Hutton: the choice between federalism and an orgy of unforgiving remembrance

Dear reader, if I don't convince you, please read Will Hutton today in The Observer. And by the way, he doesn't need to finish his article with a call for another referendum (a typical concession to secessionism by lazy commentators). He knows better than that, because he interviewed Amartya Sen about it. It is the best article about Catalonia that I have seen, perhaps together with the one by Roger Cohen of the New York Times, "Damage to Catalonia." This is what Hutton, probably the best progressive writer in the UK, has to say:
"Europe is plunging ever deeper into an orgy of unforgiving remembrance. A collective curse has settled over our continent, in which past triumphs are contrasted with present grievances. Only independence, taking back control and avenging a continuum of injustice can restore justice, prosperity and lost glory, even if, in Catalonia, there could be a slide to civil war, as EU commissioner Günther Oettinger warns. It is not that the rest of the world is immune from this contagion: witness the passions over the Confederate flag in Charlottesville, Japanese politicians genuflecting at their war shrine or jihadists avenging the Crusades. But Europe, with so many tribes boasting so much history in so many countries, is the memory capital of the globe, where too many states are so vulnerable to the agonies of secession and fragmentation.
The best justification for what is happening is that these inflated memories are but froth on a deeper and natural yearning of every subnational, culturally united minority to enjoy civic self-determination. The worst interpretation is to see Catalonia as an expression of a destructive populist appeal to its citizens’ worst instincts – puffed-up hatred of the other, driven by false grievances and impossible hopes – while cloaking those unappetising instincts in the language of self-government and democracy.
The right response, as Catalonia’s Socialist party argues, is for Spain to recreate itself as a republican, federal state rather than attempt to sustain itself as a monarchially legitimised unitary state. The only way to avoid disaster and give the mainstream parties in Catalonia the political ammunition to argue against secession, which neither they nor the majority of Catalans want, is to offer the prospect of an autonomous Catalonia within a federal Spain. It is through political creativity that historical myth can be relegated to where it belongs, along with much more determined and imaginative activism to address inequalities and neglect.
Similarly in Britain. If the unfolding disaster of Brexit is to be stopped in its tracks, and the over-remembered, over-deified past restored to its proper place, we need parallel creativity – a constitutional settlement with Europe and, at home, a real assault on the injustices that fed what was at bottom a protest vote against a status quo too many found intolerable. Too much remembering has become toxic. It is time to forget and move on."