Postwar

units of Italy could neither overcome the ultra-local identification of Italians with their native village or town nor break the political and above all the financial reach of the capital. What the establishment of regions did achieve, however, was to remind Italians of the fundamental and continuing rift between the prosperous North and the dependent South—and to offer political expression to the resentments to which this gave rise.

The result was the emergence of something quite new, at least in the Italian setting: the separatism of the prosperous. The Italian north—especially the industrial and entrepreneurial towns and cities of Piedmont and Lombardy, and the thriving farms and small businesses of Bologna and its hinterland—had for decades been markedly richer than the rest of the country and the gap was getting larger. By the end of the 1980s gross regional product per capita in the Lombardy region around Milan was 132 percent of the national average; in Calabria, at the toe of the Italian boot, it was 56 percent. The poverty rate in the Mezzogiorno at the end of the Eighties was three times that of northern Italy. Whereas north and north-central Italy were comparable in wealth and services to France or Britain, the South had fallen ever further behind, opening a gap that was only made good in part by substantial cash transfers.

In the course of the 1980s a new political alliance, the Lombard League (later the Northern League, Lega Nord), arose to capitalize on a widespread belief that the ‘South’ had for too long been freeloading on northern wealth. The solution, according to the League’s charismatic founder and leader Umberto Bossi, was to gut Rome of its fiscal powers, separate the North from the rest, and ultimately secure independence for Lombardy and its neighbours, leaving the impoverished, ‘parasitic’ rump of the country to fend for itself. The resemblance to Catalonia (or Slovenia, or indeed the Czech Republic under Vaclav Klaus) will be clear.

In national elections of the 1990s the Northern League was able to command enough of the vote in Lombardy and the Veneto to ensure itself a foothold in conservative governing coalitions. Ironically, however, the League’s hold on office depended on its alliance with Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia movement and the ex-Fascists of Gianfranco Fini’s National Alliance Party—both of which (the latter especially) depended for their support on precisely the poor, subsidized southern voters whom the League so despised. In spite of these mutual antipathies, then, and the illusions of Bossi’s more reckless supporters, there was never any serious question of Italy breaking apart or any of its provinces becoming independent.

Much the same was true of France, where the Mitterrand presidency undertook limited administrative decentralization and initiated some rather desultory efforts to disperse institutions and resources to the provinces. Of the country’s newly established regional units not even Alsace or the French Basque districts evinced much interest in cutting their ties to Paris, despite their distinctive historical identities. Only the island of Corsica saw the rise of a movement for national separation, based on a genuine sense of linguistic and historical uniqueness and the implausible assertion that the island would flourish with independence from the mainland. But, like ETA, the Corsican nationalists’ taste for violence (and inter-familial score-settling) confined their appeal to a minority.

What was distinctive about France was that whereas elsewhere in Europe politicians and commentators now paid formal homage to the virtues of autonomy and local self-government, even the faintest stirrings of regional separatism triggered in Paris an avalanche of neo-Jacobin disdain across the political spectrum. Moreover, the provinces of France with the strongest sense of difference—Brittany, for example, or the depopulated mountains of the upper Languedoc—had also for many decades been those most dependent upon government largesse. Everything from infrastructural spending on high-speed railway lines to tax benefits for inward investment came from Paris and there was never much support for the few remaining Breton or Occitan separatists, mostly ageing militants left stranded by the retreat from Sixties-era enthusiasms. Conversely, wealthy areas like the Rhone-Alpes region around Lyon and Grenoble might well have prospered on their own: but they had long since lost any memory of independence and evinced no political aspiration to recover it.

Across the English Channel in Britain, however, the Celtic fringes—despite their heavy economic dependence upon London—had undergone something of a national revival. In Wales this took mostly cultural form, with increased pressure for Welsh-language education and media. Only in the more mountainous and under- populated areas of north Wales did demands for full independence, as articulated by the nationalist party Plaid Cymru, actually find a sympathetic response. The urban south, with better transport links to England and well- established political connections to the national trade union movement and both the Liberal and Labour Parties, remained wary of the small-state nationalist ambitions of Walesfirsters.

As a result, although candidates from Plaid Cymru made an initial breakthrough in the national elections of 1974 and maintained a small but visible presence thereafter, they were never able to convince their compatriots of the nationalist case. Of the minority of Welsh voters who turned out in a March 1979 vote on devolution to regional assemblies, most were opposed. When devolution eventually came to Wales two decades later, it was not at the behest of local nationalists but as part of an administrative overhaul by the first New Labour government of Tony Blair—who calculated, shrewdly enough as it transpired, that the limited powers assigned to a new Welsh parliament in Cardiff would almost certainly fall into the hands of the same people who were now exercising it at Westminster.

The outcome—a Welsh Assembly with considerable symbolic value but little real power—appeared nevertheless to satisfy whatever demand there was in the principality for a separate national identity. Wales, after all, had been absorbed into and under England in 1536 during the reign of Henry VIII—himself scion of a Welsh dynasty—and while the recent revival of interest in its language and history was real enough, it should not be mistaken for a full-scale recovery of national consciousness. If there was anger or resentment under the surface of Welsh public life it derived from economic woes, not thwarted national aspirations. Offered the choice between an independent Wales and the recovery under English rule of the mining valleys and villages and ports devastated by de-industrialization and unemployment, very few Welshmen would have hesitated.

Scotland was another matter. There too the decline of the old industries had taken a terrible toll; but the Scottish National Party (SNP) which emerged in the Seventies could count on a share of the local vote four times that of their Welsh colleagues. Within two decades of its breakthrough as a ‘single-issue’ party at the 1974 elections—where it returned eleven members to parliament—the SNP had overtaken the Conservatives and was placing serious pressure upon traditional Labour strongholds. Unlike the Welsh, the voters of Scotland did favour devolution of power; and although they had to wait for it until 1997, the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh indisputably speaks for a country which thinks of itself as a distinct and separate nation, if not quite a state.

Scottish nationalism benefited both from the fortuitous discovery of North Sea oil and gas—which brought prosperity to Aberdeen and the north-east—and from EC regional policies, which allowed Scottish administrators and businessmen to bypass London and forge direct links to Brussels. But Scotland, though joined to England by an Act of Union in 1707, had always been a land apart. Its sense of self rested less on linguistic or religious distinctions, which—though real enough—had grown tenuous for most of its residents, than on a curious admix of superiority and ressentiment.

Thus, in the same way that so many of the classics of modern English literature are in fact Irish, so some of the greatest achievements of English-language political and social thought since the Enlightenment, from David Hume to Adam Smith and on to John Stuart Mill and beyond, were actually Scottish. Not only was Edinburgh in some ways the intellectual capital of early industrial Britain and Glasgow the radical core of the British labour movement in the early years of the twentieth century; but Scottish businessmen, Scottish managers—and Scottish emigres—were responsible for establishing, settling and administering much of England’s empire. Moreover Scotland had always claimed and maintained a distinctive and separate identity: even at the height of centralized rule from London it preserved its own system of education and its own legal system.

An independent Scotland, then, was a perfectly plausible proposition—particularly in a European Union in which it would have been by no means the smallest or the poorest nation-state. Whether the majority of the Scottish population, having secured much of the appearance and some of the substance of independence, would ever wish to go further is less certain. The limitations of geography, demography and resources which have kept Scotland dependent upon the UK are still there; and by the end of the Nineties there seemed reason to suppose that in Scotland as elsewhere the engine of nationalism was running out of steam.

Whether the same was true amongst the descendants of the Scottish emigrants who had crossed into