engleski

Possible Future States of Europe: Gateway or Getaway States

In the early 1990s, Saul B. Cohen emphasized the recurring proliferation of national states, pointing out that the number of states has more than quadrupled since 1939. The last great wave of proliferation of national states occurred in the first half of the 1990s, with the breakup of multinational communist federations. Today, about a half of the states that gained their independence then, can be recognized as functional democracies, with most of the post-communist EU member states as best examples. Cohen recognized that there were still about 30 political units in some form of dependency and 20 unit areas that are trust and self-governing territories, and therefore, possible new independent states. Some of those were more likely to become gateway states (a concept that Cohen developed), which could increase the number of states to about 250 by 2025. Most of these units were not located in the geopolitically sensitive areas, so their independence would not initiate tectonic shifts in the geopolitical balance of certain regions. On the other hand, the territories located in shatterbelts and/or rich in natural resources, were prone to instability and even war (Eritrea, South Sudan, prospective Kurdish state etc.). Nevertheless, parallel with proliferation of new states, there are processes of integration, mainly economic, and mainly in Europe, even monetary and political. These processes, on the other hand, evolve parallel with the tendencies towards independence in some EU member states, whose high democratic standards were and are tested as calls for independence became more vociferous, even resulting in separatist rebellions. The paper aims to study the prospects of current calls for independence in the EU member states, with Catalonia and Scotland as the most prominent cases, as tests for democratic institutions of the member states and the EU, respectively. These two cases show the opposite approaches of respective states towards their certain parts with secession tendencies. It also tries to respond to the research question: Will the prospective new states become gateway states and join other already established gateways, or they will become just getaways from the state from which these want to secede.

proliferation of national states, the EU, gateway states, independence and interdependence, referenda

Sažetak poslan za IPSA Kongres 2018.