Catalonia is going to hold a vote of sorts (a non-binding, unofficial “participatory process”) this weekend on the idea of independence from Spain. This hasn’t played well with Madrid, run (as the people of Gibraltar know all too well) by a government with little respect for the idea of self-determination.
The LA Times gives some background:
Just like Scotland, which held an independence referendum in September (but voted to remain in the United Kingdom), Catalonia had hoped to hold a similar referendum this autumn. But Spain’s Constitution says the unity of the country is indivisible. The central government says it is the only authority with the power to call referenda, and that they must be voted upon by all Spaniards, not those from only one region. It considers any Catalan vote unconstitutional, and took its case twice to the Constitutional Court.
After a previous court ruling in September, Catalonia tweaked its voting plans. It recruited tens of thousands of volunteers to guard polling stations, to try to protect civil servants from prosecution. In its latest form, Catalan leaders call the vote a nonbinding, unofficial “participatory process,” and acknowledge that its results are unlikely to be recognized.
With its capital, Barcelona, Catalonia has about 7.5 million residents and is one of Spain’s wealthiest regions, benefiting from an industrial history and tourism. With its own language and culture, Catalonia has long sought autonomy from the central government in Madrid.
To be fair, Catalonia enjoys a very substantial degree of autonomy already, but not as much as it was once promised. Writing in Bloomberg News, Leonid Bershidsky explains:
Catalans could argue that their rights were first recognized and then trampled by Madrid. In 2006, both houses of the Spanish parliament — and the people of Catalonia in a referendum — voted for the region’s new Statute of Autonomy, and King Juan Carlos signed it. The document granted the… region…broad self-government and fiscal powers not unlike those Scotland is about to get after its failed independence referendum.
Had those powers remained in place, there would probably be no question of secession now. Yet the [conservative] People’s Party, in opposition at the time, challenged the document in the Constitutional Court. Four years later, the court struck down 14 articles of the statute and reinterpreted another 27. The ruling, in effect, said that Catalonia had no right to call itself a nation, just a “nationality” under the Spanish constitution. It declared Catalonia’s extended tax powers unconstitutional and told the region it had to stick with the Spanish scheme of administrative division.
Throughout the appeal process, it was the current prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, who led the People’s Party. After it returned to power in 2011, Rajoy went back to the Constitutional Court again and again, seeking and receiving rulings against continued Catalan attempts to get more independence from Madrid.
Even so, Catalonia may already enjoy enough autonomy to persuade Catalans to stick with Spain (as the LA Times notes, they are fairly evenly divided on the question of independence), but what a large majority of Catalans do want is a say on the matter. That seems more than reasonable. Whatever one thinks about the merits of Scottish independence or the unlovely way in which the recent Scottish referendum was structured, the principle that Scots should decide the matter was not only sensible, but, in a democracy, right.
In an article for Delfi, the Latvian writer Otto Ozols noted the silence of Europe’s politicians and was unimpressed:
Very recently Great Britain recognised the right of self-determination of the Scottish nation, allowing it to hold a democratic referendum to decide their future. Nearly all European leaders lauded this as a great achievement and triumph of democracy. Great Britain proved its wisdom, courage and trust in fundamental values of democracy. The Scots were recognised as a fully-fledged nation, one that has the same rights as other European nations do.
At the same time, most European politicians choose cowardly silence when the same is demanded by Catalonians – an equally ancient, respected and large nation. It suddenly turns out that a principle that applies to one nation is not applicable to another. Once again – all are equal, but some are more equal than others. Less educated European politicians are making the base excuse that Scottish rights are based on special “British legislative traditions”. Apparently they have forgotten that the right of self-determination of nations is a long-standing, fundamental and universal principle of modern democracy.
The contrast is made all the more striking by the EU’s willingness to criticize the threat that Hungary’s awkward prime minister Viktor Orban (no saint, admittedly) allegedly represents to the Hungarian democracy that keeps voting for his party in inconveniently large numbers.
But when it comes to Spain, a country denying a large number of its citizens the right to a proper vote, silence.
Rajoy may not think much of self-determination, but he is evidently not alone. Self-determination is clearly not one of those ‘European values’ the EU is always so busy proclaiming.
Why the difference in the attitude shown towards the Scottish vote? Cynics might think that part of the explanation may lie in the fact that quite a few in the EU’s hierarchy would have been fairly pleased to see Britain taken down a peg or three by the departure of Scotland. As for criticizing Hungary but not Spain, well, Hungary is a smallish country that has not made much of an effort to fit in with the Brussels way, so Brussels feels free to carp. But Spain, on the other hand, is a big country that plays the European game, is in the euro zone and, we should remember, has a great deal of debt outstanding. As the Bloomberg News report notes, Catalonia ”accounts for 16 percent of Spain’s population [and] 19 percent of its gross domestic product” : the financial consequences of a Catalan exit might be, um, interesting.
There’s probably something else at work too. The principle that underpins the entire European project is that the nation state has had its day, and yet there are the Catalans, still conscious of themselves as a people despite centuries of Spanish rule, a living reminder that nationality is a very stubborn thing.
That’s not something that Brussels appreciates, not at all.