OVER Christmas a dozen women went out for dinner in a Madrid restaurant. They each ordered a glass of cava, the Spanish sparkling wine made predominantly in Catalonia. When the waiter brought the drinks he announced: “This is cava from Rioja. We don’t serve Catalan cava any more unless requested.”

Cava is as native to Catalonia as spaghetti is to Italy, sushi to Japan. If you served champagne from Bordeaux at a restaurant in Paris there would be an outcry. But the diners in Madrid were enjoying the political gesture too much to worry about the taste.

By going for the Rioja option they were doing their bit for the anti-Catalan cause, playing their part in an unofficial boycott of Catalan goods that had been gathering steam all year in Madrid and many other parts of Spain, peaking in the festive season.

Most of these ladies were veterans of the struggle. For some weeks now they had been sifting Catalan products out of their supermarket trolleys, checking lists circulated on the internet identifying goods made in Catalonia — everything from yoghurt to lollipops — and suggesting non-Catalan equivalents that may be bought in their place.

In the success of the boycott lies the clue to understanding what prompted General Jose Mena, commander of the Spanish army, to warn in a speech on January 6 that the military might intervene if Catalonia were to succeed in expanding its powers of self-rule.

Alarm bells rang all over Spain. Echoes were heard of a failed military coup in 1981; memories revived of Franco and the Spanish civil war.

The next day Jose Bono, minister of defence, put Mena under house arrest, saying the general had failed in his solemn duty to remain above the political fray. On Friday, betraying the Socialist government’s anxiety to nip this seed of rebellion in the bud, the minister was formally sacked.

The urgency was all the greater given the embarrassment that Bono was suffering. On the very day that Mena made his outburst, the minister had said in a speech before King Juan Carlos that 30 years before, when Franco died, Spain’s future had been uncertain because of the military’s “sabre-rattling” tendencies, but now that was all long gone.

Mena’s outburst suggests this is not entirely true. While there is agreement among all political parties that the general should have kept his mouth shut, he has elicited broad sympathy — floods of letters in the press, a banner at a big football match last weekend and a joint communiqué by 50 retired army officers whose views are shared by many serving soldiers — revealing once more the depth of indignation in the country at the Catalans’ separatist impulses.

The opposition Popular party’s reaction to the general’s statement was that it was “inevitable . . . a reflection of the situation we are in”.

Mena was giving voice to the worries of many on the streets of Madrid, Valencia and Seville: that if Catalonia split off, the Basque region might follow, then perhaps even Galicia, destroying a nation whose boundaries have existed for more than 500 years.

The issue has become pressing because a Catalan demand to increase significantly the region’s powers of taxation and its judicial autonomy is before parliament in Madrid. A bloc of Catalan parties representing the vast majority of voters in the region also seeks the right for Catalonia to call itself a “nation”; as well as the authority to push the Catalan language at the expense of Spanish.

The reigning anti-Catalanism is more visceral than rational, in large measure a response to the rank anti-Madridism that has long festered in Catalonia.

Not one motorway sign in Catalonia mentions the word “Madrid”, whereas on the Barcelona-bound motorway outside Madrid the first thing you see is the word “Barcelona”, the capital of Catalonia. Other Spaniards feel that the self-satisfied Catalans view them as lazy and incompetent.

This kind of low-level conflict has long been in existence, but three developments in the past two years have irked non-Catalans like never before: first, an unprecedented electoral success in the regional parliament for a Catalan independence party; second, a giant banner unfurled at Barcelona’s Nou Camp stadium before a game against Real Madrid which read “Catalonia is not Spain”; and third, a statement by a minister in the autonomous Catalan government last summer calling on Catalans not to support Madrid’s Olympic bid.

When the same minister and his colleagues arrived in Madrid with their proposals for greater autonomy — Madrid having supported Barcelona’s successful 1992 Olympic bid — the people of Madrid rose up. Calls for a consumer boycott struck chords among supporters of the centre-left government as well as the more vocal centre-right opposition.

How serious is all this? At one level the whole thing smacks of the sort of political infantilism that is perhaps to be expected from a country that has known democracy for only three decades.

The feeling of many Spanish commentators was reflected in the words of a Basque politician who said that in the light of Spain’s economic strength and status as a solid European Union democracy, Mena’s outburst would go down in history as a “hilarious and ludicrous” anecdote. Yet there is a danger that the rampant indignation, now on both sides, will give way to hatred.

The swiftness with which the government punished Mena has revealed, in the eyes of a European diplomat who knows Spain well, a certain nervousness. “The very fact,” the diplomat said, “that something as elemental as the nation’s boundaries still seem to be up for grabs is evidence that still today, somewhere in its core, Spain’s young democracy remains fragile and immature”.

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