The Spanish government must let Catalans vote

WASHINGTON DC — Democracy, in its essence, is assigning to the people the ability to have a voice in their future. It is a living political system which reflects changing realities and preferences over time, embodied in new institutional laws, structures and elected representatives that reflect the desires and aspirations of those people at any given time. From this perspective, giving voice is not the outlier; it is the norm and the foundation — and a healthy one at that — in modern democracy.

The voice that Catalans are asking to have heard is one that demands they be able to decide on their political future. Catalans want to exercise their right to vote.

Catalonia's President, Artur Mas, has announced a November 9 non-binding referendum, which asks the Catalonian people, "Do you want Catalonia to be a state? If so, do you want Catalonia to be an independent state?"

But the Spanish government insists that a referendum would be illegal and unconstitutional, ignoring that a Catalan government advisory body — led by a former member of Spain’s Constitutional Court — has detailed a series of mechanisms to organize a referendum which are both legal and constitutional.

While embedded in a centuries-old dispute, the contemporary roots of the drive towards November’s referendum begin in 2006, when many Catalans thought that self-government within Spain had been secured via the approval of a new Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia.

The Statute of Autonomy was approved after years-long negotiations in the Catalan parliament (and passed by a large majority which included the governing parties as well as the official opposition), by the Spanish Congress, and by referendum in Catalonia.

The Catalan government, opposition and civil society had rigorously followed the rules of the game, yet four years later the statute was unceremoniously dismantled by what most consider to be a politicized and unrepresentative Spanish Constitutional Court in 2010. The indignation which Catalans felt at this decision – much related to the shock and anger of having years of negotiations in good faith evaporate before their eyes – is difficult to understate but easier to quantify.

Catalans have responded loudly and clearly: Immediately following the Constitutional Court’s decision, the first of three peaceful demonstrations — of more than one million people since 2010 — took place.

Catalans spoke at the ballot box during the last Catalan parliamentary elections in 2012, when they elected a majority of MPs that had explicitly campaigned on exercising the right to vote. Polls show that 80 percent of Catalans are for a vote and 87 percent of Catalans polled said they would respect the outcome of the vote regardless of which way it goes.

This vindication of rights is nothing new for Catalans, rather, it is a vein which runs deep in Catalan historiography. Indeed, both civil society and Catalan institutions have served together as either guarantor of those rights or rallying cries to return rights usurped.

The Usages of Barcelona, begun in the 11th century, codified one of the earliest concepts of rights, and predate the Magna Carta.

It was Catalonia’s 123rd President, Lluís Companys, who made the ultimate sacrifice defending those rights before a Francoist firing squad ended his life in 1940 (an extraordinarily rare if not unprecedented case of a democratically elected president executed for political reasons). And it was a frail 94-year-old cellist and humanist named Pau Casals who likewise in 1971 so movingly evoked Catalonia’s historical role in supporting both rights and peace in front of the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Today’s Catalans want to continue that fight by demanding their right to vote, demanding that their interests be heard.

Politics and laws in democracies must be made in the interests of the people, and should not be used as straightjackets or means to suppress minority group rights.

Catalonia’s distinct language and culture were historically repressed over much of the past several centuries under a governing elite which conceptualized Spain as a uni-national, uni-cultural, uni-lingual country, rather than one which Catalans (and Basques and Galicians for that matter) celebrated as plural, multicultural and multilingual.

Spain’s current education minister spoke in the Spanish Congress of the need to "Hispanicize" Catalan students, as a reaction to Catalonia’s education policies, which clearly fall well afoul of the preferred narrative. Much as the Spanish government might prefer, however, they cannot squelch forever a discussion that a significant portion of the population has asked to have.

That said, no one realistically believes that the path Catalonia has set for itself is either easy or comfortable. It is neither.

While complicated and uncertain, it is also a path which both the Catalan government and civil society leaders have been clear about from the beginning: the process must and will be peaceful, transparent and democratic.

From this perspective, rather than treating the 'Catalan question' as an issue to be avoided, the Spanish government should be embracing it as a natural part of a democratic process and a methodical, transparent and democratic roadmap for effective political conflict resolution.

The Spanish government, and indeed the international community – many of whom are working to resolve some of the world’s most intractable conflicts – could learn much from the distinctly Catalan way in approaching these difficult but important issues.

Andrew Davis is Head of the Delegation of the Government of Catalonia to the United States of America, nominated in December 2008. Prior to his nomination as Delegate, he was a Research Fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics. He holds a PhD from the University of Nottingham (UK) in political science and a master’s degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.

This material is distributed by the Delegation of Catalonia to the United States of America on behalf of the Government of Catalonia. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.

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This piece is part of a new GlobalPost Special Reports/Commentary initiative supported by the Ford Foundation called "VOICES." The mission of VOICES is to present the ideas and opinions of those who are less frequently heard in the media, including women, people of color, sexual minorities, citizens of the developing world and young people. These voices will consistently discuss topics important to GlobalPost Special Reports including human rights, religious issues, global health, economic inequality and democracies in transition.