Stateless nations

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WE HAVE already had three instalments of BBC Scotland's series about the 'Stateless Nations' of Europe. Last week's was about a people I'd never head of, the Valdotians, who speak a French dialect but are part of the Italian state.

They live high up in the Alps in Val d'Aosta, just on the border between France and Italy, but on the wrong side of it.

They have been part of an Italian state since 1861. During World War 2 the area was a base for the French maquis against the Germans, and suffered heavy German and Italian fascist reprisals for it. The Valdotians were granted autonomy under French pressure - in 1946, and there is official bilingualism.

Autonomy

Yet their autonomy is constricted: any laws they pass have to be approved by a commission on which the representatives of the central Italian government have a two-to-one majority.

The area used to be isolated for half the year, but tunnels through the Alps and other transport improvements have changed that. Land in the Val d'Aosta is now the highestpriced in Italy, and there is a relentless pressure on the native population from immigrants. French is on the retreat.

The main industry is steel, which is, there as elsewhere, in massive crisis. So the cry for full self-control, and (for example) for charges to the Italian state for electricity generated in Val d'Aosta, is growing.

One irony is that the Italian state is far more tolerant in such matters than the French is. The Valdotians speak a FrancoProvencal dialect like that of southern France, where there are stirrings of a long-buried southern French regionalism -whose advocates charge that the south is oppressed by the French state.

Ramshackle

Peoples with a common language and culture are the raw materials of states and nations. The pre-capitalist monarchic states were loose ramshackle structures, often conglomerates of peoples. Areas, peoples, and parts of peoples changed states as a result of conquests and by way of dynastic. shifts and successions, or even purchases.

An area like the Lowlands (Belgium and Holland) would go with a prince and attach to Spain or the German Empire as he did.

The modern nations were bonded together from this raw material by the creation of unifying national markets. But even in the classic cases like France, the state did "not coincide with the entire ethnic/linguistic group of people.

The Walloon half of Belgium (independent since 1830) is French-speaking. They are yoked with Flemings who are akin to the people of neighbouring Holland.

When Germany was finally united in 1871, it was according to a smaller-Germany option which excluded German Austria, then at the head of a ramshackle empire embracing many Mick Ackersley reviews BBC2 TV's series, "The Stateless Nations' nations.

Millions of Germans were scattered in the East - three million of them in the Sudetenland alone, an area which became part of the Czechoslovakian state after World War 1. They had been resident in the region since the Middle Ages.

13 million Germans, including many from East Prussia (now part of Poland), were driven west in 1945.

On the other hand, nations like the Basques and Catalans were distinct entities within the archaic and backward Spanish state. Catalonia, with a language having much in common with French, was perhaps the most developed part of Spain, but all these minorities were imprisoned and oppressed, to varying degrees.

The Swiss created a nation out of peoples speaking four languagues - French, Italian, German and Romansch. But that is very much the exception. The normal relations within states including peoples of different cultures and languages was that of the dominant and the dominated, if not the oppressed and the oppressor.

CIENCE, I recently wrote about the discovery of how one particular cancer gene works. Now some more have been uncovered.

Cells normally grow and divide in a controlled way. Control is often by chemicals called "growth factors" (GFs) produced by cells elsewhere in the body.

If cells can escape from this control, they may form tumours, causing swellings and blockages, squeezing blood vessels and nerves, wasting the energy of the body, and lowering resistance to other diseases.

The control of growth is laid down in our genes, and it is the Boundaries have been changed and shifted many times, notably after the Napoleonic wars, World War 1 and World War 2. But today there is still a large scattering of peoples, nations and national minorities in Europe, imprisoned more or less against their will by states dominated by other peoples. They do not have the right to secede at will and form their own state, or join another one.

Ireland

Ireland is a peculiarly snarledup example. After many centuries in a common state with England, a distinct Irish nationalism developed, and took its present form in the 19th century. Independence for most of Ireland and Partition • Came together in 1920-22. The natural minority is the Protestant community in north-east Ireland.

It might be defined as a British-Irish national minority. But because of the Protestant alliance with powerful sections of the British ruling class, the partition they imposed on Ireland has created a Catholic minority in the Six Counties which is bigger as a proportion of the Six County population than the Protestants are of the whole people of Ireland.

The result has been a 'carnival of reaction' • But Ireland would have a minority, and perBOHEM Vlenna JSTRIA Czechi SLOVENIA Greek SOVERE Slovak Homens, Rumen orgetica bIsh Tatar se tiar Serbian Rushenien Vinch Bogarian SAME OTTOM RAZAR: Heman there were no partition.

disposed of by talking vaguely about "imperialism' , or, in the case of Ireland, pretending that British intervention in Ireland is the only problem.

France was one of the powers that long kept Italy divided. Nut until after France's defeat by Prussia in 1870 did the final unification of Italy become possible. In 1861 the cause of Italian unity was a major part of war