What happens when democracy fails to deliver? What happens when people give up on democracy? What happens when a majority or militant minority decide that the constitutional rights of free speech, free elections, peaceful assembly and petition are inadequate and take to the streets to force democracy to submit to their demands? Our world may…
Yesterday’s election victory for Catalan separatists, including humiliating losses for the ruling center-right Partido Popular, denotes yet another setback for the grand project of European unification and a challenge for a continent divided between a strong north and a lagging south. The Catalan separatists won a thin majority in the regional parliament, leaving them precisely…
At the moment everyone is pitching in on the situation in Catalonia as the real story. Having held a referendum on independence, in defiance of the Spanish constitution, the Catalan regional parliament must have expected Madrid to defend that constitution by not recognising the result, re-imposing direct rule to prevent it being enacted and jailing…
Catalan independence is not worth dying for. The region is not suffering oppression nor is it colonized. The Catalan independence movement is being driven by nothing more than cultural nationalism and economic self-interest. It is the self-determination of fools. Yet, regardless, with the Catalan regional parliament in Barcelona declaring UDI (unilateral independence from Spain), and with the Spanish government…
Things are in unchartered waters, crisis conditions a long way from resolved. Both sides have polar opposite values. Pro-independence Catalans want their democratic rights upheld. Madrid wants them denied, forcefully if separatists resist. UK-based lecturer in politics and Spanish Caroline Gray accused pro-independence activists of living in a “parallel universe of the new republic…(t)he situation…unpredictable…
Following a secret ballot, MPs in the Catalan parliament declared independence from Spain, with the regional leader Carlos Puigdemont saying the people had completed “a long-desired step.” Lawmakers opposed to independence boycotted the vote. The assembly’s speaker announced that the motion was passed with 70 votes in favor, 10 against, and two blank ballots, according…
