The French state is highly centralized, and the department line rarely coincide with actual ethnic boundaries, which makes using a NUTS-2 map to create the map I've done above much harder.
I would not dismiss the Bretons, nor a limited Alsatian state.
I don't think that the Basques in France would ever be serious contenders for linkage with a Basque state. Once upon a time theres was a French Basque terrorist group called Iparretarrak. ETA use France as a staging area for many years, and they still do things like store explosives in Bayonne, and so on. ETA was not amused by Iparretarrak because they wanted to avoid provoking the French.
One of the untold stories of the Basque country is the role that France played in looking away when ETA was planning terrorist attacks from the late 60's to early 90's. It was only in the 90's that French and Spanish police began to cooperate, and ETA still uses France as a staging area. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
That doesn't preclude separatism. Your map (which I had only briefly a chance to look at at home last evening) seems to show you believe too much in separatists wanting to join 'the home country'. But separatists might find autonomy preferable to becoming an unimportant province within anothjer larger country. Upthread I already pointed bruno-ken towards the example of Romania and Moldavia; I think Kosovo is destined to be another example (i.e. won't join Albania). Maybe Transdnistria is yet another example, I don't think they would want to join the Ukraine (from which Stalin cut the area off when taking Moldova from Romania). *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
