Never mind that neither Catalonia (nor Catalunya) is a country, the brazen (some say delusional) Generalitat announced with customary fanfare yesterday that proceedings were underway to christen the black sheep province (that would have to be after País Vasco, I suppose) of Spain its first ever autonomous diplomatic outpost in, where else?, but Paris.(Not totally sure what the precedent for such petulant break-away nationalism is but will check with an old LSE buddy, Jordi Vaquer i Fanes, who recently left his post at the Generalitat where, to my knowledge, he held somewhat of an ambassadorial post after leaving London's West End with a PhD in tote.)
While surely Québec has not taken such measures, one can imagine that the Kurds, Kashmiris or Tamil Tigers have beaten Montilla et al. to the punch.
(La Vanguardia, where I originally learned of this news in the printed version, seems to have exorcised this embarrassing piece from its internet archives, but the story still appears online in ABC (albeit about the original negotiations las April), the free Metro daily, and this site called Europress. The Vanguardia article explains that what is currently the Maison de la Catalogne (not to be confused with a Left Bank restaurant of the same name), with a role more symbolic than political in the French capitol, will be reconfigured over the coming months and re-emerge as the virgin embassy.)
Post Script: The Vanguardia article did mention, at the end, that the province of Catalonia does have something called "casals catalanes" established in the Mexican capitol as well as in Santiago de Chile. And the report adds that these would likely be the next to follow in the steps of Paris.
