George Friedman
Last week was spent obsessed with Gaza. In the end, nothing changed. A war was fought without an Israeli ground assault but with massive air and rocket attacks on both sides. Israel did not have the appetite and perhaps the power to crush Hamas. Hamas did not have the power to compel Israel to change its policies but wanted to achieve a symbolic victory against Israel. Both decided that continued fighting made little sense and allowed the Americans and Egyptians to bless a settlement. Everyone from Iran to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood played a role, and then the curtain on this act went down. It will come up again. It was not trivial for those who lived through the conflict, but in the end it changed little.
Last week was spent obsessed with Gaza. In the end, nothing changed. A war was fought without an Israeli ground assault but with massive air and rocket attacks on both sides. Israel did not have the appetite and perhaps the power to crush Hamas. Hamas did not have the power to compel Israel to change its policies but wanted to achieve a symbolic victory against Israel. Both decided that continued fighting made little sense and allowed the Americans and Egyptians to bless a settlement. Everyone from Iran to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood played a role, and then the curtain on this act went down. It will come up again. It was not trivial for those who lived through the conflict, but in the end it changed little.
In this context, focusing on
Catalonian elections would seem frivolous, but it is the nature of geopolitics
that the quiet and odd may have more significance in the long run than the
events that carry noisy headlines.
Catalonia is a region in
northeastern Spain. Its capital, Barcelona, is the second-largest city in Spain
and the country's industrial and commercial hub. Catalonia is also a region
that for decades has had a substantial independence movement seeking to break
away from the rest of Spain.
In a regional election held
Sunday, the movement for independence remained strong but also became more
complex. The regional president, Artur Mas, had called early elections as a way
of measuring support for a referendum on secession. Mas' party actually lost 12
seats in the election, though another independence-oriented but more left-wing
party doubled its seats. Together, the pro-independence parties increased their
share by one seat and have the necessary two-thirds majority to force a
non-binding referendum.
Without going too deeply into
the morass of regional politics, the long-standing dispute between Catalonia
and Madrid has been deepened by the financial crisis and the issue of how the
burden will be shared. Originally, Mas had not supported independence but
rather greater autonomy for Catalonia. However, he did want a deal with Madrid
in which the austerity burden placed on Catalonia would be mitigated. Madrid
rejected the deal, which drove Mas toward advocating independence and calling
the early elections. With Sunday's election results, the independence movement
has become more intense and more radical. The mainstream pro-independence party
lost, but smaller and more left-wing parties made gains, a trend we expect to
grow in Europe as the economic strains increase.
Europe's Border Imperative
Since World War II, there has
been an underlying principle in Europe that borders are sacrosanct, that they
will not be changed. The fear has been that once borders become an issue again
in Europe, the tensions that tore Europe apart prior to World War II would
re-emerge. This was not universally respected, of course. Serbia's borders were
forcibly changed after the Kosovo war (and Spain is one of four EU countries
that did not recognize Kosovo due to its own secessionist movement). But the
idea of one state making territorial claims on another was contained.
What was not contained was the
self-revision of national borders. The two most famous cases were the
"velvet divorce" of Czechoslovakia, where two nations, the Czech
Republic and Slovakia, emerged peacefully. Nor, obviously, did that principle
preclude devolution, or the fragmentation of countries into smaller nationally
based entities, in either Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union itself. A wave of
countries buried in larger transnational entities emerged in Europe in the
1990s, sometimes peacefully and sometimes not.
This did not mean that
tensions did not continue to exist. In Belgium, French-speaking Walloons and
Dutch-speaking Flemings have been hostile to each other since Belgium was
established in the 19th century. Slovakia and Romania have large Hungarian
populations, separated from Hungary under the post-World War I redrawing of the
internal borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Occasionally there are mild
nationalist rumbles among the Hungarians in both countries seeking
reunification. There is a Scottish secessionist movement in the United Kingdom.
Northern Ireland is peaceful now but it retains a secessionist movement. There
are a variety of such movements in Italy.
For the most part, these
movements have not been something to take seriously. Even the Catalan movement
is far from achieving independence. Still, we are in a period of European
history in which borders are not redrawn primarily due to states seizing
territory from each other; rather, the odds that increasingly prevalent
secession movements could change the borders are moving from the realm of the
preposterous to that of the almost conceivable. That is not a trivial evolution
because in such matters the trajectory, rather than the credibility at any one
moment, is most important. As pressures build in Europe, what was inconceivable
could become surprisingly practical in a relatively short period of time.
The European Summit to discuss
the EU budget last week was a demonstration of the degree to which national
interest -- and nationalism -- defines the existing European states. The issue
in Europe is who is going to bear the burden of austerity that the European
political and economic system is imposing. Whatever the idea of Europe might be,
the reality is that the political power rests in the nation-states, and the
presidents and prime ministers are elected by nation-states. They respond to
their constituents, and the constituents want to deflect costs.
The ongoing EU budget dispute
is a convenient opportunity for any government that wants to demonstrate to its
public that it is being vigilant in minimizing the costs of austerity. The
degree of acrimony and indeed hostility among the states -- which formed and
shifted coalitions over the budget while trying to shift the financial burden
to other states -- was startling if you looked at it through the eyes of 2000.
The structures of the European Union are rapidly devolving into its constituent
nation-states.
The question of who will bear
the burden within nation-states is emerging as an equally divisive issue. This
in turn intersects with deep rivers of European history. Catalonia has long
argued that it was a separate nation from Spain, based on history and culture,
and historically it has had a degree of autonomy. The issue remained relatively
quiet until it became clear that Spain's EU membership would have significant
economic implications. The tradition of Catalan nationalism then turned from
nostalgia to a vehicle to deflect economic pain by shifting it from Barcelona
to Madrid.
Nationalism's Difficult Legacy
There is a profoundly
important tradition in Europe of romantic nationalism. In its liberal form, it
is the idea that every nation has the right to self-determination. The problem
is defining what constitutes a nation, and for the romantics that was defined
by language, distinct history, culture and so on. It is also defined by
self-perception. A nation exists when its inhabitants see themselves as a
distinct people. Implicit in romantic nationalism is a conflict. When one
notion of romantic nationalism denies the legitimacy of competing claims by a
nation's constituent parts, romantic nationalism can become oppressive rather
than liberating. In response, the constituent parts sometimes invent national
identities for a variety of reasons, destabilizing the whole. The European
notion of nationalism can be quite destabilizing and in its most militant form
can become brutal.
The hymn of the European Union
is Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" from the 9th Symphony. It is a
celebration of the French Revolution and the spirit of liberation that
followed. The liberation was not only of the individual but also of the nation
from dynasties. It was the combination of the notion of individual rights,
national self-determination and national identity. The European Union was intended
to embody these things. They are not lost but under strain, and the point of
the strain is the nation, which, rather than forming a community, now forms
competing parts in what is a zero-sum game. Where this ends is the problem,
since the history of Europe after Beethoven was not what he would have hoped
for.
Here we see the bitter side of
the "Ode to Joy," rooted in geography. To have a nation, you must
have a place that is its own. Ever since the French Revolution, nations have
been fighting over their place in Europe. The occupation of Europe from 1945 to
1991 suspended the argument, and from 1991 -- the end of the Cold War and
drafting of the EU-forming Maastricht Treaty -- until 2008, the suspension
seemed eternal. Very slowly, the inconceivable is becoming far-fetched and the
far-fetched merely unlikely.
Romantic nationalism can
fulfill a people's dreams or nightmares and usually does both. Gaza gives us a
sense of the nightmare, Catalonia a sense of the dreams. But in most places,
and in Europe in particular, the distance between dreams and nightmares is not
as great as people might like to think. Economic pain coupled with romantic
nationalism, now bound together through a massive structure like the European
Union that is incapable of understanding the forces that are lurking beneath
the surface, have always had a way to generate nightmares in Europe.
It is all inconceivable now.
But European history is the history of the inconceivable. I doubt that the
founders of Zionism in the 19th century envisioned Gaza as their future.
Just as interesting is what
happens to the Catalonias, the buried nationalisms within existing
nation-states, that are now prepared to challenge the legitimacy of a country
like Spain and demand liberation from it and the right to its own authentic
nationalism. What began in the velvet divorce, peaceful and reasonable, now can
become much less friendly under the pressure of severe economic pain. What
other hidden nationalisms will emerge to use the shield of national
self-determination to deflect economic pain? It is easy to dismiss this as an
archaic sentiment and as something that cannot destabilize Europe now. But then
there is little in European history to allow Europeans that kind of self-confidence.
It is important to benchmark
this by the most extreme sort of consequence that we saw in Gaza. Zionism is a
movement that grew out of European romantic nationalism. It drew on Jewish
history, culture and religion to legitimize the right to a Jewish nation.
Palestinian nationalism also grew out of European romantic nationalism. The
idea of the nation-state, which took root in the Arab world in the late 19th
century and was later promoted by Arab left-wing secularists in the 1950s, very
much derived from the idea of nation-states' replacing European empires. The
Palestinian national movement derived from this tradition, claiming the right
of a Palestinian nation distinct from other nations.
George Friedman, Founder and
Chief Executive Officer, Stratfor,
November 27, 2012
"Gaza, Catalonia and Romantic Nationalism is republished with permission of
Stratfor."
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