Schedium

"A Nation, Catalan Countries! A Language, Catalan!" - Mural in Vilassar de Mar, El Maresme, Catalonia (by  1997  / Wikimedia Commons) "They have been beaten for trying to hold a referendum, their parliament has been dissolved and their leaders have either fled or been put in prison, but the Catalan independence supporters are not relenting," wrote  The Independent  on December 8 about  Catalan separatists . The Catalan independence movement has been portrayed by many international media outlets as a fight for freedom, while the intervention of the Spanish state to block the October 1st independence referendum is regarded as oppressive and undemocratic.  International media often offer a platform for Catalan separatists to explain their cause from their own perspective. For instance on December 3  Politico Europe  published an op-ed by Oriol Junqueras, the leader of the Republican Left of Catalonia (Esquerra Republicana de Cata...

They steal from us €60 million a day, independence=necessary"; pro-independence march in July 2010 (by  JuanmaRamos-Avui-El Punt  via Wikimedia Commons) Catalan separatism is not a coherent movement that unites the entire population of the region. Not only are Catalan voters split on the issue of independence, with about half of them supporting the preservation of autonomy within Spain. But the Catalan independence movement itself is deeply divided. On the one hand, secessionism is fuelled by a nationalist ideology that views the nation as a community with a distinct language, history and culture which requires an independent state to thrive. According to this view, people who are different cannot coexist within the same state. We have already discussed the contradictions of this concept of  self-determination  in a previous article. However, there is also another element to the independence movement that has not been often explored: a far-left ...