Trying to secede in a country where secession is illegal, is... you know... a crime.
You can secede in federalist countries, but most republics prohibit secession -- since most of their constitutions are based on France's model.
So, a prison sentence was pretty clear for most political observers. The only way they wouldn't get prison terms was if the secession succeeded, which it did not.
Technically speaking, I'm surprised they weren't charged with treason -- the de-facto charge in such cases. Good thing the EU requires members to abandon the death penalty to join. Most high-level treason charges usually end up with a noose around someone's neck.
Also, please downvote me. Actual statement of facts aren't welcomed here.
>Also, please downvote me. Actual statement of facts aren't welcomed here.
Facts we know (at least some of us, closer to the situation).
"What did you expect" is more loaded, as it also invokes political, and moral expectations, and can be misconstrued as "they got what they deserved" (as opposed to a neutral "they got what the law states").
And even the law can be bend, when there's a large public will -- e.g. the government is forced to reach a compromise, etc.
So, "secession is prohibited" is not enough to warrantee the current outcome.
As an example, dictatorship is also prohibited, but more than a few dictators or wannabe coup arranged for cosy non-jail deals when they were thrown out and democracy was restored...
Why should anyone downvote you? You are absolutely right. The sovereignty of a nation resides in all citizens of that nation. That’s definitely the case of Spain as it is the first article of their constitution. What happened in Catalonia was treason, and they were jailed for it. In my opinion, the sentence was actually a soft one. Violence was involved trying to take over, public funds were used illegally to help with the rebellion attempt, and the 50% of Catalans who are against separating from Spain had to live through such chaos.
I'm pretty sure you don't live in Catalunya. There was no violence, and a sentence with charges of 'sedition' and not 'rebelion' is the main difference. There's not caos in the streets as TV try to picture it, so they can justify sentences like this. nonsense.
If you want to retain your image, perhaps give the secessionists a real sanctioned vote about who to belong to. Like the election about Scottish independence that were held in UK. Stonewalling the secessionists and then complain that they are not taking it through your parliament is not a good way to handle it.
(and it feels weird to put UK up there as a positive example with regards to mature handling of elections..)
One of the differences is that the scottish vote was legal. In spain, the only legal vote would be of all spain at once; and either catalonia voting alone, or seceding after a country-level pro-independence vote, would entail rewriting the whole country structure set forth by the constitution, in order to become a confederation. Which, looking into the current political climate, would probably leave us in a deadlock much worse than brexit for years.
Regarding stonewalling, they already have a much bigger representation than what their relative headcount would guarantee. It’s just that the rest of Spain, and more than half of Catalonia, don’t want the second richest region to leave with all the wealth that we all together have concentrated there throughout the years.
There was lots and lots of psychological violence against the rest of Spain, all days in the news for more than five years and without pause. It was totally insufferable.
The rest of Spaniards had been called all kind of nasty things from this people, from fascists to thiefs, pigs, dumbs, violators, abusers and even dirty people that does not wash themselves.
Not to mention the reverse David-Star that where in fact the yellow ribbons. You don't wear it, you're harassed and called traitor and botifler. Friends of my parents, elder people that could suffer an infart, were assaulted with some people entering in their bus, crying slogans, calling them fascists and harassing them pushing banners and yellow ribbons under their nose. All of this just because they were in a holiday in the wrong part of the country and had commit the crime to hire a local bus to make an excursion. The driver didn't even tried to stop they.
Journalists doing their job were trown bottles with piss and water in direct. All in the name of peace.
Entire families are angry and split today because this snakes and child-emperors wanted to suck-suck-suck even more money
"The rest of Spaniards had been called all kind of nasty things from this people, from fascists to thiefs, traitors, pigs, dumb, violators, abusers and even dirty people that does not wash themselves."
You could say the same things are said from the 'other side' of the debate, I'm sure people say all these things from both sides, you cannot control everyone on such a big movements/issues. What I'm sure is that I haven't seen any leader say all that adjectives to anyone.
"Not to mention the anti-David-Star that where in fact the yellow ribbons".
Well... 'anti-david-star' what a nice way to describe the same ribbons (with different color) that people wear on the world cancer day.
The independence movement has always talked about the State/Government not letting people decide. It's not about hating someone because they think different than you. It's about an exercise of democracy.
> You cannot control everyone on such a big movements/issues. What I'm sure is that I haven't seen any leader say all that adjectives to anyone.
Please do not dare try again to take us for idiots. We are not talking of anonymous people, we are talking of all main independentist leaders acting as victims and light beings whereas saying things like those of spaniards:
"Scavengers, vipers, hyenas. Beasts with human form, however, that distil hate. A disturbed, nauseating hatred, like moldy dentures, against everything the tongue represents. They are here among us. They are disgusted by any expression of Catalanness... Beasts have names and surnames. We all know somebody"
Not, is not the nazi party in 1933, is President Torra spreading love in 2012.
Another example:
"Mrs. María Llanos de Luna devotes more time to her hairstyles than to the culture of the country where she lives... No, it is not natural to speak Spanish in Catalonia"
Not to mention this silly 2010 video from CIU party: "Spain steals from us". Has been 10 years hearing this victimism all the time.
The GP manages to talk about facts surrounding the issue, yet you continue to attack them with little substance. You don't provide counter examples, you simply continue to attack. This helps no one find more truth. Please stop.
E: If you think I'm wrong then post evidence and a bitcoin address, I'll gladly pay you $500 if you can show substantial evidence that there was violence involved. You won't be able to.
> substantial evidence that there was violence involved.
This was your original claim. You are implicitely withdrawing it and moving the goalpost to "evidence of substantial violence"(which is ok, but it was so easy to rebate in its original form that couldn't resist). BTW, states have the monopoly of violence which makes the comparison complicated to asses to anyone who believes in representative democracy and the separation of powers(policemen were trying to execute a court order, no less and no more).
You can keep your 500$, I already knew you were bluffing.
Regarding the issue you are bringing. Yes, the police intervention was a massive clusterfuck. It was impossible to stop the so called "referendum" without the complete cooperation of catalan police and the civil guard and national police cops were sent to an impossible mission. Some of them misbehave, probably out of frustration and fear/anger. This is something a policemen should never do.
>This was your original claim. You are implicitely withdrawing it and moving the goalpost
Oh fuck off, you knew the context. oliverx0 was trying to paint the independendistas as the violent aggressors, which was obviously what I wanted evidence of.
It's obvious that the police went out of their way to incite a violent response, and utterly failed. All you can find is a single chair-throwing incident while it's easy to find hundreds of incidents of cops attacking peaceful voters.
>You can keep your 500$, I already knew you were bluffing.
You're a scumbag intentionally misinterpreting me in order to call me a liar. I would recommend you refrain from this kind of silly personal attacks in the future, you never know just how much they might cost you.
And FWIW, I'm not bluffing. I'm more than happy to put my money where my mouth is, please name any nice (you know, not the daily stormer or ISIS) bitcoin accepting charity and I'll give them $500 just to prove that you're utterly full of shit. I won't give you the money though, as you did nothing to earn it. (However my original offer will still stand after my $500 donation to the charity of your choice!)
It was not treason, according to spanish law. The sentence is public (about 500 pages), if you can read spanish. Otherwise, an independent english reporter based in Spain, Matthew Bennet, has given very thorough coverage of it through twitter in english, for international followers. He uses Patreon if you are interested in his work.
I'd argue the sentences are harsh at least compared to many if not most European countries. Where I live, for example, the offence related to serious seditious activity (Endangering the sovereignty of Finland) carries a penalty range of 1 to 10 years imprisonment (generally, the upper range is rarely applied) and additionally requires at least a credible threat of violence or foreign state financial/military involvement.
Article talks about both rebellion and sedition. Laws in each country differ so you need to compare them by more than the name, which I understand that is what the article does. But please provide a more accurate source for the benefit of all, perhaps? Im not german, sorry.
It's hard to find anything very close to sedición, particularly given that I've understood that the Spanish Supreme Court has now found that threat of force or violence was not involved, apparently (?) basing their decision on the very broad sounding "outside of legal means" part. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.
To my understanding, a German judge ruled that there are no corresponding laws in practice. The ones considered to be similar by the letter are handled differently: the German highest court has put a much higher hurdle to their application then the Spanish court did.
Thanks! But that only talks about rebellion, not sedition. Someone else has pointed out that this is akin to treason, and requires violence. The only place the word “sedition” is mentioned is in a literal quote from Puigdemont’s defense lawyer.
The translation of sedition is "Volksverhetzung", which is a crime in Germany, but it has to be s call to harm people, not "violence against the state".
And much less in the "they should expect that it might result in violence, when we send our armed riot police in" kind of violence, but the "people will use violence against people because of their religion/skin/sexuality/..." kind.
As I understand it, it was never even considered and thrown out right away.
We expect to treat a political issue that has lasted for years to be handled in parliaments not in jail. It's not about law. Workers rights, women voting and other now socially accepted rules were not legal then but were demanded anyway, I'm sure people was imprisoned/killed for these affairs also.
England wasn't a federation when America seceded either. The idea of "rights" (or at least the idea the American founders had in mind) is that they're moral concepts independent of whatever the legal system grants.
The America that was taken over by the British (native Americans) weren't the ones seceeding. The ones seceeding were the descendants of British settlers/conquerors.
Fun fact: British America was around 200 years old when it gained independence. Catalonia has been part of Spain (as opposed to an independent principality) for around 300 years.
Were it not for the utterly ill-thought heavy handed actions of the East India company, governor and Lord North, the secession wasn't even wanted. They just wanted better representation within.
Poor handling, and particularly heavy handed handling, turned those moderates with a valid grievance into revolutionaries, and secessionists. The East India company was trying to screw over both Britain and the American colonies in equal measure.
There probably is a modern lesson in there, which is what results from overly draconian response, and something something overly powerful corporations.
> Catalonia has been part of Spain for around 300 years.
I bet that this land didn't arrived in a ship and was in the same place for a few millions of years at least. Spain has more than 300 years of history.
Sure, iberians, carthaginesians, fenicians, greek, romans, goths, arabs... but until the XV century it was several independent kingdoms, most important one Aragon and Castilla. So Spain as it is now is relatively recent. Also Portugal belonged to the same Kingdom for a while.
Sure, and they had to bring about a civil war to secede, because it was illegal.
That also happened some centuries ago, what was politically acceptable or moral was quite different then. I’d like to think that we now have the political maturity to do this slowly, legally and peacefully if it needs to happen at all.
I think it's beneficial to see it as: secession (in the US) became definitively illegal because of the Civil War.
It was specifically left out of the Constitution, for a few complex reasons, but from a de facto / de jure perspective, was ambiguous at best, until decided by war.
And if the revolutionary war had been lost, all those founding fathers would have found their heads separated from their torsos. And it would have been the legally correct thing to do.
That’s the thing with revolutions. They are only ok if they work.
And yet, the only time any states seceded from the United States, the US declared war on them to bring them back into the Union, then went on to win that war and brought the states back into the Union.
Not to mention killing a lot of people that had arrived first.
It seems that the holy right of self-determination does not apply if you are a native indian for some reason. Is even more strange if we think that indians comprised once the big majority of people living in that territory.
This shiny right does not apply also if you belong in the majority comprised by non-nationalist people living in Cataluña. Is strange that people so democratic and pacific didn't noticed that other people has rights also.
Yep. Well, then I'll won't marry anyone, because if the other part doesn't want to divorce, then you're married for life. At least you get to choose who do you marry. (A referendum is what was requested for years). I don't get the fierce defense of the unity thing, sorry. There's people demanding a referendum (as seen in Scotland) you just put them in jail, problem solved.
That's a very bad analogy because you use it opposite from how the situation is. A marriage exists within the context of state laws. The same state laws that say you can divorce also say you can't secede. So trying to secede is like trying to prohibit your partner from divorcing you. And yes, if you try to tie down your partner to stay with you it's exactly like trying to cut the ties that hold a state together.
Any criminal could just "vote" that what they did is legal. How would that work?
Yes, the same laws that do not allow a gay marriage or women voting, or allow 14 hours shifts, or slavery. Law is not my bible, I may have to obey it, but I can form my own opinions against it and fight for it.
Sure, form opinions, ask for change, make it better if you and others see fit. You don't even have to follow he law. You just have to understand that if you break it you get punished. So as long as the law is there and you break it you are a criminal whether you believe in it or not.
What you said is exactly the kind of excuse any criminal would use: "I'm not guilty because I don't believe in that law". Which seems to match perfectly with the reasoning used in the dozens of comment you posted about this, alongside some bad examples and analogies that attempt to support it.
Marriage is a overused analogy that's pretty wrong if you ask me. It's only useful if you want elicit a "beaten wife" kind of comparison.
There are other kinds of contracts(marriage is a contract), where one of the partners can't just walk away from it with its share of the assets.
> There's people demanding a referendum (as seen in Scotland) you just put them in jail, problem solved.
It only seems a good example because it didn't pass. I bet it would be a worse-than-Brexit one if it had. The reality is that a country(a modern state) is built over a thousand of trade-offs that can't be just decided in a referendum.
I wish it would be that easy. I'm pretty tired of this mess.
They did, because the central government have refused to agree to talk with them. If the central government had played ball and allowed a real election over independence, then the whole thing wouldn't have happened.
Exactly. What proindependence needs to do to try to have their way legally is to work towards a whole restructuring of the constitution. They just don’t care for that, they took an illegal shortcut, misusing funds in the process.
That's like telling a poor person that they just have to try to win the lottery. Everyone on both sides knows there's no chance in hell the rest of Spain will ever accept secession. Telling them to accept that is honest, pretending there is another path with any real chance of succeeding isn't.
I think that metaphor is not very apt, nor neutral. Catalonia is not poor in political power by any means, they have been pushing very successfully for years towards decentralization towards Barcelona. And winning the lottery is random, you can’t really negotiate.
In my opinion there are huge stresses in Spain that will open the can of worms that is redefining the Constitution during the next decades. Republicanism, decentralization, chunks of the constitution that nobody really puts in practice, etc. That wont happen in 2 days. But it can happen.
All politicians involved in the independence movement stand for no violence. In a protest of hundred of thousands of people, if someone throws a rock or burns something is a politicians fault? Does this make the movement violent? Don't make me laugh. I've seen unionist protests with much less people behave worse.
You may or may not agree with it, but this is not me randomly saying that there was violence. We are talking about the second most powerful court in Spain, unanimously agreeing that violence took place.
Would you have agreed to this if say the EU imposed a 9-year prison sentence for all of the government leaders of a country if they tried to exit the EU?
Also do you think a 9-year prison sentence is fair for something like this?
And how do you expect Catalans to react to something like this? Fall back in resentment towards the Spanish government, or turn to violence against the Spanish government?
Well, states exist by (sometimes implicit) agreement of the population. Things get tricky when significant (by whatever definition of significant) part of the population is not happy with the arrangement.
Statehood changes given enough time. In the case of Russia, and the states I mentioned, about sixty years. Scotland, part of UK for centuries, may have a referendum soon. Texas "seceeded" from Mexico in the 1840s.
The thread is about whether secession from federations is possible in general.
The USSR recognized the independence of those Baltic states (after military control of the situation failed) on 6 September 1991 and disappeared a few weeks later. Not the best example of orderly and and amicable secession, I think.
So what? Everyone knows Spanish criminal law isn't up to modern European human rights standards. The European Court of Human Rights has found Spain violating ECHR due to handing out punishments for offences as ridiculous as "insulting the Crown".
These decisions smell like they might end up before the Court as well. If found in violation, for sake of consistency at least, personally I think the EU Commission should take a serious look whether this should elicit a rule of law review akin to that applied to Poland and Hungary. (Note: I'm not saying this is necessarily as serious.)
Don't be silly. I was merely referring to well-known ECHR case law, such as Stern Taulats and Roura Capellera v. Spain, which was about two men convicted of burning a photograph of the Spanish royal couple, and stating some opinions of my own. How could I be lying?
And who are "they"? I'm no one particularly invested in this hassle.
No one on this forum is saying that these things are lawful in Spain.
The more interesting and relevant question is whether it is right or wrong. The answer to that question is not automatically the same as lawful/unlawful. Even in a democracy.
Judges are not free to ignore the law just to appease complex political issues that have been fed for 20+ years, and can be backtracked to when Pujol came to power in Catalonia. So yes, judges did the right thing. Now it is up to the next president to manage the situation. But the news being discussed here is about politicians misusing funds to pursue their own agenda, and the penal consequences.
I won't claim you are doing this intentionally, but I find it strange that you care so much about being (in my opinion) rather pedantic in this way? Don't you think it's perfectly reasonable - as a bystander and not a member of the legal profession - to apply your imagination over what ought to be and not the semantics of what is? And to engage in a debate on that basis? Do you really think that whether or not judges are free to ignore precedent has any effect on how Catalans and Spaniards feel about this decision? Or am I missing the point of your comment?
Im not sure I follow you completely - particularly the precedent point, but ill try to explain myself:
There is a huge political context around this trial, and I believe that the fact that my parent post was arguing that we should discuss about morality, not just legality, is a way to introduce this context into the evaluation of the trial to assess - and condemn - the result. I think this is mis characterizing the quality of the trial itself. Plenty of people are decrying the trial result because they want independence, which to me is intellectually dishonest. I was thus arguing that the trial itself was right, responding to a direct ask to consider right vs wrong.
Neither are judges free to ignore the European Convention on Human Rights or the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights when interpreting and applying those national laws. Also, wouldn't be the first time Spain got slapped by ECtHR because of sentences based on its outdated Criminal Code.
Ignoring the tone, people are demanding judges to ignore their duty, and the government to intervene in the judiciary system, so the two first quotes you pasted are actually contended points in parts of Spain.
Prosecuting the sessionist is a bad move by Spain regardless of the laws. Prosecution is always discretionary and what they're doing is just creating martyrs. Sessionists lost and Spain is the one being petty here.
I predict I will see new life for this movement in my lifetime.
You are patently wrong. In fact, it is part of DoJ policy to direct prosecutors to where they should allocate their limited resources. We had a very nice example of this when Obama's DoJ directed prosecutors to lower their priority on prosecuting Marijuana related crimes.
Admittedly, some serious crimes will always be, and deservedly so, a high priority. But prosecutors still just work under the DoJ. And I suspect Spain has a similar hierchy.
“The grant of broad discretion to prosecutors is so deeply ingrained in American law that U.S. lawyers often assume that prosecutorial discretion is inevitable. In fact, some countries in Europe and Latin America adhere to the opposite principle of "mandatory prosecution," maintaining, at least in principle, that prosecutors have a duty to bring any charge that is supported by evidence developed by the police or presented by citizens.”
“The legality principle commands that every case in which there is enough evidence and in which no legal hindrances prohibit prosecution has to be brought to court. Adherence to the legality principle in the procedural sense means that the prosecution service cannot exercise any discretion over the prosecutorial decision. Its role is limited to the legal assessment of the sufficiency of the evidence against the suspect. Other considerations – what are known as public interest factors in opportunity systems – are not considered as factors that prosecutors are allowed to deploy in their decisions. Rather, the public interest is regarded as a consideration for the court which might be reflected in the verdict or the penalty imposed.”
> The Member States’ criminal systems are divided on the issue of mandatory or discretionary prosecution. The discretionary principle is applied in Belgium, France, Denmark, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. In Germany, Austria, Spain, Finland, Sweden, Greece, Italy and Portugal the mandatory prosecution principle applies.
> The mandatory prosecution principle is that the prosecution authorities must act – even if no complaint has been lodged – where they suspect that an offence has been committed.
Prosecuting this is not optional.
That's not to say the government could not have applied pressure somehow if they wished of course (though in theory that's strongly discouraged), or even attempted to change the law entirely. Doing so publicly in any way though would pretty seriously harm their election changes on a national level (election is coming on November 11th).
I'm from the US and I find the notion of mandatory prosecution nonsensical. There is a limit to the workload a prosecutor can handle and prioritizing crimes is just one way to make sure more serious crimes get the manpower needed to prosecute.
But thank you for pointing out that, also, the laws can always be changed which ultimately is political.
Wow, what a terrible way to have a discussion with someone. There are so many more ways to state this than to stick out your finger and say "YOU WRONG". It becomes impossible to read any discussions on this site when people take this tone.
If you trully cared about facts you'd appreciate being corrected and overlook your distaste. Tone should have no bearing unless you just want to vent your own frustration.
I see highly downvoted comments being factually correct much too often.
I don't see a problem with my tone. It's all in your head as far as I'm concerned. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it's you who is being confrontational and adding nothing to the topic of prosecutorial discretion.
You can choose to post your opinion in edgewise here (for others to read), but I'm no longer responding to you.
A lot of Catalans were expecting exactly this. The Spanish tribunals are highly politicized and it's an area where there wasn't much reform after Franco died of old age.
My parents and other family members that grew under Franco warned everyone that this is how the Spain would react, so again, not that we didn't know.
And they did it anyway.
The trial was highly questionable, starting on how the judge was appointed (breaking default procedure), continuing with the lack of memory of all Spanish governmental officials, and ending with not letting the defenses show videos that directly contradicted the sworn deposition of armed forces. This will all be revisited in the European Tribunal for Human Rights, of course, and Spain will get a slap in the hand and Europe will move on.
Technically speaking, as you say, they could have been charged with disobedience, as there was no violence, but you would rather have a death sentence for treason, I see...
Please don't break the site guidelines. They ask you to post thoughtfully and substantively on divisive topics ("No offence, but what did you expect" is not). They also ask you not to downvote-bait. Would you mind reviewing them and sticking to the rules when posting here?
What a fascist state. Jailing for 9 years civilian leaders that organized peaceful protests. Shameful. A movement of more than 2 or 3 million of citizens, that's the way they handle political issues.
Peaceful protests? You have to be joking. Just look at all the articles of the violence that took place against the national police trying to maintain order.
I was on the streets the first of october while voting took place. Police brutality and passive protests is what I saw. show me your articles. Come on, even the charges are for 'sedition' not 'rebelion', crime that right-wing parties wanted. Don't tell me you watch Telemadrid, read la razón/abc...
The trial is subject to European courts and even if they dont appeal (which they will most probably do), this ensures that they are not abandoned to the purportedly fascist judges. So at the end they will be overseen by the EU.
By the way, Spain is one of the EU countries with the least unfavorable rulings by both the EU Justice Court and the European Court of Human Rights so I think that speak volumes of the fascist remains of our justices.
By the way the whole trial is available for anyone to watch in youtube, and judge Marchena’s job conducting the trial is widely understood to have been impeccable.
One of the differences with a fascist state is that Spain is subjected to international law. They have the right to appeal to the European Court for Human Rights, and if they are being jailed for organizing peaceful protests they will win. But that is not what they are being jailed for and you know it.
You forgot: organized with embezzled money, against the law, disobeying courts that explicitly ruled against it.
2 or 3 million citizens were completely free to do what they wanted that Sunday. No one was detained, fined, or even identified, if they did not do something in the tune of burning a police car.
It's quite hard to support freedom fighters around the globe while all along suppressing peaceful freedom fighters at home. Setting this verdict against what's happening in HK doesn't put Spain in a good light.
Are you really comparing a movement to secede from a militaristic communist dictatorship with no freedom of speech with a movement to secede from a EU member state with a full democracy? Which freedoms are these "freedom fighters" missing?
You just wanted to comment on this or do you really have any example? Because they have many parties and civil associations, they demonstrate yearly in the central streets of Barcelona, so you tell me.
"The right of a people to self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law (commonly regarded as a jus cogens rule), binding, as such, on the United Nations as authoritative interpretation of the Charter's norms.[1][2] It states that people, based on respect for the principle of equal rights and fair equality of opportunity, have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no interference."
Rights are inherently individual. You have rights, I have rights, etc. "People" don't have rights, no "Lebensraum", nothing. You, and only you, are in a relationship with the state, not subsumed in an aggregation of any kind.
"The right of a people to self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law"
I am not an international lawyer myself but seeming "the right of a people to self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law". If this is incorrect a people do have rights. In fact this is a cardinal principle in modern international law.
my understanding is that international laws are set so that humans do have rights due to their conditions of being human, based on the assumption that there are things that you cannot do, regardless of the culture you live in. It aims at invalidating the idea that I can only articulate as "that is how things work in this country". For instance, you cannot annihilate groups of people based on religion, that is a crime, internationally, even if your country allows it.
That said, and again, these are individual rights. You can't condemn Rwanda for the crimes committed by their leaders: these leaders are put on trial.
It occurs to me that the US has sanctioned Iran and other countries (not an expert) in the past/present (again, not an expert). But that isn't international law: those are unilateral decisions made by the US government.
I can see both things occurring, but not intertwined. Could you please expand on what you understand by "people do have rights"?
> That said, and again, these are individual rights. You can't condemn Rwanda for the crimes committed by their leaders: these leaders are put on trial.
Personal international law is basically a post-WWII invention,and having regularized international methods of enforcing such law started with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court quite recently.
International law operating at the level of nations has existed longer, and while ad hoc national acts are still the dominant method of compelling compliance, has had a permanent international venue for resolving cases much longer than international law addressing individual responsibility. So, yes, as well as (and longer than) we’ve been able to hold individuals accountable for violations of international law, we can also hold whole nations responsible.
Depends. If you talk about rights as given by some law, then the law subjects are the ones who bear rights. In some cases the law subjects are individuals, in other cases (international law) these are explicitly not individuals.
If that is the case, then how are groups of people held accountable? If there is a chance for groups to "have rights", then there must be a certain set of obligations that they must fulfill in order to do that.
Nations do not have "rights to vote", for instance: it all comes down to the individuals that make up those nations.
It's really hard for me to understand how groups of people would have rights, if someone could elaborate on that, that would be much appreciated.
Not sure how you mean "held accountable" when talking about rights?
Nations do have the right to vote, just look at the UN General Assembly (well, not counting Taiwan or the Sahrawis).
Regarding rights of individuals: If country A commits a violation of international law, and an individual B who is national of country C is affected by that, then B cannot sue A directly. Instead, C must bring the case against A before an appropriate court like the ICJ. This happened e.g. in the LaGrand case[1] between Germany and the US.
On the other hand, if A finds that C owes it money, and C doesn't pay, then any assets of B that happen to be under the jurisdiction of A can be confiscated to pay for the debt. This happened e.g. in the Icesave dispute[2] between Iceland and the UK.
Self-determination can't be apply to a region of Spain.
'In international law, the right of self-determination that became recognized in the 1960s was interpreted as the right of all colonial territories to become independent or to adopt any other status they freely chose. Ethnic or other distinct groups within colonies did not have a right to separate themselves from the "people" of the territory as a whole.'
The wikipedia article says "There are conflicting definitions and legal criteria for determining which groups may legitimately claim the right to self-determination." Have you not just pick a definition that agrees with you political point of view?
"Other definitions offered are "peoples" being self-evident (from ethnicity, language, history, etc.), or defined by "ties of mutual affection or sentiment", i.e. "loyalty", or by mutual obligations among peoples.[40] Or the definition may be simply that a people is a group of individuals who unanimously choose a separate state"
I spent some time in Catalonia last year and asked everybody I met (probably about 5 dozen in all) what they thought of the movement. Most were against it, and of those who were in favor, there were three distinct flavors:
* People who simply identified as Catalan and wanted to have their own language and culture as a separate political and social unit
* People who were wealthy and had assets to protect from real or perceived looming economic correction in Spain
* People who formerly opposed secession, but were pissed to live in a country with high-profile political prisoners.
It was hard to form a solid takeaway from all this; I'd need many more months to start to really understand the political dynamics at play.
One thing about which I feel strong and certain, though, is this:
The fact that something is a crime according to the entity claiming jurisdiction over a given landmass makes it neither right nor inevitable that people engaging in that thing.
The right to dissolve bonds that arbitrarily obligate people to the whims of a state to which they don't consent is a real and enduring right.
Whether or not the movement is righteous, it's not OK to jail people for peacefully (even if disruptively) trying to separate.
Of course jailing people is not a solution. But workers rights were not gained by 'asking', we expected this sentence. It's not 10 people you can jail, is more than 2-3 million people that now don't care (or even less) about 'their country'.
Peacefully breaking the law is still breaking the law. Disobeying direct orders from court can get you in jail, mishandling public funds can get you in jail, and making official declarations that go against the constitution can get you in jail. You have all the right to think this is not OK, but it is how it is.
For example the huge Catalan cannabis industry has been stuck in a legal limbo largely thanks to Madrid failing to legislate and Spanish courts blocking Catalans from doing so.
Secession should be a liberty afforded to all people. There is no excuse for forcing a group of people to live under a political system they disapprove of.
And in response to some of the commenters in this thread: of course an independence movement is going to be violent, especially when the state is trying to oppress it. The independence movements in the US, NI, and India were violent too, not because they were wrong but mostly because of mixed public opinion and an oppressive state.
Perhaps if we legally recognised the right to secession and offered citizens a democratic route to secession then violence wouldn't be necessary. Secession movements are going to happen regardless of their legal status.
Why make this argument, every time. Its not made in good faith and obviously nobody is discussing one-person states. Its always about a large group of people sharing an identity, without having their own country.
But it makes sense to ask that question! If I can rule myself on the sole basis of self-determination, it's turtles all the way down. Can Val d'Aran[1] secede from a seceded Catalonia?
Can I just ignore the rules of the country I live in on the sole basis of "a group of people sharing an identity" being people that are me?
The argument is worth having, because trying to secede part of a country unilaterally by "legal" means gets down to this absurdities.
One question that someone who wants to create a new country out of another, to put it that way, must ask should be "what can I give in return?"
If this is going to become a negotation, hopefully, then both parties must understand that there has to be compromises, and have to find common ground. Not just "this is my right because I say so", nor "this can't be because I say so".
Platitudes on liberty and justice and words that essential mean nothing lead us nowhere.
What you are doing is a form of Reductio ad absurdum. You have to assume that people have their best interest in mind. They will refrain from forming states that are too small to exist, and apart from that this is not even a remotely realistic scenario.
In fact, mistrust that people can decide things for themselves and that localism leads to the best outcome for them is the hallmark of centralism and bureaucrats. Things we don't need more of.
I know! Because it is absurd to think that we can gerrymander who gets to decide what, which is what essentially what the regional government of Catalonia is scheming to do.
The issue isn't simple and I'm positive that this has nothing to do with "human rights" or "democracy" or else. It's much, much more complex than that.
It has everything to do with "human rights" and "democracy"! No one said its simple, but a generic „its complex“ is not a proper refutation. What exactly makes this impossible? Countries form along ethnic boundaries when permitted to do so, and it is then that they are most peaceful and stable. Otherwise you will end up with suppressed minorities and ultimately war. Look at what happened upon decolonization and the fall of Yugoslavia.
People are more peaceful as neighbors than flat mates.
It's not a reduction to the absurd, unless you can make at least a thoughtful argument for why it should apply to groups of some shared attribute, and not to individuals. Which, to be honest, is probably not a terribly hard argument to make.
If secession were allowed by any group, i think it would be profitable for single families to secede. Just the money you would save on taxes would be enough for some people to pay lawyers to handle all the government stuff.
I believe there is an argument here worth discussing.
At the end of the day no matter how many people it is you are still taking away resources from the state (land, tax revenue, etc.) and creating issues with political consequences, border control, and all sorts of things.
How many people does it take to make such actions "acceptable"?
Further, allowing groups of people to just break away from the state and create their own systems, creates a threat to the state from all non-indigenous populations.
Why allow any immigration if newcomers are just going to be able to take your resources and land whenever they feel like it?
I agree that in a perfect world none of this would matter, but currently I don't see a scenario where any state would allow this, regardless of the number of people involved.
Many countries were formed by exactly this method - including the US. If you were seriously living under tyranny I suspect you'd have a different opinion.
More than half of Catalonia wants to stay, why is it bad faith and not calm, rational discussion of purported universal unalienable rights, providing counterexamples?
I've generally either agreed with or appreciated your points in this thread, but this one triggered a reflex in me which has been honed by Brexit.
If we're talking about what a population of people want, we should qualify it with a reference to which poll we are citing. Otherwise it sounds far too agenda-y.
That is a completely fair ask. Here https://www.diaridetarragona.com/catalunya/Casi-la-mitad-de-... you can read that (little) less than half of the 1500 people sampled in March 2019 by Generalitat’s Opinion Studies Centre are in favor of independence. Admittedly even less want no independence in this study, and most are in favor of a referendum.
Because it underlines the fallacy of appealing to an alleged right to cecede.
> Its not made in good faith and obviously nobody is discussing one-person states.
Strawman, and one that's based on a disingenuous premise. It's quite clear that the argument is on whether to draw the line of when a minority has your so called right to cecede. You already admit that your so called right to cecede is absurd and ridiculous if only one person wants out. How about two? Do you believe a couple has the right to cecede? How about two dozen persons? Two hundred? Do you believe a couple of appartment blocks have the right to cecede? Or is the whole idea and concept entirely absurd, and only pointed out as a self-serving tautology?
- a different language?
- a well defined culture?
- a political composition which differs greatly to that the rest of the country? (check the representation of the PP and PSOE)
If you are interested in discussing the reality of the Spanish situation, it is pretty clear where this right of seccesion might want to get exercised (Basque Country, Galicia...) and for sound, historical reasons.
Well, there are historical reasons for that too, Franco's repression on Galicia was brutal, but I agree nowadays BNG support is not comparable to the ones in Catalonia.
I was just listing regions that might have historical reasons and even parties with strong independent ideals, versus a group of friends wanting to separate from Spain for the sake of the argument.
The right to secede is important because it's democratic by nature, the majority who runs the state has to arrange with the minorities to not lose them. And if this arrangement is successful there are no rational reasons to secede. I'd even say that countries that don't allow secessions aren't true democracies at the lowest level.
No, obviously there would need to be a definition of what a legitimate secession movement is. There would be minimum population requirements I'd assume.
If you have enough money to buy large enough plot of land and to hire enough people to work as diplomats, border control, etc. there is no real reason why you should not be able to secede and form your own country, if everyone could actually do that, our governments would not be as crappy as they are, and would not be prison guards for their own population. At least that is the idea behind seasteading and charter cities.
> Succession should be a liberty afforded to all people
I think you mean 'secession'. Anyway, what would be the minimum number of people to have the right for it? A region? A city? A 'barrio'? A family? A group of friends?
> Anyway, what would be the minimum number of people to have the right for it? A region? A city? A 'barrio'? A family? A group of friends?
If you're asking my personal opinion I think there would need to be a population of at least a few hundred thousand in favour of succession. I guess it would depend on how many people are required to run a functional state.
Perhaps there would be middle grounds where smaller groups can be granted some level of independence. Although that might naturally arise from states wishing to retain some level of control over a discontent population seeking independence. I know many believe devolution is the answer to Scottish independence in the UK.
I think Facebook, for example, could run a functional government. If they were allowed to secede and turn the land they own in Menlo Park into a small low-tax low-regulation country, that would probably be quite profitable for them. So be careful what you wish for!
> Succession should be a liberty afforded to all people. There is no excuse for forcing a group of people to live under a political system they disapprove of.
Pro independent movements are quite against your first paragraph, according to discussions regarding either vall d’Aran or Tabarnia (two sub-catalonia independence movements, one based in history/culture, the other one in both jest (a la pastafarism) and anti-independence opinions.
Is anyone forcing people to live under a political system they disapprove of? People can move somewhere else where local politics is more fit to their worldview.
Etc. Please read everything about this issue with a grain of salt in both sides, it is heavily politicized to the point of reality being sidetracked. Even the prime minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, showed today grave misinformation on the ruling through a tweet.
Public uprising against established order. Which is a) something any legal system prosecutes, and b) something these people did. There is also in Spain a aggravating case for doing this from a public role, which seems reasonable and also applies to some of these individuals.
Irrespective of the undertones that you read in the word, that is what they are being judged for. It has a precise technical meaning in the law. And I’d like to know if there is any country whatsoever in which public uprising against the state from a government official, using public funds, and in the manner carried out by them in this case, is not prosecuted.
You have to take into account that this is not a military uprising of a few people, its a pacific protest from politicians who represent almost half of the Catalan votes.
There are plenty of examples where people have been pardoned in Spain for more ethically questionable reasons [1]. This, in contrast, is a clear case where it should be resolved politically, not through the legal system.
Summary: they deny the claims of violence, reject the preventive prison (~2 years for those being condemned to prison today) and denounce the lack of presumption of innocence and an impartial tribunal (119 to 124 and 132 and 133 if you want a quick look).
Violence by spanish police during the "independence referendum" [ https://spanishpolice.github.io (a few hundred videos) ]. Violence by catalan people against spanish police on the same day:
[ https://youtu.be/8ak9224HG_E (guy throwing a chair to a police entering a school) ], [ https://youtu.be/DyE0DtVd4Q8 (various people throwing portable fences to the police) ]
But the most blatant case if that of Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sánchez. They are civilian leaders, not political authorities. They presided Òmnium Cultural (cultural association) and ANC (independentist association) respectively. Today condemned to 9 years each. For context, right before the "independence referendum" there were some searches to investigate the referendum and the people involved. One of them happened in the building of the regional ministry of economy (September 20th, 2017). There, a spontaneous rally started. A few hours later, Òmnium Cultural, even though they weren't the ones to start the rally, filled the documents to formally communicate it to the city hall. Some will say they were trying to obstaculize the judicial operation, and others that they were trying to keep the spontaneous rally under control.
Well, one can take a look at the images:
- Police car destroyed, one the most famous images when trying to show the violence of the independentists: [ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DKPUVBoW0AAa4aw?format=jpg ]. Police left the car parked there, with long guns still inside. Many demonstrators, reporters and photographers climbed on top of the car during the day. At least one of the windows was broken by one of the members of the police at the end of the day, as he himself admitted during the trial.
- Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sánchez climbed on top of the police car at the end of the day too in order to try to dissolve the rally (they also spoke for a couple minutes before this, with the usual "thanks for coming, we will continue rallying tomorrow, we will vote, don't be afraid, bla bla"): [ https://youtu.be/23XrRpfMaw8 ]. They literally say: "as much as possible and in a peaceful way, let's dissolve the demonstration for today". In the trial, Lluís Llach, a famous Catalan singer (temporarily involved in politics at that point), said that he was there and that they initially tried to dissolve the rally from a stage that the association set up on another point on the street, but he eventually suggested that people didn't hear them from that point (as the stage was intentionally at a certain distance from the building [they played some music during the day to distend the mood]), and that they should climb to the police car to speak fr...
I think peaceful secession laws should be codified internationally, it is ridiculous that people still need to take to violence in order to split a first world country since the act is illegal. As for size, many of the best places to live have around 5-10 million people, so I don't see any harm in splitting out populations of that size. For example, I don't believe that Norway would be better off today if they were forbidden from splitting from Sweden 100 years ago. Note that Norway hadn't been an independent country for 500 years at that point, so their situation was very similar to current Catalonia.
One major difference between the former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, is that in the latter I am led to believe that a majority of the public wanted to stay one country. The split seems to have been a way to create more posts for national elites. Ordinary Czechs and Slovaks who I have talked to (admittedly a very small and anecdotally collected group) don't seem to have had a problem with staying part of Czechoslovakia.
In the former Yugoslavia I have no direct knowledge of anyone's opinions on the matter, but I am led to believe that a majority of several of the new countries was solidly in favor of splitting up.
In former Yugoslavio the split is again "enforced" or "allowed" based on the arbitrary criteria from the past. The only "rule" here were "rule of armed force" and "interest of the mighty".
Some ethnic group were allowed to have their right to decide in which country they want to live, some never got that right. In the end that injustice is what led to the whole bloody conflict.
Slovakia was allowed to leave, the Czechs and the federal government approved it. There was no recognition of the right of self-determination. That's only done with blood.
I believe at the end of 2015, a few months before the Brexit referendum, about 70% of people were indicating they'd vote remain in polls. That's the only reason Cameron and the rest of the Remain-supporting political class allowed a referendum at all: they were sure they were going to win.
Turns out that intense discussion, debate and political campaigning can change voter's minds. That's the point of it in fact. Who knew?
I think separatist movements will be the trend in an increasing number of regions. The reason many present nation-states exist is so that in the era of industrial war, outlying eras didn't get rolled by their more technologically advanced, more productive neighbors. Or alternatively, because they did get rolled by their neighbors and are now part of the conquering nation-state.
With the world being unipolar for the last 30 years and that sole superpower being seemingly incapable of winning wars for the last 20, many minority groups are thinking that's a bad bargain and they'd rather trade security for self-determination.
> that sole superpower being seemingly incapable of winning wars for the last 20
Is it not obvious, at this point, that "winning" the wars are not the goal? That the wars are used as pretense for endless military presence to serve geopolitical goals?
I recall in a debate with Allard Lowenstein back in those days, he said “Jerry, you want to win this and get out. I just want to get out. But your friends there “—indicating the Secretary of Defense —“want to lose it and stay in.” I admit to being silenced. I didn’t have the minutes to give a lecture on how to win a war of attrition when it is part of a strategy of containment, and I am not sure I understood the situation that well in 1968 anyway.
Obvious to me, irrelevant to the groups targeted by these wars.
In the WW2-era, the stakes were literal annihilation: a number of minority groups were specifically targeted for extermination by the belligerent powers, and many others were occupied under threat of extermination. Today, the stakes are that you face random drone strikes and your weddings get blown up. But there's nothing you can do about this: instead of "if you accept our rule, we'll let you live", it's "we're not interested in ruling you, die anyway". When wars are fought to make a point rather than to win, and that point has nothing to do with you, they're not going to change your behavior. So great powers and separatist/extremist groups exist in symbiosis, with each constructing and reinforcing the other in the absence of an external reason for their existence.
Agreed. People love to make all sorts of economic and security arguments for why this or that split is a bad deal for the people gaining self determination but the fact of the matter is that people have shown they would rather die poor and young than be told what to do by a bunch of people who's values they do not share. You simply can't put a price on freedom.
Australian aborigins or Navajo indians could say that they feel oppressed, and they have totally original cultures and languages.
This people instead are far, really far from being oppressed and show a severe case of being chronically spoiled.
They are richer than most spaniards, enjoy the best infrastructures and an excelent health care system (paid with taxes of all spaniards), have more job opportunities than many, and tailor-made markets and industries located there for their profit
They live in a fantasy world where you can just decide to ignore the law when and as you will, or close an airport or train station (because you are a "freedom figther" aren't you?), and say later that you just were joking and is unfair.
They live in the fantasy since 1920s, sure, sure. They have distinct culture and language. They carry the whole spain on their backs, which pays their healthcare i guess. They are discriminated by spanish officials. The spanish try to erase their language by abolishing catalonian schools. Their lawful actions are met with violence. Spoiled? Go home Franco, you're drunk.
... And the myth of the unique, special, superior, holier than thou culture.
The truth is that youngsters in Catalonia eat the same hamburgers, drink the same german beer, wear the same Nike shirts and pasta glasses, play the same world of warcraft, drive the same brands of cars and bikes, enjoy the same pop, rock, rap and flamenco (inherited from the Andalusian inmigrants), read the same Harry Potter books, watch the same spiderman's hollywood films, use the same smartphones and operative systems, celebrate Halloween (probably dressed as Franco, or maybe Lady Gaga), study the same english, science and maths, culture the same peruvian potatoes and tomatoes, farm the same cows, sheep and chicken, and share the same religion, mythology and culture, the same... as any other occidental people.
Their grandpas are from Andalucia, Murcia, Castilla and Asturias more often that they would prefer to admit.
They eat onions entire and make castles in the air with people that climb over other people. Two nice apportations to the planet diversity, nobody denies that.
They dream that everybody, except they, are Franco (forty years after Franco death) and they behead the dragon with a flamiger sword in from of a bunch of grateful ladies. hurrah
And they have TWO languages, not one. Spanish, with 600 millions of native speakers that everybody understands and uses (even if they choose to hide this fact and feel ashamed for it), and a different language that uses the same latin alphabet (A,B,C... we are not talking of the invention of Lord of the Ring's runes here) borrows a lot from french, spanish and maybe italian; and is used as political weapon all the time.
They aren't the only european with two languages (or the only spaniards that suffered with Franco) and they do exactly the same things as any other european in the 99% of their journey.
If we talk about their culture, maybe they should be nationalised US citizens directly, as millions of other people in the planet.
Arab Spring ended up with 7 civil wars, many of which are still going on.
I said that they're trading security for self-determination, not that they get security and self-determination. The endgame is a multipolar world with lots of wars, not peaceful coexistence.
what does this have to do with hacker news, technology, computers, or science? these are off-topic political news.
edit to paste the relevant guidelines:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
One argument for keeping politics out is this: politics are way more important than most of what we post here. If they allow it, it would dominate the site.
I read it differently: the powers that be will always punish the ones who dare to stand in the way in the harshest possible way. Something to think about when being excited about disrupting some well established and powerful sector - e.g. government.
Barcelona airport is blocked! Finally we catalans seem to have found some blood in our veins! Sadly the catalan establishment will try to defuse the situation, they are quite a bunch of cowards. Hoping we can be as strong and deterimned as the hongkongers.
Maybe the HK protests were inspired by the Catalans (probably not) but this has been brewing for a long time and Madrid has been acting this way for quite some time now.
Some in Catalonia has been against the centralization of Spanish states since they were all folded into one state (1716) while Hong-Kong at it's earliest was created 1842 if I'm looking at the right details.
If we look at when an actual movement existed for Catalan Indepdendence, it was formed 1922 (Estat Català). Granted Hong-Kong wasn't really transfered until 1997, it seems unlikely Hong-Kongers have fought for independence for longer than Catalonia.
But in the end, there are no winners or losers here, only freedom fighters.
From a Spaniard who never understood the indepentist movement, and assuming you're in it by the tone of your message: Why this movement, what do you expect to happen if Catalonia becomes independent, and how would the whole mess of issues that, for example, Brexit is facing, get done in this case?
Before we make any assumptions, please consider that I'm asking this truly from an intention of learning, and not trying to bait any flames, or establishing my position. I've just never had the opportunity to talk to someone on "the other side".
Thought: you guys ought to email one another. I find that private conversations tend to fare better than public ones, which can easily become "pissing matches".
I think it's been too long now to get concrete answers. Many people support independence because it become an identity, because they have socialized on it during their mid twenties or so.
As an example, I have had some discussions with independence supporters where they have denied me, categorically and multiple times, that at the beginning of the mediatization of the conflict, one of the most important arguments and that was debated with intensity in the television and internet gatherings was that Catalonia contributed much more money than it received, and that such a thing was unfair.
So many people simply want to become independent, regardless of the arguments against and in favour, and of any cost-benefit analysis.
Somehow everyone agrees that European countries losing their overseas colonies was a good thing, but neighbouring colonies are considered inseparable parts of the nation that happened to be stronger.
Think how you would feel if Spain was part of Portugal, France, Morocco, or Germany, Spanish language was a minority language in Spain, and you would have spent significant amount of time reading books or learning about the war or some other event that had changed the flow of history and led your country to not exist on the map.
Disclaimer: I am not from Catalonia, but from a country that barely got organized in time to be a separate state, and i am happy about that, as smaller more local governments work better, than the very centralized and huge government we would have now if our separatists did not manage to organize in time.
I think the discussion surrounds two issues right now:
1) Freeing the politicians. There's plenty of examples of politicians interfering in judicial decisions [1]. Currently, 45% of the Catalan electorate have their elected politicians in jail.
2) Discuss with the central government the best way to modify the constitution to allow a mechanism for people to vote for what they want.
I wouldn't consider myself an independentist, but being surrounded by people that are, I've come to understand that the biggest issue is whether they have the right to even have a vote on how they want to govern themselves.
As for the arguments for the independence of Catalonia, as other people mentioned here, there are several and as varied as people are in Catalonia. The first step though is to be able to even have this discussion in the form of a referendum, even if the final result is staying in Spain.
I never understood the independence movement until I watched Spanish police beat up innocent people who just dared to show up and vote in the referendum.
I'm still not a big fan of the independence movement, but it's hard to disagree with them given the actions Madrid is taking. Most foreigners I've talked to in Catalonia seem to agree with me. They don't give a fuck about the independence movement, they're simply mad about how poorly Madrid has been handling this.
Even today, most big streets in Barcelona have been shut by the police. You drive past and you see empty stretches of road full of police cars for no reason, the whole city is paralyzed.
E: lol, downvoted for a honest answer to someone who wanted to learn. It's exactly this kind of responses by Spaniards creating the strife.
Lol, don't worry about the downvotes. Just a handful of enraged unionists can make your comment almost disappear. No big deal. It is actually quite funny to see them scared like that.
> From a Spaniard who never understood the indepentist movement, and assuming you're in it by the tone of your message: Why this movement, what do you expect to happen if Catalonia becomes independent
> Before we make any assumptions, please consider that I'm asking this truly from an intention of learning, and not trying to bait any flames, or establishing my position. I've just never had the opportunity to talk to someone on "the other side".
Thank you for asking this so politely! I appreciate it very much. Really, thanks! It is very rare that Spaniards take this attitude, and it feels like a breath of fresh air.
Regarding your question, not all independence supporters share the same reasons. I think my particular reasons are not very representative, so do not take what I say as too relevant in the grand scheme of things. But I can only speak for myself.
My only reason for wanting a catalan state, separate from spain, is concern for the short-term existence of my language. I could not care less about the economic situation.
I have witnessed since my youth in the eighties the slow decline of catalan usage, and its replacement by spanish. I realize that this is not a very important concern; the world has far worse problems, but it is still a legitimate concern that merits political attention. I am anti-nationalist and internationalist, but this does not mean that all languages on Earth must disappear except one, and all cultures must be merged into a single one.
Most of my life I have not been pro-independence. I identified proudly as a catalan-speaking spaniard, and even had t-shirts with the spanish flag as I traveled around
Europe. It was in 2003, on a summer travel in Portugal with people from Spain (spanish speakers), that I realized that they did not see the catalan culture as a legitimate part of the culture of their own country. Somehow, the catalan language was "less spanish" than the spanish language. I found this idea illogical, and the fact that they seriously espoused it was deeply outraging. Then they pointed me to the spanish constitution, that states clearly in its infamous Article 3, that spanish language is the preferred language in front of the other, lesser, local languages. This was clearly contrary to my view on how things should be, but it was just a law that could be changed if most people agreed, and it seemed logical than most people would.
I did not become separatist at this point. Instead, I embarked in a sort of personal crusade trying to convince all spanish people that I knew that they should accept the possibility of the catalan language being the sole official language in the catalan countries, lest it would disappear and they would lose an important part of the culture of their country. To no avail: the fact that a person from Valladolid who moved to Girona had to learn the local language was so foreign to all castilians that it left me in sad despair.
But I did not become separatist at this point. Instead, I was moved by the enthusiasm around a new proposal for a local law ("estatut de Catalunya 2006"), that had the support of the spanish socialist party (then the main party in the state, thanks in part to its overwhelming support by catalans and andalusians), and also the support of all the parties in the catalan parliament except the spanish conservative party, which had a minor presence there. This new local law established the equality of the rights for the speakers of both languages in the territory of Catalonia. I did not agree with the form (both languages were to become equally official, and citizens had the right to communicate with the spanish administration in either language), because I really preferred a single official language, but still, it was a reasonable compromise. Then there was a referendum in Catalonia, under the auspices and support of the spanish state, and the new "estatut" was approved by an overwhelming majority. Once it was approved, the spanish par...
> catalan-speaking people is, well, a people, and it has the right to decide, alone, about its future
What about spanish-speaking people? Are they not also catalans? Is “your country” not theirs?
Paraphrasing what you said, somehow, the spanish language is "less catalan" than the catalan language. I find this idea illogical, and the fact that you seriously espouse it is deeply outraging.
They will only have to respect the local law; probably nothing will change for them in practice, unless they want to work in a public service and they cannot already speak catalan.
Unless they cannot stand to live in a place where spanish is not official. In that case, well, they will easily find twenty countries with five hundred million spanish-speakers where they will feel truly at home. Problem is, as a catalan I have nowhere else to go.
Great explanation, thanks! I would be pretty sad if the catalan language disappeared, because I've always liked its sound (my grandfather was from Mahon, so he'd speak it every now and then).
> Once it was approved, the spanish parliament decided to "cut" it and remove some articles (notably that of the official languages) and the spanish constitutional court declared it "unconstitutional".
I would also not like for the Catalan language to dissapear, but the above statement is false. AFAIK the only change in that regard was removing the preference of catalan over spanish, making them equal (https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2006-13087&b=8&tn...). Right now both languages are equally legal and valid for both day-to-day life and official documents. As the law states you have the right to use any of them and the right and duty to learn both.
I am starting to think that Snow Crash was way more prescient than most thought. There is defenitely a rise of self-governance movements. Granted, some grow with the help entities focused on undermining current regimes, but the result matters.
What Catalunha "loses" by being part of Spain (not to mention what it gains) is very different from what HK gains and loses.
Sure, CAT have the right to protest for any case they want, but at a certain point there are laws and states (and last I checked public opinion on secession on CAT was not big on the separatists side)
Please remember that only part of the Catalan population participated in the referendum - mainly the ones that wanted to secede. The result was a huge majority according to Catalan authorities but turnout was merely 40-something percent. It's widely understood that voters that wanted to remain didn't participate.
It is highly questionable whether the independence movement has even 50 percent support. Indications are that the support hovers around 40-something percent. It was highest in 2013, where it reached 55 percent. Please notice that this is not close to the super majority which is normally required for constitutional changes in most democracies.
That's not self-serving argument, it's just plain true. Most of those who didn't support independence simply didn't vote. Parties against this movement sent this message to their voters.
It seems that only a slice from the non-supporters from the left showed up to vote.
> That sounds like you abdicated your part in the decision, then?
Given that the so called decision was ripe with voting fraud (I mean, separatists storing voting ballots at home?) then the process actually has nothing to do with deciding and everything to do with a Putin-istic imposition of a policy hidden with a thin façade of an election.
No. "The Constitution has been amended twice. The first time, Article 13.2, Title I was altered to extend to citizens of the European Union the right to active and passive suffrage (both voting rights and eligibility as candidates) in local elections. The second time, in August/September 2011, a balanced budget amendment and debt brake was added to Article 135."
The argument is that democracy was not meant to work in this case; that the vote should not have been held at all and Madrid was right to prohibit it. From that perspective, there's a reasonable argument for boycotting the vote to strengthen the case that it's not valid.
This is a pretty "I know better than you" take, one that is eliding pretty important facts, like that this election was blatantly illegal. I, for one, would probably choose to not vote in an illegal election that purports to speak for me as well.
Additionally, it is not helpful to "suggest" that a majority of a region take part in illegal activity. It would seem to me that not every election is democratic; this reductive argument that elections, write large, equal democracy does not help find a solution
I disagree - if some group made an illegal referendum about my own region seceding, of course I wouldn't vote in it - it would be giving it legitimacy it doesn't deserve.
I think we should also take into consideration the fact that the referendum was illegal according to spanish state, so you have bunch of people who don't want to vote, only because it's illegal.
If there was a fair and legal vote, we'd see some actual numbers that can be trusted.
Yes, I agree. I'm not saying it's wrong/right for a referendum, just giving a possible reason we can't trust the numbers of the referendum that happened (or didn't really happen, if you're the spanish government).
There are a few cases where the independence referendum was legal and recognized by whoever they were trying to get independence from. Algergia, Guinea, Samoa, whole bunch of ex Soviet Union countries. There are future referendums planned that are recognized as well.
So it's not impossible. It just won't work with the current Spanish Government (a referendum. Indepedence, maybe)
The question is not about the support that independence movement has, but about unreasonable and unjust verdict. No sane justice system would imprison someone for separatism, removing them from office should have been the maximal measure a civilized country would apply.
The government of spain should be condemned the same way other countries that have political prisoners are condemned.
Of course you can be a separatist in Spain and be vocal about it. That will not land you in jail.
What you can't do is misuse public funds and census data to organize an illegal election.
You want to secede? No problem, but you must abide by the existing laws, or face the consequences.
In practice, the first thing they needed to do was ammend the Constitution, which, like in most democracies, requires a supermajority in the parliament and the senate. It's not that hard, there was an ammend a few years ago.
What i am trying to say is that the consequences in the current law are unreasonable and unfair, and application of that consequences escalates conflict instead of de-escalating.
Application of unreasonable punishment simply will increase the number of people supporting secession, so allowing referendum (possibly requiring 3/4 majority in catalonia alone) would have done much less damage to Spain, than what have happened instead.
I understand what you are saying, but picture this: the governor of Florida dislikes the federal government and, even throw he know the US Constitution disallows the secession of a state, announces a referendum to vote for independence. He is given plenty of warning that moving forward with it is illegal, yet he sticks to his guns, misusing public funds to pay for it. What is the penalty for that in the US? Is it excessive in your opinion? How does the opportunity of parole look like compared to Spain?
Incidentally, much like it happened with Brexit, the "leave" campaign makes all sorts of promises that it could never deliver: catalonians would keep their Spanish passports, they would continue to receive Spanish pensions, they would automatically remain part of the EU and NATO, they would not be burdened with any of the existing public debt (bond obligations), etc.
Misled with all these transparent lies, around 40% of those called to vote actually show up, while the rest of the people listen to the advice of the central government urging them not to vote and take part in that farce. Unsurprisingly, most of the people who voted were hardcore leavers.
I don't like how the Spanish central governments have handled the situation. But it's also true that there's been an outstanding marketing campaign online to paint a minority of catalonians as "the true will of the Catalonian people" and it's tiresome to hear foreigners voice strong opinions about something they understand so superficially.
Lots of Spaniards like myself are tired of the situation. Want to secede? Fine. Let's follow the law, ammend whatever needs to be ammended, have some basic plan for fundamental questions like membership to the EU, pensiond, debt obligations, etc. The, with an understanding of what is on the table, vote for it. Just like Brexit should have been done.
I agree that there is very little reason to want to secede from Spain, the problem is that the way Spain handled the issue adds a reason. I am not from USA, and in the region i live (ex USSR and middle east) i have seen multiple times how excessive force against separatism devolves into war where no one could expect it. I am not saying that situation in Catalonia is close to that, but it is important to not escalate and to have empathy for the other side.
The usual poll is drafted in a way that almost everyone answers yes (usually by pro independence newspapers). Something like: "would you approve the vote on a referendum agreed with Spain?"
Otherwise, it's pretty obvious people voting for Cs and PP will never answer "Yes" and that's already way more than 20%
Whilst it's true that the referendum isn't enough to justify actually seceding, I think that it clearly demonstrated that there should have been a legitimate referendum organised.
Please, if you dont know about the catalonia problem directly, beware of the separatist propaganda. Its known they spend a lot of public money in media.
For example, Julian Assange and Yoko Ono were paid to write some twits pro independence agenda.
It's nearly 100 years since the matter of Catalan independence was first mooted and 80 years since the end of the Spanish Civil War and matters surrounding the formation of an autonomous Catalonian State remain far from any real resolution. This just isn't just a political dispute that if given sufficient time will eventually dissipate, rather it's a fundamental one of cultural and language differences and the heavy-handedness of the Spanish state is only making matters worse.
In a world where modern democracies everywhere are coming under increasing stress because state authorities are increasingly breaking the long-held covenants of trust that bind a state and its citizenry, these outrageous sentences only make a further mockery out of the law. Ultimately, cool heads soon need to resolve this stand-of or inevitably it will lead to further civil disobedience and possibly worse. And one must never forget that the last time this happened in 1936-'39 many hundreds of thousands died over the issue.
In the modern Europe of today, borne out of the horrific chaos of WWII (and its prelude the Spanish Civil War), there should be no place where people should be subject to such authoritarian rule as they have been subjected to here.
It's now time for Europe to pressure Spain to finally give the people of Catalonia both their autonomy and freedom. Catalonia has been in Spain's chains far long enough.
You have a point, but I think you miss when you say this was a product of authoritarian rule. Catalonia is basically like an US State. They have control of their education, healthcare, police etc, they have their own parliament, and so on. Catalonia already has autonomy.
There has been a lot of mistakes on how to handle this situation but Catalan leaders made a calculated decision and forced the situation. You can express any idea, demonstrate, make your own party, but you it's not reasonable to expect that, if you not only break the law, but try to seize a large portion of a country and its resources, and just ignore the will of about half of the population in that very region, the spanish state does nothing.
And I'm not even mentioning a shitload of things that are also going on in this issue that makes it way more complicated, typical in this multi-layered spanish power plays.
> You have a point, but I think you miss when you say this was a product of authoritarian rule. Catalonia is basically like an US State. They have control of their education, healthcare, police etc, they have their own parliament, and so on. Catalonia already has autonomy.
It's wrong to say that Catalonia is basically a US state, since US is a federation while Spain is a unitary state. This means the central government can overrule whatever the communities decide on. They don't have the same authority over ruling, as the central power has in the case of Spain.
Then I suppose one of the bigger issues remain in answering "Is Catalonia autonomous enough?" and "Who decides how autonomous Catalonia should be?"
"You can express any idea, demonstrate, make your own party, but you it's not reasonable to expect that, if you not only break the law, but try to seize a large portion of a country and its resources, and just ignore the will of about half of the population in that very region, the spanish state does nothing."
I generally agree you in both practice and principle and in a democracy democratic processes say what laws or rules apply. And this is how things normally work in stable democracies. The trouble is that these days democracies are coming under considerable and increasing strain from various competing interests whose worldviews are essentially irreconcilable. Whilst this has always been so to some extent, in the past a 'reasonable' government could evaluate competing interests then come up with effective and acceptable laws based on utilitarian principles. Nowadays that's far from easy—and it's becoming increasingly so for many reasons that are too complex to detail here expect to say that attitudes and norms within societies have changed, and together with improved communications, internationalism and changes over the past 40 or so years in the way capitalism plays a role in society have had much to do with it.
At the risk of oversimplifying these complex issues, here's a few examples. Let's say a government is under pressure by a majority of citizens to regulate the bad behavior of certain types corporations but the corporations strenuously fight the proposal on the grounds of loss of jobs, loss of profits, interference in the free market and violations of international trade agreements, etc. so a stalemate ensues and thus nothing or little is done. In a previous era, the issues about 'free markets' and 'violations of international trade agreements' would have played a much lesser role and back then corporations effectively had less influence on government policy, thus governments would have found it easier to regulate. These days, there are so many instances where governments have failed to regulate that the citizenry has a justifiable right to be annoyed and to assume the democratic process has failed it. [Incidentally, one such matter has again made it into today's HN, that's the huge price Big Pharma is charging for drugs—that government has failed to act for so long is symptomatic of the problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21250491]
Another is the rise of identity politics. Whatever one's views on this are it is hard to disagree with the fact that nowadays it is increasingly difficult to govern a country where its citizens hold so few views in common. Clearly, a society wherein a majority hold common views and interests makes governance easier but today this structure has broken down to the extent that governing for all is very difficult, especially so in a democracy. Once only four or five decades ago, those within a society were much more homogeneous in their views than they are today. Back then a majority of citizens held similar views as they were bound together by a common culture or race, or by religion and or by isolation from other societies any or all of which would have steered the society in certain directions. Today, the parallel between the governance of a democracy and the parable from Aesop's fable* The Man, The Boy, and The Donkey of 'try to please all and you will please none' is truer than ever. I would add that in this era where one's rights and sense of entitlement trump the Rousseauian notion of the General Will of the Citizenry then governments are damned if they do or they don't.
Quo vadis? We should look to history for examples of what happens when citizenries consider their governance has gone beyond the pale. All too often, we see that when a majority of citizens hold such high levels of mistr...
Look, I'm a sociologist so I totally get where you are coming from, but your thougts are mostly tangential.
Catalonia can enact his own laws, and it does so. There's very little substance if you say "being freed from the chains of Spain". There isn't any massive difference in the understanding of the world between catalans and the rest of the peninsula. You could pimpoint some laws here and there, and some simbols, but it's pretty much it. There's no systemic repression of Catalans of any sorts because of speaking or being Catalan. I know that an independence supporter will disagree and is willing to paste thousands of links here, but IMO from the big picture there's no much substance.
They are not loosing autonomy as you said, as it's been happening quite the opposite.
There's a lot of stuff happening daily and a lot of propaganda going on. The Catalan government is very good at this, and it's difficult to make foreigners understand how much effort they actually put on this. To give you a glimpse, yesterday they sent their supporters to occupy the Barcelona airport. Politicians are not stupid, and they know that place is guarded by national police and the military. Some time later, as it seemed such actions wouldn't yield any PR material, they've sent their own police. That's the videos foreigners have seen in their media. Obviously, the majority of them don't have to know that Catalans have their own police, and they were sent there coordinated by their own government, that it wasn't spontaneous. And most media won't clarify it.
Today, their explanation for internal consumption is that they had to send the Mossos d'esquadra (Catalan police) because they had to "protect the demonstrators from themselves", they were afraid to be accused fo sedition again and some other BS, that of course will be noise tomorrow.
I know there's enough speculation in the last two paragraphs, but I worked for them for some time, so I know how they think. And that's my take on it because, if it wasn't for that, it would be absurd to send your people somewhere and then beat em just because.
And this stuff is happening on a Weekly basis.
Now, you think the most pragmatic solution would be just accept "the fact" that Spain lost Catalonia, and that it has to become another country. Now, what happens with half the catalans that want to remain spanish? Do we just forget about them? What if they become violent? What would do the Catalan Government if they become their own country and half its population does the same they have been doing? What if they win elections and want to rejoin? (I forgot, that wouldn't be possible under the new catalan law, they wanted to make parties against secession illegal), are we going to split and join multiple times because of this?
I mean, there's a lot to put in a cost/benefit analysis and from my POV is unclear at best. There's no clear solution to avoid conflict even if we splitted to day and we had it in good terms. And I'm not even mentioning that the most probably economic outcome for Catalonia would be to suffer massively due to loosing it's status with the EU, not being anymore the preferred port for trading with Spain and basically loosing it's status as an asset for Spain.
It's natural for everyone to try to frame events in a local setting, but take in account that you are not just witnessing two ants fighting for a piece a bread, but organizations with a lot of power and resources, that actively try to shape your opinion on the issue.
Yes, you are quite correct in that my arguments are mostly tangential; they are in fact just that. It's pretty clear that I'm coming from the much broader perspective of the very real problems of modern-day democratic politics, and I did say that I was 'at the risk of oversimplifying these complex issues', and it seems from your comments, that perhaps I did over do it. As a sociologist you will be cognizant of the fact that every survey taken in democratic countries in recent times about governance and democracy shows that about 80% of the population seriously claim that democracy has failed them.
As I see it, it's a huge problem and I agree that the Catalonian issue is a small and almost significant part of that.
I'd only add that I'm old enough to vividly remember the horrible bombing and killings in that part of the world and thus I've developed a long-held view that with the 'right' triggers that they could easily happen again.
> Catalonia can enact his own laws, and it does so.
Sorry for just pointing out one thing, but it was what you started with so I feel the need to correct it.
Yes, Catalonia can enact their own laws. But even if they do, Spain reserve the right to override them, with what they feel like. Catalans I've spoken to, have expressed this to be a pain point, especially when the relations to Madrid are poor.
Madrid can always regain control over Catalonia according to it's laws, and them having this ability, makes peoples drive to independence stronger.
Catalan (and other nationalists) are key to form governments on Spain, specially the last two or three legislatures, so this is highly debatable at best. Some laws that were not passed/revoked in the central parliament have been precisely because of the vote of such parties.
A party can be both in its autonomous and central parliament. And this has been the case for decades.
I know what independence supporters feel about, but there's no substance to an argument where Catalans are ignored or overruled from the central parliament because of any sort of authoritarian rule, because they are integral and important part of how power is distributed and managed in such institution.
I try to understand both sides without siding too much with either.
"there's no substance to an argument where Catalans are ignored or overruled from the central parliament because of any sort of authoritarian rule" leads me to believe that you're not thinking the same way as me regarding understanding both sides.
Image if the EU Council could, at any time, invoke a article to take control over what the member states themselves should decide over. This is what Catalans feel right now is happening.
Any autonomy that Catalans currently enjoy, is devolved power from Madrid. Just having the possibility for Madrid to at any time suspend the autonomy of (what they see as) their own state, makes them uneasy, and we're seeing the result of that uneasiness coming to the surface more and more recently.
> Image if the EU Council could, at any time, invoke a article to take control over what the member states themselves should decide over. This is what Catalans feel right now is happening.
Such thing has happened, but it's not the current state of affairs. The central state took control of the Catalan institutions until elections were held, not past that.
And of course such thing didn't happen in a vacuum. Not to mention that this is a pretty standard procedure in most countries.
> leads me to believe that you're not thinking the same way as me regarding understanding both sides
I can understand why you think that. I have been following this issue for the last, maybe, ten years. I've worked for politicians in political marketing for a consultant company so I know how they think. I'm an "insider" to political propaganda if you like, so I'm not just sitting back watching events like am a neutral observer.
Thankfully I've moved to another totally different field, but it affected my ability to read the really deeply, I'd say.
> just ignore the will of about half of the population in that very region
The half didn't give their opinion, they didn't ignore it, in fact they tried to do everything they could to get their position even though Spain did everything they could to not let anyone give it.
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[ 0.74 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadTrying to secede in a country where secession is illegal, is... you know... a crime.
You can secede in federalist countries, but most republics prohibit secession -- since most of their constitutions are based on France's model.
So, a prison sentence was pretty clear for most political observers. The only way they wouldn't get prison terms was if the secession succeeded, which it did not.
Technically speaking, I'm surprised they weren't charged with treason -- the de-facto charge in such cases. Good thing the EU requires members to abandon the death penalty to join. Most high-level treason charges usually end up with a noose around someone's neck.
Also, please downvote me. Actual statement of facts aren't welcomed here.
Facts we know (at least some of us, closer to the situation).
"What did you expect" is more loaded, as it also invokes political, and moral expectations, and can be misconstrued as "they got what they deserved" (as opposed to a neutral "they got what the law states").
And even the law can be bend, when there's a large public will -- e.g. the government is forced to reach a compromise, etc.
So, "secession is prohibited" is not enough to warrantee the current outcome.
As an example, dictatorship is also prohibited, but more than a few dictators or wannabe coup arranged for cosy non-jail deals when they were thrown out and democracy was restored...
(and it feels weird to put UK up there as a positive example with regards to mature handling of elections..)
Regarding stonewalling, they already have a much bigger representation than what their relative headcount would guarantee. It’s just that the rest of Spain, and more than half of Catalonia, don’t want the second richest region to leave with all the wealth that we all together have concentrated there throughout the years.
The rest of Spaniards had been called all kind of nasty things from this people, from fascists to thiefs, pigs, dumbs, violators, abusers and even dirty people that does not wash themselves.
Not to mention the reverse David-Star that where in fact the yellow ribbons. You don't wear it, you're harassed and called traitor and botifler. Friends of my parents, elder people that could suffer an infart, were assaulted with some people entering in their bus, crying slogans, calling them fascists and harassing them pushing banners and yellow ribbons under their nose. All of this just because they were in a holiday in the wrong part of the country and had commit the crime to hire a local bus to make an excursion. The driver didn't even tried to stop they.
Journalists doing their job were trown bottles with piss and water in direct. All in the name of peace.
Entire families are angry and split today because this snakes and child-emperors wanted to suck-suck-suck even more money
See the newspaper archives.
You could say the same things are said from the 'other side' of the debate, I'm sure people say all these things from both sides, you cannot control everyone on such a big movements/issues. What I'm sure is that I haven't seen any leader say all that adjectives to anyone.
"Not to mention the anti-David-Star that where in fact the yellow ribbons".
Well... 'anti-david-star' what a nice way to describe the same ribbons (with different color) that people wear on the world cancer day.
The independence movement has always talked about the State/Government not letting people decide. It's not about hating someone because they think different than you. It's about an exercise of democracy.
Please do not dare try again to take us for idiots. We are not talking of anonymous people, we are talking of all main independentist leaders acting as victims and light beings whereas saying things like those of spaniards:
"Scavengers, vipers, hyenas. Beasts with human form, however, that distil hate. A disturbed, nauseating hatred, like moldy dentures, against everything the tongue represents. They are here among us. They are disgusted by any expression of Catalanness... Beasts have names and surnames. We all know somebody"
Not, is not the nazi party in 1933, is President Torra spreading love in 2012.
Another example:
"Mrs. María Llanos de Luna devotes more time to her hairstyles than to the culture of the country where she lives... No, it is not natural to speak Spanish in Catalonia"
Not to mention this silly 2010 video from CIU party: "Spain steals from us". Has been 10 years hearing this victimism all the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QdyOSgbIVY
If you had being harassed for not-bearing a cancer ribbon, please don't hesitate to tell us your experience.
(hum, just see now that "infart" is not an english word, heart attack is the correct term)
This is a lie, only the cops were violent.
E: If you think I'm wrong then post evidence and a bitcoin address, I'll gladly pay you $500 if you can show substantial evidence that there was violence involved. You won't be able to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=klSib4rhdLs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svGsNGOpxsQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyE0DtVd4Q8
Compare those clips to these https://spanishpolice.github.io/
This was your original claim. You are implicitely withdrawing it and moving the goalpost to "evidence of substantial violence"(which is ok, but it was so easy to rebate in its original form that couldn't resist). BTW, states have the monopoly of violence which makes the comparison complicated to asses to anyone who believes in representative democracy and the separation of powers(policemen were trying to execute a court order, no less and no more).
You can keep your 500$, I already knew you were bluffing.
Regarding the issue you are bringing. Yes, the police intervention was a massive clusterfuck. It was impossible to stop the so called "referendum" without the complete cooperation of catalan police and the civil guard and national police cops were sent to an impossible mission. Some of them misbehave, probably out of frustration and fear/anger. This is something a policemen should never do.
If that's your point I could agree.
Oh fuck off, you knew the context. oliverx0 was trying to paint the independendistas as the violent aggressors, which was obviously what I wanted evidence of.
It's obvious that the police went out of their way to incite a violent response, and utterly failed. All you can find is a single chair-throwing incident while it's easy to find hundreds of incidents of cops attacking peaceful voters.
>You can keep your 500$, I already knew you were bluffing.
You're a scumbag intentionally misinterpreting me in order to call me a liar. I would recommend you refrain from this kind of silly personal attacks in the future, you never know just how much they might cost you.
And FWIW, I'm not bluffing. I'm more than happy to put my money where my mouth is, please name any nice (you know, not the daily stormer or ISIS) bitcoin accepting charity and I'll give them $500 just to prove that you're utterly full of shit. I won't give you the money though, as you did nothing to earn it. (However my original offer will still stand after my $500 donation to the charity of your choice!)
Edit: Your reference is talking about rebellion. Not relevant?
It's hard to find anything very close to sedición, particularly given that I've understood that the Spanish Supreme Court has now found that threat of force or violence was not involved, apparently (?) basing their decision on the very broad sounding "outside of legal means" part. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.
To my understanding, a German judge ruled that there are no corresponding laws in practice. The ones considered to be similar by the letter are handled differently: the German highest court has put a much higher hurdle to their application then the Spanish court did.
And much less in the "they should expect that it might result in violence, when we send our armed riot police in" kind of violence, but the "people will use violence against people because of their religion/skin/sexuality/..." kind.
As I understand it, it was never even considered and thrown out right away.
The whole US was founded on the idea of a right to self-determination. Without unilateral separation, it would still be part of England.
Fun fact: British America was around 200 years old when it gained independence. Catalonia has been part of Spain (as opposed to an independent principality) for around 300 years.
Poor handling, and particularly heavy handed handling, turned those moderates with a valid grievance into revolutionaries, and secessionists. The East India company was trying to screw over both Britain and the American colonies in equal measure.
There probably is a modern lesson in there, which is what results from overly draconian response, and something something overly powerful corporations.
I bet that this land didn't arrived in a ship and was in the same place for a few millions of years at least. Spain has more than 300 years of history.
That also happened some centuries ago, what was politically acceptable or moral was quite different then. I’d like to think that we now have the political maturity to do this slowly, legally and peacefully if it needs to happen at all.
It was specifically left out of the Constitution, for a few complex reasons, but from a de facto / de jure perspective, was ambiguous at best, until decided by war.
That’s the thing with revolutions. They are only ok if they work.
It seems that the holy right of self-determination does not apply if you are a native indian for some reason. Is even more strange if we think that indians comprised once the big majority of people living in that territory.
This shiny right does not apply also if you belong in the majority comprised by non-nationalist people living in Cataluña. Is strange that people so democratic and pacific didn't noticed that other people has rights also.
Any criminal could just "vote" that what they did is legal. How would that work?
Sure, form opinions, ask for change, make it better if you and others see fit. You don't even have to follow he law. You just have to understand that if you break it you get punished. So as long as the law is there and you break it you are a criminal whether you believe in it or not.
What you said is exactly the kind of excuse any criminal would use: "I'm not guilty because I don't believe in that law". Which seems to match perfectly with the reasoning used in the dozens of comment you posted about this, alongside some bad examples and analogies that attempt to support it.
There are other kinds of contracts(marriage is a contract), where one of the partners can't just walk away from it with its share of the assets.
> There's people demanding a referendum (as seen in Scotland) you just put them in jail, problem solved.
It only seems a good example because it didn't pass. I bet it would be a worse-than-Brexit one if it had. The reality is that a country(a modern state) is built over a thousand of trade-offs that can't be just decided in a referendum.
I wish it would be that easy. I'm pretty tired of this mess.
Article 1.2 - Spanish Constitution: 'National sovereignty is vested in the Spanish people, from whom emanate the powers of the State.'
http://www.congreso.es/constitucion/ficheros/c78/cons_ingl.p...
In my opinion there are huge stresses in Spain that will open the can of worms that is redefining the Constitution during the next decades. Republicanism, decentralization, chunks of the constitution that nobody really puts in practice, etc. That wont happen in 2 days. But it can happen.
They were. However, they were all acquitted of that charge (called 'rebellion' in Spain).
Also do you think a 9-year prison sentence is fair for something like this?
And how do you expect Catalans to react to something like this? Fall back in resentment towards the Spanish government, or turn to violence against the Spanish government?
Maybe in theory. But looking at American civil war, Russian war in Chechenia, and others, in practice it certainly isn't so.
I mean... Not in practice.
Just ask the US or Russian states.
So it goes.
The USSR recognized the independence of those Baltic states (after military control of the situation failed) on 6 September 1991 and disappeared a few weeks later. Not the best example of orderly and and amicable secession, I think.
By winning a war... any state can secede from any country if it's able to win a war against it.
These decisions smell like they might end up before the Court as well. If found in violation, for sake of consistency at least, personally I think the EU Commission should take a serious look whether this should elicit a rule of law review akin to that applied to Poland and Hungary. (Note: I'm not saying this is necessarily as serious.)
Sight. And there they go again... with their obvious lies and stupid statements that don't resist two minutes of research.
And who are "they"? I'm no one particularly invested in this hassle.
The more interesting and relevant question is whether it is right or wrong. The answer to that question is not automatically the same as lawful/unlawful. Even in a democracy.
There is a huge political context around this trial, and I believe that the fact that my parent post was arguing that we should discuss about morality, not just legality, is a way to introduce this context into the evaluation of the trial to assess - and condemn - the result. I think this is mis characterizing the quality of the trial itself. Plenty of people are decrying the trial result because they want independence, which to me is intellectually dishonest. I was thus arguing that the trial itself was right, responding to a direct ask to consider right vs wrong.
>Trying to secede in a country where secession is illegal, is... you know... a crime.
This tone is baffling to me. I don't think anybody is surprised that countries dislike secession.
>Also, please downvote me. Actual statement of facts aren't welcomed here.
I don't claim to speak for "here", but, personally, this pettiness at the end of your comment is what I'd like most to be absent from HN.
Not at all, and failing to do so can be itself a crime.
https://law.jrank.org/pages/1870/Prosecution-Prosecutorial-D...
“The legality principle commands that every case in which there is enough evidence and in which no legal hindrances prohibit prosecution has to be brought to court. Adherence to the legality principle in the procedural sense means that the prosecution service cannot exercise any discretion over the prosecutorial decision. Its role is limited to the legal assessment of the sufficiency of the evidence against the suspect. Other considerations – what are known as public interest factors in opportunity systems – are not considered as factors that prosecutors are allowed to deploy in their decisions. Rather, the public interest is regarded as a consideration for the court which might be reflected in the verdict or the penalty imposed.”
http://www.law.gov.cy/law/lawoffice.nsf/0/A5FCDD28D5A9112CC2...
Ironically, you are patently wrong.
As the other poster mentions, mandatory prosecution exists in many parts of the world, and Spain is indeed one of these places.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2... is the clearest English-language reference I can find. Specifically:
> The Member States’ criminal systems are divided on the issue of mandatory or discretionary prosecution. The discretionary principle is applied in Belgium, France, Denmark, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. In Germany, Austria, Spain, Finland, Sweden, Greece, Italy and Portugal the mandatory prosecution principle applies.
> The mandatory prosecution principle is that the prosecution authorities must act – even if no complaint has been lodged – where they suspect that an offence has been committed.
Prosecuting this is not optional.
That's not to say the government could not have applied pressure somehow if they wished of course (though in theory that's strongly discouraged), or even attempted to change the law entirely. Doing so publicly in any way though would pretty seriously harm their election changes on a national level (election is coming on November 11th).
I'm from the US and I find the notion of mandatory prosecution nonsensical. There is a limit to the workload a prosecutor can handle and prioritizing crimes is just one way to make sure more serious crimes get the manpower needed to prosecute.
But thank you for pointing out that, also, the laws can always be changed which ultimately is political.
“The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.” ― Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book
My parents and other family members that grew under Franco warned everyone that this is how the Spain would react, so again, not that we didn't know.
And they did it anyway.
The trial was highly questionable, starting on how the judge was appointed (breaking default procedure), continuing with the lack of memory of all Spanish governmental officials, and ending with not letting the defenses show videos that directly contradicted the sworn deposition of armed forces. This will all be revisited in the European Tribunal for Human Rights, of course, and Spain will get a slap in the hand and Europe will move on.
Technically speaking, as you say, they could have been charged with disobedience, as there was no violence, but you would rather have a death sentence for treason, I see...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No one is arguing whether what they are doing is legal or not, we are arguing whether it's right or wrong.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/861001/Catalan-referend...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/10/12/spain-police-used-excess...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/10/catalan-vote-claims-s...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-41463955/cataloni...
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4586709/catalonia-won-right-in...
You are lying.
The trial is subject to European courts and even if they dont appeal (which they will most probably do), this ensures that they are not abandoned to the purportedly fascist judges. So at the end they will be overseen by the EU.
By the way, Spain is one of the EU countries with the least unfavorable rulings by both the EU Justice Court and the European Court of Human Rights so I think that speak volumes of the fascist remains of our justices.
By the way the whole trial is available for anyone to watch in youtube, and judge Marchena’s job conducting the trial is widely understood to have been impeccable.
2 or 3 million citizens were completely free to do what they wanted that Sunday. No one was detained, fined, or even identified, if they did not do something in the tune of burning a police car.
Where is the fascism?
It's the part where they jail people for "sedition" instead of misuse of funds. One of these is absolutely defensible while the other simply isn't.
Edit: I think you meant to ask this in another thread, so I link it for other reader’s sake: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21247767
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBUJNbLa4ko
Freedom of association?
"The right of a people to self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law (commonly regarded as a jus cogens rule), binding, as such, on the United Nations as authoritative interpretation of the Charter's norms.[1][2] It states that people, based on respect for the principle of equal rights and fair equality of opportunity, have the right to freely choose their sovereignty and international political status with no interference."
I am not an international lawyer myself but seeming "the right of a people to self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law". If this is incorrect a people do have rights. In fact this is a cardinal principle in modern international law.
That said, and again, these are individual rights. You can't condemn Rwanda for the crimes committed by their leaders: these leaders are put on trial.
It occurs to me that the US has sanctioned Iran and other countries (not an expert) in the past/present (again, not an expert). But that isn't international law: those are unilateral decisions made by the US government.
I can see both things occurring, but not intertwined. Could you please expand on what you understand by "people do have rights"?
Personal international law is basically a post-WWII invention,and having regularized international methods of enforcing such law started with the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court quite recently.
International law operating at the level of nations has existed longer, and while ad hoc national acts are still the dominant method of compelling compliance, has had a permanent international venue for resolving cases much longer than international law addressing individual responsibility. So, yes, as well as (and longer than) we’ve been able to hold individuals accountable for violations of international law, we can also hold whole nations responsible.
Depends. If you talk about rights as given by some law, then the law subjects are the ones who bear rights. In some cases the law subjects are individuals, in other cases (international law) these are explicitly not individuals.
Nations do not have "rights to vote", for instance: it all comes down to the individuals that make up those nations.
It's really hard for me to understand how groups of people would have rights, if someone could elaborate on that, that would be much appreciated.
Nations do have the right to vote, just look at the UN General Assembly (well, not counting Taiwan or the Sahrawis).
Regarding rights of individuals: If country A commits a violation of international law, and an individual B who is national of country C is affected by that, then B cannot sue A directly. Instead, C must bring the case against A before an appropriate court like the ICJ. This happened e.g. in the LaGrand case[1] between Germany and the US.
On the other hand, if A finds that C owes it money, and C doesn't pay, then any assets of B that happen to be under the jurisdiction of A can be confiscated to pay for the debt. This happened e.g. in the Icesave dispute[2] between Iceland and the UK.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaGrand_case
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icesave_dispute
'In international law, the right of self-determination that became recognized in the 1960s was interpreted as the right of all colonial territories to become independent or to adopt any other status they freely chose. Ethnic or other distinct groups within colonies did not have a right to separate themselves from the "people" of the territory as a whole.'
https://pesd.princeton.edu/?q=node/254
"Other definitions offered are "peoples" being self-evident (from ethnicity, language, history, etc.), or defined by "ties of mutual affection or sentiment", i.e. "loyalty", or by mutual obligations among peoples.[40] Or the definition may be simply that a people is a group of individuals who unanimously choose a separate state"
* People who simply identified as Catalan and wanted to have their own language and culture as a separate political and social unit
* People who were wealthy and had assets to protect from real or perceived looming economic correction in Spain
* People who formerly opposed secession, but were pissed to live in a country with high-profile political prisoners.
It was hard to form a solid takeaway from all this; I'd need many more months to start to really understand the political dynamics at play.
One thing about which I feel strong and certain, though, is this:
The fact that something is a crime according to the entity claiming jurisdiction over a given landmass makes it neither right nor inevitable that people engaging in that thing.
The right to dissolve bonds that arbitrarily obligate people to the whims of a state to which they don't consent is a real and enduring right.
Whether or not the movement is righteous, it's not OK to jail people for peacefully (even if disruptively) trying to separate.
For example the huge Catalan cannabis industry has been stuck in a legal limbo largely thanks to Madrid failing to legislate and Spanish courts blocking Catalans from doing so.
And in response to some of the commenters in this thread: of course an independence movement is going to be violent, especially when the state is trying to oppress it. The independence movements in the US, NI, and India were violent too, not because they were wrong but mostly because of mixed public opinion and an oppressive state.
Perhaps if we legally recognised the right to secession and offered citizens a democratic route to secession then violence wouldn't be necessary. Secession movements are going to happen regardless of their legal status.
Can I just ignore the rules of the country I live in on the sole basis of "a group of people sharing an identity" being people that are me?
The argument is worth having, because trying to secede part of a country unilaterally by "legal" means gets down to this absurdities.
One question that someone who wants to create a new country out of another, to put it that way, must ask should be "what can I give in return?"
If this is going to become a negotation, hopefully, then both parties must understand that there has to be compromises, and have to find common ground. Not just "this is my right because I say so", nor "this can't be because I say so".
Platitudes on liberty and justice and words that essential mean nothing lead us nowhere.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_d%27Aran
In fact, mistrust that people can decide things for themselves and that localism leads to the best outcome for them is the hallmark of centralism and bureaucrats. Things we don't need more of.
The issue isn't simple and I'm positive that this has nothing to do with "human rights" or "democracy" or else. It's much, much more complex than that.
People are more peaceful as neighbors than flat mates.
At the end of the day no matter how many people it is you are still taking away resources from the state (land, tax revenue, etc.) and creating issues with political consequences, border control, and all sorts of things.
How many people does it take to make such actions "acceptable"?
Further, allowing groups of people to just break away from the state and create their own systems, creates a threat to the state from all non-indigenous populations.
Why allow any immigration if newcomers are just going to be able to take your resources and land whenever they feel like it?
I agree that in a perfect world none of this would matter, but currently I don't see a scenario where any state would allow this, regardless of the number of people involved.
The point that I am making is that regardless of my personal feelings, I don't see any state giving up sovereignty in exchange for nothing.
I've generally either agreed with or appreciated your points in this thread, but this one triggered a reflex in me which has been honed by Brexit.
If we're talking about what a population of people want, we should qualify it with a reference to which poll we are citing. Otherwise it sounds far too agenda-y.
Because it underlines the fallacy of appealing to an alleged right to cecede.
> Its not made in good faith and obviously nobody is discussing one-person states.
Strawman, and one that's based on a disingenuous premise. It's quite clear that the argument is on whether to draw the line of when a minority has your so called right to cecede. You already admit that your so called right to cecede is absurd and ridiculous if only one person wants out. How about two? Do you believe a couple has the right to cecede? How about two dozen persons? Two hundred? Do you believe a couple of appartment blocks have the right to cecede? Or is the whole idea and concept entirely absurd, and only pointed out as a self-serving tautology?
- a different language? - a well defined culture? - a political composition which differs greatly to that the rest of the country? (check the representation of the PP and PSOE)
If you are interested in discussing the reality of the Spanish situation, it is pretty clear where this right of seccesion might want to get exercised (Basque Country, Galicia...) and for sound, historical reasons.
We clearly don't.
I was just listing regions that might have historical reasons and even parties with strong independent ideals, versus a group of friends wanting to separate from Spain for the sake of the argument.
It really isn't, as it purposely excludes portions of the electorate that don't support the idea.
I think you mean 'secession'. Anyway, what would be the minimum number of people to have the right for it? A region? A city? A 'barrio'? A family? A group of friends?
> Anyway, what would be the minimum number of people to have the right for it? A region? A city? A 'barrio'? A family? A group of friends?
If you're asking my personal opinion I think there would need to be a population of at least a few hundred thousand in favour of succession. I guess it would depend on how many people are required to run a functional state.
Perhaps there would be middle grounds where smaller groups can be granted some level of independence. Although that might naturally arise from states wishing to retain some level of control over a discontent population seeking independence. I know many believe devolution is the answer to Scottish independence in the UK.
Pro independent movements are quite against your first paragraph, according to discussions regarding either vall d’Aran or Tabarnia (two sub-catalonia independence movements, one based in history/culture, the other one in both jest (a la pastafarism) and anti-independence opinions.
* 4 are sentenced for sedition and embezzlement
* 5 for sedition
* 3 for disobedience
Their actions have been judged under the laws of a democratic state but of course Secessionist propaganda calls it 'Fascism'.
0 people for “their ideas”
0 people for “peaceful demonstration”
Etc. Please read everything about this issue with a grain of salt in both sides, it is heavily politicized to the point of reality being sidetracked. Even the prime minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, showed today grave misinformation on the ruling through a tweet.
There are plenty of examples where people have been pardoned in Spain for more ethically questionable reasons [1]. This, in contrast, is a clear case where it should be resolved politically, not through the legal system.
[1] https://civio.es/el-indultometro/2013/05/06/saenz/
Sounds like they are correct. It's absolutely shocking to see an European country jailing people for the "crime" of sedition.
Misuse of funds by itself would be much harder to argue against.
Under a state they voted against is a pretty important point.
Under a state they weren't even allowed to vote against.
Under a state they were actively trying to separate from.
Summary: they deny the claims of violence, reject the preventive prison (~2 years for those being condemned to prison today) and denounce the lack of presumption of innocence and an impartial tribunal (119 to 124 and 132 and 133 if you want a quick look).
Violence by spanish police during the "independence referendum" [ https://spanishpolice.github.io (a few hundred videos) ]. Violence by catalan people against spanish police on the same day: [ https://youtu.be/8ak9224HG_E (guy throwing a chair to a police entering a school) ], [ https://youtu.be/DyE0DtVd4Q8 (various people throwing portable fences to the police) ]
But the most blatant case if that of Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sánchez. They are civilian leaders, not political authorities. They presided Òmnium Cultural (cultural association) and ANC (independentist association) respectively. Today condemned to 9 years each. For context, right before the "independence referendum" there were some searches to investigate the referendum and the people involved. One of them happened in the building of the regional ministry of economy (September 20th, 2017). There, a spontaneous rally started. A few hours later, Òmnium Cultural, even though they weren't the ones to start the rally, filled the documents to formally communicate it to the city hall. Some will say they were trying to obstaculize the judicial operation, and others that they were trying to keep the spontaneous rally under control. Well, one can take a look at the images:
- Police car destroyed, one the most famous images when trying to show the violence of the independentists: [ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DKPUVBoW0AAa4aw?format=jpg ]. Police left the car parked there, with long guns still inside. Many demonstrators, reporters and photographers climbed on top of the car during the day. At least one of the windows was broken by one of the members of the police at the end of the day, as he himself admitted during the trial.
- Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sánchez climbed on top of the police car at the end of the day too in order to try to dissolve the rally (they also spoke for a couple minutes before this, with the usual "thanks for coming, we will continue rallying tomorrow, we will vote, don't be afraid, bla bla"): [ https://youtu.be/23XrRpfMaw8 ]. They literally say: "as much as possible and in a peaceful way, let's dissolve the demonstration for today". In the trial, Lluís Llach, a famous Catalan singer (temporarily involved in politics at that point), said that he was there and that they initially tried to dissolve the rally from a stage that the association set up on another point on the street, but he eventually suggested that people didn't hear them from that point (as the stage was intentionally at a certain distance from the building [they played some music during the day to distend the mood]), and that they should climb to the police car to speak fr...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_da...
In the former Yugoslavia I have no direct knowledge of anyone's opinions on the matter, but I am led to believe that a majority of several of the new countries was solidly in favor of splitting up.
Some ethnic group were allowed to have their right to decide in which country they want to live, some never got that right. In the end that injustice is what led to the whole bloody conflict.
Since laws are coercive, whoever has the power (both legal and police) can jail secession leaders.
Roughly 60% to 70% say "No". So, it's unlikely to happen any time soon.
I believe at the end of 2015, a few months before the Brexit referendum, about 70% of people were indicating they'd vote remain in polls. That's the only reason Cameron and the rest of the Remain-supporting political class allowed a referendum at all: they were sure they were going to win.
Turns out that intense discussion, debate and political campaigning can change voter's minds. That's the point of it in fact. Who knew?
With the world being unipolar for the last 30 years and that sole superpower being seemingly incapable of winning wars for the last 20, many minority groups are thinking that's a bad bargain and they'd rather trade security for self-determination.
Is it not obvious, at this point, that "winning" the wars are not the goal? That the wars are used as pretense for endless military presence to serve geopolitical goals?
I recall in a debate with Allard Lowenstein back in those days, he said “Jerry, you want to win this and get out. I just want to get out. But your friends there “—indicating the Secretary of Defense —“want to lose it and stay in.” I admit to being silenced. I didn’t have the minutes to give a lecture on how to win a war of attrition when it is part of a strategy of containment, and I am not sure I understood the situation that well in 1968 anyway.
In the WW2-era, the stakes were literal annihilation: a number of minority groups were specifically targeted for extermination by the belligerent powers, and many others were occupied under threat of extermination. Today, the stakes are that you face random drone strikes and your weddings get blown up. But there's nothing you can do about this: instead of "if you accept our rule, we'll let you live", it's "we're not interested in ruling you, die anyway". When wars are fought to make a point rather than to win, and that point has nothing to do with you, they're not going to change your behavior. So great powers and separatist/extremist groups exist in symbiosis, with each constructing and reinforcing the other in the absence of an external reason for their existence.
This theory reminds me of slatestarcodex’s “The Toxoplasma of Rage,” specifically section V. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
Australian aborigins or Navajo indians could say that they feel oppressed, and they have totally original cultures and languages.
This people instead are far, really far from being oppressed and show a severe case of being chronically spoiled.
They are richer than most spaniards, enjoy the best infrastructures and an excelent health care system (paid with taxes of all spaniards), have more job opportunities than many, and tailor-made markets and industries located there for their profit
They live in a fantasy world where you can just decide to ignore the law when and as you will, or close an airport or train station (because you are a "freedom figther" aren't you?), and say later that you just were joking and is unfair.
P.S. your comment very nicely applies to the US.
The truth is that youngsters in Catalonia eat the same hamburgers, drink the same german beer, wear the same Nike shirts and pasta glasses, play the same world of warcraft, drive the same brands of cars and bikes, enjoy the same pop, rock, rap and flamenco (inherited from the Andalusian inmigrants), read the same Harry Potter books, watch the same spiderman's hollywood films, use the same smartphones and operative systems, celebrate Halloween (probably dressed as Franco, or maybe Lady Gaga), study the same english, science and maths, culture the same peruvian potatoes and tomatoes, farm the same cows, sheep and chicken, and share the same religion, mythology and culture, the same... as any other occidental people.
Their grandpas are from Andalucia, Murcia, Castilla and Asturias more often that they would prefer to admit.
They eat onions entire and make castles in the air with people that climb over other people. Two nice apportations to the planet diversity, nobody denies that.
They dream that everybody, except they, are Franco (forty years after Franco death) and they behead the dragon with a flamiger sword in from of a bunch of grateful ladies. hurrah
And they have TWO languages, not one. Spanish, with 600 millions of native speakers that everybody understands and uses (even if they choose to hide this fact and feel ashamed for it), and a different language that uses the same latin alphabet (A,B,C... we are not talking of the invention of Lord of the Ring's runes here) borrows a lot from french, spanish and maybe italian; and is used as political weapon all the time.
They aren't the only european with two languages (or the only spaniards that suffered with Franco) and they do exactly the same things as any other european in the 99% of their journey.
If we talk about their culture, maybe they should be nationalised US citizens directly, as millions of other people in the planet.
A lot of people want self determination, and they haven't exactly made much progress recently.
(Also, ask the Scots how they feel about the UK and especially brexit right now)
I said that they're trading security for self-determination, not that they get security and self-determination. The endgame is a multipolar world with lots of wars, not peaceful coexistence.
edit to paste the relevant guidelines:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
iirc the catalan separatist made some interesting use of technology when they protested in 2017 so that is relevant.
this article is about how they are now sentenced. i.e. TV news
Please don’t even start.
E: Yeah, I get that I’m going to be downvoted as this political cause is not as popular as HK, but this is regular HN content.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
When the protests started hitting the airport, police started asking for boarding passes so that only passengers could enter.
Then, the protesters set up a Telegram group to share actual boarding passes from today's flights. Dozens of them were posted to the group.
Apparently the ruse worked, although from what I've heard, not for long. The police started matching the passes with IDs.
Seems like a bad time for Madrid to move like this, HK protests have been in the news for months and will probably inspire many.
E: Can’t reply below because of ratelimit, but I specifically mean tactics here. It’s no coincidence everyone immediately rushed to the airport.
If we look at when an actual movement existed for Catalan Indepdendence, it was formed 1922 (Estat Català). Granted Hong-Kong wasn't really transfered until 1997, it seems unlikely Hong-Kongers have fought for independence for longer than Catalonia.
But in the end, there are no winners or losers here, only freedom fighters.
Before we make any assumptions, please consider that I'm asking this truly from an intention of learning, and not trying to bait any flames, or establishing my position. I've just never had the opportunity to talk to someone on "the other side".
As an example, I have had some discussions with independence supporters where they have denied me, categorically and multiple times, that at the beginning of the mediatization of the conflict, one of the most important arguments and that was debated with intensity in the television and internet gatherings was that Catalonia contributed much more money than it received, and that such a thing was unfair.
So many people simply want to become independent, regardless of the arguments against and in favour, and of any cost-benefit analysis.
Think how you would feel if Spain was part of Portugal, France, Morocco, or Germany, Spanish language was a minority language in Spain, and you would have spent significant amount of time reading books or learning about the war or some other event that had changed the flow of history and led your country to not exist on the map.
Disclaimer: I am not from Catalonia, but from a country that barely got organized in time to be a separate state, and i am happy about that, as smaller more local governments work better, than the very centralized and huge government we would have now if our separatists did not manage to organize in time.
1) Freeing the politicians. There's plenty of examples of politicians interfering in judicial decisions [1]. Currently, 45% of the Catalan electorate have their elected politicians in jail.
2) Discuss with the central government the best way to modify the constitution to allow a mechanism for people to vote for what they want.
I wouldn't consider myself an independentist, but being surrounded by people that are, I've come to understand that the biggest issue is whether they have the right to even have a vote on how they want to govern themselves.
As for the arguments for the independence of Catalonia, as other people mentioned here, there are several and as varied as people are in Catalonia. The first step though is to be able to even have this discussion in the form of a referendum, even if the final result is staying in Spain.
[1] https://civio.es/el-indultometro/
I'm still not a big fan of the independence movement, but it's hard to disagree with them given the actions Madrid is taking. Most foreigners I've talked to in Catalonia seem to agree with me. They don't give a fuck about the independence movement, they're simply mad about how poorly Madrid has been handling this.
Even today, most big streets in Barcelona have been shut by the police. You drive past and you see empty stretches of road full of police cars for no reason, the whole city is paralyzed.
E: lol, downvoted for a honest answer to someone who wanted to learn. It's exactly this kind of responses by Spaniards creating the strife.
> Before we make any assumptions, please consider that I'm asking this truly from an intention of learning, and not trying to bait any flames, or establishing my position. I've just never had the opportunity to talk to someone on "the other side".
Thank you for asking this so politely! I appreciate it very much. Really, thanks! It is very rare that Spaniards take this attitude, and it feels like a breath of fresh air.
Regarding your question, not all independence supporters share the same reasons. I think my particular reasons are not very representative, so do not take what I say as too relevant in the grand scheme of things. But I can only speak for myself.
My only reason for wanting a catalan state, separate from spain, is concern for the short-term existence of my language. I could not care less about the economic situation.
I have witnessed since my youth in the eighties the slow decline of catalan usage, and its replacement by spanish. I realize that this is not a very important concern; the world has far worse problems, but it is still a legitimate concern that merits political attention. I am anti-nationalist and internationalist, but this does not mean that all languages on Earth must disappear except one, and all cultures must be merged into a single one.
Most of my life I have not been pro-independence. I identified proudly as a catalan-speaking spaniard, and even had t-shirts with the spanish flag as I traveled around Europe. It was in 2003, on a summer travel in Portugal with people from Spain (spanish speakers), that I realized that they did not see the catalan culture as a legitimate part of the culture of their own country. Somehow, the catalan language was "less spanish" than the spanish language. I found this idea illogical, and the fact that they seriously espoused it was deeply outraging. Then they pointed me to the spanish constitution, that states clearly in its infamous Article 3, that spanish language is the preferred language in front of the other, lesser, local languages. This was clearly contrary to my view on how things should be, but it was just a law that could be changed if most people agreed, and it seemed logical than most people would.
I did not become separatist at this point. Instead, I embarked in a sort of personal crusade trying to convince all spanish people that I knew that they should accept the possibility of the catalan language being the sole official language in the catalan countries, lest it would disappear and they would lose an important part of the culture of their country. To no avail: the fact that a person from Valladolid who moved to Girona had to learn the local language was so foreign to all castilians that it left me in sad despair.
But I did not become separatist at this point. Instead, I was moved by the enthusiasm around a new proposal for a local law ("estatut de Catalunya 2006"), that had the support of the spanish socialist party (then the main party in the state, thanks in part to its overwhelming support by catalans and andalusians), and also the support of all the parties in the catalan parliament except the spanish conservative party, which had a minor presence there. This new local law established the equality of the rights for the speakers of both languages in the territory of Catalonia. I did not agree with the form (both languages were to become equally official, and citizens had the right to communicate with the spanish administration in either language), because I really preferred a single official language, but still, it was a reasonable compromise. Then there was a referendum in Catalonia, under the auspices and support of the spanish state, and the new "estatut" was approved by an overwhelming majority. Once it was approved, the spanish par...
What about spanish-speaking people? Are they not also catalans? Is “your country” not theirs?
Paraphrasing what you said, somehow, the spanish language is "less catalan" than the catalan language. I find this idea illogical, and the fact that you seriously espouse it is deeply outraging.
No, they aren't. They are spanish.
As Fernando Pessoa said: my homeland is my language.
Will they be expelled from your country or will they have a chance to stay as foreigners in their own land?
Of course not. Why do you say that?
They will only have to respect the local law; probably nothing will change for them in practice, unless they want to work in a public service and they cannot already speak catalan.
Unless they cannot stand to live in a place where spanish is not official. In that case, well, they will easily find twenty countries with five hundred million spanish-speakers where they will feel truly at home. Problem is, as a catalan I have nowhere else to go.
http://www.catalannews.com/society-science/item/supreme-cour...
Of course it isn't. The republic will be able to protect it!
I would also not like for the Catalan language to dissapear, but the above statement is false. AFAIK the only change in that regard was removing the preference of catalan over spanish, making them equal (https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2006-13087&b=8&tn...). Right now both languages are equally legal and valid for both day-to-day life and official documents. As the law states you have the right to use any of them and the right and duty to learn both.
What Catalunha "loses" by being part of Spain (not to mention what it gains) is very different from what HK gains and loses.
Sure, CAT have the right to protest for any case they want, but at a certain point there are laws and states (and last I checked public opinion on secession on CAT was not big on the separatists side)
It is highly questionable whether the independence movement has even 50 percent support. Indications are that the support hovers around 40-something percent. It was highest in 2013, where it reached 55 percent. Please notice that this is not close to the super majority which is normally required for constitutional changes in most democracies.
The way Catalan folk showed what they think on this subject, was by voting. That's pretty fundamental.
It seems that only a slice from the non-supporters from the left showed up to vote.
Next time, I humbly suggest everyone vote, and have their voice heard.
Given that the so called decision was ripe with voting fraud (I mean, separatists storing voting ballots at home?) then the process actually has nothing to do with deciding and everything to do with a Putin-istic imposition of a policy hidden with a thin façade of an election.
You adbicate nothing by refusing to participate in a illegal vote.
You can't talk about democratic legitimatecy when only 40% voted.
I know this is an emotional issue. But the rule of law is purported to be enshrined in the Spanish Constitution.
No. "The Constitution has been amended twice. The first time, Article 13.2, Title I was altered to extend to citizens of the European Union the right to active and passive suffrage (both voting rights and eligibility as candidates) in local elections. The second time, in August/September 2011, a balanced budget amendment and debt brake was added to Article 135."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Spain
Additionally, it is not helpful to "suggest" that a majority of a region take part in illegal activity. It would seem to me that not every election is democratic; this reductive argument that elections, write large, equal democracy does not help find a solution
Take a look at the support for independence: it's not a majority opinion and it's getting smaller:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_independence_movement#...
If there was a fair and legal vote, we'd see some actual numbers that can be trusted.
Declaring independence, more times than not, is an illegal act in someone's eyes.
There are a few cases where the independence referendum was legal and recognized by whoever they were trying to get independence from. Algergia, Guinea, Samoa, whole bunch of ex Soviet Union countries. There are future referendums planned that are recognized as well.
So it's not impossible. It just won't work with the current Spanish Government (a referendum. Indepedence, maybe)
The government of spain should be condemned the same way other countries that have political prisoners are condemned.
What you can't do is misuse public funds and census data to organize an illegal election.
You want to secede? No problem, but you must abide by the existing laws, or face the consequences.
In practice, the first thing they needed to do was ammend the Constitution, which, like in most democracies, requires a supermajority in the parliament and the senate. It's not that hard, there was an ammend a few years ago.
Application of unreasonable punishment simply will increase the number of people supporting secession, so allowing referendum (possibly requiring 3/4 majority in catalonia alone) would have done much less damage to Spain, than what have happened instead.
Incidentally, much like it happened with Brexit, the "leave" campaign makes all sorts of promises that it could never deliver: catalonians would keep their Spanish passports, they would continue to receive Spanish pensions, they would automatically remain part of the EU and NATO, they would not be burdened with any of the existing public debt (bond obligations), etc.
Misled with all these transparent lies, around 40% of those called to vote actually show up, while the rest of the people listen to the advice of the central government urging them not to vote and take part in that farce. Unsurprisingly, most of the people who voted were hardcore leavers.
I don't like how the Spanish central governments have handled the situation. But it's also true that there's been an outstanding marketing campaign online to paint a minority of catalonians as "the true will of the Catalonian people" and it's tiresome to hear foreigners voice strong opinions about something they understand so superficially.
Lots of Spaniards like myself are tired of the situation. Want to secede? Fine. Let's follow the law, ammend whatever needs to be ammended, have some basic plan for fundamental questions like membership to the EU, pensiond, debt obligations, etc. The, with an understanding of what is on the table, vote for it. Just like Brexit should have been done.
Otherwise, it's pretty obvious people voting for Cs and PP will never answer "Yes" and that's already way more than 20%
For example, Julian Assange and Yoko Ono were paid to write some twits pro independence agenda.
(Just moving my comment from the dupe thread)
In a world where modern democracies everywhere are coming under increasing stress because state authorities are increasingly breaking the long-held covenants of trust that bind a state and its citizenry, these outrageous sentences only make a further mockery out of the law. Ultimately, cool heads soon need to resolve this stand-of or inevitably it will lead to further civil disobedience and possibly worse. And one must never forget that the last time this happened in 1936-'39 many hundreds of thousands died over the issue.
In the modern Europe of today, borne out of the horrific chaos of WWII (and its prelude the Spanish Civil War), there should be no place where people should be subject to such authoritarian rule as they have been subjected to here.
It's now time for Europe to pressure Spain to finally give the people of Catalonia both their autonomy and freedom. Catalonia has been in Spain's chains far long enough.
There has been a lot of mistakes on how to handle this situation but Catalan leaders made a calculated decision and forced the situation. You can express any idea, demonstrate, make your own party, but you it's not reasonable to expect that, if you not only break the law, but try to seize a large portion of a country and its resources, and just ignore the will of about half of the population in that very region, the spanish state does nothing.
And I'm not even mentioning a shitload of things that are also going on in this issue that makes it way more complicated, typical in this multi-layered spanish power plays.
It's wrong to say that Catalonia is basically a US state, since US is a federation while Spain is a unitary state. This means the central government can overrule whatever the communities decide on. They don't have the same authority over ruling, as the central power has in the case of Spain.
Then I suppose one of the bigger issues remain in answering "Is Catalonia autonomous enough?" and "Who decides how autonomous Catalonia should be?"
I generally agree you in both practice and principle and in a democracy democratic processes say what laws or rules apply. And this is how things normally work in stable democracies. The trouble is that these days democracies are coming under considerable and increasing strain from various competing interests whose worldviews are essentially irreconcilable. Whilst this has always been so to some extent, in the past a 'reasonable' government could evaluate competing interests then come up with effective and acceptable laws based on utilitarian principles. Nowadays that's far from easy—and it's becoming increasingly so for many reasons that are too complex to detail here expect to say that attitudes and norms within societies have changed, and together with improved communications, internationalism and changes over the past 40 or so years in the way capitalism plays a role in society have had much to do with it.
At the risk of oversimplifying these complex issues, here's a few examples. Let's say a government is under pressure by a majority of citizens to regulate the bad behavior of certain types corporations but the corporations strenuously fight the proposal on the grounds of loss of jobs, loss of profits, interference in the free market and violations of international trade agreements, etc. so a stalemate ensues and thus nothing or little is done. In a previous era, the issues about 'free markets' and 'violations of international trade agreements' would have played a much lesser role and back then corporations effectively had less influence on government policy, thus governments would have found it easier to regulate. These days, there are so many instances where governments have failed to regulate that the citizenry has a justifiable right to be annoyed and to assume the democratic process has failed it. [Incidentally, one such matter has again made it into today's HN, that's the huge price Big Pharma is charging for drugs—that government has failed to act for so long is symptomatic of the problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21250491]
Another is the rise of identity politics. Whatever one's views on this are it is hard to disagree with the fact that nowadays it is increasingly difficult to govern a country where its citizens hold so few views in common. Clearly, a society wherein a majority hold common views and interests makes governance easier but today this structure has broken down to the extent that governing for all is very difficult, especially so in a democracy. Once only four or five decades ago, those within a society were much more homogeneous in their views than they are today. Back then a majority of citizens held similar views as they were bound together by a common culture or race, or by religion and or by isolation from other societies any or all of which would have steered the society in certain directions. Today, the parallel between the governance of a democracy and the parable from Aesop's fable* The Man, The Boy, and The Donkey of 'try to please all and you will please none' is truer than ever. I would add that in this era where one's rights and sense of entitlement trump the Rousseauian notion of the General Will of the Citizenry then governments are damned if they do or they don't.
Quo vadis? We should look to history for examples of what happens when citizenries consider their governance has gone beyond the pale. All too often, we see that when a majority of citizens hold such high levels of mistr...
Catalonia can enact his own laws, and it does so. There's very little substance if you say "being freed from the chains of Spain". There isn't any massive difference in the understanding of the world between catalans and the rest of the peninsula. You could pimpoint some laws here and there, and some simbols, but it's pretty much it. There's no systemic repression of Catalans of any sorts because of speaking or being Catalan. I know that an independence supporter will disagree and is willing to paste thousands of links here, but IMO from the big picture there's no much substance. They are not loosing autonomy as you said, as it's been happening quite the opposite.
There's a lot of stuff happening daily and a lot of propaganda going on. The Catalan government is very good at this, and it's difficult to make foreigners understand how much effort they actually put on this. To give you a glimpse, yesterday they sent their supporters to occupy the Barcelona airport. Politicians are not stupid, and they know that place is guarded by national police and the military. Some time later, as it seemed such actions wouldn't yield any PR material, they've sent their own police. That's the videos foreigners have seen in their media. Obviously, the majority of them don't have to know that Catalans have their own police, and they were sent there coordinated by their own government, that it wasn't spontaneous. And most media won't clarify it.
Today, their explanation for internal consumption is that they had to send the Mossos d'esquadra (Catalan police) because they had to "protect the demonstrators from themselves", they were afraid to be accused fo sedition again and some other BS, that of course will be noise tomorrow.
I know there's enough speculation in the last two paragraphs, but I worked for them for some time, so I know how they think. And that's my take on it because, if it wasn't for that, it would be absurd to send your people somewhere and then beat em just because.
And this stuff is happening on a Weekly basis.
Now, you think the most pragmatic solution would be just accept "the fact" that Spain lost Catalonia, and that it has to become another country. Now, what happens with half the catalans that want to remain spanish? Do we just forget about them? What if they become violent? What would do the Catalan Government if they become their own country and half its population does the same they have been doing? What if they win elections and want to rejoin? (I forgot, that wouldn't be possible under the new catalan law, they wanted to make parties against secession illegal), are we going to split and join multiple times because of this?
I mean, there's a lot to put in a cost/benefit analysis and from my POV is unclear at best. There's no clear solution to avoid conflict even if we splitted to day and we had it in good terms. And I'm not even mentioning that the most probably economic outcome for Catalonia would be to suffer massively due to loosing it's status with the EU, not being anymore the preferred port for trading with Spain and basically loosing it's status as an asset for Spain.
It's natural for everyone to try to frame events in a local setting, but take in account that you are not just witnessing two ants fighting for a piece a bread, but organizations with a lot of power and resources, that actively try to shape your opinion on the issue.
As I see it, it's a huge problem and I agree that the Catalonian issue is a small and almost significant part of that.
I'd only add that I'm old enough to vividly remember the horrible bombing and killings in that part of the world and thus I've developed a long-held view that with the 'right' triggers that they could easily happen again.
Sorry for just pointing out one thing, but it was what you started with so I feel the need to correct it.
Yes, Catalonia can enact their own laws. But even if they do, Spain reserve the right to override them, with what they feel like. Catalans I've spoken to, have expressed this to be a pain point, especially when the relations to Madrid are poor.
Madrid can always regain control over Catalonia according to it's laws, and them having this ability, makes peoples drive to independence stronger.
Catalan (and other nationalists) are key to form governments on Spain, specially the last two or three legislatures, so this is highly debatable at best. Some laws that were not passed/revoked in the central parliament have been precisely because of the vote of such parties.
A party can be both in its autonomous and central parliament. And this has been the case for decades.
I know what independence supporters feel about, but there's no substance to an argument where Catalans are ignored or overruled from the central parliament because of any sort of authoritarian rule, because they are integral and important part of how power is distributed and managed in such institution.
"there's no substance to an argument where Catalans are ignored or overruled from the central parliament because of any sort of authoritarian rule" leads me to believe that you're not thinking the same way as me regarding understanding both sides.
Image if the EU Council could, at any time, invoke a article to take control over what the member states themselves should decide over. This is what Catalans feel right now is happening.
Any autonomy that Catalans currently enjoy, is devolved power from Madrid. Just having the possibility for Madrid to at any time suspend the autonomy of (what they see as) their own state, makes them uneasy, and we're seeing the result of that uneasiness coming to the surface more and more recently.
Such thing has happened, but it's not the current state of affairs. The central state took control of the Catalan institutions until elections were held, not past that.
And of course such thing didn't happen in a vacuum. Not to mention that this is a pretty standard procedure in most countries.
> leads me to believe that you're not thinking the same way as me regarding understanding both sides
I can understand why you think that. I have been following this issue for the last, maybe, ten years. I've worked for politicians in political marketing for a consultant company so I know how they think. I'm an "insider" to political propaganda if you like, so I'm not just sitting back watching events like am a neutral observer.
Thankfully I've moved to another totally different field, but it affected my ability to read the really deeply, I'd say.
The half didn't give their opinion, they didn't ignore it, in fact they tried to do everything they could to get their position even though Spain did everything they could to not let anyone give it.
Secretly mail everyone a wallet address which they can use to vote on the blockchain.
Without the threat of violence from the state, more people will vote.