Catalan Separatists Want Independence. Who Else?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/17/world/europe/catalonia-independence-europe.html

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BRUSSELS — Separatist politicians in Catalonia have been pushing for independence from Spain. After three months of political turmoil, new Catalan elections are scheduled for Dec. 21.

The European Union has sided wholly with the Madrid government, which rejects Catalan independence. One key reason: Many other regions in Europe have their own nationalist movements, which, if successful, could destabilize member nations in the bloc.

According to the European Union, its 28 member states contain 276 separate regions with varying political structures and categories, including states, countries, regions and communities. Some, like Catalonia and Scotland, have their own representative offices in Brussels. And the European Parliament has a coalition of regional parties, the European Free Alliance, that occupies 2 percent of the seats.

Of the 276 regions, some are pressing for independence or much greater autonomy.

CATALONIA, Spain

Catalonia has its own history, culture and language, as do some other parts of Spain.

Catalonia’s push for autonomy in the 1930s was one of the reasons behind the Spanish Civil War, and the resulting Franco dictatorship crushed many civil liberties, suppressing the Catalan language. After Franco’s death in 1975, Spain’s return to democracy was enshrined in a new Constitution, which created a decentralized but not formally federal state.

In 2006, a new statute of Catalan autonomy, which had been drafted by a Socialist-led regional government, was approved in a regional referendum, as well by Catalan and Spanish lawmakers. The statute might have forestalled the current crisis over yet more extreme independence demands, but it was rejected in part by Spain’s constitutional court in 2010, after Spain’s conservative Popular Party had campaigned fiercely against it.

During the financial crisis, the regional government in wealthy Catalonia pushed unsuccessfully for a better tax deal with the national authorities. In September 2015, a coalition of separatist parties won a majority of the seats in the Catalan Parliament, but they did so with only 48 percent of the votes in regional elections.

The separatist coalition then organized an independence referendum on Oct. 1, 2017, even after it had been declared illegal by Spain’s government and courts. Based on this highly controversial referendum, separatist lawmakers voted to declare independence from Spain on Oct. 27, after which the central government stepped in and took administrative control of Catalonia.

BASQUE COUNTRY, Spain and France

The Basques have their own history, culture and language. Although the region straddles France and Spain, aspirations for greater autonomy have been almost exclusively limited to the population on Spanish soil.

During Gen. Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, a separatist group known as E.T.A. pressed for Basque independence with a violent campaign of bombings and assassinations. After Franco’s death in 1975, the Basque region recovered its autonomy and the power to raise and spend its own taxes. But E.T.A. continued its campaign of terror to claim a homeland, known as Euzkadi, and killed more than 800 people over four decades. A significantly weakened E.T.A. eventually announced a cease-fire in 2011, but the group is yet to formally disband, as demanded by the Spanish government. E.T.A. is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.

In recent years, mainstream Basque politicians have made some efforts to gain more autonomy. In 2004, the Basque regional Parliament approved a plan for a new statute of autonomy, which Spanish lawmakers rejected.

SCOTLAND, United Kingdom

Scotland joined with England to form Britain in 1707, and has had an active independence movement for decades. A Scottish Parliament was established in 1999 with limited power over matters such as health, education and the environment, and the pro-independence Scottish National Party now forms the government there. After winning a majority in the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, the party pressed for an independence referendum, with the consent of the British government. In 2014, after a bitter campaign, Scots voted 55 percent to 45 percent to remain in the United Kingdom.

In the 2016 Brexit referendum, a majority of Scots voted to remain in the European Union, while Britain as a whole voted to leave. But the Scottish National Party has delayed pressing for a second referendum on independence.

FLANDERS, Belgium

Flanders, known for its medieval cities and its World War I battlefields, is one of three regions in the federation of Belgium, but is home to the majority of the country’s 11 million inhabitants, and produces about half its GDP. Flemish people speak Dutch, whereas Walloons — residents of the second largest region, Wallonia — speak French and some German.

Flanders has existed as a political entity since the Middle Ages, encompassing the territory around the cities of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres, but never achieved full sovereignty. Belgium itself, founded in 1830, is a relatively young country in Europe. The Flemish independence movement emerged in the late 19th century and gained momentum after World War II. From 1970 onward, the region progressively obtained autonomy, following six constitutional revisions that transformed Belgium from a unitary country into a federation.

Today, Flanders has its own Parliament and government, with authority over language, culture, education, municipalities, public works, the economy and even foreign trade. The Flemish independence movement is represented politically by the New Flemish Alliance, a conservative nationalist party that is part of the current federal government, and Flemish Interest, a smaller populist party with strong anti-immigrant views. Both parties demand independence.

CORSICA, France

The mountainous Mediterranean island of Corsica is one of France’s 18 regions. Its inhabitants make up 0.5 percent of France’s population of 67 million. The island’s main economic activities are tourism and subsistence-oriented local commerce.

Because Corsica is close to Italy, Italian culture has historically had a strong influence on the island, reflected in the local tongue, Corsican.

Corsican nationalism emerged after World War I and grew into a movement demanding more autonomy and even independence. Since the 1970s, there have been flare-ups of political violence in Corsica, including bombings and assassinations carried out by groups supporting the independence movement. The French state has always opposed full independence, but over the past decades, it has granted greater autonomy to Corsica than to any other region and invested strongly in its infrastructure.

The Corsican nationalist movement is primarily represented by two political parties: Femu a Corsica, which demands more autonomy, and Corsica Libera, which is separatist. During the territorial elections of 2015, a regionalist coalition supported by both nationalist parties won 36.9 percent of the vote. In a landslide victory on Sunday, Corsican nationalists won 56.5 percent of the vote in the second round of territorial elections, confirming continuing calls for greater autonomy from Paris.

LOMBARDY, Italy

With more than 10 million inhabitants, Lombardy is the most populous of Italy’s 20 regions, and its capital, Milan, is the country’s financial and fashion center.

Italy’s 1948 Constitution gave five regions — Valle d’Aosta, Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, Sardinia, Sicily and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol — broader powers in areas including finance and administration. But regions in the north still have active separatist movements. Since 2013, Lombardy has been governed by members of the Lega Nord, a party founded in 1991 through the federation of several hybrid separatist movements, including the local Lega Lombarda.

An early incarnation of the party envisioned the creation — and secession — of a state known as Padania, which included northern regions as well as Umbria, Tuscany and the Marches. The party has since abandoned its separatist longings to pursue a broader support base, and in October it dropped the “Nord” from its name.

The Pro Lombardia Indipendenza movement is the region’s only active secessionist group. It has seats in only five municipalities and is part of the European Free Alliance.

VENETO, Italy

Veneto separatists still mourn the decline of the Most Serene Republic of Venice, a sovereign state in northeastern Italy that held sway for around 1,100 years before it fell to foreign forces in 1797. The Veneto has its own widely spoken language, Venetian.

The regional council last year also sought to have the “Venetian people” recognized as a minority, but the national government challenged that measure earlier this year. Numerous movements in the region — broadly known as Venetists — still aspire to significantly greater autonomy, if not independence. Some are longstanding parties like the Liga Veneta, which helped found the Lega Nord. Since 2010, the region has been governed by the Northern League.

In some cases, Veneto separatists have clashed with the law. A group of separatists who occupied the Campanile in St. Mark’s Square in 1997 was sentenced to prison. Members of the National Liberation Movement of the Venetian People who attended a 2009 protest march in camouflage were accused by the police of being a paramilitary group. In 2014, a group of separatists was briefly arrested on terrorism charges.

Here are two recent examples, one violent and one peaceful.

Yugoslavia was founded after World War I, uniting the Slavic peoples of the Balkan Peninsula under one sovereign state for the first time in history. But there were religious and ethnic divisions, with repeated eruptions of violence. The collapse of the Soviet Union made the collapse of Yugoslavia almost inevitable, and the country broke up in a civil war as the majority Serbs tried to enforce their dominance and hold on to all of Bosnia and the majority-Muslim Serbian province of Kosovo. The Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts provoked international intervention by NATO and the United Nations. Today, the former Yugoslavia has seven successor states: Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo. Five European Union countries do not recognize Kosovo’s independence, and Spain is one of them.

Czechoslovakia broke up peacefully after the collapse of the Soviet Union in what was called the “velvet divorce” of 1993. Since then, both its successor states, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, have joined the European Union.