The excessive “judicialisation” of politics and “appeals to the Constitutional Court” have been dominating the best part of the news and discourse about the political situation in Catalonia, becoming a, comfortable and intentional, convenient truth.
Continue reading “Catalan nationalist uprising: The politics of justice”
“We think not.”
And, in just three words, that’s the bottom line.
That was the answer given by two professors of political science at Harvard and Stanford, the authors of one of the go-to books on governing plurinational societies.¹
In Politics in Plural Societies: a theory of democratic instability, Rabushka and Shepsle present a model of development of political phenomena in multi-ethnic nations, which they refer to as plural, analysing the behaviour of both the political elites and the population of over a dozen countries in four continents.
A nation must meet three conditions in order to be qualified as plural. It needs to have diverse identities; these must be organised into cohesive political sections (parties, trade unions, etc.); and its conflicts must be understood in ethnic terms.
This calls for the following assumptions about the population: Continue reading “Is the resolution of conflicting ethnic preferences manageable in a democratic framework?”
Hair-raising headlines and fierce, angry statements from celebrities, opinion formers and political leaders followed this news:
On the afternoon of 1 October 2017, the La Vanguardia, the most popular newspaper in Catalonia, ran the following story (2):
The police intervention of Sunday 1 October to prevent Catalan secession left nearly a thousand bruised and battered, and two people in hospital for a few days.
I have desperately tried to discover why the judges and government decided to take such a course of action, but haven’t been able to find anything.
Were the police charges necessary? Was it necessary to prevent voting at the limited number of polling stations operating?
The former Minister of Foreign Affairs stated that Spain lost the communication battle on 1 October.
Continue reading “Wake up Government! Leadership also means communicating!”
At nine o’clock this morning I got the following WhatsApp message:
Whatsapp text:
– That’s going too far… it hurt me even though I’m no pro-independence… you shouldn’t use violence.
Whatsapp video:
Continue reading “Police action: the script for 1 Oct was already written”
This is SNP’s statement on the Catalan question:
It can be summed up as follows:
First, it declares that the Spanish government’s position is legitimate:
The SNP Scottish government states that:
1. The Catalan and Spanish governments are perfectly entitled to take positions for and against independence.
It then qualifies its stance by adding an ethical condition:
Quite irresponsibly, everyone seems to be overlooking one all-important aspect of the current political situation in Catalonia.
Almost by the day, we find ourselves on the receiving end of a bombardment of largely insignificant news, for the storm brewing ahead, about the percentage in favour of independence standing at 51 or lowering to 48, or whether an independent Catalonia would form part of the European Union or not…
Now, all this is beside the point and little more than beating around the bush!
