INDEPENDENCE – in a European context – is back on the agenda today as the Centre on Constitutional Change at Edinburgh University hosts a conference on whether such movements in Europe are a threat or an opportunity for the EU.
The event is one of a series organised by the Public Diplomacy Council of Catalonia (Diplocat) and it is the first time it has held one in Scotland.
Diplocat has said last year’s Scottish referendum and the results of the Catalan elections have “reinforced the debate about the status within the EU of regions which become independent from an EU member state”.
The council is a public-private partnership with the aim of fostering dialogue and building relationships between Catalonia and the rest of the world and as such, it takes a neutral stance on the subject of Catalonian independence. The Centre on Constitutional Change is a research unit set up before the indyref to examine such change and its impact on the institutions involved and the wider policy process.
Its director, Professor Michael Keating, said there can be a lot of interest in the debates.
“Catalonia is not as well-known and doesn’t have the same recognition as Scotland does,” he told The National. “So they have to go around and inform people that they have an issue.”
Support for independence in Catalonia is strong – regional elections earlier this year saw pro-independence parties win 72 of the regional parliament’s 135 seats. However they fell short of winning 50 per cent of the vote with 1.9 million of 4 million cast.
Their claim of a “clear mandate” for an independent state has been dismissed by Spain’s central government in Madrid.
“In some ways they are well organised because they have a very strong grassroots movement which in Scotland only came into being with the referendum,” said Keating.
“Support for independence has shot up in the last five years, quite dramatically. It’s about the same level as in Scotland in the high 40s, occasionally over 50.”
Where Catalonia fell short, he added, was by not having a clear road plan. “In Scotland it was a case of you want to have a referendum and the UK Government says ‘yes’, so it’s quite clear what the steps are.
“Because the Spanish Government and the Spanish constitutional court has blocked the idea of even having a referendum the whole debate is about having one.
“Once we got that out of the way we started talking about the currency and economic matters and welfare and finances and North Sea oil – all those kinds of things.
“So the debate about those detailed institutional policy matters has hardly started in Catalonia.”
Catalonia wants to keep the topic alive, but it wants to make sure it has thoroughly explored all the constitutional issues that could arise. And the pro-independence camp is turning to Europe because they’ve been knocked back by the Spanish government.
The UK Government put the constitutional provision in place for Scotland to have referendum and that is something to which the Catalonians aspire.
“They are trying to prepare European opinion because they’ve got nowhere at all with the Spanish government,” said Keating.
“The main thing about the Scottish independence debate was the Edinburgh agreement with its agreed processes, but that doesn’t exist in Catalonia. They’re really quite desperate to find some other arenas in which they can debate the issue.”
Catalonia also wants to explore whether or not the EU has a legislative device to resolve the issues arising from regions that secede from a member state, but Keating said it does not: “It’s another of these things that the EU has handled very badly, because there’s no consistency in practice.”
Keating added: “They accepted the breakup of Yugoslavia, not in any principled way, but the Germans recognised Croatia and then everybody else did, along with the other breakaway republics.
“And then finally there was the question of Montenegro and the EU stepped in and said ‘here are the rules for a referendum’ in the very last republic to break away. And then when Kosovo went some European countries accepted it and some didn’t so there was no coherent principle.”
“And in the case of Catalonia the European dimension is very important.”
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