© REUTERS/Albert Gea

It began like an Asterix and Obelix story. In 2009 a tiny village – not Gallic, but Catalan – rose up against the central authority, in this case Madrid.

In the Catalan Arenys de Munt community, a network of pipes drains the water that flows under the Rambla and its sycamore trees. However, the pipes cannot handle the massive amount of rain the region experiences in the fall, and the Rambla is often flooded, with the magnificent sycamore trees in danger of drowning. The community of barely 9,000 inhabitants has long debated what to do to address the situation.

In December 2009, as autumn threatened to submerge the community once again, a new idea was proposed: rather than Arenys de Munt, Madrid would be responsible for the problem in the future. After all, the financial means to renovate the piping was only lacking, according to then-Mayor Carles Morà, because “we send much more money to Madrid than we get back.” The mayor called for a referendum to determine whether the community would manage its own affairs in the future, and a significant part of the population enthusiastically supported the proposal – independence seemed at the time to be the town’s philosopher’s stone, an alchemical miracle that would address economic problems and ensure lasting financial stability.

The referendum took place on September 13, 2009. Only 41 percent of eligible voters decided to take part, with 96 percent of those voting for independence. In other words, only 39 percent of eligible voters voted to separate from Madrid. However, the fight for independence continued. In 2013, the community cut its ties to the central state and declared itself the “free and sovereign territory of Catalonia.”

That might sound a little overblown, even unintentionally funny. But Catalonia was not satisfied with symbolic gestures. Other cities and villages followed the Arenys de Munt community, and eventually the whole Catalan regional government under Carles Puigdemont declared its intention to break free from the Spanish state. Though Catalonia’s efforts to achieve more autonomy, even full state sovereignty, have a long history, European publics and elites were caught entirely by surprise by what seemed like a sudden outbreak of nationalism – especially because the Catalan conflict feels so out of place in the current tableaux of European crises.

Secession and nationalism have a bad reputation: they are atavistic, backward, and xenophobic. That applies just as much to the separatists in the Donetsk as it does to the rebellious governments in Poland and Hungary, and to the Lega Nord in Italy, a party that works aggressively to safeguard the wealth of its own region against the country’s poorer southern regions. Just recently, more than 90 percent of voters in Veneto and Lombardy voted in (non-binding) referenda for significantly more autonomy, above all in financial matters. This separatism is at its core aggressive, angry, and anti-cosmopolitan.

For quite a while, Catalan nationalism did not seem like a threat to Europe; like the Scottish independence movement, it seemed friendly, cosmopolitan, and explicitly pro-European. In short, it seemed like there was nothing to worry about. So when the Catalans intentionally plunged Spain into a veritable state crisis it came as a shock.

Centuries’-Old Problems

Nations are still just “imagined communities,” in the words of political scientist Benedict Anderson. And today, by invoking imagined ancient traditions, a wave of nationalism aimed at the breakup of the EU is gaining steam. Enlightened contemporary thinkers consider this use of the past illegitimate; they maintain that the conflicts of the present must be solved in the present. However, they miss the fallacy in the word “past:” once a thing has happened, it can never really pass. The conflict in Catalonia today is just the latest manifestation of the centuries’-old problem of the Iberian Peninsula.

Long before there was a Spain ruled from Madrid, Catalonia was a significant power in its own right. From 1137 on Catalonia led a community of states that would become one of the leading powers of the Mediterranean through its dynastic connections, a power that even issued its own currency. As a trading state it was externally oriented, self-confident, and open to the world. When the power of the Castilians later expanded outwards from the center, bringing with it a strictly enforced state unity and the Castellano language, there was resistance along the entire periphery of the peninsula, though only Portugal managed to return to independent statehood in 1640.

In the Basque country, this resistance was and still is ethnically motivated, which is one reason that it has turned hostile and xenophobic – and why in the second half of the 20th century it committed acts of barbaric atrocity. For the Catalans, however, secession was never a goal to be won at any price. Furthermore, their sense of self was never based on ethnicity, but rather on their nation’s culture: they wanted their right to self-governance back.

In the Spanish War of Succession at the beginning of the 18th century the majority of the Catalans found themselves on the losing side. The victorious Philipp V marched into Barcelona on September 11, 1714, and with one stroke did away with all the remaining institutions of Catalan self-governance. It was an event that was etched deeply into Catalan national memory: September 11 is an ecstatically celebrated national holiday, the Diada Nacional de Catalunya. As is often the case with history, the day of their greatest defeat has become a day for new beginnings.

After the end of an eight-year-long dictatorship under General Prima de Rivera, Catalonia’s hour struck in 1931. Spain had become a republic, and Catalonia got its full self-determination back. The entirety of its institutions of governance, the Generalitat de Catalunya, was recreated. But it lasted only a moment: When Francisco Franco and his Falange won the civil war in 1939, all rights to autonomy were eliminated in Catalonia, which had – like many other regions – fought for the Republic until the bitter end. Until Franco’s death in 1975, the Catalan language remained forbidden.

Even today, when many Catalans think of Madrid, the capital of a democratic state, they think back to Franco. Franco’s excessive push for Spanish unity has given it an ugly reputation – especially in Catalonia, it stands for Madrid’s attempts to play the center of the country against the rest, and the suppression of Spain’s diversity.

Ruling from on High

As soon as the dictator was dead, cries arose from all over the country for more autonomy. As though from nowhere, the September 11, 1977 Diada saw more than 1.5 million participants demonstrating, one of the largest demonstrations in Spanish history. That certainly made an impression: a process of regionalization was introduced, which seemed to be the only way to avoid violence. Catalan was allowed once more, there was suddenly Catalan TV, and the Teatro Lliure, the first theater in Catalan, opened in Barcelona. When King Juan Carlos visited Catalonia and spoke a sentence in Catalan during a public speech, the excitement was enormous. Everything seemed to be turning out well.

But when discussions switched from software to hardware – that is, from the language and culture to politics and the economy – things became more difficult. The government in Madrid slowed things down wherever it could, dragging its feet for years in talks over a statute governing the region’s autonomy. The Catalan draft read simply: “Catalonia is a nation.” In the final draft, however, an agonizingly awkward formulation was used to dodge the difficult questions: “Catalonia, as a nationality, exercises its self-governance as an autonomous community in agreement with the constitution and the present statute, which presents its fundamental identity norms.”

Madrid was simply not ready to transform the senate into some kind of body for regional representation. That would have bound the centrifugal forces of the autonomy movements back to the central state. Instead, Madrid dealt with the autonomous communities in an almost feudal way. It allowed them different levels of autonomy – in the case of Catalonia, for example, it allowed the creation of a Catalan police force and made moves, albeit limited ones, on the question of more tax autonomy for the region. Catalonia became autonomous in several areas. The process was not a dialogue, but rather a declaration from on high. At its core, the central government was only ready to present the autonomous communities with a sort of chaperoned self-governance.

Now the stubbornness on both sides has allowed the situation to escalate to a point that was only recently unthinkable in a democratic Europe. Without showing the slightest interest in the appearance of legitimacy, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has stuck to a legalistic position, constantly returning to the provisions of the Spanish constitution. In one interview, he said, “The only plan that we have is to make sure that the future Catalan government abides by the law. (…) Everyone can have their own political opinion, whatever that might be. But everyone must respect the law, otherwise we live in the Wild West.” His party, the Partido Popular, can trace its roots back to the Franco regime; for this reason alone, he would have been better off behaving less dictatorially.

In a situation of such high tension, when the government is nearly at the point of using force to assert its authority, references to the letter of the law cannot suffice alone. The Spanish government needs to behave in a way that builds a relationship with the opposition; brinkmanship will only guarantee that the conflict is prolonged.

Revolutionary Folly

But Madrid’s stubbornness in no way justifies the behavior of the Catalan nationalists. The region, especially Barcelona, is prospering, and the money it transfers to the central government is hardly leaving it impoverished. It has already achieved cultural and linguistic autonomy, and further steps toward self-determination will be difficult to achieve with an unfriendly central government. Spain has also given the region more weight in the EU – the EU documents concerning Catalonia are now translated into Catalan in Brussels, and in questions concerning their interests, Catalonia and the Basque Country can take part in the EU’s Council of Ministers meetings. The EU promotes the Catalan cultural scene, and one of the few EU Commission representatives sits in Barcelona. In several European capitals, including Berlin, Catalonia has its own representative, who the Catalans hope to someday turn into a full ambassador.

In light of all this, the secessionist furor seems slightly crazy. Full sovereignty has become an obsession, and those who buy into it cannot be swayed by arguments or facts. It hardly matters that only a minority – albeit a significant one – has taken part in the referenda so far, or that the region’s desire to leave Spain and immediately be admitted to the EU is unlikely to pan out. If one is being charitable to the Catalans, one could say that they are indulging in romantic revolutionary play acting. The separatists are dusting off an ancient, almost mythical conception of a people – and one that historically has often led to violence. Absolutely no one wants to get involved in the difficult work of compromise and real policy-making.

The fact that the Catalan secessionists dream of a peaceful state makes them no less foolish. This nationalism will contribute to the destruction of the political world, whether it wants to or not. Already, all other Catalan political priorities have been displaced by the independence question. But nationhood is not everything, and not even the most important thing. The strong minority pushing for Catalonia to break off from Spain is preventing the region from addressing its larger everyday problems: work, social issues, infrastructure, education, digitalization, and in general the question of how the region can succeed in a changing world.

History has shown us clearly that whenever the nation trumps all other issues – whether for ethnic or cultural reasons – the end is never good. Europe does not need another nation. It is telling that Russia’s disinformation campaigns have been active in Catalonia: Russia hopes that powerful secessionist tendencies in Catalonia will make its own annexation of Crimea look slightly better – and if the Catalan conflict destabilizes a Spain that has just recently emerged from an economic crisis, so much the better for Moscow.

The EU’s Dangerous Discretion

The EU is under incredible pressure. This new wave of nationalism, which sometimes aims to create entirely new states and sometimes aims to renationalize existing states, is hardly helping. Catalonia has shown that nationalist folly can also be peaceful and cosmopolitan. Does that mean that the EU’s existence is being questioned from both the left and the right, from the know-nothings and the elite? Does that threaten the EU’s basic existence?

The EU has decided to come down decisively on the side of the central government in Madrid. As the Spanish constitution does not allow a region to break away, the Commission is correct here – as it is when it points to the “Prodi Doctrine,” which specifies that a breakaway region will not be considered a member of the union until it completes a regular application process. Nevertheless, it was not smart to stick to these stances alone. To ridicule the secessionists, Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said that the EU comprised 27 member states, not 98, and he has argued that a Catalan state would be too small for membership in the EU. But this is coming from a man who was once prime minister of a state that did not even have 600,000 citizens (i.e. Luxembourg); Catalonia has nearly three times the inhabitants, more than 13 existing EU member states.

The European institutions are not wrong in their fear that support from Brussels for the separatists, even ambivalent support, could trigger secessionist movements all over Europe. Nevertheless, in supporting Madrid unequivocally they have overlooked something important: since its foundation, the European Community has never been a traditional organization in which states alone cooperate towards common goals.

The EU is a community of laws and norms based directly on the rights and responsibilities of individuals. In 1963 the European Court of Justice established that the functions of the common market affected “the community of affiliated individuals directly” because the treaty establishing the European Common Market is “more than an agreement based on the reciprocal duties between the states that are party to the treaty.”

Since the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht there has been the idea of European citizenship: every citizen of the EU is not only a citizen of their own state, but also a direct citizen of the EU. For the EU, the interests of the individual citizens count just as much as the interests of the member states. In this sense, the European Community – a supranational body from its very beginnings – should serve as a preview of new forms of association that are possible. The EU cannot risk losing this element without also losing its substance, its soul, and its historical uniqueness.

Losing Its Soul

And that is exactly what it is doing in the case of Catalonia. In the words of legal scholar Bardo Fassbender, the EU is behaving like an old-school international organization, defending the position of Spain, its member state, without compromise. In doing so, it is hurting itself.

At the moment, the Spanish-Catalan conflict seems intractable, and it is unlikely the autonomist energy will simply dissipate. The EU should become involved without fear of an autonomist chain reaction, and become what is has long been on paper: a mediator with authority that will address both the justified concerns of the Madrid government and the equally justified concerns of the Catalan nationalists. The EU has to take the concerns of its separatist citizens seriously. Here the EU could actually prove it has the authority that its founding treaties have long established. Nationalism could then become the catalyst that pushes European unification a step further.

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Populist is an inadequate term to describe Europe’s surging breed of politician who believes that everything would be better again if borders regained their old strength. Here’s how they could be tackled.

© REUTERS/Axel Schmidt

The use of the word “populist” to define and characterize the new boogeymen of European politics clearly shows that there is something wrong with how they are discussed. The term implies that they are merely listening to the will of the people – and what could be wrong with politicians and parties listening to the people? Nothing, of course. What is disturbing and shocking about today’s populists is not that they listen to the general populace (which they often do not actually do); the problem lies in the fact that they do not offer viable solutions to political problems. …

Read more in the Berlin Policy Journal App – September/October 2016 issue.

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© REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

You can read about the European Union’s horrible setback anywhere. At fault is the obstinate and callous austerity policy of Angela Merkel and especially Wolfgang Schäuble. The EU has deteriorated from a warm community of peace and prosperity to the cold detachment of an accountant’s office. One editor-in-chief described the chancellor, in a southern German daily, saying, “Merkel is a phenomenon. Without any apparent talent, she has managed to get far in life by doing nothing at precisely the right moment.” That is clearly nonsense –recall the sheer number of German and EU decisions she has negotiated or imposed since the beginning of the financial crisis. Certainly, one can disagree with her, but one cannot fairly accuse her of inactivity.

Why is this prejudice so persistent? It is likely Merkel’s deliberate and inconspicuous political maneuvering that is so provocative. In fact, the criticism isn’t really directed at Merkel personally. Rather, its target seems to be the complexity and general dullness of political events. Endless summit meetings, always in the routine Brussels setting, with the same morose journalist reporting endless negotiation, bargaining, and further negotiation – the inevitable impression being that a lot of energy has produced very little. It goes without saying that EU politics are especially unattractive.

The giant consensus machine that is the EU is clearly not immune to individual states with a predilection for breaking rules. And that appears to be a strike against the EU. For six months two Greek politicians harangued the rest of Europe, forcing many busy politicians to take part in incessant meetings on the same problem. On the one side, the Goliath EU – and on the other, the tiny Greek David. Naturally, the giant failed to leave a good impression.

That is not an entirely incorrect summary, yet impertinence didn’t quite win outright either. With a surprising and steadfast patience, the EU displayed its greatest strength. From a historical perspective, it is not that long ago that a conflict like the one that pulled Greece out of line would have exposed serious faults and forced nations into bilateral alliances against one another, into military skirmishes, and perhaps even into war. There was not one moment in the past six months where anything of that nature was at stake. The Greek attempt to mix up the EU shattered on the stability of EU institutions. Never did it come to bilateral alliances; the EU remained a unified front. There was no recourse to archaic, 19th-century acts. And not only the governments, but also the peoples of Europe were unconvinced. They did not rise up against Greece’s hubris, but at least accepted (albeit unenthusiastically) the patience of their leaders. Here is the 21st century at its best!

Although Grexit was avoided through last-minute compromise, Europe is not necessarily in a good place. EU representatives, who negotiate so devotedly, have made their bed and now must lie in it. There were many excellent arguments against monetary union and the common currency. The euro was born of will, not necessity – an excellent example of the sovereign power still possible in politics today. It was a half-cooperative, half-antagonistic German-French axis that ensured the euro’s existence. François Mitterrand wanted a common currency to both integrate and control the newly enlarged, economically strong German state. Helmut Kohl, chancellor of a country displaying humility despite an awareness of its resurgent power, agreed – in part because he wanted Europe’s blessing for German reunification.

Today, Greece is undergoing the terminal moraine of this decision’s fatal flaw – the compromises formed in the euro’s construction. Two economic and developmental philosophies were forcibly married, even though they were clearly not compatible: free market orientation and interventionist policy, liberalization and regulation. Much of the euro treaty was left intentionally vague in the hope that the dynamic of the euro would cause these contradictions to simply evaporate. This was only possible because the Germans holding the euro negotiation reins were not “Ordnungspolitiker” (politicians with a strong sense for order and procedural policy-making, such as then Finance Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg), but instead were European integrationists (Kohl and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher). The Stability and Growth Pact from 1997, underpinning the euro, was an attempt to reconcile these two contradictory goals even in its very title, but has actually conjured dissent.

It has not been quite as Mitterrand had hoped. Germany’s economic strength did not decline; instead it continued to flourish despite turbulence surrounding reunification and the turn of the century. The cleft between north and south grew; in the latter, the introduction of the euro created a spending bubble that harmed economic strength. The EU, now more powerful given its eastern enlargement, today experiences exactly the north-south problem that philosophers and practitioners never envisioned, with folk psychology having been banished to the dustbin of history. These amicable EU agreements have contributed to “Olive Belt” states assuming giant debts they cannot shoulder themselves or even with EU aid. It must be a difficult pill for the Greeks to swallow that today, the leading German politician touting “more Europe” is also the leading Ordnungspolitiker, in contrast to 20 years ago. In trying to do the right thing, Wolfgang Schäuble worked out the central eurozone dilemma with relentless acuity.

It is in no way assured that Schäuble’s path is passable for every eurozone country, even those with the best intentions. In 2009 Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled on the constitutionality of the Lisbon Treaty and was scolded by many for answering maybe. Yes, it is constitutional, but only in a restricted sense: “Unifying Europe on the basis of a treaty between sovereign states cannot be realized in any way that does not allow each of the member states enough room for the political organization of its economic, cultural, and social living conditions,” the court pointed out. Greece chose to follow the eurozone path. While many in the north knew exactly what they were getting into (but held their tongues for the sake of peace), the Greeks clearly had no idea. They believed they had entered a community of guaranteed economic success. Now they are realizing that their desire for the euro has likely cost them any room for the political organization of their economic, cultural, and social living conditions. Neither the EU nor Schäuble should take this condition lightly.

There is little to suggest that Greece, as it lives and breathes, has either the will or the power to rebuild its state. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras faces a Herculean project in which there will be a strong desire to let the situation degrade further, to delay land registry reform and taxation of the rich, and to rely on both the forgetfulness and the clemency of the EU. Tsipras may wield a lot of power, but any attempts to reform Greece will have to contend with ingrained traditions and mentalities that have stymied progress so far.

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