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Catalonia Declares Independence; Spain Approves Central Takeover Of Region (npr.org)
Readers share a report: Lawmakers in Catalonia have declared independence from Spain in a historic vote that prompted protests and celebration. The government in Madrid, vowing to halt any would-be secession, has authorized the Spanish prime minister to take over direct rule of the previously semi-autonomous region. The vote in the Catalan Parliament comes nearly a month after the region held a referendum on independence, over Spain's objections. The regional president then declared his support for separation from Spain but also called for talks with Madrid, in an ambiguous speech. Spain's central government, promising to crack down harshly if the declaration was real, told the region's leaders to make up their mind: Yes or no? Independence or not? Now it's final: Independence, Catalonia said.
While I generally support self determination for geographic regions the law in Spain does seem to make the declaration of independence illegal.
What I still don't understand is the heavy handed response to the referendum. Declare that it has no standing in law and ignore it; by interfering with it using unnecessary violence then refusing any dialogue the Spanish have given the Catalonians no options.
I can only see this one getting seriously violent from here. Either that or Spain is going to need a few thousand extra prisons to keep up with the sedition charges.
> I fully support the right of any region to decide who rules them
So to be clear, you believe the Union was wrong in the civil war?
Yes and no. I'm obviously against slavery and I'm glad the North intervened to stop slavery. With that said, yes, the South had the right to declare independence. It is probably turned out better for both the North and the South long term that the North won, but, yes, South had right to secede, even if they did it for an utterly despicable reason.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I grew up in rural Nevada and there's a few kooks that have done just that. There's an unofficial policy to just leave them alone if they don't cause any trouble. Instead of fighting them over taxes, it's easier just to put a lien on their property and wait for them to die.
If you look up those "laws that hurt the mainly agricultural South" you'll find out that that is just a rephrasing of issues regarding slavery; for example, the South was really mad that the Northern States didn't let them send cops up north to capture any black people they had papers claiming ownership of.
"States' Rights" actually meant the right to travel to other States and impose your own State laws on people physically in those other States if you claimed they were from your State. They wanted, for example, to take a bunch of slaves with them to a State where slavery was illegal, and to be able to force the locals to enforce not the local laws, but the laws of the State that the visitor was from. It is just a crazy idea that doesn't work if you think about it, but they demanded it all the same and went to war over it.
Don't hide behind a well-known veneer that doesn't even cover the shit.
IMO it comes down to, did the people in question participate directly in deciding their fate already? Why are they part of what they want to separate from? If the political unit you're a part of was created without the consent of the community, then IMO they forever have the moral right of self-determination.
But if your ancestors made that choice and the political unit you're a part of was joined willingly by the community, and is largely intact, then your community has the right of self-determination because you already made that determination. Changing it is to strip away the prior legit determination from others.
Catalonia has never had freedom in the modern world, they're not a part of a place called "Spain" because they chose to be. So I think they should be allowed their choice. I feel the same way about Kurdistan; they never had their choice, so it is still out there waiting to be claimed.
Scotland should be allowed to choose again and again, because the system that they chose to be a part of allows them to review their decision. Americans can make this decision again too, but it requires a Constitutional Amendment. If you have the votes, you can secede legally, but without the votes you can't claim to have a stronger determination of the will of the People than was exercised in forming the Union in the first place.
It always requires a contextual analysis.
So to be clear, you believe the Union was wrong in the civil war?
Did the US take a vote in the entire British empire before seceding? Fact of the matter is that the US couldn't be the nation it is without both being the rebellious region and quelling a rebellious region. Nation-building is also a wonderfully asymmetric process, if Catalonia was a sovereign state would you force it to merge with Spain, because a majority in the united territories wanted it? Hell no. But if you want to leave, you can't.
The "consent of the governed" is a funny concept that lead to extreme results whether you think power flows upwards or downwards. Do the people in Washington DC delegate power to the states and counties, or do the counties and states grant power upwards? If it's the latter, they should at every level be able to withdraw their support. In fact, in the extreme *you* should be able to withdraw your support to be one of the "governed" and be the literal king of your castle. I doubt the FBI or the army agrees.
In the other extreme where you say no, California can't just leave without the rest of the US having a say you're tumbling down the hill towards a world government where you can't just hog Earth's resources just because they're where you live, pollute the whole world and so on. I think it's natural to separate those two points, did the Confederacy have a right to secede? And if an independent nation wanted to re-introduce slavery, should other nations intercede on the population's behalf?
If you condition the former on the latter, you're basically saying "you can have your independence if I like what you plan to do with it" which is a bit like saying you can have free speech if I like what you say. Either you support people's right to unilaterally secede for better or for worse or you think it's a collective decision that should be made by the whole. It's not a particularly complicated principle, even though the results get pretty complicated in practice.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
At the time of the US civil war, most of the modern western world had agreed that slavery was abhorrent. France and the UK had some leanings toward supporting the Confederates for various reasons, but backed off once the war became about slavery since they did not want to be seen as pro-slavery.
The form of slavery in the south was particularly brutal, it was hereditary, and it was chattel slavery (slaves not considered to be people but personal property), and this form was unlike most other historical forms of slavery. It was not just a "cheap labor" form of slavery or indentured servitude. If the south feared the loss of their brutalized free labor, then screw them!
It is nothing like taking away H1Bs or undocumented immigrants. Those workers are allowed to move around, you cannot kill or beat these workers, you cannot maim them to prevent them from running away, you cannot take their children away and sell them for a profit; it is legal to teach them how to read and write, they can improve their position in life, they can decide to take off and go back to a different country if they wish. Not so with civil war era slaves. If the south was basing their economy on the ground up bones of the innocent, then that economy deserved to utterly collapse.
There is no defense for such an economy. This is the shame of the Southern states. This is also the shame of the Northern states, both for their own earlier slavery, and their tacit acceptance of the slavery situation.