ROME

The Scottish referendum vote earlier this week attracted the world’s attention but around Europe there are a handful of other regions that aspire to be independent.

Scotland’s decision to remain part of Britain surprised those who hold a romantic view of the country’s centuries-old struggle against England and who want to see the semi-autonomous Scottish parliament in Holyrood Palace granted more powers.

Alongside Scotland, Wales is another region of the United Kingdom that has its own independence movement. Like Scotland, the Welsh have their own assembly and devolved powers but support for nationalist party Plaid Cymru is a fraction of that received by the Scottish National Party.

In Spain’s Catalan and Basque regions, pro-independence attempts have also been a long-standing problem for the Madrid government.

In Catalonia, one of the country’s 17 semi-autonomous regions, separatist sentiment intensified in 2010 when Catalonia lost a great deal of power that it had secured four years earlier following objections from Madrid.

The region, with a 7.4 million population, was harshly affected by the economic recession that fuelled demands for independence. And the Convergence and Union Party came first in 2012 regional elections and was backed by the Catalan Independence Party in calling for an independence referendum. 

In January, several pro-independence parties submitted a demand for a referendum to be held on November 9.

Despite the Spanish parliament and senate declining this bid, the Catalan parliament has used a local law to put the referendum in place. The central government sees the vote as illegal and could prevent it at the constitutional court.

The Basque area of north-west Spain has the most say over its own affairs of any region in the country.

Recent Basque calls for independence stretch back to the early 1960s and in 1961 terror group ETA began operations against the Spanish state.

The Basque parliament voted in 2004 to approve the "Ibarretxe plan" calling for self-determination for the region’s 2.2 million. It was rejected by the Spanish parliament two months later.

In 2012, the Basque Nationalist Party won local elections and vowed to support the peace process, leading to ETA agreeing to stop its attacks. An independence vote is expected next year.

In Italy’s Veneto region, a referendum result in March called for secession from Italy for economic reasons. Rome is expected to challenge the vote as unconstitutional. 

Further north in Belgium, around 60 percent of the Flemish region have asked for greater autonomy and support for pro-independence political parties is high. The country is divided into two linguistic regions

Each election brings heated debate on whether the country should separate and during the 2010 parliamentary elections the country was left without a government for 541 days. 

Although closer to North America, Greenland, with a population of 57,000, has its foreign and defense policy dictated by Denmark, despite winning a large degree of autonomy in 1975, when three-quarters of Greenlanders voted to control the majority of public policy.

In the Mediterranean, voices on the French island of Corsica have called for independence since the 1960s. The National Liberation Front of Corsica conducted a terrorist campaign against the state, laying down its arms in June and vowing to limit itself to legal campaigning.

In Kosovo, the Mitrovitsa region regularly calls to join Serbia while across the border the Serbian region of Vojvodina local officials have demanded increased autonomy.

The Presheva district of southern Serbia, which has a large Albanian population, aspires to join Kosovo.

In another former part of Yugoslavia, ethnic Albanians constitute a quarter of Macedonia. In a recent development, an Albanian state within Macedonia, dubbed the Republic of Illyrida, was declared.

The former Soviet republic of Moldova has little control over the Transnistria region since the latter declared independence from Moldova in 1990 and a conflict two years later cemented Transnistria’s autonomy. Many of the Russian-speaking population hold Russian passports.

In April, Transnistria's parliament decided to ask for Russian recognition as part of the Russian federation.

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