FreeOrion

I haven't had the time to properly check international media about this subject. For once, I'm in the same country where the problem is going on (instead of reading about it from thousand miles away).
I'd like to know what does people from outside Spain know and think about this issue. What has happened? Is there a bad faction and a good faction? Is it justified what each side is doing?

I'll be an outlier on this because I studied 20th Century Spanish history at college and tend to follow seccession/independence/regionalist movements globally out of personal interest (I did political science with international politics as my main subjects).

It's getting a lot of coverage in England, and a lot of discussion on it, some of it really weird and misinformed (the pro-Brexit side saying it's all the EU's fault and why haven't they stepped in to help the Catalans really confuse me).

I think both sides have been acting abominably for a long time, Madrid's absolute refusal to try to resolve the Catalan issue in some way that might be workable has led the Catalans to be able to do more extreme things, this illegal referendum was a deliberate provocation and Madrid's basically fallen for it in a way that makes it now almost impossible to resolve.

My personal view is I'm a European and a decentralist, I would be quite happy to see the idea of the sovereign nation state thrown into the dustbin of history, if most of the larger nation states within the EU split up but remained in the EU it would make very little functional difference but would bring governance for the day to day important stuff down to a more locally accessible level.

It would be absolutely viable for Catalunya to be an independent nation, it's larger and wealthier than many existing EU states. But it has to be a negotiated, peaceful, consensus driven process, the confrontation both sides appear to relish is just horrific.

While I get the historic rationale of Madrid, and the historic resentments in Barcelona, the current approach of both sides is going to lead to tragedy unless someone steps up and stops it, and your new(ish) King doesn't seem to have half the chops his father did in the "great statesmen of history" stakes.

Sorry, guys, honestly, no offence meant, but according to our rules, political comments/discussions of any kind are one of the things we want to keep away from our forums (even from the Off-Topic subforum):

7. No comments on modern politics (last 100 years)

I hope you can understand and respect that, please, don't take it personal. It's just that these things have the potential to get out of hand. There are plenty of platforms on the net where you can discuss politics, religion and all those touchy, yet interesting subjects. But here we try to stay away from all that.

I'm locking this thread.