In Europe, the nation-state is relativized through the concept of ethnicity, at the infranational level, and through the development of European integration, at the supranational level. This article analyses the dynamics of identities between the French nation-state and an ethnoregion, the nation-state and Europe as a supranation.
In France, there are several peripheral regions where ethnoregionalism is active; Alsace is selected as a case study. Alsatian political identity has been quite integrated in the French nation, the Alsatians, for some decades after the Liberation, preventing themselves from being considered as a political companion of Germany that had produced the Nazis. But people in Alsace have a strong attachment to their cultural or ethnic particularity based on language and they hold Alsatian identity in high regard; Alsatian ethnoregionalism is vigorous, and it is an important factor which relativizes the framework of the French nation-state at the infranational level.
Alsatian regionalism has developed beyond its borders and it cooperates economically and culturally with the German and Swiss regions which are next to Alsace. The Regio, for example, is an transnational cooperation along the Rhine, where we must not ignose the cultural and traditional background of a territorial solidarity based on German culture and language. The European Union subsidizes interregional cooperation like the Regio, although, in this case, Switzerland has not yet entered the Union; we can see the situation that (ethno) regions have not needed to depend on nation-states absolutely in days of European integration.
We must not ignore the reaction of French nationalism against the emergence of ethnoregionalism and deepening integration of Europe. The Council of Europe, which, in the realm of human rights or cultural rights, has played a main role in European international organizations, adopted in 1992 the “European Charter of Regional or Minority Languages”, but France has not yet signed it. And at the election of the European Parliament in 1994, many French voted for anti-Maastricht parties like “L' Autre Europe” (The Other Europe) for fear that France should lose its sovereignty and national character. These cases demonstrate a rise of French nationalism. French people nowadays have their identity as French and at the same time as European; these two coexist. In case of the Alsatians, they have an Alsatian identity in addition to the two; they have three identities, which are conflicting in one case and complementary in other.
The nation-state is relativized by infranational ethnoregionalism and supranational integration of Europe, but at the same time, nationalism tries to reinforce its nation protecting the national identity; we can find both conflict and coexistence, in the correlation between nationalism and the other two. Ethnoregionalism and supranational integration are needed, in a sense, so that a nation-state might survive.
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