The current situation in Spain in November 2023 is one of the most difficult in modern history of this country.
In the last general elections in July 2023, the PSOE party got 122 seats out of 350, far from the required majority of 176 seats needed for its incumbent PM Sánchez to retain its position. With this background, the interim Government of PSOE’s Pedro Sánchez has signed an agreement with the separatist Junts per Catalunya (JpC) party. Sánchez has agreed to drop ALL ongoing judicial charges (even corruption or abuse of office charges unrelated to the Separatist case) against separatist Catalan politicians and to facilitate the Legislative reforms and actions for Catalonia to become a de facto independent State in exchange for JpC helping Sánchez to stay another 4 yrs as Prime Minister.
This is shocking in itself and is a prevarication / malfeasance of the highest order: the current PM is introducing new laws to pardon recognized perpetrators of sedition and of wholesale political corruption and promising to take Spain down the breakup path in order to stay in office!!
A casual reader might argue that this is not a huge deal and point to superficially similar cases; after all, Czechoslovakia dissolved after a democratic referendum in 1993 and Scotland retains the legal means to step out of the Treaty of Union with England dating 1707.
But the Catalan case has substantial differences. Please bear with me:
PSOE and JpC have taken a literally nation shattering decision while representing a small minority of the total Spanish population. In the last election, both parties amount to aprox. 30% of cast votes, 21% of all potential voters, and less than 17% of the total population in Spain. (note: MANY PSOE voters have rejected this agreement, especially in the hinterland -the “flyover” or “deplorable”- regions.).
Unlike other cases, the Spanish nation exists in its current form since ca. 500 years. While Catalonia has NEVER existed as an independent nation. There was never a Kingdom or a Republic of Catalonia. In medieval times it was first a part of the Hispanic March under the Carolingian Empire, then a part of the Kingdom of Aragon.
Wilfred the Hairy (died 897CE), the closest historic thing to a sovereign Catalan King. Unlike the rest of the Iberian Kingdoms of the day, he was “Count of Barcelona” and remained nominally a subject of the Carolinian Empire.
Catalonian Nationalism is a late 19th century creation influenced by the Romantic ethnonationalist movements in Germany and other Central European countries. The mainstream Catalonian nationalism led by JpC is a racist & elitist construct. In order to become acceptable it has evolved, dropping its ethnic side and changing it for the language & culture angle.
Important: Catalonia was NOT especially repressed during the Franco dictatorship. The repressed ones were the Catalan workers who, interestingly, mostly came from other regions of Spain! The repression and violence in Catalonia before the Civil War (1900s -1930s) came from the Catalonian nationalist oligarchs (inspired by Mussolini´s success, they formed their own paramilitary corps). After the end of the Civil War, the Franco regime repression focussed on the remaining Catalan workers that were still organized under mostly Anarchist and Communist trade unions and parties.
The “Escamots” were the paramilitary arm of the Fascism-loving Estat Català party. They were associated to the Hitler Youth-inspired Joventuts d'Esquerra Republicana - they were close to Fascism despite its name (Catalan Republican Left Youth). Political violence and repression of Unions and of Left parties including torture and murder was their day job. Both Catalan Peparatist parties Junts per Catalunya and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya are direct heirs of these folks.
The Catalan nationalists under Franco were not repressed for the simple reason that they were the very same aristocratic / high class / bourgeois elite that supported and raised Franco during the War. Afterwards, Franco actively supported Catalonia and funneled into the region funding, strategic industrial projects AND cheap labor force from the rest of Spain, at the expense of many areas in the Spanish hinterland that are nowadays suffering a demographic death because of this policy. Also, many Ministers and high bureaucrats of the Franco regime came from Catalonia.
The Catalan language and culture was not repressed by Franco. Catalan was freely spoken and published, and was supported by several government-funded literary awards and academic institutions.
During the 19th century the central government in Madrid also supported the industrialization and wealth accumulation in Catalonia, especially in the Barcelona elites, again at the expense of other Spanish regions. For example, the early heavy industry in the city of Malaga (1830s-1850s), strategically located close to the Gibraltar strait and the main shipping routes was dropped in favor of the Catalan steel and textile works.
Nowadays Catalonia has the highest degree of self-government of any region in Europe (definitely higher that in the case of literal Federal Republics like Germany), and possibly in the world, excepting the Swiss cantons.
Very important! This high degree of self-government has facilitated that the separatist regional governments use the public institutions for their own goals. The most disgraceful example is the public education system. It nowadays teaches 100% in Catalan and handles Spanish as a foreign language, the result is that most adults under 30 in Catalonia are not proficient in Spanish – please reflect that Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world with almost 500million native speakers, but young Catalans are being cut from it.
Also, the Catalan education system together with the public TV and radio broadcasters have a very active role in propagandizing Catalan separatism, inflaming the public opinion and shaping the discourse of the supposed long oppression of the freedom loving, victimized, “Spain-is-robbing-us”, European & civilized & diverse Catalan peoples suffering under the repressive, Franco-loving central government in Madrid.
The Catalan independence Referendum of 2017 was clearly, undoubtedly ilegal under Spanish and also under regional Catalan laws. The decision by the National government to stop it was fully compliant to the law, and this point has been corroborated by several international institutions.
Catalonia has the distinct honor of being the most corrupt region in Spain, mostly thanks to its elites being totally embedded in the regional political establishment. The push since the 2010s for independence and/or greater autonomy has been partly a reaction to a push by the Central government against this entrenched corruption.
This background of the current situation is long and somewhat jumbled but it is also very important to dispel the myth of the freedom loving Catalans oppressed by the evil, Inquisitorial, almost-African, Spaniards as the cause of the current developments. I will try to provide more detail and sources in following posts.
Now, the complex part: offering a diagnosis / risk assessment / extrapolations / Lessons Learned.
The Catalan case can and will be used as a pilot for other secessionist movements, both inside and outside of Spain, and especially in the EU and in Hispanic American nations.
The EU (together with NATO) is basically the US tool to dominate Europe on the cheap, instead of having to manage 27 different states, it is much more efficient to manage all really important policies (foreign, monetary, fiscal, defense, industrial, commerce, etc) from the protectorate capital in Brussels.
The next step is to weaken and dissolve the member states. The EU is actively eroding the sovereignty of its constituent nations and refocusing the governance onto “The Europe of Regions” and “The Europe of Cities” - this is basic “Divide and Conquer”.
The probable course of action in the EU if the Sanchez plan succeeds would be to present Catalonia as a “nation within a nation”, with international autonomy and the same rights as any other member state, then bring it to other global institutions.
The Separatist politician Carles Puigdemont (Junts per Catalunya) has been sought by the Spanish Justice since 2017. He has been chilling out in this mansion in Waterloo, Belgium, just 15km away from the EU Parlament, were he has retained his seat as Member of the European Parliament during the whole period. While nominally on the side of Spain, the EU institutions have been undermining all efforts to bring him to justice and have freezed the issue until the time was ripe again.
In the Rest of the World, especially the Hispanic American nations, the “Trojan Horses” will probably be the aboriginal national movements, like the Mapuche and Aymara in South America, that demand to carve a sovereign independent ethnic State out of the existing nations.
Dear reader: if in the near future you start to read news about the Catalan delegate to the Council of Europe or the Catalan envoy to the United Nations or some similar case, and having these delegates address the chambers in Catalan, this will be a sign that this nation breaking blueprint is bearing fruit and that its next chapter might be coming to a place near you.
Another hugely important lesson is the simplicity with which a government can create a state ideology and imprint it to a fanatical degree into the population in the course of a single generation with the relatively cheap means of a pliant public media and education systems. Having experienced the Catalan case, it is very easy to understand the developments in post soviet Ukraine. The similarity is striking… both cases are actually so close that instead of listing the similarities, i will concentrate on the only main difference, this being that in the case of Ukraine the most strident nationalist region (Galitzia) became only part of the Soviet Ukraine Republic after WWII, while Catalonia has not had any significant territorial changes in the last 300yrs.
This will be all for today. In following posts I will try to analyze in depth the Catalan and Basque nationalist movements and other related issues, like the ability of the PSOE party to become the hegemonic politic force in Spain - the “PSOE State of Mind”, or the erosion of Spain sovereignty that started in the supposedly nationalistic Franco regime, and that went into overdrive after the Democratic Transition in 1978-1986, or the psychological roots, linked to the Spanish Black Legend, that has led to the subservient Spanish attitude towards Europe and the EU.
No to worry , if the separatists scum make a move, would be a cup ,the military would take over the country ,
To say that the Spain we know today has existed for 500 years is pure ignorance of the history of the Iberian peninsula and to refer to Catalan separatism in the 19th century is, I'm not even going to say what it is, look up the revolts of 1640, after Christ of course.