Yet, regardless, with the Catalan regional parliament in Barcelona declaring UDI (unilateral independence from Spain), and with the Spanish government in Madrid imposing direct rule on the region, the stage is set for a violent clampdown by a Spanish state that has already demonstrated its willingness to mete out violence during the course of this crisis. The outcome, unless sanity prevails, may well be bloody and brutal.

© REUTERS/ Yves Herman

A woman reacts while the Catalan regional parliament votes for independence of Catalonia from Spain in Barcelona

The possibility of such a scenario when it comes to the cause of Catalan independence is especially mind-boggling, because arrive in Barcelona and you are confronted not by a downtrodden city where a heavy atmosphere of oppression lingers — such as Belfast in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, or the occupied territories of Palestine today — but by one of the most modern and affluent cities in Europe, located in one of the richest regions of Europe.

Barcelona is a truly international city, one that is alive with tourists. The shops, cafes, restaurants and cantinas are bustling. Culturally, it boasts an abundance of riches, while its infrastructure and transport network — bus, rail and underground — is first rate. Yet here we are, witnessing a crisis that appears more compatible with the Barcelona of 1936 than 2017..

© AP Photo/ Santi Palacios

Protesters hold fake handcuffs as they take part a rally outside the Catalan parliament in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, Oct. 27, 2017.

I say “appears” because it would be a mistake to depict the current crisis as a re-run of the Spanish Civil War, despite the efforts of some to draw such a connection. The Catalan independence movement, as mentioned, is being driven not by anti-fascism or anti-colonialism, but by cultural nationalism and economic self-interest, during which both have been elevated to the status of political principle.

Spain today is a liberal democracy with a democratic constitution voted on and supported by the vast majority of Spaniards, including Catalans, when established in 1978. This being said, the alacrity with which Madrid deployed massed ranks of Guardia Civil riot police against unarmed civilians in Barcelona and elsewhere in the region on October 1, in an attempt to disrupt a referendum it deemed illegal, suggests that the germ of authoritarianism planted within the country’s political culture by its fascist dictator, Franco, is yet to be completely eradicated 42 years after his death.

In fact with every action he has taken during the present crisis, Spain’s Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, has only bolstered support for Catalan independence rather than minimize it. If politics is an art it is one he has failed to master to any meaningful extent. Because regardless of its provisions, the moment that a constitution is used as justification for unleashing violence against unarmed civilians as a first rather than last resort in any given crisis it loses legitimacy, as does the government acting in its name.

© REUTERS/ Susana Vera

Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy leaves his seat during a debate at the upper house Senate in Madrid, Spain, October 27, 2017

On the other side of the crisis, meanwhile, Carles Puigdemont and his separatist supporters have embarked on a kamikaze reach for independence regardless of the balance of forces arrayed against them. With the EU, Washington, indeed the entire international community, failing to register anything other than fulsome support for Spanish unity up to this point, one can only hope they have a plan B up their sleeves when it comes to facing down the wrath of a Spanish government that has, as said, proved it is prepared to batter, bludgeon and brutalize civilians who dare challenge or defy its writ. If not — if Puigdemont and his supporters do not have a plan B, given that plan A of appealing to Brussels for intercession and mediation has failed — they have merely exposed their supporters and people to more violence.

In politics, as in war, knowing when to retreat is as important as knowing when to advance. Indeed the former is often more difficult and requiring of more courage than the latter, due to the challenge it brings of managing the unrealistic expectations and demands of some within your own ranks; those for whom any backward step is tantamount to betrayal. With this in mind, it is clear that Puigdemont, faced with the choice of acting sensibly in the face of the aforementioned balance of forces militating against UDI, or succumbing to the pressure exerted against his leadership from within his own movement, opted to succumb.

© AP Photo/ Manu Fernandez

Catalan President Carles Puigdemont sings the Catalan anthem inside the parliament after a vote on independence in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, Oct. 27, 2017.

It is a decision that may well mark his political epitaph.

What also cannot be gainsaid is that Catalan opponents of independence have had their democratic rights subverted by their separatist counterparts’ declaration of UDI. Having boycotted the October 1 referendum in protest over its legality, they now find themselves confronted with the prospect of being ripped out of Spain against their will. How can such a state of affairs possibly be acceptable to those who believe in democracy?

The wider point is that neither side in this crisis is without blame when it comes to bringing it to the point of no return. It proves that stability, cohesion and unity can never be taken for granted — even within supposed Western bastions of democracy, such as Spain — and that the principle of self-determination can either be a shield risen in response to oppression, or a sword wielded in service to opportunism and self interest.

It bears repeating — the underlying cause of the crisis that has engulfed Spain is the same one that has fueled support for Scottish independence in recent years; the same one that drove Brexit and which is behind the emergence and traction of anti-EU parties across Europe. It is an economic model, neoliberalism, whose sustainability was shattered irrevocably by the global financial crash and ensuing recession, starting in 2008.

Yet instead of burying the corpse of neoliberalism, as they should have by now, political elites have for purely ideological reasons extended themselves in trying to breathe life back into it with the imposition of austerity programs that have sown even more misery and dislocation in the lives of millions of their own citizens.

Thus they are the authors of their own demise.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.

Check out John’s Sputnik radio show, Hard Facts.

Though tensions may have ratcheted down — at least temporarily — the underlying issue fueling this crisis, along with the various other crises that have been and are still unfolding around the world, has by no means been resolved. That issue is neoliberalism.

© REUTERS/ Eloy Alonso

Catalonia Standoff: Spanish Constitution, ‘Sons of Francoists’ vs Independence

When Karl Marx wrote in his Communist Manifesto that modern “bourgeois society is the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells,” he could have been describing today’s crisis within neoliberalism, one that evinces no sign of abating anytime soon.

In fact, far from abating it is a crisis that has merely been intensified by the actions of the economic elites and various governments which rule in their interests throughout the West and wherever Western liberal democratic ideas predominate. The current and escalating crisis engulfing Spain over Catalan independence is a case in point.

Having attended the mass opposition march and rally to Catalan independence in Barcelona on October 8, I was struck by the fact that were it not for this enveloping crisis of neoliberalism — involving the introduction of draconian austerity by the Spanish government in Madrid over the past few years — the eruption of separatist movements, growth of nationalism, xenophobia as the new normal within the political mainstream, would likely not be happening.

© AP Photo/ Alvaro Barrientos

Pro independence trade union worker holds up ”esteleda” or Catalan pro independence flags, in support of the Catalonia’s secession referendum, and against to alleged brutality by police during a referendum on the region’s secession from Spain that left hundreds of people injured, in Pamplona, northern Spain

The fact it is happening is an indictment of the aforementioned economic elites and their political bag carriers; evidence that not only have they failed to learn the lessons of this monstrosity of an economic system — one that sits as a tyrant over the lives of the vast majority living under it, rather than serve their needs — but that their only response to global economic recession that erupted in 2008 due to the contradictions and irrationality embedded within it, has been to impose more neoliberalism in the form of draconian austerity programs. The result has been a deepening of the very crisis they have asserted that austerity would overcome.

In the case of Catalan separatism, it is no coincidence that this crisis has arrived on the back of the swingeing cuts in public spending introduced by Madrid in 2010, responsible for pushing millions of across the country, including Catalonia, into poverty and unemployment. Add the ingredients of cultural nationalism, national identity, and in the case of Spain unresolved issues surrounding the civil war and General Franco’s dictatorship, and you have yourself a perfect storm.

© Sputnik/ Javier Luengo

The Catalan Diaries: All Eyes on Catalonia

The situation is similar when it comes to the emergence of the movement for Scottish independence from the UK in recent years. Then we have Brexit, the spread and growth in support for nationalist and anti-EU parties across Europe, the election of Trump in the US, and going further back, the 2011 Arab Spring, prior to its transmogrification into an Arab Winter of Salafi-jihadism — all of them are symptoms of the same crisis of neoliberalism.

Fundamentally, this is an economic system and doctrine that can only ever exist in a state of conflict with national sovereignty, identity, and cultural pluralism. It is a one-size fits all economic system which carries with it a particular set of liberal values that are no respecter of borders, cultures or specific national identities, diminishing the ability of states to take economic measures in the interests of their own people rather than the multinational banks and corporations that in truth are in command.

The instability and wreckage wrought in the name of this economic system, and its accompanying liberal values, have not only fueled separatist and nationalist movements in the West, they have also been a major factor in the neo-imperialist assault unleashed by Washington and its allies beginning from the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

As Perry Anderson writes of this world-historical event and its implications:

“Communism was dead, but capitalism had not yet found its accomplished form, as a planetary universal under a singular hegemon. The free market was not yet worldwide… In the hierarchy of states, nations did not always know their place.”

The Russian people felt the whip hand of neoliberal economics during the 1990s, the same decade that saw the destruction of Yugoslavia, followed the next decade by the destruction of Iraq as Washington reached to assert full spectrum dominance, using the atrocity of 9/11 as a pretext. Afghanistan, Libya, the conflict in Syria, sanctions on Cuba, North Korea — what each of the aforementioned states has had or has in common, regardless of their specific characteristics, is that they refused to be dominated by the neoliberal Washington consensus.

Understanding the nature of this monster requires that we resist the easy option of treating all of the various conflicts and crises around the world in isolation. They are not isolated, they are inextricably linked — linked to an economic system that is without a shadow of any doubt the common enemy of humanity in our time.

© REUTERS/ Gonzalo Fuentes

People walk behind a banner during a pro-union demonstration organised by the Catalan Civil Society organisation in Barcelona, Spain October 8, 2017

Whatever happens in Catalonia, the needs of the region’s people will not be met by merely changing the national flag flying over the municipal buildings. You can’t eat a flag — a flag does not put food on the table, heat a home, or educate children. This necessitates the assertion of not only political sovereignty but also economic sovereignty.

Irish rebel leader James Connolly, executed by the British for his part in the Easter Rising in Dublin of 1916, prior to leading his men out to fight and die for Ireland’s national liberation, left no doubt of the folly in believing that independence in itself would be enough:

“If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”

The people of Catalonia should take note.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.

Check out John’s Sputnik radio show, Hard Facts.