Who wants independence?

Cui bono? (“Who ben­e­fits?”) is a ques­tion Ci­cero posed two mil­len­nia ago to get a court to ac­quit one of his clients. It is al­ways a wise ques­tion to ask: the world be­comes more in­tel­li­gi­ble when we un­der­stand that peo­ple sup­port what they be­lieve ben­e­fits them.

Take the rise of far-right pop­ulism. Sur­veys in­di­cate its sup­port­ers are gen­er­ally less ed­u­cated, more tra­di­tional/au­thor­i­tar­ian and op­posed to im­mi­gra­tion, con­cen­trate in re­gions less favoured by glob­al­i­sa­tion (e.g. the US Mid­west and South, rural France or East Ger­many) and have lower av­er­age in­comes, al­though they are also over­rep­re­sented among the rich­est “old money” and the less-ed­u­cated mid­dle class (e.g. shop­keep­ers or the self-em­ployed). In short, in a glob­alised world favour­ing the urban, ed­u­cated mid­dle classes, those left be­hind de­mand that the gov­ern­ment re­verse gear and de­fend the poli­cies they pre­fer: those of au­thor­i­tar­i­an­ism, pres­sure against eth­nic mi­nori­ties (whether bet­ter to expel or ex­ploit them) and pro­tec­tion against the global mar­ket, even at the ex­pense of the over­all econ­omy – and the ed­u­cated mid­dle class’ well­be­ing.

Con­sider the case of Cat­alo­nia. It is com­mon in the Span­ish media to link Cata­lan se­ces­sion­ism to anti-glob­al­i­sa­tion pop­ulism and eth­nic su­prema­cism, but a quick fact check suf­fices to dis­miss the no­tion as pre­pos­ter­ous. Not only is Cat­alo­nia priv­i­leged by glob­al­i­sa­tion, but in­de­pen­dence sup­port­ers are over­whelm­ingly mid­dle class and sub­stan­tially more ed­u­cated, less au­thor­i­tar­ian and more wel­com­ing of im­mi­gra­tion than their union­ist neigh­bours: in short, they rep­re­sent that ed­u­cated mid­dle class the global mar­ket favours. So why com­plain?

They com­plain that they are the losers of Spain’s re­cen­tral­i­sa­tion, which is deny­ing them many of glob­al­i­sa­tion’s ben­e­fits. Glob­al­i­sa­tion el­e­vated Barcelona (the “Span­ish Liv­er­pool”) from provin­cial ob­scu­rity to the top of global city rank­ings, yet the Span­ish gov­ern­ment not only un­der­in­vests in in­fra­struc­ture and siphons out taxes at an un­par­al­leled rate in­ter­na­tion­ally, but even lever­ages its eco­nomic and reg­u­la­tory power to en­tice Barcelona’s busi­nesses to move to Madrid. This di­rectly im­pacts local wel­fare, par­tic­u­larly for the ed­u­cated mid­dle classes, who see their wings clipped by the very gov­ern­ment that should pro­tect them. Their out­rage at this jus­ti­fies the mas­sive scale of pro-in­de­pen­dence mo­bil­i­sa­tion, while their back­ground ex­plains the move­ment’s un­usu­ally well-or­gan­ised, ef­fec­tive, peace­ful na­ture.

Yet a piece is still miss­ing from the puz­zle. Glob­al­i­sa­tion is also putting Is­tan­bul ahead of Ankara, for ex­am­ple, but the Turk­ish gov­ern­ments do not short-change Is­tan­bul in in­fra­struc­ture in­vest­ment (which was spec­tac­u­lar in re­cent years) or un­der­mine its role as the coun­try’s busi­ness cap­i­tal. The same could be said of Milan vs Rome or New York vs Wash­ing­ton DC. Within the de­vel­oped world, it is the Span­ish case that is ab­nor­mal, for in most na­tions the rest of the coun­try would not un­der­stand why the state’s power was utilised to favour one place so bla­tantly against the other – un­less, of course, the dis­favoured re­gion was re­garded as “alien”. This is what makes the Cata­lan case dif­fer­ent: for cen­turies, Cata­lans have played the role of “Spain’s Jews”, and Spain’s elites have all-too-often lever­aged this atavis­tic an­i­mad­ver­sion to redi­rect pop­u­lar out­rage when under pres­sure. Thus, for the last decades, as glob­al­i­sa­tion in­creas­ingly favoured Barcelona and threat­ened to tilt the coun­try’s power bal­ance, Madrid’s es­tab­lish­ment was able to rally voter sup­port in the rest of Spain against the Cata­lan chal­lenger.

This ex­plains why Span­ish gov­ern­ments seem un­will­ing to ne­go­ti­ate any con­ces­sion to Cat­alo­nia, as this would both be un­pop­u­lar in the rest of Spain and, ar­guably, un­nec­es­sary given the over­whelm­ing sup­port they have from the state’s ma­chin­ery, Spain’s av­er­age voter and even Eu­rope’s high­est in­sti­tu­tions… Yet, they should be­ware, for po­lit­i­cal sup­port is fleet­ing, since the an­swer to “who ben­e­fits” changes all the time.