Brexit and Catalan secessionism: lessons from a distorted analogy

This article analyses the EU and Spanish parallel territorial crisis through the lens of secessionist studies. The EU membership referendum in the UK, held in June 2016, occurred in the midst of a deep internal territorial crisis both in the UK and Spain that led to a unilateral referendum held in October 2017 in Catalonia and to a renewed referendum demand in Scotland. What are the differences and similarities between the EU and member states territorial crisis? Were these political divorce demands, from the EU and from a member state, comparable? This article aims to answer these questions using qualitative and quantitative data from the UK and Catalonia to compare these cases of break-away demands testing the main explanations of secessionism at individual and group levels (economy, identity, institutions, strategic bargaining). The article concludes that Brexit demands were triggered by different factors than Catalan secessionism. The final section discusses the main implications of these findings for the EU and the literature on secessionism.