I’m a fan of secession in general. So, Scottish referendum, Quebec, Kurds, Catalonians, South Sudan, East Timor, etc…even Texas and California.
That being said, suppose Madrid moves in with full force, are the Catalonians capable of mounting any real armed resistance?
(Bolding is mine)
The referendum was illegal. Those who are opposed to independence didn’t turn out to vote largely for that reason. I don’t think the word “boycott” is the best choice. Puigdemont and the Catalan Parliament do not have the authority under the Spanish Constitution to hold a referendum of this type.
Both Rajoy or Puigdemont have behaved in ways that make it difficult for me to see a way forward that doesn’t turn ugly. And that is unlikely to be good for either of them, the citizens of Catalonia or the rest of the citizens of Spain.
The (totally ludicrous) scenario in the OP wasn’t “What if the Spanish national government refuses to accept Catalan independence?”, which I’m sure the EU is totally on board with. It was “What if the Spanish national government has anywhere from 100 to 10,000 people (politicians, businesspeople, retired, whatever) killed without trial?” Which is batshit crazy, and I don’t think the EU would confine itself to “boilerplate declarations” if it happened.
If you mean violence then that would be incredibly stupid. They will undoubtedly take over the media, government and civil service. In fact they already have, if I understand correctly.
Nope. Maybe guerrilla/terrorist attacks. They would need access to arms. Probably a lot of arms. I don’t have much trouble thinking of a couple of countries/groups that would love to see the EU in complete upheaval over this so, I’m sure they could get what they need for small scale havoc if they wanted too.
Doubtful. The EU doesn’t want to see every secessionist movement in every nation acted upon. It’s best if some examples are set.
Since we are typing today, yes we can live with that precedent.
Extra-judicial execution is bad. Trial for treason sounds good.
Will be interesting to see. I don’t think the EU is favorable to secession at all. It’s a terrible Pandora’s Box to open. Recognizing this as in internal affair of a sovereign nation is probably what Germany would do.
Holding onto colonies an ocean away in the age of sail while dealing with other hostile nations that were working under the premise of divide and conquer is much different than holding onto a contiguous region or a renegade state.
Squash them with the legal tools at ones disposal. The idea isn’t to create a bunch of martyrs and irregular warfare that looks terrible in today’s media. The idea is to have trials of treasonous leadership, remove their flags, and make the cost of rebellion uncomfortable.
Secession in general would lead to many many wars between non viable states.
How would the EU kick Spain out? There’s no process to remove a member from the EU that doesn’t want to be removed, so as far as I can tell if the EU wanted to kick Spain out they’d have to violate the existing agreements that make the EU. I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘Spain would have to kiss EU membership goodbye’.
I would assume the way that the civil war will start is the following :
a. The Spanish Equivalent to the FBI now has a list, a long list, of all the government officials who are openly violating their responsibilities to the central government. If the legislature of Texas passed a bill that says that Texas is independent, and Texas government employees obeyed the bill and started interfering with Federal officials, that’s a Federal crime.
b. So the obvious thing to do when you know where the criminals are and they committed their crimes on TV is to go and place them under arrest.
c. So you have hundreds of Federal agents with Polizia on their jackets coming to arrest all the Catalonia legislators who voted for this bill. Someone - whether it be an army, a militia, or local police, pull out weapons and stand in their way.
Will it result in 600k dead? Just depends, I guess. The modern interpretation of the Civil war is the Southerners were basically just ignorant idiots. They had approximately a 0% chance of eventual victory, and every Northern soldier they killed hardened the resolve of the North to win. No way it was going to end in a negotiated settlement, and the Norther material and manpower and technology advantage was so vast that no change in civil war tactics would have resulted in a victory for the South.
Well, maybe.
I would hope that the good folks of Catalonia can do the math and won’t start a fight they can’t win.
Have any of you actually read any of the histories of the Spanish Civil War and its preliminaries, in Catalonia specifically or across the whole of Spain?
It’s precisely because pretty well all parties are frightened by the possibilities of this descending into major violence that the central government is using its constitutional powers to impose new elections to the Catalan parliament before Christmas.
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What happens if the result of the present turmoil is a swing towards a clear majority for parties supporting independence (which there actually isn’t at the moment) is another matter, since the courts have already decided that the constitution doesn’t actually allow for a referendum on independence, whether or not organised with the agreement of the central government.
How can any succession movement respect the rule of law when the law says that succession isn’t permitted?
I’m not aware of any independence movement with this amount of support that simply melted away because the government simply ignored it.
Regardless of what the Spanish constitution says, the movement has legitimacy because a huge amount of Catalans say it does and I don’t expect it is going to disappear any time soon. Direct rule, dissolution, new elections etc. all just put off the inevitable and If Spain are heavy-handed and murderous they will simply drive more people into the hands of the separatists. They’ve already basically told the Catalans that their semi-autonomous status is a sham.
So when the elections happen again and a party runs on a manifesto dedicated to independence or even an officially recognised referendum this time…what then?
Does Madrid start picking and choosing who is allowed to win a democratic election? I see no good options for Spain and even if they crush this by force the problem does not go away. What was needed was an official referendum with Spain and Catalonia willing to stand by the result.
It’s not. It’s even stupider than declaring independence but not but maybe.
[quote=“Novelty_Bobble, post:31, topic:800026”]
Regardless of what the Spanish constitution says, the movement has legitimacy because a huge amount of Catalans say it does and I don’t expect it is going to disappear any time soon.
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Define “huge”. According to the last poll by the Generalitat itself, the amount of people who were in favor of independence was hovering around 40%, and was lower than the amount that said so in a poll held some months earlier.
Unfortunately, that may well be true. Both sides have acted horrendously here. The Catalan government has been acting in rather bad faith, and the Madrid government has acted very stupidly.
Actually, the amount of self-governance Catalonia had in the past 40 years was the highest they had had in basically their whole history. Some Catalan politicians are already blaming the independentist parties for the suspension of autonomy.
Incidentally, article 155 of the constitution (contemplating the takeover of the authority of a region if that region acts in ways that are contrary to the interests of Spain as a whole) was out there, among others, by Catalan delegate(s) (the Spanish constitution of 1978 was a collaborative document).
Exactly that happened in the past. Several times, Basque parties were forbidden to take part in elections because of alleged links to ETA terrorism. That was the official reason argued (not the fact that those parties were independentist). But I am sure that that could happen in Catalonia and that some reasoning could be presented to justify it.
The worst part of this all, though, is the flight of industries and companies away from Catalonia. So far close to 2000 companies (among them many really important ones) have moved their HQ away (this has consequences re: where taxes are paid). They account for roughly 35% of the GDP of Catalonia.
Plenty of ordinary people have moved their bank accounts to locations outside Catalonia. That is not a good sign regarding the confidence of the average person re: hypothetical independence.
But worse is to come. Some companies are also beginning to learn ve facilities and production capacity elsewhere. That is the really worrying development. Business, finance and enterprises are an easily-scared bunch. They do not trust the prospects of an independent Catalonia and prefer to move elsewhere in Spain. There is a risk of a general stampede of companies and enterprises away from Catalonia. That would destroy the place.
And once the companies go away and install themselves elsewhere, getting them to come back is not that easy.
This whole thing is depressing. I said elsewhere that the whole thing stinks of dick-measuring competition between Madrid and Barcelona 
What a shitty situation.
If only there were a way to tell for sure. Such as sampling everyone in Catalonia on a specific day.
In that case (numbers for the October 1st vote courtesy of the Catalan government) you would have 90% of 42% of the adult population - that means, 37.8% of the adult population in favor of independence.
The people who were against independence, in general, did not vote. My anecdotal evidence are people I know in Catalonia; they generally considered the vote as an illegal and unauthorized exercise, and in case of a “Yes”, that “yes” would be unenforceable.
Trouble is of course, the numbers mean nothing unless it is a legitimate referendum. Unless Madrid allows that, no-one has a legitimate mandate one way or another and this issue will fester until there is a generational shift.
Agreed. One hopes cooler and more sensible heads prevail but it doesn’t look good at the moment.
You can’t really hold polls in very high esteem but then say that there isn’t confidence in an actual vote were it to be held. Seems to me that abstainers either wanted there to be no confidence in the vote as a spoiling mechanism or thought that it was rigged.
Now, in the past few days my opinion has gone against the referendum but only because I fear that it, like most other “independence” votes this decade, has been sponsored or at least actively helped by Russia. But not because the referendum is illegitimate on its face.
I guess my opinion on the vote per se is that it is legitimate because it was created by the local government, and that more people should have participated, unless it was heavily bankrolled by the Russians in which case it isn’t a legitimate grievance brought by the local people but rather astroturf. That’s a different question from whether independence is either legal or advisable.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the Russian government had its hands into this insanity. Anything that upsets Western countries (and tangentially messes with international organizations like the EU or NATO) is A-OK for the Kremlin.
No proof of that, of course. Just an impression.
Incidentally, the numbers I quoted were the official participation numbers in the vote of October 1st. That was the point - that even taking into account the official numbers, it shows a not very high level of support for independence.
We are pretty good at building human towers. Don’t know how useful that would be in an actual war, tho.
Well, we do have Parliamentary elections. 47% of the population voted for the the party currently organizing this sedition. To be fair, they voted them when they were claiming that this sort of Unilateral action was completely, and I quote, “off the table”.
Hopefully, in a month and scratch we’ll have another. And hopefully whoever wins doesn’t decide to take over and do whatever they want regardless of the rest of the Parliament.
I don’t know why so many people in the internet doesn’t seem to want to give validity to actual elections instead of referendums.