Contemporary EU-discourse of secessionist parties

The relationship between secessionism and European integration represents a prominent debate in the literature. Since secessionist parties are – together with the separatist-oriented regional public – major purveyors of the separatist agenda, scholars have analysed EU-attitudes of this regionalist party family subgroup (e.g. Elias 2009; Hepburn 2010; McGarry and Keating 2006). They explored what secessionist parties want from the EU and how it can help them achieve their core goal – breaking away from the state while accommodating de iure independent statehood within the European framework. However, this debate seems to have dwindled during the last decade. Recent works focus predominantly on legal and technical aspects of the ‘internal enlargement’ in the EU (Evans 2020), i.e. issues surrounding the seceding region’s (re)accession to the EU as a sovereign state (Bremberg 2020; Closa 2017); the case studies are almost exclusively Scotland and Catalonia. It follows that EU-attitudes of secessionist parties, and secessionist movements in other European regions in general, have received hardly any attention in the post-2010 period. There are currently dozens of instances of parties beyond Scotland and Catalonia which define themselves as secessionist. Given their minor political power in regional assemblies, they are now a far cry from proclaiming independence. The pertinent question is how these ‘second-order’ secessionist parties – which however constitute the overwhelming majority of cases – perceive the contemporary EU and what they make of it. This approach is further justified by the fact that the European polity has experienced an unprecedented cumulation of crises in the post-2010 period (Riddervold et al. 2020); the repercussions thereof on the regional level remain under-researched. This paper builds on author’s work-in-progress and advances on extant literature in several respects. Firstly, it conducts an exploratory analysis of EU-discourse of three ‘second-order’ secessionist parties in three different contexts: Plaid Cymru (PC), Corsica Libera (CL) and Süd-Tiroler Freiheit (STF). I find a striking predominance of non-secessionist themes in these parties’ EU-discourse. Rather, they seem preoccupied by aspects of sub-state minority protection in the EU and ‘everyday’ issues of EU legislation and EU regional policy. Importantly, although these parties do project – albeit vaguely – their independence into the European framework in the long term, they address mainly the institutional here and now and call for action within the contemporary constitutional set-up of the EU. Secondly, for the first time, the paper evaluates EU-discourse from parliamentary debates held in regional assemblies. It does so by applying thematic analysis to EU-relevant utterances (2017-2021) identified in the corpora by an original dictionary of search and context words. Finally, the case selection takes account of a more nuanced variation of secessionist strategies at the ‘second-level’ heretofore neglected by the literature. This comprises the sovereign state of Wales (PC), Corsica’s gradual and ‘sectorial’ transition to independence (CL) and separatism-irredentism of South Tyrol (STF).