History in the making

Al­though his­tory is hap­pen­ing all around us all the time, it’s not often we re­alise it. We are nat­u­rally caught up in our day-to-day ex­is­tences, and we can feel we have no choice but to leave a lot of the big is­sues to oth­ers. In fact, that is the basis of our po­lit­i­cal sys­tem, in which we ac­tively par­tic­i­pate every few years by turn­ing out to vote, and the rest of the time we have rep­re­sen­ta­tives (sup­pos­edly) tak­ing care of our po­lit­i­cal in­ter­ests for us.

How­ever, some­times things hap­pen that are so mo­men­tous that we can­not just re­main on the side­lines. An ex­am­ple is last year’s bid for in­de­pen­dence, which began with the ref­er­en­dum on Oc­to­ber 1 (see our re­mem­brance of that day on pages 20 and 21), which was fol­lowed by those days of hope, ex­pec­ta­tion and un­cer­tainty that ended in the Cata­lan par­lia­ment mak­ing a de­c­la­ra­tion of in­de­pen­dence, the im­po­si­tion of di­rect rule from Madrid, and then po­lit­i­cal lead­ers going into exile or being sent to prison.

It is now a year since that mo­men­tous au­tumn and it could be a good time to take stock of where we stand now. Or maybe not. To me it feels like we will only re­ally be able to do that much later, when the his­tor­i­cal events that began last year have run their course. It re­minds me of that quote at­trib­uted to Chi­nese pre­mier Zhou Enlai who when asked in 1972 about the im­pact of the French Rev­o­lu­tion, replied: “Too early to say.” It feels as if we are still in the mid­dle of it, that this story is not yet over, and how things might turn out is any­body’s guess.

When I started this col­umn, the temp­ta­tion was to give my take on the in­de­pen­dence process and per­haps make some sort of pre­dic­tion about how I see things going in the fu­ture. But a cou­ple of sen­tences in, I re­alised that would not be a good idea, be­cause while I can make some­thing up, I re­ally have no idea how this is going to play out.

And to be hon­est, I’m quite happy with that. The whole thing has been a fas­ci­nat­ing ex­pe­ri­ence to both watch and par­tic­i­pate in, and I some­how just feel priv­i­leged in a way to feel his­tory un­fold­ing around all of us.

In this issue of the mag­a­zine, we also have an in­ter­view with in­ter­na­tional human rights lawyer, Ben Em­mer­son (pages 42 and 43). The man who is lead­ing the de­fence of po­lit­i­cal lead­ers be­fore the UN’s human rights court shares his thoughts on how he sees the process de­vel­op­ing, and he is in a good po­si­tion to make an ed­u­cated guess. His take is in­ter­est­ing, but it is just that, an ed­u­cated guess.

I could make a guess here, too, and you could ei­ther ac­cept it or re­ject it. But I’ve changed my mind, I’ll make no guesses, no pre­dic­tions, I’ll just en­cour­age you to keep watch­ing this space, as it were, be­cause we are in for a roller­coaster ride as his­tory car­ries us along. Where it will de­posit us, we don’t yet know, but that is one of the best things about life .