I’m very much afraid that, when seeing a correslation between Krimea and Cataluña, Spanish foreign affairs minister García-Margallo, along with many politicians and journalists, are all missing the point. Krimea’s present and past realities have nothing to do with Catalonia’s except for one thing: the referendum for independence is illegal. For the rest, Catalonia is not a region populated by a 97% of people sharing nothing with the country to which it belongs, whereas Krimea is. Equally, Catalonia is not a region artificially added to a country by political decisions totally foreign to its people’s will, while Krimea is. As a matter of fact, Krimea has never been Ukraine, whereas Catalonia has always been Spain. That’s why such presumed correlation is, to the best of my judgement, wholly mistaken: the real problem is not that Krimea wants its independence from Ukraine, but that Ukraine should have never become independent from Russia. So, we’d rather express the real correlation like this: Catalonia is not Ukraine’s Krimea, but Russia’s Ukraine.
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Using the logic of what land was or was not a part of which country in history is not always as it seems. Wasn’t Spain once a Muslim country? And with sharia law, wouldn’t Spain have been a different country in name as well as culture?
I cannot comment on your article as I simply don’t know enough about these two histories.
Almost right: for some centuries, Spain was taken over by muslims, with doesn’t mean population was muslim; but even supposing Spain’s age to be “only” 600 years old, after all muslims were kicked out, Ukraine is in comparison but a newborn; and a very artificial one, for that matter. At the same time, Catalonia has never been a country nor a kingdom, but a county. I very much recommend you this amusing and extremely interesting short video:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?q=watch+as+1000+years+of+european+borders+change