We study a class of nonlocal functionals in the spirit of the recent characterization of the Sobolev spaces W 1,p derived by Bourgain, Brezis and Mironescu. We show that it provides a common roof to the description of the BV (R N ), W 1,p (R N ), B s p,∞ (R N ) and C 0,1 (R N ) scales and we obtain new equivalent characterizations for these spaces. We also establish a noncompactness result for sequences and new (non-)limiting embeddings between Lipschitz and Besov spaces which extend the previous known results.2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. 46E35.