Even as the economic crisis-plagued European Union (EU) crawls towards creating more supranational structures for a single banking and fiscal union, a reverse trend of sub-nationalistic separatism is complicating the quest for a “United States of Europe”.

Ethnic secessionist movements in the United Kingdom, Belgium and Spain are finding the milieu of the economic crisis conducive for mobilising their respective constituents to break away from existing Central governments and form newly independent states.
The medicine for a continental economic disease may lie in “more Europe”, i.e. deeper multilateral integration of the EU’s 27 member countries into a larger whole, but for restive regions that have long nursed ambitions of independence, the crisis is a rare window of opportunity to achieve their narrower goals of splitting European states into smaller entities. Just when policymakers and experts are advocating a centripetal push to make the EU more complete and robust, the centrifugal forces are out to extract their pounds of flesh from the worst economic mess since the Great Depression.
The signing of an agreement between British Prime Minister David Cameron and First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond, to conduct a referendum for independence of the Scottish people in 2014 threatens to unravel the United Kingdom as we have known it since the Acts of Union in 1707. Scottish nationalism against English subjugation was alive for centuries but has taken a more assertive turn as a by-product of the grave economic meltdown that has afflicted the UK since 2008.
The harsh pill of government spending cuts across the board that Mr Cameron has pursued in a bid to bring down the ballooning public debt of the UK is being opposed by protesting publics throughout the country, but has assumed an ethnic hue in Scotland. Mr Salmond — whose Scottish National Party (SNP) has been ruling the autonomous local government in Scotland since 2007 and thirsting for total independence from the UK — is gaining more adherents to his vision of a “just society” based on social democratic welfare state provisions that are being systematically dismantled by Mr Cameron’s Conservative Party at the national level. Mr Salmond has provocatively highlighted the coming independence referendum of 2014 as the year when “the nonsense ends” and Scottish people will be freed once and for all from London’s austerity stranglehold.
There are older economic justifications, such as exploitation of North Sea oil reserves by London, which animate Scottish separatists to seek freedom from the UK. But the present double-dip recession and merciless cuts in state spending are tilting even less-convinced Scots to embrace the cause of independence. Though opinion polls still grant a majority to Scots wishing to remain part of the UK, two more years of austerity-induced economic suffering lie ahead before the referendum and the SNP may yet see its finest hour of a cherished dream coming true.
An irony of the secessionist resurgence is that prospects of the wannabe new nation states joining the EU as full sovereign members are working in favour of separatism. Subsidies from the larger EU budget as well as access to the common European market are giving wind to separatists’ claims that the post-independence states will be economically viable and self-reliant. The SNP is aiming to take a seat in the EU and even in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) for its future independent Scotland, thereby shielding the new state from economic or security shocks.
A similar pattern of propitious local and regional conditions are operating in Belgium, where the separatist Flemish Nationalist Party has gone from strength to strength and is in a commanding position to obtain independence for Dutch-speaking Flanders from the Francophone Wallonia. Flemish secessionists argue that the French-led centre, based in Brussels, is a “taxation government” that is redistributing the prosperity of the Dutch region to the economically shambolic French part of Belgium. In an eerie echo of northern European public opinion, which is opposed to a “transfer union” that bails out southern Europe’s sick economies, the Flemish people are complaining that they are being fleeced to prop up the economically moribund Wallonia region.
Political freedom is now intrinsically woven with the attraction of economic freedom from burdensome federal arrangements. It takes a severe economic crisis for this linkage to become obvious and add on to older historical grievances about ethnic or linguistic discrimination and differences. All the European state-building efforts over decades to cultivate multiculturalism and cosmopolitan “European identities” are now facing the heat from a new wave of self-determination that is gaining ground amidst economic loss and anxiety about declining standards of living.
Particularism is the new European challenge, nowhere more evident than in Spain’s Catalonia region. The regional president of Catalonia, Artur Mas, has been on the warpath to declare independence from the economically down-and-out Spain. Warning that “Catalonia will not survive without its own state”, Mr Mas is planning to hold a unilateral referendum for secession from Spain without the consent of the Central government in Madrid. Catalonian nationalists have accused Madrid of orchestrating “financial asphyxiation” of their region, which contributes to one-fifth of Spain’s national income. As in the other secessionist battlegrounds of Europe, Catalonian separatists insist that Spain’s tax system redirects revenues from rich regions like theirs to poorer regions, and that Catalonia is being bilked for saving Spain from bankruptcy.
Smaller secessionist voices are taking the cue from Spain, Belgium and the UK and also staking claims to carve out their own mini-states. A separatist movement has arisen in Venice to be free from recession-hit Italy because, in the words of one Venetian nationalist, “of the 70 billion euros we pay in taxes to Rome, we get back about 50 billion euros”. Basque separatists are also rejuvenating through local election victories in another corner of Spain.
Multi-ethnic nation-states are in retreat in Europe as the economic crisis has rendered them incapable of guaranteeing equitable flow of welfare to all their regions. By the time the global economic crisis finally subsides, we should not be surprised if the EU and the United Nations have a few new member states and the world witnesses a more fragmented Europe. Global crises are what they are, precisely because they trigger unforeseen local crises and reshape political geography.

The author is a professor and Dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs