A country is in big trouble when cities or states it thought prosperous start clamoring for bailouts. Think back to the New York headlines of the 1970s ("Ford to City: Drop Dead") or consider the states now careening towards bankruptcy (Illinois and California tops among them). But Spain has a bigger problem. It is a complicated constitutional federation that relies on the semi-autonomous region of Catalonia to pay a lot of its bills, and Catalonia is now saying to Madrid what Ford said to New York. The Catalan president, Artur Mas, has called elections for November 25, promising to interpret a big victory as a green light for a referendum on full inde- pendence. Spain's govern- ment has declared, Spain's Supreme Court has opined, and Spain's national assem- bly has voted that such a referendum would be illegal.
Artur Mas
All of Europe is broke, but Spain is broker, and for a long time Catalonia appeared to be even broker still. For years its public finances have been in disorder and its banks on the verge of collapse. But Catalonia remains the economic, research, and finan- cial powerhouse of Spain. Many of its woes come from the need to carry the rest of Spain—with its bubbles and its scandals and its elaborate patron- age systems—on its back. Catalonia has a trade surplus of almost $30 billion with the rest of the country, and loses 10 percent of its gross domestic product to the other regions through transfer programs. When a nationalist march in Barcelona, the capital, on September 11 drew huge crowds, Mas seized the moment to demand a less onerous fiscal compact from Madrid. Since that could have imperiled 1 or 2 percent of the Spanish budget, conser- vative premier Mariano Rajoy, already facing budgetary pressure from Euro- pean authorities, said no. Mas dis- solved the Catalan parliament and asked the public for an "indestruc- tible majority" to hold an indepen- dence referendum within four years.
Catalan nationalism is ancient, but the movement as we now know it dates from the 19th century, when the region's industrial development turned the area around Barcelona into something dramatically more modern than the rest of Spain. Mas's voters are not the ignorant, vindic- tive, and folkloric nationalists of caricature. His mentor Jordi Pujol always strove to distinguish his movement from nationalisms that were "exclusive, uncooperative, and often disrespectful."
The movement has much in common with other breakaway movements gaining steam in Europe now. Scottish nationalists will hold a ref- erendum on independence in 2014, and the new Flemish nationalists have just captured the mayoralty of Antwerp. The Catalan website In Transit has described all these move- ments as "cosmopolitan national- ism." Pujol built the nationalist Convergence and Union (CiU) party around gentle, cultured, center-right businessmen. He encouraged immi- gration, on the grounds that North Africans (or whoever) would have to learn the Catalan language, while internal migrants from Andalusia would be content to stick with Span- ish. (He has only been half-right. The Achilles' heel of the CiU in the Mas era is that the Catalan language on which the national identity rests is now spoken as a first language by only a minority in Barcelona.)
This kind of nationalism is not as unsettling as its predecessors. For much the same reason, it is not as logical, either. Catalans, like Scots and Flemings, do not seek a country for "ourselves alone." They explic- itly seek to submit themselves to the European Union's system of "shared sovereignty." Mas reportedly wants the wording of the referendum ques- tion to read: "Do you want Catalo- nia to become a new state within the European Union?" The legal scholar Antoni Abat Ninet has written that Catalonia must make clear right off the bat that it "assumes the suprem- acy of community law and intends to maintain stability in international relations and respect for fundamen- tal rights." The foundation Catalunya Estat is optimistic that, under inter- national law—specifically the Vienna Convention of 1978—Catalunya could glide right into EU membership.
Scottish experts, too, have devoted a good deal of thought to whether their country can automatically maintain its membership in the EU. They are a bit less sanguine. In an opinion prepared for the British par- liament, Graham Avery of the Euro- pean Policy Centre in Brussels wrote that "Scotland's EU membership would need to be in place simultane- ously with Scottish independence." But why? What if it weren't? Would Scotland still want independence? Would Catalonia? These nationalists sound less like Garibaldi fighting for the unification of Italy than Eleanor Holmes Norton debating statehood for the District of Columbia.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/mas-movement_663550.html
No comments:
Post a Comment