Liz Castro

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/many-grains-of-sand-by-liz-castro/

A beautifully illustrated book, given to me by the author, listing numerous campaign tactics used by the proponents of independence for Catalonia in the heady years from the 2006 Statute of Autonomy to the botched independence declaration in 2017. A lot of this is genuinely inspiring activism: the people who went to all 50 US state capitals to present their case to the governors; the human towers and works of permanent and less permanent art; the integration with sports.

A lot of this could in fact be copied elsewhere in a society with a reasonable amount of freedom of expression, though there’s not many places with both a strong independence movement and an open society.… (meer)

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2083743.html

This is a digestible book of 35 essays about Catalonia, all written at the end of last year, which is being widely distributed by sympathisers of the Catalan cause. The two key grievances which come up again and again are the question of fiscal imbalance, where Catalonia feels that it is subsidising the manifestly unsuccessful policies of the central Spanish state, over which is has little say and for which it gets little in return; and the language issue - using Catalan in public could get you arrested not very long ago, and Madrid does little to reassure Catalan concerns on this point. There are two pieces about Europe, a snapshot of Brussels opinion by a leading MEP, and a brief but powerful piece by Edward Hugh on the political economics (or the economic politics) of Catalonia's drive for independence.… (meer)