The Historical Basis for Catalonian Independence

[JohannaK]

Catalonia should be annexed by Andorra.

You big trollish thing.

When that citizenship was imposed at the expense of the life of members of your family then it is an insult of the worst kind. I don't know about Joan or is family so I can't judge.

We would have not had it better with the Republic. Addressing another point, my grandparent's uncle was a Republican aviator who perished in the war, my grandmother had a shop which was destroyed by nationalist bombings (with no loss of life, fortunately), the second husband of my great-grandmother had to fake death to avoid death at nationalist hands in the Ebro.

There was an autonomous Anarchist Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War.

The only form of Catalonia worth existing IMO, just to see if it would work or become a Spanish Somalia.

It is amazing how much it achieved with the boycott of the central government to this "experiment" in sociology. In Aragon, the collectivisation of lands greatly boosted agricultural production, which receded when Líster troops forced the lands to readopt the individual property system under Communist Party directives.

Gangleri2001, the mother closest friend of mine works at the press department of Artur Mas himself, and his father, councilor of CiU at el Masnou (not so important).
I too have friends connected with the 400 bourgeoisie families elite group, politicians and the IESE. And one even very connected with CNI, Spain espionage agency.


Rest assured, when I say the Catalonia cannot be independent I can say it with conviction. To be anti-independency hasn't held me to be more or less connected with the 'upper classes'..

I must concur with gangleri here. I know you live in Sant Cugat, but you are definitely an extension of this Upper Diagonal society which concentrates most of the haute bourgeoisie of Catalonia, and which is by its own condition of wealthy and powerful reactionary and opposite to any changes in the status quo.

BTW, is there any mod online? Can we ask them to split this conversation into another thread?

I support this.

 

[Dachs]

Breaking up a post into constituent parts so you can argue against individual bits instead of the whole is somewhat incourteous, dude. Now I have to refute these things point by point because the "points" are all you have.

God, where do I start?

The beginning, right. Megalomaniacal was perhaps too strong an adjective, but they were certainly hegemonic, if not during the war itself, then certainly in the decades leading to it. Louis was nothing if not a long term planner.

Except that it's completely impossible to demonstrate any sort of plan on his part here.

I don't totally agree with John Rule, because he claimed that Louisine France was basically blameless for everything that happened after the Treaty of Nijmegen (I'm exaggerating his viewpoint slightly), but claims like this one leave gaps and loopholes big enough for Rule, Mark Thomsen, and those like them to drive a whole bus through.

He didn't need any by 1701, it was the culmination of an expansionist career that you conveniently listed above. The WSS was the opportunity needed to undo as much of Louis' achievements as possible. Just because he didn't take any active steps to expand his power during the WSS doesn't mean we can excuse the rest of his career, the designs of the past decades having become the status quo.

This is frankly ridiculous. First you claimed that the War of the Spanish Succession was Louisine imperialism and hegemonic war incarnate; now you've abandoned that argument and labeled it "punishment" for France's expansion in the 1670s, which is in itself a tacit acknowledgment that the Habsburgs and Maritime Powers wanted and planned this war - a statement that would go too far for most historians.

Why did Louis' earlier conquests need to be "undone"? Contemporary leaders did not seem to think they did: the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick had more or less formalized which of Louis' conquests everybody was more or less okay with him keeping which everybody wasn't okay with. The war started because Louis and Felipe accepted Carlos II's will instead of Leopold's interpretation of the partition treaty, not because the rest of Europe decided that it'd be a grand thing to beat the living crap out of France. The aim of "rolling back France" didn't become prominent until after the Battle of Blenheim. It was opportunistic, not a sine qua non for the allied powers, and rightly so, because nobody would be happy if Europe were returned to the way things were in 1672.

And it was not as though Louis was an inveterately aggressive monarch with whom the rest of Europe could not live in peace. He had effectively renounced conquests during the Nine Years War, and the maneuvering during the Treaty of Ryswick confirmed that. His goals in the 1701 war were fundamentally defensive. Yes, he overplayed his hand in 1700 and 1701, by having Felipe grant the asiento to French merchants and recognizing James II's son as the king of England. It's hard to see how the asiento negotiations were aggressive in nature, though, especially considering that the English wanted that right too and had a much less valid pretext for it. And recognizing the Old Pretender was not proof of French designs to destroy the English monarchy and replace it with a nest of Jacobites, but rather an unavoidable consequence of Louis' belief in the divine right of kings. It was insulting, it was arguably unnecessary, and it was not imperialistic or hegemonic or megalomaniacal in the slightest. Louis could not back this up and turn it into a threat even if he wanted to, and there's not a lot to suggest that he did want to.

this is evidently a misunderstanding brought about by a poorly worded sentence on my part; not help by my exaggeration for effect what with all the replacing "hegemonic" with "megalomanaiacal" and invoking the present tense all.

It's impossible to speak of hegemony and Louisine France in the same sentence after the Nine Years War, and difficult to do so before it. Louis just played the game, like everybody else.

Just because he had no choice in the matter doesn't make it any less necessary to oppose it, as you say (if the Spanish and Austrians had not been so stubborn the life long enemies Louis and William could have agreed on the Second Partition treaty and life could have gone on as normal).

Besides, he had no choice in accepting a Bourbon Spain, but he did have a choice in flooding the garrisons in the Spanish Netherlands with French troops and bringing the Bishopric of Liege on side to deprive the Dutch of their much coveted barrier. Finally, he didn't have to declare James Francis Edward Stuart the rightful James III on his father's death in 1701, undermining the shaky legitimacy of Queen Anne. This was the straw that broke the back of the majority of British public opinion and made the fate of English Succession dependent on the outcome of the War over the Spanish one (Clauses IV and V)

Besides, while it was clear that Philip was not Louis' puppet, it required the Treaty of Utrecht to stipulate that the crowns of Spain and France could never be held by a single person (Clause VI)- and although this wasn't an aim personally for the then ancient Sun King, it was definitely something the next generation or two could try. Again, Louis was in it for the long term.

I don't believe that the War of the Spanish Succession was systemically avoidable. It, or something like it, would almost certainly have happened given the respective objectives of the European Great Powers. I also don't believe that it occurred because Louis XIV was an aggressive expansionist, imperialist, or hegemon, and that painting him in that light is an artifact of British propaganda and clouds the issue.

Again, the stability of Anne's throne was not contingent on the unsupported opinion of a foreign monarch. Yes, as already mentioned, Louis' decision was unnecessarily antagonizing and silly. It was also not grounds for war.

The Netherlands issue was one of those reasons that war was probably unavoidable. For Louis, securing Felipe's patrimony and beating the Dutch and Austrians to the punch was the primary objective there; the same move struck the Dutch and Austrians as aggressive, Louis seizing a springboard to cross the Rhine and grabbing territory for himself. It was hard, if not impossible, to reconcile these viewpoints, especially in the climate of 1700-01. What happened there, and in Italy, was an issue of two incompatible understandings of security colliding into each other, not an instance of one side or the other seeking hegemony or acting purely aggressively.

Finally, the Spanish and French thrones could never legally be unified, and everybody who was familiar with Carlos II's will knew this. The will stipulated that any Spanish monarch had to be resident in Madrid, and if Felipe V succeeded to the French throne he could not do that. Louis did not renounce Felipe's rights in France because of ideological reasons - the divine right of kings issue again - not because he actually planned to unite the Spanish and French monarchies. If Louis had circumscribed Felipe's rights in that manner, he believed, he would thereby be ideologically undermining his entire basis for rule. Was this arguably silly? Sure. Was it aggressive? Again, no.

Because Stadtholder William was no Louis XIV. Even together, England and the Netherlands did not equal the population of France at that time. Besides, the purpose of William's life and career was always the thwarting of the ambitions of Louis, not Dutch hegemony, and that was the main purpose of the 1688 invasion, to force England into opposing Louis, not unreasonable given Charles II and James II's close ties with France.

See, this is silly. Louis was supposedly a bad guy, according to you, because he did aggressive things. When Leopold and Willem did aggressive things, though, they weren't bad guys because they weren't Louis. You can see how this looks hypocritical, right?

I didn't say that, either; I even freely admitted we did very well out of the Treaty of Utrect, screwing over our steadfast allies, the Dutch, and breaking promises with everyone from Austria, to Portugal, to the Catalans.

How you manage to twist a paragraph long statement basically saying "there was more to the WSS than Catalans you know" into some "Britain saved the world again at great expense to ourselves, isn't Britain wonderful?" Nationalist diatribe is beyond me.

I didn't mention how we managed to secure the Asiento, the Spanish Slave trade, thus further dipping our hands in the blood of innocents, or how our Textile industry took off because of the widespread destruction of the Flemish textile industry (and, coincidentally, the Polish Textile trade in the Great Northern War) or how Spain was important to merchants in itself as well as as access to lucrative trade in the Levant, because, frankly, it wasn't relevant to the issue Catalan independence. Maybe I should have been more careful in how I phrased it, but sometimes there just isn't time to add all the necessary asterisks and footnotes on the off-chance that somebody might take me for some swivel-eyed, foaming at the mouth, Daily Mail reading, blinkered nationalist.

By the by, a Marlborough/Wellington comparison doesn't really work. Marlborough was General, Government Minister and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary largely responsible for cementing and keeping the Grand Alliance together even if Blenheim or Oudenarde was no Waterloo.

EDIT: I've just re-read my original post and I'm even more puzzled- I didn't mention Britain; I said "the War of the Spanish Succession had everything to do with limiting the megalomanaical designs of Louis XIV..." I didn't even imply Britain working alone, you just assumed it! I don't have the post count for you to clock up precedent so I don't quite get where this is all came from.

I'm not trying to say that England/Britain did bad things in the war; that's not the point. My point is that you're painting Louis as, basically, Napoleon, which he wasn't, and assigning blame for the war to an aggressive, expansionist, imperialist French policy that simply did not exist at that time.

This understanding of Louisine policy has a very long history in Britain, for obvious reasons - it was first useful to paint the leaders of France as would-be hegemonic warlords, and then it later became popular and nationalistically appropriate to do so. More to the point, nobody else in the world cared to do so, or had a reason to. Trigger words exist. Bringing up these accusations of Louis and then protesting innocence when I refer to them as being part of a British nationalist tradition is like mentioning Protocols of the Elders of Zion and then being surprised at accusations of antisemitism.

This doesn't necessarily make you a Torygraph-reading, foaming-at-the-mouth borderline black shirt, but it does mean that your view of these events is constricted by a British viewpoint - "our great island story" and all that - that for whatever reason you haven't chosen to abandon. It's like how many Americans, even the ones that don't scream "Amuricuh! **** yeah!", think that the United States was justified in fighting the War of 1812 or that the United States won that war, when by any reasonable calculation it's impossible to say either of those things. They're just viewing it through the lens of an American nationalist historical tradition.

About the other stuff. I explicitly compared Marlborough to both Castlereagh and Wellington for a reason. Like Castlereagh, Marlborough was effectively in charge of the government and its foreign policy; like Wellington, he was also responsible for England/Britain's military commitment in the war. The point that I was trying to get across there was, again, that the War of the Spanish Succession was not like the wars of Napoleon. Fighting Napoleon meant fighting on the side of civilization against unbridled, unchecked aggression. Louis wasn't like that. But Marlborough often comes up in the same sort of conversations as Wellington and Castlereagh.

Besides, the only conceivable forms of civic nationalism in Latin Europe is Jacobinism-like forms of it and those are highly repulsive.

Or you could just be Euronationalist, which seems to me to be very unobjectionable.

 

[JohannaK]

Thou hast not answered to my question, Dachs.

 

[Dachs]

Thou hast not answered to my question, Dachs.

I don't see what's to expand on. Civic nationalism defines the nation as a community based on - to steal a phrase - sentiment and interest, not some murky primordialist racial ties or an arbitrary language. Ethnic nationalism is at least implicitly xenophobic, where civic nationalism, uh, isn't.

Ever hear about a guy named Ernest Renan?

 

[JohannaK]

Nope.

 

[Dachs]

Look him up, he's pretty chill.

 

[JohannaK]

Will do. *writes note*

 

[gangleri2001]

I don't see what's to expand on. Civic nationalism defines the nation as a community based on - to steal a phrase - sentiment and interest, not some murky primordialist racial ties or an arbitrary language. Ethnic nationalism is at least implicitly xenophobic, where civic nationalism, uh, isn't.

Ever hear about a guy named Ernest Renan?

What? That's civic nationalism? I though it had something to do with the state you belong to á la jacobinist. You see? Like when the English made up that British thing when they created the UK. Perhaps civic nationalism has many meanings and I've come across with those definitions closely related to the despiteful jacobinism for my entire life, to the point that civc nationalism to me equals jacobinism.

But if civic nationalism is what you say, in that case Catalan nationalism is civic.

 

[Dachs]

But if civic nationalism is what you say, in that case Catalan nationalism is civic.

You claimed that Catalan nationalism is based on the language you speak. That's exclusionary. Civic nationalism is intrinsically inclusive: a tool of unity as opposed to division.

 

[JohannaK]

See that's why I asked you to expand on it. I had not a clear view of what it was. It is more civic than linguistic indeed, language simply happens to be a factor of unity for most of us. And when I say most I mean almost everyone.

PD: I see this Benedict Anderson person talked about as influenced by Renan. Would you recommend him?

 

[Lohrenswald]

This civic nationalism seems kind of weird. It sounds like something that hinders people from going against the status quo.

 

[JohannaK]

I'd say it's kind of an opposite to that, actually, after reading the wiki article on Renan's Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?

It seems to me that it proposes a nation which is unified not only by a common past, but by the will of enlarging this common past by sharing the present. And when this will is not there any more by a region of the so-called "nation", it should be allowed to secede according to the feeling and sentiment of its people.

 

[eduhum]

Hello Mr. Upper Diagonal! What have you eaten today in the Real Club de Polo? Was Javier de Godó there? Were you reading La Vanguardia or watching 8tv? Having a master's degree from ESADE and IESE feels great, isn't it?

Now seriously. After what you've said I can clearly see that you belong to that unionist bunker of the Upper Diagonal of Barcelona. You guys would do anything in order to oppose independentism. The best of it is that you'll be the first ones to declare that you've always been independentists once we become an independent state.

I actually am not from Unió. Before the crisis, I'd go with PP. But then again, I'm not really into a single political party. And I don't like Camacho.
And no, I'm not Upper Diagonal, more of a Sant Cugat del Vallés xD. I liked CIU because of Lluís Recorder, the only decent and excellent man in there, but alas, he wanted to retire.
And my University is Navarra (yeah, OPUS DEI ).



Besides all this, I consider sad that you completely neglect my opinion based on who am I.

 

[Lohrenswald]

I'd say it's kind of an opposite to that, actually, after reading the wiki article on Renan's Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?

It seems to me that it proposes a nation which is unified not only by a common past, but by the will of enlarging this common past by sharing the present. And when this will is not there any more by a region of the so-called "nation", it should be allowed to secede according to the feeling and sentiment of its people.

I think it's silly to believe that even the majority of the population in an area have the same interests overall.

And it seems to me that in practice, people arguing against the general situation will be called traitors.

By the way, I read the article.

 

[JohannaK]

And it seems to me that in practice, people arguing against the general situation will be called traitors.

It happens. I can tell you. You could tell if you lived here. Sometimes I am amazed at how much they say we are the worst scum on Earth but they still don't want to get rid of us.

 

[Lohrenswald]

It happens. I can tell you. You could tell if you lived here. Sometimes I am amazed at how much they say we are the worst scum on Earth but they still don't want to get rid of us.

"They" being spanish/castillians and "we" being catalans, yes?

 

[gangleri2001]

You claimed that Catalan nationalism is based on the language you speak. That's exclusionary. Civic nationalism is intrinsically inclusive: a tool of unity as opposed to division.

No. It's not exclusionary because you said that civic nationalism is based on sentiment and interest, and it happens that in Catalan nationalism the Catalan language is at the center of the sentiment and, therefore, the identity of being Catalan. That's why adopting the language becomes a requirement though it's not necessary make it your mother tongue or that of primary usage. It requires knowing the language and some degree of daily militancy for it.

See that's why I asked you to expand on it. I had not a clear view of what it was. It is more civic than linguistic indeed, language simply happens to be a factor of unity for most of us. And when I say most I mean almost everyone.

Almost everyone? Even the fiercest Spanish unionists who hate Catalonia as much as they can are considered Catalans if they speak it on a daily basis.

I actually am not from Unió. Before the crisis, I'd go with PP. But then again, I'm not really into a single political party. And I don't like Camacho.
And no, I'm not Upper Diagonal, more of a Sant Cugat del Vallés xD. I liked CIU because of Lluís Recorder, the only decent and excellent man in there, but alas, he wanted to retire.
And my University is Navarra (yeah, OPUS DEI ).



Besides all this, I consider sad that you completely neglect my opinion based on who am I.

I haven't said anything about your political faction, I was referring to your social stratum. And if I neglect your opinion based on who you are is because, given your stratum, you belong to an ideological bunker and it's impossible to have any discussion with those in a bunker.

The best example of this ideological bunker is Javier de Godó and his whole Grupo Godó: he prefers to have a regional news agency and ask for subsidies in order to survive than becoming the largest privately held news agency of an independent Catalonia. And what about José Manuel Lara who has already stated that he'd ruin his Grupo Planeta if Catalonia becomes independent by making it leave the country overnight, leaving behind the whole infrastructure of the Grupo Planeta?

How the hell am I supposed to discuss with you while you claim to have personal contacts close to the CNI and you belong to the same social stratum of Javier de Godó or José Manuel Lara and expect you to change your views?

 

[JohannaK]

Almost everyone? Even the fiercest Spanish unionists who hate Catalonia as much as they can are considered Catalans if they speak it on a daily basis.

I have not said that people who speak Catalan are not Catalans. In fact I do not consider that a knowledge of Catalan is necessary to be a Catalan, although it would certainly be a bit of a difficult position, but thanks to the relatively healthy state of the language everyone who considers himself a Catalan should eventually know it.

What I referred to is the preservation of this healthy state of Catalan, which unites almost every single individual in the country, except for those idiots at PPC and C's.

 

[Arakhor]

For someone who appears to be deeply embedded in his own idealogical bunker, Gangleri, you'd probably do well not to start throwing stones, so to speak.

 

[Dachs]

No. It's not exclusionary because you said that civic nationalism is based on sentiment and interest, and it happens that in Catalan nationalism the Catalan language is at the center of the sentiment and, therefore, the identity of being Catalan. That's why adopting the language becomes a requirement though it's not necessary make it your mother tongue or that of primary usage. It requires knowing the language and some degree of daily militancy for it.

I think it's truly remarkable that you're attempting to tell me what I meant to say, and that my own interpretation of what I meant to say is wrong.