ADAM RIGGIO - Defanging Nationalism: Quebec's lessons for the Spanish
Catalan protesters in the streets. (Getty Images / Sandra Montanez)
Written by: Adam Riggio
Spain’s courts and central government have, for the past two years, been throwing the punitive force of the country’s law and police against leaders and activists in the Catalan separatist movement. The Canada Files recently reported on the government’s most recent blow, when a national court banned the region’s President Quim Torra from running for his own position, or any other elected post in Spain.
Among his crimes was one with a distinctly democratic label: disobedience.
Banning Torra from political office is only the most high-profile of the aggression of the government in Madrid toward that separatist movement. Catalonia’s former President Carles Puigdemont has been in exile in Belgium since the end of 2017, after Madrid’s crackdown over that year’s referendum and his subsequent unilateral declaration of independence. The Spanish government has filed an extradition order with Belgium to force Puigdemont’s return and imprisonment.
The Spanish government is not only pressuring Catalonia’s leaders, but also ordinary pro-independence activists. Nine former members of Puigdemont’s cabinet were sentenced to prison at the end of last year. Their crimes all revolved around disobeying the government in Madrid over the independence referendum.
Crackdowns Radicalize Opposition
Canadians have dealt with our own separatist movement, a political push to snap the country literally in half. Québécois separatism began in the 1960s, and in 1970 the Front de la Libération du Quebec had kidnapped a British diplomat and murdered the provincial finance minister.
That provoked a massively disproportionate response from Canada’s Prime Minister at the time, Pierre Trudeau. His crackdown saw a literal military invasion of Montréal. But far from crushing the separatist movement, its leaders simply chose to avoid terrorist activity.
Instead, the foundation of the Parti Québécois legitimized separatism, and held two referendums on sovereignty in 1980 and 1995. The second vote saw independence lose by less than one percent of the ballots. The elder Trudeau’s military crackdown had broken up the terrorist FLQ, but it also galvanized Québécois popular opinion toward separatism. One is hardly inclined to trust the government institutions that put tanks and soldiers on the streets of your homes.
The pursuit of electoral legitimacy for the separatist cause has been imitated by similar movements throughout western Europe, including Catalonia’s. Yet Spain has utterly fumbled its own case for federalism. Spain’s government reacted to a mere referendum with sustained military and police repression. Catalan public opinion has, in response, only become more dedicated to independence.
What Has Worked in Quebec
In 1995, the Canadian government barely avoided having to tackle a referendum victory for Quebec’s independence. The response was not a further military crackdown, but a years-long public relations campaign of tacky pro-Canadian advertising.
The 21st century saw new progressive political movements taking shape in Quebec, including the student-based socialist movement and the organizing of the federal New Democratic Party. These cultural changes have largely soured Québécois public opinion on independence.
Pro-federalist Spanish politicians and organizers can take from the Canadian case two important lessons. One, repression only encourages separatist movements. Two, political organizing around shared interests ultimately works best to defang separatism.
If the Spanish government and other Spanish political parties want to return the Catalan people to a happy place in that federation, they will have to concentrate on finding common causes to rebuild trust between Catalonia, Castile, Andalusia, Basque Country, and Madrid.
With Spain’s high unemployment rate, economic revitalization can be the heart of a progressive political program that builds solidarity among all the people of Spain, including the traditional regions as well as immigrants from across Europe, the Arab world, and North Africa. Working together to build entrepreneurial and co-operative business concerns can jumpstart a new era of prosperity and social harmony for all the people of a new, reborn Spain.
What Is Different in Catalonia
Of course, it will not be that easy in Spain. It isn’t that easy in Canada either. The old Parti Québécois is now a parody itself. All the romantic and democratic rhetoric of its founders has been reduced to an ugly, racist nationalism of exclusionary white supremacy.
Such a vile racism has always been part of the separatist spirit in Quebec. That became most clear for the first time in Jacques Parizeau’s enraged concession speech blaming blacks and Jews for separatism’s defeat in the 1995 vote.
The Parti Québécois has been trampled by a far-right political party that co-opted its nationalism and wed it to their policy of corruption for the sake of the idle rich. The federal separatist party is now no longer separatist, riding an openly racist political platform into national parliament.
Opposition to nationalism is now the opposition to racism that is, for now at least, unfortunately concentrated in multicultural, economically prosperous Montréal. Racism remains a powerful motive for the politically active in rural Quebec and along the lower St. Lawrence River. Anti-Muslim mass murderer Alexandre Bissonette is a product of the same white supremacist organizing as the Wolfpack and other extremist groups and militias from the Quebec City area.
Catalan separatism, like the Québécois independence movement, is not built on progressive values. The movement is motivated by economic resentment. Catalonia is the economic powerhouse of an otherwise sluggish Spain.
Catalans want to free themselves from Spain because they believe that their productivity supports the rest of the country, and they are tired of it. It is a separatist movement of the relatively wealthy, who wish to keep more of their wealth for themselves instead of helping others in the federation.
Progressive Solidarity
The repressive actions of Spain’s national government has made heroes of Quim Torra and Carles Puigdemont, as well as others in Catalonia’s separatist movement. But that separatist movement is based on regressive economic resentment, the refusal of a prosperous people to continue supporting the rest of the country. The leader of the government that continues to hound and suppress Catalan separatists is Pedro Sánchez of the Socialist Party.
The actual best way to deal with Catalan separatism is to end the police suppression of the movement, and instead undercut the popular opinion that drives it. The people of the other regions of Spain must reach out to Catalan people in a nationwide act of political organizing. That way, people can build business and co-operative networks across Spain, into the rest of Europe. Barcelona can become an economic bridge even into North Africa and the Middle East, from where many new Spaniards come.
Defeating regressive separatism is not a matter of the military and police. It comes from building networks of solidarity, mutual aid, and investment in economic prosperity across and beyond what would have been the borders of a new, closed, resentful state.
Adam Riggio hosts the podcast Radical Democrats Radio, in partnership with The Canada Files.