The EU in the Discourse of Secessionist Parties: From Safety Net to Prison?

European secessionist parties used to consider the European Union as an objective ally. Following the ‘Size of nations’ approach of Alesina and Spolaore (2003), they argued that the economies of scale created by the common market facilitate the breaking up of states, in order to bring policies in line with small-scale preferences. Yet it has become obvious for some time that the reverse may be true. According to the so called Prodi-doctrine, formalized in a letter to the British House of Lords by president of the Commission Barroso in 2012, a break-away state would have to re-apply for EU-membership. This implies that it can be barred from EU-membership by a veto from its former state, as a consequence of which the EU-treaties would no longer apply to the new state. The Catalan crisis has recently confirmed that the EU discourages and obstructs secession. As The Economist (14/10/2017) put it : “For separatists, the EU once looked like the net that would guarantee their safety as they leapt into freedom. Instead, it has become their cage.” Partly for that reason, the Flemish separatist N-VA has recently shifted from a pro-European towards a tentative Euro-critical stance, as shown by previous research (Brack, Wolfs and Van Hecke, 2017). In this paper, we will investigate whether other secessionist parties in Europe have gone through a similar development. More in particular, we will analyze the discourse about the EU of secessionist parties from four different member states (Spain, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Italy) during the past fifteen years. Our corpus will include party manifestoes, campaign material, speeches and interviews with party leaders.