Fragile Nations within Multination States: Towards a Nation’s Fragility Index

Where diverse identities and national identifications coexist within a single state, the latter can, and should accommodate the formers, especially if these are fragile nations. In this paper, we will present the cases of Catalonia (Spain), South Tyrol (Italy), and Québec (Canada) as such fragile nations, resting on their respective societal culture – yet coexisting with a majoritarian national community. By fragile nations, we refer to nations which, though they consist in numerical majorities within a determined territory, represent themselves as minorities with great uncertainty about their future as specific, bounded and dynamic national communities. For the purpose of this paper, the fragile nations that would fit our design are limited to those in plurinational context. To paraphrase Milan Kundera, one can say that, for a fragile nation, its mere existence is continuously called into question. Therefore, the fragility of a nation expresses itself through a kind of collective existential insecurity. Otherwise put, fragile nations live by the tragic feeling that they could disappear. This being said, the fragility of a nation is not a fatality, nor can it be understood on the ground of duality (fragile/not fragile). In a sense, every nation is to a certain extent fragile. Nevertheless, the fragility of a nation living within a larger state is amplified by the fact that it cannot empower exclusively on its own will its societal culture and institutional framework. More precisely, we suggest that five legally-constitutional pillars are central, if not fundamental for the fragile nation to sustain its societal culture on the one hand, and to feed a healthy democratic life on the other, where group oriented conflicts between the majority and the minorities are more often to be fairly managed. These pillars are: 1) recognition of the nation; 2) linguistic rights; 3) immigration and integration rights or competences; 4) rights in the matter of constitutional revisions; and 5) right to secede. Empirically, the state of each pillar will be grasped by respectively two indicators. While confronting Catalonia, South Tyrol, and Québec to those pillars and indicators, we will attribute them a total score on the Nation’s Fragility Index – for which we significantly adapted the structure and methodology of Banting and Kymlicka’s Multicultural Policy Index to our research object and conceptual design. Whilst the interpretation of the scores we get on the Index is restricted for the moment to the sole expression of the three cases presented, one must construe this research design as a work-in-progress for a grounded theory of nations' fragility. Indeed, the theory will be generalizable once we’ll have added a significant number of cases to it. In so doing, our contribution is intrinsically interdisciplinary. First, within the scale of political theory, we propose an original conceptual and methodological framework to assess fragile nations. Second, we build on comparative politics with the tools specific to the approach of comparative constitutional law, where finally we normatively judge of the fragility of nations and of its consequences from an analytic political philosophy point of view.