Thanks for the link, but, as you pointed out yourself, the list of devolutionist movements is not exhaustive.... Although it's exhilarating to learn that some Banaba atoll in the Pacific and the exiled Maluku Selatan Republic are both struggling for their self-determination, I was disappointed not to see an entry about Chechnya or about just any other Russian province, for that matter (except Belarus). So, in case you're acquainted with the webmaster, please, notify the necessary updates to him/her....
Furthermore, there's a gross intellectual dishonesty in lumping East Timor together with Austria, or Belgium's Flanders together with some Pacific "casino-island" or some Latin American "banana-Republic".
Austria's Jorg Haider is not fighting for "devolution" or for "freeing the Austrian people". Nor is he struggling for the economic progress of some Third World impoverished wasteland --Austria enjoys one of the best lifestyles in the world (at least according to OECD's Western technocrats).
Austria ALREADY is a sovereign country led by an Austrian-only establishment, ruled by a 100%-Austrian bourgeoisie. Of course, the building of the EU requires that member countries relinquish some of their prerogatives to EU supranational bodies. But then again, where do we find the foremost eurocracies? The EU Parliament, along with the Commission and all the Directions (the so-called DGs: DGI, DGII,..., DGXII,...) are located in Brussels --ie a French-speaking enclave in Germanic territory; the European Court of Justice is located in Germanic Luxembourg; the ECB is located in Frankfurt; and, last but not least, Europe's key chancellery lies in Berlin.... What would have Austrians and other North-Europeans thought of Madrid, Milano, and Marseilles as EU's key toponyms?? I think Austrians got rather a fair deal.
What's basically at stake in Europe's allegedly devolutionist parties is the secession of the rich, pure and simple! Prosperous Flanders, oil-rich-silicon-glen'd Scotland, Lombardia, Catalugna, etc. are not fragile countries, homeland of some brutalized minorities whose cultural legacies are routinely pulled down by a hostile government. Quite the contrary: Corsica, for instance, would likely be less developed than Albania were the French government to turn off its subsidies to the rebellious island....
Obviously, I'm quite aware of the strong appeal devolutionary politics has for Americans: it nicely fits their traditional distrust towards any form of central government and it demagogically deludes them in their blind conviction that every success story is a purely individual, non-collective matter.... Hence your frenzy for gated communities and trigger-happy militias.
Such a vision of society is naive, self-deluding, and hazardous for the whole social fabric. A minimal sense of community is always a prerequisite for any sustainable civilization; consequently, inequalities and injustice can be dealt with so long as the under-class, the middle-class, and the happy few share together some common utopia.... But suddenly, you've got these silly petty bourgeois who start lamenting about the red-tape burden, about excessive taxes, about food stamps, welfare, about arrogant minorities, about hurricanes, about medicare, medicaid, about gun control, about.... you name it! And they just break the social contract that used to bind them to the rest of society.
Up to this point, their delusion works devilishly well --there's no feedback from the underclass yet. So, people entrenching themselves into gated-golden-communities, abiding exclusively by their own, private rules, paying only their self-managed utilities, have the comforting feeling that "it's just fine!" The life of Riley amidst an ocean of misery! The bums outside the gates? LOL! They just don't have a clue 'bout what's going on! WRONG: the rednecks from outside your private Disneyland do have a clue, it just takes time for its translation into a social backlash.... At that point, the petty bourgeois usually realize that their lifestyle did rest upon some weird concept as a "community" --but it's too late. |
