The Catalonia question

Catalonia hasn't really been independent since the 12th century, but the region has declared independence from Spain after an overwhelming majority of voters participating in a referendum demanded it. However, only a minority of eligible voters participated, while the central government declared the referendum illegal. Secessionists claim that a majority would have turned out if not for vote-suppression by the central government, but from what I've read the secessionists have never gotten a majority to turn out for any of the votes leading up to the independence referendum. That would seem to disqualify the referendum, as hundreds of thousands of protesters claimed in Barcelona last weekend, but democracy historically has been government by majority of those who show up. Where the credibility of this secession fails is in Catalonia's apparent inability to defend its independence in the face of the central government's monopoly on force. The secessionists apparently believe that massive civil disobedience will be enough to compel acquiescence from Madrid, but probably have underestimated the extent of civil disobedience against them. Their naive action most likely will prove even more irresponsible down the line, for there is nothing like the suppression of a powerless movement for independence to generate terrorist violence in the future.
It seems like we must expect more such episodes. Scottish secessionism has not been stilled by the defeat of a similar referendum, but was revived by the U.K. Brexit vote, with which the Scots disagreed. Just last week I heard that regions of northern Italy are contemplating separation. There as in Catalonia, locals who see themselves as their nation's breadwinners declare themselves tired of providing for deadbeats elsewhere or the central government. The Catalonians themselves aren't easily pigeonholed as left, right or populist, nor is this movement necessarily an expression of the anarchist sentiments for which the region is known through George Orwell's reporting during the Spanish Civil War. Catalan nationalism has been simmering there since the 19th century, but approaches critical mass in the 21st because globalization fueled more by corporate economics than by democratic politics paradoxically sharpens differences among peoples. Whatever the real numbers are, fewer Catalonians  than ever see themselves in the faces of fellow Spaniards, and you can see the same thing happening around the world. In every local enclave, possibly, the locals judge every stranger or every seeming outsider complicit in their economic decline or the corruption of their virtue, and people once taken for granted seem increasingly like strangers. Some Euro-paranoids see Russia's hand behind it all, perceiving a Putin divide-and-dominate strategy at work. It looks to me more like people like the Spaniards need no help dividing, and that neither the Russians nor any other nation will conquer if this process continues.