How doe the independence movements in Catalonia and Scotland compare?
Secession is a means of resisting the neoliberal strategy of devolving responsibility for implementing austerity down from governing parties and central state apparatuses to elected bodies whose policy options are severely restricted both by statute and partial reliance on the central state for most of their funding. In the case of the devolved nations the assump- tion is that the people most likely to participate in local decision-making will be members of the middle-class, who can be expected to behave, en masse, in ways which will impose restrictions on local taxation and public spending, and thus maintain the neoliberal order with a supposedly popular mandate: atomised citizens voting for which services they want to close. In these circumstances, without any illusions in the ability of small states to resist the pressures of the world capitalist system, deciding to secede can be seen as both a progressive and democratic option which need not involve nationalism at all. In each case, however, constructing an argument for why a particular group should determine their own future has to be done on the basis of a political argument, and not by circumventing it through reliance on the notion of a ‘right’.