... After the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, the dictator Francisco Franco took away the right to teach the Catalan language in schools and renamed monuments and entire towns, stripping away the vestiges of Catalan history. With the demise of Franco's authoritarian regime in 1975, there have been many popular manifestations of Catalan identity, from a million-person march on National Day in 1977 to a mass refusal to honor Spain's national anthem at Camp Nou, Barcelona's famous soccer stadium. (Can you imagine secessionists in Texas jeering while the Star-Spangled Banner played at a Cowboys game?) But with the economic crisis and controversial court rulings has come increasingly serious public debate over the integrity of the Spanish state.

In the aftermath of a constitutional court rescinding Catalonia's 2005 Statute of Autonomy—a decision which brought over a million protestors onto the streets of Barcelona on July 10, 2010—issues of identity and culture in Spain have been at the center of Catalan regional politics. The Statute definitively declared Catalonia as "a nation." But what is a nation? Are its boundaries territorial, cultural, or linguistic? The original pre-Civil War 1932 Catalan Statute had defined Catalonia as an autonomous region rather than a national entity. Autonomy within Spain had even been the position staked out by figures like Pujol, the President of Catalonia from 1980 until 2003. But since Artur Mas took over the presidency, and crises have taken down governments across southern Europe, opinions have hardened.

Some look to economics as a casus belli, arguing that Catalonia is forced to remit far more to Madrid than they receive in return. On the other hand, Catalonia also has a very high regional debt. It's important to remember that the provinces of Catalonia, Navarre, and the Basque Country, all located in northern Spain on the border with France, have been granted tremendous autonomy since Spain's transition to democracy and the promulgation of the 1978 constitution. A fully realized independent state, however, would have to expend billions in creating state institutions, border controls, armed forces, diplomatic embassies—the list goes on and on. And Catalonia might not be welcomed immediately into the European Union. Notwithstanding these fiscal realities, demands for greater Catalan autonomy now have been overshadowed by calls for outright independence. A straw poll held last year garnered 80 percent of the vote in favor of an independent state, although only 33 percent of Catalans bothered to show up.

Thinking back on my first personal experience with Catalan politics, I now realize that it's not about facts or the exact details of historical narratives. When politicians like Mas lay flowers at one of the monuments to the 1714 "secessionists," as he did a few weeks ago, they do so with a wink and a nod to history. But the power in such commemorations is in the evocation of an emotional appeal to a seemingly timeless nation and people. That's the real trick of romantic nationalists, who can gloss over economics and history to call for the creation of a state that they themselves may one day lead.