Catalonia and the European Union

The Spanish state, with the specific endorsement of the King, has made very heavy weather of the ongoing attempt by a bunch of Catalan nationalists to set up an independent state. These Nationalists have achieved a majority in the regional parliament; but there is no reason for an external observer to believe that there would be a majority vote of eligible electors in Catalonia in favour of full international statehood if a full and fair referendum was held. Many Catalans are dubious about the prospect; many other Spaniards live within Catalonia who value to unity of the state, and many non-Spanish EU citizens may have voting rights.

The regional government was crazy to hold a 'referendum' that the central government simply had to declare illegal and disrupt. The very heavy-handed methods used by some police will affect the debate for months to come, and will scar some people for life [and some of them will pass on visceral hatred of 'Madrid' to future generations].

It appears that up to a quarter of the population did manage to fill in ballot forms - the exact number will never be known - and the regional authorities announced that 90% of the votes they have received were in favour of a split. Thus they claim that they will declare 'independence' within a few days; and bring their region under Spanish martial law. A few individuals will leap onto a bandwagon from being demonstrators to seeking 'martyrdom', mostly by getting themselves imprisoned but some  may put themselves at risk of being killed, either in skirmishes or by committing terrorist offences which could be subject to the death penalty.

The exclusive responsibility for bringing the situation to such a crisis point lies on the regional government. It has no evidence that even a narrow majority of the population wants this high level of confrontation; even if they do resent the net payment that is extracted from their taxes to support the less-affluent areas of a large and complex country. The regional hotheads have mistaken a populist fad for a massive and well-founded 'national' consensus of the Catalans: and in so doing have set back the negotiation of a well-justified extension of their region's autonomy for a generation.

While individual politicians all over the EU have expressed regret at the heavy approach from Madrid, the EU institutions have been united in support of the central government, which is the member of the Union. There are far too many minorities, all over Europe, who would claim various degrees of separation - ranging from autonomous status to full sovereignty and EU membership - or their allegedly separate status. Hence the Union shrugs off such disruptive aspirations, and [in the way of all bureaucracies] discounts the claims of populist 'nationalism'. Left over from the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, a couple of million 'ethnic Hungarians' live in Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine. Slovakia grants minority rights to the Hungarian language and to Hungarians, but takes careful steps constantly to adjust county boundaries so that none of then ever shows a majority Hungarian population that could then opt for secession [notionally taking their Slovak minority into an alien state]. Left over from Stalin's ruthless realignment of frontiers and populations in 1944-8 are at least twenty million German descendants of the expelled populations of East Prussia, eastern Pomerania, Danzig, Sliesia, the Saxon settlements of Transylvania, Sudetenland and many more areas that were ethnically cleared.

Bundled into a single country as Belgium, Netherlandish-speaking Catholics were allocated with French-speaking Walloons and given a foreign king to 'unite' them: a bizarre settlement that just about works, but is repeatedly threatened. Two small German-speaking areas were allocated to Belgium by the Versailles Treaty, and remain within the state with local linguistic exceptionalism. It is now a strange thought that most of Napoleon's 'French' subjects did not speak Ille-de-France French, but used a whole host of regional languages; many of which are related to what is spoken in other territories under different governments, as was his own native Corsican patois. A rigorous policy of enforced use of French was imposed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: most notably on the Germans of Alsace and Lorriane between the two world wars. Several regions of Italy are home to vissiparous movements; and there is no clear linguistic frontier of demarcation between Poland and Belorussia or Ukraine. Latvia and [to a lesser extent] Lithuania and Estonia have an uneasy endowment of Russian-speakers whose families were settled there by Stalin.

Ireland is providing a serious sticking-point in the Brexit negotiations. Brittany and Cornwall have minorities who cherish a fondly romantic view of their common separateness from the states in which they subsist. Hundreds of thousands of Austrians were given Italian first names by decree in the South Tyrol when it was ceded to Italy as a shabby reward for its belated entry into the First World War on the winning side. Greece still prevents the statelet of Macedonia from using that name because it has its own province of Macedonia, complete with a suppressed Slav minority population.

In the ignoble but undoubtedly aristocratic tradition of Metternich, the EU simply prefers not to know about these nationalist issues. In the high-level scenario building around Brexit, some ScotNats though that there was a chance that a suddenly-independent Scotland could retain the UK's membership of the EU. The fact that there has been a decline in support for independence since the referendum on that subject opted for retention of the UK made a snap referendum too risky; and EU sources made it clear that a post-Brexit breakaway Scotland would have to go to be back of the queue for EU membership applications.

Spain has now been brought to the brink of a massive and wholly unnecessary confrontation, by a minority of a minority who are trying to impose a new constitutional order on a putative statelet. They are more appallingly ignorant even than they are overwhelmed by ambition. It will be tragic when people start getting hurt as a result of their irrational ambition.