Machiavellian lessons

The Prince, Machi­avelli’s most fa­mous book, is still today an end­less source of po­lit­i­cal in­sights. Chap­ter VI, for in­stance, pro­vides a suc­cinct out­line of one of Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence’s main ob­sta­cles: “The in­no­va­tor has for en­e­mies all those who have done well under the old con­di­tions, and luke­warm de­fend­ers in those who may do well under the new. This cool­ness arises partly from fear of the op­po­nents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the in­credulity of men, who do not read­ily be­lieve in new things until they have had a long ex­pe­ri­ence of them.”

Cata­lan in­de­pen­den­tists’ ex­tra­or­di­nary re­silience against their many, pow­er­ful op­po­nents (the Span­ish gov­ern­ment, press and ju­di­ciary, the EU and most of its con­stituent gov­ern­ment…) bears wit­ness to their as­pi­ra­tions’ com­pelling na­ture – for oth­er­wise their sup­port of them would, per Machi­avelli’s as­ser­tion, be a lot more tepid. In the last ten years, Cata­lan in­de­pen­den­tists led huge, im­pec­ca­bly or­gan­ised demon­stra­tions with well over a mil­lion par­tic­i­pants (in­clud­ing a ref­er­en­dum that con­sti­tutes the most im­pres­sive peace­ful civil re­sis­tance ac­tion ever seen in West­ern Eu­rope), all of which strongly con­trast with the com­par­a­tively scarce en­thu­si­asm union­ists have shown for sim­i­lar demon­stra­tions through­out the same pe­riod. Why?

Sur­veys high­light that the av­er­age union­ist in Cat­alo­nia (ob­vi­ously with a wide dis­per­sion of in­di­vid­ual cases) is older, poorer and less ed­u­cated than the typ­i­cal in­de­pen­den­tist. This union­ist pro­file is vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal to Trump sup­porter’s in Amer­ica or Brex­i­teer’s in Britain. No sur­prise: low-ed­u­ca­tion, low-in­come vot­ers usu­ally iden­tify more strongly with their na­tional ori­gins while, feel­ing neg­a­tively im­pacted by cheap labour com­pe­ti­tion, sternly op­pose im­mi­gra­tion and glob­al­i­sa­tion. As in Cat­alo­nia, these peo­ple are often im­mi­grants or chil­dren of im­mi­grants from else­where in Spain, this is the na­tional iden­tity they tend to sup­port.

Yet in other coun­tries this voter pro­file is re­mark­ably ac­tive (and ag­gres­sive: in 2016 a Brex­i­teer mur­dered a Re­mainer politi­cian, Jo Cox, and in 2021 Trump’s sup­port­ers stormed the Capi­tol) whereas its op­po­nents are typ­i­cally tamer. In Cat­alo­nia, con­versely, union­ist demon­stra­tions are a lot less crowded than in­de­pen­den­tist ones – al­though, true to type, they are also, gen­er­ally speak­ing, more in­tim­i­dat­ing (par­tic­u­larly when neo-Nazi types join them). This is ev­i­dently be­cause in­de­pen­den­tists be­lieve in their pro­ject strongly enough to mo­bilise for it en masse, whereas few Cata­lan union­ists re­ally be­lieve they would lose much with the change, al­beit their Span­ish na­tional iden­tity com­bines with their fear of Span­ish in­sti­tu­tions’ re­tal­i­a­tion to align them against se­ces­sion – hence they are happy to vote for union­ist par­ties at reg­u­lar elec­tions but hardly bother to demon­strate against in­de­pen­dence.

Under more de­mo­c­ra­tic con­di­tions, a po­lit­i­cal propo­si­tion count­ing with strong sup­port from over half of the pop­u­la­tion in­clud­ing its most ed­u­cated por­tion, as is the case of in­de­pen­dence, would suc­ceed hands down. Yet the Span­ish state’s re­pres­sive ac­tions, to­gether with the threat im­plicit in the ram­pant cata­lanopho­bia the media fos­ter else­where in Spain, not only pre­vent this but also add to the union­ist camp those who, while not re­ject­ing the se­ces­sion con­cept per se, re­gard it as a dan­ger­ous pipedream. This is why sur­veys can­not re­veal the true sup­port for in­de­pen­dence: only a ref­er­en­dum would, as it would make the pos­si­bil­ity of in­de­pen­dence real, tan­gi­ble enough to re­move that fear fac­tor from the equa­tion. The state aims to in­ten­sify this fear through var­i­ous forms of abuse, in­clud­ing law­fare, po­lit­i­cal re­pres­sion, wide­spread defama­tion and an ex­or­bi­tant fis­cal deficit. Yet, if the state’s strate­gists think they are fol­low­ing Machi­avelli’s ad­vice, they should have read on much more care­fully, for Chap­ter XVII also ex­plains that, while in­spir­ing fear may favour the prince, abuse begets out­rage and thus strength­ens the op­po­si­tion.