Top Quotes: “The Struggle for Catalonia: Rebel Politics in Spain” — Raphael Minder
Introduction
“When the Diada was held in 2012, citizens took to the streets because they were upset by rising unemployment and budgetary squeezing, but mostly because they were galvanised by the belief that independence could somehow brighten Catalonia’s economic future. Many demonstrators wanted to underline their faith in the European Union rather than in Spain. There were EU flags and the dominant slogan of the demonstration was “Catalonia, new state of Europe.””
“The organisers of the rally claimed two million attendees. Local police estimated 1.5 million, but the central government in Madrid countered that ‘only 600,000 Catalans took to the streets on that day. Yet even the lowest estimate represented a sizeable proportion of the 7.5 million residents of Catalonia. Whichever figure was correct, the Diada raised the separatist pressure on Mariano Rajoy, Spain’s prime minister, at a critical moment. Rajoy was in the throes of a major Spanish banking crisis. However, he refused to succumb. Whatever the size of the Diada and the pressure from Mas, Rajoy was not going to offer Catalonia a more advantageous fiscal treatment just when Spain was worrying about a debt default. So the game was upped. From that point, the Diada became an annual show of force by Catalan separatists, which took a different format each year.
In 2013, the demonstrators formed a human chain that crossed Catalonia. It copied the chain formed in August 1989 by the inhabitants of the Baltic republics of the Soviet Union, to demand their independence from Moscow. In 2014, the Diada took the shape of a seven-mile-long “V” for “vote” down two othe main avenues of Barcelona. In 2015, the Diada march resembled a human arrow. In 2016, separatists held smaller demonstrations in five cities, rather than just Barcelona.”
“Nobody knows exactly how many Catalans converted to secessionism after the start of the financial crisis. But politicians and sociologists generally agree that about half of those who voted for separatist parties in 2015 did not support secessionism a decade earlier. In the Catalan election of 2015, 48 per cent cast their ballot in favour of separatist parties, which was enough for separatists to gain a parliamentary majority.”
“Ironically, the fighting in Catalonia helped Portugal regain independence from Spain — after a period of Iberian union between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. This was because Spanish troops left the western side of the Iberian peninsula in order to provide reinforcement for those fighting in northeastern Spain. Portuguese noblemen seized this opportunity and started their own insurrection in 1640 with far more success than the Catalan reapers. In 1668, Spain recognised the House of Braganza as Portugal’s new and independent ruling dynasty.”
“There are Catalan speakers in seven different places, who share other aspects of Catalan culture, but mostly distance themselves from Catalonia’s politics, especially when it comes to the question of secession.
As well as in Valencia, just south of the region’s border, there are Catalan speakers in the Franja d’Aragó (the Strip of Aragón) to the west. In the principality of Andorra, which is wedged in the mountains between France and Spain, Catalan is the official language. On the French side of the Pyrenees mountains, Catalan is the second language, after French, in the département of Pyrénées-Orientales. Out on the Mediterranean, variants on Catalan are spoken in the Balearic Islands, as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island of Sardinia.
Catalan-speaking regions have a total population of 13.5 million, which is almost double the number of people who reside in Catalonia itself. About 11 million people understand Catalan while 9.1 million people speak it, according to a government study.
To add to the complexity, not everybody agrees on what kind of Catalan is spoken where. In Valencia, for instance, residents call their language ‘Valenciano,” which some have sought to label as linguistically separate from Catalan. This has been part of a largely moribund debate that has shifted depending on which party has been in power. In 2015, a new left-wing regional government said the place should be renamed as València, introducing a grammatical accent that is not used in standard Castilian Spanish, but is common in Catalan. Predictably, unionist politicians voiced outrage.
As in so many other parts of the world, the modern borders of Catalonia do not mark the precise limits of a cultural identity that inevitably became more widespread through migration. After Christians defeated the Moors, many people emigrated to Valencia from what is now the western edge of modern Catalonia, around Lleida. They took with them their way of speaking, which is slightly different to that spoken along the eastern coastline.”
“Polaco means Polish in Spanish, but academics are divided over why it became used to describe Catalans as foreign.”
“France absorbed the Catalans in a 1659 peace treaty signed by King Louis XIV, which shifted France’s border with Spain down to the Pyrenees mountains. The modern dispute over Occitania suddenly revived the feelings of Catalan identity in southwestern France.
But strong as these feelings are, I found very few French Catalans willing to break away from Paris. Ironically, many wanted more interventionism from the capital instead.”
“After Franco’s death, Spain could have given full recognition to Catalan, Basque and Galician as minority languages. Instead, lawmakers in the Spanish Congress continue to debate only in Castilian. Similarly, when Spain joined the European Union in 1986, the then Socialist government did not try to add Spain’s minority. languages to the tower of Babel that is Brussels, home to twenty-four official European languages.
“The Spanish Congress is the only European parliament that has four official languages at its disposal but has decided only one of them can be used, said Narcís Serra, a former mayor of Barcelona and former Spanish Minister of Defence. It is probably impossible to get a Swiss person to understand this.”
“The Catalan language has also received scant attention in Spain’s education system. One astonishing fact is that while only eleven Spanish universities outside Catalonia offer courses in Catalan, twenty-seven German universities provide the opportunity for students to study the Catalan language and culture.”
“Started in 2005, the internet domain name ‘.cat’ received the first approval worldwide for a domain dedicated to a language. One of its promoters was Amadeu Abril i Abril, who left his law firm in 1995, after its founder died. He then took up a part-time job as a university professor, while spending the rest of his. time studying the development of the internet.
With some help from Jonathan Poster, one of the American gurus of the internet, Abril i Abril started an association to register ‘.cat’, based on language criteria rather than territorial identity. Catalonia had previously failed to register ‘.cat’ as a territorial domain, because Catalonia did not fulfill the rules of the internet’s international agency. These stated that contiguous territories could only have their own domains if they operated as separate economies, with their own taxes or currencies. The alternative approach amounted to swapping the passport for the dictionary, he said. The Catalan government provided about €200,000 in funding, while the project was also helped by the arrival of a new Socialist government in Madrid, whose Industry Minister was a Catalan, José Montilla.
Somewhat amusingly, some American web experts accused the Catalans of wanting to register ‘.cat’ surreptitiously, as a commercial venture for cats. ‘Americans know as much about geography as I know about Saturn,’ Abril i Abril said. ‘Some said we were cheating by promoting a language spoken by nobody when what we wanted is to sell things for cats, which represent a valuable market.’ However, the absurd took on its own form of reality when Catalonia took legal action against a dozen cat-linked websites for usurping its domain. One of them used a mock page of The New York Times to promote news about cats.
“We had to generate a new concept to get Catalonia on the web, but we ended up really believing it was the right approach,” Abril i Abril said. ‘The languages that didn’t manage to get good access to television then faded — and the same will happen to languages that aren’t on the internet.’
Following Catalonia’s lead, two other regions of Spain have registered their languages as domain names, Galicia and the Basque Country.”
“So is Catalan fighting for its survival? Statistics would appear to prove not. In late 2016, the Catalan government presented a study showing that 94 per cent of residents understood Catalan while 80 per cent could speak the language. This was from a population among which 35 per cent had been born outside Catalonia.
“The most potent battleground for the Catalan language, however, is the classroom. The debate dates back to the redistribution of powers after Franco, when Spain’s regions took charge of education. Spain’s regions chose different ways to resurrect the languages banned by Franco. The Basques introduced an education model in which parents can decide whether or not to send their children to a state school in which Basque is the main language. The Catalans, however, made their language compulsory in state schools, with Castilian taught as a second language.
Meritxell Ruiz, the Catalan regional Minister for Education, gave different reasons for why Catalans and Basques had made these decisions. First, by the time Franco died in 1975, almost nobody spoke Basque, she said, while Catalans kept their language alive, particularly at home. Second, the Basques were willing to adopt a system ‘in which ethnic Basques should learn their language but not necessarily outsiders,’ she said.
In Catalonia, on the other hand, integrating migrants was a major concern. If we created two schools, migrants would go to Spanish schools and Catalans to Catalan ones, she declared. Third, Catalan children will pick up Castilian outside the classroom as both languages come from Latin-unlike Basque, which has a peculiar grammar.”
“In 2016, a quarter of L’Hospitalet’s registered population had been born overseas. But this was not reflected in the city council – not one of the twenty-seven members had been born outside Spain.”
“At the time of writing, Catalonia, home to the largest Muslim population in Spain, has been spared major acts of violence related to radical Islam. Even at the height of the economic crisis, I never heard anybody embrace the kind of controversial ‘America first’ protectionism that helped Donald Trump become president. In Spain, nobody is campaigning for jobs to be earmarked for domestic rather than foreign workers amid high unemployment.
Christophe Bostyn, a Belgian consultant working in Barcelona, recalled how difficult it had been for him to get his head around how different Catalan nationalism was from other forms of nationalism. He said that during his first stay in Catalonia, as a university exchange student, he spotted a banner on campus put up by students that read ‘Catalonia is not Spain.’ Coming from Belgium, where the far-right Flemish nationalist party was at the time making strong political gains, I thought ‘not here as well!,’ Bostyn said. Yet as he settled down, he came to appreciate that ‘nationalism here wasn’t right-wing and excluding,’ but instead one of the most integrating and open forms of nationalism I have seen.”
“Four months after Maragall’s election, the socialists unexpectedly took office in Madrid, after terrorists bombed trains heading into Madrid’s Atocha station in March 2004, just days before the general election. The Atocha bombings were the most deadly terrorist strike on European soil. They would go on to change the course of Spanish politics. After the bombings, Spain’s conservative government tried to pin the blame on ETA, despite mounting evidence that Islamic and not Basque terrorists had planted the bombs. Spain’s Interior Minister, Ángel Acebes, even held a news conference in which he called anybody who doubted ETA’s responsibility ‘wretched’.
Shocked by the government’s response, citizens took to the streets and then took their outrage to the ballot boxes. As a result of this protest, the relatively inexperienced Socialist leader, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, became Spain’s new prime minister.”
“The unhappy fallout from the statute not only helped convince many Catalans that the Spanish political and judicial system was flawed, it also left a strong feeling of betrayal by a Socialist party that had counted on its voters in Catalonia to win office in Madrid. Six years later, at the time of writing, I continue to hear Catalans dismiss out of hand any Socialist initiative as a pile of empty words. It has created a situation in which neither of the two main parties of Spain is seen as a reliable partner in Catalonia.”
“According to Francisco Longo, professor of public management at Esade — a Barcelona-based university — the political relationship between Barcelona and its surroundings was purposely complicated by Franco after the civil war. Franco wanted to stop Barcelona from competing head-on with Madrid. In the 1940s, Madrid absorbed neighbouring towns like Carabanchel and expanded significantly as the capital city. But ‘in Barcelona this didn’t occur because Franco didn’t want Barcelona to grow at the same scale as Madrid,’ argued Longo, who previously worked as a senior administrator in Barcelona’s city hall.
Instead, Barcelona’s political management structure was set up according to a model that endures today. The mayor is in charge of the city itself, but doesn’t control a metropolitan area that stretches across 250 square miles and is run by separate city halls.
‘The importance of the metropolitan area of Barcelona can only be understood if we think about how Madrid would have been governed without absorbing its dormitory towns, Longo said. Franco’s divide-and-rule policy in Catalonia explains some infrastructure problems to this day, including the construction of a metro line between Barcelona and its airport in El Prat. The line opened in 2016, after major administrative delays. ‘The development of infrastructure gets very difficult when there is no central authority,’ Longo said.”
“It took just one minute for the child to reach the top of a wobbly human tower measuring about forty times his own size. Spectators all around him packed the main square of Valls. After steadying himself, the child raised his hand in victory. Shouts and applause erupted from the crowd.
Valls is the birthplace of the elaborate human towers that were first constructed in the early nineteenth century, and are known as castells in Catalan. The nerve-racking balancing act — the castells sometimes collapse just before the hand-raising attempt — has become increasingly popular across most of Catalonia in the last forty years.”
“Since 1992, when a Socialist government inaugurated a high-speed train link between Madrid and Seville, Spain has remained at the vanguard of rail technology that it has also exported worldwide. Spain has the biggest high-speed railway network per capita in the world and is only second overall to China.”
“This policy was also arguably developed because of concerns over how to supply Madrid, which as a landlocked capital stood at a disadvantage compared to cities like Barcelona or Valencia that also had shipping routes. In response to this problem, in 1870, Spain adopted a railways law to ensure that any major railtrack reached Madrid. That legislation, Bel argued, has continued to underpin all of Spain’s rail construction.
Indeed, I have often found that travelling by train through Madrid is the fastest way across Spain, even if the map might suggest otherwise. The travel time between Barcelona and Alicante is roughly the same whether via Valencia or Madrid, although the detour via Madrid is twice the distance.”
“Galicia, she said, could never match Basque or Catalan separatism because we have always been too poor. While economic migrants moved to the Basque and Catalan regions, impoverished Galicians left to find work in the Americas and wealthier parts of Europe. They left behind a society heavily reliant on farming and subsidies from Madrid, Novoneyra said.”
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