How can political institutions peacefully and democratically accommodate nationalist parties and their conflicts? Paul Anderson’s Territorial Politics in Catalonia and Scotland: Nations in Flux addresses this challenge, one that seems especially pressing in the aftermath of 2024’s anti-incumbent, often populist, politics. He approaches this question through two well-known cases of stateless nations in rich countries, Scotland and Catalonia. The case studies are in service of his central argument, that is, in order to be sustainable and democratic, multinational states should adopt a set of policies and institutions, called “plurinational democracy,” which recognize the distinctiveness of nations within them.

The book is explicitly normative. Drawing primarily on Will Kymlicka’s (2001) Politics in the Vernacular and Michael Keating’s (2001) Plurinational Democracy: Stateless Nations in a Post-Sovereignty Era, Anderson posits a model of the ideal plurinational state as marked by four characteristics. They are recognition (formal acceptance that the stateless nations have different status and distinctive needs), self-rule (extensive autonomy for the stateless nations), shared rule (a significant role for the stateless nations in the state government), and a political culture accepting of their political and institutional distinctiveness. The onus of creating such a state seems to primarily be on the central state and the titular nationality (e.g., self-identified Spaniards in Spain), not representatives of the stateless nation.

The benefit of such a state is that it will be more reliably democratic and resilient. The author suggests neither the UK nor Spain completely fulfills these criteria although the UK conforms better than Spain. Sometimes the states in question do not try to accommodate the particular requirements of plurinationalism. In 2017, the Spanish government suspended the entire Catalan government and then arrested nationalist leaders as a response to an advisory referendum on independence.

Thus, a plurinational state is both cause and consequence for Anderson. Insofar as it is a cause, it creates a more stable and liberal democratic state more resistant to secessionist challenges. Yet at the end of 2024, the UK and Spain are both intact, Catalan nationalists are out of office, the Scottish National Party’s two decades of electoral dominance seem to have ended, and support for secessionism is flatlining in Scotland and Catalonia. That would be despite both countries’ failure to implement most of the plurinational agenda Anderson prizes over the last decade. The argument about a plurinational state as a cause is therefore not so compelling. It seems that a state can be sustainable and broadly democratic without adopting the plurinational formula. There might be more subtle counterfactual arguments about how Spanish or UK politics would be different and better had the central states adopted more plurinational institutions and politics, or that Catalan and Scottish secessionism will revive, but they are not made here.

Insofar as a plurinational state is a consequence, the book’s two long case studies present its establishment primarily as a result of interactions among political parties. The original data in the book, which claims to follow a “comparative case study” approach, are about parties and feature 45 reported interviews with party actors supplemented by sources cited in the bibliography. Despite this, Anderson does not report the distribution of interviews between Spain and the UK, let alone between parties (p. 2). In both countries, the book argues that constitutional courts increasingly matter as the politics of secessionism become contentious and are unsurprisingly more sympathetic to the central state. The resulting state is more legalistic and less plurinational.

The case studies focus on what parties and governments have done since around 2000. One of the book’s major contributions is its emphasis on “nationalism” as more than just a property of certain Scots and Catalans. Spanish, English, and “state” nationalisms (affection for the state, if not the largest nationality) can all matter. Anderson shows that the behavior of London and Madrid must also be understood as part of variable political strategies to activate or de-activate British (or English) and Spanish nationalism. These dynamics could be explored more: for example, would support for Brexit be a case of English or British nationalism at work? Is there really much difference between loyalty to a Spanish nation and loyalty to a Spanish state? Are there any internal contradictions in the idea of a state nationalism?

It is hard to read the country chapters as anything other than case studies of polarization around nationalism. Polarization is a useful, if destructive, political strategy in many contexts and has been helpful to some parties in both countries. It is clear, though not explicitly argued in the book, that Scottish and Catalan secessionism made wonderful wedge issues for all the nationalist parties, whether Scottish and Catalan nationalists, the British Conservatives, or the Spanish right (Popular Party, Ciudadanos, and Vox). They shared an interest in undermining the multinational, statewide, center-left parties and developed a shared technique to accomplish it: polarizing politics around a single issue, secession, that split social democratic coalitions while unifying their voters. Viewed this way, nationalists were the joint enemies of plurinational accommodation because their strategies undermined the parties with the structural interest in promoting it.

Maybe statewide parties of the center, capable of brokering divergent interests including those of different nationalisms and territories, are as much part of any sustainable democratic formula as formal recognition, specific institutions, or a particular political culture. Maybe what plurinationalism requires is parties that aggregate interests from across the whole state, manage conflict, and reduce polarization of national identity. That finding might have broad lessons in an age of party system change, polarization in some electorates, and challenges for older, more catch-all, parties. What looks like a distinctive politics of nationalism could be understood as part of a broad fragmentation in postwar party systems.

The book’s focus on nationalism and territorial politics shifts its focus away from other forces in politics. Interest group politics are absent. Political economy is absent. Differences and changes in the economic structures of the different nations, or even their short-term economic fortunes, are not discussed. Likewise, Anderson’s territorial politics exclude public policy, whether as a motivation for voters’ and politicians’ behavior or an object of intergovernmental dispute. The financial crisis, the spectacular Catalan debt crisis nested within it, and the EU’s receivership of Spanish finances, appear only as a pretext for centralization, as does COVID-19 (a topic on which Anderson has written well elsewhere).

These omissions make the book a less complete explanation than it could be. Further, there are almost no citations to works published in Catalan or Spanish which might have enriched the discussion. The few references in those languages cite political statements or news articles.

The omission also makes the lack of explicit scope conditions more of a problem. Was there anything else, visible in comparative perspective, that might have explained these outcomes—such as the overall wealth of the two countries, economic interests, media ecologies, or the comparatively limited clientelism in their politics? Nationalism, polarization, and party system fragmentation dominate the news, so it is a pity that it remains unclear who else besides students of the two countries and theorists of plurinationalism should read this book. Nonetheless, the book illuminates some of the key challenges of creating plurinational democracies, and it will be of interest to students of state nationalism and legalization.