Regionalist parties have raised, during the last decade, territorial demands to substantially increase political autonomy of certain European regions within multinational states. Further, some of these demands have included claims to shared sovereignty or outright independence from the state. Not surprisingly, these demands appear in contexts where sub-state national identities are strong and regional and state-wide nation-building projects compete against each other. In most cases, however, regionalist parties’ territorial demands occur in states where substantive processes of political decentralisation and accommodation of national diversity have been implemented. The territorial debate is prominent in party politics at the regional arena, and nationalist parties have especially benefited from being in office at the regional level to raise further demands of autonomy or independence. It is clear now that the earlier stages of political decentralization have not appeased the territorial claims of many parties in sub-state nations such as Scotland, the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Flanders. Yet, independence receives only a minority support from the public in these territories. Where does this whole process lead? It seems that traditional political independence is not plausible in the short term, but maintaining the current territorial status quo does not seem a valid option for central governments either. Popular views on the matter suggest that more autonomy is wanted, albeit short of independence, in this set of European sub-state nations. Within this wider framework, the paper focuses on the Scottish case and the independence campaign led by the nationalist government. My main purpose is to understand the dynamics of devolution in Scottish and British party politics and how parties construct their territorial preferences in the eventual independence referendum campaign. A redefinition of (shared) sovereignty between region, state, and the EU might well occur in Scotland, which would trigger other territorial debates across Europe.
