Abstract
AbstractFor three European states in particular, the Covid-19 pandemic has served to catalyze pre-existing territorial disputes. While the United Kingdom, Spain, and Belgium have all had very different responses to the pandemic, in all three cases the actions of central and regional government have put existing structures of regional autonomy under strain. In Spain, the pandemic response has become intertwined with the Catalan independence debate (especially in disputes between pro-independence parties), and elsewhere in the country it has cemented co-operative relationships between moderate nationalists and the statewide left. In Belgium, the pandemic has accentuated territorial disputes and further complicated government formation. And in the UK diverging responses to the pandemic have helped boost nationalist movements in the devolved nations; particularly the cause of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and their ambitions to create an independent Scottish state. While the year has been highly significant for secessionist movements in all three states, only in the UK does a decisive shift towards state-breakup seem to have occurred. The article argues that whether or not a secessionist movement benefits from the pandemic is highly contingent on contextual factors, including the performance of state-level governments in responding to the pandemic and the relative autonomy of regional governments during the response.
Highlights
The territorial dimension has become increasingly important in many European states in recent decades
Catalonia, and Coronavirus When faced with a surging outbreak of the novel coronavirus, the Spanish government, led by Pedro Sánchez of the center-left PSOE, responded by re-centralizing certain powers for a Spain-wide strategy
This approach stands in contrast to the UK, which has seen no attempts to temporarily modify autonomy arrangements to meet the demands of the pandemic, allowing devolved governments to take diverging responses to the crisis
Summary
At the onset of the pandemic, Belgium was nearly a year without a federal government. The two largest parties in Flanders—the conservative nationalist New Flemish Alliance (NVA, the leading component of the Flemish government) and the Far-right secessionist Flemish Interest (VB)—are excluded from the administration This means that the government has a decisive majority in francophone Wallonia, but only a minority of Flemish MPs. While the VB has long been subject to a cordon sanitaire (Pauwels 2011), the NVA was part of the last federal government, and is infuriated by its exclusion. There is fear that the party will turn to an alliance with VB—something the party repeatedly mooted last year during Flemish government formations, and something which would constitute a dramatic realignment of Belgian politics Such a formation might herald the creation of a majority nationalist government in Flanders at the election (Le Vif, July 5, 2020), but for the present the NVA finds itself shut out of the corridors of power. The key test will be what the effect of a francophone majority government will be in Flanders, which could potentially serve as a wedge issue for the nationalists and a means to discredit the Flemish parties which have taken part in the new administration
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