When attempting to secede from a state, as the Scottish independence movement seeks to do, or to defeat a secessionist movement, as the UK’s governing political parties seek to do, it is natural to look abroad to similar movements and similar states to learn lessons from them.

In the past, Europe’s secessionists and the states they are in contention with looked to Scotland and the UK to learn from the SNP’s electoral victories and success in securing a legal independence referendum, and from the UK’s approach to managing (and, in 2014, defeating) the Scottish independence movement. Today, both Scotland’s secessionists and Scottish Labour, seeking to dislodge those secessionists from government, would benefit from looking in the other direction – to Spain, in particular.

The history of secessionism in Spain is more explosive than that of secessionism in Scotland. In the Basque Country, the campaign for independence became one of political violence in the 1960s after revelations that the fascist regime of Francisco Franco had been torturing Basque activists, plunging the region into a spiral of terrorism and repression.

Inspired by the revolutionary socialism of other nationalist movements around the world, particularly in South America and Vietnam, the left-wing Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Country and Freedom), more commonly known as ETA, would go on to kill 829 people, including 340 civilians, between 1968 and 2010.

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More recently, the wildcat Catalan independence referendum in 2017 devolved into violence when security services were dispatched to close polling stations, forcibly evicting civilian voters and poll workers, and in one incident engaging Catalan firefighters forming a human wall to defend a polling station. A judicial investigation into the incidents found that 218 people had been injured in Barcelona alone before the Spanish government ordered the withdrawal of the police.

This incident sparked a constitutional crisis and long-running conflict between the Catalan and Spanish governments, in which the Catalan government declared independence and the Spanish state imposed direct rule from Madrid, and which led to the functional exile of Catalan secessionist leaders. That conflict is only now coming to an end.

Against this backdrop of conflict and animosity, events of recent years have marked a major shift. In 2020, the Spanish government led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez agreed with Catalonia’s secessionist-led government to begin a dialogue on Catalonia’s political future. The two sides agreed that the Partido Popular, which had led the Spanish government in 2017, bore ultimate responsibility for the constitutional crisis. This marked the beginning of a period of relaxing tensions between the Catalan and Spanish governments amid a broadly more accommodating attitude of the Spanish central government towards the country’s secessionists.

Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party has benefitted politically from this change in approach. In the 2021 Catalan regional elections, the Socialists came first for the first time since 2003 and in last year’s Spanish general elections, they came first in Catalonia for the first time since 2008. In the wake of the elections, the Socialists agreed to an amnesty for Catalan secessionist leaders that will shortly come into force, allowing such figures to return home and closing this chapter in the turbulent history of relations between Barcelona and Madrid.

Those concessions, prolonging and extending Sánchez’s accommodationist approach to managing secessionism in Spain, came with further political rewards for his party as they won last week’s Catalan regional elections with their highest vote share since 2003 and deprived Catalan secessionist parties of a majority for the first time in over a decade.

The Herald: A Saltire and the flag of Catalonia fly in George Square, Glasgow, in 2017A Saltire and the flag of Catalonia fly in George Square, Glasgow, in 2017 (Image: free)

At the same time as Sánchez’s accommodationist approach has borne fruit for his party in Catalonia, the Basque secessionist party EH Bildu has been building support. Founded in 2011, Bildu is rooted in the Basque secessionist left and is the successor to a series of left-wing secessionist parties descended from Herri Batasuna, which was banned by the Spanish Supreme Court in 2001 for being considered the political wing of ETA. Several of Bildu’s senior politicians have past links to ETA, and its leader, Arnaldo Otegi, was convicted in the 2000s of glorifying ETA terrorism and is considered a past member of the terrorist group.

Despite this, Bildu came third in the Basque Country in last year’s Spanish general elections, winning the same number of seats as the Socialists and the historically dominant, non-secessionist Basque Nationalist Party. And a few weeks ago, they narrowly finished second in the Basque regional elections, achieving the best result for a Basque secessionist party in the history of Spanish democracy.

These might seem very different cases – one of a unionist party successfully defeating secessionists in one region of Spain, the other of a secessionist party achieving historic results in a different region. But they bear a crucial similarity that is worth paying attention to: in neither case were these successes rooted in either’s attitude to secessionism.

In the Basque Country, Bildu campaigned on improving public services like education and healthcare, accusing the ruling Basque Nationalist Party of failing Basques on kitchen table issues. The Socialists have done likewise in Catalonia, focusing on the impacts of recent droughts, and accusing the secessionist coalition government of failing to adequately prepare.

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Bildu’s campaign should remind the SNP of their approach to winning power in 2007 and a majority in 2011, setting aside the constitutional question to focus on the issues voters care about. In a period of receding secessionist movements across the democratic west, including Scotland, secessionist parties will win and retain power on other issues. Appearing consumed by constitutional questions will put voters off.

And while Labour will likely not need to make concessions to Scottish secessionists to hold power after the next UK general election, by merely working with, not against, a secessionist government in Barcelona the Spanish Socialists have largely neutered that movement and are on the verge of returning to power in Catalonia. A cooperative, rather than a combative, approach to relations between London and Edinburgh in 2025 may help Labour seal the deal with nationalist voters.

As in Spain, constitutional politics is increasingly taking a back seat in Scotland as more fundamental issues re-assert their primacy. And as in Spain, parties on both sides of the divide will have to adjust their tactics to thrive. They could do worse than look across the Bay of Biscay to learn lessons in how to do so.