A crowd estimated at 1.5 million rallied in Barcelona on September 11, 2012 to urge the secession of the Catalonia region from the E.U. state of Spain. I put it this way because the fact that Spain was at the time a semi-sovereign state of the European Union mitigates the importance of whether Catalonia becomes a separate state or not. Similarly, the Egypt region of the U.S. state of Illinois had thrice in the history of Illinois hosted a movement to secede from that republic to form a new state in the U.S.
Whether a Catalonia in the E.U. or Egypt in the U.S., the fact that federal law would presumably still apply lessens the impact of the change, especially in the U.S. because of all of the competencies or domains that had been claimed by the Union at the expense of the powers of the state governments (something the Europeans have been assiduously trying to avoid).
The full essay is in Essays on the E.U. Political Economy, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.
