Catalan president in exile Carles Puigdemont wrote an article on Sunday in the Scottish newspaper The National where he expresses his thesis that the EU can guide both the Scottish and the Catalan towards independence, despite the fact that European institutions completely disagree with it.
As Puigdemont states in his article, the right to self-determination is a "very important" European matter. He also says that he trusts that the EU institutions "will strive to ensure that, in all cases, a serious political dialogue is established to enable a stable resolution to be reached".
Puigdemont points out that the EU needs to realise its role in the cases of Catalonia and Scotland's relations with Spain and the UK, "in the knowledge that, right from the outset, the European Union is not in favour of Catalan or Scottish independence", but also considering that the EU is a place where "it must always be possible to resolve political conflicts by voting", that is, through a referendum.
Exiled Catalan president agrees that in both cases of independence, they will not be single events, but long political processes based on negotiation and agreement, "in European style".
A committed Europe
At the end of his article, Puigdemont exposes his idea of the EU is and analyses its current status after Brexit. For him, the EU has to be above the interests of states and materialise in its citizens' will. He adds that "the lack of leadership in the European Union has led the European project to a profound state of stagnation that distances it from its founding values of peace, democracy, economic progress and solidarity, while also feeding Euroscepticism".
However, Puigdemont believes that the European political project is not to be "dismantled" since it has managed to bring a time of peace to the continent. He considers that the EU must not see the possible cases of independence as a potential crisis but as a democratic opportunity to reaffirm, precisely, democracy.