European Council President Donald Tusk | Valda Kalnina/EPA EU’s Tusk urges Catalan leader not to break with Spain The EU has sided with Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy in the standoff with Catalonia’s separatist government.

European Council President Donald Tusk made a direct appeal to Catalonia's pro-independence leader Carles Puigdemont on Tuesday not to go ahead with a unilateral declaration of independence, warning that it would lead to conflict with Spain and make dialogue impossible.

Speaking a few hours before Puigdemont was due to address the Catalan parliament about the October 1 independence referendum — which was condemned as illegal by Madrid and its EU allies — Tusk said he had been in contact with Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in recent days to ask him to "look for a solution to the problem without the use of force, to look for dialogue, because the force of argument is always better than the argument of force."

"Today I ask you to respect in your intentions the constitutional order and not to announce a decision that would make such a dialogue impossible," Tusk, addressing Puigdemont, said in a speech to the EU's Committee of the Regions in Brussels.

"Diversity should not and need not lead to conflict whose consequences would obviously be bad for Catalans, for Spain and for the whole of Europe," said the former Polish prime minister, who prefaced his appeal to Puigdemont by saying that he himself was "as a man who knows what it feels like to be hit by a police baton" and "understands and feels the arguments and emotions of all sides."

Catalan regional president Puigdemont says the October 1 referendum — in which a majority of those who voted were in favor of separating from Spain, but the turnout was only 42 percent of the region's electorate — gave him the mandate to carry out the separation. However, threats by local businesses to pull out of the region have given many Catalans pause for thought and increased calls for dialogue rather than divorce.