Nationalist bedlam is abroad in Europe this summer. In Spain, Basque separatist madness cuts loose again. Germany is shaken to the core by neonazi assaults on foreigners. In Ulster, despite all the progress, violence poses a constant threat. In France, Corsican independence loonies bomb and kill. A grim holiday season scene it all makes. If there is a ray of hope, it is in France, and it is not stretching things too far to say that Tony Blair has a hand in it. What Blair has done for Scotland and Wales seems to be causing excitement in unthinkable places.
France hardly seems fertile ground for devolution. The crux of the French republic is that it is one and indivisible. This was a basic tenet of the revolution that created the republic more than two centuries ago. Modern France still installs uniformed viceroys, bearing the imperial Roman title of prefect, to uphold the unshakeable principle in every corner of the land.
But what is this? The incendiary Mediterranean island of Corsica pointing France down a federal road? The next thing we know, big provinces such as Brittany and Provence will be suing for autonomy.
Behind a current rush of Gallic anguish over the true importance of national indivisibility is a quiet rethink on devolution by the left-wing prime minister, Lionel Jospin. It was Corsica that pushed him into it. As the rethink has matured in recent days, the first cracks are appearing in the old set-up of absolute adhesion by the provinces to a monolithic republic.
The Jospin government’s embrace of a scheme for genuine autonomy for Corsica may not be a direct consequence of Blair’s “release” of Scotland and Wales, but it is no doubt encouraged by it. All France’s major European partners, from Germany and Italy to Spain and Britain, have come to apply a good dose of federalism within their borders. Even the continuing violence in Spain’s Basque country hasn’t held back this process.
Until now, the traditional French government method of dealing with Corsican nationalist violence has been entirely predictable: repression – give the gendarmes their head. This response has revealed not only how the French state perceives any threat to its authority, but also the “danger” it sees in encouraging ethnic and cultural differences. The reason for the French government’s ingrained rejection of devolution is fear that any real power-sharing, any letting go, will bring the house down. Temptation to stray from this has registered as an act of treason against the republic. All credit to Jospin, then, that he is the first to try to break the mould.
Corsica (population 260,700) is a weird, clannish place. Beautiful but sinister, scenic but poor, it won’t pass a geo- historical test of Frenchness. The French revolution was well under way by the time the island was hooked into the French state (after a shaky year or so of British rule). Its chance bestowal on France of Napoleon Bonaparte is the master key to its Frenchness – this, and the popular notion that half of mainland France’s police, and all its gangsters, are Corsican. While fewer than 20 per cent of island voters back the violence-prone nationalist movement, it seems pointless to deny, as the French state has done, that Corsicans represent a distinct people with their own language (bastardised Italian).
For the past 25 years, on-and-off nationalist extremists have tried blasting and assassinating their way to independence, culminating in the murder, in February 1998, of Claude Erignac, the resident prefect – the man the government had placed there to restore the rule of law. But it took the recent assassination of a leading separatist hardman turned realist – a Martin McGuinness figure in the violent imagery of the Ulster that Corsica sadly resembles – to show that a good measure of home rule is now in sight, and that nationalist extremists are brutally divided on how far autonomy should be pushed.
This is because, instead of descending into the old spiral of violence and repression, Jospin’s unlikely tactic has been negotiation – not clandestine stuff, as had been tried before, but open bargaining.
The outcome of six months of unsung government talks with nationalist diehards and the island’s mainstream party leaders is an autonomy plan – one that offers Corsica laws distinct from those of mainland France, and a separate cultural identity.
It thus appears to open a route to eventual independence, were Corsicans to vote for it. The island’s toothless assembly has ratified the plan, and the French parliament will soon examine it.
Leaving aside the violence, which is bound to stalk autonomy’s endgame, any solution for Corsica must affect the political shape of the rest of France.
No one loathes this prospect more than the interior minister, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, the number two in the French government and guardian angel of the indivisible republic. Nationalism is all right with the outspoken Chevenement, as long as it is French, not regional. His France is a nation of citizens enjoying the same rights, not of people with differing identities and cultures. If Corsica escapes France’s tight clutch, he asks, what is to prevent Savoy, Alsace and other provinces slipping their prefectorial reins? “Pandora’s box would be open wide,” he frets.
Chevenement’s fears have so far been finessed by Jospin getting the autonomy plan to where it is, but a surprising number of French politicians – on the right, in particular – seem to fear nevertheless that France itself will be destroyed if the Corsican language is so much as brought into the curriculum in Corsican schools.
Certainly, with Corsica able to tailor separate laws (the autonomy plan is, for the moment, deliberately imprecise here) and set its own regulations, it would be hard to forbid the likes of Brittany, Provence, Savoy and the Basque country to seek similar freedom.
But what advantage is there in the indivisible republic? Apart from politicians who wear the republic as an epaulette, the French today seem past this kind of thing. They have never felt more confident, the polls say, about themselves and their country. In part, a buoyant economy and falling unemployment account for this, but France is obviously comfortable with itself as a nation. Most citizens, it seems reasonable to deduce, do not believe that their country would break up by going federal – or, for that matter, through losing impoverished Corsica altogether. The violence in Corsica has finally got the mainland French feeling rather as many English people do about Ulster. Good riddance, they say, but don’t expect us to pay your way any more.
It won’t come to that. But far more French sovereignty has already been transferred to the European Union than would be lost in relaxing the nation’s grip on Corsica. The same would go for Brittany and the rest. Moreover, the latest news reaching Jospin from Scotland is that a genuine measure of autonomy tends to put outright separatists out of business, rather than spur them on.
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