The EU can’t stop people’s desire for nationhood

Brussels is right to fear the Catalan yearning for self-determination. It won’t recede any time soon

Nationalism was supposed to be dead. It was discredited by the horrors of the 20th century; it was rendered obsolete by the possibilities of the 21st. When Earth’s problems are as big as they are, doesn’t it make more sense to forget our differences, work together, to let the world be as one?

But then, on Sunday, in the heart of the EU, the greatest experiment in political integration since the USSR, the Catalans had a vote to leave Spain – and the Spanish police went to town on them with batons and rubber bullets. Nationalism is alive and well and, thanks to this colossal act of stupidity by the Spanish authorities, probably in rude health. Only a fool would be surprised. The timeless desire to govern oneself does not evaporate in a wave of cheap foreign imports, mass migration or the application of force.

Let’s be honest: what most of us Brits know about Catalan nationalism you could fit on the back of a postage stamp. But anyone with eyes in their head can see the reality behind the dream of a united Europe.

Earlier this year I visited Verona and was astonished by the city’s obsession with its own story of David vs Goliath. I saw a production of Nabucco, Verdi’s take on the Babylonian enslavement of the Jews. The staging and costumes reimagined the epic as an account of Verona’s fight for independence from the Austro-hungarian empire in 1866. The Veronese were cast as the Chosen People – a slightly offensive metaphor given the historical suffering of the Jews – and when the Emperor Nabucco granted their freedom in the opera’s final act, the stage filled with Italian tricolours. A chorus held up a banner that read “Viva Verdi!” As the arena erupted in ecstatic cheers, we retreated quietly back to the hotel room, to the PG Tips smuggled in from Blighty.

As I said, the overall message of national self-determination might be clear, but the details are a little more complicated than a British audience would first realise. Many Brexiteers, for instance, have sided with the Catalans and their referendum, accusing the EU of inaction or even complicity in Spain’s police tactics. Isn’t the big, bad EU obviously the enemy of healthy nationalism? Not necessarily in practice, no. Many nationalists actually support the EU because they think it functions in their interest – either because it provides the kind of stability that a country like Spain has historically struggled to achieve by itself, or because it offers regional nationalists an escape route. Catalan secessionists, for example, generally expect to leave Spain only to join the EU – just like the Scottish nationalists. And that makes sense: membership of the euro promises a softer landing for a freshly independent nation.

So, the EU faces a difficult choice between the ambitions of embryonic nation states and the integrity of those they want to burst free from. Catalonia is not like Scotland leaving the UK: we would dearly miss Scotland but, to be frank, we could afford to lose it. Catalonian independence would be more like London flouncing off and taking all its money with it – condemning the people left behind to poverty. The EU could not support the beheading of Spain. Who would abscond next? The Flemish? The north Italians with their nutty Veronese operas? For a while, the tactics of the Catalonian opposition gave Europe’s elite good reason to disavow them. The referendum was unconstitutional, they said; its political sponsors were corrupt opportunists. But Spain’s brutal overreaction has turned the narrative upside down. It’s reminiscent of the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, when the British response turned a containable problem into a national rebellion.

Nationalism can end in freedom and liberty; the Catalan are a cosmopolitan people. But it can also end in blood and barbed wire. I understand entirely why the EU fears it – I do, too. But it is a reality. Just as the Soviet Union tried to deny that people were motivated by self-interest, so the EU’S moral driving force is a trans-national ideology completely at odds with the human condition. Emmanuel Macron – so beautifully naive that he looks younger than me even though he is considerably older – has laid out a plan for an Eu-wide asylum agency, identity cards, even a European army. And has said, God bless his cotton socks, that this package is so attractive that once the British see it, they may well ask to rejoin the EU. Yes, please! We would love to join an EU with the military power to do to its rebellious members what the Spanish did to Catalonia last Sunday.

The more the Soviets tried to deny a human being’s desire to improve himself, the more they produced corruption and criminality. Likewise, the European experiment is an attempt to reconcile divergent needs and instincts, for which Spain’s tragedy is only a microcosmic example. Perhaps nationalism is a fantasy of an imagined community, but for the believer it is a compelling truth. They want to run their own societies, by their own traditions and, it so often ends up, surrounded largely by their own people.