Spain-Catalonia: An impartial explanation of Catalan separatism

This 11 September again 1.4 million Catalans protested for independence from Spain – making

the 2003 anti-Iraq war protests in London look like picnic. The story of this conflict

teaches you more about modern politics than any textbook ever could: You have the pragmatists,

the romantic idealists, the power politicians, and a wannabe messiah. You learn about the

tension between democracy and law, and politics and truth. And, most importantly, it makes

you reflect upon the relationship between the State and the Nation. And here’s our

introduction to it. Hello and welcome, I am Marc and this is El

Contexto. In this video we’ll update our last year's analysis of the conflict between

the conflict here in SPain between the central government in Madrid and the regional government

in Barcelona. How you can you know what's actually true in such an environment of polarisation,

heated opinion, and disinformation. Let's investigate! In these videos we'll show you

how you yourself can try to get an objective view of this conflict.

Hello and welcome to this series on the conflict between Spain and Cataluña. In this first

video we’ll just give you a quick and brief overview of the situation.

Let’s give you the essential context: Cataluña is one of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities

that came about after the fall of fascism with Spain’s transition to democracy until

around 1981. Since then, the central government has bargained with each autonomous community

individually about their relationship, leading to a complicated and asymmetrical devolution

of power to autonomous communities. The currently strong Catalan separatism is

not a sudden outburst of romantic nationalism, but a conflict escalation of precisely these

negotiations between the central government in Madrid and the regional government of Cataluña.

See, until 2006 social democratic governments both in Cataluña and Spain had renegotiated

Cataluña’s Statute of Autonomy agreement. The centre-right Partido Popular, which defends

a very centralist Spanish nationalism, however, sued before the Constitutional Court that

this Statute was illegal. The Court didn’t rule until 2010, when it determined that many

clauses were unconstitutional. In particular it agreed that Cataluña may call itself a

‘Nation’, but that the only nation recognised by Spanish law was the Spanish one. Then it

stripped a tax conditionality – and here you have to know that Cataluña is one of

Spain’s net tax contributor to the rest of the country on the order of 4-8% of its

GDP. Finally the court ruled the Catalan language could not be given preferential status before

Spanish. Those three, Catalan identity, taxation, and the status of the language, especially

in schools, are still today the main substantial issues propelling separatism. But since then

the conflict has escalated significantly. But it's good to remember that it was after

this ruling had reached Cataluña that the first big protest of around a million people

took place in Barcelona.

It’s against this background, and with the

unfolding economic crisis, that Artur Mas and his conservative-liberal CiU came to power

in Cataluña in 2010, and Rajoy with his conservative-liberal PP in Spain in 2011. These two are the political

protagonists of this conflict escalation, but especially behind Mas there is a highly