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Another Great Illusion:1 The Advancement of Separatism through Economic Integration*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

Dawn Brancati
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Abstract

Economic integration is widely argued to increase subnational demands for independence. Yet increasingly high degrees of integration have not been associated with a commensurate growth in separatist activity. This article argues that integration is not likely to promote separatism in general because the economic benefits of integration are not uniformly positive, and are not large enough for most regions to provide for their own defense in order to sustain themselves as independent states. This argument is empirically tested using the case of post-WWII European integration, a hard test of the argument, since the European Union is the most advanced economic integration scheme in the world. The quantitative analysis supports the argument, showing that European integration is only weakly associated with a modest increase in electoral support for separatist parties. Further qualitative analysis suggests that the effect of integration is conditional on other factors as well.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , April 2014 , pp. 69 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © The European Political Science Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*Dawn Brancati is Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Seigle Hall, St. Louis, MO 63130 (brancati@wustl.edu). This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, SBE-0849215. For comments on earlier drafts of the article, I would like to thank Ruth Ben-Artzi, Paolo Dardanelli, Matt Gabel, Shareen Hertel, Simon Hug, Peter Lynch, John McGarry, Michael Keating, Guillermo Rosas, Margit Tavits and Lieven de Winter. For research assistance, I would like to thank my head RA, Amanda Sabele, and my assistant RAs.
1The title is an illusion to The Great Illusion, in which Norman Angell argues that economic integration makes war between European countries obsolete.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/22808
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