{"id":13652,"date":"2013-01-21T11:42:30","date_gmt":"2013-01-21T10:42:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/?p=13652"},"modified":"2023-01-06T22:46:48","modified_gmt":"2023-01-06T21:46:48","slug":"catalonias-independence-a-reply","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/?p=13652","title":{"rendered":"Catalonia’s Independence: A Reply\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Autors, Prof. Dr. Nico Krisch<\/a> \u2014 unter anderem Professor of International Law<\/em> an der renommierten Berliner \u00bbHertie School of Governance\u00ab \u2014, ver\u00f6ffentliche ich hier einen hervorragenden Beitrag zu den katalanischen Unabh\u00e4ngigkeitsbestrebungen.<\/p>\n

Joseph Weiler\u2019s polemic on Catalan independence <\/a>has certainly stirred up debate (see the comments on the piece), which is always helpful. But as much as I admire much of Weiler\u2019s academic work, I find this intervention heavily misguided in substance, in part because of a misunderstanding of the reasons behind the Catalan drive, in part because of a misreading of the nature of independence claims in general. I write this having spent a significant part of the last decade in Barcelona, with a growing appreciation for the concerns of Catalans and of sub-state nationalism in general, which has certainly toned down my earlier, perhaps rather na\u00e0\u00afve cosmopolitanism that had little time for nations and borders.<\/p>\n

Weiler laments a return of Catalans to \u2019an early 20th-century post-World War I mentality, when the notion that a single state could encompass more than one nationality seemed impossible\u2019, and he finds it \u2019laughable and impossible to take seriously Catalan arguments for independence\u2019 when they have a statute of autonomy. He thinks that all Catalans could possibly complain about dates back to the Franco period and before, and that today they should leave this behind, drop talk of independence and work out their differences with the rest of Spain. But the latter is precisely what they have tried for several decades, and with limited success. Spain\u2019s 1978 constitution is an awkward compromise, born out of a transition from dictatorship. It stops well short of establishing a federal state and, despite Spain\u2019s enormous cultural diversity, has many centralist elements. Catalans are a structural minority in that setting \u2013 and less protected than the Basques who achieved a more favourable position in and after the constitution. While it is true that they don\u2019t face persecution or any kind of grave human rights violations, discrimination can also take more subtle forms and result in systematic disadvantages when it comes to appointments to public office, investment in infrastructure or the distribution of resources in general. And even achievements in linguistic rights are called into question when the Spanish government can declare \u2013 as it has recently done \u2013 that it intends to \u2019hispanicise\u2019 Catalan school children.<\/p>\n

All this does not reach the threshold for remedial secession under international law. But is international law, state-centric and state-made as it is, a good guide for our normative approach here? Probably not. Political theorists are engaged in an extensive and sophisticated debate about the grounds for secession, and not many hold as restrictive a view as international law does. In fact, quite a few support a voluntarist position, which is based on the mere choice of the relevant collectives. On liberal grounds, this is similar to the arguments for leaving divorce to the choice of each of the spouses. Political divorce is, of course, not so easy, and it always raises the question of which collective ought to decide. But there is little reason to privilege the historically often arbitrary shape of existing states and force minorities to accept the decisions of a much larger group, which will often be hostile or at least indifferent to their claims. If different demoi compete, they will indeed need to work out the situation among themselves \u2013 but on an equal footing rather than in a situation of subordination of one to another.<\/p>\n

Weiler\u2019s attack on a \u2019regressive and outmoded nationalist ethos\u2019 also misses the point because most of our political structure \u2013 and especially international law \u2013 is still based on nationalism. It is just the nationalism of those nations that have managed to find recognition as states. Given that structure, it is not surprising that minority nations would also aspire to the main organisational form of self-determination \u2013 statehood. Moreover, it is weird to think that it is the boundaries drawn by (Spanish, French, German, etc) nationalism that should determine the feelings of solidarity of all parts of a country. Catalans have no doubt that they owe solidarity to Europe as a whole, but they don\u2019t see why they should owe that much more to people in Andalucia than to those in Southern France (who, geographically and probably also culturally, are closer). On what side of a border you live is often a mere accident of history, and we need a more fine-tuned instrumentarium than the binary inside\/outside of a state to think seriously about obligations of solidarity.<\/p>\n

The European Union, in fact, is a project that should allow us to do just that. As the people of Europe grow closer, the state structure in which we live loses importance \u2013 both for institutions of political representation and for structures of solidarity. This is what we mean when we say that Germans should help the South of Europe not merely out of self-interest but out of obligation. Just as solidarity in Europe no longer stops at boundaries, it does not always come in binary fashion. There are many shades of it, and there are many shades of \u2019we\u2019 in the European polity. Thinking that the Catalans only know their very own \u2019we\u2019 would seriously misunderstand the position of most of them. They feel part of a broader \u2019we\u2019, but not necessarily a Spanish one. Many would be satisfied with a significant amount of autonomy in a truly federal state, and they seek independence only because the Spanish state has frustrated efforts in this direction consistently over the years. If another status were available, they would probably be happy to take it. International law doesn\u2019t have much on offer, but the EU might be the place to invent intermediate forms.<\/p>\n

But until we\u2019ve done so, we should be careful not to jump to conclusions. The Catalan drive to independence (just as similar movements elsewhere) is not some form of \u2019tribalism\u2019, as Weiler has us believe. It is a form of democratic self-government, born out of frustration with the processes of a larger entity that often enough ignore the wishes and concerns of minorities. If we are committed to some form of democratic liberalism \u2013 to a respect for the freedom of individuals to choose their own lives and to determine their political fate \u2013 we\u2019d better take it seriously. And, just as in Scotland and potentially in Belgium, we\u2019d better understand it as an attempt at redrawing the internal boundaries of the EU, rather than as a move away from the Union.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Autors, Prof. Dr. Nico Krisch \u2014 unter anderem Professor of International Law an der renommierten Berliner \u00bbHertie School of Governance\u00ab \u2014, ver\u00f6ffentliche ich hier einen hervorragenden Beitrag zu den katalanischen Unabh\u00e4ngigkeitsbestrebungen. Joseph Weiler\u2019s polemic on Catalan independence has certainly stirred up debate (see the comments on the piece), which is always […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allgemein","entity-eu","location-catalunya","language-deutsch","language-english","topic-recht","topic-selbstbestimmung"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13652"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75997,"href":"https:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13652\/revisions\/75997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brennerbasisdemokratie.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}