The Mobilization Potential of Regional Identity: Forced Separatism and Patterns of its Development

Abstract

Local, regional identity is an important aspect of collective identity that can be potentially destructive or creative - to promote separatism and disintegration of the society, or to act as a factor of consolidation. In the context of globalization and the exacerbation of ethnic conflicts and clashes of identities, the regional identity becomes an important theme of the political analysis and practical problem of public administration. As a rule, separatism of regions based on regional cultural, linguistic and historical features and notions of regional superiority. Well-known examples of regional separatism are the Basque Country in Spain and Wallonia in Belgium, Northern regions of Italy. Depending on historical circumstances, regional consciousness in the hierarchy of identities recede into the background, wiping out by the feeling of belonging to a wider community at the state level as a whole, or on the contrary stoking the separatism and the desire to create independent state. With regional identity were forced to fight the unifiers of Italy and revolutionary France and many other national States, trying to construct a nation based on a broader, over regional united community. Today the conflict potential of regional identity is a possible cause of destabilization and disintegration of nation states.