The
strongly-worded statement
on Catalunya by UK Foreign Minister Mark Field will inevitably disappoint independentistas, but in terms of the
element of surprise it’s roughly on a par with a declaration by the Pope that
he’s a Catholic. From the perspective of
the UK Government, the Spanish declaration of the indissoluble unity of the
territory and nation of Spain is an obvious truth, although of course that tiny little bit at the
bottom of the Iberian peninsular can never be considered part of the territory
of Spain. Territorial integrity has its
limits, after all.
No
doubt the UK government would argue that the apparent discrepancy here is
justified on the basis of the fact that every test of opinion in Gibraltar
reveals that the population wish to remain British and not submit to Spanish
rule, and they’d be right in that assertion.
It’s a little inconvenient, though, that they claim that the people of
Gibraltar have the democratic right to decide not to be part of Spain at the
same time as supporting the Spanish government’s assertion that the people of
Catalunya can never be allowed the same right.
Hypocrisy
and double-speak on this sort of issue are not, however, a problem for those
who rule states like the UK, for reasons which are largely historical. The larger member states of the EU – and I
think here of Italy, Germany and France, as well as Spain and the UK – take
their current form and occupy their current boundaries solely as the result of
centuries of conflict and conquest. The
whole history of European statehood is one of shifting lines on maps, of states
being born and then crushed out of existence, and of nations finding themselves
in different states at different times.
For all the talk of Europe being composed of nation-states, a precise
coincidence of national identity and state boundaries is very much the exception,
not the norm.
Not
wanting to go back to a situation where Europe is composed of a whole series of
warring states arguing over where to draw lines on maps is a natural reaction
to our common history (and it is our common history, whatever Theresa May might
believe), but the response of demanding that the lines and structures must
remain ossified at the point which they reached when the fighting stopped is a
response which pretends that nationality and identity are firm, settled and objective
realities. That flies in the face of the
human experience. Preventing violent
change is one thing, but preventing peaceful change ultimately makes the violent
sort more likely.
Those
larger states incorporating different national identities which were brought
together by war and conquest pretend that they are in fact the natural state of
affairs. Those who ended up victorious
in the process of aggregation of territory have long tried to meld together the
disparate peoples and identities under their control into one single new ‘nation’,
proving – if proof were ever needed – that the concept of what constitutes a ‘nation’
is itself highly flexible. So, the
nationalists running Spain claim that Spain is in fact one single nation, and
demand that all those living within its boundaries accept the nationality thus
bestowed upon them, and accept that any other identity which they might feel is
‘regional’ not national. In its
insistence on French as the only identity, France takes, if anything, an even
harder line on those Bretons, Basques, Catalans, etc. who find themselves within
its borders.
The
history of the UK demonstrates another important aspect of this, which is that
the creation of states doesn’t follow the existence of nations; it is rather
that the creation of nations follows the existence of states. The UK is defined as a nation state not
because the boundaries follow those of an existing nation, but because the ‘British’
nation was created to match the boundaries of the state. The same is true of Spain, France, Germany,
Italy etc. From the date of the incorporation
of Wales into England, the state has pushed the idea that differences should be
‘extirpated’, and that all should share a common identity.
But
here’s the sting: what history shows us is that even with a determined central
power, and centuries of time to exercise that power, eliminating alternative
identities is actually a very difficult thing to do. It can work, up to a point, when people
perceive a common interest – after all, the decline in the use of the Welsh
language wasn’t a result of the actions of ‘the English’ but of those of Welsh people
who bought into the idea that the future was ‘British’. However, even with that assistance and
complicity, it took centuries to get to the position where the language was
spoken only by a minority; and even without the language, the ‘Welsh’ retained
a sense of identity which was never entirely subsumed in Britishness. (Whether that sense of identity should be
given political expression in the structures of governance is another question
entirely; the point is simply that killing a sense of national identity is no
small task.)
The
Spanish position on Catalunya, naturally and inevitably supported by the UK
Government, is that if a Catalan nation ever existed it has subsequently been
subsumed into a bigger and better Spanish nation, and that the ‘rest of that
Spanish nation’ has an absolute right to over-rule the Catalans. It’s a position which seems to make what is
to most people the most obvious solution – a properly organised democratic
referendum in which both sides put their case and the people decide – a non-starter. But in the real world, there are only two ways
of holding all the territory of an existing state together – the first is by
consent and the second is by the exercise of force. That a state which exists in its current form
only because of the past use of force should see force as the natural means of
assuring its own continuity will come as no surprise, just as the support of
other states with a similar history is equally unsurprising.
Spain,
like the UK, is in a sense the prisoner of its own history, with Spanish
nationalists unable to see an alternative future based on co-operation rather
than domination. Part of the task of independentistas is to help the
centralist nationalists escape from a prison which is of their own making.
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