Compare this to the experience of Catalonia. The Spanish Government did all it could to stop people voting. They seized ballot papers, arrested officials, disconnected technology and shut down apps, and when that failed used police brutality and repression - the latter in full display of a shocked world who could not believe what they were seeing in 21st century Western Europe. In one day - October 1st 2017 - the Spanish Government lost any right to the high ground and made the Catalan case for independence even more powerful. [...]
Spain is in a very different place. The idea and ideals of Spain have been dealt a powerful, perhaps even mortal blow. It’s hard to see how the Spanish and Catalan authorities can agree any way forward. The stakes are high – this is a crisis about democracy, self-determination and the right of a people to be only governed by consent. The Catalan authorities will clearly not back down, but what mechanisms for independence can be identified which Spain will respect? How can the Spanish government climb down from using repressive force? And if Spain in the short-term further ratchets up the temperature by suspending the Catalan authorities (via Article 155 of the Spanish constitution) what kind of end game have they in mind? [...]
The Catalan vote and the recent Kurdish referendum throw up the thorny issue of who and what constitute a nation state? The realpolitik answer is that the shape and nature of the world and even the boundaries of most nation states is entirely haphazard and one which in many cases defies logic and any sense of natural justice. Instead, the existence of many nationless peoples, from the Kurds to Palestinians and the case of Tibet, are a product of when and how empires retreated and dissolved, and who emerged at the right time to seize the claim of statehood. The writer Fred Halliday called this ‘post-colonial sequestration’ to explain this state of affairs, by which some nations emerged as empires fell, and others (the Kurds, Palestinians, Tibet) missed the opportunity and then have had to struggle to claim their statehood. [...]
All of this also reflects on the nature of the United Kingdom. The caricatured, reactionary image of the UK is one many of us tell and retell on many occasions. This is a country which has presided over war and military action in every year since 1945, which sponsors privatisation and corporate greed the world over, and has long lineages of racism and xenophobia. But there is also another British story: which includes the defeat of foreign and domestic fascism, and the victories and triumphs of generations of working people and the labour movement which have stood for democracy and human rights and against the powers of privilege and reaction.
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