This book investigates why, despite European integration, separatist nationalism continues to thrive in EU member states. Laible demonstrates that the EU sustains the importance of statehood, and therefore separatism, and creates new forms of political capital that nationalists employ in their struggles for self-government.
Jane Jacobs, writing from her adoptive country, uses the problems facing an independence-seeking Quebec and Canada as a whole to examine the universal problem of sovereignty and autonomy that nations great and small have struggled with throughout history. Using Norway’s relatively peaceful divorce from Sweden as an example, Jacobs contends that Canada and Canadians—Quebecois and Anglophones alike—can learn important lessons from similar sovereignty questions of the past.
This book provides a comparative survey of recent attempts at secession and separatist movements from across Europe and Asia, and assesses the responses of the respective host governments. With political analysis of recent cases ranging from the Balkans, the USSR, the UK and the Basque Country, to Sri Lanka, Burma, China, Tibet and Taiwan, the authors identify both similarities and differences in the processes and outcomes of secessionist and separatist movements across the two distinct regions.
In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, secessionist forces carved four de facto states from parts of Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Ten years on, those states are mired in uncertainty. Beset by internal problems, fearful of a return to the violence that spawned them, and isolated and unrecognized internationally, they survive behind cease-fire lines that have temporarily frozen but not resolved their conflicts with the metropolitan powers. In this, the first in-depth comparative analysis of these self-proclaimed republics, Dov Lynch examines the logic that maintains this uneasy existence and explores ways out of their volatile predicament. Drawing on extensive travel within Eurasia and remarkable access to leading figures in the secessionist struggles, Lynch spotlights the political, military, and economic dynamics--both internal and external--that drive the existence of South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria, and Nagorno-Karabakh. He also evaluates a range of options for resolving the status of the de facto states before violence returns, and proposes a coordinated approach, spearheaded by the European Union, that balances de facto and de jure independence and sovereignty. Slim but packed with information and insight, this volume also offers instructive lessons about the dynamics of intrastate and ethnic conflict and the merits of autonomy and power sharing in places as diverse as Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, and Chechnya.
This book explores the conflict between the Catalan project to become independent and the Spanish state’s opposition to any attempt of secessionism. The volume addresses some of the key political and academic issues of contemporary European societies: nationalism, separatism and sovereignty. The banned referendum in Catalonia in October 2017 unveiled the existence of multiple crises, from territorial to economic and political. Indeed, the Catalan issue is about the crisis of sovereignty: who holds legitimacy to make decisions, and who is in power legally and politically? The book is structured according to three themes: sovereignty and its people, where the realignment to independence, populism and the definition of the demos are discussed; collective identities and actions, to account for the shaping of ‘us’, the importance of collective memory and the cross-alliances forged during the referendum; and internationalization, focusing on Europeanisation, international media and comparative constitutional perspectives.
Sovereignty marks the boundary between politics and law. Highlighting the legal context of politics and the political context of law, it thus contributes to the internal dynamics of both political and legal systems. This book comprehends the persistence of sovereignty as a political and juridical concept in the post-sovereign social condition. The tension and paradoxical relationship between the semantics and structures of sovereignty and post-sovereignty are addressed by using the conceptual framework of the autopoietic social systems theory. Using a number of contemporary European examples, developments and paradoxes, the author examines topics of immense interest and importance relating to the concept of sovereignty in a globalising world. The study argues that the modern question of sovereignty permanently oscillating between de iure authority and de facto power cannot be discarded by theories of supranational and transnational globalized law and politics. Criticising quasi-theological conceptualizations of political sovereignty and its juridical form, the study reformulates the concept of sovereignty and its persistence as part of the self-referential communication of the systems of positive law and politics. The book will be of considerable interest to academics and researchers in political, legal and social theory and philosophy.
This title draws on extensive research from four plurinational states - the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, and France - to provide a radical rethink of the very nature of sovereignty and the state.
Nationalism remains one of the key political, societal, and sociopsychological phenomena in contemporary Europe. Its significance for the justification of state policies and the stability of political systems, particularly in the context of advanced democracies, and its significance for people's basic needs for a political and cultural identity and a sense of national pride continue to challenge scholars. The international scholars assembled in this edited collection suggest that the use of three perspectives--supranationalism, boundary-making nationalism, and regional nationalism--may be promising as an explanatory framework for the analysis of nationalism in Europe. The book's contributors distance themselves from older dichotomies such as civic and ethnic nationalism and questions the one-sided normativity of nationalism, in particular in the concept of liberal nationalism. It argues that a promising approach to contemporary nationalism should reflect the multiplicity of nationalism. The volume is a collection of studies by a multinational group of authors with backgrounds in Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Germany, Latvia, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, Ukraine and the United States.
The electoral success of secessionist parties in Catalonia and Scotland over the last decade, together with Brexit and the support for Eurosceptic parties in many EU member states, have prompted a rethink of many taken-for-granted notions about politics in Spain, the UK and the EU. Secessionist parties in Catalonia and Scotland often combine calls for independence with support for the EU, but independence for Catalonia might entail the loss of EU membership. In the UK, Scotland voted for the UK to remain in the EU, yet it was forced to leave the Union along with the rest of the country: what effect has Brexit had on Scottish independence claims? Through comparing Catalonia and Scotland, this short volume aims to contribute to debates on, and advance knowledge of, visions of independence and integration, how they interrelate in Europe’s emergent political order, and what they entail for European integration and democracy in the EU.
The book outlines the historical development of Public Law and the state from ancient times to the modern day, offering an account of relevant events in parallel with a general historical background, establishing and explaining the relationships between political, religious, and economic events.