“’No government in the world’ could tolerate the threatening
of its unity,” said Mariano Rajoy, the prime minister of the E.U. state of
Spain after a week of protests pro and con on whether the region of Catalonia
should secede from the state.[1]
On October 1, 2017, the region had held a referendum on the question in spite
of the efforts of the state police to stop the vote. Ninety percent of the 40%
of the region’s residents voted in favor of breaking off from Spain, but the
active presence of the police means that the results could not be taken as an
accurate reading of what the population of Catalan wanted.
I contend that the state government should have permitted
the referendum because democracy itself depends on a people’s
self-determination. In intimidating the vote, the state government inhibited a
result that could be taken as the people’s will. The respective sizes of the
political protests could not be taken as indicative; neither could
pronouncements by Catalan or state officials either way. Sergi Miquel, a
Catalan lawmaker, insisted that the turnout would have been much higher had the
police not acted violently against potential and actual voters, but we cannot
surmise how that turnout would have voted. He had an interest in portraying the
averted turnout as pro-secession, while the state’s prime minister had an
interest in portraying the Catalan people as pro-Spain. Only a fair and open
referendum could have revealed what the region’s people wanted, and democracy
itself prizes the will of the people even above a government’s political and
territorial interests.
That Spain is an E.U. state mitigated what was on the line
(i.e., the significance of secession), assuming that Catalan would be a state
too. Generally speaking, being part of the same federal system would mean that
Catalan and Spain would be part of the same political system and thus have some
laws and regulations in common. One of the prime benefits of federalism is that
such commonality coexists with differences that reflect different cultures and
self-identifications of peoples. People in Texas are both Texans and Americans.
So too, Catalan people would be both Catalans and Europeans; Spaniards are of
course Europeans as well. In other words, both Catalans and Spaniards would be
E.U. citizens even if the region were to secede and become an E.U. state, and
this track would mitigate the significance of secession. It follows that the
state’s drastic efforts to violently curtail the referendum can be seen as
excessive, as well as being at the expense of democracy. It may be that
government officials generally are inclined to lose perspective and resort to
force because they can. I submit that force in a democracy should be a last
resort, especially when the use interferes with taking the measure of the will
of the people.
[1] Patrick
Kingsley and Jason Horowitz, “Amid
Catalan Crisis, Thousands Hold Rallies in Madrid and Barcelona,” The New York Times, October 7, 2017.
See also: Essays on the E.U. Political Economy
