Catalan Popular Party candidate for the upcoming Catalan regional election Xavier Garcia Albiol and Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy in a campaign meeting in Salou, Spain on December 17, 2017. NurPhoto/Press Association. All rights reserved.It seems as though in the ongoing Spanish debate over the Catalonian question, one must start by stating where one speaks from. So here it is. As a Greek and French citizen married to a Brit living in Brexitland, whose Franco-German mother survived the last European civil war by denying both her nationalities, whose father’s parents lost everything as 1922 refugees from Asia Minor, I do not belong nowhere but in many somewheres.
While I hate all nationalisms, I do like the sense of anchoring that comes with national belonging – and feel extremely lucky to have so many such anchors. To be absolutely clear: my instinct is strongly against Catalonian independence. But I am also wary of passing judgment on the merit of the case from far away. Indeed, I try to be especially attuned these days to the dangers of denying the complexity and mysteries of politics of which we are not familiar, having just co-authored a book delving into the many ways in which Germans and Greeks reveled for many years in a long-distance ping-pong of simplistic caricatures of each other.[1]
