To start with, the Catalan claim rests on the separate history and identity of the Catalans which entitles them to a separate path from the rest of Spain. But Spain as a whole, as, indeed, Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, United Kingdom (this is why it’s called ‘united’), let alone Poland and Romania, are the products of different regions, states or a part of states opting in at some historical moment when borders have been put into question – 1918, 1945, 1989-1990 – in order to combine their destinies into modern multinational states. Some of them opted for unitary states, others for federal ones, but none of the European nation states are based on collective identities where the region is based on a specific ethnicity. [...]
Therefore, the insistence of the Catalan Parliament on being allowed a unilateral right to secede is anything but democratic. There is no iron law of democracy allowing the right to unilaterally vote to leave a nation state that one has subscribed to before without coercion. Catalonia was no colony. Therefore, the citizens of the rest of a Spanish state based on the 1978 democratic Constitution have as much right to vote on the future of their joint project as do those who reside temporarily in the autonomous Catalonia (of which many are Spanish). [...]
In Catalonia students are only taught in Catalan in their first years of schooling, English is more promoted than Spanish as a foreign language (although the majority of Catalans have long indicated that Spanish was the number one mother tongue, before this statistical item was dropped). The obligatory use of Catalan as the sole medium of instruction for all school subjects has been championed by Catalan nationalists over the past decades with little contestation, although in no other region of Europe has a group which does not have the linguistic majority managed to promote a monolingual model[2]. [...]
The combination of nationalism with populism is not new in Europe and has been resurfacing in recent years. But the Catalan story is exemplary. If we accept such self-serving and irresponsible arguments in one case, the whole of Europe is gone. This is why both Vladimir Putin and Nigel Farage champion the Catalan cause, because it enfeebles Europe. Could something that propaganda channel Russia Today champions daily, the cause of Catalan independence, be good for the rest of us, Europeans? Perhaps it is time to think more critically of charismatic Catalan national heroes, before they rally all the separatists of Europe. In the early 1990s, Italy also had similar problems, when the Northern League (Lega Nord) party enjoyed an electoral breakthrough in Veneto and Lombardy precisely by campaigning against Rome and the “centralist state” allegedly ripping off the hard-working North to redistribute resources in the parasitic South.
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