Strategies Towards Independence: The Role of the External Actors and the Nationalist Movements in Spain

This paper explores the influence that the external actors have played in the development of the strategies towards independence that nationalist movements in Spanish Regions have taken. With a focus on the two most important nationalist movements in the post-1978 Spain, Catalonia and the Basque Country, this paper explores the different uses of external resources and actors both by these two types of separatism and how the role that external actors play has changed as the Spanish democratic political system matured.

While for the Basque nationalist movement, the external actors have a legitimizing function that add pressure to the Spanish institutions to find an acceptable solution to the Basque question, in the case of Catalonia, the Catalan nationalists are much more exposed to the position taken by actors outside of Spain.

The analysis from the historical perspective also shows that some external actors (particularly, international organisations) have evolved from being entities that could legitimise the claims in favour of secession towards a form of referee that determines the chances of the process to succeed due to the transformation of the supranational entities themselves. This is particularly clear in the case of the European Union that occupies a privileged position in the recent developments occurring in Catalonia.