Secessionism and Supranationalism: Scotland and Catalonia.

The impact of the self-determination processes of minority communities within the space of larger multicultural states poses one of the greater challenges to stability and cohesion within individual European nation states today. Selfdetermination by democratic means can in turn impact upon the very process of European integration especially with regard to concerns raised over the creation of successor states and the very concept of the 'internal enlargement' of the European Union. The prospect of a constituent part of an EU member state gaining independence is growing, as the desire for national independence of the historical regions is once again on the agenda in the process and aftermath of the Scottish referendum and the unofficial Catalan referendum or poll on independence; a process which can be seen as a second wave of contemporary nationalism since the first wave in the 1990s. In light of the recent Scottish and Catalan referenda, this chapter considers the importance of the EU to the historical regions and how they can by-pass the centralized state through Brussels, thereby gaining greater recognition than within their own state entities and reinforcing their own identity construction. Yet, there might by an ambiguity here: whilst the institutional structure of the European Union would appear to encourage greater autonomy of the regions, particularly with initiatives for regional development and cross-border co-operation, the EU does not seem to support the outright independence of sub-national entities. As such this chapter focuses on the two referenda that took place in Europe in the autumn of 2014, before considering the role of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]