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Protests planned in Madrid against amnesty for Catalan secessionists
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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You have not thought about this deeply. In this case your "uninvolved party" is the nation of which many inhabitants of the "involved party" consider themselves members. The premise of your argument is that all people living in Catalonia consider themselves exclusively Catalonian. In reality some of them don't even consider themselves Catalonian, let alone exclusively Catalonian. What's your answer to them? "Tough shit"? This is not England and France, this is a nation within a nation. It is indeed a complicated issue.
How do you know if the people in Catalonia consider tgemselves Catalonian or Spanish without a referendum?
Conflicts about the belonging of countries or ethnicities and regions to a country are far from unique and in every case you will not have 100% being on on side.
Sure. But saying "this is not complicated" is just wrong. Some situations are not (particularly) complicated, for instance when there's an empire and a bunch of discrete nations whose people speak separate languages and are somewhat agreed about their identities. For example. eastern Europe pre-WWI. This situation is relatively messy by comparison. That's all.
What kinda weird point is that and how is that the premise of my argument? This is exactly why you hold a referendum to find out whether enough people actually support it. I'm arguing for the ability of people to choose their own fate in a democratic manner. Not pro or contra independence.
I'd say you're actually arguing for the rights of peoples, rather than people, i.e. groups rather than individuals. Which is fine when the people in question is a monolithic block. But here the people concerned are in fact arguably not a people at all, if you go by the identity surveys and election results. So, next step in your view: an independence referendum for every region and district, and if a simple majority wants out then the the others get dragged out of their own country? Maybe it could be gerrymandered to shut up the whining minorities? Yes, it's complicated.
An independence vote should maybe not just be a simple majority, I think at least more than 2/3 like what is usually required for a change in consitution would make sense. But other than that, you're just describing how democracy works. Just about no western country is a homogenous group. There are always people of wildly different background and with wildly different views and they often get rules imposed on them they don't like. This is already happening right now. So are you against current countries running democratically as well? You're arguing that a presumed minority of non-independence voting Catalonians will feel disenfranchised, but you're at the same time perfectly fine with the presumed majority of Catalonians feeling disenfranchised right now? How does that make sense? If you're arguing for minimizing disenfranchisement, your point is clearly inconsistent.
The only way to minimize those frictions for a society that can only function in organized groups is to make the units of self-determination relatively small. So yes, I absolutely think that every geographical region that wants to hold an independence referendum should do so. Why not? There's nothing speaking against that. If your concern is that many people might have rules voted on them they don't like than you should be for each individual's votes counting as much as possible.
Also, there's nothing saying that if a country goes independent, there can't be some transitional rulesets, where people can potentially switch nationality, lived by mixed rules for a while etc. I absolutely think that in such cases there should be some rulesets in place to ease the transition and give people some choice. But all that only makes sense if we have some consensus about where the majority of a region wants to go. Which Catalonia isn't even allowed to officially find out where they stand and start negotiating about that.
How do you gerrymander a region deciding about its independence? If the regional borders for a referendum are "arbitrarily" drawn (all borders are) in a way that 95%+ or whatever support independence, that just means that you just minimized the amount of people who would feel disenfranchised by that decision, which is what you made your main point of concern. Gerrymandering only can be done (maliciously) when te seats/votes for a plurality of administrative units is determined in a first past the post voting system. None of that has any relevance for or applies to an independence referendum.
Actually, I agree with all your points here. If individual rights are protected then I have nothing against every town and village declaring independence, especially if a supermajority wants it. And my gerrymandering argument was terrible for the reason you give. I basically share your viewpoint.
Really I was pushing back against what I thought to be your uninformed understanding of the Catalonian situation, which is in fact complicated. This is not an oppressed people - come on, let's get real - and in fact a big chunk of this sort-of-nation hardly sees itself as Catalonian at all. Economic interests are at stake. And as the other poster says, the local politicians behaved completely recklessly when they didn't even have a proper majority. A lot like spoiled self-absorbed children.
In response you'll probably say that that's because they're treated like children, and the solution is to give them the power to secede. And you'd be right. And like Scotland they would probably choose not to, and the whole subject could at last be put to bed, for a while at least.
Also, "If people vote on something, some people will also vote against it and have choices enacted they don't like" isn't a sign of something being anti-democratic. It's how democracy works. So I'm pretty sure that my point is consistent here.