Fight in Catalunya
Bullfighting supporters and opponents clashed verbally before the first bullfight to be put on since the passage of a law that will prohibit the sport in Catalonia starting January 1, 2012.
I wonder how politicized the issue has become. I’ve heard Catalans say the sport as a Castillian thing that’s foreign to their culture, even though history says otherwise. Still, this kind of rejection of things associated with Madrid is an expression of Catalan identity which is to be expected. Of the multi-ethnicity European nations created in the 19th century (Germany, Italy, Spain), Spain probably has the least cohesive sense of nationhood, which is maybe why it needed a dictator to hold it together.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the future. The Constitutional Court in Madrid recently struck down or weakened a few parts of the Catalan Statute, but didn’t invalidate the whole thing. It’ll be a long process.
