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Spain Must be Defended: Explaining the Criminalization of Political Dissent in Catalonia
Abstract
This paper asks how we can explain the remarkable punitive turn against the political opponents of a liberal democratic state in twenty-first-century Europe. It uses Michel Foucault's analysis as a point of departure for understanding how the form of state power witnessed in Catalonia is entirely consistent with a Westphalian fixation with the indissoluble unity of statehood. Moreover, we identify a classic dual strategy of criminalization and depoliticization that will be familiar to critical students of the criminal justice system. The form of justice resorted to by the postfascist Spanish state is one that seeks to replace politics with law; to impose a kind of legalized violence that is at the same time a proxy for war and a proxy for politics. yet, in the process of presenting state repression as having only legal – rather than social or political content – all the Spanish state can do is repack age this political struggle in a form that reflects the war-making origins of the state. We argue, therefore, that in the Catalan case, as in countless other political conflicts, the autonomy of the political realm is a fallacy: the political realm cannot hide its violent origins.
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Entry into the EU was the best way to safeguard the liberal market economy while getting into a first world developed economy. It became included within an international division of labour, although semi-peripheral within the EU.
Between 2012 and 2017, the Spanish Constitutional Court was presided over by Francisco Pérez de los Cobos, a member of the PP, and the brother of Diego Pérez de los Cobos, who was in charge of coordinating the police operations in Catalonia on 1 October and had been a senior official in the PP government. Andrés Ollero, who previously spent 17 years as a MP in the Congress of Deputies representing the PP, is currently the magistrate of the court (Bernat and Whyte 2019).
Diari de Tarragona, La jutgessa manté l'acussació de presupmte delicte d'odi contra l'alcalde de Reus. 10 December ( http://diaridigital.tarragona21.com/la-jutgessa-mante-el-presumpte-delicte-dodi-contra-lalcalde-de-reus/; accessed 2 January 2020).
ARA, L'agressor de Jordi Borràs és un policia nacional, 17 July 2018 ( https://www.ara.cat/soci-etat/fotoperiodista-Jordi-Borras-individu-identificat_0_2052394943.html; accessed 2 January).