Citizenship after the Nation State: Regionalism, Nationalism and Public Attitudes in Europe (Comparative Territorial Politics)

This book has quite a pre-history. Its earliest inspiration was a series of projects on public attitudes on devolution in the various parts of the United Kingdom commissioned as part of the Economic and Social Research Council's (ESRC) Devolution and Constitutional Change Programme in 2000. Led by Anthony Heath (England), Alison Park (Scotland), Richard Wyn Jones (Wales) and Roger Mac Ginty (Northern Ireland), and informally coordinated by John Curtice, these projects built or extended datasets on public attitudes on the devolution reforms that extend (at least) back to the devolution referendums in Scotland and Wales in 1997, and which continue in various ways through to today. As Director of the ESRC programme, I was aware both of how rich these datasets were, but also how little we were able to contextualize them with comparative data from elsewhere. So, towards the end of the ESRC programme, and building out from a core United Kingdom group of Park and Wyn Jones plus Ailsa Henderson and Daniel Wincott, we convened a group of colleagues from Austria (Franz Fallend and Peter Ulram), Belgium (Lieven de Winter), France (Romain Pasquier), Germany (Dieter Roth and Roland Sturm), Spain (Enric Martínez-Herrera and Francesc Pallares) and Sweden (Mikael Hjerm) to see whether research that would collect data systematically about the public's attitudes on decentralized systems of government was desirable and feasible. The answer on both counts was yes, and in spring 2007 an application was made under the title Citizenship after the Nation-State (CANS) to the European Science Foundation (ESF) for a 'European Collaborative Research Project' which included all the above, except de Winter (Belgium's idiosyncratic system of decentralized government meant that de Winter's region, Wallonia, was not a signatory to the ESF). At least three national components of the project had to be supported if it were to go forward. Some months later the ESF, working with national research funders, approved the Austrian, German and Spanish components of the project, but not the French, Swedish or the U.K. projects. The U.K. component was crucial in providing coordination for the whole, and the ESF's rules were that if the coordinator was not funded, the whole project fell . xiv Acknowledgements Offering an confrontation of the uncritical choice of the 'nation-state' as a unit of analysis in postwar social science, this book utilises specially collected data from 14 regions across five European states to explores how citizens define and pursue collective goals at regional scale as well as at the scale of the 'nation-state'. An outstanding cast of contributors led by Charlie Jeffery, Ailsa Henderson and Daniel Wincott, confront the idea of 'methodological nationalism', that is the uncritical choice of the 'nation-state' as a unit of analysis that dominates postwar social science. It looks within the state to a regional-scale unit of analysis. Using specially collected data from 14 regions across five European states Citizenship After the Nation State explores how citizens define and pursue collective goals at regional scale as well as at the scale of the 'nation-state'. It shows that regional institutions, actors and processes have transformed the state, in many ways 'de-nationalizing' it, and recasting it as a more complex form of political organisation, one that needs to respond to the demands of distinctive regional political communities as well as the political community as organized at the state-level. What comes 'after the nation-state' is, in other words, not the regional disintegration of the state or the emergence of a 'Europe of the Regions', but rather the consolidation of multi-levelled statehood "An outstanding cast of contributors led by Charlie Jeffery, Ailsa Henderson and Daniel Wincott, confront the idea of 'methodological nationalism', that is the uncritical choice of the 'nation-state' as a unit of analysis that dominates postwar social science. It looks within the state to a regional-scale unit of analysis. Using specially collected data from 14 regions across five European states "Citizenship After the Nation State" explores how citizens define and pursue collective goals at regional scale as well as at the scale of the 'nation-state'. It shows that regional institutions, actors and processes have transformed the state, in many ways 'de-nationalizing' it, and recasting it as a more complex form of political organisation, one that needs to respond to the demands of distinctive regional political communities as well as the political community as organized at the state-level. What comes 'after the nation-state' is, in other words, not the regional disintegration of the state or the emergence of a 'Europe of the Regions', but rather the consolidation of multi-levelled statehood."--Provided by publisher Front Matter....Pages i-xvi Introduction: Regional Public Attitudes beyond Methodological Nationalism....Pages 1-30 Citizenship after Devolution in the United Kingdom: Public Attitudes in Scotland and Wales....Pages 31-51 A Comparative Study of Citizenship in Three Spanish Autonomous Communities....Pages 52-79 Regional Citizenship in Germany: Solidarity and Participation in a Unitary Federal State....Pages 80-108 Public Attitudes to National and Regional Citizenship in a Unitary Federal State: The Case of Austria....Pages 109-134 Regional Citizenship and Scales of Governance in France....Pages 135-154 Citizenship in Europe: A Comparative Examination of the Territorial Scales of Political Life....Pages 155-180 Conclusion: Citizenship After the Nation State: The 2009 Survey and Beyond....Pages 181-205 Back Matter....Pages 206-248