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eric reguly

Mariano Rajoy was beaming on Friday morning, for a while anyway. Within hours of the failure of Scotland's wannabe secessionists to win the independence vote, the Spanish Prime Minister was praising the unionists who had kept the United Kingdom intact. "Yesterday they chose between segregation and integration. Between isolation and being open. Between stability and uncertainty," he said in a video statement. "And they chose the best option for everyone – for themselves and for Europe."

His joy didn't last long. The Catalan MPs duly pushed ahead with a law that would allow a non-binding vote on Catalonia's independence; it is to take place on Nov. 9. The wealthy region, in Spain's northeast, has always had a strong nationalistic streak. When Catalans need to leave the region for business or pleasure, they say "I'm going to Spain today," as if the non-Catalan bits were as foreign as France or Morocco. To them, the frontier between their homeland and the rest of Spain is not invisible.

Mr. Rajoy is fighting the Catalan independence movement and may resort to the constitutional courts to try to ban the vote. But the Catalans are not easily intimidated. Not only were they emboldened by the pluck of the Scottish nationalists, they realize that the new world order, where trade restrictions are disappearing and open markets are becoming common, no longer demands rigid, historical borders.

There will be more independence movements in Europe just when the leaders of the European Union and the euro zone within it are pleading for more unity, more integration, "more Europe," as they call it. The independence efforts are likely to be peaceful, barring the odd riot or mass demonstration, but they are equally bound to be messy and distracting while clashing with national political movements in countries that are becoming skeptical of the grand European project. Imagine if Scotland had separated and applied to join the EU just as the rest of the U.K. was trying to get out of the EU, which it may well do, and euroskeptic-in-chief Nigel Farage bellows for freedom from the EU nanny state. Brussels, we have a problem. A big one.

It is not hard to imagine why Catalonia was emboldened by the Scottish referendum, even though it went the wrong way for the independence crowd. The unionist victory was hard won and came close to not being won at all. Before the summer, the Yes side was treading water, with about 30 per cent support. By early September, one or two polls put them in the lead and the three main Westminster parties went into a panic. The 10 percentage point gap between the No side and the Yes side (55 per cent versus 45 per cent) meant that a mere 5 per cent swing among voters would have ended Scotland's 307-year union with England. To Catalonia, that's encouraging.

Catalonia now realizes that there is no such thing as outright defeat in a serious and popular independence campaign. Either you win or, like Scotland, you lose and nail a consolation prize. Westminster is now committed to negotiating "devo max" – maximum devolution – that will give Scotland vast power to set its own spending, taxation and political agenda, while leaving the grubby stuff, like immigration control and cleaning the loos on nuclear submarines, to Britain. You can bet that Catalonia is saying: We'll take some of that too.

Catalonia is not the only independence movement outside of Scotland. Northern Italy comes equipped with a party, Lega Nord (Northern League), that advocates autonomy from the rest of clapped-out Italy and occasionally outright secession. The party was the coalition partner in the governments of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and typically snags 5 per cent to 10 per cent of the votes in Italian elections. It also controls a few seats in the European parliament.

The Veneto region in northern Italy, whose capital is Venice, held a non-binding referendum on independence in March and wants to hold another one. In Belgium, the Dutch-speaking Flemish would like to break away from their French cousins in Wallonia. And so on down the scale of seriousness.

And why not? To varying degrees, these regional independence movements are acknowledgment that they no longer need to be part of a large political entity – the U.K., Spain, Italy – to survive and thrive. That's because the common market – the EU in this case – means they can trade with anyone they want and take investment from anyone they want (okay, maybe not Russia). They can go it alone without the sponsorship or the international bullying power of the state.

"When nations remove trade barriers among themselves, economic integration reduces the benefits of large jurisdictions and increases the costs of holding together heterogeneous populations," Edoardo Campanella of the Harvard Kennedy School said in a note published last month on the Voxeu.org economists' site.

"The Catalans and the Scots, for instance, perfectly understand this logic."

That's why the EU will see more independence movements. A couple may be successful. At the same time, a couple of countries may try to leave the EU as anti-EU parties, such as Marine Le Pen's Front National in France, come on strong. How the EU will cope with member countries breaking up, or others wanting out, is an open question. The EU's identity crisis may be yet to come.

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