Since the 90´s, Europe has been depicted as the most privileged political arena for regional nationalists to enhance regional autonomy. Back at that time, along with the advent of the principle of subsidiarity, Europe seemed to dissolve sovereignty enabling regional political actors to prosper in a context where independence could eventually be reached. In spite of these powerful political ambitions, these political actors have come to realize that Europe can only provide the “elements of usage” for regional nationalists in government to deliver policies to reinforce their relative position in power and endorse new state reforms. Moreover, the lack of pre-normative judgments in a context where fluid and informal negotiations, on the one hand, and accessible policy networks facilities, on the other, have provided minority civic nationalists with the best conditions to access political power more directly and beyond the limits of democratic and constitutional maps. In the XXI century, minority civic nationalists have become “pragmatic nationalists” in the sense that the European venue is now used to deliver regional policies which will enable them to expand their small trench of political power in a realistic way, without sticking to strict politics of nationalism. These political actors have learned to use Europe as a source of political leverage, choosing carefully what they consider to be the most appropriate European institutional resource to bargain relations in network linking actors and institutions by the means of a regional sense of patriotism. In a complementary vision, some of them have also learned to use Europe as a selective discursive reference on the attempt to higher the political profile of the region. The European system of governance is now conceived as a “political” and a “discursive” game where institutions and actors are linked in network by the means of a rational and a sociological resource dependency logic for gains of political legitimacy or/and political autonomy. Departing from an original rational-sociological new institutionalist approach and applying the concept of “usage” of the European Union, we will demonstrate that the N-VA in Flanders, since 2004, and the SNP in Scotland, since 2007, have become “pragmatic nationalists”. Within this research, “pragmatic nationalism” will be stated as a new partial theory of regional empowerment as well as a sui generis form of "bottom-up" regionalism.
