Ideologisk symbios mellan nationalism och regionalism i dagens Europa: En idéanalys av European Free Alliance valmanifest från 2014

Författare

Jessica Mattisson

Summary, in English

In several regions of today's Europe there is an increased activity for socio-political self-government or total independence. The European Free Alliance (EFA) is a transnational European party that represent many of these regions at a supranational level. As the party brings together regions with strong national and regional identities and constitutes an ideological platform for meetings between nationalism and regionalism, the EFA becomes an interesting object for analysis. The purpose of this study is thus to investigate and analytically discuss the political message articulated by the EFA with focus on the interaction between regionalist and nationalist ideas. This essay intends to convey the main content of the EFA’s political discourse, especially on ideas about nationalism, regionalism and political self-determination. The main ideas of the party are discussed based on EFA’s official manifesto, published before the 2014 European Parliament elections. The research was carried out by using idea analysis, together with the essays theoretical framework: the theories of nationalism and regionalism. These were then applied to the study’s empirical material. In this essay, I determine that EFA indeed convey both regionalist and nationalist ideas in their manifesto and that regionalism and nationalism, depending on the context, indeed can be interconnected “isms”.

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