Catalan Secessionism and Globalization

The emergence of Catalan secessionism at the beginning of this century seemed to announce a positive effect of the new global order. Catalan separatism put forward a peaceful procedure based on the celebration of a simple referendum, whereas the classic and modern forms of state formation traditionally involved episodes of violence seen through dynastic conquests, wars of independence, or postcolonial partitions. Popular referendums, as seen in Quebec (1980 and 1995), in Scotland (2014), or New Caledonia (2018), represent a useful instrument to negotiate and redraw borders without the traumas of war and arbitrary impositions. This instrument has become particularly serviceable because globalization promotes the reduction of the size of nation-states. As Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore argued in The Size of Nations, smaller states can adjust to the fluctuations of the global market more effectively. This flexibility has become more desirable than the ideals of self-sufficiency and selfdefense characteristic of large modern states.¹ Thus, in the global context, referendums are an attractive method of state formation because they can facilitate a flexibilization of borders while concurrently reinforcing two of the main ideological pillars of globalization: democracy and peace. In short, referendums and popular polls certify that the global order is succeeding in pacifying the planet under the principles of liberal democracy.² The Catalan case, however, has shown that the method of referendum does not always entail a peaceful process.

A Tale of Two Cities: Barcelona and Madrid

In contrast with the referendums in Quebec, Scotland, and New Caledonia, which proved that territorial demands can be negotiated without violence, the 2017 referendum in Catalonia marked the beginning of a period of intense repression by the Spanish state, which included police force against the population, imprisonment and forced exile of political leaders, censorship of freedom of speech, and daily deployment of lawfare.³ Why has Spain, in contrast with Canada, the UK, or France, reacted so aggressively against Catalonia's demand for a referendum? A number of political, economic and ideological factors revolving around the competition between Barcelona and Madrid can be adduced to explain the Catalan/Spanish case.

The first reason is that this uncompromising reaction should be the natural response of any constituted power when it encounters the threat of a new constituent power that is trying to dispute its territorial integrity. The function of the state is to repress any action that the constitutional order deems as illegal. When a social actor brings forth a demand that cannot be fulfilled within the current legal order, the state must turn this a-legal event into an illegal act and thus repress it in the name of the law. In other words, when a political event takes place outside the law, a process of struggle begins between a normative order that attempts to reduce the act to an illegal crime, and a generative force that tries to disclose and change the boundaries of the legal order. As Hans Lindahl has explained, a-legality reveals these boundaries as "fault lines:" they are not orderable limits that can be expanded or shifted, but rather irreducible fissures that "must be overstepped, and in being overstepped lead over from one legal collective to another."⁴ Thus, while the a-legal force of Catalan secessionism aims to create an event that founds a new legal order, the current legality of the Spanish state aims to restrain this force and eliminate the fault line through its sovereign power. Furthermore, the Spanish state has justified this sovereign decision with the principle of universal equality, where wealthier regions such as Catalonia do not and should not have the right to detach themselves from their poorer counterparts.⁵

This economic aspect points at another, more tangible economic reason behind the Spanish reaction: new market competition between Madrid and Barcelona. The two main cities of Spain had a relatively complementary relationship during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Barcelona, the predominant industrialized area of the peninsula, needed the protectionist measures of the Spanish state for its control of the peninsular market. Madrid, a city in the middle of agrarian and backward Castile, needed the industrial force of...