Time for Spain to say ‘adios’ to Catalunya

In Catalan, Catalonia is Catalunya. Catalan sounds a lot like Spanish to the casual passerby, with its musicality and rolling rrrrrrrrs, but when you listen, you can hear the differences, writes Suzanne Harrington. 

It’s not necessarily more beautiful — the Spanish word for welcome, bienvenido, becomes ‘benvinguts’ in Catalan — but it is distinctly different. Thinking of Catalunya as Spanish is like calling Scotland English — it’s just not. Beyond language, everything else is different too — the food, the culture, the politics, the religion. And in the case of football — FC Barcelona better.

On September 11 every year, Catalunya celebrates its own national holiday. This holiday commemorates the September day in 1714, when Catalunya lost a war with Spain and became ruled by Madrid — during football matches at Camp Nou, at 17 minutes and 14 seconds, fans stand and chant, not for the team, but for independence. On September 11 in Barcelona, multinationals like McDonalds have long been spray-painted not by animal rights activists, but by Catalan nationalists — Hamburguesa No, Butifarra Si. They don’t want American hamburgers, they want Catalan sausages.

Franco did a lot for Catalan nationalism by banning the language, suppressing the culture, and imposing Spanish Catholicism on a region that leans towards atheism. You don’t get flamenco in Catalunya — instead, people dance the sardanya, a complicated, sedate circular dance organised on Sunday mornings in town squares. They don’t like bullfighting, but prefer making human towers — where the whole village literally stands on layers and layers of each other’s shoulders — and their national saint is not the Spanish James, but Jordi – George — the same one as England. They regard Spain as a foreign country, its borders hundreds of kilometres away.

Whatever you think of nationalism — so often hijacked by jingoistic flag wavers, keen to hate people they have never met, while taking pride in past events in which they played no part — the fact is that Catalunya wants independence, and has done so for a very long time. Basically, since 1714.

Watching footage of everyone’s favourite city being overrun by Spanish Guardia Civil robocops, who indiscriminately bashed Catalan firefighters and Catalan old ladies alike, was shocking to the outside world; to Catalans themselves, it must have felt like a nightmarish Franco flashback.

Seeing masked police entering polling stations and ripping ballot boxes from the hands of voters is not something you expect in an EU country; neither is sending in violent, tooled-up police to suppress democracy in action. When this happens in other countries, we invade them. When it comes to what is happening in Catalunya, the EU remains silent. Doesn’t one of the basic EU rules ban member states from using state violence against its own people? Even if Catalunya doesn’t think of itself as belonging to Spain, they still don’t need to be bashed over the head for wanting to vote. This is the behaviour of dictatorships.

Spain, you have so lost. Say adios to Catalunya. It’s over.