Viva Espana !!

[mistermack]

Should every region everywhere have the right to call a vote for independence?
Where do you draw the line, where you deny some and allow others?

Czechoslovakia managed to sort itself out peacefully, and so has the UK. (so far)

The US had a civil war over it. The Chechens got stomped on.
Is it always the splitters who have the moral high ground? I find this kind of nationalism pretty repulsive. Especially when a richer region wants to split, so as not to have to share it's assets.

[Svartalf]

seriously, I'm not even sure Catalunya, has a broad enough back to wing it alone, and they are notoriously the wealthiest region in Spain.

[Hermit]

Every few years some people in Western Australia start a secessionist movement, usually during a mining boom. Over a period of two or three weeks a couple of dozen articles are written and television reports are broadcast in a style that betrays desperation to increase readership/ratings. Then the secessionists decide that their time is better spent drinking Swan Lager in a pub.

New Zealanders, by way of contrast, try to become Australia's seventh state. They go about it with cunning. Using reverse psychology, they pretend that they want to remain apart from Australia. So far we have not fallen for their trick, and it is unlikely we ever will. We have learnt our lesson about what it is like to live with Kiwis when we allowed them to turn Bondi into little Auckland during the 70s. At that time posters went up all over the islands of the long white cloud saying "Would the last one to leave NZ please switch the light off."

[JimC]

What Spain needs is an invasion from a foreign country, which will unite all Spaniards. Portugal or France would be good choices, with the dark horse being Morocco, attempting to restore the Moorish era...

[pErvinalia]

Mexico should colonise Spain.

[Hermit]

What Spain needs is an invasion from a foreign country, which will unite all Spaniards. Portugal or France would be good choices, with the dark horse being Morocco, attempting to restore the Moorish era...

Last time Moroccan troops were used to sort Spain out it resulted in Franco's 35 year dictatorship.

[rainbow]

[Svartalf]

What Spain needs is an invasion from a foreign country, which will unite all Spaniards. Portugal or France would be good choices, with the dark horse being Morocco, attempting to restore the Moorish era...

Portugal once used to be a Spanish province, and has enough work remaining independent without trying an invasion that it doesn't have the population for.

France is too busy trying to maintain peace in its former African colonies to devote its precious few soldiers to an invasion of Spain, that we don't want anyway, we have enough problems with our own basques without also seizing Spain's, and Cataluña that's a hotbed of trouble currently, and then we'd have to deal with Galician and Andalucian identities...

yeah, the Arabic/African invasion is the key, but they don't yet realize it has started. I don't know how many the the boat people that arrive through the south coast, Ceuta and Melilla stay in Spain and how many go on to invade France.

[mistermack]

The impetus is there for every poxy little region to want "independence" if they are in the EU.
You don't need the safety of belonging to a big state, when you will still be belonging to an even bigger state, before long. The EU mandarins must be looking at the prospect of dozens of copycat unilateral declarations of independence if this one succeeds. There's two Basque ones waiting in the wings, keeping a sharp eye on the Catalans.
That's why the EU have come out so strongly in favour of the Spanish government, they are shitting a brick.

They could stop the tendency in it's tracks, by declaring that no succeeding state would be allowed into the EU.
And passing it into EU law. You could make an exception for instances like the Czechs, where both parties agreed.