Struggling Over the Costs of Independence: Secessionist Actors and the Business Community

Rather than being a logical product of brute ‘facts’, support for secession must be socially constructed (Aspinall 2007; Giuliano 2011; Herrera 2007). In building support for their political project, secessionists pursue a two-pronged strategy: stimulating grievance among their constituents, while reducing the perceived cost of secession. Reducing the perception of economic risk associated with independence is critical in obtaining broad-based support. This paper examines the role of the business community in that process. I argue that big business in the secessionist region presents a key obstacle to the formation of secessionist discursive hegemony. Private business has the incentive to oppose secession (due to risks to profitability), the political clout to articulate skepticism toward secession (due to autonomy from regional political elites), and the legitimacy on economic matters that no other political player possesses (as investors and employers). The paper will present preliminary findings of research conducted in Catalonia and Scotland. Secessionist governments strive to minimize big business dissent, and to discredit it by forming pro-independence business organizations. Big business, on the other hand, is reluctant to oppose secession openly, and does so either via lobbying organizations (thus reducing the possible cost of dissent for individual firms), or via firms with less exposure to the regional market or regional government contracts. This work will be supplemented by research on Quebec, and contrasted with Slovenia, where all big business was government owned. The impact of business opposition on level of support for secession will be tested via survey experiments in Scotland and Catalonia. While the project’s focus is on a fairly narrow set of cases (Western, developed democracies), the conclusions are broadly applicable because they speak to the strategies through which support for secession can be capped in multinational states in general.