Maintaining or Withdrawing? Majority and Minority Perspectives on the Legitimacy of National Solidarity

Universal solidarity is a pillar of the social-democratic tradition. At the same time, a rich sociological literature shows that solidarity is bounded. Hence, social-democratic parties often face a dilemma between their ideological universalism and the banal or hot nationalism that they share with other actors of the territory where they act. The current literature tends to examine the link between identity and welfare either with reference to the inclusion/exclusion of newcomers or by looking at separatist movements willing to withdraw from the solidarity system of the parent state. No study however has so far simultaneously considered the arguments legitimising redistribution of both majority and minority nationalist actors. This paper does that by comparatively investigating the position of the Partido Obrero Socialista Español (PSOE) and the Catalan left-wing separatist party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC) from 1990-2019 on three political debates pertaining to the link between welfare and identity in Spain: fiscal federalism, territorial redistribution and immigration. As a robustness check, we also consider material from the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC). We hypothesise that the tension between nationalism and universalism will take opposite forms in the two parties: while ERC will have to justify withdrawal from solidarity with the rest of Spain, the PSOE will have to warrant imposing solidarity with the rest of Spain on Catalonia despite recognising the regions identity. In both cases, however, the documents show that identity acts a pre-political factor that ‘naturally’ justifies (without need to be explained) differential treatment according to ERC and symmetric federalism in the case of the PSOE. The paper contributes to the current dearth of studies on how social-democratic parties deal with nationalism (point 5 of the CfP) and to making explicit the banal nationalism of majority left-wing parties (point 6 of the CfP).