How to resolve the Catalan mess to everyone’s satisfaction

A referendum is an excellent idea: it just needs to be conducted on a wider basis.

The Cataloonies aren’t going to get the referendum they claim they want, and there’s considerable resistance in other parts to the notion that they should get yet more pork to assuage their (Nilotic) grief. However, some gesture is clearly in order, on the one hand to increase the perceived legitimacy of Spanish territorial unity and on the other to neutralise some of the sting of the violent separatist fringe.

Leaving aside the racism, the protectionism, and lots of other stupidity, the 1714 moan is essentially about the partially successful attempt of the Bourbon administration following the War of the Spanish Succession to forge a common market of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon on the basis of enlightened-despotic legal and administrative practice imported from France. There was resistance to this in both Castile and Aragon. But, while no one in Badajóz gives a shit any more, the Cataloonies have adopted the complaint of the predominantly Austracist Crown of Aragon, and it is on that basis that a referendum should be held.

The population of present-day { Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Balearics, and, for all I care, southern Italy, Roussillon, Sardinia, the bit of Greece around Thessaly and anything else I have forgotten } should be asked whether it wants to stay in Spain or leave the European Union and try to breath some life back into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It will say no, Rajoy and Mas will have triumphed before the part of their electorate that cares, and we can all settle down to another 300 years of quiet moaning and increasing irrelevance.

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Last updated 18/02/2014

Crown of Aragon (3): The Crown of Aragon was a composite monarchy, also nowadays referred to as a confederation of individual polities or kingdoms ruled by one king, with a personal and dynastic union of the Kingdom of Aragon and the County of Barcelona.

Duchy of Neopatria (1):

Kaleboel (4307):

Kingdom of Naples (1): The Kingdom of Naples comprised that part of the Italian Peninsula south of the Papal States between 1282 and 1816.

Kingdom of Sardinia (1): The Kingdom of Sardinia was a state in Southern Europe from the early 14th until the mid-19th century.

Kingdom of Sicily (1): The Kingdom of Sicily was a state that existed in the south of the Italian peninsula and for a time the region of Ifriqiya from its founding by Roger II in 1130 until 1816.

War of the Spanish Succession (6): The War of the Spanish Succession was a European conflict of the early 18th century, triggered by the death of the childless Charles II of Spain in November 1700.


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