Euro crisis fuels Spanish separatism

By David Gardner in London

Spain has entered a constitutional crisis. The decision of Catalonia’s nationalist government to call a snap election in November – which in practice will amount to a referendum on independence – has opened the way to Catalan secession. That decision, in turn, may give a lift to Basque separatists, now running neck and neck with mainstream nationalists in regional government elections due next month, after winning the largest number of Basque Country seats last year in local and general elections.

As a Spain trapped in the eurozone crisis tries to battle its way through a wrenching recession, it must now contemplate the real possibility that its plurinational state, which replaced the suffocatingly centralist Franco dictatorship with highly devolved regional government, may break up.

The eurozone crisis that has brought down governments across Europe’s periphery now threatens the survival of a nation-state. The north-south fractures inside the EU are starting to open up within member states.

When the Soviet Union and some of its buffer states broke up at the end of the cold war, EU leaders on the whole regarded this exercise of the democratic right to self-determination as a good thing. But the idea that separatism could seep into the settled structures of western Europe is wholly alien to them, notwithstanding frequent inter-regional tensions.
Such tensions are a regular feature of the tug-of-war in, for example, Italy and Belgium, between a more prosperous north and a relatively less wealthy south. In Spain, where for a combination of economic, historic and cultural reasons the industrial revolution first took root among Basques and Catalans – peoples with a deep sense of nationhood and linguistic identity – the “national question” is always alive.
The post-Franco transition to democracy resolved this by restoring ancient rights to what a constitutional neologism terms the “historic nationalities” – essentially the Basques and Catalans – but by disguising this with grants of self-rule to regions that had never sought autonomy.

The economic crisis has mercilessly exposed the financial incontinence of some of these baronial fiefs, such as Valencia, controlled by the ruling Partido Popular of Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s prime minister. Catalonia, amounting to one-fifth of Spain’s economic output, is also heavily in debt.

The mainstream nationalist Catalan government led by Artur Mas was elected to secure the same rights as the Basques, who collect their own taxes.
Mr Rajoy, whose centre-right PP seems to want to use the crisis to recentralise Spain, rejected this last week.

A majority of Catalans feels Madrid takes too much of local income to redistribute elsewhere. The clamour for independence has become mainstream. Sentiment turned when the constitutional court in Madrid – acting on a petition from Mr Rajoy’s PP – struck down democratically approved enhancements to Catalan home rule. This is not just about money. But austerity is politically toxic and intrinsically centrifugal.

Nor is this, as some observers argue, a textbook example of how EU integration dissolves national cohesion in less than homogeneous states. The most proximate cause of Spain’s identity politics is Franco’s ruthless attempt to expunge Basque and Catalan identity. EU membership, by contrast, spread wealth throughout all of Spain, albeit unevenly, for the first time in history – and devolution was part of the reason.

But that model appears to have run its course, and Mr Rajoy and Mr Mas have backed themselves into irreconcilable corners. Is there a way out?

Felipe González, former Socialist prime minister and emblematic (if tarnished) figure of the democratic transition, last week said the constitution needed to be recast into a more federalist mould. King Juan Carlos, whose image has also been diminished by controversy, last week recalled the spirit of that transition, tacitly invoking the national pacts that made democracy possible.
A feasible way forward would be to combine these ideas: a new all-party pact, including Basques and Catalans, to confront the economic emergency and reform the constitution along more federal lines. But federalism is about trying to spread prosperity and iron out regional inequity. It is not clear all actors in the present drama understand this.