Then Madrid will have to ask itself if it is going to impose its laws by force, if the Catalan people choose their future peacefully and democratically," says Joan Maria Pique, the Catalan government's director of international communications.
"In its commitment to a democratic process to decide freely and democratically our future, through dialogue and negotiations, Eta is prepared today as yesterday to agree to the minimum democratic conditions necessary to put in motion a democratic process, if the Spanish government is willing," it says.
They don't want to give us the option of deciding democratically our future because they fear losing us … or perhaps our money.
"With just weeks before an election in which the Malian people were getting ready to freely and democratically decide their future, nobody has the right to substitute themselves by force to popular will," Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, a former prime minister, said in a statement.
The birth of a nation - Scotland has the "rare opportunity" to democratically determine its future, argues Kevin Pringle, strategic communications director of the Scottish National Party.
More recently, the current Iraqi government ignored a December 31 , 2007deadline and refused to implement a key Iraqi constitutional provision known as Article 140 that would allow the Kurds to democratically decide their future.
The future of Mohammed Nasheed, the first democratically-elected president of the Maldives, appeared increasingly bleak on Thursday after a criminal court on the island nation issued a warrant for his arrest.
In a world where political strife is too often settled with violence, we come here every four years to bestow the power of the presidency upon our democratically elected leader... Future generations will mark this morning as the turning-point for real and necessary change in our nation.
So the police state of the future will be created and defined democratically, community by community.
