[pmontra]

I understand that but I think that the economic objection doesn't carry much weight: I guess that Catalonya paid its own share of the infrastructure of the other regions of Spain. Same thing with Brexit: the EU benefited from having the UK in the Union (money and not only that) and viceversa. Then the UK voted to go and they go (well, maybe, the way they're handling it is so weird.)

I think it ends up to what people living in a part of a country / union want to do, if they want to be one or not. My impression from far away was that the last time they had a kind of vote in Catalonya it was like about half of the people living there wanted to secede and half didn't. Probably not enough given the circumstances but I'd like to live in a place with clear procedures for secessions. I'm not (most of us don't) even if the EU has them for its member countries.

[dcabrejas]

Sorry but you are comparing apples to oranges. The EU is not a country, it is a club of countries. The EU doesn't and never will have the power to choose whether a member state can leave or not. That's how it is. So it is wrong to compare a region of a country seceding than comparing a country leaving the EU. Which is more similar to a country leaving NATO for example.

[vidarh]

You don't need to go that far back before you could have replaced EU with USA and the statement would have sounded equally plausible. Then it stopped being plausible. The EU is more tightly integrated in many ways than the US was during the period of the Articles of Confederation.