Sun Fin wrote:I have to say, ignoring the horrible fact that people have been harmed and the pain that it is causing, I do find events like these fascinating! I'm intrigued to see how events unfold over the next few days and weeks.
Yeah, I'm basically in the same boat. Obviously it would be best if these kinds of things could be completely peaceful, but it's obvious that they won't be, particularly with the Basques also paying close attention to see if they might want to try something too.
Sun Fin wrote:I feel like Spain have given the referendum more credibility by their actions. If they'd announced that it was illegal and then just ignored it happening it would have largely flown under the radar around the rest of the world. It would have taken time for Catalonia to stop talking about it but it might have happened eventually. Now they've created martyrs (I mean no-one died but anyone injured the the 'cause' will be more passionate than ever I'm sure) and Spain will be facing a lot of international pressure.
That may be, but I'm not entirely convinced of that.
My mostly uninformed gut feeling is that the separatists were mostly serious about this from the get-go. No doubt they've been a bit emboldened by the whole thing (Now you can say, in true
Monty Python and the Holy Grail style, "Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help! I'm being repressed!"), but I am not convinced it would have just gone away if the government just sat back and did nothing.
Potentially, it could have been the opposite. Imagine if Madrid says something like "Spain's constitution doesn't allow for succession, so what you're doing is completely illegal" and left it at that. It could have the opposite effect; now the separatists might think "Rajoy and the other government leaders are not willing to risk an incident or scandal by trying to stop us, so we should definitely push this as hard as we can and then they'll be forced to let us go when/if the vote goes in our favor." So you can see the pros and cons of both taking a hard stance and ignoring it.