Emmanuel Dalle Mulle

• PhD, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva
• PostDoc Position at Complutense University of Madrid

In most accounts of peacemaking after World War I, “flawed” decisions at “Versailles” caused the ethnically mixed states of Central and Eastern Europe to descend into violent ethnic clashes, while the allegedly more homogenous Western European states faced few issues with minorities. This article challenges this simplistic view by examining the tre...

Papiers d'actualité / Current Affairs in Perspective, Fondation Pierre du Bois

The end of the First World War was a crucial time for nationalist leaders and minority communities across the European continent and beyond. The impact of the post-war spread of self-determination on the redrawing of Eastern European borders and on the claims of colonial independence movements has been extensively researched. By contrast, the inter...

Interwar European majority-minority questions have been predominantly discussed in the context of the East until now. This volume challenges that geographical emphasis by examining both Eastern and Western European experiences. It thus lays the foundation for a new comparative international history of the relations between national majorities and m...

The 1939 Option Agreement between Italy and Germany concerning South Tyrol was the first population transfer agreement in western European history. Its analysis offers a unique opportunity to shift the focus of the historiography on interwar minority questions from eastern to western Europe, thus challenging the lingering view of eastern Europe as...

Papiers d'actualité / Current Affairs in Perspective, Fondation Pierre du Bois

Social‐democratic parties face a dilemma between the universalist ethos of their socialist tradition and the nationalism that they share with the other political actors of the state where they act. In this paper, we examine comparatively the position of the Spanish party Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) and the Catalan party Esquerra Republ...

This article introduces our themed section on The Left(s) and Nationalism(s), which provides a comparative analysis of the relationship between nationalism and different left-wing parties in Western Europe. It highlights the innovative comparative perspectives offered by this themed section, which not only concerns a series of different geographica...

Most historiographical currents examining the history of human rights postulate a clear break between the collective rights tradition of interwar minority protection and the ensuing age of individual human rights. Two observations, however, suggest a more nuanced account of the transition from the League of Nations’ to the United Nations’ rights sy...

Recent scholarship on the populist radical right tends to imprecisely describe the welfare agenda of this party family with reference to its key ideological characteristics of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. We propose an alternative analytical framework that considers the multidimensionality of welfare state positions and the “deservingn...

Maurice Pinard, Nationalist Movements Explained. Comparisons from Canada, Belgium, Spain, and Switzerland. London: Routledge, 2020, 202 pp, 11 illustrations. ISBN 9780367271459

Papiers d'actualité / Current Affairs in Perspective, Fondations Pierre du Bois

Since the early 2000s, the Flemish nationalist party New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) has experienced a burgeoning growth. Paradoxically, for a stateless nationalist and regionalist party (SNRP), this performance has occurred without major changes in mass support for independence and only ambiguous ones for more regional autonomy, which suggests that th...

This paper inquires into whether the three types of arguments usually formulated in the normative literature on the legitimacy of secession – i.e. communitarian, choice, and remedial arguments – are articulated (or not) by separatist parties in Catalonia and Scotland. It concludes that these actors do use such arguments, but they tend to merge them...

Advanced introduction to nationalism, by Liah Greenfeld, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2016, 137 pp., $108 (hardback), $19.96 (paperback), ISBN 9781785362545 - Volume 46 Issue 3 - Emmanuel Dalle Mulle

Based on rigorous analysis of the propaganda of five Western European separatist parties, this book provides in-depth examination of the 'nationalism of the rich', defined as a type of nationalist discourse that seeks to end the economic 'exploitation' suffered by a group of people represented as a wealthy nation and supposedly carried out by the p...

La letteratura sull’etnicità e il nazionalismo si è prevalentemente concentrata sulla costruzione sociale dell’Io collettivo per opposizione ad uno o più Altri negativi. Attraverso l’analisi dei discorsi di tre partiti nazionalisti d’Europa occidentale dagli anni Ottanta ad oggi, questo saggio dimostra invece come l’Io collettivo possa relazionarsi...

This paper argues that the Scottish National Party and the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie have recently made an instrumental case for independence that runs counter to traditional principled notions of external self-determination as an end in itself, as well as to remedial arguments based on claims of victimisation, alien rule and lack of recognition. The...

This article describes and assesses the process of territorial and non-territorial devolution in Belgium. After providing a description of the linguistic structure of the country and the background that led to its transformation from a unitary consociational democracy to a federal one mixing forms of territorial and non-territorial autonomy, it pro...

This paper analyses claims of equality and difference in the context of two multinational states – Spain and the United Kingdom – with specific reference to the arguments for self-determination made in Catalonia and Scotland by the separatist parties Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya and the Scottish National Party. It starts from the acknowledgmen...

This paper analyses the debate over the consequences of Scotland's and Catalonia's potential independence on the membership of the European Union by focusing on the status that the new states arising from secession would be granted. The main research questions are as follows: would an independent Scotland/Catalonia automatically become a member of...

PhD preliminary dissertation, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.

This paper aims at exploring the role of emotions and rationality in two major recent instances of national mobilisation in Western Europe, that is, the campaigns for independence referenda in Scotland and Catalonia. It does this by looking at the justifications in favour of external self-determination of the two most important separatist parties i...

This paper looks at Belgium as a case offering a privileged perspective to observe two dynamics: the interaction of territoriality and non-territoriality in a context of transition from a unitary to a federal architecture; the efficiency of non-territorial autonomy in appeasing ethnic conflict and protecting cultures in a context of linguistic comp...