Democracy in Spain

I have been carrying on a running argument with an Indian colleague of mine about what he considers to be the unfair handling of the Turkish coup and the Catatonian bid for independence.

His baseline, as it turns out, is that the major difference is that Turks are "people of color", and Spaniards are white, and therefore Spanish police brutality is overlooked and Turkey is condemned for being barbaric. To him that explains why the Germans are so aggressive about the Turkish handling of the coup.

My counter has been that the Germany has been less concerned about the Turkish response to its own population (although the wide ranging imprisonments under the auspices of the coup seem to be more politically motivated as opposed to dealing with real security concerns) but rather with the imprisonment of German journalists under the guise that they are foreign agents "spying" on Turkey fomenting unrest.

They are also concerned about threat that Erdogan poses to democracy in that he is using autocratic means to change laws to position himself to be able to claim the mantle of "operating within the law".

The Germans have a history with this and so are perhaps especially sensitive about putting into law actions which are actually criminal.

Furthermore, I have argued that it is incorrect to compare the Turkish coup with the situation in Catalan and a better comparison would be how the Spanish are going about dealing with Catalonia versus the Turkish handling of their Kurdish minority.

I haven't made much headway.

This despite the fact that the Kurds haven't even ventured to hold an independence referendum in Turkey. The recent response to the Iraqi Kurdish plebiscite is perhaps a good indication of why not. The Iraqi central government responded quickly and remorselessly with military force.

And we shouldn't forget that a referendum in Turkey on Kurdish independence, as in Catalonia, is against the law.

It is an imperative of central or federal governments to ban referendums as they would go at the core of the state's central powers. Even if the Scottish referendum had been won by those wishing to leave the UK it was not a legally binding referendum although it had been countenanced by the central government.

This morning a spokesperson for the Catalan independence movement was quoted that this was not a question of legality but rather of democracy.

I think that might be where the problem begins.

One of the first tenets of democracy is the rule of law.

I would suggest that the Spanish government has been clear regarding the illegality of a referendum and how they would respond to it. Incarcerating the Catalan government and calling for a new election is not something they thought up overnight.

They have Article 155.

Spain's Senate voted 214 to 47 to invoke Article 155 and seize control of the region immediately after it had declared its independence. This marks the first time since the fall of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 that the central government has taken direct control of one of Spain's 17 semi-autonomous regions.

Despite the fact that I think the Spanish government was a bit heavy-handed with their police actions against the referendum, the basic response was the correct one.

All the plebiscites in the world, if they are against the law in the country in which they are held are actually anti-democratic. If you want to have a legal plebiscite then you have to win enough votes at a national level to legalize a referendum, especially on independence.

Democracy is a two-edged sword.