The Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos, who in the 1970s won the Panama Canal back for his country, used to tell less successful Latin American leaders that the United States is like a monkey on a chain. You can play with the chain all you like—but if you play with the monkey, you’ll get badly hurt. The great and ancient European nation of Catalonia—with its beautiful language that resembles medieval French, its epic poets, its classical composers, its exemplary architects, and above all its shrewd businessmen—has long been in the same position with Spain. Lately Catalonia’s president, Carles Puigdemont, has begun harassing the monkey.
Catalonia is a serious country. As part of what used to be Aragon, it shaped Spain from before Columbus until the 18th century. If it were a member-state of the European Union it would be of average size (16th of 29). But for hundreds of years now, Catalonia has been a mere province of a Spanish state that is primitive, pious, and poor by comparison. Not only is their culture being disrespected, the Catalans complain, their money is being stolen. The region’s 7.5 million people pay about $18 billion more in taxes than they get back in services, say advocates of independence.
In a 1979 “statute of autonomy,” Madrid agreed to, and Catalan voters approved, significant areas of autonomy in policing and local government. These grew over the decades, but non-Catalans are not interested in seeing them grow further. In 2010 Spain’s constitutional tribunal rejected a plan for broader autonomy. It blocked a referendum on independence in 2014. Catalan president Artur Mas rebranded the vote as a “consultation” and held it anyway. This spring he was banned from politics for having done so. In early September, two pro-independence parties in Catalonia’s assembly used a parliamentary trick to schedule another referendum. The Spanish court blocked it. The Catalan politicians announced they would hold it anyway, and declare independence within 48 hours if they got a Yes.
When the vote took place on October 1, there were no election rolls, and the results were not independently verifiable. Given that Spanish authorities had declared the vote not just illegitimate but criminal, those who agreed with the authorities tended not to vote at all. The pro-independence side got 90 percent of the vote on very low turnout. As an exercise in democracy it would have been unimpressive even in an emerging colony.
But as an exercise in national will, it was extraordinary. Most of the irregularities were the result of Spain’s attempts to stop the referendum. And Spain failed. Conservative prime minister Mariano Rajoy ordered the semi-autonomous Catalan police to block the vote. They showed no inclination to do so. Thousands of members of the national police were brought into Catalonia’s harbors on cruise ships. The head of the Catalan police, Josep Lluís Trapero, is being investigated for sedition. The charge involves an incident in September when Trapero’s men allegedly failed to come to the aid of national police who were trapped in a Barcelona building by a mob of Catalan nationalists. Does that make Trapero a hero or a scoundrel? Well, it depends who wins.
When truncheon-wielding national police clashed with voters at several polling places, Rajoy was accused of poor judgment and heavy-handedness. Hadn’t he provided the separatists with images that made the Spanish state look repressive? Maybe. On the other hand, it is hard to see how Madrid would have benefited from images that made the referendum look normal. Had Spain showed any sign of regarding the vote as an ordinary democratic exercise, had the majority of Catalans voted, had the result been some banal-looking tally like 53-46, then calls for independence might have risen.
Puigdemont was like the dog who caught the bus. Here was his result—a 9-to-1 majority—and a lot of sympathetic international press coverage. Yet he stalled for time. Instead of declaring independence, he said Catalonia had won the “right” to declare it. He kept calling on the European Union for help in “mediating” and alluding to the Spanish state’s violation of “civil rights.” But what is there to mediate? If Spain does not have rightful sovereignty over Catalans, how can it give them civil rights? If Catalonia does have sovereignty over Catalans, why should it surrender their fate to the say-so of some foreign arbitrator or mediator?
Puigdemont saw clearly the logic of the European Union. It aims at destroying the authority of the old European nation-states. He must have assumed it would be happy to lend Catalonians a hand in destroying the authority of one state in particular. Certain politicians agreed, but they were fringe ones. The leftist opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. Belgian prime minister Charles Michel. And the Green member of the EU parliament Philippe Lamberts. “Absolutely nothing can justify the violent repression we saw,” said Lamberts after the vote. “Yes, it is an internal affair, but an internal affair of the European Union.”
But Puigdemont failed to see that this destruction of nation-states is only the inner logic of the EU. The politicians pursuing the project draw all their real authority from those very nation-states, so they must avoid all expressions of disrespect. Emmanuel Macron, the reforming president of France, reportedly even assured Rajoy of his backing in a phone call. The European Commission called the vote illegal.
Businessmen followed suit. A “day of protest” on October 3—with widespread reports of shopkeepers intimidated into closing their stores—made the whole independence drive look like something a bit more Bolshevik than it perhaps was. The Financial Times, describing those who don’t want independence as “Catalonia’s silent majority,” warned that companies were “drawing up plans to leave the region.” This turned out to be true. Catalan bank stocks fell by 5 percent, and on October 5, Banco Sabadell, Barcelona’s second-largest bank, announced it was moving its headquarters to Alicante.
King Felipe VI intervened to scold Catalan authorities for their “unacceptable disloyalty to the powers of the state.” It was easy to mock a king lecturing his people on democracy. Alberto Garzón of the United Left party declared that the speech of “Citizen Felipe Borbón” had been shameful. But the king’s logic was correct: He argued that Catalan leaders had “placed themselves outside of law and democracy.” It was holding the referendum that was the trespass against the Spanish state. The old conservative Popular party, the new conservative Citizens party and the Socialists rallied to the king’s way of looking at things, particularly after Puigdemont accused him of partisanship in a national address. The new left party Podemos has tended to be objectively pro-independence. Its interest in disrupting Spain’s institutions is like that of Americans for Tax Reform in tax-cutting. They favor it in all contexts and at all times, and don’t really need to know the details.
But the king’s logic holds for the Catalan side, too. If it was holding the referendum that was the trespass, then independence has already been declared. In the days after the vote, the Catalan parliament announced a special plenary session to discuss independence. Spain’s constitutional tribunal declared it unconstitutional. There was an increasing likelihood that should the parliament meet anyway, the government would activate Article 155 of the constitution, suspending Catalonia’s autonomy and likely nationalizing its police force.
Viewed through the eyes of a Spanish constitutionalist, the Catalan referendum was a high crime—a crime against democracy in a country that has a tradition of, let us say, forcefully quashing domestic dissent. As Tony Blair’s longtime adviser Jonathan Powell put it, “The objective must be to avoid Catalonia settling into a protracted armed conflict of the sort we saw in Northern Ireland.” Viewed through the eyes of a Catalan nationalist, Spain’s objections to Catalan independence are not just an interference, they are an aggression. The national policemen swinging truncheons on October 1, who felt they were upholding the law in their own country, were actually invading someone else’s.
When we talk about self-determination and sovereignty, we hit an element of politics that is irreducible. As Van Morrison once sang: “It ain’t why why why, it just is.” There is nothing to talk about, nothing to be explained, and nothing to be negotiated. No one is right and no one is wrong. We are looking at the abyss that ever threatens to open up under a multi-ethnic state.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
