Catalonia’s Pro-Independence Parties Win Parliamentary Election, Dealing Blow to Spanish Government

sanman · Dec 21, 2017

Voters in Catalonia have voted for independence from Spain in an election that was marked by strong turnout:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...9c6a68-e4df-11e7-927a-e72eac1e73b6_story.html

BARCELONA — The three pro-independence parties in Catalonia won the majority of seats in a parliamentary election in the region Thursday, setting the stage for another showdown with the central government in Madrid.

With a record-breaking turnout of more than 80 percent, Catalans dealt Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, a major setback as the secessionist leaders stood poised to return to power in Barcelona, among them former regional president Carles Puigdemont, now in exile in Brussels.

Voters packed polling stations to pick a new legislature and to answer again an old and bitterly divisive question: Did they want to remain a part of Spain or seek independence?

With 99 percent of the ballots counted, the three pro-independence parties had taken 48 percent of the vote, while the unionist parties and a few smaller parties had garnered 52 percent.

But the pro-independence parties were set to claim 70 seats in the regional parliament with those numbers, giving them a majority in the 135-seat chamber. The unionists and other parties took 65 seats.

In my opinion, the creation of the European Union has emboldened various historic peoples to now leave the countries they've been merged into, thus threatening the integrity of the EU's member states. The EUrophiles don't like to admit this, and so they basically scoff at these popular movements as being deluded aberrations. That doesn't seem to be stopping those popular movements, ham-fisted responses from the member states notwithstanding. As the cracks and fissures grow, it looks like the whole EU enterprise is doomed to lurch from one crisis to the next, as the EUrocrats play their fiddles and plug their ears - until everything falls apart.

Glen Contrarian · Dec 21, 2017

sanman said:
Voters in Catalonia have voted for independence from Spain in an election that was marked by strong turnout:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...9c6a68-e4df-11e7-927a-e72eac1e73b6_story.html

In my opinion, the creation of the European Union has emboldened various historic peoples to now leave the countries they've been merged into, thus threatening the integrity of the EU's member states. The EUrophiles don't like to admit this, and so they basically scoff at these popular movements as being deluded aberrations. That doesn't seem to be stopping those popular movements, ham-fisted responses from the member states notwithstanding. As the cracks and fissures grow, it looks like the whole EU enterprise is doomed to lurch from one crisis to the next, as the EUrocrats play their fiddles and plug their ears - until everything falls apart.

This "balkanization" of nations began long before the EU was created. It began with the end of the colonial system after WWI. It was slow, with stops and starts, but as time goes on, some nations have had to resort to tyranny to prevent provinces from breaking away. I fully believe that someday we'll see significant drives (which may or may not be successful) for independence for Texas, Alaska, and possibly either California or Hawaii...and if Texas does try to go, there's a significant possibility that much of the Deep South may try to go, too. I don't expect to see this anytime soon, but perhaps another fifteen or twenty years from now...or perhaps sooner if we're unable to get our current national partisan divide under control.

Thelion · Dec 21, 2017

Glen Contrarian said:
This "balkanization" of nations began long before the EU was created. It began with the end of the colonial system after WWI. It was slow, with stops and starts, but as time goes on, some nations have had to resort to tyranny to prevent provinces from breaking away. I fully believe that someday we'll see significant drives (which may or may not be successful) for independence for Texas, Alaska, and possibly either California or Hawaii...and if Texas does try to go, there's a significant possibility that much of the Deep South may try to go, too. I don't expect to see this anytime soon, but perhaps another fifteen or twenty years from now...or perhaps sooner if we're unable to get our current national partisan divide under control.

Texas and the deep South are welcome to go, and take Oklahoma and Kansas and Kentucky with them

Glen Contrarian · Dec 21, 2017

Thelion said:
Texas and the deep South are welcome to go, and take Oklahoma and Kansas and Kentucky with them

I strongly agree! But I'll hate having to have a visa just to get some decent Southern food unless I cook it myself....

FieldTheorist · Dec 21, 2017

Glen Contrarian said:
This "balkanization" of nations began long before the EU was created. It began with the end of the colonial system after WWI. It was slow, with stops and starts, but as time goes on, some nations have had to resort to tyranny to prevent provinces from breaking away. I fully believe that someday we'll see significant drives (which may or may not be successful) for independence for Texas, Alaska, and possibly either California or Hawaii...and if Texas does try to go, there's a significant possibility that much of the Deep South may try to go, too. I don't expect to see this anytime soon, but perhaps another fifteen or twenty years from now...or perhaps sooner if we're unable to get our current national partisan divide under control.

Only in the earliest days did the US have the problems that Europe has had for literal thousands of years. Even at the height of the Civil War, the US has never had the mentality that the Europe has.

It's really difficult to understate how radically warped the European view of ethnicity and nationality, and it's historical, entrenched, rigid adherence to hypersensitive mono-culturalism. I'm averaging over a huge number of people here, and there's loads of Europeans who don't have these issues and do believe in multi-culturalism, but it's a common occurrence in Europe. In some senses, you couldn't find analogues of commonly expressed European sentiments in the US unless you went to a Klan meeting. In Europe, it's not necessarily racism, per se, it's the constant obsession with dichotomizing and taxonomizing all of the differences between each ethnic group, stoking identity politics and never letting go of any grievance even if it's 1,000 years old, open displays of irritation with groups that don't conform exactly to your culture, and this sort of obsession with categorizing people by what culture they grew up in as this defining, absolutist notion of a person's nationality/ethnicity.

I once got into a two hour argument with a group of British (I'm sorry, English --lest they possibly suffer the offense of even potentially being confused with being a Scottish, Welsh, or Cornish person) people over whether or not it was permissible to call someone an "American" if they hadn't been raised in the US. Their argument, and they were deadly ****ing serious, was that it was basically an unthought to consider an individual --who was born in the US, moved back to their country when they were a 4 or 5, and then moved back to the US again when they were 18 and continued to live there afterwards for decades-- because they weren't "raised" in the US and therefore it was an unthought that this person could be categorized as an "American." And this was amongst a group of ostensibly Left-leaning to far-Left Europeans. They wouldn't even hear about the fact this person had been a US citizen since birth, they basically thought that was some sort of trickery I inserted into the conversation to muddy the water. The amazing thing is that they'll then have the audacity to go on and give sermons about how they aren't racist because they don't hate PoC --so long as they totally adopt that European group's culture, mannerisms, food, language, religion, politics, and general belief system. The French are the worst in this regard, but frankly in my experience they're just more willing to be open about their opinions.

So when I hear that the Europe wants to split itself up because it has irreconcilable differences, or when I read about history of Hitler or even the modern day fascists thriving in Europe, I honestly cannot say that I'm surprised. Europeans may have tweaked some of the underpinnings of their worldview to accommodate other races in superficial senses without resorting to open violence, but the pairing of extreme xenophobia and ethnocentrism must be dealt with first by Europeans before there will ever be a functioning EU, or even fully functioning states like Spain.

joG · Dec 22, 2017

sanman said:
Voters in Catalonia have voted for independence from Spain in an election that was marked by strong turnout:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...9c6a68-e4df-11e7-927a-e72eac1e73b6_story.html

In my opinion, the creation of the European Union has emboldened various historic peoples to now leave the countries they've been merged into, thus threatening the integrity of the EU's member states. The EUrophiles don't like to admit this, and so they basically scoff at these popular movements as being deluded aberrations. That doesn't seem to be stopping those popular movements, ham-fisted responses from the member states notwithstanding. As the cracks and fissures grow, it looks like the whole EU enterprise is doomed to lurch from one crisis to the next, as the EUrocrats play their fiddles and plug their ears - until everything falls apart.

I believe you are probably correct. Within the EU there is no real function for supra-regional national governments. Small countries have more power relative to their population size than large ones. Nato guarantees peace for all and does not require Berlin or Madrid. Free trade does not require that extra national layer of bureaucrates and parliament and government. If Malta or Luxembourg can handle it, so can Catalonia or Corsica or Norther Italy, for that matter.

FieldTheorist · Dec 23, 2017

joG said:
I believe you are probably correct. Within the EU there is no real function for supra-regional national governments. Small countries have more power relative to their population size than large ones. Nato guarantees peace for all and does not require Berlin or Madrid. Free trade does not require that extra national layer of bureaucrates and parliament and government. If Malta or Luxembourg can handle it, so can Catalonia or Corsica or Norther Italy, for that matter.

I think objectively Spain's response to Catalonia's attempt at seceding is an example of why Catalonia has a legitimate right to be concerned about existing inside of Spain, but on the other hand:

1.) It's an interesting question about how Europe should reorganize itself in light of an EU. I feel like Catalonia (and Scotland) is an interesting case study. It really demonstrates that European regions (whether they are official countries, regions of country, or historically are inhabited by specific ethnic groups) really haven't moved past their conception of ethno-states being the only legitimate form of a state. "Spain is where ethnically Spanish people live, and if you live in Spanish you need to become a Spaniard." And they mean that very literally, you will need to rigidly conform to Spanish culture, utterly internalize Spanish norms and fashion, etc. So much so that Catalonians need their space and need to answer only to themselves, and Spaniards need their own carved out space.

2.) It's a weakness endemic to the entire structure of the EU that all of these regions will want to break off from their original nations. The issue is that the EU also has no real unifying government that can organize an "EU economy" with associated fiscal and monetary policies. Because all of the countries hate each other and want nothing to do with each other, they basically have this extremely loose political confederation with a badly organized shared currency. So de facto Paris and Berlin control everything because there's not even enough structure to it to have serious checks and balances, real intra-EU economic and financial planning, etc. So even if all of these regions secede from their pre-EU nations, they're just going to be trading their hatred of Madrid (or similar) with a newly forged hatred of Paris and Berlin.

So I guess these regions will likely secede but I'm not sure anyone is going to be happy until they all agree to share a European Federal government with real checks and balances, uniform bills of rights, and joint economic/fiscal planning with uniform representation in a parliamentary system.

Glen Contrarian · Dec 24, 2017

FieldTheorist said:
Only in the earliest days did the US have the problems that Europe has had for literal thousands of years. Even at the height of the Civil War, the US has never had the mentality that the Europe has.

It's really difficult to understate how radically warped the European view of ethnicity and nationality, and it's historical, entrenched, rigid adherence to hypersensitive mono-culturalism. I'm averaging over a huge number of people here, and there's loads of Europeans who don't have these issues and do believe in multi-culturalism, but it's a common occurrence in Europe. In some senses, you couldn't find analogues of commonly expressed European sentiments in the US unless you went to a Klan meeting. In Europe, it's not necessarily racism, per se, it's the constant obsession with dichotomizing and taxonomizing all of the differences between each ethnic group, stoking identity politics and never letting go of any grievance even if it's 1,000 years old, open displays of irritation with groups that don't conform exactly to your culture, and this sort of obsession with categorizing people by what culture they grew up in as this defining, absolutist notion of a person's nationality/ethnicity.

I once got into a two hour argument with a group of British (I'm sorry, English --lest they possibly suffer the offense of even potentially being confused with being a Scottish, Welsh, or Cornish person) people over whether or not it was permissible to call someone an "American" if they hadn't been raised in the US. Their argument, and they were deadly ****ing serious, was that it was basically an unthought to consider an individual --who was born in the US, moved back to their country when they were a 4 or 5, and then moved back to the US again when they were 18 and continued to live there afterwards for decades-- because they weren't "raised" in the US and therefore it was an unthought that this person could be categorized as an "American." And this was amongst a group of ostensibly Left-leaning to far-Left Europeans. They wouldn't even hear about the fact this person had been a US citizen since birth, they basically thought that was some sort of trickery I inserted into the conversation to muddy the water. The amazing thing is that they'll then have the audacity to go on and give sermons about how they aren't racist because they don't hate PoC --so long as they totally adopt that European group's culture, mannerisms, food, language, religion, politics, and general belief system. The French are the worst in this regard, but frankly in my experience they're just more willing to be open about their opinions.

So when I hear that the Europe wants to split itself up because it has irreconcilable differences, or when I read about history of Hitler or even the modern day fascists thriving in Europe, I honestly cannot say that I'm surprised. Europeans may have tweaked some of the underpinnings of their worldview to accommodate other races in superficial senses without resorting to open violence, but the pairing of extreme xenophobia and ethnocentrism must be dealt with first by Europeans before there will ever be a functioning EU, or even fully functioning states like Spain.

I quite agree. Up until this past January, one of the things I was proudest of about America is that no matter where one came from, one could come to America and actually BE an American in every way that counts, socially as well as legally. Unfortunately, right now we've got a group in charge that would almost certainly reject and denounce my favorite poem, "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus...never mind that it's engraved at the base of our Statue of Liberty. Even assuming we sweep the idiots out of power and prevent them from ever getting close to being in power again, it will take us decades at a minimum to regain the reputation we had earned and maintained for so long.