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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