I did not know that anyone considered the word pejorative. Thank you for letting me know.
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On other hand it is a very established term that describes the process accurately. Still it tends to sound condescending.
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Is this a game? I see their balcanisation and your imperialism and raise the stakes with nationalism.
A propos raising the stakes, where is this going to lead, I ask you both? (And several others on this thread, come to think of it?)
This? Probably nowhere.
But if it didn’t… I don’t see anything intrinsically wrong with a Federated Europe in which the recent national boundaries have been slightly reformed to recognise historical communities. An independent Catalonia or Scotland does not strike me as a major threat to peace.
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Intrinsically? Well, not really.
However, the othering involved is intrinsically destructive. Specifically the reference to so-called historical truths is often shere bullshit. It’s blood-and-soil ideology all over again
Precisely that is what’s wrong with nation states. And repeating the mistake on a smaller scale is just as stupid, and even more dangerous nowadays.
In Europe, this is no joking matter. The US may have had a secessionist war, but nobody alive remembers that. A balcanisation, the term used with apologies to @stanestane, is genuinely a horrible possibility in some regions. While enforcing and propagating a myth of a nation in a top-down approach (like currently happening in Hungary and Poland) is a terrible idea and threatens minorities within the nation state, a bottom-up approach with similar rhetorics is just as dangerous. The ETA, the IRA, and the FLNC are radical, extremist groups which spring to mind.
In the case of Catalunya, the situation is quite different from other regions demanding more or even complete independence. But I still have a very uneasy feeling when I read of a “dictatorship” under which Catalunya would suffer currently.
I’m going to have to impeach you for abuse of <h1> power.
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sí a la llibertat!
I hope the people of Catalunya push ahead with this. What could be clearer than the democratically expressed will of the people to decide how they are to be governed?
I see no reason why an imperfect constitution, drawn up during the transition from fascism should carry more weight than the democratically expressed will of the people.
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The easiest way to stymie Franconian independence is to ask what should be the capitol of Franconia. None of the Franconians want it to be Nuremberg, except for the Mittelfranken. From there, Bayreuth hates catholic Bamberg, Würzburg thinks everyone in Oberfranken are dolts, and so on.
Yeah, I lived in Bayreuth and Kulmbach for two decades. I got to know the Franconian mentality, and now prefer living in Munich.
Minga, oida!
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My impression is that the threat to peace isn’t so much a few specific regions with national aspirations; but the notion that you can’t possibly share a government with people outside your heavily mythologized combination of ethnicity and geography.
Once you start down those lines; things get troublesome. If you want to do things the nice way; you’ll quickly discover that you have to do a lot of chopping to produce homogeneous units: minority regions within larger states often have regional minorities of their own; who become the new minority regions within larger states if the first minority region becomes a state. If you aren’t so squeamish; there’s an incentive to arrange for the recognized historical community to align with the territory, with a number of exciting options available, from comparatively subtle non-recognition of regional dialects in the educational system, to just expelling or exterminating anyone who doesn’t fit the narrative.
It certainly isn’t trivial to govern people with a history of vigorous mutual enmity; but the ‘eh, just self-determination the problem away’ approach is problematic because you can’t actually divide your way out of mixed polities(even single cities usually have a few good rivalries going); but the idea that you can encourages not even trying to make governing under less than ideal conditions work.
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As best I can tell, poll numbers suggest that about 80% of ‘the people’ are in favor of the idea. Are there any other areas where that 20% should be concerned that constitution is secondary to the will of the people?
I’m not advocating tyrrany of the majority here. There is a place for a framework of human rights supporting a democratic state, however this situation is not threatening anyone’s human rights.
Instead, what we have is the tyrrany of the dead, where the writers of the Spanish state’s constitution have tried to bind future generations to their vision of a centralised, indivisible state. And that flies in the face of the right of today’s people to determine their own forms of association and government.
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Reductio ad absurdum fallacy.
Cascadia is an independent Pacific Northwest. Pacifica is an independent left coast. Hopefully we can entice British Columbia to join us. 
I don’t mean to suggest that advocating for Catalan independence is basically just warming up the ovens, it seems a largely harmless exercise in itself; but [quote=“Purplecat, post:47, topic:102441”]
I see no reason why an imperfect constitution, drawn up during the transition from fascism should carry more weight than the democratically expressed will of the people.
[/quote]
is about as solidly majoritarian as one could possibly make an argument, saved from being tyrannical only by the fact that the popular will isn’t in a tyrannical mood today.
None of this implies that what the constitution presently requires is actually a better idea, or that the proposed plan is illegitimate; just that this particular line of argument gets uncomfortably flexible uncomfortably fast. That makes either using a less flexible one; or being sure to have a reason why this one isn’t applicable to more dangerous plans, or both; attractive.
(Especially given that one of the usual steps of ‘nationhood’, after you’ve achieved territorial independence, is to decide what the grounds for authentic citizenship are and who does or doesn’t make the cut. This definitely never gets ugly fast.)
I’d be a lot more nervous of this sort of thing if it wasn’t for the overarching organisation of the EU. Catalonia and Spain-minus-Catalonia would still be EU countries, with free movement and trade between them. I doubt that much would change in the near term apart from symbolically.
Unfortunately, the EU itself is under a lot of pressure these days.
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Puerto Rico is a sort of unincorporated Caribbean island territory of the U.S.
It’s been having occasional referenda about whether it wants to be an independent country or not.
Previous results were always “let’s talk about this again later.”
But the most recent result is so ridiculously pro-annexation it seems likely to be fraudulent.
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Spain will block any attempts from an independent Catalonia to enter the EU. The Catalans will attempt to argue, like Scotland tried, that as they’re already in the EU they should go straight in, that doesn’t seem likely to succeed though.
I happen to be vacationing in Barcelona this week and we saw protestors marching, so we interviewed the two Catalonian cabbies we’ve had so far about it. One thinks it’s naive but the other one was very passionate. It’s an interesting time to be here for sure
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Not everything is that simple. Pressure and threats to people that want to stay into current law (about 50 percent) are disgusting: http://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/cataluna/2017-06-13/amenazas-independentistas-alcaldes-socialistas-referendum_1398286/
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