The Catalan "independence" cause has taken the world by storm, thrown into the global spotlight by the heavily publicized referendum earlier this week and Madrid's forceful response to this unconstitutional measure. Supporters all across the world have been energized by the recent events and have taken to describing them in civil war-era terms as a battle between "democracy" and "fascism". Furthermore, they also accuse the Rajoy government of being "Francoists", as they do the country's post-Franco 1978 Constitution which returned Catalonia's autonomy in an even more robust way than before and even bestowed this privilege to the rest of the country as well.

Although it can be safely presumed that Spain naturally retained some of the "Francoist" members of its permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies ("deep state") after the death of their movement's eponymous leader, it's an exaggeration to refer to the constitution and the present government as "Francoists" in the sense of what the term stereotypically implies. Rather, the improper use of such polarizing civil war-era terms demonstrates that the separatists are trying to capitalize on the revolutionary nostalgia that their domestic and foreign supporters have for reliving the 1936-1939 anarcho-communist experiment via a simulacrum, one which plays out differently depending on their audience.

Two Simulacra

As it relates to the Catalans themselves, this is meant to force them into the false binary choice between "standing with their ancestors against fascism" or "betraying their motherland for the Francoists". Concerning the foreign supporters of the Catalan separatists, they're supposed to get riled up and vent their hatred against Madrid and impassioned support for Barcelona all throughout social media, picking up on the cue that they should inaccurately compare modern-day Madrid to post-Maidan Kiev in making the Alt-Media argument that Catalonia has as much of a right to "independence" as Crimea does to its reunification with Russia.

This is a false equivocation, the full debunking of which isn't the focus of this article however, as it's important enough in this context to draw attention to the polemical chain reaction that's being spun by the separatists and their supporters in crafting a self-interested narrative for serving their cause. There are many well-intentioned individuals who are standing behind Barcelona, so it's not at all to infer that most of them don't sincerely believe in this interpretation of events, but the point here is just to highlight how Catalonia's "independence" crusade is exploiting historical memory and revolutionary nostalgia in order to advance its organizers' argument that the region needs to split from Spain.

Spanish Scenarios

Centralized Crackdown:

While most people might be led to think that the Catalan Crisis is solely between Barcelona and Madrid, the fact is that it actually involves all of Spain and is poised to have geopolitical reverberations throughout the entirety of Europe. Concerning the politically unstable Iberian country, Catalonia's separatist campaign already crossed the Rubicon of no return after the referendum and Madrid's reaction to it, so there's no going back to the previous status quo. This means that only three scenarios are probable: a centralized crackdown, Identity Federalism, and separatism. The first one could see the state implement Article 155 of the constitution in temporarily imposing direct rule over the region, though with the expected consequence being that it might catalyze a low-scale civil war if the Catalans resort to terrorist-insurgent tactics to resist.