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.
Showing posts with label Slovaks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Slovaks. Show all posts
Wednesday, 4 October 2017
Tuesday, 26 September 2017
The Kurds: An Inconvenient People
In parts of the northern regions of the country called Iraq there is a majority of people who consider themselves to be of a Kurdish ethnicity: as there are in a large swathe of Turkey and parts of other 'national' territories; not the least important being Syria. The vast majority of the Kurds were subjects of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the First World War, when that monarchy [like the Austro-Hungarian 'dual monarchy'] was dissolved.
In Europe the victorious allies imposed the Versailles Treaty on Germany, and the Trianon Treaty was supposed to resolve the territorial boundaries of the successor states to Austria and Hungary; including much-reduced 'rump' states called Hungary and Austria. The US President had published his ''Fourteen Points" during the war, setting out America's war aims: to which the British and the French subscribed, insofar as the postwar settlement of Europe was concerned. Prominent among these points was the 'principle of nationality': some groups who had been subject to Austria and Hungary had declared themselves to be separate nationalities and small armies [for example, cohorts of Czechs, Poles and Slovaks] had fought with the allies; or claimed to be ethnically related to the people of neighbouring states, as with Romanian-speaking subjects of Austria and Russia. All these claims came out at the peace conferences, and an attempt was made to accommodate them.
The distribution of people and languages in Europe did not easily lend itself to a process of drawing clear frontiers around the ethnic groups. Thus German speakers were allocated to France in Alsace and Lorraine, alongside French speakers, and to Poland and to the Czecoslovakia that was cobbled together after the great Slovak leader Stefanik was conveniently removed in an 'air accident'.
Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians were deposited in frontier areas of Slovakia and Romania. The great German port of Danzig was created a 'free city', the polyglot Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste was severed from its hinterland by its allocation to a sliver of Italian territory, and the German-speaking former capital of Hungary - Pressburg - was considered for free city status until it was designated the capital of Slovakia and given the newly-minted title of Bratislava.
Some of these territorial allocations - notably those in Czechoslovakia and Poland - were the trigger point for the Second World War; and hangover border issues still remain as with the Slovak-Hungarian minority. New ethnic mixes were created by Stalin, who rebuilt the USSR by moving millions of people so that Donetsk is an almost-entirely Russian-speaking city and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have large Russian-speaking minorities. Spain faces an urgent crisis over the much longer-running claims for independent sovereignty for Catalonia; and Scots nationalism is not dead. Rich Dubliners send their children to centres in the west of Ireland where they are expected to improve their pronunciation of a language that they are most unlikely to deploy in their careers; while the Ulster protestants are fiercely resisting demands for their province to adopt the formal bilinguality that prevails [at great cost] in the Irish Republic.
With so many loose ends quietly festering in Europe, there can be no surprise that similar problems exist elsewhere; as with Tibet, and with the Muslim minority who are currently in flight from Myanmar.
The Kurds have the misfortune to have had no advocate of significance in western capitals in 1919, when the majority of them were allocated to the newly-defined Turkish state and others were simply in the way of the mapmakers as the British and French arbitrarily delineated new states which defied both the aspirations of the Arabs who had fought with the 'allies' in the First World War and the interest of minority populations within those artificially designated states. After all, it was what the Europeans had done at the end of the nineteenth century in delineating their colonies in Africa: which led to the absurd situation of today, whereby the posit-independence states in Africa bear little or no relevance to the ethnicity of their populations. There is scant chance of Kenya electing a President Obote as long as the Kikuyu are the majority ethnic group.
The Kurds of northern Iraq provided tough and useful allies for the USA in the resolution of the mess that Bush II and Blair created in that country. Yesterday they voted to be a sovereign nation. That is utter anathema to Turkey. A festering sore that is ninety-eight years old is about to swell into a major international crisis. The Kurds surely have their rights; as do the rulers of Turkey, Syria and Iraq. The times call for new thinking: the fraught political situation will not permit that to have any effect.
In Europe the victorious allies imposed the Versailles Treaty on Germany, and the Trianon Treaty was supposed to resolve the territorial boundaries of the successor states to Austria and Hungary; including much-reduced 'rump' states called Hungary and Austria. The US President had published his ''Fourteen Points" during the war, setting out America's war aims: to which the British and the French subscribed, insofar as the postwar settlement of Europe was concerned. Prominent among these points was the 'principle of nationality': some groups who had been subject to Austria and Hungary had declared themselves to be separate nationalities and small armies [for example, cohorts of Czechs, Poles and Slovaks] had fought with the allies; or claimed to be ethnically related to the people of neighbouring states, as with Romanian-speaking subjects of Austria and Russia. All these claims came out at the peace conferences, and an attempt was made to accommodate them.
The distribution of people and languages in Europe did not easily lend itself to a process of drawing clear frontiers around the ethnic groups. Thus German speakers were allocated to France in Alsace and Lorraine, alongside French speakers, and to Poland and to the Czecoslovakia that was cobbled together after the great Slovak leader Stefanik was conveniently removed in an 'air accident'.
Hundreds of thousands of Hungarians were deposited in frontier areas of Slovakia and Romania. The great German port of Danzig was created a 'free city', the polyglot Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste was severed from its hinterland by its allocation to a sliver of Italian territory, and the German-speaking former capital of Hungary - Pressburg - was considered for free city status until it was designated the capital of Slovakia and given the newly-minted title of Bratislava.
Some of these territorial allocations - notably those in Czechoslovakia and Poland - were the trigger point for the Second World War; and hangover border issues still remain as with the Slovak-Hungarian minority. New ethnic mixes were created by Stalin, who rebuilt the USSR by moving millions of people so that Donetsk is an almost-entirely Russian-speaking city and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have large Russian-speaking minorities. Spain faces an urgent crisis over the much longer-running claims for independent sovereignty for Catalonia; and Scots nationalism is not dead. Rich Dubliners send their children to centres in the west of Ireland where they are expected to improve their pronunciation of a language that they are most unlikely to deploy in their careers; while the Ulster protestants are fiercely resisting demands for their province to adopt the formal bilinguality that prevails [at great cost] in the Irish Republic.
With so many loose ends quietly festering in Europe, there can be no surprise that similar problems exist elsewhere; as with Tibet, and with the Muslim minority who are currently in flight from Myanmar.
The Kurds have the misfortune to have had no advocate of significance in western capitals in 1919, when the majority of them were allocated to the newly-defined Turkish state and others were simply in the way of the mapmakers as the British and French arbitrarily delineated new states which defied both the aspirations of the Arabs who had fought with the 'allies' in the First World War and the interest of minority populations within those artificially designated states. After all, it was what the Europeans had done at the end of the nineteenth century in delineating their colonies in Africa: which led to the absurd situation of today, whereby the posit-independence states in Africa bear little or no relevance to the ethnicity of their populations. There is scant chance of Kenya electing a President Obote as long as the Kikuyu are the majority ethnic group.
The Kurds of northern Iraq provided tough and useful allies for the USA in the resolution of the mess that Bush II and Blair created in that country. Yesterday they voted to be a sovereign nation. That is utter anathema to Turkey. A festering sore that is ninety-eight years old is about to swell into a major international crisis. The Kurds surely have their rights; as do the rulers of Turkey, Syria and Iraq. The times call for new thinking: the fraught political situation will not permit that to have any effect.
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