EU Referendum


EU politics: breaking up is so hard to do


12/09/2014



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Hundreds of thousands of Catalans packed the streets of Barcelona yesterday. They were there to demand the right to vote on a potential split from Spain, their ambitions boosted by the Scottish referendum, scheduled for next week.

Participants, estimated as many as 1.8 million, dressed in red and yellow, the colours of the Catalan flag, and lined up along two of Barcelona's main arteries to form a huge "V" for "vote", visible in aerial footage. Many wore T-shirts saying Ara es l'hora ("Now is the time") in the Catalan language, in a festive atmosphere on Catalonia's national day.

"We want a say in politics and our future. We've won back our sovereignty (by getting independence on the political agenda) and realised the strength we have, if we mobilise, to change things," said Carme Forcadell, head of the National Catalan Assembly (ANC), one of the organisers of the event.

"We don't expect anything good from the Spanish government. All we get is misunderstanding, intolerance, threats and totally anti-democratic attitudes. They've always been like that," says Oscar Sanchez, "We just want to be treated equally, with respect. Nothing more. We are Catalans, not Spaniards".

With polls standing at 80 percent in favour of independence, the Catalonian campaign has drawn momentum from the coming Scottish referendum. The fact that Scots have been allowed to vote at all was singled out as the main motivation for taking part in Thursday's event.

"We don't understand why that is constantly denied. We look up to Scotland," said Victor Panyella, a 50-year-old professor wearing a yellow T-shirt with a red "V" on it. "They are so lucky to belong to a country that allows that kind of vote".

And there lies an interesting dynamic. With Scotland, "on the slab", so to speak, other European separatists are watching developments with more than academic interest. If Scotland does manage to break away, there will be plenty of other movements wanting to repeat the experience.

The interesting thing here is that the growth of separatist movements is in part a reflection of the weakness of the national governments which have hitherto held together the disparate parts of their domains.

Now enter M. Monnet, his friends and successors, who have spent lifetimes undermining nation states, all in the interest of creating their glorious supranational state.

But the irony now seems to be that, rather than paving the way to a United States of Europe, weakening the nation states is lifting the lid on a wholly different can of worms. Instead of unifying states, reducing their power is having the opposite effect, fragmentation rather than unification.

The "colleagues" might thus have to confront the daunting prospect (for them) that their great guru was wrong. Far from being the fount of all evil, nation states were (and are) the only thing standing between us and a fragmentation that, once started, will only continue.

At the end of the line are the terrors of tribalism, and the Scots may find that they have unleashed forces over which they have no control. A spilt from London may not be the end of it, with the Orkney and Shetland islands to follow.

That dirty word, "nationalism" may have to be rehabilitated. The nation state may be the only thing standing between us and chaos.

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