Spanish
life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
-
Christopher Howse: A
Pilgrim in Spain.
Life
in Spain
- Cataluña: A few quotes on the morning of this critical day:-
- There was no sign yesterday that the two sides were any nearer to reaching agreement. BUT . . . There were growing signs of panic among Catalan separatists as the exodus of companies gathered momentum . . . . Moderates, alarmed by the prospect of economic collapse, are calling for a pause and fresh negotiations with the government in Madrid.
- Spain has decided to stand on the crazed idea that it is indissoluble. See the full article below.
- A rapid sprint for independence is a recipe for a Catalan disaster, but the most ideological of nationalist might think it a price worth paying. The question is: is the Generalitat mad enough to jump? We'll soon know whether it's decided to recoil from the brink or jump into the abyss.
- Europe, Spain and Cataluña - at the most macro level: See Article 2 below: The Bells of Barcelona Toll for Europe, by David Goldman - author of the book "Why Civilisations Die", which I've previously cited here.
Spanglish: An advert for Efecto lifting . . .
British Product Description: For spinach - Raw and Naked. Naked?? I know they say sex is widely used in advertising but is there really someone out there turned on nude spinach leaves?
Galicia: An intriguing tourist guide. If anyone can make sense of it, please share your understanding in the Comments. Either way, please don't come.
Pontevedra: I've established there's a lost property department in the main Policia Local station. I've checked there for my lost car&house keys - without luck - but I've never thought to ask about the several panama hats I've left behind around the city. Must do so when I get back. Without much optimism, I have to admit.
Today's cartoon:-
ARTICLE 1
Europe Hostage to the
Ludicrous Hyperbole of the Spanish Constitution: Craig Murray,
former British Ambassador
Borders shift, over
time, as the tides of human history and interaction ebb and flow.
They always have and they always will. A Historic Atlas of Europe at
100 year intervals shows up the constant flux.
All within only the
last 100 years, even a really major state like Poland has started by
not existing at all, having been abolished 130 years previously, then
come back into existence for two decades, then been abolished again,
then been reinstated once more but entirely shifted a full two
hundred miles westward from its previous incarnation.
There have been six
truly major boundary and status changes to Germany in the last 150
years, the last only 27 years ago.
A glance at a
historical atlas of Europe century by century shows a kaleidoscope of
continuing shifts in states as they form and reform, move, merge and
dissolve. It is the normal state of Europe. Nor is it in any sense
slowing down; this is not a process which has stopped. Even in the
short period since I left university, eight states currently members
of the European Union have undergone truly drastic changes to their
national boundaries or nation state status.
Even Hitler was only
nuts enough to think his Reich would last for a thousand years. Spain
(which incidentally was almost entirely Muslim a thousand years ago)
tops Hitler for mad ambition. Spain believes its current borders will
last forever. The Constitution specifies the “indissoluble unity”
of Spain. This plainly mad claim is the entire basis of the
“legalistic” stance of Rajoy. An excellent article today by Gerry
Adams in the Guardian points out that Rajoy is making negotiation
impossible by insisting on the precondition that it is illegal even
to discuss Catalan independence.
I do not know how long
the human race will last. I tend to the optimistic assumption that it
will have a good few thousand more years to run. It is vaguely
amusing that some people believe that, whatever the state of Europe
and human societal organisation in 3017, there will still be an
indissoluble Spanish nation with its existing frontiers. I suspect
those people like to forget that in 1017 their ancestors were
Muslims. They also, of course, do want to see a border change in
having Gibraltar returned to Spain – something in which I always
supported them unequivocally, until the Guardia Civil in Catalonia
beating old women one Sunday, and the fascists marching down the
street the next, gave me doubts.
I suppose if you are a
right wing Catholic you are more inclined to a mystical view of
indissoluble human unions that people whose life view is more
grounded in reality. Nobody in their right mind believes any of
Europe’s current political boundaries will last forever. The entire
Western Establishment and media did not just recognise, but pushed
for, their dissolution when it was Yugoslavia or Serbia in question.
But they have now, for reasons of right wing solidarity, adopted
Spain’s “indissoluble union” hyperbole. Even Establishment
outlets like the Economist which once claimed intellectual
credentials, proclaim this daft clause as though it were God’s
writ.
The boundaries of
Europe change, all the time. They have throughout human history. The
pace of those natural shifts has not slowed. It is part of the ebb
and flow of human societies on this wonderful, culturally rich
continent. To attempt suddenly to freeze all national borders is not
just gross hypocrisy, given the attitude of the same political
leaders to other border changes and to Spain’s demand for
Gibraltar. It is an effort that could only be sustained by
ever-increasing use of violence.
Spain has decided to
stand on the crazed idea that it is indissoluble. The logic of that
is that, if 100% of Catalans or Basques were to seek Independence, it
still should not be allowed. Is that really a position Europe’s
politicians wish to adopt?
ARTICLE 2
The bells of Barcelona
toll for Europe: David Goldman
President Trump got bad
advice about the secession crisis in Catalonia. When Spanish Prime
Minister Mariano Rajoy visited the White House last week, he said
that Spain's northeastern region would be "foolish to secede."
On the contrary, the gutsy Catalans are the world's poster-boy for
populism. Their independence movement is a real revolution. America
shouldn't meddle in Spain's internal affairs, to be sure, but we
ought to recognize a kindred political movement when we
see it. Ultimately, the Catalan independence movement is a response
to Europe's demographic cataclysm.
Here's
what I wrote in Asia Times today:
Political
analysts are blinking in disbelief at yesterday’s events in
Catalonia, trying to recognize the political phenomenon that took the
world by surprise over the weekend. For the first time since the end
the Second World War, a revolutionary movement has asserted its power
over an important European region. The conduct of the Catalan
independence referendum was a thoroughly organized insurgency
involving the whole of civil society, from the region’s Catholic
Church to the organs of public safety. Unlike the failed independence
movements of Quebec or Scotland, it was not a top-down affair
promoted by a small political elite with the sentimental support of a
popular minority. Unlike Italy’s Lega Lombarda, it was not a
regional lobby fighting for more control of tax revenues. Catalan’s
independence movement is the genuine article.
Never
in postwar European history have tens of thousands of citizens
collaborated in a campaign of civil disobedience so well planned that
it successfully countered the mass deployment of national police and
the paramilitary Civil Guard, and with sufficient grit to take nearly
1,000 injuries requiring medical treatment. The Catalans kept more
than 2,000 voting stations open and saved their ballots from seizure,
allowing more than 2.4 million of the region’s 7 million residents
to vote. 90% of them supported the establishment of an
independent Catalan republic.
To
frustrate the Madrid government’s attempt to suppress the
referendum, the independence movement coordinated the occupation of
hundreds of polling stations by ordinary citizens, including families
with children. It persuaded the regional police, the Mossos
d’Esquadra, to stand off the Civil Guard and National Police, as in
this video published by the Catholic-Monarchist newspaper ABC:
It
organized the fire brigades of Catalan towns to form human shields
between the polling stations and the Civil Guard. It established
mechanisms to hide the ballot-boxes from the national police and
transport them to a secret site for counting. Where the national
police forces broke through, ordinary citizens defended the vote with
their bodies, resulting in nearly 1,000 injuries, against roughly a
dozen injuries for police, in a display of determined but non-violent
resistance.
The
Catalans did so with the explicit support of their Church, 400 of
whose clerics signed an independence manifesto last week, including
some bishops. Unlike the anti-clerical left-wing movements of the
past, the Catalan revolutionaries evinced thoroughly bourgeois goals.
As a revolutionary movement, the Catalans better resemble the
Americans of 1776 than the French of 1789, the Russians of 1917, or
the Catalan revolutionary government of the late 1930s that
ultimately was crushed by Francisco Franco. They are tired of
subsidizing the backward money-sinks of Spain’s southern provinces;
they are hard-working and productive, and want to separate from the
economically irreparable parts of Spain.
In
retrospect, the panic on the part of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano
Rajoy is easier to understand. Universally condemned for overreacting
to the Catalan independence movement, Rajoy had few choices. He knew
that he was dealing not with a few grandstanding politicians but with
a movement that reached into the capillaries of civil society. If he
failed to kill it in its cradle, he would not have another
opportunity to stop it. Thanks to the thorough organization and grit
of ordinary citizens, Rajoy failed miserably. His statement yesterday
that “there was no referendum” rings hollow. It recalls the
famous deathbed statement of the mid-19 th-century Spanish prime
minister, the Duke of Valencia; asked if he wanted to forgive his
enemies, he said, “I have no enemies. I killed them all.”
Catalonia,
to be sure, has trampled on the Spanish Constitution. But
constitutions depend on the consent of the governed, and Catalonia
refuses to be governed by Madrid. Rajoy now faces a political crisis
without a clear solution. His minority government depends on the
support of a Basque regional party, and the Basques are sympathetic
to the Catalans. The governor of the Basque Autonomous Region
proposed yesterday that Madrid adopt a British or Canadian solution,
allowing the Catalans to vote on secession as did the Scots in 2014.
The difference, of course, is that the Scots depend on British
subsidies and voted to stay, while the Catalans subsidize the rest of
Spain and would vote to leave. The Basques well might follow.
This
is an existential crisis for the Spanish state, for reasons I laid
out on Sept. 30. Spain is at the cusp of a steep rise in the
proportion of elderly dependents (from 25% of the economically-active
population to an insupportable 50% by 2050). The question comes down
to who will be eaten first in the lifeboat: with the lowest fertility
rate of any large European country, Spain cannot support its elderly,
and the Catalans want to maintain themselves first. There
is a great deal of speculation about the possible knock-on effects in
the rest of Europe. Catalonia is a singularity. The notionally
separatist Lombard League has no stomach for a real fight, and no
ambitions to create an independent country, as the League-affiliated
Mayor of Bergamo explained in an interview yesterday.
The Lombards
merely want to keep a higher proportion of their tax revenue. The
Italian regionalists are playing comedy, while the Catalans are
enacting a tragedy: They perceive this moment as one of existential
import for their future existence, and will not back down.
The
first response of the rest of Europe, to be sure, will be to ask the
Catalans as well as the Rajoy government to put the genie back into
the bottle. We are well past that point. After demonstrating that
mass civil disobedience could defeat the heavy-handed efforts of the
national government to suppress them, the Catalans will not turn
back. Nor should they. Europe’s infertility leaves the more
productive regions of Europe with the choice of impugning their own
future by picking up the retirement bill for the continent’s dead
beats, or going their own way.
The
Catalan movement is a singularity in modern politics. But an
important motive for the independence movement is the order of
consumption in the European lifeboat. As I wrote on Sept. 30, the
unifying theme in Germany’s Sept. 24 election was voter repudiation
of bailouts of Germany’s neighbors. That was the brunt of Brexit,
whose supporters rallied support by declaring that they would rather
give more money to Britain’s National Health Service than to the EC
budget.
Ernest
Hemingway’s leftwing account of the Spanish Civil War was titled
“For Whom the Bell Tolls.” In this case, do not ask for whom the
bell tolls: It tolls for Europe.
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