Tufta,
You're welcome!
About "Quo vadis, Europe?", maybe the time of an Europe of Federal and Centralistic nation states is over. Maybe the Future of Europe will be a confederation of regions or Euregions.
I sometimes think that in a time of freedom of movement and labour within Europe, all over Europe diaspora's from other European nations will come to existance. In some cases that means that towns, subburbs, cities and regions will be populated by other people than the original people who lived there.
Today the Hague has the largest Polish settlement in the Netherlands. The province of Limburg in the South welcomes Polish settlement, and now even a PVV dissident has nothing against Polish labour in the Netherlands. And mind you he is a rightwing Populist and liberal-conservative nationalist. (Comparable to
PiS and
Solidarna Polska) Conservative, Nationalist and Populist.
Back to your Link, next to
Catalonia, the
Basque Country,
Corsica and
Scotland,
Flanders in
Belgium also wants to become independant, and Belgium will dissolve in time. And the Northern-Irish Catholic Ires also want to be independent from
Great Britain. The Irish troubles aren't from the past. They got a huge support base in the USA with the Irish-Americans. And not only from the Irish gangsters with their arms trade, drugs and prostitution rings. No I mean Irish Catholic communities in the USA. For instance Boston, a bastion of the Irish working class and middle class in the USA.
I think the Hungarian regions in other Central- and Eastern-European countries will cause problems to the Union in the near future too, due to the discrimination of ethnic Hungarians by the Slovak, Rumanian, Ukrainian and Serb authorities and expansionist ideas of strong Nationalist parties in Hungary.
In Central and eastern Europe, there are at least nine zones afflicted by ethnic hatred and intolerance...the greatest potential for hostilities can be identified eith problems of discrimination against the Hungarian minority in southern Slovakia and Romanian Transylvania. In both cases, national regimes have discriminated against local ethnic Hungarians, depriving them of the right to use their native language for official business; taking step to reduce the use of Hungarian as a language of instruction in local schools, and, in the Slovak case, removing Hungarian street signs from villages populated entirely by Hungarians, replacing them with Slovak-language signs. Slovak authorities even went so far to pass a law requiring that Hungarian woman marrying a Hungarian man add the suffix "-
ova" to her name, as is the custom among Slovaks. Hungarians have rebelled against the prospect of such amalgams as "
Nagyova", "
Bartokova", "
Kodályova", and "
Petöfiova".
(Source:
Sabrina P. Ramet; Whose democracy?: nationalism, religion, and the doctrine of collective rights in post-1989 Eastern Europe (1997); p52-53)
South Tyrol in ItalyAnd in the autonomous province
South Tyrol in northern Italy Austrian separatism was strong too. Most people are German speaking Austrians there and they want to be part of Austria again. Under the Italian fascist government, huge efforts were made to bring forward the Italianization of South Tyrol. The German language was banished from public service, German teaching was officially forbidden and German newspapers were censored with the exception of the fascist Alpenzeitung. The regime massively favoured immigration from other Italian regions.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befreiungsausschuss_SüdtirolEuroregionIn 1996, the Euroregion Tyrol-South Tyrol-Trentino was formed between the Austrian state of Tyrol and the Italian provinces of South Tyrol and Trentino. The boundaries of the association correspond to the old County of Tyrol. The aim is to promote regional peace, understanding and cooperation in many areas. The region's assemblies meet together as one on various occasions and have set up a common liaison office to the European Union in Brussels.
South TyrolSouth Tyrol is one of the two autonomous provinces that make up the autonomous region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. The province has an area of 7,400 square kilometres (2,857 sq mi) and a total population of more than 500,000 inhabitants. Its capital is the city of
Bolzano (German:
Bozen; Ladin: Balsan or Bulsan).
T
he majority of the population speaks German. Around a quarter of the population speaks
Italian, and a small minority have Ladin as their mother language.
South Tyrol is granted a considerable level of
self-government, consisting of a large range of exclusive legislative powers and a fiscal regime that allows the province to retain 90% of all levied taxes.
In the wider context of the European Union, the province is one of the three members of
the Euroregion of
Tyrol-South Tyrol-Trentino, which corresponds almost exactly to the historical region of
Tyrol.
