View from the outside

Last week, talk­ing to my sis­ter, the sub­ject of Cat­alo­nia’s in­de­pen­dence came up and she, rather du­ti­fully but with­out much en­thu­si­asm I could tell, asked me how things were going with that. I imag­ined her brac­ing her­self for a long ex­pla­na­tion of the po­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion here, so I thought the bet­ter op­tion might be to dodge the whole thing. Up and down, I told her, or some­thing along those lines, and we moved on to other sub­jects.

In a way it was a shame, be­cause it would have been in­ter­est­ing to get her take on the sit­u­a­tion, given that she is an in­tel­li­gent woman with good in­stincts, who is also com­pletely on the out­side and who could see the whole thing with fresh eyes.

I admit to feel­ing a bit un­sure about what is going on po­lit­i­cally right now. I read the Cata­lan press and they pre­sent things one way, I read the Span­ish press and they see things an­other way, with the truth no doubt some­where in the mid­dle. The for­eign press cov­er­age is patchy and most often just seems to re­hash what is said in our main­stream media. More ob­jec­tive view­points from peo­ple who are in­ter­ested in the sub­ject and also in­formed about it would be help­ful.

And that’s when I read an in­ter­view with US pro­fes­sor of in­ter­na­tional law, Allen Buchanan, which you can find in this issue of the mag­a­zine (pages 22-24). Buchanan, who was re­cently vis­it­ing Cat­alo­nia and who spoke in Girona and Barcelona, is an ex­pert on se­ces­sion processes and the au­thor of a book on the sub­ject. So, un­like my sis­ter, he ac­tu­ally has an in­ter­est in the topic and, in his case, great knowl­edge of the cur­rent po­lit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion. He is also a for­eign aca­d­e­mic who has no dog in the fight, as it were, and so his analy­sis of the sit­u­a­tion and his sug­ges­tions for how to go about re­solv­ing it came across to me as re­fresh­ingly ob­jec­tive.

I won’t go over what he says here, as you can go and read the in­ter­view for your­self. How­ever, I will say that his views seemed fairly bal­anced and re­al­is­tic to me, which is more than I can say for many of the words spo­ken or writ­ten about the in­de­pen­dence cri­sis in Cat­alo­nia and Spain that I see every day in the Cata­lan and Span­ish media.

That is not so much a crit­i­cism, as I think it’s nat­ural that jour­nal­ists and ex­perts will in­evitably allow their state­ments to be coloured by their opin­ions and ex­pe­ri­ences, as well as the plat­form they are ap­pear­ing on; it’s only human and there is a lot at stake. How­ever, I might need to look abroad to get some real ob­jec­tiv­ity, as long as I can find peo­ple like Buchanan whose knowl­edge of the issue matches his in­ter­est. I can tell you now that my sis­ter’s going to have some home­work to do!