Calling on Europe? Secessionist Political Parties and Their Communications to the European Union

Abstract

To what extent do independence‐seeking political parties across Europe appeal to the European Union (EU)? What accounts for differences in these parties' communication levels? In accordance with the literature, we expect that such parties would bypass their host states and seek support from the EU for their nationalist causes, while the EU itself also offers institutional opportunities further enabling parties to solicit assistance, even if it does not always deliver what these parties want. To explore this argument, we conduct an online search for documents and other texts in which secessionist political parties directly and indirectly appeal to the EU and analyze them with social network tools. The resultant network is characterized by multiple parties communicating to the EU but to different degrees. We also find that moderate political ideology on the left–right spectrum, constituent support, and competition in the secessionist movement positively and significantly correlate with higher intensity of online communication.

Choose your target wisely: how the EU shapes nationalism in contemporary Europe

“…Furthermore, the EU's multilevel governance structure and regional funding means that it is often seen as acting as a safety net for ethnoregional parties, by providing them with resources and institutional support that they would not have otherwise had (Jolly 2015;Keating and McGarry 2001). In particular, their ability to utilise the Committee of the Regions (CoR), European Parliament, and regional offices in Brussels means that ethnoregional parties "can petition EU institutions in an attempt to strengthen vertical layers of political support and circumvent the state" (Boylan andTurkina 2019: 1312).…”

“…For example, this understanding of the EU is relatively clear in the finding that EU integration narrows the range of policy issues in national elections (Nanou and Dorussen 2013), since the EU's competency in an issue area reduces parties' incentives to supply positions on these issues. Similarly, the separate literatures on nativism and ethnoregionalism often focus on how the EU can encourage parties to supply these forms of nationalism (Boylan and Turkina 2019;Gessler and Hunger 2021;Jolly 2015).…”

“…These two reforms are important as they provide new tools, tactics, and forums for parties to push for greater regional autonomy (Boylan and Turkina 2019), which parties can point to when trying to convince voters of the feasibility of greater autonomy. In particular, if parties are finding it difficult to have their concerns addressed by the central state, then CoR and the multi-level negotiations over structural funding provide new avenues for these parties to raise these concerns and to internationalise them.…”

“…In contrast, the literature has tended to develop theories about how the general structure or goals of the EU influences each form in isolation, without theorising about the EU's overall effect or how these specific changes to EU governance have influenced the relatively saliency of these appeals. Thus, for internal homogenisation appeals, the literature provides a disjointed understanding of the EU's effect, with some scholars focusing on either how the EU is portrayed as threatening the nation-state's homogeneity (Marks et al 2006), or how it can act as a safety net and ally for ethnoregional parties (Boylan and Turkina 2019). However, these disjointed findings means that we do not have a systematic understanding of the EU's role in shaping internal homogeneity, or of which effect is strongest.…”