Take Umberto Bossi for example. As a university activist in the early 70s, he was a Leftist and set up Lombard regionalism much in the vein that a Catalan Leftist would portray his own particualar grievances today. In fact, I still recall watching Bossi harangue Lega crowds this century reminding them that the Northern regionalists proudly opposed the centralising forces of Fascism. Though I presume it was the centralist nature of the rest of the Italian Right that bothered/bothers Bossi.

You’re right that Mussolini was a northerner (a Romagnol, who likely grew up speaking this tongue), but I often wonder whether the relatively high support for the Fascist Party in northern provinces in the 1920s and 30s was more an expression of the bourgeoisie and factory-owners accommodating to a force that would keep the wage-hiking Reds at bay from their Southern rabble workforce rather than an enthusiasm for Mussolini’s Neo-Romanism (remember, the Lega fancies Padania as a barely Romanised Celtic land).

The Catalan Question is even more perplexing. You’re correct to note that Orwell and the romance of the Civil War has induced foreigners, especially the wide-eyed and big-hearted, into viewing the whole of Catalan seperatism as a historically Leftist endeavour, but it has had several incarnations throughout time. Even there among the barricades of 1936-39 lies a glitch. A big part of why Barcelona had become a hotbed for Marxist and Anarcho-syndicalist movements is that the huge local proletariat was largely, if not exclusively, non-Catalan in origin and was living in shambolic quarters right next to a city of splendour and abundance. So much so that a subtext of Kulturkampf was in evidence: in some quarters, leftist militias erected banners declaring “Speak Spanish” as a culture war symbol against their Catalan-speaking bosses and burguers, presumably chiding their snobbery as much as their exploititiveness. At the same time you had genuinely Catalanist left-wing groupings like the Esquerra Republicana Català, so the picture becomes further mudied.

Now, if you go back to 1714, supposedly Catalonia’s starting point for regional seperatism, you have to be wary that the French Rev has yet to take place and hence to speak of Left-vs-Right seems anachronistic. But if anything, their revolt was an expression of feudal privileges and a defence of an older Hapsburg form of monarchy as a bulwark against the French-imitating centralising model of a Bourbon monarchy. One might even say it was a defence of traditionalism versus modernisation. Over the next two centuries, the Catalan middle and upper-classes were happy to push for a maximum of local autonomy but never at the expense of their precious access to Spain’s imperial markets – Cuba in particular. Thus, cultural nationalism became a safety valve for expression of local atavisms where political agitation might have been too disturbing to contemplate. Granted, the loss of Spain’s Empire in 1898 makes much of being associated with Spain appear tainted to Catalans on the left and the right. But even post-Civil War and post-Franco, the Catalan urban business community and even its rural conservative faction were always happy to do business with Right-wing parties in Madrid provided that Madrid maxxed their fiscal autonomy and let them engage in a cosplay cultivating dreams of a future nation/yearning for a mythical past. In premise, Catalan regionalism has always had left-wing and right-wing manifestations. For example, Barcelona soccer club has made a killing marketing itself as a sort of anti-Spain, and the kind of rebel-romance mythos that a global fanbase loves to imbibe, yet its directors and operators have featured a hotel magnate who was a fully-paid up member of the Partido Popular – oft-deried as the successors to Franco – on the basis that having the Spanish Right lording it over federal matters in Madrid is preferrable to the Spanish Left holding the levers, as well as a Friedmanite economist whose vision of an independent Catalonia is more Singapore than Scandanavia. What has happened in recent years to bring us to this present impasse is that the etiquette in the Madrid-Barcelona tango has broken down: the Spanish Right is wedded to a centralist vision of the nation since 1812 which in turn alienates the two most productive regions of the country which it needs to prevent the entire peninsula from becoming a left-wing governed banana republic. But since the Spanish Right also purports to defend the Catholic Spain in the culture wars, it ends up casting itself as a punching bag for the grievances of every weed-smoking co-op buying cat-owning leftie in Catalonia and every other corner of Spain. Such that I have lefty friends in Madrid who are egging on Catalan independence because they hope it will become the encarnation of a Spain they wished to see had the Second Republic triumphed. Hell, some of them will even take to learning Catalan and relocate there. So now the prospects of a fiscally prudent Catalonia becoming independent only to midwife a Bolivarian experiment is probably keeping the more right-leaning regionalists awake at night: separate from Madrid only to become a reenactment of Madrid in 1936 (Madrid, despite the libel thrown at it by everyone within Spain who hates Spain, was a leftwing holdout for most of the Civil War), and this time with an open-borders mayor in Barcelona gladly declaring a sanctuary city for Mohammedans (cos, y’know, to atone for Spain having had the temerity to reconquer territory from the Moors).

The Basques are a fascinating case. But for a quirk of fate, they might have sided with Franco in the Civil War and spared themselves the resulting loss of autonomy that came with defeat. This was the most socially conservative people in Spain, who in preceding centuries had raised arms in defence of absolute monarchy whenever Madrid appeared to be foistering Englightenment ideals upon the country (“Don’t teach your sons Spanish, the language of Liberalism,” Basque priests used to intone). The Basques were horrified by the licentiousness and anti-clericalism of the Second Republic. But the Republic offered them autonomy: again, the tragedy of the Spanish Right alienating potential allies through its French-originating centralism. For Basque Nationalists, their seperatism was always ethnolinguistic, even racial in the late 19th century, until the emergence of ETA and its focus on anti-Franco and increasingly leftwing/ PLO/Carlos the Jackal type worldview. But curiously, as late as the 1990s you had Basque bishops refusing to condemn ETA atrocities or speaking of them in mealy-mouthed terms – old habits die hard.

* = much debate abounds as to whether Lombard is in fact two distinct languages, East and West. A smiliar controversey obtains over Emilian and Romagnol. If you want a taste of what Eastern Lombard sounds like, check out musician Charlie Cinelli who sings in the Brescian dialect. It sounds like Gaelic-Norse being sung in a mead hall – about a million miles away from the vowel-ending warblings of Neapolitan crooners

** = Venetian is sometimes not classified as Gallo-Italic due to its lacking in French-type vowels and a rather stripped-down system of pronunciation in common with other obscure Romance tongues like Raeto-Romansch, Ladin and Friulian.