Flags within flags: the Catalonia question

As I sit looking out at the blue waters of the Mediterranean three flags fly outside the window: the green-white-green of Andalucia, the red-yellow-red of Spain and the blue and gold of the European Union. It is like a heraldic equivalent of a Russian matryoshka doll, each one representing an entity that is subsumed in the next. 

Yesterday’s unnecessary referendum in Catalonia and the ridiculously heavy-handed reaction by Spanish authorities was the equivalent of taking an axe to a matryoshka to find out what lies inside. Yes, people have the right to vote on who should rule them, but when those who rule them want to gain greater power, greater status for their own egos, at the risk of social and ecnomic stability, the motives of their regional rulers should be called into question.

The European Union, - despite what its detractors will tell you - has been the greatest success storsy in our continents turbulent history in creating peace and prosperity. Not without its problems, but none of them have been tackled by the traditional European way: bloody warfare. It is devoutly to be hoped that the events in Catalonia yesterday are not the first indications of a return to form.

Spain is a federal country, its regions with huge degrees of autonomous power and responsibility. The current Catalan authorities seem tempted to make a grab for more power, and by so doing abandoning their responsibility.

An ‘indpendent’ Catalonia might be a matter of local pride, but not practicality. Vaingloriious at best. Would it leave the EU? No, its proponents declare. Could Spain veto it joining? Yes, of course, any nation can. Would it? Probably not, in the end. 

But what on Earth is the point??? The proponents of Brexit in the supposedly United Kingdom (Watch that space especially if Catalonia does secede from Spain) believe they can strike deals around the world, but really they are hankering after an irrevocably lost empire. 

It may well be, and it may even be desirable, that the day of the nation-state is over, particularlly those which like the UK and Spain are cobbled together composites. But if so, it should not occur through the creation of smaller and would-be more ethnically homogeneous mini-nations; that is a fast track to the past, not the future. 

The EU was and has always been the only way, the matryoshka metaphor the only sane possibility: yes, I can be Scottish and British and European, yes I can be Catalan and Spanish and European. There comes a time when cutting out the middle man isn’t always the answer