By Martin Delfin. Memo From Madrid
The people of Catalonia remind me of a certain small sector in Puerto Rico who favour independence. The Caribbean island is a US territory and home to 3.8 million people who have the right to come and go to the United States as much as they please without a visa. In truth, they have been US citizens since 1917. This special relationship began in 1898 when Spain lost the island, along with Cuba and the Philippines to the United States in the brief but disastrous Spanish-American War declared by Queen-regent Maria Cristina of Hapsburg.
Cuba and the Philippines were eventually granted independence but Washington decided to hold on to Puerto Rico because there had never really been any significant push for independence much less separation from Spain. As historian John Bergamini put it in his excellent 1974 book “The Spanish Bourbons: The History of a Tenacious Dynasty,” Puerto Rico “with more local self-government than Cuba, had shown little inclination to be freed.”
In Catalonia, people are calling for mass demonstrations to protest the Constitutional Court’s decision Monday to scrap 14 amendments of the so-called Estatut – the region's governing body of bylaws approved by voters in a 2006 referendum. The bench majority considered them incompatible with Spain’s Constitution. Among those struck down are the preamble which describes Catalonia as “a nation” and a clause that gives the courts in the northeast territory judicial independence from the Spain’s legal watchdog, the CGPJ or the General Counsel of the Judiciary. There is also the statement in the autonomous statute that proclaims Catalan the “preferred language” to be used at all public institutions that was also declared unconstitutional. The Catalan nationalist party bloc (CiU) called the Constitutional Court’s decision a “serious one,” and said it would not have accepted anything more than a carte blanche approval of all of the more than 200 clauses that make up the statute which Catalans voted for during the referendum.
Since 1967, Puerto Ricans have been offered three plebiscites to chose their own political future – whether they want to be independent, become a US state or keep the status quo. The current relationship with the United States, adopted in 1952, is commonwealth status. Loosely based on the British system, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (or Estado Libre Asociado) affords islanders many US benefits. Besides travelling to and from the mainland, they can tap into many health and federal retirement benefits. They use the dollar, but don’t pay federal income taxes. They are disallowed to vote for president and cannot make their own bilateral treaties. The island has three major parties: Popular Democratic Party (PPD), New Progressive Party (PNP) and the Independence Party (PIP), whose respective pole positions should be centre-left, centre-right and far left but are actually defined by their status positions they support – commonwealth, statehood and independence. In all three plebiscites held in 1967, 1993 and 1998, the current status quo has won hands down with independence getting less than 5% of the vote and statehood coming in second.
The majority of Catalans believe they are perhaps better off on their own rather than being attached to Spain. Jose Montilla, the Socialist regional premier, said Monday night he didn’t like the Constitutional Court’s ruling but “just because I am going to respect it, doesn’t mean I agree with it.” And if it were up to Josep Duran i Lleida and some of his CiU forces, a coup would be in the offing with a separatist militia operating from the Pyrenees.
Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero gave Catalonia a chance to obtain broad autonomy in 2006 when the Socialists supported then-regional premier Pasqual Maragall’s bid to draft his own set of bylaws. But the term “nation” and the seemingly forced upon Catalan language has scared many, especially those in the main opposition Popular Party which took the challenge to the Constitutional Court. Catalonia, as opposed to other regions such as Galicia and Castilla-La Mancha, had been given a chance to become a Spanish commonwealth but it still wants more. The Catalans believe they can make it on their own if they declare their independence from Spain saying that they can survive on the region’s industrial power base. But do the most educated Catalan independence supporters really believe that those companies and firms which actually serve a large Spanish consumer market will remain inside a budding nation? Kosovo is Europe’s newest nation, recognised by some countries – Spain excluded – but it hasn’t made any headway in helping nurture a financially wracked continent back to health.
In Puerto Rico, supporters of independence are mostly romantic, with lofty dreams of a one-day Republic of Puerto Rico that hinges on a scary reality – cutting ties with the United States would mean a drastic plunge in living standards, the closing of almost all American companies, which employ hundreds of thousands of islanders, and the loss of federal benefits. I think perhaps the Catalan nationalists should have a heart-to-heart with members of the Puerto Rico’s Independence Party.
Martin Delfin writes for the English language version of El Pais
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