Wholly Separate

Whether or not Sarah Palin has ever been in the Alaskan Independence Party, the serious suggestion that she might have been illustrates how fallacious it is to suppose that separatism is a left-wing movement at least in some ancestrally Marxist sense, or even at all. It certainly isn't in Alaska. Nor is it in the American South. Nor is it in parts of the American West, where it does sometimes turn up.

Nor is it Scotland. Nor is it, really, in Wales, where Leftist rhetoric is employed to no lasting electoral effect whatever in the English-speaking South, but where the real Plaid Cymru heartland is still among Welsh-speaking farmers who are really Tories or old-style Liberals, but who are particularly concerned about the language. Nor is it in Ireland, where Marxism is confined to the core of Sinn Féin, and is certainly not much shared among its wider voters, whose economic interests, whether or not they like to admit it, would be extremely ill-served by Northern Ireland's incorporation into the Irish Republic, where "labour must wait" as much now as when James Connolly first told it so. Nor is it among the sorts of Englishmen who have adopted separatist bombast in recent years.

Nor is it Flanders, although there it might yet turn out to be just too paleocon to go through with dissolving a Catholic monarchy. Nor is it in Spain: Carlism is difficult to place in left-right terms, but the "Fueros" in "Dios, Patria, Fueros, Rey" certainly underlies, at least in part, the separatism in Galicia (land of the old Falangist, Manuel Fraga and his Partido Popular Galego), in the Basque Country (where there is opposition to the Mass in Spanish instead of in Latin, because it is Spanish rather than in Basque), and in Catalonia, where the separatists also look to the staunchly Catholic nineteenth-century tradition of Gaudí, the tradition of resistance to capitalism not least because capitalism is inseparable from decadent social libertinism and from cultural philistinism.

It should, however be emphasised that there is nothing Catholic (certain transient appearances notwithstanding) about the Romantic reaction against rationalism and its Revolution, any more than about those things themselves. Nor is there anything Catholic about wishing to dismember a Catholic Kingdom, in Spain any more than in Belgium.

So, is there anywhere where separatism really is a movement of the Left?