Welcome! or welcome back, to Springtime of Nations. With another week comes another worthy struggle for self determination and a push against the centralizing power of the state.

The Spanish autonomous region of Catalonia is where we turn our attention today. Libertarians and anarchists of all stripes will likely know it as the place where Spanish anarchists maintained a short lived region of autonomous control, and may know that in 2017 the region attempted to unilaterally secede from Spain. However, the roots of this national movement go quite deep, and the Catalonian struggle is worth a broader look.

The story begins with the medieval Principality of Catalonia, a sovereign state in confederation with the Kingdom of Aragon. Catalonia was ruled by the same king but under their own laws. Slowly, this changed over the 15th and 16th centuries as Spanish monarchs consolidated their power over the numerous kingdoms and principalities of their Realms. In the context of the Franco-Spanish War of 1635-1659 which put their homeland on the frontlines between these two large centralizing states, the Catalonians had had enough, not only of the stripping away of their regional autonomy, but the overburdening presence of the Castillian army in Catalonia, the real power in Spain. In 1640 this boiled over in the “Corpus of Blood” riots that swept the capital Barcelona and its suburbs, with pissed off peasants yelling “long live Catalonia and the Catalans!” and “Let the wicked government of King Philip die!” as they killed Castillian officers, including the Viceroy of Catalonia. As the conflict spread, the Catalonians declared themselves an independent republic in 1641 and allied themselves with the French in the broader war, with the French absorbing them into their kingdom later that year. The French and Catalonian forces were eventually defeated in the war, with Catalonia being reincorporated into the Kingdom of Spain in the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrnees. The last straw for Catalonian independence was after the Spanish War of Succession in 1714, when King Phillip V officially changed Spain from a constitutional monarchy to an absolutist one and replaced Spanish as the official language of Catalonia (Catalan is not actually a dialect of Spanish at all, being much more closely related to the Occitan language spoken in Southern France.)

After this, Catalonian nationalism was repressed and dormant for hundreds of years, with the principality being officially abolished in 1833 in favor of 4 provinces, part of a Spanish centralizing reform. The 20th century however saw a rekindling of pro-autonomy movements in Catalonia, with the right wing Regionalist League of Catalonia being founded in 1901. They managed to affect the creation of a federal polity known as the Commonwealth of Catalonia in 1914 with some limited regional powers. Frustration with the slow and compromising stance of the ‘Liga’ led to the founding of the center-left Catalan Action party in 1922, and after the abolition of the Commonwealth by the military dictator Primo de Rivera to the even more radical ERC in 1931 (an important Catalonia nationalist party even today). By 1931, Spain had entered what is now known as the Second Spanish Republic with the abolition of the Kingdom after de Rivera was deposed. Initially Catalonian nationalists supported the new republican government, but broke from it in 1934 after right-wing nationalists took power in Spain and declared its independence for 1 day before crushed by the larger state. The so-called “events of 6th October” radicalized many Catalonian workers into joining growing Marxist and Anarcho-Syndicalist groups like the CNT and UGT labor unions. By 1936, Spain had been split between center-left and left wing Republican forces and Right wing nationalist forces supported by factions of the Army, engaged in the Spanish Civil War. The radical leftists in Catalonia joined together to form a semi-anarchist polity called Revolutionary Catalonia, wherein the anarcho-syndicalists played a decisive role in “governance”. Libertarians who may have heard of the intriguing nature of this social revolution should also know the darker side, best told by Bryan Caplan in his essay ‘The Anarcho-Statists of Spain’. To be brief, the CNT and their allies engaged in violent expropriation of land that involved the killing of clergy members and capitalist management. They also became involved in a deadly conflict with the Stalinist faction of the Republican side which led to the May Days of 1937 where anarchists and marxist leninists killed eachother on the streets of barcelona. Infighting like this was a major cause of the defeat of the Republicans and the victory of the Nationalists led by Francisco Franco in 1939.

When Franco consolidated his control over Catalonia, he not only abolished the Generalitat of Catalonia (the autonomous region’s official name) but greatly suppressed the teaching of Catalan, catalonia history, and even changing the names and coats of arms of sporting clubs like FC barcelona. When the dictatorship fell with Franco’s death in 1975, Catalonians were eager to take back what they had lost under his regime, with banned organizations and parties like the ERC reforming to run in the newly reestablished Autonomous Region of Catalonia, legalizing catalan in schools and other nationalist measures. In 2006, a broad coalition of catalonian nationalist parties ranging from christian democrats to classical liberals, social democrats and communists pushed for greater autonomy in a referendum that passed with a large majority. The Spanish constitutional court however, revised a large part of the Statute of Autonomy which outraged the Catalonian nationalists who engaged in mass protests that year with the slogan Som una nació. Nosaltres decidim (“We are a nation. We decide”), with other large pro-nationalist demonstrations taking place in 2012 and 2013 with an even more radical agenda: Full independence. The nationalist coalition, still quite popular in the next few elections, prepared to hold a referendum on the question of national self-determination, which showed 80% of Catalonians who voted supported full independence, although only about 40% of the population bothered to vote. Pushing ahead, the nationalist coalition wanted a binding referendum on Independence in 2017 while the Spanish constitutional court had of course ruled this to be unconstitutional. when the Catalonians ignored this ruling and got to work preparing for a vote, the Spanish state struck, sending military police to shut it down. This still did not deter the Catalonian government, which passed a majority resolution to become an independent state. The men who led these parties were hunted down and jailed, some are still in exile abroad and the rest remain in Spanish prison with some minor government officials levied heavy fines.

With the region of Catalonia going to the polls once again on the 14th of February, it seems like the Nationalist coalition will again win a slim but real majority in the regional parliament. Will they once again attempt to break free from a Kingdom that has oppressed them since the middle ages? Perhaps. Will they be successful? Who knows. But their cause is just, and Libertarians of all people should support this rainbow coalition of Catalonians of all stripes who wish only to be left alone and see to their own affairs. One problematic issue of Catalonian nationalism of interest to the libertarian is that many of them are for joining the European Union after breaking off from Spain, which seems very counterproductive. Hopefully however, the silence of the EU towards the violent repression in 2017 of their movement has cooled their attitudes towards that Supranational empire. In conclusion, to quote the Catalan’s themselves again, Som una nació. Nosaltres decidim (“We are a nation. We decide”)! Next week we will tackle the Rojava region in Syria. May a thousand flowers bloom.