Read on Twitter
For quite some time, I have insisted on the similarities between Britain and Spain. The former an island and the latter almost one, both are peripheral, Atlantic nations. The comparison also holds with Catalonia and Scotland, not least in their risible treason.
There is a superficial historical similarity: Catalonia is not Castile, nor Scotland England; in the consummation of the Spanish and British nations, they have been adjutants, rather than articulating forces. At some long-forgotten point, this may have carried some social cost:
Johnson sledged Boswell for being a Scot; Castilian grandees looked askance at the Catalan language’s place in the administration. The separatist seizes these anecdotes and imagines a history of oppression where Edinburgh becomes Léopoldville.
For the Edinburgh and Barcelona pound shop literati, the Jacobite and Austracist lost causes give way to English and Castilian malevolence and assimilation. Carlists’ refusal to have a little girl for monarch is equated with vegan café socialism.
Despite slight disdain from the capital and its environs, Scots and Catalans were bankers, industrialists and imperialists. If opium granted Jardine Matheson its Oriental empire, Catalans found theirs in the Caribbean with slaves and rums like Brugal, Barceló and Bacardí.
Scotland wasn’t a subject nation, not even an Ireland. Scots were keen imperialists. The same is true of Catalans. They were keen sugarcane/tobacco planters—keen slavers, too. They were also forceful usurers: a Scot founded HSBC; Catalans lent to the Cuban gentry at 40% interest.
This is not to condemn them, as limp-wristed unionists are wont to do, perhaps tracing a separatist’s genealogical link to some prominent imperialist. My intention is to show that in both countries, the descendants of men of empire LARP as downtrodden coolies and Celts.
Like the Highlanders in Crimea, Catalans volunteered for 19th century Spain’s principal fronts: Morocco and Cuba. Oaths were administered, hymns written, society dinners organised, and the volunteers sailed off with their red barretines and 
flags with the provincial arms.
flags with the provincial arms.
This wasn’t a liberal nationalist accoutrement of the 1860s. The liberal Spanish state and the familiar mechanisms of indoctrination—schools, railways and the national press—did not exist in time for Napoleon’s appearance, yet Girona remained loyal to its Andalusian commander,
Gen Álvarez de Castro, and resisted for a bitter seven months. The Principality, for that is what Catalonia is, was consumed by ravenous hatred for the invader; the archives speak of death befalling any man who was found to be a foreigner, that is, neither Catalan nor Castilian.
Joseph Bonaparte’s sealed paper was burnt. Government and defence juntas were formed, proclaiming their loyalty to Ferdinand VII and the fatherland. The nascent Barcelona liberal press was inclined to agree: ‘He who does not serve the fatherland serves the tyrant’.
It’s true that Catalans and Scots have always held regionalist sympathies. Romanticism brought national and literary awakenings. In Scotland, a cult emerged around kilts, bagpipes and spurious tartans, with the devotees being those responsible for the Clearances—Saxon Lowlanders.
Scots in the EIC organised a subscription of funds for a monument to Robert Burns, finding little trouble in reconciling their love of the native soil with that of the Empire. All this was true of Catalonia. Here the movement was more organised. It was called the Renaixença.
The Renaixença was, above all, linguistic-literary. Its objective was a rebirth in Catalan letters, not independence. Its leading lights were often conservative Catholics—men who appealed to the Middle Ages and the countryside. Their loyalty to Spain was unquestioned.
When they were not priests, they were nobles and bourgeois imperialists: men who celebrated their ancestors of the Reconquista against the Moors, rhymed a few knightly scenes, prayed for Spain to avoid religious ‘error’, and got on with their business of managing Cuban estates.
Catalans have traditionally been regarded as enterprising and, well, tight, hence the expression, ‘La pela és la pela’ (Money talks). This is no coincidence. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Spain was avowedly protectionist. There were three pillars to this structure:
Castilian grain proprietors (think of a Britain where the Corn Laws remain), Basque steelmakers and Catalan industrialists. It’s not necessary to remind anyone that Spain was relatively backward, but Catalonia made Spain the world’s fourth-largest cotton processor, after 
.
.
Of this oligarchic triad, the Basques and Catalans reigned supreme. Theirs were the new industries; they remain Spain’s bankers and manufacturers. The Catalan tariff was resented by export-oriented regions and the ever-present, ever-unsuccessful free trade bloc.
I don’t mean to condemn the Barcelona bourgeoisie: Listian protection of infant national industries is right and proper, as the Chinese and Japanese can tell. They were subsidised nonetheless: Valencia was kept from exporting its fruit; the rest, turned into a captive market.
Catalan pressure also made what remained of the empire—the Antilles and the Philippines—into captive markets for Catalan producers. This policy’s effect on elite islanders’ view of autonomy, and latterly independence, was not insignificant. The Industrial Institute of
Catalonia continued unabated, working through successor organisations that tried and failed to form a national protectionist league with branches outside Catalonia. When Laureano Figuerola—an utter rarity, a Catalan free trader—briefly reduced tariffs, intending to force greater
efficiency upon native capitalists, he accused his region of impoverishing the entire country. His own class branded him a traitor ... to Spain. He was correct: not until much later would Spanish manufactures improve considerably and see their prices reduced.
1898 was Spain’s Suez, yet infinitely more harrowing. Catalan boys died fighting in Cuba. Catalan papers boycotted American goods. Spain was vanquished; honour (and markets) were lost. A degree of disillusionment with the national parties that had lost the war benefited
regionalists, above all the conservative ones, who had been agitating for autonomy, official recognition of Catalan and guaranteed places in the administration for natives of the region. As in Scotland, the end of empire also boosted workers’ movements and the left.
Spain was now a backward nation without honour. Its remaining possessions were minor African territories. Amidst these circumstances, a more virulent trend towards self-government developed in the Principality. During the II Republic, there was outright left-wing separatism, but
these forces also spoke of a Catalan state within a federal Spanish (or, at times, Iberian) republic. A common myth holds that the regime was an alien imposition upon Catalonia. This is patently false. Many panicked Catholics and middle class men rushed to the Nationalist ranks.
The cause was in part funded by Joan March, a Majorcan banker (Catalan is spoken in the Balearic Islands), and Regionalist League leader Francesc Cambó, who deemed the war a crusade. Josep Pla (regrettably untranslated), the Baron of Terrades, Valls Taberner—all Nationalists.
crusade. Josep Pla (regrettably untranslated), the Baron of Terrades, Valls Taberner—all Nationalists.
Aristocrats and the Carlist yeomen of inner Catalonia were united in their disdain for communists, anarchists and anti-clericals. A great many young men made their way to Burgos, casting their lot with the Generalissimo’s armies. Yet more celebrated liberation.
The question of Catalan autonomy was settled only by the rise of Franco, who did not, as is commonly stated, ban Catalan. He was understandably suspicious of autonomist tendencies, not least the use of a non-Castilian tongue in government, but the language was permitted socially.
Indeed, by 1946, the Barcelona municipal government was printing copies of L’Alàntida, a Catalan-language epic poem that lauds the Spanish discoveries. The quarrel was ideological. Mayors were local notables, not city mayors. The perennial toffs at the top remained.
Much like the Attlee ministry favoured Scotland with its ‘development areas’, Franco favoured Catalonia (and the Basque Country). Factories, notably SEAT’s, were placed there. 25% of the National Industry Institute’s budget were allocated to Barcelona province. Castile, in a
tragic charade my English friends will recognise, received a fraction of this. Naturally, internal migration was high, and it is now rare to find a Catalan without at least one grandparent from another region of Spain. These ‘xarnegos’ are well-represented amongst secessionists.
Upper Barcelona profited handsomely: the aforementioned Valls Taberner’s son, Luis, chaired the Popular banking group for 32 years. Yet with the Caudillo’s death, Franco’s Catalan mayors became, almost instantaneously, CiU members. Their children are often outright separatists.
I’m particularly fond of Antoni Comín’s curious case: his grandfather was a Carlist leader during the Civil War; his father, a Christian communist; Antoni, a separatist who can’t return to his country. A pity, for he should’ve been an unremarkable middle class chap.
Instead, he’ll have to live in Brussels until he convinces someone to pardon him for LARPing as a revolutionary. I do not doubt the SNP has such genealogical tragedies. One day, I’ll discover an MSP whose great-grandfather was a baronet or distinguished colonial administrator.
This thread has been diffuse. My intention with it has not been to insist on perfect comparability, but to note certain parallels. We imagine our countries to be singularly damned, their problems intractable and sui generis. The situation is not quite so dire:
European countries have many of the same problems. Consequently, they have many of the same solutions. In the case of Britain and Spain, it’s a matter of prestige, propaganda and money. Self-strengthening, vigour and enrichment are the cure to treasonous temptations.
