Catalonia’s relationship with the rest of Spain was not idyllic but it took the shape of a healthy contest, epitomized by the eternal rivalry between Spain’s two world-famous soccer teams: Real Madrid and Barcelona. If other Spaniards sometimes perceived Catalans as arrogant, they also thought them more efficient, more modern, more “European.” The Catalans, for their part, would sometimes grumble about Spain’s too easygoing approach to life, but then they would mock their own sense of superiority, and they, too, celebrated southern Spain’s vibrant culture. After more than a century of receiving a constant stream of migrants from other parts of Spain, Catalonia had become “a little Spain,” where Andalusian flamenco, Gypsy rumba, and Galician bagpipe music were almost as significant a presence as Catalan culture itself. This was particularly true of Barcelona. Barcelona, says Spain’s seventeenth-century literary hero Don Quixote, is a “fountain of courtesy, shelter of strangers, …reciprocator of firm friendship.” [...]
And then 2010 changed all that. In that fateful year, two things happened. The economic crisis that had struck the whole world at the time was felt hard across Spain, but in Catalonia the cutbacks to social services and the austerity measures of the Catalan government were harsher than those Madrid imposed on the rest of Spain. This caused a wave of anger at the establishment and created an atmosphere in which any radical idea could succeed. At the same time, after four years of agonizing deliberations, the Spanish Constitutional Court issued a controversial ruling. The Catalans had approved in a referendum a new, reformed statute of autonomy. Now the court was annulling parts of it. Catalonia was not to be called a nation, the Catalan language would not have absolute primacy over the Spanish language, Catalonia was not to have its own justice and tax system. [...]
By 2015, it had become clear that the “Scottish option” was not available. Artur Mas tried something else. He called a snap regional election and turned it into a plebiscite. Votes for nationalist parties would be counted as votes for independence. It was a narrow miss. The secessionists won a tantalizing 47.8 percent, almost a majority, but short of it. Yet the whims of the electoral law handed them a parliamentary majority nonetheless. Faced with the temptation, they succumbed. The relatively moderate Mas was replaced by the much more radical Puigdemont, who was willing to call a referendum even if it meant stepping outside the law. He wouldn’t care if the Constitutional Court did not approve or if the turnout didn’t pass the 50 percent threshold. What had hitherto been an irreproachably democratic movement morphed into a popular and institutional insurrection. Ithaca could wait no longer.
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