Independence in Europe: A Feasible Project or Wishful Thinking? A Study on the Attitudes of EU Institutions towards Secessionist Instances in Member-States

Secessionist pressure has considerably grown in intensity and number of cases in the last decade across established democracies of Western Europe. Since 2012, separatist forces in Catalonia have tried to find a way to hold a binding referendum on independence from Spain. Most notably, in September 2014, a formal and binding referendum on Scotland’s independence from the UK was held, with the secessionist camp winning almost 45 per cent of votes. All these instances of secession fall within the political project of ‘Independence in Europe’, which envisages the creation of a new independent state that then becomes a new member of the EU. However, the actual feasibility of this project is far from being certain. EU treaties are rather elusive on the possibility for a region to achieve independence and join the EU as a new member-state. In order to evaluate the feasibility of the ‘Independence in Europe’ projects, it is therefore crucial to see if there are consolidated attitudes towards this general idea, whether these attitudes are positive or negative, whether there are important differences across EU institutions and within them – crucially across member-states represented in the European Council and the Council of the EU, or across groups of the European Parliament (EP) or across Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) of different nationalities. It is also important to understand if the attitudes of the various institutions (and actors) change depending on the specific conditions that characterize the individual instances of independence and why. To the best of my knowledge, no study has ever been conducted to try and answer these questions. This original project would, therefore, provide new and important insights concerning the politics of independence in Europe by investigating the perspective of EU institutions and elites. The first objective of the research is to find out whether there are (or not) settled attitudes towards the general idea of ‘Independence in Europe’. In case there are, whether they are positive or negative and why. In addition, the research aims to find out if there are important differences of attitudes across EU institutions or within them (e.g. across member states represented in the European Council or the Council of the EU, or between Groups in European Parliament or between MEPs from different member-states). The second objective is to find out if (and why) there are differences in the attitudes towards the project of ‘independence in Europe’ across the cases of Catalonia and Scotland.