Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics and this week we are

talking Catalonia. How did we get to this situation? What happens next and how

bad could this be? Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the

London reviewer books, Europe's leading magazine of books and ideas. We've already

had some LRB writers on this podcast, John Lanchester, Mary Beard and we hope to

have some more soon talking about the state of democracy and the state of the

world. As well as politics, the LRB has book reviews, essays about art, poetry,

and exhibitions. Whether you want to get a deeper understanding of world

events or just get away from it all and read about Picasso and Octopus's, the

LRB will have something fascinating for you.

In a few minutes I'm going to be talking to Helen Thompson, Chris Brooke and

also Brendan Sims, historian of Europe and someone who has been warning that

this was going to happen for a long time and as you'll hear, thinks this could

be the death of Europe. But before that a conversation I've just recorded with

Mark Weller who is professor of international law here in Cambridge and has

been involved in some of the most complex piece negotiations around the world

including in Kosovo, in Yemen and he's chaired a commission at the behest of

the Catalan government to answer the question, can Catalonia become an

independent state? So before we get on to the really meaty politics of this,

Mark is going to help us understand what the legal issues are because that is

the context that we need for knowing what the political issues are. I started by

asking Mark what is the question that his commission was told to answer?

...