THE THIRD WAVE
vous. The hooded ones announce that they are responsible for the bombing of the Serra-di-Pigno television repeater station—the only Corsican source of French telecasts. They want Corsica to secede from France.
Seething because Paris traditionally looked down its nose at them and because the French government had done little to develop then* island economy, Corsicans were angered anew when units of the French Foreign Legion were shipped to bases hi Corsica after the Algerian war. The locals were further outraged when the government gave the pieds noirs—ex-colonials from Algeria—subsidies and special rights to settle in Corsica. Settlers arrived hi hordes and promptly bought up many of the island’s vineyards (the main industry, apart from tourism), leaving the Corsicans to feel even more like strangers on their own island. Today France has a small-scale Northern Ireland brewing on its Mediterranean island.
At the opposite end of the country, too, long-simmering separatist sentiments have flared up hi recent years. In Brittany, with high unemployment and some of the lowest wage scales hi France, the separatist movement has widespread popular support. It is split into rival parties and has a terrorist arm whose members have been arrested for bombing public buildings including the palace at Versailles. Meanwhile Paris is beset with demands for cultural and regional autonomy in Alsace and Lorraine, parts of the Languedoc, and other sections of the country.
Across the Channel, Britain confronts comparable, though less violent, pressures from the Scots. In the early 1970’s, talk about Scottish nationalism was regarded as a joke in London. Today, with North Sea oil providing the potential for Scotland’s independent economic development, the issue is not funny at all. While a move to create a separate Scottish assembly was defeated in 1979, pressures for autonomy run deep. Long irked by government policies that favoredthe economic development of the South, Scottish nationalists now charge that then- own economy is poised for a takeoff, and that the sluggish British economy is dragging them down.
They demand more control over their oil. They also seek to supplant their depressed steel and shipbuilding industries with new ones based on electronics and other advanced industries. Indeed, while Britain is” torn with controversy over whether to go ahead with plans for a state- backed semiconductor industry, Scotland is already, after California and Massachusetts, the third largest assembler of integrated cir cuits in the world.
THE CRACK-UP OF THE NATION
Elsewhere hi Britain separatist pressures are evident in Wales, and tiny autonomist movements are even surfacing in Cornwall and Wessex, where local regionalists demand home rule, their ownlegislative assembly, and a transition out of backward industry into high technology.
From Belgium (where tension among the Walloons, ihe Flemish and the Bruxelloises is rising) to Switzerland (where a split-away group recently won a fight for their own canton in the Jura) to West Germany (where Sudeten Germans are demanding the right to return to their original homeland in nearby Czechoslovakia) to the South Tyrolese in Italy, the Slovenes in Austria, the Basques and Catalans in Spain, the Croatians in Yugoslavia, and dozens of lesser known groups, all of Europe is feeling a relentless buildup of centrifugal pressures.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Canada’s internal crisis over Quebec is not yet over. The election of the Quebecois separatist premier, Rene Levesque, the flight of capital and business from Montreal, the heightened bitterness between French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians have created the real possibility of national disintegration. Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, fighting to preserve national unity, warned that “if certain centrifugal tendencies fulfill them-selves, we will have permitted this country either to break up or to become so divided that its existence and its ability to act as one nation will have been destroyed.” Quebec, moreover, is not the only source of divisive pressures. Perhaps equally important, though less well known abroad, is the swelling chorus of separatist or autonomist voices in oil-rich Alberta. Across the Pacific, nations like Australia and New Zealand display similar tendencies. In Perth a mining magnate named Hancock has charged that mineral-rich Western Aus-tralia is compelled to pay artificially high prices for eastern Australia’s manufactured wares. Among other things, Western Australia claims that it is politically underrepresented in Can berra; that, in a country of vast distances, airfares are rigged against her; and that national policies discourage foreign in vestment in the West. The gold-lettered sign outside Lang Hancock’s office reads “Western Australia Secession Move ment.”
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