Le mutevoli visioni dell'Europa dei partiti nazionalisti sub-statali. I casi del Bloque Nacionalista Galego e dello Scottish National Party

Generally sub-state nationalist parties have been considered as pro-european parties. Many scholars have claimed that European integration has offered to these parties many opportunities in terms of votes, offices and policy. For this reason, according to scholars, sub-state nationalist parties have europeanized their consititutional goals, adopting also pro-EU positions. However more recent researches and the empirical evidence show that not all sub-state nationalist parties are pro-EU and that many of them have changed, over time, their attitudes towards the EU. Starting from these theoretical premises, the article tries to answer the following questions: why do sub-state nationalist parties assume different attitudes towards the EU and the European integration? Why do they change their European position over time? By focusing on two parties (the Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG) in Galicia and the Scottish National Party (SNP) in Scotland) some factors are considered: parties' ideology and organization, the domestic and the European "structures of political opportunities" and the evolution of the European integration process. The article concludes that European integration has not the same impact on sub-state nationalist parties. Parties' different interpretations of the EU depend principally by the differences of their domestic contexts. In particular sub-state nationalist parties' European positions are determined by strategic considerations, conditioned more by the domestic "structures of political opportunities" than by those at the European level. Furthermore ideology, when is radical, contributes to influence the general vision of "goal-oriented" and "value-based" parties. And parties' organization helps to understand the parties' ability to change, over time, their European attitudes.