(Written in the 1910′s)
To have an iberian union of any kind three things are essential… : 1) to abolish the spanish monarchy; 2) the final separation of the Peninsula in its three essential nationalities: Catalonia, Castile and the Galaico-Portuguese state and … 3) the constitution of a federation (of the parts)…
Of all the problems that shake and perturb the undisciplined life of Europe , the problem of catalan separatism is, perhaps, the one that reflects more flagrantly the fundamental conflict to which the world delivers itself today and is, therefore, the one having more curious elements to learn from.
… The conflict between Catalonia and Spain is the conflict between the concept of a country as a nation and the concept of a country as a civilization. The former is a geographical concept, prefigurated as ethnical and afirmed linguistically. The latter is an historical concept, prefigurated as imperialist and that afirms itself as cultural.From the national point of view, Catalonia is a nation, a country, with a way of being, with special tendencies, with its own language that defines them and with the aspirations that desires them.
It is not a pseudo-nation like Belgium or Switzerland, that lack from the beginning of the linguistic base to show to the world that they have personality. It is not an artificial nation, like the United States of America, where the linguistic unity only expresses the tradition of the colonization, without bases in an own culture, or a national psyche… Neither a dead nation, like Ireland… It is not a region spiritually conquered, like the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, originally germanic, that Louis XIV stole to Germany…
