Roland Vaubel, Merkel advisor, interviewed by RAC1 on Catalonia, secession, and the EU

Update: Here's the third excerpt from the interview of Roland Vaubel:

“The European Commission is really trying to discourage the secession of Catalonia and Scotland by saying that after secession Catalonia and Scotland would no longer be members of the European Union. There's no basis for that at all in international law and it's not the Commission which has to decide that but the Council.”


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Jordi Basté and the crew at radio show El món a RAC1 continue to impress me with the interviews they're able to get. It's so nice to be able to hear important voices on Catalonia's independence process directly, without filters. On Wednesday, Basté interviewed Angela Merkel advisor, Roland Vaubel, author of an interesting new paper titled, The Political Economy of Secession in the European Union, who had several interesting things to say about Catalonia:

"They cannot veto secession, they can only say that Catalonia, by seceding from Spain, will leave the European Union. They can say that, but it's a completely open question."


"No, the referendum is legal, and if there's a strong majority in the referendum, I think that the rest of Spain cannot really say that Catalonia cannot leave."


You can listen to the full, original audio (dubbed into Catalan) on SoundCloud.