Catalonia: What is the game?

I have been trying to figure out the game Rajoy is playing. It is not immediately obvious. Backwards induction led Puigdemont to back down from declaring independence. Backwards induction should then have led Rajoy to accept Puigdemont’s “suspension.” Rajoy should have said, “Thank you for not declaring independence, note that doing so would be illegal, much obliged.” End of crisis, at least for a while, start of talks on constitutional revision.

But that is not what Rajoy did. Instead Rajoy refused to accept the out Puigdemont offered him. He pushed Puigdemont into a corner. Never push anyone into a corner.

Even after that, Puigdemont behaved rationally. (I must note that this has been a marked departure from Puigdemont’s behavior up until this point.) The Financial Times reported that Puigdemont tried to find a last-minute out but Madrid rebuffed him. 

So now we have a declaration of independence. Madrid will invoke Article 155 and take over the community. 

Why did Rajoy choose to go down this path?

There are three hypotheses.

1. “Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.” There are governments to whom that adage applies. I do not think the Rajoy administration is one of them. Oh, they are incorrect, but I don’t think it’s because they are stupid.
2. Internal constraints. Rajoy may realize that he has been ineluctably creating a secession crisis, but he may also believe that a hard line is the only way to hold together his coalition. I do not believe this to be true, but it is a reasonable hypothesis.
3. Rajoy believes the Catalan opposition is unitary and rational. He has played down the game tree and backwards inducted. His (correct!) conclusion is that Catalonia is always screwed and screwed badly in the even of a contested divorce. He therefore assumes that his Catalan opponents will back down in the end. 

And therein lie his two errors. His first error is that he assumes that “less costly for Madrid” means “no cost for Madrid.” Accepting Puigdemont’s climb-down had no cost to Madrid. Engaging in economic warfare or (worse) fighting in the streets of Barcelona will be terribly costly for Madrid. The risk of either would have been zero had he reacted less strongly.

His second error is to assume that he is dealing with a unitary Catalan opposition. He is not. Puigdemont has already punted responsibility over to the Catalan legislature. Now it will be up to individual Catalans whether and how to resist. Catalan officials could choose to stay at their posts. Catalan police could refuse to obey orders from Madrid. There might be mass demonstrations, but that would be a sideshow to the real non-violent civic disobedience: bureaucrats continuing to stay at their posts but refusing orders from the Congress in Madrid. 

Here is what Rajoy should do, given where we are: show restraint. Fire recalcitrant bureaucrats but refrain from making arrests. Wear down the opposition. Take civil action, sue for breach of contract, insure that businesses keep paying their taxes. Essentially bore the Catalans into submission. Even if there is mass resistance from the bureaucrats, keep it civil. Reason being is that it is one thing to have mass walkouts by bureaucrats. It is quite another to have them actively set up a parallel state enforcing parallel laws and collecting parallel taxes. Once that happens, the jig is up, and the only responses Madrid will have on the table are (1) impose crushing sanctions or (2) break heads. 

Human nature being what it is, I do not think (1) or (2) will work, at least not at the level of pain that voters in Castilla and Andalucía and Aragón and Extremadura will be able to countenance. (I hope.) If we go there, then, Spain will disintegrate but with much human suffering along the way. So let us hope that Rajoy realizes that the only solution is boredom.

Comments

[Randy McDonald]

Do you think he will show restraint?

[Noel Maurer]

No. But that’s on the basis of past behavior. I’m confused as to why. Puigdemont appears more fanatical and held a far more precarious position, yet he walked back from the brink. Not so Rajoy.

I suspect he believes Catalan politicos will back down and that without leadership, any mass resistance will dissipate. He’s right on the first. He’s gambling on the second.

[J.H.]

Could we really get civil war in Spain though? I'm trying to picture it and it's difficult. How do we get there? Having the catalan police fighting the Spanish police and eventually the Spanish army? It would seem like such a civil war wouldn't last very long. Unless we are talking about a short war between both sides followed by a ETA/IRA style insurgency/terrorist campaign.

[Randy McDonald]

https://warontherocks.com/2017/10/what-political-science-tells-us-about-the-risk-of-civil-war-in-spain/

^ The above article looks at least not non-insightful.

[J.H.]

Interesting article. Also interesting that it makes out parallels with Yugoslavia (especially pointing out that in essence one root cause was Slovenia and Croatia being miserly as I noted in a previous discussion). A couple of differences though are that in Yugoslavia, the republics' territorial defence were equipped with military weapons (even if most were outdated or even obsolete) and were able to acquire weapons (from Yugoslav army stores and smuggled in) and had foreign sympathy (notably from Germany when it recognized them).

In the case of Spain, it would seem extremely likely that if shooting ever started, a blockade would be declared and properly enforced and Catalan police and any militia would be without the weapons needed to fight. And I can't see Germany or any other Western state recognizing Catalonia.

[Randy McDonald]

I can only imagine shooting working in the favour of Catalonian separatists if it involves Spanish police or military forces shooting peaceful and unarmed people.

[Bernard Guerrero]

"I suspect he believes Catalan politicos will back down and that without leadership, any mass resistance will dissipate. He’s right on the first. He’s gambling on the second."

You got it, here. I will simply note that it's not necessarily a bad gamble. Given that support for secession is limited, divide and conquer (call it option 3a) seems like a possibility.

[Noel Maurer]

The game tree assumes that Madrid will peacefully resist attempts to create a parallel state. I could have put that in as a choice, but since Rajoy's response is certain I didn't bother.

Successful "divide and conquer" would be the "Fail" box on the game tree. I didn't put a flag on the choice because the success of the strategy doesn't entirely depend on Madrid: in game-theory speak, "nature" gets a move.

It's not a terrible gamble, I agree, but only for the short-term. If you define success as keeping Spain united, then Rajoy has sacrificed certain success in the short-term in order to have a lower probability of success in the long-term. (Not a typo.) Put that way, his decision is a bit inexplicable.

At the risk of repeating the logic of the post, I can only rationalize Rajoy's decision in three ways:

(1) He did not realize that a strategy of restraint before the referendum would succeed. That, however, would also require him to be stupid, and the Prime Minister is most certainly not stupid.

(2) Rajoy is playing an entirely different game.

(3) Rajoy believes that the Catalan resistance will fold with probability 1 ... and he believes that his actions will lessen rather than increase the probability of future secessionist action in the future.

I can see why he would believe (3), but he is incorrect on both counts. Which isn't to say that the probability of the Catalans folding is zero! It ain't. It's high. But it ain't one.

[Bernard Guerrero]

The second clause in #3 is understandable in some historical contexts. Québécois separatism, maybe?

[Randy F McDonald]

Bernard, that Québécois separatists would back down?

I do not know. As I blogged yesterday—Noel saw the post—to a non-rational extent Québécois were relatively indifferent to things like the decline of Montréal as a national economic centre. The ethnolinguistc split in Montréal was such that Francophones really did not care about national issues, and were more concerned with local issues. The welfare of a modernizing Francophone population, engaged in its own entrepreneurial no as the old Anglo establishment declined, was more important.

Now, from what I know about Catalonia and Spain, the ethnic difference between Catalonians and other Spanish people (or, Catalanophones and Hispanophones?) Is not nearly so stark. Catalonia is engaged economically with the rest of Spain, to its benefit, in a way that Québec ne'er was with Canada. (I do not think Québec has ever been a have province, Montréal notwithstanding.) Catalonia has things to lose. Then again, Canada and Québec never had anything like the Franco dictatorship with its demonstrable efforts to marginalize Catalan culture. This could work for separatists, too.

[Andrei Gomberg]

I suspect it is nastier. Rajoy deliberately plays with Catalan crisis for domestic (i.e., Castillian) political reasons. What he is really after, is screwing PSOE. He thinks he can manage Catalonia right around boiling over: but he does not care that much if it does.

[Dave K]

I'm not Spanish so I could be missing political nuance, but Rajoy seems to be acting as if time is not on his side. Perhaps there's a calculation that the odds of violent Catalan resistance increase over time and that a rapid aggressive response is less risky than a cautious slow response that gradually reaches the same decision (forceful confrontation). Rajoy may be balancing coalition politics and Catalan outcomes in determining which decisions are viable.