Take a leaf out of Quebec’s book to find best outcome to Catalonia crisis
YESTERDAY, the Catalan parliament declared independence. Immediately, the Spanish government annulled this move and announced direct rule from Madrid.
By Monday, the Spanish authorities will have taken over all the organisations of the Catalan state, including the police force. This escalation will only further inflame nationalist sentiment in Barcelona.
This story has a wearily familiar feeling to it. The extremists are taking over. The Catalan nationalists will manipulate every mistake by Madrid and in turn Madrid will become increasingly deaf to the legitimate yearnings of a significant chunk of the Catalan people, who want to go on their own.
So one side will escalate its own indignation and the other side will denigrate its significance, thus leading to a bigger and bigger crisis.
As Yeats noted in ‘The Second Coming’: “Things fall apart” when “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity”.
This description is Spain right now. The middle ground is simply shrugging its shoulders and allowing others to make decisions, while the extremists are becoming more cacophonous.
If we examine nationalist and separatist movements of the past 30 years, we have three examples of what might happen in Spain. The first is the Quebec route, the second is the Czechoslovakia path and the third is Yugoslavia’s road to devastation.
The preferred route for those who want compromise is the Quebec path. This is the pattern that follows the rise and fall of Quebec separatism in Canada. The Quebec example is highly instructive.
My first visit to Quebec was in the mid-1980s as an 18-year-old student worker. In 1985, Montreal was a slightly edgy, down-at-heel, still bilingual city. The Parti Quebecois wanted to lead Quebec out of Canada and create an independent Quebec. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Quebec underwent a series of constitutional crises.
Each time there was a crisis between Quebec and Canada, the nationalists got stronger. Ultimately, the Quebec nationalists got their day in the sun with the 1995 referendum.
In the event, the vote was wafer-thin: 49.5pc voted to leave Canada and 50.5pc voted to stay. The referendum was extraordinary but interestingly, after that, the fortunes of the nationalists waned – maybe because Quebec became more, not less, French after 1995.
The Montreal I visited last year was firmly within Canada but profoundly more French than the city I had visited in 1985.
So the nationalist vote peaked in 1995 and has waned since then, but it has waned because the nationalists have been successful in preserving the unique French Canadian identity of Quebec. They have become more French and more Canadian at the same time. It is a solution that many Spaniards and Europeans want for Catalonia.
The Canadian government allowed the Quebec government to ramp up its linguistic laws to preserve French. In return, the Quebec government dialled down the nationalist moves.
TODAY, Montreal is a cosmopolitan city of the wealthy Canadian province that feels like bits of rural France and hippest Brooklyn combined. Quebec nationalism has won and Canadian federalism has also won, in a very Canadian display of constructive pragmatism. Dissolution was averted through dialogue. For many, this route is the best possible outlook for Catalonia.
The second path for Catalonia is the ‘velvet divorce’ of the Czechs and Slovaks. The old state of Czechoslovakia was dissolved peacefully on January 1, 1993.
Interestingly, as late as September 1992, opinion polls showed that only 37pc of Czechs and 37pc of Slovaks actually wanted separation.
However, nationalist politicians on both sides agitated in parliament for separation and, rather than prolong a row, the leaders of the biggest parties on both sides agreed to separate and form two countries. The entire divorce was done with the minimum of fuss, little acrimony and, better still, a total absence of bitterness.
Some people hope that Catalonia, if it insists on independence, might be able to negotiate such a velvet divorce with Spain.
However, this doesn’t look too likely as the past few weeks indicate a level of acrimony between Madrid and Barcelona that is becoming more, not less, aggravated.
The final path is the path to war that befell Yugoslavia and in particular the Croatian-Serbian war of the early to mid-1990s. Right up to the end, the majority of Serbs and Croats still clung to the idea of the Yugoslavian confederation remaining intact. What was regarded as a difficult but manageable constitutional dilemma descended into civil war in a matter of days. Elements in the Yugoslavian armed forces made crucial mistakes at pivotal moments, dragging a largely unwilling population into ethnic conflicts that pitted neighbour against neighbour in violence not seen in Europe since 1945.
People sometimes dismiss Yugoslavia as a one-off and remind us that during the Second World War the Croats and the Serbs, Communists and nationalists murdered each other with impunity. For those with a sense of history, we should remind ourselves that more than a million Spaniards were killed in their civil war. This slaughter is still within human memory.
Very soon, people will look to the EU. My sense is that the EU will not abandon the Catalans. The ‘Europe of the regions’ slogan only makes sense when you recognise regions. Add to this the fact that the EU is an expansionist project; if it stops expanding, it loses purpose. It doesn’t kick regions out. No matter what it says now, if it comes to it, the EU will recognise Catalonia and the Catalans know this. In fact, this is Barcelona’s diplomatic ace and Madrid knows this too.
We should all hope that the Catalan crisis takes the route of either Quebec or Czechoslovakia but the Croatian path can’t be ruled out and that is terrifying.