To Stay or To Leave : That Is The Question

When we look at a map, we just see a bunch of countries, sovereign states more or less recognized by what is called the “International Community”’, each of them filled with a color, knowing next to nothing of what there is inside, regarding every country as a single, uniform block. And we don’t ever wonder how mistaken we might be.

On November 25th there was an election to Parliament in Catalonia, a region inside Spain. It was not the first election to the Catalan Parliament, but it has been, by far, the one that has called most attention from international media. The reason is simple: the Catalan President called a snap election and included holding a referendum on Catalan independence in his party’s program.

In Catalonia there have always been people in favor of independence from Spain. And when I was a kid, more or less fifteen or twenty years ago, those people were regarded as crazy, mad, naive or idealistic. People who were just dreaming. There was then only a single party in the Catalan Parliament with such an idea in its manifesto, earning (until 1999) no more than 13 or 14 seats out of a total of 135. In those days I was a fervent unionist, that is, advocating that Catalonia should remain inside Spain. From 2001 to 2004 I spent three years living outside Catalonia. I changed my mind completely, and it seems that the currents of political opinion in Catalonia were revolutionised. In 2003, the then only independentist party in the Catalan Parliament nearly doubled its seats (from 12 to 23), and the results of the last election show that the parties in favor of holding an independence referendum have, combined, 87 seats, of which 74 are openly in favor of seceding from Spain.

More and more people, from workers to lawyers, politicians, journalists, etc. are considering the merits of seceding and, perhaps, advocating it. How can one explain such an extraordinary change in the Catalan political landscape, so extraordinary that I would not have believed it when I was younger, even if completely drunk?

I think that the whole thing may be summarized as “the history of a failure”’, that of the Spanish state. There are countries with only one language, one culture, states we could define as the “Nation-State”. There are some others with several languages, multiple identities, with some form of self-government, or perhaps a federal scheme, such as Belgium. Spain has tried, throughout its history (especially since 1714), to become a Nation-State, with a single language, a single culture, becoming the extension of the Kingdom of Castille. I think that everybody could agree that Spain has failed (at least until now) in this attempt. It has been usual, in Spain, to attempt the uniformisation of the country, and several dictatorships have attempted it with bold means such as persecuting and forbidding the Catalan language, the Catalan culture, denying self-government institutions and suppressing those that would happen to be in existence.

With the death of the last dictator, General Franco, and the transformation of his regime (which suppressed all Catalan self-government institutions, forbade and persecuted Catalan culture and language, etc.) into a democracy with its new Constitution, it was believed and hoped that the relationship between Catalonia and “the rest of” Spain could enter a path of mutual understanding, trust and even appreciation. It seemed that with the new Catalan self-government institutions, the Catalan Parliament, the Catalan language being official alongside Spanish, there would be no reason for grievances, conflicts or serious complaints. This belief has proven wrong. Completely wrong.

When the Spanish Constitution was being drafted, the issue of how to deal with the so-called “nationalisms”’ was raised. The question was how to give a proper response to those regions in Spain with a strong particular identity, usually felt as a national identity, with their own language, etc. The solution devised was what is called “the State of the Autonomies”, which is not the same as a federal state but it could be a bit similar. The Spanish Constitution recognises the right of the regions to create self-government institutions, with a government and a Parliament, and it also specifies which powers may be transferred to these regional institutions and which ones must be kept by the central government, etc. The Constitutional Court, alongside its other duties stipulated by the Constitution, is entrusted with the task of resolving conflicts between two or more regions and between a region and the central government.

Jordi Salvador Pont

http://www.rostrum.no