Word: separatist
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...various times since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, Castile has tried to take Catalunya over and suppress its speech. Francisco Franco banned all publishing and teaching in Catalan, hoping to prevent his subjects from thinking separatist thoughts. But obdurately, Catalan survives, and now that separatist dreams have faded -- Jordi Pujol, the president of the autonomous region of Catalunya, dropped the separatist plank from his party's platform last October -- it is the language that remains the focus of Catalunya's enthusiasm for cultural distinction...
...movement has begun feeding on itself. In the former Soviet Union, for example, the success of Latvians, Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians and Tajik, among others, in breaking free from Moscow has encouraged separatist movements inside Russia. Tatars, Chechen, Ingush and Yakut are demanding either greater autonomy within the Russian Federation or full independence. In many areas, though, ethnic groups are so thoroughly mixed that it is impossible to draw neat border lines between their respective turfs. Any attempt to do so only creates new minority problems: a Serb minority in Croatia, for example, instead of a Croat minority in a Serb...
...crisis could go any number of ways, including petering out. Quebeckers may not want to risk a leap into the dark of independence during a recession. (Even a Quebecois economist admits that sovereignty would involve transitional costs of as much as 10% of Quebec's GDP -- a prospect that separatist politicians carefully soft-pedal.) It is possible, finally, that some deal will be struck either by Mulroney or even by western politicians willing to give Quebec its head in return for a redesigned federal government...
That might seem surprising, since Bossi's league originated as a separatist group urging the north to secede from a central government that was bleeding it for the sake of the poorer south. But voters up and down the peninsula are attracted by the league's message of opposition to corruption and confusion in high places, to government taxation and red tape, and to every social ill from joblessness and drug peddling to immigration. Bossi and some of his allies have voiced views toward dark-skinned immigrants that are as racist as any in Europe...
FEAR REIGNED for the larger part of the campaign. In a style that has become far too common on the island, the state-hooders employed defamatory tactics, accusing Governor Rafael Hernandez-Colon and his Popular Democratic Party of rebuffing the United States and pursuing a separatist ideological course. Under the leadership of Dr. Pedro Rosello, the prostatehood New Progressive Party unleashed a campaign of fear, aimed at equating the "Si," or affirmative response, with a vote of confidence to the governor for an additional term as well as an increase in crime, drug-addiction, alcoholism, mental illness, unemployment, social upheaval...