A COLLECTION of essays is part of an international campaign to help put pressure on the Spanish government for a valid, binding referendum on independence in Catalonia, according to its editors.

Building A New Catalonia: Self-determination And Emancipation also has lessons for the independence movement in Scotland, they say.

Several high-profile contributors feature in the anthology, including Liz Castro, chair of the International Committee of the Catalan National Assembly, former Catalan MP David Fernandez and Jordi Cuixart, president of Catalan cultural organisation the Omnium Cultural.

Cuixart is one of 12 people currently on trial at the Spanish Supreme Court for their part in the Catalan independence referendum of October 2017, which the Spanish government says breached the constitution. Cuixart has been in custody since.

“He’s one of the most respected leaders right now,” says co-editor Ignasi Bernat of Cuixart, who wrote the book’s opening chapter.

“The Omnium Cultural is the biggest cultural association in Catalonia, with more than 120,000 members. It was Cuixart who explicitly declared the political nature of the trial.”

Bernat, an academic and activist based in Barcelona, says coverage of the trial has been overshadowed by the run-up to Spain’s general election on April 28.

Meanwhile, Cuixart and his co-accused, including former Catalan vice president Oriol Junqueras, face a combined total of roughly 200 years in prison if they are given maximum sentences.

Bernat doesn’t believe the general election, Spain’s third in four years, will offer much hope to supporters of Catalanonian independence, whether it’s a win for the surging far-right party Vox, or the neo-liberal Ciudadanos (Citizens Party).

“What will solve the problem is a referendum all parties accept as legitimate, and for which the result is binding,” Bernat says. “The polls are saying 80% of people want a referendum. We need the European Union or institutions like the United Nations to help. It is only with international pressure that we can do that. The book is part of this.”

Co-editor David Whyte, professor of socio-legal studies at Liverpool University, says we should be careful about expecting the EU to help Catalonia. On the issue of the prisoners, there is silence.

“It’s incredible that no-one in Europe is making this a big issue,” he says. “It shows us that the EU is more interested in defending its narrow project than in defending European democracy. That’s not an anti-European Union statement. But I do feel we need to be cynical about an EU that claims to be founded on human rights and democracy, when it tolerates political prisoners in the 21st century.”

Prominent contributors from outside Catalonia include UK broadcaster Chris Bambury, former SNP MP George Kerevan, Mike Small of Bella Caledonia, economics writer Paul Mason and economist Costas Lapavitsas, a former member of Greece’s leftist coalition Syriza.

Like Syriza, the more radical parts of Catalonia’s independence movement feature strands which are explicitly pro-environmental, anti-racist and pro-feminist.

In the book’s preface, Catalan MP-in exile Anna Gabriel links the struggle for women’s autonomy with that of national self-governance, similar to Women For Independence’s belief in “independence for women”.

Whether in Scotland or Catalonia, the process of imagining a different constitutional settlement opens up the potential for alternative modes of how we live today.

While both places share a situation of concentrated wealth and a “revulsion for austerity”, Whyte says Scotland can learn from the strong grassroots organisations in Catalonia, especially with regard to another independence referendum.

“There were real positives about the referendum,” says Whyte, who was in Catalonia on October 1, 2017, when images of heavy-handed Spanish police were beamed around the world.

“One of the reasons the police felt they had to take extreme action was that people were so organised. You’d see school kids and their teachers barricading the polling stations. Although people faced the violence of the police and the referendum was invalidated, those structures at a community level which defended the referendum, they haven’t gone away. They were renamed from ‘committees for the defence of the referendum’ to ‘committees for the defence of the republic’. In many ways that’s much more enduring than a police baton.”

Whyte says a key lesson from Catalonia is that democracy is not handed down from above.

“If there is going to be a second referendum in Scotland,” he says, “people need to be very organised in their communities to make sure that they are demanding a Scotland that’s going to work for them, a Scotland that’s going to serve them, and that they will be part of.”

Building A New Catalonia: Self-determination and Emancipation is published by Pol-len Edicions and Bella Caledonia