open biomedical ontologies (OBO)

The territorial Opportunity Structure comprises three interrelated dimensions that, in theory, shape the struggle over the making of the boundary: the formal distribution of migration-related competencies; the initial boundary and its implications for later development; and the dynamics of party competition at sub-state level.

The distribution of migration-related competencies

For Kymlicka, ‘national minorities’ can adopt a ‘post-ethnic’ identity and a

‘multicultural’ approach to immigrant integration under two necessary conditions. First, they must have some control over the volume and composition of immigration in order to exorcize the fear becoming a minority “within their own traditional territory.”

Second, they must have some leverage to decide upon the terms of immigrant integration “in order to mitigate the strong temptation for immigrants to integrate into the dominant culture (which usually offers greater mobility and economic opportunities)” (2001: 67). According to this line of reasoning, minority nationalists would mainly, if not exclusively, be concerned with the preservation of the national culture and would be willing to expand the membership boundary to newcomers only insofar as the latter would be subject to the patchwork of policies supposedly constituting a coherent integration model and guaranteeing national survival over subsequent generations. According to Kymlicka, the shift from boundary contraction to

41 boundary expansion towards immigrants follows an incremental path correlated with the gradual devolution of migration-related competencies. While Kymlicka does not specifically address the question of emigrants, his argument suggests that political elites’ boundary-making strategy towards those who left would follow a diametrically opposed path. As the ethnic bond loses its significance in the wake of devolution, so does the link with emigrants and their descendants.

Kymlicka proceeds from the accurate premise that encouraging human mobility can be used as an instrument of territorial management aiming at homogenizing a culturally diverse population. For instance, the Moroccan government has encouraged the resettlement of ethnic Arabs to the Western Sahara in order to weaken the cultural basis of the Sahraouian movement (Petithomme 2010). On the other hand, historical occurrences of central elites using human mobility as a tool to mitigate peripheral dissent are plenty. One obvious example is the USSR, where both internal mobility and emigration were severely constrained, the explicit economic rationale conflating with the implicit aim of moderating secessionist tensions in the periphery (Torpey 2007). The mass-deportations of Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars and Chechens from their homeland to the Kazakh SSR (later Kazakhstan) in 1944 are only some of the many examples that can be drawn from the Soviet case. Some authoritarian regimes have also sought to stimulate inflows of co-ethnics for a similar purpose. In the 1990s, the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic encouraged ethnic Serbians living in Croatia to settle in Kosovo where ethnic Albanians represented the majority, with the illusory hope that this would tip the demographic balance in the contested territory.

However, Kymlicka’s hypothesis suffers from at least two flaws. First it relies on an essentially culturalist understanding of minority nationalism, an ontological bias which has already been discussed at length in previous sections³⁰. Second, it is based on a naïve understanding of institutions and the way they mediate actors’ behaviour in a plurinational context. If institutions do matter, their incidence is much more complex and subtle than Kymlicka seems to acknowledge. From a territorial politics perspective, the struggle over the distribution of competences across multiple tiers of government is not only driven by good governance and normative considerations, but also by the more

30. As Andreas Wimmer put it, “Kymlicka’s world is made of state-bound societies composed of ethnic groups, each of which is endowed with its own culture and naturally inclined to in-group solidarity” (2009: 249).

42 trivial logic of blame-shifting. A number of scholars have for instance noted how the devolution of welfare competencies to regional and local administrations came about in a context of welfare retrenchment, necessitating the adoption of unpopular reforms, and financial strains, requiring drastic budgetary cuts and difficult trade-offs in the allocation of scarce resources. From this perspective, the decision can also be interpreted as a crafty way of “devolving deficits” and shifting the burden of responsibility for chronically under-funded public provision to other tiers of government (Keating 2009c). To be sure, blame-shifting is not the exclusive property of the centre, and minority nationalists miss few opportunities to blame it for all the evils occurring within their territory. As Derek Urwin (1982: 228) put it, “regionalist mobilization is much easier when hostility prevails: otherwise, the problem for regionalist protagonists is to break the benignancy of the relationship.”

As for migration-related competencies, states have admittedly been reluctant to give away powers they consider strategically relevant and closely associated to their sovereignty, either beyond to supranational institutions, or below to regional governments. The European Commission learned this lesson the hard way, after several frustrated attempts to harmonize immigration policies and naturalization procedures across the European Union, in spite of compelling evidence that the absence of coordination between member-states was counter-productive, especially since internal border controls were suppressed by virtue of the 1985 Schengen agreement and the Citizenship of the European Union introduced by the 1992 Maastricht treaty³¹. But a territorial politics perspective cast doubts on the simplistic assumption according to which the conquest of competences constitutes an end in itself. Bearing this in mind, the systematic comparison of empirical developments in Scotland and Catalonia provides a fertile ground to evaluate the strengths of Kymlicka’s hypothesis.

The initial boundary and path-dependency

While nationalists may have a fundamental interest in stressing residency as the main criterion of membership, they are nonetheless constrained by the way in which the

31. Unlike most federations, in which the federal level enjoys legislative powers over the acquisition and loss of the status of full and equal membership, European citizenship is acquired automatically, as it is derived from member-state nationality. In effect, this complex institutional architecture multiplies the anomalies generated by the non-cooperative behaviour of sovereign states (Bauböck 2006). A similar mechanism is at play with the harmonization of immigration policies within the Schengen area, and the open-method of coordination has to date largely failed to deliver (Caviedes 2004).

43 boundary was initially created and its evolution over time. Historical institutionalists tend to emphasize continuity over change, on the grounds that institutional patterns tend to reproduce themselves and mould politics over extensive periods of time according to the logic of path dependency (Peters 2005). There is indeed evidence that states have responded to immigration-induced pluralism following the cognitive channels established by past experiences with national, religious, ethnic or territorial pluralism. In France, they were apprehended with the very same ‘one and indivisible’ Republican frame while in Britain, the large discretion traditionally granted to peripheral elites in Wales and Scotland heavily influenced the way in which ‘race relations’ came to be managed from the 1960s onwards (Bulpitt 1986). Likewise, the multiculturalist doctrine in Canada was built upon the pre-existing historical compromise between the two

‘founding nations’ (Winter 2008), while the Dutch management of religious pluralism known as Verzuiling was for a time replicated in response to post-colonial immigration (Penninx & Schrover 2002). Yet, this phenomenon has sometimes been over-estimated.

In his oft-cited historical comparison of nationality laws in France and Germany, Brubaker (1992) attributed their supposed stability over the past two centuries to the resilience of cultural idioms, well-entrenched conceptions of nationhood that can be traced far back in the past and have conditioned the state’s attitude towards immigrants to the present. However, Brubaker himself revised it later and gradually came to adopt a radical constructivist posture, stressing how national boundaries can shift over a short period of time according to changing political circumstances. Ultimately, between those proclaiming path dependency as a supreme principle occurring irrespective of environmental changes and radical constructivism, there remains considerable scope for a more tempered and contextual approach. There is no contradiction in acknowledging that political boundaries can be remarkably stable and outlive the purpose for which they were initially created, producing unintended effects constraining actors’ ability to address new challenges as they can shift at specific critical junctures or gradually evolve over extensive periods of time (Steinmo 2008). As Rogers Smith put it, “because no political community is simply neutral and all are products of contestation and compromise, the politics of people-making, involving both force and story, is always an ongoing as well as competitive politics, even within apparently well-established unified political communities” (Rogers Smith 2003: 42).

Would-be leaders and new entrants are encouraged to comply to varying degrees with the pre-established frame, while being left with sufficient room for altering, modifying,

44 and in turn be influenced by it. Let us consider for instance the case of the ‘one-drop-of-blood’ rule in the United States, which was initially enforced to segregate and subjugate the locally born Black population. The 1960s Civil Rights movement marked a critical juncture, although the rule did not disappear altogether but rather re-oriented public policies and institutions in a diametrically-opposed direction. Through a mechanism of boundary-inversion, the norm of negative discrimination was replaced by that of positive discrimination without fundamentally affecting the location of the boundary (Wimmer 2008b). Closer to the purpose of this dissertation, the ethnic or even racial boundary initially established by early Basque ideologues in the late nineteenth century was eventually abandoned after World War II (Diez Medrano 1994). Nevertheless, it influenced later developments and fed the antagonism between natives and immigrants from the rest of Spain, in spite of the fact that the national movement in the pre-Franco period emphasized residency as the main criterion of national membership (Linz 1981).

Likewise, in the Belgian case, Patrick Loobuyck and Dirk Jacobs attributed the contrasted approaches to immigrant integration in Wallonia and Flanders to their distinct national history and sensitivities. In their words, “it is not by accident that in Flanders there is a lot of emphasis on language competence and the importance of ethnic cultural identities – two issues which have had a prominent role in the history of the Flemish nationalist movement” (2009: 113).

Boundary-making strategies in relation to emigrants are fraught with similar ambiguities. On the one hand, the membership boundary can be expanded relatively easily, as the 1990s U-turn of the Mexican federal state in relation to Mexican nationals settled north of the border illustrates (Robert Smith 2003). However, boundary contraction is likely to be a much more protracted and contested process, as dismantling the existing web of institutions connecting the homeland with specific segments of its population abroad is a necessarily harder task than establishing it. Besides, groups and organizations enjoying a privileged voice in homeland politics, or privileged access to economic or cultural resources, are less likely to renounce it so easily. Hence, contracting the boundary in relation to emigrants is usually preceded by a more or less extensive period of boundary blurring. In Galicia for instance, political parties have been heavily dependent on the electoral support of overseas-voters settled in South America at least since 1980 and the establishment of a democratically-elected Galician Parliament. In 2010, the Spanish Parliament passed a law reducing the scope of the

45 electoral franchise at local elections to resident citizens only and a similar reform in regard to meso-level elections is also being considered. Yet, the negotiations have been particularly difficult and brought to the surface a variety of competing interests, both in the homeland and overseas³².

Party system and dynamics of party competition at sub-state level

Radical right wing nationalist parties, operating at state-wide level and defending anti-immigrant positions, and minority nationalist parties are often amalgamated as two sides of the same coin. In a careful analysis of what makes them distinct, Cass Mudde found that minority nationalist parties could embrace a variety of ideologies, covering the entire political spectrum. He nonetheless found that the numerous labels used in the literature – autonomist, regional nationalist, ethnonationalist, non-state-wide parties, moderate nationalist – made their commonalities particularly hard to establish (Mudde 2007: 28). In an equally ambiguous way, Seymour Lipset listed them among his ‘revolts against modernity’. However, he also acknowledged that, in stark contrast with the pre-war period when most of them were “identified with rightist socioeconomic politics, sometimes fascist ones, and often had strong links to the church” (1981: 464), the 1960s saw the development of territorial movements associated with “larger forms of post-industrial protest which characterized New Left politics” (1981: 464). To be sure, the Lega Nord in Italy and Vlaams Belang in Belgium illustrate how minority nationalist claims can go hand-in-hand with a virulently racist rhetoric, equally attacking immigrants coming from other parts of the state and beyond. However, the exaltation of ethnic particularisms, if frequent, is far from being the privilege of minority nationalist parties, as the proliferation and rising popularity of state-wide radical right wing parties across Europe illustrates.

In one of the few studies examining minority nationalist’ attitudes towards immigrants, Gershon Shafir (1996) contrasted historical developments in the Catalan, Basque, Latvian and Estonian cases and attributed the variations in outcomes to their distinct routes to modernization. In his view, hostility towards immigrants is rooted in the danger they once posed to the privileges of economic, cultural and political elites already destabilized by the tidal wave of modernity. Admittedly, some traditional elites

32. The Galician case is further examined in Chapter II, section 2.1.4.

46 in the periphery have been threatened by industrialization and subsequently turned to ethnic nationalism, the early days of the Basque movement being a classic example.

However, Shafir reduces minority nationalism to a political device created and controlled by a narrowly-defined privileged class pursuing its self-interest, failing to acknowledge that it overlaps and cuts across other cleavages. In stateless nations, political parties are encouraged to position themselves on both the centre-periphery and left-right axes and defend positions that are more or less polarized along both lines of differentiation, be they competing across the whole state or only in the territory over which they lay claim. In Flanders, support for outright independence is stronger among right-of-centre and far-right parties, whereas in Québec, the Parti Québécois combines its secessionist aspirations with a social-democratic agenda. In Corsica, the highly fragmented nationalist political space never managed to develop a clear socio-economic doctrine, although the movement leans towards the left and comprises a potent ecological wing. Hence, the way in which support for nationalism overlaps with socio-economic and ideological cleavages varies from one case to the other. One phenomenon, however, remains constant across cases. The sub-state party system and associated patterns of party competition considerably influences the struggle over the making and unmaking of membership boundaries. There is now a growing body of literature examining the incidence of party systems and dynamics of party competition on migration-related policy-making.

As far as immigrants are concerned, parties can either compete for the vote of immigrants, or for the anti-immigrant vote. Although this assertion is not equally valid in all settings, left-of-centre parties have privileged the first option, notably by blurring boundaries in the name of class solidarity and/or equality, whereas right-of-centre parties have rather flirted with the second one (Thranhärdt 1994, Bell 2008). Hence, we may reasonably expect that if support for nationalism strongly overlaps with a left-of-centre ideology, nationalist parties are more likely to seek support among immigrants.

Conversely, if the nationalist cleavage is primarily associated with a conservative ideology, nationalist parties are more likely to compete for the anti-immigrant vote.

As for emigrants entitled to vote in their province of origin, political parties’ ideological identities have not systematically impacted upon their willingness to compete for the votes of expatriates. However, a growing body of literature suggests that patterns of party competition in the homeland do affect strategies of boundary-making in relation to

47 those who left (Lafleur 2011). As expatriates tend to adopt more volatile electoral behaviour than domestic voters and parties have limited knowledge of their characteristics, actors usually rely on preconceived ideas that are often far from reality.

The Italian example shows that the decision to expand the boundaries of the franchise may turn against those who took it with the belief that they would be electorally rewarded for it. In 2001, the Italian Parliament extended the constitutional right to vote to Italian citizens abroad, an initiative that proved to be decisive in the 2006 centre-left coalition victory. Ironically, the reform was proposed by the neo-fascist MP Mirko Tremaglia – who became in 2001 the first ‘Minister for Italians in the World’ (Choate 2007: 729) – and passed with the unconditional support of the Northern League which was equally outvoted. In Belgium, the development of the ethnic conflict in the homeland over the past forty years has led to the parallel division of Belgian political opinion abroad. Indeed, Belgian expatriates, especially from Flanders, have gradually turned to nationalist parties, following the deterioration of the political climate in the homeland (Lafleur 2011b). However, Belgian political parties have been reluctant to instrumentalize them as a means to export the ethnic conflict beyond their borders, and the Flemish government has mainly used Vlamingen in de Wereld, the most influential Flemish association abroad, as a cultural and economic resource rather than an electoral one. On the other hand, emigrants and self-identified members of the diaspora have sometimes played a role that goes beyond homeland parties' electoral strategies. In some cases, they themselves instigated and constructed the national movements’ ideological identity and drew the initial boundaries of the people (Vertovec 2007). In Corsica, the intellectual underpinnings of the national movement were initiated and formalized on the benches of the University of Nice and later imported into the homeland, a phenomenon which goes far in explaining its romantic undertones. Ultimately, no general hypothesis can be formulated in regard to the incidence of the party system in boundary-making strategies vis-à-vis emigrants. It seems, however, that specific parties are more likely to seek their support, on the basis of a more or less accurate perception that they will be electorally rewarded for it.

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