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 The leader of ethnic Serbs in Bosnia was quick to claim a
precedent, asserting his autonomous Serb Republic's right to secede
or at least turn the former Yugoslav republic into an even looser
confederation.
By contrast, Western Europe's nationalists have distanced themselves
from Crimea, concerned that the worst East-West crisis since the
Cold War may give separatism a bad name.
"Catalonia is not Crimea," the government of the northeastern
Spanish region declared last week after the central authorities in
Madrid tried to link the two.
Catalan President Artur Mas wants to hold a referendum on November 9
on independence from Spain, but Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy
has opposed any such vote as illegal.
"The Catalan situation could not be further from the Crimean one,"
the regional government said in a position paper circulated to the
Madrid embassies of the 27 other European Union members. The Crimean
referendum presented a "false choice" since it was an attempt to
legitimize the annexation of the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine,
it argued.
Western governments, condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin's
move to change borders in Europe by force as a violation of
international law, have mostly rejected any linkage between Crimea
and the independence movements on their continent.
But European diplomats say several governments quietly hope voters
will note the political and economic difficulties raised by the
break-up of nation states and will want to avoid such uncertainty.
Separatists may be hoping that Crimea is largely forgotten by the
time they hold a vote.
Nearly a century after U.S. President Woodrow Wilson introduced the
right to self-determination into the lexicon of international
governance after World War One, the implementation of that principle
remains fraught with risk in Europe.
MORALLY SUPERIOR?
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Britain had taken a morally
superior path by agreeing on a consensual process for a referendum on
Scottish independence to be held on September 18.
Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish
National Party, tried to turn Kerry's statement against the British
government. London has warned that an independent Scotland would
have to reapply to join the EU and could not be sure of sharing the
pound currency.
"Of course you lose all of that moral superiority in the democratic
process if you then say, 'of course Scots have the right under this
consensual process to vote for independence but then we will set
about flinging them out of the EU, refusing to share sterling'. The
whole argument dissolves," Salmond told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show.
Spanish leaders, struggling to hold their country together and avoid
any vote on Catalonia's future, have tried to harness public
revulsion at Putin's action by drawing parallels between the two
cases.
Crimea's vote on splitting from Ukraine and the proposed Catalan
referendum on secession shared one crucial feature, Spanish Foreign
Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo said last month. Both were
unconstitutional.
Spain is unwilling to give any ground on Catalonia, fearful that
allowing a self-rule vote or granting the region greater autonomy
would encourage similar demands from the Basque Country and other
regions with historic nationalist movements.
Catalan leader Mas has signaled he will not break the law and if
blocked by the courts, he will turn the next Catalan election in
2016 into a de facto vote on independence instead.
Opinion polls show that public support for Catalonia to go it alone
is running at about 50 percent, while in Scotland, most polls put
opponents of self-rule in the lead. A TNS poll on March 25 showed 42
percent of Scots would reject independence, with 28 percent voting
"Yes" and 28 percent undecided.
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In Belgium, which holds a general election on the same day as
EU-wide European Parliament elections on May 25, talk of prosperous
Dutch-speaking Flanders breaking away from poorer French-speaking
Wallonia has been muted for once. The main Flemish nationalist
N-VA party's big campaign issue is tax reform. It is focused more on
reducing the amount taxpayers in Flanders pay to the federal
government than on further steps to pull the country apart.
The extreme-right nationalist Vlaams Belang party, for its part, is
more concerned with fighting Muslim immigration.
BALKANIZATION
Putin's action in Crimea has had the biggest echo in other breakaway
regions of former Soviet republics where there are "frozen
conflicts".
The parliamentary speaker of Transdniestria — a Russian-backed
sliver of territory that split from Moldova in 1990, went to war
with it in 1992 but did not win international recognition — appealed
to Moscow to annex his area too.
In the Balkans, where most blood has been shed in Europe in the last
quarter-century in the name of self-determination, the Crimean
crisis has caused a new flurry of calls for a further
"Balkanization" or fragmentation of the region.
Kosovo's prime minister has rejected Russian leaders' comparisons of
the situation in Crimea with his own country's separation from
Serbia against Belgrade's wishes following NATO's military
intervention in 1999.
Hashim Thaci, once the leader of ethnic Albanian guerrillas who
fought to drive former Yugoslav forces out of Kosovo in 1998-99,
said: "Under no circumstances can the Kosovo case be compared with
the case of Crimea.
"Kosovo is a unique case. The international community intervened
after the genocide by Serbia took place," he told Reuters in an
interview. "We never demanded to leave one country and join
another."
But Bosnia's Serbs see Crimea as an inspiration, and a vindication
of their struggle for their own state or unification with Serbia.
Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik immediately supported Crimea's
referendum on joining Russia as "legitimate and democratic" and said
the Serb Republic was watching closely the secessionist movements in
Crimea, Catalonia and Scotland.
"We are monitoring them closely and will apply the best world
practices when the time comes," Dodik told reporters during a
late-March visit to Belgrade.
Serbia's new leaders, whose top priority is their own bid to join
the prosperous EU, did nothing to encourage him.
(Additional reporting by Kylie MacLellan and Guy Faulconbridge in
London, Julien Toyer in Madrid, Philip Blenkinsop in Brussels, Daria
Sito Sucic in Sarajevo, Ivana Seularac in Belgrade and Fatos Bytici
in Pristina; writing by Paul Taylor; editing by David Stamp)
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