A new state in Europe? Scenarios for Catalan self-determination

Historically, the political structure of Spain has been a source of conflict: peripheral regions as Catalonia and the Basque country have questioned the centralized power of the state and have claimed a higher level of decentralization in view of their distinct history, cultural identity and language. Recently, political and social discontent has escalated in Catalonia, leading to the unilateral announcement of a Catalan self-determination referendum for November 2014. Regardless of political or ethical preferences, it will be necessary to foresee the consequences of this process for Catalonia, Spain and elsewhere. A scenario approach focuses on possible outcomes of the current debate rather than on the arguments put forward in the controversy. Those in favour of Catalan independence have depicted a future for their country with a booming economy that will situate it at currently unattainable levels of prosperity. Opponents of secession argue that Catalonia will become a failed state. These future visions of an independent Catalonia can be described as scenarios, the underlying assumptions and plausibility of which can be analysed. EU membership and the effect of borders on international trade are identified as key variables. The alternative scenarios will also be crucial to evaluate the broader impact of “a new state in Europe”.

Article published in Futures, Volume 64, December 2014, Pages 51–60.
doi:10.1016/j.futures.2014.10.008.

Link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328714001694.

Why did we go to war?

One hundred years later, we are still discussing what caused the First World War, and who is to blame. What we should have learned is that while isolated incidents and the reaction to these in itself may have seemed rational and understandable, the sum of these incidents became a catastrophic leap into death and destruction. With this hindsight we could have avoided a similar chain of events one century later.

In the escalation of tensions in Ukraine, we have seen the following critical incidents:

1. Interference in domestic affairs
If Ukraine was a sovereign state, an intervention in its internal affairs could only have been justified in the case of severe violations of human rights. But what was under discussion were the country's international relations. The EU support for protests against an elected president was a casus belli - not for Russia but for Ukraine.

"The censorship guy". Homage to Manuel L. Abellán

Manuel Abellán (Barcelona, 1938-2011) was a professor at the Universiteit van Amsterdam when in the late seventies, early years of the Spanish democracy, he managed to enter into the archives of the Francoist censorship and started his endeavour of reconstructing what had been purged and of identifying those who had been responsible - many of them still respected politicians, writers or scholars who had slipped through the nets of the Transition's imposed amnesia.
The following piece was published in the special issue of the electronic journal Represura, homage to Manuel. My title comes from one of the anecdotes of Manuel's research and his contacts with the former Francoist esteblishment when, after being introduced to former Franco minister Fraga the latter recognised him as "the censorship guy", to which Manuel replied "No, no, the censorship guy... that would be you".
Besides my professor, Manuel was an admired and beloved friend until he passed away in December 2011.

“El de la censura”
Jeroen Oskam

         Empecé a trabajar con Manuel Abellán en los años ochenta, en la Facultad de Letras de Amsterdam. Acababa de salir su primer gran estudio sobre la censura franquista. En Amsterdam daba clases, principalmente, sobre Historia Contemporánea de España, una asignatura cuyo atractivo era una visión coherente que vinculaba sucesos dentro pero también fuera de España con la evolución del pensamiento político y cultural – superestructura, decíamos hace tiempo –, de tal manera que no era raro que una clase sobre la Primera República terminara tratando de la actualidad política holandesa. Para el estudiante que yo era entonces, eran oasis de lucidez en un ambiente donde se confundía romanticismo y palabrería con erudición.

A Big Data Police State?

If you look at the long term future of social media, I do not believe that privacy is the main concern. It is of course not the best place to share those things you would not want to be public. But the larger part of 'posts' will be hardly compromising for its users.
That is, if taken separately. The long term trend in social media appears to be building search algorithms that can make sense of all these posts, and attach a meaning behind them to individual users. As Facebook developer Rasmussen explains in a BBC-interview about the value of newsfeed posts:

"It's by far our biggest data source. The engineering challenge of building a search index that can manage that volume of data is big. We're well underway to making the system scale that far - we just aren't there yet."
It means a friend searching for "Friends who like football" could identify you if you had once written something like "Come on United!" in your feed.
[...]
"There are really interesting techniques around sentiment analysis," Mr Rasmussen says, "where people try to take text and figure out whether it's someone saying they like something or don't like something.
(See: BBC News - Technology, "Lars Rasmussen: the brains behind Facebook's future")

 A few months ago, when we started an ETFI-project on the future of social media, I spoke of a scenario in which both industries and governments would adopt a more repressive attitude. The fact that social media as Twitter have created temporary openings of free speech in totalitarian countries is a matter of technical unpreparedness rather than a feature which is inherent to the new media. On the contrary: indepth indexing of newsfeed posts will be an unprecedentedly powerful tool for repressive organisations.

The rational allocation of resources dogma

What would be the right price for a house? One of the most visible symptoms of the current crisis is the oversupply in housing. Demand is stable: housing is a basic necessity, and being evicted can drive people to suicide (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and counting). This means that prices would have to drop to the level where buyers step in. They do not.

We do not have a mechanism that rationally measures the value of a house.

The future of social media

Last October 31, ETFI professor of Scenario Planning Albert Postma painted scenarions for the long-term future of social media at IPK's World Travel Monitor^® Forum 2012 in Pisa. His presentation included the opinions or visions of several international colleagues, including my own. I see two important trends. In the first place, a growing gap between different types of news consumers, with some able to access far more sources of news than would have been thinkable in the past, and others, overwhelmed by the vast offer of news, limiting themselves to 'low-cost' news (or fun, bizarre etc. news; see "In a bizarre world ...").
A second trend is growing pressure on the freedom of expression the internet in general, and social media specifically, have generated, both from commercial parties (especially the entertainment industry) and from political power.

For the other opinions, see ETFI's Youtube channel at http://www.youtube.com/stendenetfi.

In a bizarre world ...

Now that the traditional newspaper business model has become obsolete, apparently internet newspapers' main challenge is to fill the space between the advertisements. It does not matter how, in fact there seems to be a distinction between 'low-cost' news and news with value which can be offered in the printed press or behind paid access.
The 'low-cost' or copy-paste news is identical in most newspapers, which are obviously generated automatically.

Especially popular are the sections of 'bizarre', 'weird' or 'fun' news. Is this genuine news, or pure fiction for marketing purposes? Take the following article:

Belgian couple headed for Lourdes arrives in ... Loudes
A Belgian couple that wanted to visit the image of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes, did not arrive in the pilgrimage site in the French Pyrenees, but in the town Loudes, according to the French magazine La Montagne. Loudes is situated in the also picturesque Haute-Loire and, like Lourdes, in France, but a few hundred kilometers from the place where Bernadette saw the Virgin Mary half a century ago.

The Belgians did have a GPS in their car. Unfortunately they had typed in "Loudes' instead of 'Lourdes'.

Source: HLN.be (http://www.hln.be/hln/nl/959/Bizar/article/detail/1472833/2012/07/19/Belgisch-koppel-op-weg-naar-Lourdes-belandt-in-Loudes.dhtml) and La Montagne (http://www.lamontagne.fr/auvergne/actualite/2012/07/19/en-route-pour-lourdes-un-couple-de-belges-se-retrouve-a-loudes-1224910.html).

Strange. Even if this were interesting or 'fun', who made this story? Did the Belgians call the newspaper, or a Loudes policeman? Was there a reporter involved, or do we just submit our weird and fun stories through the newspaper websites?

So far, 134.342 people liked this story on Facebook. In a bizarre world where we no longer understand who took our money, we stay informed through random weird stories, that may be true, or just fun.

The abandonment of democracy

In our history books we have studied how economic crises and abandoning democratic principles go hand in hand. It is fascinating and frightening to see, currently, how this mechanism is being set in motion.

Originally, democracy was the sovereignty of the will of the people. The people are free to decide and join forces to defend the common good by majority vote. But now there appears to be a footnote: the people may be wrong. Mistaken. EU Commissioner De Gucht raises the question in an interview with the Belgian Standaard: Greece remaining in the Euro-zone will only be possible "if the Greek people will be able to judge rationally in their elections. But they are desperate people... " (De Standaard).

If economic austerity is the only rational thing to do, why do we still have to vote? And why do people fail to see what is good for them? Is there an institution which prevails over democracy and which may judge what is rational and what is not?

And what can we do if the people give the wrong answer?