Gain your ends - and damn them

No Safe Har­bour

Chap­ter One is ex­tremely clear and well writ­ten. It sets out the “four main cul­prits” for the “po­lit­i­cal dead­lock be­tween Cat­alo­nia and Spain” (p.48). The first is the con­text of the draft­ing of the 1978 Span­ish Con­sti­tu­tion, over­shad­owed by the still-in­tact in­flu­ence of the Franco dic­ta­tor­ship. Sev­eral key ar­ti­cles were di­rectly in­serted by the Crown and the Army. Sec­ond, Pon­satí ex­plains the lack of pro­tec­tion of na­tional mi­nori­ties against the Span­ish ma­jor­ity. Third, she lam­basts the se­vere mal­func­tion of Spain’s ju­di­ciary, with no checks against di­rect po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence in the courts. And fourth, the Con­sti­tu­tional Court, in the­ory ex­ist­ing to in­ter­pret am­bi­gu­i­ties in the Con­sti­tu­tion, has be­come a weapon in the hands of Span­ish na­tion­al­ism.

Chap­ter Two gives a pot­ted his­tory of Cat­alo­nia from me­di­ae­val times. Car­reras’ ac­count of the 1936-39 Civil War is too brief and is mis­lead­ing. Sur­pris­ingly, his ac­count of the 1970s Tran­si­tion and the 1978 Con­sti­tu­tion to­tally con­tra­dicts Pon­satí’s view in Chap­ter One. Car­reras gives a right-wing view of the Tran­si­tion as suc­cess­fully restor­ing Cata­lan in­sti­tu­tions and self-gov­ern­ment. He ar­gues that, with the 1979 Statute of Au­ton­omy and Pujol’s elec­tion as Pres­i­dent in 1980, “Cata­lan his­tory seemed to have reached a safe har­bour” (p.76). In fact, Tar­radel­las was in­stalled by Madrid as Pres­i­dent, with­out pow­ers, of the Gen­er­al­i­tat in 1977 with no de­mo­c­ra­tic man­date. The June 1977 gen­eral elec­tion in Cat­alo­nia had given a ma­jor­ity to the So­cial­ist (PSC) and Com­mu­nist (PSUC) par­ties.

Chap­ter 3 analy­ses the Con­sti­tu­tional Court and its de­fi­cien­cies as an ar­biter of the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the his­toric na­tions of the state and the cen­tral state, de­lib­er­ately left am­bigu­ous in cer­tain phras­ing of the 1978 Con­sti­tu­tion. The au­thors high­light Pujol’s skill “fish­ing in the Span­ish Cof­fee Pot” (!!) to ob­tain more and more de­vo­lu­tion and tax rev­enue for Cat­alo­nia. The Con­sti­tu­tional Court’s de­ci­sion against the Cata­lan Statute of 2006, de­spite prior po­lit­i­cal ap­proval by the Cata­lan and Span­ish Par­lia­ments, means “the ’Au­to­nomic State’ has col­lapsed, drag­ging down with it the in­flu­ence of the Con­sti­tu­tional Court” (p.94).

Chap­ter 4 ex­plains the growth in sup­port for in­de­pen­dence in the last decade. The two au­thors em­pha­sise the im­por­tance of grass-roots move­ments, which forced the main Cata­lan par­ties to re­de­fine their pro­grammes. The move­ment from below shat­tered Con­vergència i Unió into sev­eral par­ties and split the So­cial­ist Party. The chap­ter em­pha­sizes the cross-gen­er­a­tional sup­port for in­de­pen­dence, which gives the lie to Span­ish na­tion­al­ists’ ar­gu­ment that in­de­pen­dence sup­port is due to in­doc­tri­na­tion of the young through the Cata­lan ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.

Chap­ter 5 is a fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cus­sion of the eco­nomic con­se­quences of the cre­ation of a new state. Among so many un­knowns, Xavier Cuadras-Montó con­cludes that “greater po­lit­i­cal power means bet­ter eco­nomic op­por­tu­ni­ties” (p.125). He does not ig­nore, how­ever, the many neg­a­tive con­se­quences of se­ces­sion with­out agree­ment be­tween Spain and Cat­alo­nia, the most likely sce­nario. How­ever, a key de­fect, he omits any ref­er­ence to global warm­ing and the need to trans­form the cap­i­tal­ist eco­nomic model. His con­ser­v­a­tive ap­proach sup­poses that economies can con­tinue to grow.

In Chap­ter Six, Car­les Boix looks at self-de­ter­mi­na­tion in in­ter­na­tional law, from Woodrow Wil­son’s de­c­la­ra­tions after the First World War to the ex­pe­ri­ences of Scot­land, Kosovo, the Jura and Que­bec in re­cent decades. He ex­plains the con­flicts be­tween the ideas of ter­ri­to­r­ial in­tegrity and self-de­ter­mi­na­tion.

The chap­ters are all writ­ten by Cata­lans in Eng­lish, one as­sumes, as no trans­la­tors are cred­ited. Un­for­tu­nately, this has led to num­bers of minor er­rors and cum­ber­some for­mu­la­tions. Cor­rec­tors should have been em­ployed. Though the book is per­fectly com­pre­hen­si­ble, read­ing would be eas­ier were the text more flu­ent.

No Fire­works

The book’s very worth­while ob­jec­tive is to in­flu­ence the Eng­lish-speak­ing world. How­ever, though every per­son won to sup­port for the Cata­lan cause is very wel­come, the strug­gle will not be won or lost in the press, par­lia­ments and courts of Eu­rope. The Span­ish state, not a new Cata­lan state, will al­ways be the prin­ci­pal ally of the other main states of the Eu­ro­pean Union. Re­alpoli­tik, i.e. the in­ter­ests of the pow­er­ful, will pre­vail in the chan­cel­leries of Eu­rope now just as it did in 1713/14. If the strug­gle is to be won, it will de­pend on a mas­sive, rad­i­cal mo­bil­i­sa­tion that can win sup­port from vot­ers for union­ist par­ties. And this per­spec­tive is lack­ing in the book.

The Case of the Cata­lans gives the ar­gu­ments for in­de­pen­dence, but not the strat­egy of how to win it: just as, on Oc­to­ber 27 2017, the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment had lots of ideas why in­de­pen­dence was a good op­tion, but a dearth of plans to ac­tu­ally put it into prac­tice. In­stead of fire­works en­thus­ing the crowds in the Plaça Sant Jaume that night, in­de­pen­dence went off like a damp squib. The Cata­lan Gov­ern­ment’s Min­is­ters did not go to work in de­fi­ance of Rajoy’s sus­pen­sion of Cata­lan au­ton­omy. They did not call on the mass move­ment to de­fend the new Re­pub­lic. They failed to test the wa­ters. This book’s au­thors suf­fer from the same lack of strat­egy and of con­fi­dence in the mass move­ment.

These crit­i­cal com­ments are part of the de­bate. They should not de­tract from the qual­i­ties of this suc­cinct, hard-hit­ting book. It is a valu­able source of sta­tis­tics, in­for­ma­tion and ar­gu­ments for sup­port­ers of in­de­pen­dence.