THIS weekend will see a general election in Catalonia, the region of Spain (actually an "autonomous community") beloved by foreign tourists and especially by soccer fans (the Barcelona football club plays the world's most sublime form of the game). To proponents of Catalan independence, the election is a godsend: Artur Mas, president of Catalonia's government, may not actually want full independence but it's conceivable that he will have to go with a popular tide which will keep the independence issue on the agenda in the months to come.
Cassandra has no wish to delve into the ins and outs of the Catalan issue—brilliant covered both in the new issue of The Economist and in The World in 2013—but he does wonder whether the various tides of independence around the world are ever quite as strong as their advocates proclaim. One obvious exception is East Timor, which won its freedom from Indonesia ten years ago. But, post-colonial and post-Soviet nations aside, have there been others in recent memory?
Doubtless Cassandra's readers will correct him, but my point is that Quebec never quite makes the choice to secede from Canada; the Basques and the Corsicans may throw the occasional bomb but few ordinary citizens seem desperate to wave the flag of a new nation; and polls show that a majority of Scots and Welsh want to stay part of the United Kingdom. In other words, most people prefer the comfort of the known to the anxiety of the unknown (in the case of the Scots and Catalans, for example, it is very unclear whether membership of the European Union, which they all favour, would be automatically granted). As Saint Augustine famously declared, "God, grant me chastity and continence—but not yet." The exception to that generalisation is the Kurds, who would dearly love to separate from their host-nations of Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq—and they are very unlikely to get that chance in 2013 or even in many years to come.
