“The Spanish constitution, unlike the American, Canadian, or British constitution does not recognize the country as a union of pre existing entities (territories, regions), but as the land of the Spanish people”.
Well maybe, I haven’t read it all, but if the Spanish constitution doesn’t recognise that modern Spain came together out of smaller formerly independent kingdoms, most importantly the union of Castille and Aragon, that doesn’t make it untrue. Anyway, a plain reading of the text suggests that the Spanish constitution does recognise the country as a union of pre-existing entities. You quote it yourself: “La Constitución reconoce y garantiza el derecho a la autonomía de las nacionalidades y regiones que la integran” (the constitution recognises and guarantees the right to self-government of the nationalities and regions of which it is composed).
“Let me point out that Spain is one of the most decentralized countries on the planet”
Maybe; I’m not sure how it compares to, say, the USA, or the UK, in terms of the amount of law-making powers that are devolved to its constituent parts, but I understand that one of the contributing factors leading up to the current crisis was a 2012 ruling by the constitutional court to roll back some of the devolved powers that had been granted to the regional Catalan government - meaning that at the very least it is not as decentralised as it was immediately prior to 2012, and presumably not decentralised enough for a lot of the inhabitants of that region.
“Moreover, the constitution was approved by 95% of Catalans in a 1978 referendum…I don’t see how that is tyranical”
What is at least potentially tyrannical is declaring that the Catalan voters of 1978 get to override the wishes of their descendents for all time to come. If it is legitimate for the Catalans of 1978 to elect to join a union, but not legitimate for the Catalans of 2017 to elect to leave that union, then that is a double standard that needs to be argued for, it cannot simply be assumed. The idea of democracy does not usually include the principle that a law, once made, can never be unmade, no matter how dissatisfying it may turn out to be for subsequent generations.
“I have the utmost respect for the 60% of Catalans who stayed at away from this nonsense and didn’t go out to vote.”
That is a tricky one. I think the truly courageous thing if you wanted to register your objection to the referendum happening, and didn’t want to legitimise it by actually voting one of the proposed options, would have been to go, but to spoil your ballot. However, I can totally understand someone deciding to just stay away. Still, the optimal solution to the problem of an illegitimate referendum is to have a legitimate referendum. If Madrid was confident that Catalan independence was an obviously bad option, they could have agreed to allow the vote to go ahead, in the full expectation that the majority of voters would vote no.
“The biggest problem with this referendum is that in Catalunya, you cannot say that you like living in Spain without being called FASCISTA or a fan of Franco and there is thus no “moderate” opposition to the nationalist movement”
That is indeed a problem, and we tasted something of the same phenomenon here in Scotland with our own independence referendum a few years ago. But again, if the Spanish central government has acted in such a way as to prompt enough Catalans to vote for parties promising to push for independence, then the problems started long before the independence movement got taken over by left wing radicals. Having got to that point, the sensible thing would have been to agree to hold the referendum while it was still very likely that the majority would have voted no, and then in the subsequent years, work to repair relations so that an overwhelming majority of Catalans would prefer to remain in a united Spain.
I am not old enough to remember, but I understand that in Scotland, for generations, the independence movement was a tiny lunatic fringe, and it wasn’t until the Thatcher government that it started to take off as a serious possibility. If the Thatcher government had managed to avoid disproportionately raising the hackles of Scottish voters, the SNP might never have become a party to be taken seriously, let alone become the powerful party they are today.
I am still undecided on the question of Scottish independence. I don’t expect that it would have made a massive difference to people’s lives either way. But I am glad that the UK government agreed to have the referendum, which they won comfortably if not overwhelmingly, rather than send in the riot police.