyal”. He openly speaks for the more well-off, comparing the “fatigue” in Catalonia with the complaints of Germany, France and other major states that they are subsidising southern Europe’s poorer states, such as Greece, Portugal and Spain.
The role played by Berlin and Paris in imposing crushing austerity on these countries is glossed over, because Mas wants entry into the EU. It is proof that an “independent” Catalonia will carry out precisely the same attacks on workers as it has already done as an “autonomous region.”
Belgium
In Belgium, the same message comes from the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), headed by Bart De Wever, which won decisively in local elections earlier this month by complaining of the Dutch-speaking north subsidising the poorer south of the country.
De Wever, who became mayor of Antwerp, has declared, “The Flemish have had enough of being treated like cows only good for their milk.” He described Belgium as “a transfer union” dependent upon “checkbook federalism”. Like his Catalan counterpart, he pursues a pro-EU agenda.
Italy
In Italy, the Lega Nord (Northern League) is an openly right-wing formation, opposing subsidies to the less prosperous south under the slogan “Roma ladrona” (Rome Big Thief). But Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti’s demands for cuts in regional spending have also sparked protests calling for a Venetian republic.
In South Tyrol, separatists are demanding that 90 percent of tax revenue collected in the wealthy province be returned to the region.
Scotland
The Scottish National Party (SNP), run by Alex Salmond, a former oil adviser to the Royal Bank of Scotland, has secured agreement for an independence referendum in 2014.
The SNP has long posed as a defender of limited welfare measures against central government cuts by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition and the preceding Labour Party government. But its real agenda is to establish a low corporate tax location for the European market that will serve the interests of the financial elite and its hangers-on.
Edinburgh is the second largest financial centre in the UK after the City of London and the fourth largest in Europe, measured by equity assets. It sustained a growth rate of over 30 percent between 2000 and 2005. It ranks ahead of Qatar, Oslo, Glasgow, Dublin, Abu Dhabi, Brussels, Milan, Madrid and Moscow in the Global Financial Centres Index.
The SNP claims Scotland ranks fifth within the EU in GDP per capita, if account is taken of Scotland’s economic share of the UK’s national air space, territorial waters and oil and gas reserves in the North Sea continental shelf, which it says should be controlled by Edinburgh. Scotland has been wealthier than the rest of the UK every single year since 1980, it insists.
Political Fraud
The various pseudo-left groups seek to dress up these movements as progressive because their “objective role” is to break apart imperialist nations and this will somehow, at some ill-defined future point, open the way to a socialist development. They are carrying out a political fraud, designed to conceal their orientation to the bourgeoisie and a desire to share in the spoils of this new round of “nation-building”.
All these movements advance a perspective that is antithetical to the fundamental interests of the working class. The growth of separatist movements throughout Europe is a retrograde development that cuts across the critical struggle to unite the working class in opposition to the social counterrevolution being carried out under the auspices of the European Union.
Balkanisation of Europe
The perspective of these movements is a recipe for the Balkanisation of Europe and its transformation into a madhouse of competing mini-states. These capitalist enclaves would all implement policies dictated to them by the troika and the banks and corporations, resulting in the ever more horrific immiseration of the broad mass of working people.
Left unchallenged, they will pit workers against one another in a race to the bottom in terms of jobs, wages and conditions. Worse still, as is proved by the experience of Yugoslavia, bourgeois nationalism and separatism fuel fratricidal conflict ending in war.
Trotsky once described the state system of Europe as akin to the cages within an impoverished provincial zoo. It is not the task of the working class to build still smaller cages, but to liberate the continent from all such archaic national divisions and build a harmonious and planned economy, based upon production for need and not profit.
This means waging an irreconcilable struggle against the EU and all its constituent governments—independently of all factions of the bourgeoisie and their petty-bourgeois accomplices—for the creation of workers’ governments and the United Socialist States of Europe.
*This article was published by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS). Go to Original. Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those ofHuman Wrongs Watch.
**Photo: Palau de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona, HQs of regional government: Credit: Mutari | Wikimedia Commons
2012 Human Wrongs Watch
Filed under: Market Lords, Others-USA-Europe-etc., The Peoples 
2012-10-30 06:20:25
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Sounds like the article was written by someone with no knowledge of European history. the boundaries of States like spain, France, Belgium, the UK, etc stem from war and conquests. One of the first attempts of the central powers that pulled the strings was to destroy the culture of the peoples subjugated. It was implemented through the educational system that shamed and sometimes inflicted corporal punishment to pupils caught speaking their own languages. Google “Welsh Not” for an example.
Sites like World Socialist Web Sites seem to want to keep said native people from setting themselves free from these centuries from oppression. They’re either deluded or are puppets of said “bourgeoisie” because they intend to create the single market and destruction of native cultures that turns people into mindless consumers to fill their inner void which the powers that be have been dreaming about.
The author of this article has no idea what they are talking about. They make out it’s all a recent thing when, eg Scotland has been trying to gain independence for centuries. But even if they get their seperation from Britain, they will still be members of the EU, so it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to the EU, but the EU has more authority over smaller nations. So it won’t be the wonderful outcome of autonomy they are expecting, but rather a weakening because they are now a tiny nation easy to push around and manipulate by a faceless undemocratic oligarchy.