I did not write (much) on the then-up-and-exploding crisis on the long-simmering Catalan independence-versus-self government-question, despite it being an island of labour and the occasional elegant sentence, and thus so greater the reason to recapitulate the question and its developments now that one (well...) term in office of the post-referendum Parliament of Catalunya has now passed.
The result, in a way, needed no mention, and hardly got it outside the realm of old king Philippe - as he would be known, in the land of his Bourbon ancestors, if only he knew - and of old Francisco, now displaced from both his Jefatura and his eternal place of rest. Whether the unearthing and reburial of long-rotted carcasses can or should be undertaken for the purpose of vindicating those left in the soil, or unearthed under circumstances both more and less dignified, is a question I shall not even try to ponder, but rather waste my living breath on the question haunting successive governments to such an extent there is no ability, no ice-breaker, to break the bonds and deliver a new future by merely, well, stomping across it until the very bones are broken and eaten and only words remain.
Given this array of problems, which would have seemed so comparatively small for most of the Francoist (or Franquist, paying homage to the trend of originalism in language) regime, one would think the fourty-five year-old carcass of a short and pitiful and now very, very dead man would face less priority to the Santos government than the Catalan issue the right-wing government . Or, as Nixon put it about Rajoy Brey's predecessor, now also Santos': "A loyal friend and ally of the United States. After a tragic and bloody civil war, he brought back Spain to economic recovery. He [re]unified a divided nation through a policy of firmness and fairness against those who fought against him." Is this, prays Santos, the hope for the future of the Catalans, who were at the end of so much "firmness and fairness"?
The fairness of a fair and decent recovery, economically put, after years of war and famine and repression that saw not even a token legislature emerge - as it did in Portugal, and the Stalinist satellites - may have necessitated the firm brass of the garrotte, Nixon may have said if allowed (and properly prodded, as he later was) to go on. But if this past is to be addressed in such a fashion as to necessitate literal excavation, we may address - to this government of reconciliation and of apology and commutation to those who cannot even hear or rebuke such words - our discerning scepticism over the recent calamity in old Catalonia, whose token quasi-sovereignty was yet again rebuked and revoked only three and a half years past. This came not as a bureaucratic measure but as crown and rebuke following the accomplishment of ruining a plebiscite through the bussing in of Spanish (I should say Castilian with a risk of breaking sensitive emotions and adherence to Spanish unity in Leon, Galicia, Andalusia and so on) riot police in order to shut down polling stations and beating grandmothers' faces to a pulp. Following this slight infringement of Catalan, if not wholesale Spanish, democracy (the two being the same, according to the fuckers of Madrid).
How, then, is a European community supposedly dedicated to the rule of law - and not in the sense of giving Francoist properly delineated punishments to trespassers of Francoist laws, or adhering to the core principle of broken necks for broken laws - deal with a government brutally repressing a democratic referendum, or rather the broken attempt at a democratic referendum and the exercise in popular sovereignty, with the purpose of breaking this sovereignty, indeed this populus, in two? There is, necessarily, only one available answer.
The very question of popular, Spanish or Catalan - or, dare I call it now, Basque - sovereignty is not as simple as the purveyors of the referendum and of separation and republicanism, the Catalan republican left not the least, at least as far as international law is concerned. If a people is democratically sovereign, can it be forcibly kept in the bosom of a state which it does not want and which may - in all earnest brutal recognition of facts - does not want them? (That is, according to the old blood-stained adage; Wanting the territory, not wanting the people.) I cannot say, but I must, pinpoint the two cannot be separated. At the same time, as has been known for at least a century now, international law defines the state as subject and any derogation not explicitly permitted is read to permit the action, in view of the state's conduct and not an individual, organisation or province's desires to exercise similar rights, and any permissibility on the account of popular sovereignty as a principle would necessarily, if not too hastily, break down every country concerned to its smallest consenting building block. Catalonia or Catalunya, however, is not such a small and feckless hypothetical entity. If Algeria is permitted independence in spite of French designs and words of une et indivisible, your desires may be heard but the solution is ours, the majority, and history is a mere argument desiring a tear but not an exercise of rights, why cannot the Catalans - sorely oppressed, smashed and molded together by every measure short of outright genocide - as the phrase was used by Lemkin - and repeatedly held together by external and brutal efforts aimed at terminating that original freedom must necessarily be given a similar concern. If not, what is the difference? A small pond of water? A river insufficiently wide or salty?
I would ask, given previous posts of French and otherwise defined European colonial rule, whether this principle can be invoked or must be practiced on request. If Spanish Morocco, once a quite larger thing than the twin cities of Ceuta and Melilla offering a scant passage to metropolitan Spain, was retained on account of the Spanish state's - as it was known - desire for it, eventually coalescing in a 92 % majority in Spain, opposite an even stronger majority in the opposite of any part of Morocco, would carry not far if the desires of Moroccans is that of paramount concern for their independence. That Catalans should have fewer rights, as a collective, on account of them being too much similar to their Castilian brethren?
That being said, and not only with Catalonia in mind, there are numerous arguments put not only against the procedure - willingly diluted and destroyed by the authorities seeking by any means to quell it - but the underlying structural process and causes, as opposed to arguments, itself. For whereas as the political cause of Catalan independence - cultural, economic and linguistic as well as political - has reared its head in a startling roar more aggressively, the reasons behind it may not be as much of confidence as fear and desperation the designs of Francoist Spain - and before him, the Bourbons - be accomplished with peaceful means of intergration and absorption into a wider Spain and a wider Europe.
Secondly, and not too much in line with the moral authority of Madrid, the European project is certainly not chided, or even questioned (quite humbly) by the Catalan liberationists, there is
The case has aroused little homage in the cultural community, where Orwell once penned a passionate defence not only for liberty, for socialism, or for Spain, but the particular culture and circumstances making possibly its long-held resistance (being prioritised not quite so much as Madrid, and hardly even controlled by it) but some voices of fierce resistance. The most vitriolic, as well as not too eloquent, has been that of adopted Spaniard Mario Vargas Llosa, who did not steep to the depths of audacious eggshell with glasses Martin Schultz, who compared independentists in Britain to the attempt, then with steel and blood, of Germans to dominate Europe. Surely too, whatever the prospects of now-independent Britain, of Catalonia free of Spain but not of Europe, would be significant enough, but the hopes of Madrid pen on the notion that a fight will be too thorough and consuming and end the new country in a place where they simply are not, by their former masters as well as the wider European community and its interests, to act
In this soup of toxins and unclear outcomes, there is no elegy easy of note to be sung. The demographic restructuring of Spain - there I used the term - will continue, and make the cause of independence feel all the more ancient, but then also a lot more relevant. The cause for independence did not flourish in the 1970s or 80s, when its promise should have been seen as more potent, let alone politically relevant and unlikely to face resistance of this kind.
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