Nei giorni dal 6 al 13 agosto 2000 si è tenuto a Oslo, promosso dall’ICHS (“Comitato Internazionale di Scienze Storiche”) il 19° “Congresso Internazionale di Scienze Storiche”,
Uno
dei venti argomenti della sezione Temi specialistici era “Regioni e
regionalizzazione”, introdotto da Einar Niemi dell’Università di Tromsø, per il
quale sono stati presentati nove contributi specifici. Tra questi ci è sembrato
di particolare interesse quello del Prof. Hans Jürgen Puhle, dell’Università
Johann Wolfgang Goethe di Frankfurt/M, sul tema “Regioni, regionalismo e
regionalizzazione nel ventesimo secolo – Europa”.
La
terminologia adoperata è in parte opinabile, la stessa definizione di “regioni”
(espressione di natura geografica passata al lessico amministrativo) risulta
palesemente impropria nei casi in cui, trattandosi propriamente di comunità
etniche, sarebbe più corretto utilizzare quest’ultima categoria.
Ciò
comunque nulla toglie allo spessore accademico dell’intervento svolto dal Prof.
Puhle, ricco di interessanti attinenze geopolitiche, che qui integralmente
riproduciamo nella versione in inglese, non essendo disponibile quella in
lingua toscoitalica.
Hans-Jürgen Puhle
Regions, Regionalism, and Regionalization in 20th-Century
Europe
This paper will focus on the
relationship between regions and states, i.e. the relevant nation states and
‘nations’ (no matter how the latter are conceived), between regionalisms and
the respective nationalisms or other movements in favor of competing objectives
(religious, class, etc.), and on processes of regionalization in Europe,
basically in Western and Southern Europe, with regard to their different
motives, actors, aims, modes of operation, coalitions and outcomes. Of
particular interest are the relations between regionalisms and
regionalizations: Regionalist movements, if they do not aspire to separatism or
a full fledged federalization of the state, usually are asking for moves towards
decentralizing and regionalizing the state, for regional autonomies or at least
more liberties, processes which will be called regionalization. And it can be
shown that strong regionalist movements can help in (eventually even trigger)
regionalization, particularly if the respective objectives of the regionalists
and of the political elites of the state somehow coincide, at least in parts.
There have also been, however, regionalizations which had not much to do with
regionalist movements.
The region, hence, here is
understood as a subnational entity.
What a region is depends on
how it is defined. Everything can be defined as a region provided that it is
smaller than a state and larger than a locality, a département or a small
province. It can be a ‘classical’ historic region like the traditional French
provinces which were institutionally demolished by the Revolution and Napoleon,
or earlier territories of their own like Lombardy, Catalonia, Wales or
Franconia, but it could also be an artificial construct invented by technocrats
like a recent French planning region or one of the NUT levels of EU
regulations. If there is a political move for it, every part of a centralist
state could be regionalized (even if it was never before considered to be a
‘region’), but feelings of a regional identity and cohesion, and regionalist
movements usually will only be generated if there is a longer regional
tradition, a common history and experience, a distinct language. Here we can
find striking similarities between today’s regionalisms in Western and Southern
Europe or on the Balkans and the ‘small’ nationalisms of the periphery or of
minorities or conquered peoples which.tried to break away, since the early and
mid 19th century, from the multinational empires of the Habsburgs,
the Ottomans and the Russian Czars (or from the U.K., in the case of the
Irish). We can find structural and functional similarities between ‘regional’
and ‘national’ constructs and mechanisms with regard to self-definition,
ideology, region building, movements, coalitions and politics in general. Many
regionalist movements can also be conceived of (and some consider themeselves)
as movements of ‘minority’ nationalisms (‘minority’ with regard to the state as
a whole, not to the region where the ‘nationals’ usually constitute the
majority). It is not always so that
‘nationalisms’ are per se stronger than ‘regionalisms’. There can be
comparatively ‘weak’ nations and nationalisms (like those of the Bosnians or
the Makedonians, or in earlier times the Rumanians), and ‘strong’ regionalisms
(like the one of the Catalans). Beyond the traditional preferences for a
particular wording (e.g.: ‘national’ in Spain and Great Britain, ‘regional’ in
France) it is the constellation of the different factors that counts. Minority nationalism and regionalism both
seem to figure on the same sliding scale and can be functional equivalents, so
that many of the questions, categories and approaches which have been designed
for the analysis of nations and nationalisms can also be applied, in a modified
way, to regions and regionalisms. This paper will show how profitably this can
be done in a number of areas. The basic focus here will be on two purposes: (1)
to try to explain the differences among West and South European regionalisms
(or: minority nationalisms), and to account for the characteristic fact that
some have made it to a full-fledged political mass movement, and most have not,
and (2) to try to locate the West and South European regionalisms within their
broader context and their interactions with the established states and ‘nation
state’ nationalisms. There will be five points:
1. Questions and Problems of Comparison
2. Typological Stages
3. Some West and South European Cases
4. Modifications: The Catalan and the Basque Case
5. Regionalization
in Western and Southern Europe and the EU
1. Questions and Problems of Comparison
In contrast to
most of the Central, East and North European minority nationalisms of the 19th
century, the 20th-century regionalisms in Western and Southern
Europe have in general been centered around a region, not a state. They have
usually opposed the centralist states and their traditional.3 nationalisms,
which in many ways have reflected the different paths of European societies
into the modern world. And, to a certain extent, they have destroyed or
modified old assumptions like those of Great Britain, Spain or France being
‘nation states’. Some of them have, completely or in parts, even gone
separatist, like the Irish and the Basques, and have asked for a new ‘nation
state’ of their own, which should bring together the nation in terms of
regional culture and history in a state. They meant it territorially, not in
the sense of an association of individuals, no matter where they lived, as
conceived of by Otto Bauer. Their protagonists thought about dividing lines and
boundaries, and some of them have not been far from seeing their region as kind
of an ‘opportunity structure’ along the lines of Rokkan, Urwin and others, even
if the movements went more fundamentalist or primordialist afterwards. So in
some cases the ‘opportunity structure’ theories have a high explanatory
potential. Like the ‘nation’, the
‘region’ is a construct, an invention, a fiction. If the idea of a region ‘of
one’s own’ is to inspire people, it is important that the alleged common
characteristics be sufficiently plausible to a sufficient number of people. As
in the case of the nation, they can be found in language and culture, religion,
traditions, institutions, shared beliefs, mechanisms of communication and
‘understanding’ (Tönnies), of inclusion and exclusion. And it does make a
categorial difference whether or not a region has some institutional degree of
autonomy or self government, as in the case of the nation it makes a difference
whether or not the ‘nation’, in the moment it comes to conceive of itself as a
nation (or is being ‘invented’), has a state of its own. ‘Regionalism’ here is conceived as a
political concept and ideology and the respective movement behind it. What all
regionalisms seem to have in common is that they represent aspirations,
movements, organizations with a certain mass support, which, by means of
political mobilization, organisation, pressure and even unrest and violence,
try to emphasize and strengthen the influence and the power of a region against
the central state and its authorities. As a rule, regionalists ask for self
determination, self government, institutional decentralization, including the
decentralization of the bureaucracy, and for certain privileges, and they
demand a respect for their traditional culture and their peculiar institutions.
They may want to keep them if they are still in possession of them, or they may
want them back if these institutions have been abolished or taken away. They
react against the aspirations and demands of a centralist state, they want
autonomy, at times separation and independence whether they can afford it or
not. In federal states where there is already a certain degree of self
government, limited autonomy and a decentralized set of institutions, political
regionalism generally tends to be weaker. Québec certainly was an exceptional
case, given a cultural ‘minority situation’ within a region.
What my colleagues
and I have been trying to do in our research is to look comparatively into some
West and South European cases of regionalism or peripheral nationalism in order
to find the adequate categories for their analysis and a tentative working
typology, and to ask some simple questions like the following:
1. What makes some regions go regionalist (or
nationalist) and others not? Why have some regionalisms become political
movements with mass support, whereas others have stopped at the level of some
cultural mobilization?
2. Who are the regionalists? Which are the issues
and interests involved? What is the relationship between ‘regional’ (or:
‘national’) and ‘social’ cleavages, between socio-economic and other
(linguistic, cultural, religious) factors?
3. How can we explain the different degrees of
heterogeneity of the regionalist movements? What is the relative weight of the
divergencies within a region, of the economic background, of class, of
‘ethnicity’?
4. Does ‘bigness’ matter? Do time constellations
matter? 5. What is the weight of
industrialization and urbanization, of migrations, of the proximity of the
languages or dialects involved, or of ‘irredenta’ situations and of social and
political institutions?
6. Why have some movements been more successful
than others? Is there anything the
latecomers in regionalism (or minority nationalism) could learn from the
pioneers, e.g. Occitania from Catalonia?
7. Which are the solutions that have been
accomplished? And particularly, have the different patterns of regionalization
in Western and Southern Europe been adequate answers to the demands of the
regionalist movements?
2. Typological Stages
In order to find
adequate descriptive and analytic categories and patterns for a comparison
between different regionalisms.5 we can productively make use of the
terminology and the hypotheses Czech historian Miroslav Hroch has developed in
his book „Die Vorkämpfer der nationalen Bewegungen bei den kleinen Völkern
Europas” (1968), the first comparative and systematic study of the nationalist
movements of the smaller nations of Northern, East Central, and South Eastern
Europe during the nineteenth century. (Engl.: “Social Preconditions of National
Revival in Europe”, Cambridge 1986). As it has been shown by subsequent studies
by P. Alter, G. Brunn, O. Dann, L. Mees, K.J. Nagel, A. Helle and others,
Hroch’s categories and criteria for periodization to a great extent, can also
be applied to the West and South European cases of regionalism, no matter
whether or not we share Hrochs basic assumptions, or the concept of ‘national
awakening’ with all its dangers of reification. In both cases, Hroch’s Eastern
nationalisms and our Western regionalisms, we have territorially concentrated
movements within larger established states, be it the multinational empires of
earlier times, or the centralist West European states like Great Britain,
France or Spain which have (though erroneously) conceived of themselves as
being ‘nation states’ and the administrators of which, for a long time, have
tried to ignore the existence of minority ethnic groups within the boundaries
of their countries. In both cases we find the phenomenon of a belated nation or
region building opposing a traditional state structure. The earlier East
European nationalist movements, and a few in Northern and Western Europe, like the
Irish, have generally asked for self government, ideally expressed in a new
‘nation state’. The West and South European regionalists and peripheral
nationalists in their overwhelming majority have preferred federalist solutions
or statutes of autonomy and limited regional self government.
Within the East
European context Miroslav Hroch has proposed a typology of three different
stages within the development of the movements of the ‘small nations’:
1. The
first stage (phase A) is characterized by the early beginnings of a national
consciousness in linguistic and cultural terms which remains limited to a
relatively small group of some intellectuals (mostly teachers, professors,
librarians, doctors and the like) who try to preserve or even codify the elements
or institutions of the hitherto not yet established national culture.
2. The
most important second stage (phase B) is the phase of what has often been
called the ‘national awaking’: It begins with the massive breakthrough of
national consciousness and cultural nationalism (AB), and it might end - if it
comes to this - with the breakthrough of political nationalism as a mass
movement (BC).
3. The
third stage (phase C) is the period of full-fledged political nationalism from
its start to its further achievements which might eventually end in the
establishment of the ‘nation state’ (NS).
Hroch is primarily interested
in Phase B, and in what happens in the transitions from A to B and from B to C.
He is particularly concerned about relating the transitions in nationalism: AB
and BC to the basic transitions in the economic, social und political history
of the statewide society involved as a whole. The latter transformations, in a
somewhat simplistic way, may be labelled as: bourgeois revolution (BR),
industrial revolution or breakthrough of industrialization (IR), and
organization of (a) working class movement(s) (OW).
If we now try to
bring these six variables, three referring to nationalism and three to
statewide development, for different movements, nations or regions, into their
respective time sequences, we find different patterns of relationship between
‘national’ (or in our case: ‘regional’) and statewide developmental processes
which have essentially framed the character of the particular nationalist movements.
Some of these patterns or time sequences can be found, not without
simplifications, in the following list (‘tentative typology’, fig. 1), which,
in some cases, might require slight modifications in the course of further
empirical research. The criteria AB, BC, NS have been more or less designed
according to Hroch. The periodizations of the types 3 to 5 follow Hroch; n. 1
and 2 have been added to show the contrast. The types n. 6 and 7 for the West and South European
reegionalists have been put together on the basis of evidence I have
collected. The terminology is mine.
(Fig. 1)
Some of these
cases (particularly those under 6 and 7) evidently need some comments: The
relative over- or underdevelopment of a region (in terms, basically, of the
distribution of sectoral employment and the sectoral shares in the GNP and
other indicators), which constitutes the basic difference between n. 6 and 7,
refers to the time of the breakthrough of cultural regionalism or nationalism
(IR v. AB) in a particular region (cf. Flemings/Walloons; Wales divided). ‘NS’ means, of course, in most cases not the
‘nation state’ but its functional substitutes like autonomy statutes,
federalization or regionalization. I shall not go into the earlier East
European cases which have been studied in extenso by Hroch and others and of
which I am not an expert. Some of the results of Hroch’s research, however,
should be mentioned here briefly, because they seem to have a certain relevance
within the West European regionalist context:
-
For Hroch the fundamental prerequisite of the existence of a nation and
of full fledged nationalism is the dominant role of the regional or national
bourgeoisie. This has been more or less corroborated for the regionalisms (or
minority nationalisms) of our West and South European cases; only in the case
of the Basques it has to be modified, but even here, to a certain extent, it
might be upheld if we include into the definition of the ‘bourgeoisie’ the more
traditional, pre-industrial and professional urban strata, in the wider German
sense of ‘Bürgertum’.
-
Hroch has generally recognized the fact that, during the phase of the
‘national awaking’ (phase B), it is not yet the bourgeoisie which plays the
leading role and directs the nationalist movement. The bourgeoisie comes later,
usually at the end of phase B. In its beginnings, the promoters of the national
consciousness and of an incipient cultural nationalism are mostly
petty-bourgeois opinion leaders like teachers, clerics, journalists or
professional urban notables, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers etc. We can find the
same pattern in Western Europe.
-
Another characteristic is that the later phase B sets in, the more
peasants may be found in the nationalist movement.
-
Furthermore, the strength and the tempo of a ‘nationalist awakening’ (if
we are to use this term) seem to depend on the size of the small nation and on
a certain degree of education and urbanization, of (distant) market
orientation, communication and social mobility. Here Hroch’s results are
matched by the evidence presented by Karl Deutsch, Stein Rokkan and others.
High rates of mobility and communication may, however, have disintegrating and
retarding effects within the process of building the small nation (or the
region), if they exist at a statewide range prior to the breakthrough of
nationalism or regionalism. Similarly, nationalism or regionalism can also be
weakened by a constellation in which we find the conflicts and antagonisms
between entrepreneurs and workers already institutionalized at a statewide
level before the interests of the smaller nation or region opposing the
centralist state come to be articulated. So, in the formulae of our list, it
makes a big difference whether AB follows OW or vice versa (cf. the Czechs or
the Catalans vs. the Basques).
3. Some West and South European Cases
It seems, however,
to be a characteristic of the West and South European cases that only a few of
the regionalist (or minority nationalist) movements have reached phase C, i.e.
the breakthrough of a political movement with mass support. The exceptions are
Catalonia, the Basque provinces, the Irish, and probably, to an extent, the
Corsicans. This is not only due to the fact that after 1918 a number of East,
Central and South East European nations could take advantage of the breakdown
of three multinational empires, a situation which never had an equivalent in
Western Europe. If we want to find out why these few have made their way to
full-fledged political regionalism or nationalism, and others not, like the Gallegos
or the Occitans, although the explicit regional and national identity of the
latter in cultural terms cannot be questioned, we have to look more in detail
into the peculiar combinations of socio-economic, linguistic, cultural and
institutional factors. I shall only mention four categories.
1. It is
obvious that the divergence between socio-economic underdevelopment and
overdevelopment of the region in relation to the state to which it belongs (cf.
position of: IR), makes a significant difference, but cannot explain
everything. The particular strength and power of Catalan regionalism since the
midst, and Basque regionalism or nationalism since the end of the 19th
century, to a grat extent, could be derived from the disproportion between
political dispossession on one hand, and relative economic overdevelopment on
the other. In the case of the Flemings and the Welsh, however, relative
overdevelopment at a time has not pushed the respective regionalism or
nationalism into phase C, apart from the fact that economic development does
not always automatically coincide with social and political development. The
Flemings and the Walloons reacted differently at different times, according to
their economic situation. And Wales has always been divided into the developed
South and the underdeveloped North. Ireland, in contrast, has experienced a
successful fight for its liberation promoted by a strong nationalist, though
factionalized movement with
mass support, inspite of the fact that it was - with the exception of the
Northeast - so obviously underdeveloped that it might figure in our list among
the backward South East European nations constituting the type of ‘insurgent
dissociation’.
2. To have
a regional language and culture of one’s own seems to be a minimum requirement
for the formation of cultural and hence political nationalism or regionalism,
but it certainly is not a sufficient guarantee for the success of a political
movement, the basic indicator of which would be that at least one of the two
strongest parties of the region were.9 regionalist or nationalist. Two cases,
Andalucía and the Canary Islands, during the last 20 years, have shown how
difficult, if not impossible it is to try to create an ‘artificial’ political
regionalism or nationalism lacking a basis in language and culture. The support
the respective movements of these two regions have received in the polls for a
moment, after 1980 has turned out to be a short-lived coalition of protest
voters. On the other hand, the existence of a regional language may not suffice
to bring about a massive political movement, as it can be seen in Spanish
Galicia, in Wales, in Occitania, or in Brittany. Scotland may be an example to
the opposite, having achieved a certain level of nationalism without having a
unifying language of some size of its own.
3. A third
factor which seems to make a great difference and which has a much greater
importance than it has been granted by most of the literature, is the existence
or non-existence of well defined (past or present) administrative and political
institutions which are peculiar to the region. Most of the studies centered
around ethnicity, memory, cultural constructions or deconstructions, have
tended to underestimate the weight of institutions, which often have been the hard
core of the historical process which is, I think, more than myths, symbols,
cultural interaction, language, policies or a diffuse ‘ethnic past’.
Catalonia, which practically
has been a state of its own in the middle ages and has kept many of its institutions
much longer, and the Basque provinces with their historical micro-autonomies
guaranteed over centuries, have had such institutions which have been invoked
by the contemporary regional nationalisms of both regions. Galicia, which has
always been part of the Kingdom of León, had nothing comparable. Here, the lack
of such institutions, or at least of the memory of their previous existence,
has undoubtedly contributed to the political limitations of Gallego regionalism
or nationalism which, in spite of its extended and rich culture, has never come
to surpass phase B before the 1980s. The different ‘nationalist’ groups of
Galicia only began to fare better in the polls in the 90s, after some years of
institutionalized and experienced regional autonomy. Before this, the ‘ethnic
past’ was definitely not enough. Other containing factors of political
regionalism in Galicia have been the relative underdevelopment, the lack of
industrialization, apart from some shoreline enclaves, a low rate of
communication, the poverty, isolation and dependency of the small ‘minifundista
peasants’, by far the majority of the Gallego population, and the clientelistic
structures of traditional ‘caciquismo’ which, by their integration into the
statewide (not regional) notable party system, for a long time have prevented
rural Galicia from any kind of mobilization or autonomous organization,
regionalist or not.
A similar absence of
distinctive regional institutions can also be noted for Brittany and Occitania,
apart from the latter’s traditional territorial subdivisions. In the case of
Corsica its character as an island, its peculiar history and clientelistic
rivalries may, to a certain degree, have strengthened its regionalism. Even the
relative weakness of Welsh regionalism or nationalism compared to the Scottish
may have one of its roots in the quantitative and qualitative differences of
regional institutions, particularly the absence of distinctive administrative
institutions in Wales.
4. In
order to account for the special situation of Northern Ireland and of the
Basque provinces, characterized by violence and terrorism, a fourth category
should be introduced, in addition to relative development, language and
characteristic institutions, which is the existence of high rates of repression,
frustration and violence.
Some of the cases mentioned
here have also been analyzed by some authors (M. Hechter, T. Nairn et al.),
within the framework of the theory of ‘internal colonialism’, a (rather
descriptive) derivative of the nationalistic and anti-imperialist Third World
dependency theories which has particularly emphasized the process of
exploitation of the peripherical regions by the centralist administration and
its agencies. The explanatory potential of this theory, within the context of the
problems dealt with here, has, however, remained limited. It applies to
underdeveloped regions only, and it cannot explain why some of the internally
colonized regions have made it to massive political regionalism or nationalism,
and some others have not.
4. Modifications: The Catalan and Basque Case
A typology
constructed on the basis of the four criteria I have mentioned would be a
productive first starting point, but still needs further modification. Catalan
and Basque regionalism or nationalism, e.g., would have been in the same
analytical category, at least until 1940, but they nevertheless have developed
quite differently: In Catalonia the transitions to cultural (AB) and to
political regional nationalism (BC) have taken place about three decades
earlier than in the Basque provinces (AB 1850/1880, BC 1900/1930). The
breakthrough of industrialization in the Basque region was, however, only about
a decade late (late 1870s vs. late 1860s).
The bourgeois leadership of Catalan regionalism, however, left the
workers basically to the anarcho-syndicalists. The Basque regional
nationalists, in contrast, who were not in the first place led by bourgeois
groups, tried to integrate at least the skilled workers of Basque origin who
felt threatened by the majority of unskilled immigrant workers. Catalonia was
dominated by the textile industry, the Basque region by heavy industry,
shipbuilding and metal industry. Given the size of Catalonia and the traditions
of its economy, Catalan bankers, merchants and entrepeneurs were used to
thinking in regional categories and dimensions, and their attention focussed
around Mediterranean and worldwide, not Spanish markets. Thus the regional
bourgeoisie could become the promoter and first leader of Catalan regionalism
since the 1890s. When, at a later stage, after 1917, the Catalan peasants and
the middle classes turned regionalist or nationalist, they had to create new
and different parties corresponding to their divergent interests. Catalanism,
to the end of the Civil War, remained divided along the lines of social
stratification into two or at times even three different currents. Until the
1920s the bourgeois Lliga was the hegemonic political factor; after 1930
the politics of Catalanism were dominated by the groups and parties of middle
class leftist liberalism and republicanism which had eventually formed the
alliance of the Esquerra. The
bourgeoisie of the Basque region, in its vast majority was not
nationalist or regionalist. The size of the Basque market was relatively small.
Banking and industry, therefore, had always been integrated into the statewide
Spanish market, of which they dominated sizeable sections, and Basque business
interests had for long been closely connected with the interests of the state
bureaucracy in Madrid. Heavy industry and shipbuilding, in addition, were much
more in need of state mediation, state initiative and protection than textile
industry. With the bourgeoisie being absent, the social milieu which, from
around 1900 on, organized politically in the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV),
was and remained comparatively homogeneous: It was catholic and basically
conservative, at times tendentially (but not too much) republican. The
nationalists were essentially petty-bourgeois notables, craftsmen, shopkeepers,
peasants and fisherman. The catholic clergy fulfilled an important elite
function within the movement. Compared to Catalonia, another fundamental
difference is that the PNV and its labour union (founded in 1911) succeeded in
mobilizing a sizeable number of workers of Basque origin, a process which was
undoubtedly facilitated by the fact that the Basque bourgeoisie did not belong
to the Basque movement. Basque regional nationalism, in spite of some
occasional splits and secessions, down to the years of the Republic and the
Civil War, was and remained, on the whole, a much more homogeneous and united
movement than Catalan regional nationalism. The problems of the Basque movement
did not so much result from its social heterogeneity, but more from the smaller
size and the institutional diversity of the region, the somewhat artificial
character of Basque ‘unity’ and identity in linguistic and cultural terms, the
special problem of Navarra and the ribera in the South, where only half of the
population is Basque, the difficulties of the language and of a valid
definition of what ‘Basque’ means, and the comparatively lesser degree of
cultural saturation and self-confidence. It is only a minority of the Basques
who speak and understand ‘Euskera’, the Basque language. These factors have also contributed to the
different reactions in Catalonia and in the Basque provinces to Francoist
repression and to the consequences of the second Spanish industrialization,
since the 1960s, for the earlier industrialized regions: Francoist repression
has produced more devastating effects among the Basques. Basque opposition
against the regime has been more widespread, more radical, better organized,
more violent and more efficient than in Catalonia, and thus has triggered more repression,
etc. During the 1960s Basque regional nationalism has definitely split into two
factions, the moderate majority faction in the tradition of the PNV, the new
Basque Left which first organized in the numerous marxist-leninist groups of
ETA, some of which have propagated and - in their view quite successsfully -
used terrorism and violence as political means. During the transition from
Francoism to democracy these groups formed two new political alliances of the
‘patriotic Basque left’ (HB and EE), which, in the elections down to 1992,
received between 22 and 30 % of the Basque vote. Whereas the more moderate EE
later merged with the socialists, the major and more extremist group, Herri
Batasuna (HB), since the late 90s Euskal Herritarrok (EH), continued to attract
a sizable (though through the 90s slowly declining) share of the regionalist or
separatist vote (12.3% in 1996). This party which has openly fought any
compromise between the regional government and Madrid and steered an
antiparliamentary and separatist course, can, however, not any longer be
considered to be marxist or even leftist in its entirety. Some of its groups
seem to be rather close to the die-hard radicals and separatists (now a
minority) within the traditional PNV, which has eventually split into two
parties (PNV and EA). Until the end of the 20th century, despite
some progress which has been made, it has not been possible to unite the
divergent forces of Basque regional nationalism behind a common platform for
the regional peace process.
In contrast to
this, Catalan regional nationalism, to a great extent due to the virtually
moderate and reduced, but persistent and continuous oppositional activities
within the region, at the end of the Franco regime has presented itself much
more unified than ever before. Since then, during more than two decades, the
populist catch-all strategies of the dominant Catalanist party (CiU) which,
under the leadership of Jordi Pujol, has governed the region, have, however,
contributed to a process of moderation, if not dilution of traditional
Catalanism.
5. Regionalization in Western
and Southern Europe and the EU
Regionalism and
Regionalization are related to each other. In Western and Southern Europe,
during the last decades, regionalization has become a fashion in politics (and
a major growth industry in the social sciences). This is, of course, not to say
that there has not been a need for it. There is a need for it, within the
traditional state structures as well as within the emerging European Union.
Regionalization has, however, not in all cases been meant to be a response to
the challenges of regionalism or peripheral nationalism, although the pressures
of the latter have been felt. Its motivations have been much more general:
The socio-economic
development of advanced industrial societies has produced two convergent trends
which have fundamentally modified the 18th and 19th-century
traditions of federal and centralist states. Traditionally federal states like
Germany, the United States or Switzerland have experienced a certain degree of,
as it seems, unavoidable centralization, for reasons of planning, bureaucratic
administration including the welfare and defense bureaucracies, of corporate
coordination and integration into international markets and systems.
‘Cooperative federalism’ has just been one variant of it. - In the
traditionally centralist states of Western and Southern Europe, particularly,
we find that, despite all the tendencies towards ‘bigness’ and corporate
intermediation at the macro-level, there seems to be a structural need of
advanced industrial societies, at a certain stage of their development, to
create institutions of participation, administration and planning, of
representation and control at an intermediate level between the grass roots and
the state. Planning, corporate coordination and the administration of the
welfare state need a certain degree of centralization, but it seems as if they
could not optimally function along centralist lines only. The people and the
interests want a medium level ‘in between’ for purposes of initiative,
modification and control.
These structural trends
towards a regionalization of the state exist independently from whether or not
there have been traditions of regionalism in the regions. They may, however, be
reinforced or even changed in quality by the intervention of regionalist (or
minority nationalist) factors. So regionalization in a regionalist area is
usually different from, and more complex than, regionalization in a
non-regionalist area. In contemporary Western and Southern Europe, and even
within some states like Spain, we can find both cases. A common characteristic
of all the cases we know has, in fact, been the rapid emergence of regional
bureaucracies and the costly growth of the number of bureaucrats which at times
has matched the number of municipal and provincial or departmental
administrators who had already existed before regionalization began. This
process of an advanced parallel bureaucratization has been the more criticized,
the less obvious and the less politically legitimized the performances and
achievements of the new regional authorities have been, e.g. in Italy more than
in Spain. - In the details, the forms and modes of regionalization in Europe
have widely varied:
1. In France
regionalization (22 regions, out of 95 départements) for more than a decade
(1969-1981) has not been a response to major regionalist demands, all of which
- with the possible exception of the Corsicans - generally did not go beyond
the stage of a cultural movement. Its motives, like those of the
‘planification’ after 1945, have clearly been fiscal and technocratic, in order
to promote ‘l’amélioration et la rentabilisation du fonctionnement de l’Etat’.
What became regionalized, basically was the state budget. The regions were
primarily meant to be planning regions. The status quo of their economic
desequilibrium was not substantially altered, nor were the traditional power
structures. Frequently the aspirations of technocratic planning and the traditions
of departmental notable politics have entered into a stalemate. And at times
the central bureaucrats of Paris even sided with the prefects of the
departments against the weaker and less established regional authorities. Out
of the regions which have displayed regionalist energies, only Corsica,
Brittany and the Alsace have been designed to become regions of their own. The
space of Occitania was divided between several regions.
The regional reforms of the
socialist governments after 1981 have essentially modified this situation,
although it may still be an open question up to which point the changes might
have affected the structure of the distribution of power. The reforms which
have not been reversed by Conservative governments, have undoubtedly shifted power
from the prefects to the assemblies, both in the departments and in the
regions; the Parisian bureaucrats have been instructed to pay more respect to
regional interests and institutions, and in the two cases of a more explicit
and visible regionalism, Corsica and the Alsace, for evident political reasons,
special arrangements have been made in order to satisfy at least some of the
demands from the regions. In the case of Corsica this has eventually led to a
(moderate) autonomy statute in 1991, which, for more traditional than
functional reasons, nobody seems to like.
2. In Italy
(20 regions, out of 95 provinces) we find a mixed experience: With the
exception of the German speaking South Tyrolians, regionalist movements have
been generally weak and politically uninfluential. The basic motivation for a
limited regionalization, at least in the ‘classical’ cases of Sardegna, Valle
d’Aosta, Trentino-Alto Adige (1948) and Friuli-Venezia-Giulia (1963) has been
the protection of linguistic minorities, an objective that has been more or
less achieved. The only ones to take resort to stronger and at times even
violent resistance, because their demands were not met, were the South
Tyrolians. For them a solution has been found which, besides bilingualism, a
tripartite educational sector and the ‘proporzionale etnica’ within the
regional civil service implied a de facto deregionalization (or at least a more
realistic regional re-destricting): The statute of 1972 shifted powers back to
the provinces of Bolzano (German majority) and Trento (Italian majority). In
Sicily where regional autonomy was granted first in Italy (1946), basically
under the pressure of American mafia interests, regionalization has turned out
not to work at all, because there were no autochthonous political energies
behind it. When in the years after 1970
Italy turned to what might be called comprehensive regionalization, by which 15
new regions were created, the protection of linguistic and cultural minorities
basically worked in the North and in the Center (cf. Piemonte, Veneto, Molise),
but not in the South (cf. Basilicata,
Puglia, Calabria). To a certain extent, this can be considered to be a general
pattern. As far as financial redistribution or promotional or developmental
budgets are concerned, the comprehensive regionalization has, on the whole, not
changed much, except for an increase in patronage for the Christian Democrats
and the Communists, in ‘their’ respective regions, until the early 90s. The
poor regions have remained poor; in some cases even the subsidies from Rome,
which they had received in earlier years, have been cut. The expectations of an
increase in political participation and more efficient control of the
administration have also not come true. What was, indeed, achieved, was a
drastic increase in the number of civil servants and the emergence of new types
of regional bureaucrats and politicians, on one hand, and an additional
institutionalization of party hegemonies at the regional level, on the other.
This and the more general
state of inefficiency, stalemate, corruption and clientelism in Italian
politics, has triggered, during the last decade, a new and regionally powerful
movement: the Leghe, from the Lega Lombarda to the Lega Nord, which, for its
localist roots, its lack of coordination and its erratic moves, may not exactly
be a typical regionalist movement (and certainly not one from the periphery),
but rather an ill-coordinated protest coalition from the grass roots, inspired
by some semi-charismatic populists, but with leadership problems. In addition,
the lega has already lost some of its influence and votes in the course of the
slow reconsolidation of the Italian party system during the late 90s.
3. Given
the long and persistent rivalries between the Flemings and the Walloons, the
case of Belgium (3 regions out of 9 provinces), unlike France and Italy
and more like Great Britain and Spain, has been presenting a set of severe
problems which could only be solved by establishing a full-fledged federal
system (through a temporary intermediate stage of a ‘consociational democracy’
à la Lijphart et al.). This process began when the Belgians regionalized their
state in 1980, a move that still suffered from a number of deficiencies: so the
tripartition of the country did not (and could not) everywhere correspond to
the linguistic boundaries, and the fundamental problems of dealing with the
ethnically mixed and disputed Brussels region were, for the time, postponed. In
the end a complete federalization of the state helped more than everything else
to contain the severe conflicts and cleavages between the regions, even if this
secular reform of the structures of the state was overshadowed by the
repercussions of the overall crisis of the institutions and of the political
elites of Belgium in the late 1990s. 4.
In the United Kingdom we find three different problems overlapping, all
of which have been focussing around different degrees of administrative
decentralization or regionalization: separatism and the violent social and
religious conflicts in Northern Ireland, the politics of devolution for
Scotland and Wales since 1974, and the statewide administrative reforms which
have been initiated in the 1960s. - Northern Ireland has always been a special
case for which a ‘solution’ is not in sight, as it has regularly been shown
after continuous sequences of agreements between the two governments on a
‘guided’ autonomy, from 1990 down to early 2000. This is basically due to the
impact of the ‘irredenta’ situation and to the fact that there is no consensus
and no majority for one single solution of the problem. The catholic
separatists have, however, remained a clear minority casting no more than about
one third of the vote (1974, 1983), with about two thirds (basically
protestant) preferring to stay within the UK, although a majority of them might
have wished a higher degree of regional self government, which Whitehall was,
on the whole, rather reluctant to grant in the war-like situation of the last
decades. The devolution of limited legislation to the Ulster assembly has
eventually been revoked twice in favour of the emergency powers of the
Secretary for Northern Ireland. The
second time it happened in early 2000, only shortly after some executive powers
had been transferred to the fragmented Northern Irish Assembly (10 parties!) in
a long delayed implementation of the peace agreement of Good Friday of
1998. The problems of Northern Ireland
will certainly not be solved by devolution and administrative regionalization
only. The regionalist and nationalist
movements of Scotland and Wales have usually received much less popular support
than the Irish. In 1983 88% of the Scots and 92% of the Welsh voted for British
parties, and not for the nationalists. Even at the height of nationalist influence
in British politics, in 1974 when a Labour minority government needed the votes
of the nationalist MPs and therefore started the policies of devolution, the
Welsh nationalists won only around 10%, the Scottish around 30% of the vote of
the region. Scottish nationalism has always been stronger than its Welsh
equivalent, due to size, historical and institutional traditions, a relatively
greater homogeneity, and temporarily also the issue of the North Sea oil. This
had repercussions for the performance of devolution policies which came in two
waves, the first in the 70s, and the second in the late 90s:
(1) After
the design of the first White Paper (1975) which had provided for the creation
of a legislative assembly and a weak executive with no substantial economic
functions for Scotland and Wales, had been watered down and the respective
bills had been buried in committee, two new and more restricted bills, one for
Scotland and one for Wales, were introduced and put to a referendum in March
1979. Both failed: The Scotland Act reached a slight but insufficient majority;
the legislation for Wales was only approved by 12% of the vote.
(2) The second move
towards devolution, under the aegis of Tony Blair’s Labour government, was more
successful, but also made the differences clear: The jurisdiction of the Welsh
Assembly was designed to be much more limited than the powers of the Scottish
Assembly; and in the regional referenda of September 1997 the Welsh bill was
carried only by a slight majority of 50.3% (by 6722 votes, to be exact),
whereas 74.3% of the Scots were in favour of a Scottish Assembly (and 63.5%
favoured regional tax legislation). The particular model of a semi-autonomous
regional government which has evolved in Scotland and Wales, with regard to the
weight of the regional powers somehow figures between the Spanish and the
French case, and it was facilitated by the fact that the Labour Party won a
clear plurality (though not a majority) of seats in the elections to both
assemblies of May 1999: Its basic idea was that the secretary of state for the
region in the Westminster government became the first secretary of the regional
assembly. The new spirit of regionalization and decentralization has also
contributed to the proliferation of an institution which had belonged into the
context of the abortive first devolution attempts of the 70s: since spring
1999, the Scottish and Welsh Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) have been
copied in eight regions of England (the North East is even aspiring to an
‘assembly’).
4. Decentralization
in the UK, in a protracted way, has also been promoted by processes of general
administrative reforms since the 1960s. These reforms, by designing bigger and
more adequate units of self government with different and flexible sectorial subdistricts
have, at least until Mrs. Thatcher cut them back, fundamentally reinvigorated
the participatory energies of local government which had been contained by the
expansion of the welfare state bureaucracy. Thus for the first time in British
history, government and administration at an intermediate level between
Parliament (and the central agencies of the Civil Service) and the town
councils (or the JPs) has been institutionalized. Here, in a way, the British
case, like some German traditions, has shown that regionalization, to an
extent, can been substituted for by mechanisms of efficient and ‘cooperative’
local government, if there is a tradition of strong local self government.
5. The
case of Spain (17 regions, out of 50 provinces) seems to be the most
elaborate and most complicated case of regionalization within contemporary
Western and Southern Europe. Here regionalization and the creation of the
‘Estado de las Autonomías’ throughout Spain has played a decisive role of
fundamental importance in the process of the transition from Francoism to
democracy during the years after 1975. The constellations were unique and, on
the whole, promising: A new democratic constitution had to be made in a decade
in which regionalism was very much en vogue all over Europe. The traditions of
peripheral regional nationalism were very much alive in Spain, not only in
Catalonia and in the Basque region, and the existent minority nationalist
movements had been strengthened during the last decade of the dictatorship by their
active part in anti-Francoist opposition. Centralism had been one of the basic
features of the regime and of its ideology; so resistance, opposition and
democracy had become more and more identified with anti-centralism and
decentralization, even in regions which lacked substantial regionalist or
nationalist traditions. In the first electoral campaign of 1977 even the
parties of the Spanish Left which had always been as centralist as the
conservatives or even more, spoke out for regionalization or even for
federalism, hitherto the tradtional panacea of the Catalan republicans and the
anarcho-syndicalists.
On the other hand, there was
the century-old tradition of Bourbon centralism, of a centralist bureaucracy
and of its usually successful fights against regionalist aspirations; there was
the ideological legacy of Francoism and the menace of a military coup usually
referred to by its proponents as a necessary action in order to “preserve the
unity of the State”. So the Spanish politicians of the transition had to be
careful and to compromise. And this is, basically, why they decided in favour
of comprehensive regionalization instead of a small number of autonomy statutes
for the ‘historical’ regions with strong regionalist movements only, as it had
been the strategy of the governments of the Second Republic in the 1930s
(Catalonia 1932, Basque provinces 1936).
Comprehensive regionalization
means regionalization as a rule, throughout the whole territory of the State,
instead of institutional privileges for some who happened to be stronger and
more influential than others. The legalistic fiction, to a certain extent, has
served its purpose in not too openly violating the alleged “unity of the
State”. There are, however, differences to be made and they have been made:
Even the Spanish constitution of 1978 has provided for different procedures in
order to obtain regional autonomy for the ‘historical regions’ and for others.
(So if there was not a sufficient initiative from the grass roots in favour of
regionalization, the Madrid government and parliament could help.) And the
powers transferred from the state government to the new regional governments
which are elected and controlled by regional parliaments, have been defined
differently, along a sliding scale, in the different autonomy statutes for the
17 regions passed between 1979 and 1983. The same applies to financial and tax
legislation. In both cases, the autonomy and the jurisdiction of the regional
governments lie more or less within the frame of the autonomy statutes of the
1930s for Catalonia and for the Basques.
After the end of the
transition in Spain, we can clearly distinguish between three different classes
of regional autonomous communities: First Catalonia and the Basque
provinces, both (in the Basque case occasionally with the help of socialist
votes) governed by their respective nationalist majority parties, both
unproportionately privileged by the agreements on tax and revenue sharing (the
Basques, for evident political reasons, more than the Catalans), both equipped
with old and peculiar institutions of their own, and both building new
bureaucracies with explicit regionalist loyalties.
Secondly, we have not so
privileged and poorer regions displaying a certain amount of cultural
regionalism which try to use their autonomous jurisdiction in order to promote
their specific educational and cultural objectives and to develop the regional
infrastructure. Here we find Galicia, Asturias, Aragón, the Canary Islands and
the Baleares and even Andalucía, where temporary regionalism or regional
nationalism, despite its artificial, transitory and voluntaristic character,
has created a certain regional solidarity against Madrid.
In the third category,
we find the regions of the Center where regionalist ambitions have always been
low or nonexistent. They had to be
created for reasons of uniformity, and their expanding bureaucracies seem to be
duplications of the provincial bureaucracies at a higher level. These regions
have not been against regionalization, and they have not really fought for it
either. They have been indifferent. But even here the situation has changed
after more than a decade and a half of autonomous institution building. Today
even these regions would not want to miss their new institutions with which
they have come to identify more and more: a clear case for the importance of
institutions in the process of framing memories and identities. By these
processes the regions have also gained more weight against the central state
with regard to many issues: traditional clientelism has become even more
regionalized, and within the leadership structures of the statewide political
parties the former leaders of programmatic or ideological currents and factions
(usually based in Madrid) have been substituted for by the regional
‘barones’. In the years to come, the
Spanish experiment in regionalization will face a number of severe problems.
Among the most important ones are the continuation and extension of the
transfers of powers from Madrid to the regions, the creation of more flexible
and efficient mechanisms and channels of interregional redistribution and of
tax and revenue sharing between the state and the regions, and instruments and
funds to cope with interregional disparities in development which have been
(and will continue to be) accentuated by Spain’s accession to the EC. Not to
speak of the difficulties of creating a minimum consensus of interregional
solidarity and of the fact that Spain is still waiting for the long promised
and indispensable structural reforms of its administration and tax system which
should cemplement regionalization to make it work. On the whole, the Estado de
las Autonomías, originally invented as a pragmatic and completely unsystematic
compromise in order to appease the resistance of the ‘poderes fácticos’
(particularly the military) during Spain’s transition to democracy, in the two
decades of its existence has unexpectedly shown a constructive potential to
establish itself as a new type in its own right which might eventually develop
into a more federal order (as the Catalans and some others insist it should).
To sum it up: the Spanish Estado
de las Autonomías, devolution and institutional reforms in Britain, a more
comprehensive regionalization in France and Italy, the federalization of
Belgium and decentralizing moves in a number of other states (even Portugal and
Greece have started considering more decentralization) have made Europe more
regional during the last decades, much beyond the classical core of the federal
orders of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In addition, cross-border
cooperation between the regions has been intensified, encouraged by EC/EU funds
and not much hindered by regulations and interventions of the states (e.g.
Saar-Lor-Lux; along the Haut Rhin; between North Rhine-Westphalia and
Friesland, etc.), and the mechanisms of the slowly advancing European
integration have contributed to emphasize and invigorate the common interests,
identities and strategies of the regions: The European regional development
programs and ‘cohesion funds’ had a special appeal for the less developed areas
of the ‘Celtic fringe’ or the ‘arc atlantique’. The more advanced and stronger
regions (e.g. the ‘quatre moteurs’, or the ‘arc méditerranéen’) intensified
their cooperation ‘from below’ in order to compensate for the fact that the
institutional innovations of the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam did not
live up to their expectations of giving more influence to the regions: The new
‘Committee of the Regions’ has turned out to be rather powerless, the weight of
the regions in it has been further reduced by the inclusion of the communes,
and the best way to make the regional interests voiced and heard in Brussels
has remained the traditional method to channel them through the respective
state governments in the council of ministers which still is the seat of power
in Europe. Here the regions which are part of a federal state usually have a
clear institutional advantage. The
unrealistic ‘sandwich theory’ shared by many regionalists since the 1970s,
according to which, in the course of an advancing European integration, the
nation states would somehow inevitably be crushed between the European
agencies, one the one side, and the regions, on the other, has not worked. The
dream of a ‘Europe of the regions’ in this sense has not come true.On the other
hand we can find that the processes of regionalization and the protracted
progress in European integration have both triggered more competition for the
nation states and have contributed to open up, enrich and make more flexible
people’s conceptions of their feelings of belonging and their identities, in
the sense of a dual or triple ‘patria chica - patria grande’ model which
might be helpful in a world characterized by the dialectics between
globalization, on the one hand, and new (and often fundamentalist) localisms on
the other: People in Europe, particularly younger people, have increasingly
come to feel, at the same time, as being rooted in their regions, as citizens
of their states, and as Europeans. In this sense, Europe, at the beginning of
the 21st century, is very much alive in its regions, even if the
dream of a ‘Europe of the regions’ did not come true.
Note:
For more details and
evidence, see, e.g.: Hans-Jürgen Puhle, Staaten, Nationen und Regionen in
Europa, Wien 1995; ed., Nationalismen und Regionalismen in Westeuropa,
Geschichte und Gesellschaft 20/3, 1994; Regionale Identitäten, Nationalstaat
und Nationalismus in Spanien, in: G. Bossong
et al., eds., Westeuropäische Regionen und ihre Identität, Mannheim 1994,
187-207; Das Baskenland zwischen Separatismus und Integration, in: F.-J. Hutter
et al., eds., Das gemeinsame Haus Europa, Baden-Baden 1998, 87-101.
Fig. 1
Hans-Jürgen Puhle: Regions, Regionalism, and Regionalisation in 20th-Century
Europe
A tentative typology of several cases:
1. Integration: AB - BC - BR/NS - IR - OW
England, France
2. Belated integration: AB - IR/BC - (BR) - OW/NS
Germany
3. Integrated dissociation:
Czechs
AB - IR - BR/BC - OW - NS
Norwegians, Finns AB - BR/BC - IR - NS -OW
4. Belated dissociation: AB - BC - (BR) - IR - (NS) - OW Estonians,
Croats, Slovaks
5. Insurgent dissociation:
Serbs, Bulgarians AB - BC - (BR) - NS - IR - OW
Irish AB - (BR) - BC - NS - IR - OW
6. Disintegrated dissociation (developed):
Flemings
BR - IR - AB - OW
Welsh
BR/IR - AB - OW
Catalans BR - IR - AB - OW - BC - (NS)
Basques BR - IR - OW - AB - BC - (NS)
Walloons, Alsatians BR - IR - OW - AB - (BC - NS)
7. Disintegrated dissociation II (underdeveloped):
Gallegos, Occitans, BR - AB - IR - OW - (BC)
Britons
Corsicans BR - AB - IR - OW – BC
BR
bourgeois revolution
AB transition to
cultural nationalism
IR industrial
revolution
BC transition to
political Nationalism
OW organisation of
working
NS ‘nation state’
(or equivalent)
class movement
(acc. to M. Hroch)