H77 - Intergovernmental Relations; Federalism; SecessionReturn

European national governments have faced since 90s two contradictory pressures. While European Union requires ever closer economic integration, individual regions have called for increasing political disintegration. In 2014 four crucial referendums on the independence of regions in Ukraine, Italy, Scotland and Spain were held. This wave of secession movement and the fear of contagion to states with latent autonomous tendencies turned attention from the integration studies to the research of disintegration. This consultation deals with the literature review of the political-economic aspects of secession tendencies in European integration. Secession spreads especially among the most developed regions of nation states. In an environment of economic barriers the right to secession is therefore not Pareto-optimal. Economic integration of small states, however, provides the benefits of the single market and reduces costs for the secession of the mother country. Comprehensive survey serves as a basis for future research of the political economy of conflict in the contemporary secession pressures.

This study aims to analyze and compare selected Spanish politicians'speeches, where the discoursive representation of "economic crises" supports the construction and reproduction of various collective identities and differences. I will reflect the theoretical approach of the social construction of identities and I will use the methodology of the critical discourse analysis to explore the basic discoursive strategies of argumentation that Spanish politicians utilize to re/define the relations among different dimensions of political identities.