Catalan President Pere Aragonès made a trip to Ireland this week to meet with some Sinn Féin leaders. The Catalan pro-independence movement is used to looking to the British Isles for references to address the “political conflict” with the state. Scotland has always had a prominent place on the compass marking the transition to Catalan belief in independence. The Scottish referendum of 2014 has been used as recurring evidence that it is possible to vote for the independence of part of a country’s territory. The UK has ruled politically and judicially that this cannot be repeated, and the fight launched by Nicola Sturgeon has led to her resignation as Scottish Prime Minister. With this movement, the Catalan independence movement lost its main political reference in Europe.
“I believe I have brought this country closer to independence and I believe we are in the final stages of this journey,” Sturgeon said in his farewell address ten days ago. However, he did not specify how this path towards independence was to culminate, as his intentions were cut off by two separate doors slammed by the British government and the UK Supreme Court. The Conservative Government has made it clear it will not give Edinburgh permission to hold a consultation like it did nine years ago, and last November judges responded by refusing to meet a Scottish requirement to determine whether the Autonomous Parliament might be capable of assent to the law , calling for a referendum. The plan of the head of the SNP (Scottish National Party) has reached an impasse.
“The main element to explain Sturgeon’s resignation is a political issue rather than a personal one, because he saw himself running out of the way to organize a second referendum,” argues Dani Cetrà, a political scientist from the University of Barcelona and a PhD in Political Sociology from the University of Edinburgh. Cetrà, who worked for the Center on Constitutional Change during the decade he lived in Scotland, points to the crossroads of Scottish independence. “His plan has always tried to find negotiated and legal paths, and when Sturgeon realizes the path is impassable, he abandons it,” he summarizes. The academic, who now lives in Catalonia, sees similarities with the Catalan case. “The parallelism is clear, what can you do when you have a mandate that pushes you to call a referendum but institutionally have no way?” he wonders.
The Scottish model served as a regular point of reference for the Catalan pro-independence parties. “What we saw in Scotland is the way to go,” Artur Mas said in 2014 as the process machinery started to rev up. In March 2017, half a year before 1-O, Carles Puigdemont and Oriol Junqueras wrote an article in EL PAÍS pointing out that Scotland is an example to follow. “The Scottish scenario of an agreed referendum is what we want in Catalonia,” said the then-President and Vice-President of the Generalitat. Last summer, Puigdemont said he had no doubts that the British government “respected” the right of Scots to decide their future. Reactions to Sturgeon’s resignation were quieter. “Your leadership will continue to be an inspiration,” Pere Aragonès limited himself to saying.
After the double veto by Parliament and the judiciary, the Scottish head of state attempted a penultimate maneuver to flee forward. He advocated turning the next UK general election, scheduled for late 2024, into a de facto independence referendum. The plan crunched in the ranks of the SNP.
Diego Muro is Senior Research Associate at CIDOB (Barcelona Center for International Affairs) and Full Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. “It is extremely complex to interpret an election as a referendum. Interpretation can be forced, as was the case in Catalonia, but people choose for many reasons, from inflation and unemployment to the type of relationship they want with Europe. When a ruler wins an election, we can never be sure whether he wins because of his qualities or because of the antipathy the alternative arouses,” says Muro. Dani Cetrà thinks similarly: “In Catalonia we are aware of the difficulties involved in reading a party’s votes in relation to the pro-independence votes.”
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Diego Muro claims that “the SNP has no clear and viable options to request a second referendum” and believes this was an important factor in Sturgeon’s departure. This scenario raises the question of whether Scottish separatism can take the direct route and tries to promote the idea of a unilateral route. “They always rejected that option,” says Muro. “Scotland has learned from the Catalan case and knows that the unilateral way does not work, because if pro-non-rupture voters with the state are boycotted, the result loses strength and legitimacy before the international community,” explains Dani Cetrà.
In their March 2017 article, Puigdemont and Junqueras applauded the London Government for allowing a consultation on Scottish sovereignty, and despite the fact that the No had won 55% support, the two Catalan politicians announced that this a game to be played: “Everything seems to indicate that Scotland and the UK will once again agree to hold a new independence referendum. The second in three years. It’s not bad for something that in Spain can’t even be part of a dialogue table between the Spanish and Catalan governments.” The announced second Scottish referendum failed to materialize and disappointment drove Sturgeon on. “I’m human,” argued the Prime Minister of Scotland at the farewell ceremony.
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