Regional strike against the prison detention of the ousted Catalonian Government,November 8, 2017. NurPhoto/ Press Association. All rights reserved.On December 7, Catalan nationalists are expected to demonstrate in Brussels under the slogan ‘Wake up, Europe. Help Catalonia’. The protest is a new push to focus international attention on Catalonia ahead of regional elections on December 21, and which follow months of tense struggle between the regional and national governments.
Over the coming weeks, Catalan nationalist leaders will continue to frame the Catalan conflict along two lines of argument. The first is that Catalans are a unified ‘people’ fighting against an authoritarian ‘state’ (presumably one with no ‘people’ behind it). The second is that they have merely operated at a ‘soft’ level of expressing beliefs and identity, whereas the national government headed by Mariano Rajoy has responded on a ‘hard’ plane with police action and incarceration of political leaders.
To study the playbook pursued by the Catalan movement is of value to any European or world citizen with concern or interest at the dimensions of contemporary ethno-nationalist populism. This is because neither of the arguments mentioned above stands up to rational scrutiny. Nationalist leaders have not simply been expressing dissent or putting forward political solutions; they have taken unilateral actions which affect the rights of all Catalans – and, indeed, all Spaniards – without having a mandate to do so. One might argue, in fact, that it is nationalist leaders who have turned a state (in the form of the powerful devolved administration) against its people. What is at stake in the Catalan crisis, then, is not a nineteenth century struggle for national liberation, but rather the very contemporary question of whether élites are answerable to the rule of law.
