CATALONIA
"
BARCELONA — The story goes that if you put a frog into lukewarm water
and then turn up the heat, it won’t notice the gradually increasing
temperature until it is too late. That would have been a good
characterization of what was happening to Catalonia between the
transition from the Franco dictatorship in the 1970s and the year 2000.
From the outside, things might have looked rosy, but from the inside,
people felt like they were gradually getting boiled. Catalans had little
control over taxation, spending or investment, and the Spanish
government was aggressive about attacking the use of the local language.
But from 2010 on, it started to feel like the Spanish government had
abruptly put the heat on high, as the ruling Popular Party overturned a
hard-won compromise on autonomy, stripped out guarantees for use of the
Catalan language and contested Catalonia’s right to call itself a
nation.
With Thursday’s vote, Catalans have jumped out of the water for good. "
