[romaaeterna]

Good, I'm glad that we're agreed on the individual right.

Now what is the right of the group? What rights does Spain as a nation have and what right to do the Catalonians have as a people, and where do such rights come from?

The answer to each question will have a lot to do with how much you love each one.

Someone who hates Spain and the Spanish would certainly suggest that their course is to be a grubby landlord, trying to get every cent out of a tenant before kicking them out the door. Someone who loves them would hopefully never think of them as the sort of nation that would wish to impose on a free people or steal anything from a people, especially not land or property.

Lovers of Spain, properly, will think of their rights as rights of attraction, and free association, and from the governors to the governed. Haters will think of the Nation's rights as something to be imposed, and their duties as something to be extracted from their subject peoples.

What do you think of Spain? Is it love or hate?

[xyzzyz]

Now what is the right of the group? What rights does Spain as a nation have and what right to do the Catalonians have as a people, and where do such rights come from?

The nation of Spain certainly is sovereign on the territory it occupies, so it is bound only by the rules it imposes on itself (and of course, external powers which might impose other rules upon it). The nation of Spain chose to specify the rights extended to its people through the constitution, and through specific laws. From that, Catalonians, as part of the Spanish nation and subject to its sovereignty for as long as they reside under its jurisdiction, stem the rights Catalonians have as people.

Look, I'm not a lover or a hater of Spain, but what I learned so far about how the world works is that it is divided into countries, which set the rules, called law, on their territories, and get to enforce it. If you don't like the rules, usually there's a mechanism to change those, but if you can't make it work through that mechanism, your only option is to assert your own sovereignty, and hope to prevail over the existing contender. So far, the separatists in Catalonia hasn't been successful neither the former nor the latter. I might sympathize with them, but certainly I do not think that they have any right whatsoever to secede.

[romaaeterna]

> The nation of Spain chose to specify the rights extended to its people through the constitution, and through specific laws. From that, Catalonians, as part of the Spanish nation and subject to its sovereignty for as long as they reside under its jurisdiction, stem the rights Catalonians have as people.

Interesting. I belong to a country where we think of ourselves as telling our rulers what our rights are -- deriving from God, some say -- and certainly not coming down to us from those rulers in any way. Sometimes we have to fight for these rights. It has been violent sometimes. Other times the process has been used. Some of our rights have yet to be asserted.

But try telling an American that George Washington and company gave us our rights, and you'll see who far that gets you. We love our country.

I hope that the people of Spain can love their country too.

[xyzzyz]

Note that I said "[t]he nation of Spain", not the "rulers" of Spain. It's exactly the same as in US: in both cases, the nations codified the rules through the constitution they made the law. If anything, it is more of the case with Americans who are given down rules from above: the American constitution was created and voted into the law by the representatives of the people, while in Spain, the people themselves voted the current constitution into the law through public referendum.

[vidarh]

The point is that in the case of most modern nations, they did not exist as separate nations until they asserted that they were, often by waging war on those who insisted they were not.

These nations bootstrap their nationhood, and are first legitimate after the fact.

One would hope that we will extend civilization to the point where people who want independence don't need to kill to prove they're serious.