How the EU failed to prevent the Catalan 'train crash'

"I don't think the EU was not interested [in what was happening]," political scientist Camino Mortera-Martinez told EU observer. "Both the Spanish and the EU did not think it would go that far. It was unthinkable, even for Madrid."..."The Spanish government was very naive," noted Mortera-Martinez, who works at the Centre for European Reform, a think tank in Brussels. "It thought that it would be enough to say that the referendum would not happen, and that if it happened it would be enough to send the police." 

..."They saw that people were eager to listen to them," unlike the Spanish government, Mortera-Martinez said. "They thought that because people were listening to them, they were going to support them." In the end, "there was a very thin line between reality and fantasy".