THE FOUR SMOOTH-RUNNING KNOTS OF THE SPANISH STATE.
For Spanish state continuity or disintegration, four points heed close attention:
1) Euskal Herria (the Basque Country).
It
is the separatist engine that propels the civil desobedience movement
for self-determination. It is technically at a draw with Madrid, who
fears giving autonomy will cause a “domino effect,” especially with
regards to Catalonia.
2) Catalonia/Països Catalans.
It
is the engine that enables the Spanish State economic viability, but
politically it does so at the Basques’ expense. Madrid’s tactics are to
encourage an anti-Catalan racist feeling (in every respect similar to
anti-semitism) in order to dissuade Catalonians from separatist aims.
Catalonia contains more than a quarter of the country’s population,
producing one third of the exports and production in only one sixth of
the country’s territory.
Catalonia is fiscally drained by
Spanish taxation: Spanish leaders made a strong anachronistic state
that “buys” votes in Castile and Andalusia.. Catalonians are mighty
athletes (more than one third of country’s great sportmen/women) and
also artists, but Catalonia represents only 1/20th of the Spanish army
(dominated by Andalusians and Castilians, as was the Yugoslavian
federal army in the hands of the Serbians when Yugoslavia
disintegrated).
3) Andalusia.
It is the demographic
engine and of the cultural-popular vitalism. Expropiated from its
identity signs (having had its own cultural identity erased) (folklore,
language,…) by the Spanishism (Castilians) who manipulate and
dominate Spanish influence through the media, regional houses,
“Sevillana” dances, “Rocio” pilgrims, etc. Here Madrid’s tactics are a
radical way to impose their folklore, which has created confrontations
with the Catalonians and the Basques, and the obsessive Spaniardization
of the vital and popular might of the Andalusians. Today, Andalusia is
hostage to Madrid’s influence with a multi-secular Stockholm syndrome
and main common fodder of the Spanish imperialism.
4) Madrid.
It
is the political/media/religious/military power nucleus. It has
well-paid strategists who design what the media must say: obsessive,
subliminal, and irrational Spanish aggressiveness as a “spontaneous”
way to spread “Spanish” sentiments. Only an international collapse
would ruin the Spanish centralist state because they avoided both World
Wars. While all are “domestic affairs,” in Madrid, they know when and
how to oppose each other, social classes and nationalities and
ideologies to have the yard under control when to impose a dictatorship
or a war. Now that they joined the EU and NATO, they are advised by
high instances, but they have to concentrate on mass media, carefully
censoring and manipulating, because they can’t use the army to massacre
as before, according to their age-long tradition.
As long as
Catalonia is the financial support power center, “Spain” will survive.
Nevertheless, to keep Catalonia under control, Madrid needs to hold
onto Euskadi and to fuse a real Andalusian nationalism. If Andalusia
flourishes, it is possible that a popular anti-Spanish sentiment there
will rise, Spain stay KO.