Quebec and Scotland Said No to Secession, but Catalonia Is Still Going to Try

“Like Quebec, like Scotland, Catalonia also wants to decide its political future,” the Spanish region’s secessionist president, Artur Mas, said after about 1.9 million of his compatriots turned out to vote yes to independence in a nonbinding ballot on Nov. 9. Never mind that both Quebec and Scotland decided to stay in their respective unions with Canada and Britain when they were given the chance to leave. “I ask the people of the world, the governments and media, to help us to convince the Spanish government to sit down at the table to talk,” Mas said from his perch in Barcelona. “We deserve to hold a normal legal and binding referendum to decide our political future as a nation.”

The Spanish government in Madrid thinks otherwise. While British Prime Minister David Cameron and his Scottish predecessor, Gordon Brown, made a great show of courting Scotland’s voters before their September referendum, the conservative government of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has gone on the attack. He appealed to Spain’s Constitutional Court, which issued two rulings that invalidated the Catalan poll. After the vote, state prosecutor Eduardo Torres-Dulce ordered regional police to find out who was responsible for opening up the public buildings used for voting. “You can’t ask the prime minister to negotiate over national sovereignty,” Rajoy said at a Nov. 12 press conference in Madrid. “Independence is bad for the Catalans, and it’s bad for the rest of Spain.”