Greens and the Nation: is Small Beautiful ?

Greens is globally a neglected political family as far as the study of nationalism is concerned. For good reasons apparently, since political ecology seems to be the political ideology the least prone to nationalism, with its distrust of big and centralised political units, its stance in favour of minorities and diversity… The aim of the presentation will be to explain that the national issue is not forgotten by the Greens, but is completely reimagined with a bottom-up and plural perspective under the form of regionalism. Ecologist theoreticians have defined different regionalist approaches, notably bioregionalism, ecoregionalism and econationalism, which became the basis of the Green approach on the national issue as soon as the 1970s. It explains up to a certain point how Greens and the regional nationalist parties of the European Free Alliance have become long-term allies at the European and national level (for example with the parties of Régions et peuples solidaires in France). Today, the Green political parties are often the closest to the demands of regional nationalist movements: the Scottish Green Party was actively involved in the campaign of the referendum on Scottish independence (2014), Initiative for Catalonia Greens is in favour of self-determination and the formation of a Catalan state… In analysing the regionalism of the Greens, the presentation will demonstrate that it is not “identitarian” or “patriotic” but “cognitive”: it is devoid of nostalgia but on the contrary a tool for a post-national, multicultural and democratic Europe.