On Catalonia and the referendum
How did things in Catalonia end up the way they did? Under Francoism, the Spanish government committed itself to a shameful pattern of cultural and linguistic repression in Spain’s so-denominated “historical” communities—Galicia, the Basque Country, and Catalonia. The peaceful constitution (in both senses of the word) of post-dictatorial Spain depends in large part on the restoration (or concession) of a significant measure of autonomy to those same communities. But the response to Catalonia’s October 1 independence referendum suggests a crisis for the status quo.
From a merely “cosmetic” perspective—to borrow a turn of the phrase from our own current President—the footage was horrific: military and federal police forces decked out in riot gear breaking down the doors at polling places, clashing openly with members of the Catalan Mossos d’Esquadra, dragging voters and protesters by their hair and ears, beating them to the ground with their truncheons and then continuing to beat them after they’d fallen, breaking fingers, leaving children and elderly people bleeding and in tears. These events aren’t just embarrassing domestically: for a Spanish government hoping to keep its European allies lined up against the idea of Catalan secession, the violence can’t help but weaken its bargaining position.
But the whole lamentable mess—all the clubs and shattered glass and the approximately 900 injured—wasn’t unforeseeable. In October 2015, following the previous month’s electoral victory of the pro-independence alliance Junts pel Sí, the Catalan parliament set into motion an “hoja de ruta,” or roadmap, to independence, agreed upon by the alliance’s constitutive parties the previous month. In October 2016, in line with that original plan, a parliamentary resolution was passed calling for a binding and binary independence referendum to be convened no later than September 2017, followed by an immediate or virtually immediate declaration of independence in the (expected) case of a Yes victory.
The Spanish central government’s response to these circumstances was, for a long time, denial. Time and again, Spanish president Mariano Rajoy, leader of the ruling Partido Popular (a political party itself constructed from the legislative remnants of Francoism), stood there blinking through his rimless eyeglasses and declared that there would be no referendum.1 The referendum-day violence, then, can be understood as a mere extension of that attitude of denial from something that could happen to something that was, in fact, happening. And as “it won’t happen” began to transform into “it sure appears to be happening,” the Spanish government opted to criminalize the whole affair, sending in the military and federal police to conduct raids on the warehouses where ballots and ballot boxes had been stored. Less than a week before the referendum was scheduled to be held, the police arrested fourteen middle and high-ranking government officials for their involvement in its organization. Those who turned out to vote, to manage precincts, to collect and count ballots, were treated as dangerous criminals by the military and militarized police.
The Spanish government’s lengthy refusal to engage even rhetorically with the referendum—and its subsequent criminalization of it—were predicated on its unconstitutionality. And, thanks to various court rulings on the subject, its illegality. For months, El País, the newspaper of record of constitutional Spain, has described the Catalan referendum as “el referéndum ilegal” or “el referéndum independentista ilegal,” as though the one concept were literally unthinkable without the other. The problems with this approach are obvious. Under the Spanish constitution, and as confirmed by Spain’s highest court, calling the referendum, organizing the referendum, and voting in the referendum may have been illegal, but these actions were no more criminal than sitting at the front of the bus when the law dictates that you sit in the back. Arresting people for trying to organize a vote and bludgeoning people trying to vote doesn’t look to very many people like a democratically elected government fulfilling its obligation to protect its citizens. It looks instead like violent political repression, which is, of course, exactly what it was.
Yet the more fundamental problem is disingenuousness. To suggest that the issue with the referendum specifically, and the Catalan government’s pursuit of independence from Spain more generally, is that it is not legal under Spanish law presumes that under Spanish law there exists some legal and democratic path to independence. But the Spanish constitution makes no such provisions for secession. Under Spanish law, and under the Spanish constitution, illegality is effectively built into the pursuit of independence as such and so cannot, on its own, provide grounds for disqualifying this or that particular such pursuit.
... It is true that Catalonia pays more money in taxes to the Spanish government than it receives in return (and no less true that not all of this unreturned tax money is, as the Spanish government claims, redistributed to Spain’s needier communities). But it is also true that Catalonia is an extremely wealthy community with many exceedingly wealthy individuals (many of them current and former Catalan government officials, and many of them suspected of or charged with corruption of fraud). Whatever problems Catalonia may have with social and economic inequities owe as much to the disproportionate distribution of that wealth (when not the outright pillaging of it) by the Catalan government as to its partial appropriation by the even more deeply corrupt central government in Madrid. This is not, in other words, a straightforward case of exploitation.
by Elis S. Evans, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Adolfo Lujan
How did things in Catalonia end up the way they did? Under Francoism, the Spanish government committed itself to a shameful pattern of cultural and linguistic repression in Spain’s so-denominated “historical” communities—Galicia, the Basque Country, and Catalonia. The peaceful constitution (in both senses of the word) of post-dictatorial Spain depends in large part on the restoration (or concession) of a significant measure of autonomy to those same communities. But the response to Catalonia’s October 1 independence referendum suggests a crisis for the status quo.
From a merely “cosmetic” perspective—to borrow a turn of the phrase from our own current President—the footage was horrific: military and federal police forces decked out in riot gear breaking down the doors at polling places, clashing openly with members of the Catalan Mossos d’Esquadra, dragging voters and protesters by their hair and ears, beating them to the ground with their truncheons and then continuing to beat them after they’d fallen, breaking fingers, leaving children and elderly people bleeding and in tears. These events aren’t just embarrassing domestically: for a Spanish government hoping to keep its European allies lined up against the idea of Catalan secession, the violence can’t help but weaken its bargaining position.But the whole lamentable mess—all the clubs and shattered glass and the approximately 900 injured—wasn’t unforeseeable. In October 2015, following the previous month’s electoral victory of the pro-independence alliance Junts pel Sí, the Catalan parliament set into motion an “hoja de ruta,” or roadmap, to independence, agreed upon by the alliance’s constitutive parties the previous month. In October 2016, in line with that original plan, a parliamentary resolution was passed calling for a binding and binary independence referendum to be convened no later than September 2017, followed by an immediate or virtually immediate declaration of independence in the (expected) case of a Yes victory.
The Spanish central government’s response to these circumstances was, for a long time, denial. Time and again, Spanish president Mariano Rajoy, leader of the ruling Partido Popular (a political party itself constructed from the legislative remnants of Francoism), stood there blinking through his rimless eyeglasses and declared that there would be no referendum.1 The referendum-day violence, then, can be understood as a mere extension of that attitude of denial from something that could happen to something that was, in fact, happening. And as “it won’t happen” began to transform into “it sure appears to be happening,” the Spanish government opted to criminalize the whole affair, sending in the military and federal police to conduct raids on the warehouses where ballots and ballot boxes had been stored. Less than a week before the referendum was scheduled to be held, the police arrested fourteen middle and high-ranking government officials for their involvement in its organization. Those who turned out to vote, to manage precincts, to collect and count ballots, were treated as dangerous criminals by the military and militarized police.
The Spanish government’s lengthy refusal to engage even rhetorically with the referendum—and its subsequent criminalization of it—were predicated on its unconstitutionality. And, thanks to various court rulings on the subject, its illegality. For months, El País, the newspaper of record of constitutional Spain, has described the Catalan referendum as “el referéndum ilegal” or “el referéndum independentista ilegal,” as though the one concept were literally unthinkable without the other. The problems with this approach are obvious. Under the Spanish constitution, and as confirmed by Spain’s highest court, calling the referendum, organizing the referendum, and voting in the referendum may have been illegal, but these actions were no more criminal than sitting at the front of the bus when the law dictates that you sit in the back. Arresting people for trying to organize a vote and bludgeoning people trying to vote doesn’t look to very many people like a democratically elected government fulfilling its obligation to protect its citizens. It looks instead like violent political repression, which is, of course, exactly what it was.
Yet the more fundamental problem is disingenuousness. To suggest that the issue with the referendum specifically, and the Catalan government’s pursuit of independence from Spain more generally, is that it is not legal under Spanish law presumes that under Spanish law there exists some legal and democratic path to independence. But the Spanish constitution makes no such provisions for secession. Under Spanish law, and under the Spanish constitution, illegality is effectively built into the pursuit of independence as such and so cannot, on its own, provide grounds for disqualifying this or that particular such pursuit.
... It is true that Catalonia pays more money in taxes to the Spanish government than it receives in return (and no less true that not all of this unreturned tax money is, as the Spanish government claims, redistributed to Spain’s needier communities). But it is also true that Catalonia is an extremely wealthy community with many exceedingly wealthy individuals (many of them current and former Catalan government officials, and many of them suspected of or charged with corruption of fraud). Whatever problems Catalonia may have with social and economic inequities owe as much to the disproportionate distribution of that wealth (when not the outright pillaging of it) by the Catalan government as to its partial appropriation by the even more deeply corrupt central government in Madrid. This is not, in other words, a straightforward case of exploitation.
by Elis S. Evans, N+1 | Read more:
