Original autor: Grad Student in USA.
Tomorrow [October 1], the government in Catalonia will try to organize a referendum to declare, unilaterally, the secession from the rest of Spain. This process has been opposed by the central government, and by most population in Spain. People in Catalonia are also divided, but at this point, it is uncertain to what proportion. You may have seen troubling images in TV, with police arrest. Some people have suggested that democracy may be endangered. While the degree of tension is indeed very intense, I do not think this is the case. I do think, however, that this is the symptom of a large series of problems and a decades long process. I have until now avoided to discuss this, especially in public. So have many other people like me, I think. What follows is a personal account of how we got where we got and how I see things. I haven’t re-read it, so perhaps there are grammatical mistakes. So be it.
I don’t even remember how it originally happened. Most likely, my memories are shaped by this narrative that is not even accurate, not even historically, but this is my account of how I lived it.
In the beginning, about 15 years ago, a popular idea in my environment suggested that Spain was a ‘plurinational’ country, and it ought to have a federal system to accommodate those differences. Federal sounded modern, like America or Germany. This was a cool idea to hold. I even played with it before I became an undergrad.
Even then, perhaps due to my francophile education, I was instinctively suspicious of the idea that a medium size country like Spain should treat their citizens differently based on their identity or cultural traits. I saw citizenship as something based on the law and political participation, and did not see why access to basic social and citizenships rights should be defined by individual identities or personal emotions. The idea of citizenship based on cultural belonging is one that I have always instinctively distrusted at a normative level, especially since I have always perceived that this type of post-material values were held by a postmaterialist elite instead of serving people from humble origins, and I never felt that the richer more prosperous than average regions in my country were really in a situation of oppression. Inevitably, with identity rights, always came material interest, like limits to redistribution to other region or the limitation of the influence of the common democratic government at the local level. In general, my strong jacobin rooted beliefs in republican equality prevented me from sympathizing with these views.
Nor have I ever been in any fashion attached to the idea of Spain as national entity. Perhaps like most progressively educated elites in my country, and just similarly to what pushed Catalans in the nationalist direction, I did not feel there was much of what to be proud in Spain. I remember the first time I felt something similar to ‘national pride’. It was when the socialist government approved, against a noisy minority, the law that legalized gay marriage. It was a very strange feeling, because it was very new. Things have changed a lot since then, but at the time, only 15 years ago, in the West, many attitudes that on current standards would be seen as openly sexist or homophobic, were seen by then as politically just fine. Spain was a pioneer in regulating gay marriage on an equal stand on heterosexual unions, and for the first time I felt my country was at the front of social progress.
But for a while, the ‘problem’ of nationalism in Catalonia was a debate about the best way to organize the state. There was room for having civilized conversations. I enjoyed arguing in my social circle what at the time was a very minority view: that more self-government was not necessarily an improvement on progressive standards. I believed, and still believe, that concerns for equality were basically in tension with decentralized management of public services. The opposition to devolution was a position that was usually argued only on (Spanish) nationalist grounds by conservative people, but generally not argued on social justice or material equality grounds. Since then, I have changed my mind on this subject, several times indeed. At some point I came to accept that the inequalities generated by decentralized government were probably minor, and an acceptable cost given how much many people seem to care about their ‘national identity’. I was willing to accept that keeping a good business environment was necessary for the economy and that, together to the maintenance of personal freedom, implied some limits to full egalitarian redistribution, so why not accept a similar tradeoff in the name of ‘convivencia’ (a spanish word for ‘living together’).
Then, there was a backlash. I don’t remember exactly who started it. Two parties who defended positions close to mine on this topic appeared in the electoral arena, but their zeal on the topic always pushed me back. I suspected that behind the call for equality, lied feelings guided by aversion against alterity, even some sort of Catalanophobia, often gross stereotypes. These were stated by people with whose attitudes and political character I never felt close to in general terms. I never found very credible the zeal of the conservative party of my country for ‘the rule of law’ or ‘legal equality’, which I always felt was just nationalism in disguise. Many of the things they said were exaggerated. I just did not feel I could be in the same boat. Similarly, on the other side, people started to feel offended, and qualify the Spanish conservatives with all kinds of ugly and equally exaggerated adjectives. Both things occurred simultaneously, and I became disenchanted. I think for a relatively long time, even years, I avoided completely debating the topic of nationalism and decentralization in Spain.
Things were stable for a while. But then the economic crisis hit and Spain had to go through of the hardest adjustment processes of the democratic period. At the time, I was learning economics, and I understood the very basic intertemporal nature of what a balance of payment crisis meant: it is a very large shock on consumption, and thus on individual wellbeing. An excess of expenditure leading to substantial foreign debt, a real bubble thatbursted, creating an enormous sudden credit constraint and a large drop in consumption and economic activity. Perhaps I was lucky enough at the time to be studying international macro and be able to understand that the adjustment period was the natural consequence of the artificial feeling of prosperity created by the housing bubble. But in terms of economic psychology, it was dramatic, as many in Spain discovered that we were much poorer than we actually thought we were. It was a shock on the most basic economic wellbeing variable: permanent consumption and living standards.
Thus, to most people in Spain, who also were in a much less financially comfortable position than I was to think coldly about this, the austerity measures taken by the government to adjust the external account were seen as undemocratic and caused substantial social backlash. In most of Spain, people went to the streets and camped as a sign of protest. The political environment was over time fully reshaped, with substantial consequences for the party system.
Suddenly, secessionism started to rise like crazy in Catalonia. If you ask people from Catalonia, most of them will tell you it was all fuelled by the decision by the supreme court to substantially cut down the reform of the self-government chart. My interpretation was, and still is, that the decision was only the catharsis of the process. Just as antiausterity politics emerged in the rest of Spain and coordinated in people leaving traditional parties, in Catalonia people coordinated on the idea of leaving Spain. It is true that there was a discontinuity with the court decision, which is very visible in the data, but in my view this was only an trigger that unified, and crystallized in the mind of Catalan public opinion, the latent hostility due to the politics of the great recession.
Then, most of my Catalan acquaintances and friends, who used to think about this in a way I could perfectly under, seemed to have gone in what one decade before was a super minority political view: they became secessionists. The change was enormous and worked in an accelerated fashion. Always following my memories, I remember at some point the style of debate started to change. Where some years before I could actually debate with people about the best way to organize the state, most conversations I had on the topic were terminated at some point by some type of ‘You can not understand this because you are not Catalan. This has to do with feelings and you Spaniards do not understand it’. It became personal, emotional, political discussions became like couple fights.
Language also started to change. I don’t remember the first time that I heard on facebook the idea that Spain could not be considered a democracy or that the government was fascist or extreme right in nature, but I remember I regarded it as a funny eccentricity. By then, I had learned the standard social norm of avoiding personal conflict when I heard something stupid. Because the disagreement will remain longer than your mutual patience, you typically don’t want to call someone stupid when acts in that way, also because you may not be right. But then, these statements became increasingly common. The structure of political critiques drastically changed: from disagreement or accusing the government of being wrong, to saying that it was a gang of fascists and that the regime was not and perhaps had never been democratic. That basic rights were disrespected. These statements became increasingly common in Spain, and in the case of Catalonia, they were coupled with the demand for leaving the country and starting one of their own.
I became surprisingly late aware that at the heart of this idea was the assumption that the Catalan individuals were perceived by secessionists as somehow different to other Spaniards. In retrospect, these signs were there from very early. It was also natural to believe it: you would not want to leave a group which you felt was a very evolved and wonderful place to be. In my mind, this happened to many in Spain at some level. Some of us migrated out of Spain, a country that we perceived had little future in terms of opportunities, with a 20% unemployment and poverty rates rocketing. Others, who did not have that option or did not want to take it, left traditional parties, and they perceived these did not offer much opportunity. And, finally, others wanted to leave the Spanish boat altogether, as the grass felt much greener on the other side. The expectation crisis was common, but it affected each of us in different fashions.
Of course, the idea that new parties would fix everything soon started to have to deal with the reality of hard politics. As new parties entered the political arena, it soon became obvious that they were no less vulnerable to the bitter flavor of power- side deals, boring current policy making, corruption, compromise, etc. The roots of the problems of the country were not a political corrupt class filled with intrinsically ‘bad’ people. The problems were economic in nature, and institutional, even perhaps cultural in some aspects, and thus electing new politicians did not necessarily produce the radical changes that many would have wished. So, many, who used to be not very active in politics, had to learn the tragic nature of politics the hard way.
But, while the illusion of ‘new politics’ had to deal with compromise, power struggles and so on making its adherent to update their expectation, nothing of the sort happened in Catalonia. Secessionists blamed the government. Nationalist collude against the left wing coalition in power in Catalonia, and came back to power. They blamed the central government of the austerity measures that they (just like many other regions) had to implement. While corruption scandals emerged. The founder of the modern Catalan nationalist party and president of the region for so long was found to have been essentially a crook, with accounts in Switzerland. It also became more or less evident that, as it was the case elsewhere in Spain, patronage and pork barrel expenditure were rampant in Catalonia. Things started to get really weird when people who were my natural Catalan counterpart, people that I perceive very close to me on many levels (demographic, ideological, etc) started to become strangely supportive of the christian democratic conservative party.
I can now visualize the first time I saw one of my progressive friends defend the former president of Catalonia against its tax evasion charges on the idea that it was not a normal legal process, but an attack against the Catalan secessionist movement. Of course, I had not doubt that the timing could have been opportunistic, but none of this justified, in my opinion, defending a corrupt conservative politician that, it turns out, had ruled Catalonia for 20 years based on a patronage system that ensured its electoral hegemony. Unlike in the rest of Spain, those who had ruled Catalonia for most of the democratic period were not considered responsible for the crisis. People who were formerly critical of this party, again, a christian conservative party, became staunch supporters against any external critique.
By then, my opinion on nationalism had moved away from the ‘equality story’ mentioned above, to a more political account. What I had observed over time is that social issues were crowded out of the agenda because of the nationalist cleavage. I was by then familiar with the idea that in the USA working classes were separated by race, and the nationalist-unionist divide within Catalonia (which was, and has remained, stably around 50/50) seem to work for me in the same fashion. I regard the problem of nationalist identity as a tool of political domination and an excuse to avoid political accountability.
Of course, secessionism worked like partisanship in politics. It all was based on a myth. I am not being condescending: we all work based on myths. My idea of a bright future out of Spain, or the common idea of most spaniard of renewal by new political parties were also ideas based on myths. But although our own myths had to be demystified as soon as they were taken to the real world, the myth of a future prosperity for Catalonia once it would be liberated from the Spanish chains never had to deal with reality. The nationalist coalition that seized power on a razor thin majority implemented reforms that could be seen as just equally unpopular as those in the rest of Spain, but avoided been blamed for them by appealing to the then strong momentum of the nationalist feeling. And people cherished that myth. It gave them hope without ever been disconfirmed.
I remember when a person I know published a report which accounted for the perception of corruption in different regions of Spain. Catalonia was one of the places were corruption was perceived to be highest. I remember this report the anger of Catalan scholars in my social circle. In a comic way, the mainstream interpretation was not that Catalan institutions were corrupt, similar to Spain. That went, of course, against the core of the nationalist myth belief. The interpretation that was common among my secessionist friend is that, since it was based on a survey, this evidenced that Catalans were more sensitive to corruption and tended to overreport briberies and have higher standards. This is of course plausible. What is alarming is that prior conceptions and perception about their own culture prevent people from reading a standard piece of evidence in the most straightforward way because in their mind it could not happen. I even remember some people suggesting that this type of research work should not be discussed in public but in scholarly circle. If discussed in public it could be ‘instrumentalized’ against Catalonia and its secessionist cause. This is just an example of one of the many situations in which I felt people around me had become completely nuts, and the seccesiones ‘proces’ (as it was called), was poisining the political environment, but there were many others that I don’t feel like listing them all here.
It also took me several years, after one visit to Catalonia, to realized that Catalan politics were intrinsically heterogeneous, and much more diverse than it looked from outside. From Madrid, Catalonian politics looked very homogeneous. I, at least, perceived an almost unanimous nationalist country, in which Spanish was rarely spoken. Both things were inaccurate. Spanish is widely spoken in daily life, especially in urban environment. And the nationalist block is only about half of society, and in spite of party realignments, it has remained so. These things were not apparent because all that was Spanish in Catalan society was not associated with Catalonia in the public sphere. My favorite example is one TV, Telecinco, channel which is the most viewed channel in the whole country, and also in Catalonia at the time. But this is a very gross channel, which is is associated with non-educated item. I was surprised when I saw the statistics, since what I associated with Catalonia, and its image, was the Catalan regional TV channel, which promotes (Catalan) culture and that I had always envied when I was a child because it featured my favorite cartoons.
It really took me a long time to realize how ethnolinguistic cleavages produced acted in Catalonia. The moment that I first thought about it was when I was talking with one of my friends about dating apps. Dating apps were not as mainstream as they are at the time. People of my generation were among the first to have regular internet connection, and we have internalized all the dangers associated with meeting people in the internet. So I asked my friend about the risks of going on a date with a completely unknown person. The answer I got really surprised me. I was told that the app was in Catalan and that induced a certain selective bias, since a large portion of those who spoke Catalan tended to be members of the middle and upper class, which ensured that you would not meet ‘weird people’. Perhaps because I have lived in a bit of a social bubble for a substantial part of my life, I have never developed proper classist feelings. Very few people in my friend circle do not have higher education, most speak english not even the most basic intuitions to understand how social interactions works, so at the time I was really shocked by such a direct statement.
With time, as I read some sociology, which is of course the most classist of all disciplines, I became sensitive to the role that culture plays shaping social interactions. I learned about assortative mating, microaggressions, social roles, etc. And of course I learned to understand that we tend to get along better with people of our own gender, race, class, and of course national culture, and thus our personal networks are built along those patterns, and how we use it to distinguish ourselves. Once a sociologist friend told me that Catalonia had a middle upper class culture. And, while at the moment I found that idea a bit marxistic eccentric, it helped me to become aware and convince myself that it was actually the case. This was a bit of a taboo. I have expressed it recently to other people, but met substantial resistance to discuss it. I became aware that my love for Catalonia and Catalan culture was actually guided by the fact that the symbols I associated with it were cultural items that, as an upper class individual, I found intuitively appealing. What Barcelona meant for me was a wonderful bohemian and cosmopolitan city, with nerdy bookshops, Gaudí architecture, much better fountain pens shops than Madrid, the Liceu (the local opera), and the best economics department of the country, and in general a rather progressive and intellectual environment. In contrast, I associated Madrid with uneducated taxi drivers, ugly traffic, a very poor cultural life, and a reactionnary political environment. This does not mean that Barcelona did not have ugly traffic or that taxi drivers asked you whether you wanted to listen to Scarlatti of Schoenberg when you got into their cars. It just meant that we do not associate Barcelona with those things, only with its bight and cosmopolitan side.
Interestingly, things have substantially changed in the last decades. I recently discussed with a friend, who is also from Madrid, that it was really shocking that world gay pride was being celebrated in Madrid, that it was suddenly perceived as a gay friendly, modern, and cool hipster city. This was in stark contrast with the city I grew in, which I would never have perceived as a gay safe environment.
But I digress. The point I wanted to make is that it took me a while to understand that the Catalan public sphere was, in fact, a pretty bourgeois and somehow elitistic environment. And so was its general environment. I am not saying that other parts of Spain, or Madrid is a classless society. But the nature of the cleavage is different. It is much easier to integrate yourself, because there is no ethnic cleavage. Madrid is, for example, a city in which almost everyone of my friends are second generation immigrants (myself included), but we do not feel strangers at all. Of course, the reason why I like Barcelona’s culture, or catalan politics, was because it was largely dominated by people like me: opera goers, fountain pen lovers, independent rock (don’t infer that I like this cultural product, I just happen to have many friends with abominable musical taste) aficionados, hipsters (same), etc. And of course I could relate to those things more directly than to the boring governmental environment of Madrid. I believe that the same is true for many foreigners. Of course, such an environment is hardly representative of Catalonia, or Barcelona at large. It is, again, a myth, but a widely believed one which has been entertained and perceived as true, especially by non-catalans.
What is largely ignored is that, just as most people in America are not vegan or even close, and many vote Trump (although walking on a college campus may make you think otherwise) this background was hardly, if at all, representative of Catalan society. Spanish speaking population either tended to sort themselves out of the Catalan public sphere (in politics, society), read different newspapers, or simply belonged to a group that is typically underrepresented in the social sphere. These people were either invisible to me (and to most people), or I did not associated them as proper Catalan. Thus my impression that secessionism had become an almost unanimous sentiment.
I have recently become particularly interested in the topic of social segregation in catalonia. A recent paper by two economists used surnames to study how being catalan or having Catalan origins relates to social patterns. https://academic.oup.com/restud/article-abstract/82/2/693/1584558/The-Informational-Content-of-Surnames-the?redirectedFrom=PDF . They have found that, indeed, people with Catalan origins have increasingly married each other, and tend to be of higher class than non-catalans. In general, there seems to be a rather substantial amount of evidence (both anecdotal and hard) that Catalan society is internally divided along ethnolinguistic lines, but this division to a large extent overlaps with other cleavages: class, education, income, politics and vote, nationalist sentiment. Of course, this is just normal: Catalonia has been historically receiver of immigrantes from the rest of Spain, who had to be assimilated, but had a substantially different cultural and social background. When two observationally different social groups live in the same space, they often do not melt. It happens with race in the united states, and just everywhere else. I just was not aware, at all, that this was the case.
I regard this artificial perception of homogeneity of the Catalan public sphere as one of the roots of the generic misunderstanding of Catalans and other Spaniards. And the central root of the polarization process of the last several years. If people read different newspaper, do not talk to each other, etc, and your environment is not representative of larger society, you are likely to have a distorted image of things. Just as people perceive things collectively agreed in Brussels in the EU as somehow illegitimate because no one in their country (even if in the larger union they do) agrees with them, something similar happens between Spain and Catalonia.
This has a more personal counterpart. For the last decade and a half, I perceive (based on anecdotal evidence) that there has been an exodus of highly mobile population (especially scholars, who are a substantial portion of my friends) due to the political conflict. I have heard several people to confirm this impression. Barcelona was, and probably still is, a very cosmopolitan environment. Yet, with the secessionist movement, all scholars were expected to take a stance. They were not prosecuted politically or anything like that, of course, but the social environment just became weird. This has been particularly extreme with the recent referendum but it has been going on for a while. Many people, even Catalans themselves, have expressed been tired (many of them have moved to Madrid) of Barcelona. There was no ethnic cleansing, but the sorting process acted on itself. I became aware of this phenomenon when I visited the CREI webpage, a center of economic research. CREI is wonderful since it has a series which asks leading researchers to write a literature review connected to their field in a nontechnical fashions. Things like CREI were the (elitist, upper class) items for which I fell in love with Barcelona. I recently visited the page where these essays are published http://www.crei.cat/opuscles/ . If you have a look at the webpage, you will see that starting 2012, when the nationalist coalition acceded to power and the secessionist ‘proces’ was started, essays stop from being translated into Spanish. This is hardly a problem, since they are still in English. But I regard it as one of the symbols of how something that should have remained outside political conflict, and having a rather cosmopolitan and non-national basis (economic research), was somehow polluted by a political conflict. And my perception is that this is likely to be evidence of a more general climate of political hostility. This is of course based on anecdotal evidence, but this piece is only about my experience and how I have lived the last two decades, not about particle physics.
Recently, I witnessed a dispute between two persons who used to get along well on twitter. One was on the ‘unionist’ side, another one of the ‘secessionist’ side. Former friends were literally insulting each other. A friend of mine said ‘So, this is getting personal’. I thought for a moment and said ‘Wasn’t it personal in the first place?’. When I said it, I did not realized that that utterance would lead me to write this piece. Indeed, from the very first moment in which you make public the preference not to share your political space with members of another group, because you dislike the way they act, their ideas, or you think that ‘They are unable to understand you’, the political becomes intrinsically personal. Secessionism is about who you would like to share your political space with, who you consider your equal, with whom you want to share your resources and the same perimeter of justice and rights. And, if you want to exclude a group, it is because you dislike them, or do not feel comfortable with them, or consider that they are wrong. This does not necessarily have to be this way. But in practice, the fine line is easy to cross. And during the last decade I saw plenty of people cross it.
Of course, as the Spanish and public spheres progressively separated from each other, citizens became strangers and misunderstandings increased exponentially. The catalan middle and upper classes, who dominate the Catalan public space, became increasingly different, in their beliefs, and in the way they looked at the world, from their Spanish counterparts, and to some extent to the rest of Catalonians society. Disagreements became confrontations and differences were translated into conflict, as it just happens when two groups do not understand each other. Just as rural working white Americans feel they are governed by strangers when they look at the millionaire club that is the congress, the same happened between two societies.
As I was saying at the begining, in retrospect, polarization has become pretty intense. Or so I perceive it. I have had conversations with Catalan friends who, when we talked about the last two decades in politics, seem to live in a completely different world than I have. I am not saying they are wrong, I am saying things are seen in completely different fashions on each side-but I obviously believe, by definition, that I am right and they are wrong, since otherwise I would change my view. The account and the perception of relationships between the rest of Spain and Catalonia are crazily different. The standard narrative is that Catalonia was fooled by Spanish elites, who promised a reform of the autonomy chart (the regional so called constitution), and then manipulated the constitutional court to ripped it off. My account, if you read the above quoted post, is very different, of course. I just see secessionism as the Catalan manifestation of the antiausterity backslash. My secessionist friends claim that they are ‘oppressed’ or ‘repressed’; that they suffer fiscal expropriation by Madrid. A friend of mine (who is not Catalan) claimed that there is a pattern of ‘political inequality’ (a term that is often used for minorities misrepresentation in politics, and that associate with civil rights fights and enforcement of right to vote), and he said that some type of compensation should be enacted. For me, it is really hard to see one of the richest, lower unemployment and low poverty regions in Spain could be seen, in any possible way, as exploited by the rest of the country. It just feels lunatic when you look at the statistics and you see the contrast with horror stories that are often by secessionists.
Another of my favorite is this idea of political misrepresentation. In fact, Catalonia has ample power and autonomy for self government. Only some competences are left out, like defense and taxation, and stuff like that. They even have their same police. It is true they do not have fiscal competences (and other regions do), but Catalonia enjoys, by any standards, a very strong self-government. This is not apparent is you are left with the accounts that Catalan secessionist often report, which without denying it, seems to suggest that there are substantial obstacles.
The other claim is that regional interest are marginalized, because the government can act unilaterally, for example imposing caps on fiscal policy. This is what my friend was referring to by ‘political inequality’. But my perception is that the influence of Catalans, especially the middle and upper classes that often complain, in Spanish politics is just enormous: nationalist parties have historically been pivotal in the parliament, and managed to get substantial concessions. This is also true on historical grounds: the influence of the Catalan upper and middle class at the elite level has been almost monolithic during the whole democratic period, most of the XIX century, and probably also during the dictatorship-although it is certainly true that Catalan culture was repressed, and so on.
One claim that in my view is highly unplausible is the perception of an overwhelming majority that is supposed to be in favor of independence. This majority does not show up in the surveys, although it certainly has increased dramatically in recent years. Actually, when the parliament passed the law that would organize the referendum, they had a razor thin majority in the parliament. The regional president recognized publicly in an interview in TV that they just did not have enough support to organize this process with the other half of Catalonia’s political spectrum. Nonetheless, this is not apparent, not at all. The secessionist movement is strongly mobilized, and by looking at the pictures it would seem that it is almost unanimous. Of course, if you are able to mobilize 20% of the population into a demonstration you can certainly make it feel like everyone is out there, but the evidence that the current government is backed by an overwhelming majority just does not seem to be there.
My all time favorite is the idea held by many Catalan leftists that after secession, they will be able to implement some type of hard redistribution welfare state and completely reshape Catalan politics in a socialdemocratic hegemonic country. Some of them argue that this will be possible once the allegedly 7% of GDP that is transfered to other regions will be retained. Then, they will be able to get plenty of money. But, as I explained, Catalonia has historically been ethnically divided and nationalist are largely upper class. It is likely, therefore, that the christian conservative party that has historically won will also control the system, and the policies implemented rather conservative. I do not see any prospect for hard redistribution, or the Spanish speaking population being more integrated into Catalan public sphere.
All of these things are uncertain, of course. The problem is that people are not sure about it.
All of these claims remind me of the Trump election. After the election, I read stories about students who had not to avoid attending class because they were in a state of emotional distress. To me, this was kind of martian. Polls, although wrong, consistently showed that a very large portion of the population supported Trump, and an even larger the republican party. Nonetheless, after several years in the United States I know of not a single person in my social circle who is a Trump supporter. Even worse, I have tried to ask Americans if they know some, and it is very often the case that they do not. The disconnection of the liberal bubble in which I live from the other half of the country explains most of what has been going on and why people with a globalist elite background like myself find the Trump phenomenon completely unintelligible.
Only recently did I become aware of how I had myself contributed, in some way, to this pattern, by stopping to discuss this topic in public. In the old/good days, when I was younger, I used to spend a lot of time talking about politics. When someone said something that was completely lunatic, I just told him I disagreed. Maybe the situation got tense, but probably the discussion would go away. One of the persons that has had the most influence on the way I think is a French catholic royalist, who was in favor of the return of the monarchy to France. We had similar interest, and some type of personal chemistry, and spent hours and hours discussing politics, from completely polar points of view: abortion, separation of church and state, the property of the means of production, immigration. On each of these topics, imagine the two most opposite views you could figure out, and these were the ideas that were confronted. For me, this was a wonderfully enriching experience, since it is rare to be confronted with someone that is both different from you and intelligent enough to make you rethink all your points of view. I always feel that he is one of the persons that made me the nerd I am today: if I wanted to ‘win’ the discussion, I needed to become smarter, and so I started to read. I used to do this a lot, with many people, and it stimulated me a lot. It also allowed me to understand the diversity of points of views, and to try to communicate mine.
But as I explained above, this changed over time. My group of friends are all publicly engaged in public debate, but we all have substantially similar opinions. Most of them have better things to do than to confront views on whatsapp in unending conversations. More importantly, the debate about Catalonia just bored me. And I believe it was the case for many others. It looked like the same thing again and again. On the secessionist side, people were very active. They have always thought about this as a battle for international image, and report, always in English, what I regard as a highly distorted image of what is going on. On the national side, there was the government, a government that I hardly feel identified with, and that for political and aesthetical reasons, makes me very uncomfortable to side with. And with the government, there were many people who agreed with it, thus not an environment in which I felt welcomed either. Thus, I just deserted from the political arena in many ways, but especially from the Catalan debate. The Catalan debate just looked crazy to me. My Catalan friends had become crazy about it. They made points that, as I explained, looked to me extravagant, and I just did not feel like contradicting them, but instead emphasized what made me close to them. It is always better and easier to avoid personal conflict. The few times I have spoken to my friends about these issues, it often ended with some type of ‘You are not able to understand it because you are not from Catalonia’ escape route.
At some point, however, trains got to the cross-road, and decade long lack of dialogue was obvious. In a recent conversation, two friends of mine were talking about the topic. One of them quoted Desmond Tutu, saying that if your not on the side of the oppressed, then you are on the side of the oppressor. My friend asked ‘What do you mean with “the oppressed”?’ A silence followed ‘Do you mean that Catalans are oppressed because the central government does not invest in public works?’. The answer was an implicitly embarrassing yes. It just seemed that for my friend, the oppressed minority status of the Catalan people was just a fact, obvious, as obvious and uncontested as gay marriage may be to you if you attend the liberal arts department of Berkeley.
At this point, I feel that a pattern of language inflation has been largely uncontested. People talk about political tension as ‘a coup’, about a right wing government as ‘fascist’. I have even heard comparisons with apartheid south africa.
A particularly undesirable consequence is that the opposition to secessionism has become associated with the right. The left has historically been more sympathetic to self government demands but, above all, it has been hostile to right wing ideas, and thus to the government position. As a result, a systematic critique of the nationalist narrative has only had origin from a conservative point of view. This is hardly because this critique is not possible. It just hasn’t been articulated.
As you may guess, I believe that progressive ideas are incompatible, at a very basic and strong level, with the central tenets of Catalan nationalism. Nationalism has, as I argued, the tendency to be exclusive, to implement differences among equals. I don’t think that cultural affinity should be the basis for citizenship in any open society. Catalan nationalism is, as I argued, a bourgeois dominated movement, not so much demographically, but at its character and core, its agenda has reflected the interest of a conservative upper and middle class segment of catalan-speaking educated minority. Thinking of Catalans as oppressed in any possible sense is something essentially ludicrous, as crazy as thinking of upper incomes who pay taxes as oppressed. The two central items of the nationalist agenda are limitation of (territorial) redistribution, and more self-government (i.e., disenfranchisement from the decision process of all those unrepresented in Catalan politics). Both things -political exclusion and tax resistance- are historical items of XIX century bourgeois political organizations, and their demands has been remarkably stable in Catalan politics over centuries. I am not saying it is impossible to accommodate these ideas in a progressive framework (I think it is very hard, but with some heroic assumptions it may be), but I believe there is a substantial case for critique.
This critique has been largely absent. Let me underline the gravity of the issue: a group of people who are privileged from any metric, are claiming that they are governed undemocratically, oppressed, and that they would like to avoid redistribution and have a larger power share to rule their house. Yet, opposition to these ideas has been only met with the rhetorical appeal to ‘the rule of law’ and ideas that smell to Spanish conservatism and nationalism like crazy. Instead, people like me, and me personally indeed, have found particularly uncomfortable to express these ideas. Doing it is a bit like supporting the conservative right, it is partly boring, and highly irrelevant since we are concerned with other policy topics, like welfare state structure and so on.
But, given the recent general feeling in my facebook environment that Spain is basically in a situation of democratic suspensions that my secessionists friend suggest, I really have decided that, even if I lose friends, it is urgent to try to communicate with each other more often. To say it when your pals do or say something you think is deeply stupid. To express disagreement, especially in the international environment in which many of these voices are asymmetrically represented. Perhaps I am wrong, but if I am, and I do not discuss with other people, none of us will have a sense that the other exists.
