It's frankly disgraceful that the Spanish state has turned to violence to suppress the democratic process.
But even then, you can't recursively deplete the meaning of the word "democratic" by tying it to pre-existing arbitrary constitutions, even more so when said constitutions trivially violates the right of people to self-determination.
a) the usual situation where some people don't participate in a regular referendum or election that most of the population and all authorities support as constitutional, and then
b) the situation in Catalonia where the referendum is only considered legal by some of the authorities, where other authorities have told voters to refrain from voting and are actively trying to prevent the voters from voting, and where a presumed 40-50 percent of the "electorate" don't even believe it's constitutional.
Let's not pretend that people that would vote "remain" are likely to participate in a vote they have been told by the some of the authorities not to participate in. Only the "leave" voters who believe the referendum is legal in the first place have a clear incentive to participate in it.
I can point to a HUGE number of laws that make a farce of the democratic process in almost any modern democracy. A short list that applies mostly to the USA but some to other countries also:
* Gerrymandering (the act of designing districts along demographic lines to influence an election outcome)
* First past the post voting (where voters can't vote for who they really want, they have to vote 'strategically' for the person they think will come first or second)
* Voter ID laws that seek to disenfranchise certain demographics by requiring hard(or expensive)-to-acquire ID they are less likely to have
I agree the Spanish central government seemingly had no choice but escalation. But that escalation is tragic and will only make Catalonia's independence inevitable, whereas it was not at all clear cut before this.
You kind of need to reach some critical mass to be able to organize a functioning nation. Getting to city-states could be viable, but I don't think it can go much farther.
It seems to me this constitution article was put in place to specifically specific regional identity issues that the country of Spain was built on. Spain is moreso a collection of regional identities than a firm national national identity.
As a counterexample, the Dutch constitution does not identify what the unity of the Dutch state actually means or that breaking Dutch unity is against the law a priori [1]. Historically speaking, this has not been a great concern despite historical [2] and modern [3] seperatist movements, because the Dutch "identity" has historically been synonymous with the Dutch nationality to a very large degree. The same cannot be said for Spain.
As a disclaimer, I'm not advocating identity politics here. I'm just trying to give a historical explanation.
[1]: The Dutch constitution does define treason but what constitutes treason is left rather vague and therefore up to a judge to decide. Would/should the same Spanish judge have deemed this referendum treason in the absence "state unity" laws? Not a rhetorical question.
Why? I agree that people who want to secede should be able to but I see no reason to restrict it to “groups that have a significant cultural claim”. That’s just leaving it up to those in power.
A non-democratic option would be the government breaking off without consulting the residents. Or a government saying people who live in a region aren't allowed to have a vote to decide their fate because politicians from other regions forbid it.
Additionally, to see why a group of people wanting to secede might also be unethical, think about this case. A country finds unobtanium in its land. Decides to build an unobtanium factory there, which costs 20% of GDP but it pays off with awesome employment growth and tax revenue. Now the inhabitants of that region don't like that their tax gets used mainly in poorer areas of their country and want independence. Fair? I don't think so. So voting to leave is not always a natural right. Only under agreed conditions with all the national territory is ok. Barring ethnic cleanses, war and stuff like that but nothing like that has happened in Catalonia's case.
O O
Very few independence movements are "fair". There are regions of every country in the world that generate a disproportionate amount of wealth relative to the others. There are regions with unique local identities that feel they're unfairly being squished out by others. There's no way to please everybody, and so countries essentially never respect independence votes and prefer conflict.
There are few countries today where people would say, "you know, let's undo our independence." There are a lot of people who say "we can't let them become independent because it's bad for the people in the other regions." People thought America's independence was an ass-backwards and illegal decision because those fools were trying to get a free ride off of England while keeping all the resources to themselves. They, just like nearly every country that opposes secession, decided war would be a good idea to end it.
There is no way Catalans could organize a legal referendum. That's something which is not going to change in the foreseeable future, specially having seen how the Spanish government has been behaving the last 15 years.
Whenever you say to Catalans: this is not a legal referendum, you loose all legitimacy if you do not suggest how this can be made legal. And by that I mean a serious, well intentioned proposal, not simply a way of kicking the problem down the road, as the often repeated "let's change the constitution to allow for a referendum". This is positively never, ever going to happen, so it can be considered a joke.
Something can be democratic and illegal - when laws are enacted to prevent certain applications of democracy, as it appears to be the case here. Something can also be democratic and undesired - many on here that Brexit is an example of that.
But words have meanings. A referendum if held under basic voting and independence rules is by definition democratic. Even if it concerns unilateral secession.
Definitely not, not under any circumstance. But if backed by a big (60%?) part of the population, then yes. Referendum are dangerous beasts, but not allowing popular opinion to be heard once in a while is even worse.
So, as happens with democracy, which is "the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time", a referendum is the worst option, except for all the rest.
Anyway, the referendum specifically doesn't have any anti-fraud guarantees and people who don't want independence aren't going to vote so the "yes" is going to win 9X% most likely.
It's not like they would be forced to act on the result, right, or would international law compel them to respect it?
I simply wonder why the national government decided to try to stop it in the first place, instead of letting it go ahead and then ignore the outcome.
Also, the law most often mentioned - Spanish constitution - mentions that Spain cannot be divided. This is just a referendum. The goal is the division of course. But the referendum itself is not changing anything.
And to say that there's no choice but to apply the law isn't true, when it comes to questions this big the system of: make law=> judicial system interprets=> police enforce breaks down, because it's a political question not a legal question. Eg. how Uber in London is implicitly political, it's too big to be held by courts and keep politicians out. Spanish politicians absolutely had some leeway in how they dealt with this.
It's illegal to hold a vote like this in North Korea too and the judicial process would be similarly "forced" to follow the law. Still democratic.
A government saying that voting in a specific circumstance is illegal doesn't make the voting anti-democratic. That simply makes it illegal.
Another example is that under 18s can't vote in most countries. If 17 year olds decide to get together and vote anyways, what they're doing isn't anti-democratic. They're just doing something illegal. They're violating a restriction of democracy.
We already had tons of examples for why this is a very poor criteria. IMO, this vote is just one more example.
There's nothing in that suspension that implies beating people who want to participate. Spain brought police and paramilitary police in the thousands in preparation for this.
There's clearly a lot more going on that just a government trying to follow the law. The 9N 2014 voting was similarly suspended and this didn't happen. Also check out how the population in several Spanish cities sent their police and paramilitary police to Catalonia with chants of "a por ellos" (roughly, "go get them") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA1Sw-szU6w
How do you morally justify that a people who according to all recent polls has a 80+% support for an independence referendum is governed by those who are happy using violence against them, their children and their elders to suppress a peaceful attempt to decide about their own future? In my opinion they have lost all legitimacy to govern or tax these citizens.
Spain has pushed this to a situation in which the only way for Catalans to have a representative government and have their rights (including that of self-determination) respected is independence. I wonder how many more Catalans have embraced the independence movement today.
A better example would be California or Texas. I’m pretty sure we would not see the preemptive harsh measures Spain has engaged in.
Obviously the situations are somewhat different. While I can actually imagine something wacky like that getting on the California ballot, it's not something very many people in California or elsewhere would take seriously.
There is clearly no internationally accepted right to self-determination. Maybe there should be, but I'm not sure it can be made fair and practical.
The status quo seems to be:
> According to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the UN, ICJ and international law experts, there is no contradiction between the principles of self-determination and territorial integrity, with the latter taking precedence. ¹