Catalonia, an identity debated

Foreword

by Josep M. Fradera

It has been more than a century that the case of Catalonia represents an important challenge for the social sciences and for politics in Europe. Historical nation, its forced military incorporation into the unitary scheme of Bourbonian Spain has not erased the many differences with the Castilian part of the monarchy (right, language, manners). On the contrary, it is even during the XVIII^e A century that its economic differentiation asserted itself, in an still not very decisive way. As the historian Pierre Vilarly shown it masterfully, these economic differences did not separate Catalonia from the Spanish whole, but even more merged the destinies of the different regions of the peninsula. These differences increased to XIX^e century, mainly due to massive Catalan industrialization. At the same time, the political integration of Catalonia in the Spanish whole became more solid, following the pacts between the liberal elites of the different parts of the monarchy to found a unitary political project. It was precisely at the heart of these nation-state projects for all of Spain (with the exception of the Basque Fores and Navarre provinces), that the inheritance of the differences inherited from the past was used in a new way, first In terms of a powerful regionalism, and then a non -separatist nationalism, or rather, of a nationalism within which the separatists were always in the minority. Throughout the XX^e century, this regionalist nationalism, or this regionalism with nationalist discourse, was constantly present in the great -range problems of Spanish society. The drastic solution, through castellanist unitarism, which Francoism (1939-1976) intended to give the problem, as it is notorious, a resounding failure. And against any prognosis, this united and misunderstood presence from the peninsular center threatens to perpetuate itself to XXI^e century, as one of the most notable testimonies of the Spanish difficulty in finding a harmonious solution (if it exists) to the cohabitation of the various regional/national entities of the Iberian Peninsula.

Both by its duration and by its complexity, this problem represents a notorious challenge for the social and historical sciences. No one can reasonably claim today to give lessons on this subject, nor to be worth an overall perspective which resolves all the conceptual questions involved. For the intellectual sectors identified with nationalism, it is obvious that the persistence of the Catalan case does not in any way represent an hermeneutic problem, teleologism and finalism being posed as implicit postulates to the explanatory patterns from which they develop their interpretations. For the others, this is indeed an extremely complex problem. For example, no teleological explanation may explain why a well integrated region within Hispanic imperial structures at the end of XVIII^e Century (in a comparable way to post-jacobite Scotland) reinterpreted a century later its medieval glories and the permanence of an “archaic” language as signs of differences with the whole in which it was integrated. There is also no teleological explanation for the behavior of the ruling classes which, when they had hoisted the flag of a liberal project of nation-state, withdrew a few decades later in the Nordic mists of this Historicism, again asks the question of their position in the Spanish whole, and slowly sliding towards a model which was going beyond that of their very dear Provençal felibres. It was not the memory of the past that led the generations spent to these dramatic ruptures, but it was rather the convenience of the historical contingency which again located them at the center of collective concerns.

If these key moments of the long XIX^e century cannot be explained since the logic inherent in nationalism, the beginning of XX^e century, when explicit and massively rooted nationalism occupies the center of the Catalan political and cultural scene, cannot be either. Ultimately, the first thing to say is that Catalonia is not just an example of more nationalism, as long as credit is given to the schemes of the left of the sixties and the Aboriginal nationalist tradition. Catalonia was the platform for an original nationalism movement, while sheltering completely amalgamated movements to Spanish politics as a whole. For this reason, it is not difficult to understand that it was both an example for other European nationalisms and the Orwellian mirror of the continental left. The history of the country therefore challenges elementary analyzes and schematic solutions. Even more today, after reception in two successive waves, during the second half of the XX^e century and the beginning of XXI^eof large -scale migratory flows, first of the south peninsular, and then around the world. In this context, the modes of transformation of the old forms of collective identification, within the framework of a Spain which has changed spectacular after Franco, and in a still imprecise Europe, pose an important problem with the historical and sociological imagination .

Translated from Catalan by Jeanne Moisand.