Emmanuel Dalle Mulle defended his PhD thesis last week at the Graduate Institute, where this young student from Italy had already completed a Master’s degree in International Studies in 2009. His research, entitled "The Nationalism of the Rich: Discourses and Strategies of Separatist Parties in Catalonia, Flanders, Scotland and Padania", was supervised by Andre Liebich, Honorary Professor of International History and Politics. Around 50 PhD candidates defend their theses every year. We will be presenting some of the best theses in a new series of students’ portraits starting today.
Why did you choose to work on nationalism in Europe?
The media often talk about the rise of nationalism in Europe. Now, when looking at Europe overall, this is often a superficial conclusion, not necessarily supported by empirical data. However, we do have some nationalist movements that have been very successful, not only in the last four or five years, but also in the last two or three decades. This is even more surprising because, until the 1960s, modernisation theory – the then dominant approach in the social sciences – interpreted nationalism as a primordial force doomed to disappear with the unstoppable advance of economic progress. In other words, in Europe and North America scholars believed that nationalism was a good and natural thing for people going through the decolonisation process, but it would never appear, or reappear, in "advanced societies". In light of this, understanding why and how these movements have been able to obtain such good results is already a sufficient reason to focus on the subject.
But there is an additional reason. The propaganda of the parties analysed in my work – the Republican Left of Catalonia, the Flemish Interest, the New Flemish Alliance, the Northern League in Italy and the Scottish National Party – is based on an argument of economic victimisation according to which the nation that they claim to represent is economically more advanced than the rest of the country they belong to, but it is fiscally exploited by this latter. They thus give priority to the economic dimension (an aspect often neglected in the study of nationalism) and argue that their nation is held back by a more backward core. This is a type of nationalist discourse that we do not find before the 1960s and that has not been systematically analysed until now.
Has your decision to deal with five different cases studies – which is a huge work – brought a “plus” to the conclusions?
Nationalism is a difficult subject to study because it is very pervasive and elusive at the same time. For instance, after more than three decades of scientific literature on the subject, we are still very far from having reached a consensus on a basic definition of the phenomenon shared among the main scholars in the field. However, an aspect on which most experts agree is that a contextual approach is probably the best way to examine nationalism. My work uses precisely such a contextual methodology, with a detailed analysis of the discourse and strategy of the five nationalist and separatist parties mentioned above. It also contains an evaluation of their arguments in light of the available socio-economic data. The decision to work on five parties has enabled me to obtain a good compromise between the need to conduct an in-depth case-study analysis and, at the same time, to confirm the transnational nature of the phenomenon – although limited to the European context.
Do your conclusions help explain Europe's current political crisis?
It depends what you mean by "Europe's current political crisis". On the one hand, the origins of the parties studied in my dissertation trace much further back in time. On the other hand, their discourse does touch upon issues of inter-territorial solidarity, economic migration and the clash between individual and group equality that Europe is currently facing on a continental scale. For instance, the rhetoric of austerity promoted by the European Commission and the German government of Angela Merkel, among others, in the context of the euro crisis – notably the moral distinction between responsible, thrifty northern economies and irresponsible, spendthrift southern ones – strikingly echoes the arguments of these movements against solidarity with the poorer regions of the countries to which they belong. The study certainly shows that national identity still is a fundamental variable in order to understand contemporary Europe.
What can you tell us about your PhD experience at the Institute, and your future professional plans?
Writing a PhD dissertation is like running a marathon: you are alone and, therefore, you need a lot of motivation and stamina, as the run lasts for four or five years. I believe that the Institute offers excellent conditions to do that, notably with regard to the quality of the scholars it hosts, the infrastructure that it provides to them and the support to doctoral students. Yet I was not affected by the recent raise in tuition fees which might have considerably changed those conditions. This good quality is also a general feature of academic research in Switzerland as a whole, especially thanks to the support that the Swiss National Science Foundation gives to young researchers. I was indeed able to take advantage of a Doc.Mobility scholarship that allowed me to spend a semester as a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science and another one at Boston University. There, I learned a lot and I substantially improved my work. Now, I am committed to pursuing an academic career and I have already applied for post-doc grants in order to achieve this goal. I will probably have to leave Switzerland for a while, but I would be very happy to come back in the medium or long term.