Artur Mas, Carme Forcadell and Oriol Junqueras during the Catalan plebiscitary election day celebrations in Barcelona. Joan Cros/Demotix. All rights reserved.Democracy, and by that I mean the modern, Western understanding of it, is a near-sacred concept. The right for people to freely and fairly elect their leaders – and for their leaders to therefore possess a legitimate mandate for governance – is seen as inalienable in the Western world.
We take it for granted. We shouldn’t.
It is an inconsistent idea that the powerful are at liberty to interpret in whichever way they see fit. The differing recent experiences of Scotland and Catalonia’s independence movements reveal how democracy can in one instance be broadly respected, and in the other used as a weapon to shut down voices that loudly and democratically challenge the status quo.
