Catalonia's Crisis of Independence

Even by recently chaotic global standards, it’s fair to say that Spain has had a pretty bumpy week. Last Friday, the leaders of the Catalan parliament were declaring independence for Catalonia. Today, eight of those leaders are behind bars. Their incarceration pending trial is the culmination of a standoff between the regional authorities—who declared that the results of the October 1 referendum on independence gave Catalonia the right to secede from Spain—and the national authorities, who had declared that the referendum, heavily disrupted by national police, was illegal.

With Catalonia’s regional president Carles Puigdemont having fled to Brussels earlier this week, eight cabinet colleagues were remanded in custody yesterday (and one was let out on bail) in preparation for a trial focusing on their involvement in Catalonia’s referendum and independence declaration. This sounds tumultuous enough, but the fallout from the Catalan arrests could possibly be so serious that everything that’s happened up to now could be a mere prelude.