After Scots, Catalans show support for secession
After the Scottish independence referendum last year, the north-eastern Spanish Province of Catalonia also held an unofficial independence referendum recently. like in Scotland-UK case, wherein the pro-independence Scottish Nationalist Party won 55 out of 57 Scottish seats in Westminister, Catalan nationalists also came extremely close to an outright victory, winning a huge majority of the seats in the local legislature. And just like the Scottish Saltire flies across the sparse mountainous region of the UK, the alternating yellow and red stripes of the Catalan Senyara gently waves across most balconies in Barcelona. On the Barcelona metro, announcements are made in Catalan, followed by English with Castillian Spanish relegated to the last. Separatist movements used to be the preserve of less developed nations for years, and despite the occasional violent separatist movement in Europe, such as that in Spain's Basque region and in northern Ireland, Europe has been by and large peaceful. This has led to incredible economic progress and growth across the western part of the continent. It is this economic growth that possibly has led to the increase of a long suppressed sub-nationalism across Europe's nation states.
The modern nation state in Europe did not exist before World War I and only after two bloody wars and the aftermath of the 1946 Potsdam conference, were borders finally drawn. Immense human migration, although nothing on the scale of what occured in India in 1947, took place. And in drawing up the modern European nation states, some peoples found themselves part of a new nation state, sometimes rather tenuously. This was bound to unravel. The seemingly endless disintegration of Yugoslavia starting in the 1990s, and the breakaway of the Baltic states from the Soviet Union at the same time, proved that in Eastern Europe, peoples felt that there were greater economic opportunities in creating new countries. Some countries even split peacefully, like Czechoslovakia which had the ‘Velvet Divorce' to break up into two nation states.
Yet, Western Europe remained the preserve of large nation states united by a common cause. But economic progress and a younger demographic which has been made to realise its own history have led to movements such as those in Catalonia and Scotland. European leaders rightfully fear that if these two flashpoint Provinces do achieve independence, potential nationalist leaders will emerge across the continent. leader in national capitals across Europe will have to realise that sooner than later they will have to devolve power. Of course, there are lessons to be drawn from these movements across the world, but for now, it remains to be seen if there will be a re-drawing of European boundaries that will take the continent back to the Middle Ages where it was a mess of Duchies and small kingdoms.