Following a call from grassroots organization '#parlem?' (do we talk?), thousands of protesters wearing white demand dialogue in front of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Oct 7,2017. Matthias Oesterle/Press Association. All rights reserved. Having watched the waves of protest and speeches and chaos unfold over the past week, my mind has been cast back to a moment I of insight. In one of our university Spanish prose classes, I remember bouncing around possible translations of a specific word in an English text. We scrambled around for a solution, but produced nothing more than clunky phrases which sat like awkward imposters amid rows of perfectly uttered Castilian. I remember our lecturer explaining that in fact in Spanish there was no real equivalent : the word ‘to compromise’ has no translation.
When you consider the last 80 years of Spanish politics, this is revealing. After all, Civil War sparked by a coup d’état is probably the epitome of escalated tension. Francisco Franco’s 36-year fascist dictatorship prohibited compromise in its pursuit of protectionist economic policies and a deeply socially conservative agenda. More recently, in June of 2016 the country was forced to hold a second round of general elections after the major parties bickered for 135 days in talks supposed to establish a coalition government. Bluntly speaking, this is a political arena where principles are never sacrificed to satisfy practicalities.
This seems crucial to understanding the current situation in Catalonia. Ordinarily, of course, the desire of a state or community to become independent isn’t met with an open mind by any central government. The dissolution of a union isn’t exactly an appetising prospect, realistically-speaking. After all, the loss of Catalonia would be a huge blow for the Spanish economy: it is home to 19% of the country’s GDP, 20.7% of foreign investment and 25.6% of exports. Perhaps more importantly, the success of the independence movement would mean almost certain failure and ridicule for the leader and party running the nation at that time. Just remember the hysteria of Cameron and Osborne just days before the Scottish referendum in September 2014, when the possibility of an independent Scotland on their watch saw them galvanised into last minute campaigning. Rajoy would go down in the history books as the prime minister who lost Catalonia, just as Cameron is now the man who took the UK out of Europe.
