Nation-ality

The people who live here.

It's the phrase used to define who will vote in September's referendum in Scotland. And it signals how different the independence debate is in Scotland than in, say, Kurdistan.

In most "nationalist" debates the heart of the debate is ethnic, defining your nation by virtue of your parentage. JK Rowling got this wrong, in her £1m No statement in which she says that people might judge her 'insufficiently Scottish'  http://www.jkrowling.com/en_GB/#/news-events/latest (to which the National Collective's Mairi McFadyen wrote such a brilliant reply http://nationalcollective.com/2014/06/11/an-open-letter-to-j-k-rowling/ ).

In Scotland it's not about being Scottish, or not being Scottish enough. It's about a group of people, living in a nation, choosing how they should be governed.

I am Scottish. But like millions of Scots I don't live there, an emigrant looking for opportunities and a lifestyle that Scotland did not appear, in 1975, to provide. I'm ethnically and culturally Scottish, but it's right that I should not have the vote in a country that I chose to leave 39 years ago.

The evolution in the nationalist debate has not apparently registered with the No campaign. The No discourse is still shouting about nationalists closing the borders and hating the English. This is childish. The people who live in Scotland could define themselves as Scottish, English,  Catalan, Pakistani, Brazilian, Kurdish or any one of the hundreds of homes, or ethnicities, that make up Scotland's diverse populace. All of these people can vote.

The policies promoted by the Yes campaign underline this. Yes to immigration (what a difference from Westminster's xenophobia,) Yes to continuing in the EU (UKIP England says No), and Yes to a Nordic alliance, linking Scotland to its historic kin in Scandinavia. The movement to independence is the opposite of isolationist; anyone who thinks for a moment about how a new small country will organize itself will realise that it must make international alliances. The independence White Paper http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2013/11/9348) emphasises this, saying that Scotland wants to join and work with international institutions;  "Scotland will be an active member of global institutions and will be party to fair and reciprocal agreements which respect human rights..."

The debate in Scotland is not ethnic, and it is not  isolationist. It's geographic, placing a brilliant new country into a world map. A new country, where the people who live here - wherever they may call home - are sovereign.

The Catalan Question

We are "a party divided" no longer "united in our diversity."

The words of Pere Navarro, leader of the PSC (Partit dels Socialistes del Catalunya, http://www.socialistes.cat/) in his resignation speech earlier this month.

The cause of his sudden departure? The Catalan Question, mainly. The nationalist movement here is led by the left. As a result the PSC, the mainstream socialist party, has haemorrhaged votes to the nationalist left. Like Gordon Brown in Scotland, the PSC has tried to outline a federal future, but like Mr Brown's version it sounds neither clear nor likely. Voters are not buying it.

The Catalan Question is dominating Madrid politics. Our new king, Phillip VI, made an oblique reference to it in his coronation speech on Thursday. The Catalan Question seems more important in Madrid, than the Scottish Question is in Westminster.

In part this is because of different ideas of nation and thus nationalism, defined here by language, by street protest, by youth participation in Assembleas and Casals. Catalonia has suffered from a history, still in living memory, of bloody oppression.

The images of the nation are different, too; there is no equivalent here of the postcard-packaged image of Scotland (castles, lochs and kilts). Catalonia is harder to package.

Language is central to the debate. In the village in which I live almost everyone speaks Catalan. Our kids go to school in Catalan: a teacher in Mallorca has just finished a hunger strike as part of a mass protest against the imposition of Castellano in state schools there. Catalan is the starting point in any debate. Open your mouth and we know which side you are likely to be on. Harder to do that in Scotland.

We have a generation of protesters to rely on. At the village festas, and most other mass events you'll see a busy wee stand, the Catalan Senyera fluttering, surrounded by a group of older people talking animatedly. This is the Assemblea Nacional Catalana (ANC, https://assemblea.cat/), the campaign of signatures for a referendum. The ANC volunteers are, many of them, people who were case-hardened under the 'porres' (batons) of the oppressive Guardia Civil under General Franco. There have been hilarious scenes at demonstrations of the modern police trying to move them on, caught between respect for the elderly, and their orders.

Protest seems much more natural here. People fly the Estellada (Catalan independence flag) at every Barcelona FC match. We couldn't understand why Alex Salmond was criticised for doing the equivalent when Andy Murray won Wimbledon.  Extraordinary numbers of people here join the mass protests. For the Via Catalana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_Way) 1.6 million people held hands along 480km of our coastline on 11 September 2013.

The great gasping maw of a difference is that in Scotland you can vote. Here, we can't. The Madrid Government refuses to give the Catalans a vote, and both the main parties agree. Artur Mas, Catalan President, has laid plans including ordering 6,000 ballot boxes for the referendum he plans to hold on 9 November.

But Madrid will not allow Catalans to vote and refuses all talk of a referendum. We can expect a summer of discontent followed by an autumn of protest, with the 11^th September, Catalan national day, a special focus.

The Catalans will celebrate their day just one week before the people of Scotland vote for their independence.  We’ll be watching, with envy.