PART OF THE PROCESS

Ac­cord­ing to the or­gan­is­ers of last year’s Sep­tem­ber 11 pro-in­de­pen­dence march in Barcelona, some 400,000 peo­ple turned out on the streets of the cap­i­tal to cel­e­brate Cat­alo­nia’s na­tional day and de­mand their right to self-de­ter­mi­na­tion. That’s a lot of peo­ple, al­though it’s nowhere near the up to 1.5 mil­lion who turned out in 2012 for the na­tional day protest that would even­tu­ally lead to the un­of­fi­cial ref­er­en­dum on in­de­pen­dence in 2017.

But if you want to look at it an­other way, you could say that de­spite the fail­ure of the ref­er­en­dum and the con­se­quent push for in­de­pen­dence, and de­spite the heavy handed re­sponse from the Span­ish state au­thor­i­ties, and de­spite the Eu­ro­pean Union and the in­ter­na­tional com­mu­nity wash­ing its hands of the issue, and not to men­tion a global pan­demic thrown in for good mea­sure, the fact that the na­tional day protest is still at­tract­ing many tens of thou­sands of peo­ple every year is some­thing of an achieve­ment.

At the time of writ­ing, the 2022 Sep­tem­ber 11 pro-in­de­pen­dence march has still not taken place, and while I doubt the num­ber of par­tic­i­pants will be any higher than last year, I would not at all be sur­prised if they were not that far off. Per­son­ally, I never shared the op­ti­mism of many of those around me who firmly be­lieved that the wide­spread pop­u­lar sup­port for in­de­pen­dence that we have seen in re­cent years was going to lead to Cat­alo­nia’s se­ces­sion from Spain. Yet one thing that be­came very clear was the de­sire of a great many peo­ple in Cat­alo­nia to take charge of their na­tional des­tiny. Wit­ness­ing the pas­sion in the peo­ple around me con­vinced me that - in­de­pen­dence or not - this de­sire is deep, heart­felt and not likely to dis­ap­pear any­time soon.

In Cata­lan, the push for in­de­pen­dence over the past few years is often re­ferred to as ’the process’. Any process is made up of a se­ries of steps and the length of a process de­pends on how many steps there are and how long each step takes to com­plete. As a process, achiev­ing the in­de­pen­dence of Cat­alo­nia is un­likely to be ei­ther sim­ple or quick, and what can only be de­scribed as a his­tor­i­cal process is, by de­f­i­n­i­tion, going to take a long time.

So 10 years on from that na­tional day when well over a mil­lion peo­ple took to the streets of Barcelona to stand up for their na­tional rights, Cat­alo­nia is still not in­de­pen­dent and the peo­ple have still not been able to ex­press their po­lit­i­cal wishes at the bal­lot box. But that doesn’t mean it’s never going to hap­pen; rather, per­haps it just means that the process is going to take a lot longer than any­one imag­ined, that it is an in­cre­men­tal process, and that each Sep­tem­ber 11 protest is just an­other step on the long road to self-de­ter­mi­na­tion.