Most foreign observers believe that many people in Catalonia have a deep-rooted historic love of their region which makes them have spontaneous nationalist emotions. I think they have missed the fact that, for over thirty years, a carefully designed social engineering programme has been executed by the nationalist regional governments which have ruled the region for most of that period. These plans were kept mostly in the dark, but already back in 1990 it emerged that a plan named “Programa 2000” had been put in place by the leaders of the main Catalan nationalist party, “Convergencia i Unió”, with the objective of promoting the long-term “recatalanisation” of society. This plan, whose main details are attached here, included taking control of education, regional media, administrative, political and economic institutions and using these to create a “national collective identity”. The success of such a policy has been globally apparent in the events of the last weeks, but for those of us who live here, it has been the case for many years.
One may ask why the central government let this happen, if it was so obvious. In fact, one of the main culprits of our current predicament has been a decentralised political system which encouraged an exchange of votes, whereby the regional nationalists supported whoever was in power in the national government, in exchange for laissez-faire in the regional government. Such short-sightedness has cost us dearly and contributed in no small measure to lead us to where we are today.
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