Catalonia, a model for European regions?

Leo Wieland fears that Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's "policy of smiles and concessions has opened Pandora's box, and that it could lead to internal instability, increased demands from tribally-minded regional nationalists, and in the end to a Balkanisation of the Iberian peninsula": "The hard-core nationalists in the Basque country and the somewhat more moderate ones in Catalonia are not open-minded, urban figures; they often seem to have sprung straight from the pages of an old picture book dating back to the 19th or 20th century. The areas they govern are not exactly models of free communities, but ones where (sometimes racist) narrow-mindedness is thriving, along with the tribal network and cronyism, which is cleverly combined with the regional language as an instrument of power."

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