FROM WASHINGTON:

The Windrose‘s 2017 hiatus is over.  It’s good to be back.

The Catalonian crisis of 2017 isn’t close to being over.  The regional elections just before Christmas gave an absolute majority, 68 seats in a Parliament of 135, to a separatist parties.  The outlaw Carles Puigdemont’s liberal nationalists, JuntsxCat, received 34 of those.  The Republican Left took an incredible 32.  Els Ciutadans, the liberal anti-nationalists (or post-nationalists, or however you want to describe them) remains the greatest single party, with 37 seats, but if the separatists can form a working coalition across the left-right spectrum we may see a second push for independence in 2018.  A serious one.

The last attempt felt distinctly amateurish.  The secret urns, the pathetic turnout, the Guardia Civil beating old women in the street, Puigdemont playing Bonnie Prince Charlie.  And it felt amateurish most of all because of the inconsistency of the message, on both sides of the fight.  The independence movement claimed to be the Europeanists; they were asking to leave the European Union, in defiance of the Maastricht Treaty no less, which establishes the EU as a body of sovereign governments and not of nations.  Spain signed; Catalonia did not.  And it’s a strange kind of Europeanism that Nigel Farage and Sputnik News can get behind.

More troubling than Farage and the Kremlin’s support, though, was Matteo Salvini’s.  Salvini, the bearded, bumbling right-wing chief of Italy’s Lega Nord, is currently trying to resole the old boot of Berlusconi power, and is fishing for votes in the Center and South.  But he comes from a tradition of Northern separatism quite similar to Puigdemont’s.  Its strongholds in Lombardy, Veneto, the Piedmont, and increasingly in Emilia-Romagna are wealthy industrial zones, resentful of the rural South, which the Lega sees as parasitic.  Many Catalans hold similar views: they, the industrious North, have handed their wallets to the lazy, corrupt Andalusians and Extramadurans.  Under these old resentments are even older prejudices, namely the one that holds that race is a continuum of North and South: that southward the people get darker, lazier, more venal and more corrupt, while northward they get larger, paler, more industrious and more honest.  Greeks and Persians, Romans and Egyptians, Protestants and Papists, the Nordic race and the Mediterranean.  It was false in Aeschylus’ day, and it’s false now.

But whatever old prejudices are hiding in Salvini’s tweets and Puigdemont’s speeches, there are worse problems for Europe.  The EU survives by recycling economic surpluses — or at least it should.  The dream of a unified Europe, as old as Goethe and Victor Hugo and Garibaldi and Churchill, is not enough to keep a monetary union bound together.  Exporting economies need to be willing to hold up the rural and underdeveloped ones, not just in the form of investment across the Union, but in the form of fiscal transfers.  The proper mechanism for such transfers is sadly lacking in the EU, and is worth a thorough examination.  But you’ll remember the rancor of the 2015 Greek crisis — the bitterness of the Germans at having to pay off Greek laziness.  Greek “laziness,” rather.

This all seems out in the weeds.  But it highlights the greatest irony of the Catalonian situation: that the Catalonian independence movement runs on the same logic as the Bundesbank and the German conservatives, who wanted to wash their hands of a European nation, a fellow EU member, rather than bolster them.

If Catalonia isn’t willing to support Andalusia, why should Milanese taxes support Naples?  Why should the Bundesbank be responsible for unemployed Greeks?

(They should care because Southern emigrants literally made the Fiat cars of Turin and died in the armies of the House of Savoy and dug the coal in Belgium that made the EU possible.  And because the Bundesbank’s predatory lenders in the 1990s knew exactly what they were risking when the Euro was established and Greeks could take out German loans.  And because Europe is an end in itself.)

I say all this with a little sadness, though, because part of me likes the Catalonian independence movement.  Like most of Europe, I was disgusted by the Guardia Civil’s violence.  Moreover I like the romance, frankly, and it’s a little hypocritical of outlets like the Windrose to support the Scottish National Party, say, and not the Catalonians.  (SNP’s 2014 referendum was legal and not bungled, so at least there’s that.) The Windrose also enthusiastically supports the cultural diversity of Europe, which means embracing the ancient local cultures of places like Catalonia.  There is nothing remotely contradictory about Catalonia a nation — a Catalonia that speaks Catalan in its schools and courts, maintains its own gendarmerie, watches Catalan news instead of Spanish networks, seeks protected status for Catalan food, teaches Erasmus students in Catalan, and lists its nationality on tax forms as Catalan — and a Kingdom of Spain that includes Catalonia, with fiscal transfers from wealthy regions to poorer regions.

Madrid might do well to consider a few more degrees of Catalonian autonomy in exchange for that.  Even symbolically:  suppose the name of the country changed?  “The Kingdom of Spain and Catalonia.”  “The Kingdom of Spain and the Catalonian Lands.”  There is no shortage of historical precedent:  the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, surely, but also Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Kingdom of France and Navarre, The Kingdom of the Southern Slavs, the Empire of All the Russias.

“Negotiating,” Puigdemont recently wrote in Politico, “is not a sign of weakness or cowardice.”  We’re only 12 days into the year.  We’ll see if anyone agrees with him on that.