A Referendum for Catalonia
BARCELONA, Spain — On Sept. 11, 2012, Catalonia’s national day, about 1.5 million people marched through Barcelona carrying banners saying “Catalonia, Europe’s Next State.” The march was a peaceful expression of hope. On Wednesday, with the same purpose, hundreds of thousands of people will form a human chain across Catalonia.
The history of Catalonia goes back centuries, when
Iberian tribes traded with Greeks and Carthaginians along the Mediterranean
coast. An identifiable Catalan culture developed in the Middle Ages and has
strengthened through time, despite the loss of the Catalan sovereignty at the
end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, and the subsequent repeated
suppression of our government, schools, language and values.
Catalonia fought hard to defend the Second Republic in
the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. But democracy and autonomy were crushed
and the Catalan language was made illegal as Spain endured 40 years of brutal
dictatorship under Franco.
After at his death in 1975, Spain made an astonishing transformation to a multiparty democracy,
and in 1978 a new Spanish Constitution recognized Catalonia’s autonomy and
language once again. The institutions of Catalan autonomy continued to develop
with the reconstitution of the Catalan presidency and Parliament, along with the
return of the Catalan language to our schools.
But the advances haven’t met Catalan expectations.
Countless proposals from Catalonia to Madrid have been rejected out of hand or
subverted by court rulings. For example, in 2005 the Catalan regional Parliament
passed a new Statute of Autonomy delineating powers that should be delegated to the region. The
Spanish Parliament approved in 2006, though only after removing key elements. Nonetheless, the Catalan
people approved the weakened version of the statute via referendum in June 2006, seeing that something was better than nothing. Then in 2010 the
Spanish Constitutional Court unilaterally revoked and rewrote crucial sections
of the statute in a process that the Catalan government believes was
procedurally dubious.
Though financial concessions were made to the Basque
region, our repeated requests for a new fiscal pact with Madrid to mitigate the
current unjust system are constantly denied. We have been willing to pay more
than our fair share to the central government to support poorer regions of
Spain, but it has gone too far. Catalonia now receives less public expenditure
per capita than more than half the other regions of Spain, though we contribute
far more than average. In addition the Spanish government has failed to carry
out its investment obligations, even in their far more limited scope as required in the weakened
statute.
There are many more examples that have led the Catalan
people to feel we have exhausted every means possible to reason and negotiate
with Madrid and the only option left is to seek sovereignty. Recent
parliamentary elections in Catalonia gave us a mandate to call for a referendum
on Catalonia’s future, something a majority of our people and political parties
support.
There are five different legal ways within Spanish law
that a referendum could be authorized. Canada granted Quebec the right to hold
two separate referendums and has protections within Canada because of this. More
recently, Britain gave Scotland the right to decide its future in an
independence referendum next year.
But despite all our efforts to seek this basic civil right Spain refuses.
I appealed to Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy for his
assistance on the referendum in March 2013 with the support of 80 percent of the
Catalan Parliament. The request was rebuffed. In July, I made a formal written
request to hold a referendum. We are still waiting for a reply.
We do not seek to isolate ourselves. Catalans are
deeply pro-European and we do not imagine a future outside the European Union.
Catalonia would have the eighth largest economy in the union and would be a net
contributor to its budgets. We would be a solid European Union partner for
strengthened political unity, security strength and economic growth.
We also seek no harm to Spain. We are bound together
by geography, history and our people, as more than 40 percent of Catalonia’s
population came from other parts of Spain or has close family ties. We want to
be Spain’s brother, as equal partners. It goes beyond money or cultural
differences. We seek the right to have more control over our economy, our
politics, our social services.
The best way to solve any problem is to remove its
cause. We seek the freedom to vote. Every individual has a right to expect this
from his government, while also sharing equally in the benefits. In Europe
conflicts are resolved democratically, and that is all we ask.
We seek justice and equality for our diverse society.
Over 17 percent of our 7.5 million people came from abroad. But we are united in
our call to let us be heard at the ballot box.
Artur Mas is president of
Catalonia.
