A separate Catalan peace?

Throughout the Civil War, the European powers sought the outcome to the conflict that best suited their geopolitical goals in western Europe and especially in the Mediterranean. Their naval rivalries there meant that the slightest rumour of a posible separate peace for Catalonia, or all the Catalan-speaking territories, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands included, immediately caught the attention of the foreign ministries. 

The idea that a Catalan government controlled by left wing democratic nationalists would enter into negotiations with France, Great Britain, or even the Soviet Union, whuch was present from day one, was the inspiration for Spain's Gateway to the Mediterranean and the Catalan Question by the German geographer Franz Pauser. Without any direct interests in the Mediterranean, the Germans assumed that a sovereign Catalonia would automatically become a natural extensión of France, reinforcing its lines of communication between its naval bases at Toulon and Bizerta and other ports in French North Africa, and this a support in a war against the Wehrmacht. Pauser argued that it was essential to prevent the secession of Catalonia, and even more important to keep the coast of Valencia and the Balearic Islands out of teh hands of a state that would effectively extend France to Gibraltar

Published in 1938, Pauser book was not the intellectual fantasy of a dilettante, but but the embodiment of something that had a solid but distorted basis in fact. The Generalitat was indeed communicating to the British and French governments that Catalonia was a political actor with its own personality that had to be taken into account when it came to a solution to the situation in Spain. 

Between 1937 and 1939, Josep Maria Batista i Roca, the Generalitat’s representative in London, and Nicolau Maria Rubió i Tudurí, his counterpart in Paris, did not hesitate to present proposals, albeit veiled and indirect, for a separate peace that would treat Catalonia – or Greater Catalonia – as a democratic ally distinct from Spain against the coming Nazi-Fascist assault. Batista put the proposal to Lord Halifax in June 1938, and Rubió put it to the French in November, stating that Catalonia would wash its hands of Negrín’s Republican Spain.

Like a number of Italian military men, Pauser feared precisely this outcome. In the struggle for control of the Mediterranean, Italy needed to “hold onto” the Spanish coast in order to disrupt British maritime trafiic between Gibraltar and Suez, passing through Malta and Cyprus, as well as France’s north-south military connections. That Catalonia would not only sign a separate peace but fall under the control of a regime friendly to the Soviet Union was a fear shared by everyone from Great Britain to the Vatican. In fact, the spectre of a separate peace, which seemed completely real in the fears o dreams of foreign ministers and military commanders, never had any substance. Whatever Pauser might think, Catalan nationalism neither wanted nor dared nor had enough international perspective to attempt it with any seriousness. Perhaps it was Republican loyalty, perhaps a lack of vision.