Catalonia Declares Independence; Spain Approves Central Takeover Of Region (npr.org) 579
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.
nasty situation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:nasty situation (Score:5, Informative)
Every time a governed people declare independence it has been "illegal" by the current government's law. The US revolution was illegal according to English law, the Mexican Revolution was illegal according to Spanish law, etc. The only question is, can they defend and enforce their independence by use of martial force.
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When the dominant nation is broke, and the independent region has economic power, all they have to do is 'general strike' and bleed the rulers.
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I agree with the rule of law argument, but the brutal repression of free expression served to invalidate the law and confirm the righteousness of independence. But that may be a distinctly american/puritan perspective.
"An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law." - Dr. Martin Luther King
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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.
That isn't really feasible.
If Spain does nothing now, eventually Catalonia will do something that Spain must respond to. I mean, Catalonia wants independence because they want something that Spain isn't giving them, right?
Ignoring it may allow time for reconciliation, but most likely it will simply allow Catalonia to prepare its defense and seek allies.
I have no opinion for or against Catalonian independence, but it is quite reasonable for Spain to respond with immediate and decisive military action if they
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Re:nasty situation (Score:5, Insightful)
While I generally support self determination for geographic regions the law in Spain does seem to make the declaration of independence illegal.
Could someone explain this one to me? So you support independence unless the mother country passes a law declaring it illegal lol. Not exactly difficult for the mother country to do that, is it? In fact almost all countries have laws against secession. The Scottish referendum was an oddity (and frankly I still don't know why Cameron even allowed it).
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IIRC, the UK and Scotland agreed there would be a vote and that recent referendum was that agreement being upheld thereby making any successful vote of independence legal. Scotland joined under the assumption that such a vote would happen just as the UK agreed they would accept the results of such a vote.
As opposed to having no legal framework or agreement that would "allow" a vote of independence as in the case of Spain.
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The usual cave-men are at work here, believing that violence will solve all of their problems. The actual truth is that Spain is economically in much worse shape than Catalonia and was content to just leave it at that. The Catalonians obviously were fed up with this state of affairs. This also means that if Spain now takes over by force in Catalonia, they will be massively hurting themselves. But it takes two brain-cells to rub together to see that, and the cave-men in power do not have those. All they need
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Declare that it has no standing in law and ignore it
Ignoring a self declared independent region when they have ignored the high court's ruling of their actions against the constitution of the land is not likely to make the situation better.
Either that or Spain is going to need a few thousand extra prisons to keep up with the sedition charges.
Other than a handful of people who assaulted police officers the only arrests have been members of parliament. The bitching about citizens is something that you CAN ignore.
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The problem is not the referendum or the result, it's the Spanish constitution.
We've been saying the same thing about the 2nd amendment for years. A constitution either needs to be fully upheld or amended by the decision of the entire people. Picking and choosing which parts to follow and when devalues the entire concept.
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for assaulting police officers
self defence defence
You don't english well do you.
But I'm actually interested. Given how only 12 people were arrested for assaulting police officers, just what was your "self defence" going to be? Charge with an axe in your hand?
Fuck off.
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That's what they did last time, in 2014, and you can see how well it worked then.
That aside, one of the main functions of a government is to maintain the rule of law. To repeatedly sit back and allow people (and elected officials, at that) to openly defy the highest court in the country when they have pre-notification of the date and method of their defiance would be a tremendous
It's a complicated thing (Score:5, Insightful)
We kind of have some experience with this in Canada... the problem will be the separatists who want full autonomy (fine) will not care if they drag non-separatists with them (not fine), and likely won't even respect the concept of parts of their region separating from them to stay with Spain (also not fine).
Spain kind of has a responsibility to the citizens of the region who DON'T want to go (even if there's only one of them, because they don't have a lot of responsibility for those who are at least technically traitors due to acts of sedition).
And if you magically get all that sorted out, there's still the endless bickering over how to divide up Spain - borders, debt share, citizenship rights, trade agreements, government pensions... every single item on the list (including bajillions of items I've likely overlooked) has the potential to bring the two sides to civil war.
Good point, but traitors support the enemy (Score:2)
> Spain kind of has a responsibility to the citizens of the region who DON'T want to go
Good point.
> they don't have a lot of responsibility for those who are at least technically traitors
It seems to me traitors support the enemy. Separately isn't treason, I don't think. If during World World II some people in California were trying to have California join the Axis, acting in unlawful ways to make that happen, they would be traitors. I don't know that voting to separate into two friendly nations is
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This is something that all modern countries are going to have to come to grips with. It's unreasonable to expect that the borders drawn up in 1945
Re:It's a complicated thing (Score:4, Insightful)
How big does a border region have to be to have it's own vote?
e.g. If CA left the USA, the north coast, the central valley and Sierra would leave CA and (some parts) rejoin the USA. Perhaps also SanDiego.
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It's funny you mention that, because as much as I think subdividing a modern nation is a far worse idea than trying to fix its internal divisions... I'm starting to think that maybe the US states would be happier if they were organized into two or three different entities instead of all under the same federal government. There's about 30% of the nation that can't reconcile its politics with the other 70%.
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>the minority get out voted and have to suck it up or leave.
People really don't like becoming Displaced Persons. Ultimately this comes down to how willing people are to use force.
>that requires a willingness to negotiate in good faith.
Usually they believe they are, but ALSO usually both sides have issues on which they are inflexible, and they're seldom issues the other side is willing to make concessions on.
>This is something that all modern countries are going to have to come to grips with.
As the
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The trend is clearly in the opposite direction The 20th century was the death of large empires. First it was the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires that failed. Then the British, Dutch and French Colonial empires. India partitioned. The Soviet Union collapsed. Yugoslavia fell apart.
The most prosperous countries in the world today are either small countries (like the Nordic states) or actual city states
Re:It's a complicated thing (Score:4, Insightful)
In the Catalonian case over 90% of voters voted to leave
90% of the 43% of the population who voted in a referendum that had been declared illegal by the Spanish government. Given that the separatists are far less likely to respect the view of the Spanish government than the loyalists, I think that probably skews the results more than a little.
On the other hand a recent opinion poll showed that 41% were in favor of independence and 49% opposed (source [bbc.com]).
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Re:It's a complicated thing (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you are saying is no matter how many people want to leave, as long as you crack enough heads open during the vote to keep people away from the polls, you can always claim a minority want to leave?
No, he is saying that unless the vote is fair and open and legally legitimate, there will be people who don't bother to vote because they've been told that the vote is irrelevant. Anything else is essentially just taking a survey from a biased group.
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If you don't show up for a vote, your vote isn't counted. It's an entirely self-inflicted wound, and it does not give any special rights to complain afterwards. In particular, it does not convey the right to count all non-voters as being in one camp or the other. By not voting they've shown they have no interest in the process and don't care either way.
As for the poll, that was taken before Madrid decided to go all stormtrooper on Catalonia. That changed the opinion of a lot of people.
Also, I'm more than a
I'm confused (Score:3)
Is this "Spexit" or "Cexit"?
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Catalexit?
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"civil war"
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cout
Breakaway regions (Score:2)
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Except that all the far lefties who lead these "independence" movements want to immediately join up with the EU, thereby forfeiting their independence to Brussels. It's a bad joke.
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Maybe they don't care so much about some sort of chest-thumping independence, but just that they want local control of local issues and think Spain doesn't respect that enough? Perhaps Brussels executes its authority differently than Madrid?
Spanish Civil War, part 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Why Geographic Income Concentration is Bad (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an excellent example of why to avoid and diffuse geographic income concentration. When a high concentration of wealthy workers are gathered into one region, they'll soon want to secede so that they can live in a country free of poor people. The super-rich have options like Monaco, St. Bart's, and ships like The World and Utopia, but wealthy workers can't afford these so they go for secession.
You see similar secessionist urges coming from Silicon Valley for the same reason. No word on what they plan to do with their large homeless population though, perhaps they'd make it a law of their new country that anyone below a certain net worth would be exiled? No word on who will clean the toilets etc. either. Maybe they'll have very loose immigrant labor policies so that people can commute across the border?
Re:This is Why Geographic Income Concentration is (Score:4, Insightful)
Apart from the fact that they were a nation of their own once, have a separate cultural identity and language that was suppressed via fascist dictatorship, your correct, it's just a group of rich people gathering together to screw the poor.
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How, precisely, do you propose to diffuse income over everywhere? Rivers and coasts have been the rich places throughout human history. Getting a UBI to keep the poor afloat is hard enough, without some cockamamie scheme to demand that the Smythe-Worthingtons live in whatever empty place on top of that.
Perhaps offer tax incentives to companies based on their geographical spread. Being packed into one campus like Google would be the most heavily taxed scenario, and being spread thinly everywhere would be ideal and offer the greatest tax advantage. I'm not asking wealthy people to move to the boonies, I'm asking companies to offer employment in the boonies so that there might be more wealthy people there and less where all the other wealthy people are. Otherwise you get the runaway positive feedback loop th
Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:4, Insightful)
... and I'm not talking military protection. I don't think anyone is about to invade Catalonia (besides the Spanish). I'm talking about protecting citizen rights, protecting their economy, protecting their well being. There are certain economies of scale a country of Catalonia won't have on their side. It will be a lot more expensive to be independent. That extra money they spend in taxes to Spain will quickly be gobbled up by their new extra expenses.
Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Insightful)
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Greece was rolling downhill straight into a manure pile regardless of the EU.
The EU can't magically fix entrenched internal problems.
Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:4, Informative)
Greece was taking out stupendous loans, on top of fudging their books. They landed in a mess of their own making.
Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:4, Insightful)
LMOL uh no Potsy. Goldman Sachs helped them big time.
That's downright silly. Goldman Sachs are no angels, but blaming them for the Greek crisis is similar to a bad craftsman blaming his tools. All Goldman Sachs did was enable multiple incompetent and dishonest Greek governments to screw all pooches they could get their paws on. It was not Goldman Sachs that was deciding Greek policy. It was consecutive Greek governments from all parties. They chose to cook the books, they enabled and enjoyed massive corruption, they stole and wasted money like it was going out of style. And it was the Greek people that cheerfully and repeatedly voted those characters in, because they liked the populist give-aways, and thought the rest of Europe has a duty to pay for their lifestyle. So, sorry, I'm not at all buying into the Greek victimhood narrative.
Greece had a golden opportunity to get loans at a very low interest rate, because lenders saw "Germany" on the EU credit card Greece was using. Had the Greeks had even a smidgen of vision, they'd have used this to invest, modernize their economy and infrastructure, increase their productivity. Instead, they wasted all the money on corruption, on give-aways, on the most inefficient and bloated public sector in the EU (jobs for the boys!), on the earliest retirement age in the EU, and so on. And when the brown and smelly hit the fan, what was the Greek reaction? Do you think any of them - politicians, or population, say "we fucked up, we need to fix it somehow"? No, they hurled insults at the EU and Germany, they demonstrated in the streets, they ran referendums trying to blackmail Europe into keeping paying for their undeservedly high quality of life. And I still don't see concerted effort to fix the problems - even now, five years or more after the beginning of the issues, Greece is still almost at the bottom of the EU countries in the Corruption Perception Index published by Transparency International; only Bulgaria scores worse.
The EU had no interest in helping Greece.
First, that's bull. The EU went overboard in helping Greece - they got hundreds of billions in bailouts and bank recapitalization, creditors were forced to accept "haircuts", and so on. Second, why would the EU prioritize Greece for help? If it's about helping the quality of life of the population, there are many other countries in the EU that make do with much less money than Greece. For example, the average Bulgarian's annual income is only about one third of the average Greek's. If anybody has a claim on European help, it's the poorest countries, not Greece.
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IMO it's not so much Spain they depend on as the EU. So it really depends on whether the newly formed Catalonia can get membership into the EU and/or strike trade deals with the US/Japan/China.
IIRC, they resemble California a lot in this regard -- their economy depends on international trade and the rest of Spain is (in their view) holding them back.
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The issue is that the EU will not likely accept Catalonia in to the EU. Spain will obviously try to block it, but other EU nations also don't like the precedent it could set by allowing a region to separate but still maintain ties to the EU.
Trade deals with other countries are far more likely.
Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, Catalonia is very pro-EU, and as long as Spain still has a claim the EU has to defend the status quo. But if at some point Spain and Catalonia make a deal, then the EU would instantly welcome Catalonia.
They're not asking for anything that is opposed to EU values.
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> 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?
Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Interesting)
> 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.
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right to secede
Am curious your thoughts, how far does that go? The state, the county, the city, the municipality, the property, the region (being made of potentially multiple jurisdictions).
Is there a limit to that right and if so what is it? If there is not a limit, can any jurisdiction with 50% +1 secede from a host? And does the host have to consent in order for secession be legitimate in the eyes of other sovereign states?
Only talking about peaceful secession for obvious reasons.
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Am curious your thoughts, how far does that go? The state, the county, the city, the municipality, the property, the region (being made of potentially multiple jurisdictions).
I don't think there is an easy answer or a rigid answer for that. If a group of people can be recognized as a unit- an identifiable "people"; they have that right. That's a wishy-washy answer, I know; but, I don't think there is an easy hard-and-fast answer.
The group breaking away must be responsible for what they're doing and be ultimately self-governing. They would have to take on a fair share of the debt and obligations of their nation. You obviously couldn't have some guy on a ranch declare his ranc
Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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According to "Lost Cause" revisionism, created by A. W. Pollard in 1866, it was all about tariffs; tariffs he conveniently failed to mention were passed AFTER the south seceded. It was his attempt at lionizing the Confederacy by erasing the stain of slavery from their "just" cause. And for 150 years of southern school children, it worked.
It's quite simple: thanks to the 3/5's compromise, Dixiecrats and northern allies enjoyed complete domination of all three branches of government for almost 50 years, and l
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What was it about then?
Money and power. Slavery was an terrible byproduct
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What was it about then?
Same as always. Power (facilitated by money, facilitated in large part for the South by slavery).
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News flash, it was never about slavery.
Slavery might not have been the only concern; certainly the South had other concerns such as the industrial North passing laws that hurt the mainly agricultural South, but the number one issue was slavery.
The slave owning South was about to become a minority of states to the non slave owning states. They were worried that slavery could be made illegal (and their entire economy tanking as a result).
Anyone that says the war had nothing to do with slavery is either being deceitful or has been duped by someone
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To be specific, it was about power and the potential loss of such.
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Yeppers.
Ultimately, it was about rich people in either the North or the South losing their influence and power.
Slavery was the proximate cause, of course. No doubt about that. And that radical in the White House...
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After 50 years of political domination, they could not conceive of living in a country where they weren't in control of the nation.
Re: Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Informative)
According to the Confederacy, it was the only factor. [archive.org]
Re: Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Insightful)
The Articles of Secession disagree with you. Maybe the original authors should have consulted you first?
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News flash, it was never about slavery.
It wasn't about slavery on the Northern side, no. But the motivation to secede absolutely was all about slavery on the Southern side.
Oh, the proximate causes were a couple of generations of increasing tension and disagreement with the North, but the root of nearly all of that tension was slavery, especially the ongoing efforts of the North to ensure that new states entering the union were not slave states, thus gradually eroding the power of the slaveholding bloc. The final straw was the election in 1860
Re: Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Informative)
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The northern recruiting posters were about 'preserving the union'. Motivations varied, but most Northerners were still open racists, even most abolitionists.
Read what Lincoln wrote about the role of free blacks. Clearly he was a NAZI, deserved punching.
Re: Support Right to Independence (Score:3)
You do have to put it in context though. Slaves were sub-human machines to most of the US (both North and South) back then.
Take away the slaves is like taking away the H1Bs from a tech company or machines from a factory, itâ(TM)s not about the concept of slavery but the money and economy it represents.
It can be hard to conceptualize but the facts of those days were a bit different than our interpretation of it. To the south, the end of slavery meant the end of cheap labor and they feared the majority o
Re: Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The Civil War was about states rights and slavery represented just one of those rights. The southern states wanted to limit the power of the federal government.
This is absolutely incorrect. During the 50 years of democratic hegemony prior to to 1860, they constantly used the power of the federal government to abrogate the rights of "free" states to refuse the recognition of, or the extradition of slaves in their respective states.
I repeat: the south was not upset at the powers of centralized government; they were throwing a hissy-fit because those powers no longer belonged to *them*.
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Stupid racist, the south's secession was illegitimate because they didn't let male slaves vote for or against it. The Civil War was the United States rescuing American citizens from traitors.
And even if they did, the US would have still been morally justified to invade and free the salves, and execute all the slavers. The only difference is it wouldn't have been a civil war.
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Stupid racist, the south's secession was illegitimate because they didn't let male slaves vote for or against it.
That is an excellent point! (that slaves didn't get a choice in it- not the part about being racist). Slaves made up a minority of the South, but still, a large enough number that they probably would have tipped the overall support into remaining with the union. I doubt every white man in the South wanted independence, but I bet almost every black man wanted it not to happen.
Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:4, Informative)
Also 3/5s of male slaves counted towards apportionment. That means the south had more members of congress that way than if they only counted free citizens of those states. This gave them a lot more clout which lead to several decades of stalemate about the slavery issue. When the south started losing this political tug of war they decided "screw this!" and seceded.
Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Context Matters (Score:3)
So to be clear, you believe the Union was wrong in the civil war?
So to be clear you think the US was wrong to declare independence from the UK? Each situation is different and if we look at historical situations where this has happened nobody will think that those declaring independence were always wrong or always right: the context matters.
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Puerto Ricans don't pay US federal income tax, but they are citizens. Most US citizens are required to pay US income tax, even if living overseas.
Their 'state' government is a bankrupt disaster.
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Their 'state' government is a bankrupt disaster.
So is our President -- literally [politifact.com] and figuratively (lack of personal morality: lying, groping women, stiffing contractors, Charlottesville response, "pick a tweet", etc...)
Just sayin' ...
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> 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?
As their names imply, The Union was for a strong Union of States(Nations) while the Confederates was for a loose Confederation of States(Nations).
In this aspect, the Union was wrong to oppose them from leaving just as it would be wrong to oppose Texas or California or Hawaii from leaving today.
That being said, I would not be in favor of Texas leaving today if I knew that the plan upon leaving was to make a certain class of people second class citizens.
The Civil War should have been fought over Black Rights not on whether or not Nations (States) had a right to leave the United States(Nations).
Ironically, that is what is taught in public schools today that the Civil War was fought over Slavery.
*Sadly, since the Civil War, the meaning of State has been lost and no longer means Country/Nation like it once did.
The States had quit being "States" in the true meaning of the word State long before the civil war though. By that point they were already more like provinces than independent nations that were loosely bound together. "States Rights" movements and trying to return to a more confederate group of States was a reaction to becoming a minority of states that allowed slaves. "States Rights" was not an issue until losing slaves was a threat. The only reason the South wanted a return to a confederation from the
"Protection" (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, I think Catalonia is making a big mistake here. There is no way they will be better off without the protection of Spain and the European Union.
Protection from what? From countries that would take most of Catalonia's economic output and use it for themselves?
Or maybe you meant "protection" against police beating and arresting citizens for trying to vote.
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Claiming the EU is taking Catalonia's economic output
Spain way more than the EU.
The only people arrested were those who fought with police
Man I hate when people LIE about actual events in a way so easily disproven [slate.com].
I mean, there is video everywhere on this showing that you are lying through your teeth - the Catalonian voters were doing the non-violent protest thing where they were simply staying in place to keep polls open, and being beaten for the trouble.
All you just did was show how you like covering fo
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Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:4, Informative)
You think Catalonia will have a hard time getting back into the Union? I bet they'd trade Spain for it in a heartbeat...
Spain without Catalonia is essentially Greece when it comes to how broke they are.
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However it works out, Spain is now broke. They can't afford a civil war, nobody can, but Spain can't even really get started.
Next step is 'general strike' in Catalonia, not extensive shooting.
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Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Informative)
Why should they need to forgo the protection of the EU -- as a european entity, would their membership be rejected?
Their membership would almost certainly be rejected. For one thing, they would need approval of all member states. Spain isn't going to give their's. Not just to be vindictive cunts, but also because they wouldn't want to encourage independence movements in other regions like the basque country. Germany, Italy, etc, all have small independence movements in regions. They wouldn't want to help breakaway states by giving the safety net of the EU.
Catalonia won't get EU membership. Not right away and perhaps not for a long time if ever.
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as a european entity, would their membership be rejected?
Spain is a member; Catalonia is not. If they were no longer part of Spain, they would have to become a member in their own right.
They would have to petition for membership, negotiate terms, and persuade the current members of their suitability.
Plus, the EU would have to recognize them as independent nation in order to consider their application in the first place.
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Are you a historically separate ethnic identity from your neighbors who has occupied your land longer than your government has existed? Then yes, I support you. (This means, of course, that I also support sovereignty for Native Americans and native Hawaiians.
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No, because he supported the "rights" of German settlers who were attempting to take over neighboring countries by colonization. They had no such right to that land.
Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Support Right to Independence (Score:5, Insightful)
I fully support the right of any region to decide who rules them (if decided by fair and free referendum).
All members of my census block have voted unanimously to succeed from the country and immediately cease any and all tax payments to local and national taxing authorities.
Thanks for your support.
Duely noted- you shall receive a demand for $100,000 as your share of the national debt; plus several million in legal work to separate our two countries. Expect to produce a visa when reentering the country, failure to do so will be seen as an invasion- we shall retaliate by taking your land and putting you in a military prison. Because we have no trade agreement with you- you shall pay a major tariff on any goods you move between our two nations.
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...Learn to be like her...
OK, But I'm gonna have to stuff the bra with a couple boxes of Kleenex...
Yes, I will take them out of the actual Kleenex box first...
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If you want to look like Tomb Raider 1's Lara Croft, you might as well leave them in the box :-P
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Whoa wait, I saw this on CNN and now AC is telling me it's not Fake News?!? Are the Russian hackers funding this with Ukrainian ransomware campaigns or not?
Often, CNN will present misleading aspects of real news to serve their agenda. Sprinkling in a healthy amount of truth is the best way to sell a lie after all.
Hollywood has run out of ideas (Score:2)
Didn't we do that one already?
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Re:Hollywood has run out of ideas (Score:5, Funny)
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They knew proper process
What proper process? They tried to talk with Spain for years to organize a referendum that both sides would be happy with. Spain always refused.
There is no way out. The "proper process" you talk about is to ask Spain to agree with Catalonia to leave. With that logic, we should bring back the USA into the UK and ask the UK if it's ok for the USA to leave.