Catalan elections: the ghosts that won’t go away Nationalism is an idea whose time has come, gone, and come back again David Goldman
http://www.atimes.com/article/catalan-elections-ghosts-wont-go-away/
Yesterday’s election victory for Catalan separatists, including
humiliating losses for the ruling center-right Partido Popular,
denotes yet another setback for the grand project of European
unification and a challenge for a continent divided between a strong
north and a lagging south. The Catalan separatists won a thin majority
in the regional parliament, leaving them precisely where they were
before the Oct. 1referendum on secession from Spain – with a small
plurality in favor of breaking away and a large minority determined to
stay. The election result, though, has dire implications for Partido
Popular leader Manuel Rajoy’s minority government, and for European
cohesion in general.
Nationalism is a ghost that refuses to be exorcised. As Annette
Prosinger wrote in a front-page commentary in the conservative German
daily Die Welt. “This election was in reality a referendum on the
independence movement. The result will astonish all of those who bet
on the disenchantment of the Separatists. The magic is more tenacious
than people thought: It has overcome everything: The drop in tourism
and economic investment, the flight of enterprise from Catalonia, and
the rejection that the independence movement received from the EC. The
supporters of the independence movement were not unsettled by the fact
that none of the glorious promises of Carlos Puigedemont and his group
came true, and that prospering Catalonia has become a crisis region.”
The term “disenchantment” (in German, Entzauberung) is deeply fraught
in the German language: it was the watchword of the Romantic movement
that incubated European nationalism during the 19thcentury, calling
for the “re-enchantment” of a world left disenchanted by the
Enlightenment.
To say that Europe faces a crisis of identity is a vast
understatement. With total fertility rates below 1.4 births per woman
in Germany, Italy, Spain and all of Eastern Europe, the nations of
Europe are at a demographic turning point past which their cultures
may become so diluted as to defy any future attempts at
reconstruction. The Catalans speak their own language despite
centuries of Spanish attempts to suppress it; the first Bible
translation printed in Spain was in Catalan – not Spanish – in the
year 1478, and the Inquisition burned every extant copy. They are the
most productive and outward-looking Spanish region, and their capital
Barcelona is one of the world’s great global cities, but a majority of
Catalans will accept economic hardship in order to restore their
identity.
Catalan aspirations reverberate in Germany, where the Alternative für
Deutschland (AfD) emerged as a right-wing protest party first in
opposition to Berlin’s beneficence to Southern Europe, and
emphatically in protest against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2016
decision to accept 1.2 million Muslim migrants. In a Youtube video,
AfD leader Nikolaus Fest defended Catalan nationalism in the clipped
accent of his native Hamburg.
The AfD’s enthusiastic view of developments in Catalonia has no direct
bearing on policy; despite its 12% showing in Germany’s September
elections, it remains a leper party that none of its larger peers will
countenance. But the AfD has accomplished in Germany what the Catalans
have accomplished in Spain: it drew sufficient votes away from
Merkel’s Christian Democrats to prevent Merkel from forming a majority
government. Spain already has a majority government under the Partido
Popular, which lost 8 of its 11 seats in the Catalan regional
parliament yesterday. The nationalists remain a minority in Western
Europe, but a big enough minority to paralyze the pre-existing
political configuration.
In Austria, the right-wing, anti-immigration Austrian Freedom Party
has become the first “ultra-right” (that is, nationalist-populist)
party to enter a European government.
Nationalism meanwhile has become a governing movement in most of
Eastern Europe. Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia are
in open revolt against the European Commission, which demanded that
every European nation accept a quota of migrants. In the name of
protecting their respective cultures against large-scale Muslim
migration, the Eastern European governments formed the so-called
Visegrad Group to oppose European policy and now face sanctions.
The revolt against European integration has spilled into foreign
policy. Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Bosnia-Herzegovina broke
with European protocol and abstained from this week’s UN General
Assembly vote against the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s
capital. Israel, which embodies the oldest and most successful
nationalism in the world, has become an improbable source of
inspiration to the Eastern Europeans, whose Jewish populations were
mostly exterminated during the Second World War.
When bond traders got to their desks in Europe this morning, the first
hot potato they dumped was not the debt of the Spanish state, but
rather Italian bonds. Italy has twice the outstanding public debt of
Spain (at $2.3 trillion), and remains the most vulnerable among
European debtors. The European Central Bank’s so-called quantitative
easing program expanded the bank’s balance sheet to 38% of European
GDP. Its purchases of Italian debt will have financed the whole
Italian budget deficit at artificially low interest rates between 2014
and 2019. The quantitative easing program will be phased out during
2018 –sooner rather than later if German desires prevail – and Italy
will have to find a way to get its state finances under control.
Politically, Italy is in no position to do so. Italy remains the sick
man of Europe, with an economy that is still 6% smaller than it was
before the global financial crisis of 2008. Italy also is the focal
point of Europe’s immigration problem, which has shifted from the
Balkan route to Germany to the sea route across the Mediterranean.
Italian popular hostility to immigration is far stronger than in
Germany or Austria, and anti-migrant populist parties are likely to
make gains in Italy’s national elections (which might be held as early
as March). Despite scandals and convictions for tax fraud and other
offenses, Italy’s populist billionaire Silvio Berlusconi appears back
in national politics.
That is why Catalonia’s elections are bad tidings for Europe this Christmas Eve.
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