The EU will not help the Catalan secessionists’ cause

SEPARATISM in Europe these days comes draped in a blue flag with yellow stars. “If in Europe you’re not a member state, you’re nobody,” said Josep Huguet i Biosca, a Catalan politician who favours independence, back in 2004. His quote appeared in a now-dusty manifesto for “An Independent Flanders within Europe”, published in 2005 by a group seeking liberation from the yoke of the Belgian state. The Scottish bid for independence, in 2014, was similarly shrouded in European aspirations. For some of its more starry-eyed advocates, the European Union was supposed to dissolve atavistic nationalisms. In some places, it seems instead to have encouraged them.