Abstract
Scholars who invoke understandings of nationalism as “parasitic on a prior and assumed definition of the [modern] state”1 argue that separatism is a useless endeavor in a world where the sovereignty of the modern state has been called into question. European integration appears to confirm many of the trends that are postulated to reduce incentives for national separatism. Originally envisioned by statesmen who argued that nationalism was antithetical to stability and prosperity in Europe, the EU by the late 1980s seemed to be ushering in an era that would, indeed, move it beyond nationalism. The creation of the Single Market and the growing authority of supranational2 institutions and decision-making procedures are argued to have transformed state sovereignty to an extent that many question the value of a separatist agenda in this context. Analysts who posit that self-government in the EU cannot be understood in the same terms as previous nationalisms base their arguments on an assumption that the European environment has changed to the extent that older forms of nationalism are no longer available and therefore that the nation-state paradigm is no longer achievable or desirable.
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Notes
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 4.
By “supranational,” I mean cooperation in which “a new level of authority is created that is autonomous, above the state, and has powers of coercion that are independent of the state”; supranational institutions are those with interests that “stand above individual state interests, and [make] decisions on the basis of the interests of the whole.” See John McCormick, Understanding the European Union (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 5. Most understandings of supranationalism also make reference to the loss of sovereignty by states to EU institutions, or “the way in which the member states have voluntarily surrendered some of their national sovereignty and independence to collective institutions.” See
Neill Nugent, The Government and Politics ofthe European Union (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 478.
The quotation is found in Kal Raustiala, “The Evolution of Territoriality: International Relations and American Law,” in Territoriality and Conflict in an Era ofGlobalization, ed. Miles Kahler and Barbara F. Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 219. The policies of the Single European Market were intended to promote the “four freedoms” across the members of the EC: the free movement of goods, services, capital, and people.
Philip H. Gordon, “Europe’s Cautious Globalization,” in European Responses to Globalization: Resistance, Adaptation and Alternatives, ed. Janet Laible and Henri J. Barkey (Oxford: Elsevier JAI Press, Contemporary Studies in Economic and Financial Analysis 88, 2006), 1–18.
Some states, including Belgium, deferred granting local voting rights to EU citizens out of concern for locally delicate linguistic political questions. Saskia Sassen has noted that even with regard to the purportedly sovereign modern state, citizenship has not always been understood in exclusively territorial terms. Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Some states have long made claims on their respective citizens regardless of where they live, for example, exercising extraterritorial demands regarding taxation or military service.
Ibid., 69.
Simon Hix, The Political System ofthe European Union (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 124–26.
The foundations of the multi-level governance approach to European integration are elaborated in Gary Marks, Liesbet Hooghe, and Kermit Blank, “European Integration From the 1980s: State-Centric versus Multi-level Governance,” Journal of Common Market Studies 34, no. 3 (1996): 341–78. See also
Michael Keating and Liesbet Hooghe, “By-Passing the Nation State? Regions and the EU Policy Process,” in European Union: Power and Policymaking, ed. Jeremy J. Richardson (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); and
Gary Marks and Doug McAdam, “Social Movements and the Changing Structure of Political Opportunity in the European Union,” West European Politics 19, no. 2 (1996): 249–78.
For an overview of lobbying processes in the EU, see Sonia Mazey and Jeremy Richardson, eds., Lobbying in the European Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). An analysis of which subnational governments are represented in Brussels and why is provided in
Gary Marks et al., “Competencies, Cracks and Conflicts: Regional Mobilization in the European Union,” Comparative Political Studies 29, no. 2 (1996): 164–92.
For a history of the evolution of regional policy and an argument that changes empowered the Commission at the expense of states, see Harvey Armstrong, “The Role and Evolution of European Community Regional Policy,” in The European Union and the Regions, ed. Barry Jones and Michael Keating (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 23–62; see also
Gary Marks, “Structural Policy in the European Community,” in Europolitics: Institutions and Policymaking in the ‘New’ European Community, ed. Alberta Sbragia (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1992), 191–224. Discussions of the politicization of regional policy across EU member states may be found in
Liesbet Hooghe, ed., Cohesion Policy and European Integration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 190–91.
Geoffrey Garrett, “International Cooperation and Institutional Choice: the European Community’s Internal Market,” International Organization 46, no. 2 (1992): 533. For other elaborations of intergovernmental approaches, see
Robert O. Keohane and Stanley Hoffman, ed., The New European Community: Decisionmaking and Institutional Change (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991); and
Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation State (London: Routledge, 1992).
Derek Urwin, The Community of Europe: A History of European Integration Since1945 (New York: Longman, 1991), 246.
Gary Marks and Doug McAdam, “Social Movements and the Changing Structure of Political Opportunity in the European Union,” West European Politics 19, no. 2 (1996): 266. Emphasis added.
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 185.
Eric Hobsbawm, “Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996), 257.
Michael Keating, Plurinational Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ix, 15. On legal pluralism, Keating cites
Neil MacCormick, Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State and Nation in the European Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Claims to popular sovereignty in Scotland—in contrast to, and at times in conflict with claims to parliamentary sovereignty for England (or for the UK)—represent one possibility of sovereignty adhering to entities other than the modern state, that is, in this case the Scottish nation.
John McGarry, Michael Keating, and Margaret Moore, “Introduction: European Integration and the Nationalities Question,” in European Integration and theNationalities Question, ed. John McGarry and Michael Keating (London: Routledge, 2006), 1–20.
For a discussion of the various perspectives on Irish politics that support this and similar propositions, see John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 279–82.
See James Mitchell and Michael Cavanagh, “Context and Contingency: Constitutional Nationalists and Europe,” in Minority Nationalism and the Changing International Order, ed. Michael Keating and John McGarry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 246–63.
James Goodman, Single Europe, Single Ireland? Uneven Development in Process (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), 116, 117.
He describes these as nationalisms that “seek to resist the hegemony and power of the dominant group.” Ashutosh Varshney, “Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict and Rationality,” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 1 (2003): 85–99.
Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” in Old Societies and New States, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Free Press, 1963), 108–9.
Here Varshney refers to Charles Taylor’s 1994 work, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, on the social context of dignity and identity, in agreement with Taylor’s claim that: “Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and a reduced mode of being.” Varshney, “Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict and Rationality,” 92.
Tom Nairn, Faces ofNationalism: Janus Revisited (London: Verso, 1997), 215–16.
While the current literature in this category is too large to be examined systematically here, its premises are exemplified by the work of, among others, James Caporaso, who argues that many different state structures have existed historically, and that “at best, we can speak of different state forms, thought of as clusters of institutions embedded in specific social formations that are in turn embedded within distinctive historical periods. These state structures should not be reified and thought of as eternal fixtures of politics.” James A. Caporaso, “The European Union and Forms of State: Westphalian, Regulatory or Post-Modern?” Journal of Common Market Studies 34, no. 1(1996): 31. See also
John Gerard Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization 47, no. 1 (1993): 139–74.
The question of whether sovereignty can be located only in the modern state is far from settled. Some perceive the world of medieval Europe as one of fragmented, dispersed, or divided sovereignty, with the concentration of sovereignty in the modern state occurring only in recent centuries; others question whether it is even possible to imagine a sovereign in the medieval context, as no single political form could claim final authority. On the former, see Elizabeth Crighton, “Shared Sovereignty as an Instrument for Peacemaking in Northern Ireland,” in Reconfigured Sovereignty: Multi-layered Governance in the Global Age, ed. Thomas L. Ilgen (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 51–69; Thomas L. Ilgen, “Reconfigured Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization,” in Ilgen, Reconfigured Sovereignty, 6–35; and
Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). On the latter, Hendrik Spruyt notes that even though the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor claimed final jurisdiction with regard to each other, neither possessed sovereignty in a territorial sense; in fact, he argues, “the logic of feudal organization lacked a sovereign.” Spruyt, Sovereign State, 38.
See Janice E. Thomson, “State Sovereignty in International Relations: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Empirical Research,” International Studies Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1995): 213–33; see also
Stephen Krasner, “Compromising Westphalia,” International Security 20, no. 3 (1995): 115–51.
See Friedrich Kratochwil, “of Systems, Boundaries and Territoriality: An Enquiry into the Formation of the State System,” World Politics 39, no. 1 (1986): 27–52.
See Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Describing England as a prototype nation-state by the fourteenth century, Hastings argues that England’s neighbors were forced to develop state structures to protect their nations from conquest. The Scots leadership succeeded, constructing both nation and state and embarking on a nationalist campaign that led to independence from Plantagenet overlordship; Wales and Ireland failed to develop states. See in particular pages 66–71.
Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 74.
Alexander J. Motyl, Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 82.
Ibid., 105. See also Kratochwil, “of Systems, Boundaries and Territoriality,” and Spruyt, Sovereign State.
See Sassen, Losing Control? Will Kymlicka addresses a broad range of arguments claiming that a post-sovereign (in his reading, a “post-national”) world order is challenging the model of the sovereign state and fostering the rise of a “cosmopolitan rendering of political space.” of phenomena including transnational, substate, and international institutions and forms of mobilization Kymlicka argues, they “presuppose the ongoing existence and vitality of territorially bounded national units, and that indeed none of them offers any alternative model of how to organize self-governing political communities or to allocate democratic political authority.” Will Kymlicka, “Conclusion: The Futures of Nationalism,” in Nationalism and Its Futures, ed. Umut Özkirimli (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 148.
See Andrew Moravcsik, “Negotiating the Single European Act: National Interests and Conventional Statecraft in the European Community,” InternationalOrganization 45, no. 1 (1991): 19–56. See also
Garrett, “International Cooperation and Institutional Choice,” and David R. Cameron, “The 1992 Initiative: Causes and Consequences,” in Sbragia, Europolitics, 23–74.
See Tanja A. Börzel, States and Regions in the European Union: Institutional Adaptation in Germany and Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
Janet Laible, “Nationalism and a Critique of European Integration: Questions from the Flemish Parties,” in Minority Nationalism and the Changing International Order, ed. Keating and McGarry (2001), 223–45;
Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, “‘Europe with the Regions’: Channels of Regional Representation in the European Union,” Publius 26, no. 1 (1996): 73–91;
Liesbet Hooghe and Michael Keating, “The Politics of European Union Regional Policy,” Journal ofEuropean Public Policy 1, no. 3 (1994): 53–79; and
Jeffrey J. Anderson, “Skeptical Reflections on a Europe of Regions: Britain, Germany and the ERDF,” Journal of Public Policy 10, no. 4 (1990): 445.
Milada Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration After Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 66–67.
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© 2008 Janet Laible
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Laible, J. (2008). New Contexts and New Meanings for Strategies of Self-Government. In: Separatism and Sovereignty in the New Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617001_2
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