Catalunya's Struggle for Independence: Is the Spanish State is a "normal" capitalist state or is it an imperialist "prison of the people"?
In short, the Spanish state is an imperialist power, albeit not of the first order like the US, UK, Germany or France.
In addition, the Spanish state is not even a bourgeois democratic republic, but a state which combines parliamentary democracy with a reactionary monarchy at its top. The recent speeches of King Felipe VI, with his chauvinist denunciation of the Catalan's desire for independence, are a powerful demonstration of the reactionary nature of this monarchy. Catalunya's struggle for independence has therefore also an additional democratic character, as it is a struggle to free the Catalan people from the monarchist system.
If we add to this the fact that 11-12% of Spain's population are migrants, it becomes even more obvious that the country's population has an extraordinary multinational composition. Hence, the dominance of the Castillian-dominated bourgeoisie and its state apparatus can only be maintained by massive national oppression and bureaucratic centralism of these minorities.
In other words, it is crucial to understand that the Spanish state is not a "normal" capitalist state. It is a state dominated by the imperialist Castilian bourgeoisie which, from its inception, discriminated and oppressed ethnic and national minorities like the Catalans, the Basques or the Galicians.
While it would take us too far afield to go into this in detail, we wish to remark that this Castillian chauvinist character of the Spanish state is a result of its peculiar history. The total defeat of an early bourgeois revolution of the cities in 1520/21 as well as of later rebellions against the absolutist reign in Madrid – both in Catalunya as well as other parts of the country – helped to foster a strong and arch-reactionary feudalist regime with very strong ties to the Catholic Church. The notorious Spanish Inquisition which began in 1478 and was absolutely abolished only in 1834, and which prosecuted about 150,000 persons, was also an important feature of the absolutist monarchy in Spain.
Likewise there was the vicious campaign of coerced Christianization, accompanied by numerous pogroms, which finally resulted in the complete expulsion of its non-Christian minorities like the Muslims (up to one million people) and the Jews (up to 350,000 people). This, too, was an early and bloody hallmark of Spanish chauvinism.
Hence, a Castillian-dominated backward center in Madrid could only keep power over the economically more advanced minorities by imposing strict authoritarian centralization over them.
For all these reasons the Spanish state has always been a "prison of the people" and remains so until today.