Europe's rich mull abandoning the poor

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "It's a revolutionary project," said Roberto Maroni, once Italy's Interior Minister and now head of the Padania Liberation Committee. "The difference is that the (Northern) League is now the revolutionary party, not the Communists."

Just the name 'Northern League' sets the fascist alarm bells ringing in anyone alert to the linguistic nuances of Europe's dreadful 20th-century history, and League boss Umberto Bossi's rallies live up to the image -- flags and banners, 'Green Shirts' guarding the leader, ranting, paranoid rhetoric, the lot.

"He shouts and screams like Mussolini," said an onlooker -- but Bossi's aim is not to take Italy over. He wants to break it up, and a series of mass rallies recently culminating in a 'declaration of independence' in Campo San Stefano in Venice on Sept. 15 was designed to give credibility to the idea of a break- away state taking in all of the richer, northern half of Italy.

'Padania', the new country would be called, after the valley of the Po river that runs east across the northern Italian heartland. Bossi's Padanian republic would extend to 100 kilometers (60 miles) from Rome, it would have 32 million people -- and they would have the highest per capita income in Europe.

This is the key distinction between the old Communist revolutionaries and outfits like the Northern League. The Communists promised to end the distinction between rich and poor. The new regionalist parties that are proliferating across Europe are more often attempts by the rich to get away from the poor entirely -- by seceding from their existing countries.

The two richest parts of Spain, Catalonia and Majorca, both nourish separatist parties whose appeal is at least as much to the voters' wallets as to their local nationalisms.

A Dutch member of parliament, This Woeltgens, suggested two weeks ago that the Netherlands should merge with the neighboring German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to form a new state in the area once occupied by the forgotten kingdom of Lottingen. This ultra-rich region of 31 million people would then have huge leverage over the policies of Germany and the European Union.

And in Belgium last week, four French-speaking professors issued a manifesto demanding that the country be broken up into its French- and Flemish-speaking halves. At first glance this seems counter-productive, since Wallonia, the French part of Belgium, is poorer than Flanders. But the trick was that 'Wallobrux', as the secessionists named their new creation, would also inherit the largely French-speaking city of Brussels (Bruxelles, in French), which contains a large share of the country's wealth.

Even in this age when the crudest economism drives policy, it is still rare for a separatist movement to run on purely economic motives. It's usually about ethnicity, religion, language and history: Kashmiris, Kurds and Eritreans barely mention economics when they make their case for independence.

Even Quebec separatists, though compelled by the spirit of the age to make a (highly implausible) argument that independence from Canada would boost Quebec's economy, are manifestly driven by old-fashioned ethnic and linguistic grudges. Basque, Corsican and other European separatist movements don't even bother about economics.

But 'Padania' has no ethnic, linguistic, or historical basis. Those seeking to dismantle the 126-year-old Italian state simply want to stop subsidizing their poorer, southern fellow-citizens, who without large subsidies from the north would have a standard of living comparable to that of Portugal or Greece.

'Lottingen' is an even more extreme anomaly, since it proposes submerging one established nationality, that of the Dutch, in another purely for economic gain. And 'Wallobrux', though it is defined in linguistic terms, is really mostly about money too.

What unites these bizarre projects is the fact that they are all in Europe. Perhaps that explains them as well: money is generally a coward, but the well-padded economic separatists of Europe know that even if they got their wish, they would still be contained within the safety of the European Union. So the phenomenon is unlikely to spread to the rest of the world.

Can it succeed even in Europe? Probably not in countries where the authority and reputation of the state is still intact -- which dooms the notion of 'Lottingen' to early extinction -- but Italy and Belgium are the walking wounded of European states.

Belgium was existed since 1830 because that suited the needs of the great powers, but it has never roused much enthusiasm among its own citizens. ("Small country; small-minded people," remarked a 19th-century Belgian king, Leopold II.) Recent revelations about the corruption and incompetence of the authorities, ranging from the assassination of a deputy prime minister to the discovery of a paedophile ring, guarantee the separatists an attentive audience.

In Italy, the state is even weaker. The end of the Cold War broke the domestic deadlock that had frozen the Italian Communists out of power for 40 years at the price of effective one-party rule by the Christian Democrats and their allies. Soon after, revelations about forty years of corruption began to spill into the public view, and the old parties imploded.

Italian politics is now wide open for the rise of new parties that project an air of confidence and competence. The Northern League got only 20 percent of the vote in northern Italy in the last election, but it has already brought down one government in Rome. Umberto Bossi's stage-managed declaration of Padanian independence recently was pure theater, but given the current situation in Italy, his influence is bound to grow.

Europe, with 52 countries, has now drawn ahead of Africa's mere 51. (All the rest of the world has only 80-odd.) But the Europeans are not resting on their laurels. As somebody once observed: "Big bugs have little bugs upon their backs to bite 'em. And little bugs have littler bugs. So on. Ad infinitum."