Events are making it increasingly difficult for the anti-secessionist scoffers in the USA to credibly claim that secession is unthinkable and impossible, either here or anywhere else in the world.
Separatists in the Spanish region of Catalonia moved one step closer to independence on Tuesday when the two largest pro-independence parties announced their intention to form an alliance and push for a referendum in 2014. As the New York Times notes, these two parties hail from opposite ends of the political spectrum and have failed to see eye-to-eye for years. The fact that they are now uniting suggests that Catalonia is getting serious about independence.
Madrid did its best to spin the results of the Catalonia election as a defeat for the secessionists, but as we predicted, the new Catalan coalition has united behind the demand for an independence referendum that Madrid says is illegal.
Notice that Catalonia has not been independent of Castille since 1516, and lost its right to its own laws in 1716. This voluntary union is considerably older than the federal Union violently imposed upon the southern States by Washington in 1865; the US union is younger, shakier, and much more morally suspect than the Castillan-Catalonian one.
Of course the government in Madrid says Catalonian self-determination is illegal. Those who rule without the consent of the people always say self-determination is illegal; like the great dictator Abraham Lincoln, they will say anything in order to prevent those over whom they wish to rule from gaining their freedom.