David Gardner: Spain and Britain need not fear the F-word

It is probably not accidental that the two EU countries facing the most imminent challenge from separatists within their borders – the UK from the Scots, and Spain from the Catalans and Basques – are old, proud, post-imperial nations whose unionist integration was essentially the enterprise of monarchy. The eventual answer to this problem does not have to be either separatism or unionism (monarchy is a secondary issue). It could as well be a creative form of federalism, even though federalism as a word, let alone a formula, sends semantic shivers up the political spine of both countries.

Yet if the majority nationalists – also known as unionists – were to look more empathetically at their minority nationalists, they might detect the ambiguities and hesitancy behind much separatist discourse. Instead, Madrid uses Spain’s constitution as a tablet of stone to bludgeon Catalans and Basques, London threatens the Scots with being shut out of sterling, and both capitals – episodically echoed by Brussels – warn independence means probable banishment from the EU.

Surely it has occurred to all three capitals that these minority nations might settle for something short of secession; that, on close examination, there is something like a triangle at work here in which the Catalans are watching the Scots, who are watching the Basques, who are watching the Catalans, who are also looking at the Basques – all to see who can get more, and how.

But there is a curious reluctance to discuss alternatives – especially to develop further the asymmetric federalism that already exists in the UK and Spain, where Scotland, Catalonia and the Basque Country already have more home rule than other regions, yet want still more.

When Catalan leaders look at Scotland, they see that the British government has allowed September’s vote on Scottish independence, and chosen to campaign against it. Madrid says flatly that Spain’s constitution prohibits any plebiscite. In 2006, the Catalans did hold a referendum, approving an enhanced statute of autonomy, after affirmative votes in the Catalan parliament and both houses of the Spanish parliament. That law was eviscerated in 2010 by the Constitutional Tribunal, acting at the behest of the centre-right Popular party now in power in Madrid – which catapulted Catalan separatism from the fringe to the mainstream.

The Scottish National party has long taken an interest in the Basque Country, where the governments there and in adjoining Navarre collect almost all their own taxes. This fiscal autonomy has helped mainstream nationalists transform a moribund rust-belt economy into an engineering powerhouse – and diluted the potency of radical separatists, at least so far. That may be why Alex Salmond, the wily SNP leader and Scotland’s first minister, initially wanted two questions in September: one on independence and another that would have given Scotland fiscal autonomy. The reason the Basques are nervously watching the Catalans is clearer.



Under the Basque fiscal formula, the autonomous government remits to Madrid roughly eight times less revenue per capita than the Catalans. When Artur Mas, the Catalan president, met Mariano Rajoy, Spanish prime minister, in September 2012, he sought fiscal autonomy “with solidarity” – the right to collect taxes but put more into the central pot than the Basques do. Basque leaders, who feared a reopening of their advantageous deal, heaved a sigh of relief when Mr Rajoy dismissed the Catalan idea.

There are, of course, differences in these febrile situations. A common feature is that mainstream nationalists tend to be ambiguous about independence and ambidextrous in their alliances. In Spain, Catalans and Basques have allied in the past with right and left in Madrid, the better to secure more devolved power; the SNP kept a sinking Labour government afloat in 1978-79 in exchange for the first devolution referendum. The mainstream nationalist chameleon usually changes into bright separatist colours when thwarted.

Yet as Catalonia is poised to trigger a constitutional crisis in Spain, Mr Mas has left himself wiggle room, saying Catalonia needs its “own state”. That formula might fit inside a reformed constitution that offers the Catalans more of what the Basques have.

Offering Catalans a Scottish choice seems beyond the Spanish polity and is miring the debate in the reductive idiom of identity politics, which catches anyone suggesting federal solutions in its crossfire. In the UK, there is more recourse to technical objections to asymmetric federalism, for example that equity demands uniform rules in areas such as taxation. But equity and freedom should be bedfellows. Denying the yearning for freedom in the name of égalité is an outdated Jacobin concept; not so fiscal solidarity.

There is no reason why some regions, especially those with a deep-rooted sense of nation, should not have greater self-rule than others if that is what they want – the cost, to paraphrase the King James Bible, of sharing a house of many mansions.


David Gardner


FT