Spain nervous with Catalonia says it will not interfere with Scotland's referendum

5th Wednesday, February 2014 - 23:12 UTC Full article

García Margallo also warned Catalan leaders about a unilateral declaration of independence

Spain has no intention of interfering in Scotland’s push for independence and is willing to consider an eventual Scottish application to join the EU as a separate state, foreign minister García Margallo said in an interview with the Financial Times.

The newspaper said that while he refused to comment directly on whether Spain might veto Scottish accession to the EU after an independence vote, he insisted the cases of Scotland and Catalonia were “fundamentally different”.

Madrid would continue to resist a Catalan plan to hold its own referendum on independence less than two months after the Scottish vote in September, he told the FT.

García-Margallo also warned Catalan leaders in particular not to go down the route of a unilateral declaration of independence.

“A state born through a unilateral declaration of independence would have no international recognition whatsoever. It would be absolutely isolated in the concert of nations. Such a state would not have access to the United Nations system or to the World Bank or the IMF,” he said in the interview.

The Spanish official drew a parallel with unrecognized break-away regions such as South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Somaliland, all of which he said remain in “international limbo”.