In my formative years in Catalonia —the 80’s and 90’s— a cultural hegemony apparently indestructible reigned. It was the result of an unstable yet functional coalition between nationalism and progressivism.
Nationalism was committed to ensure the Catalan language as a culture language comparable to any other in Europe. In many aspects, it succeeded. The Catalan translations of classic books were simply extraordinary —back then, I read in Catalan a good deal of great European fiction, French and English, from nineteenth century, Greco-Roman classics and a lot of poetry. Contemporary authors —I had a soft spot for Quim Monzó and Sergi Pàmies— were excellent. Maybe there was nothing the likes of Juan Marsé or Eduardo Mendoza, with their ability to compose great over-arching portraits of Barcelonian society. But they did not pretend so, either; they were fresh, brief and sarcastic. The Catalan Encyclopaedia, a Jordi Pujol’s personal effort, was formally as good as any other you could buy in Spain, and the newspaper Avui was technically a quite decent newspaper, despite being (no pejorative intention here) a regional newspaper with scarce resources and even less readers, regardless its ideology.
Then there was the music: with great cleverness, in a way not so different of the Socialist Party’s in the eighties promoting a certain Spanish pop modernity, the Catalan government and municipalities gave their support to good music bands in the nineties: Sopa de Cabra made rock rooted in the Stones; Umpah-pah were the most sophisticated, and they fused Van Morrison with reggae and Irish folk music; Sau made a spotless pop that versed almost exclusively on love, sex and low life. Judging from their lyrics, they were only vaguely political, albeit their concerts were attended by crowds of people bearing pro-independence flags. Convergència was not interested in modernity at all, but it was familiarized with it and knew how to use it in its cultural effort: to create a modern culture for a language they hope to become “normal”, to use their words; that is, hegemonic in their territory. What was going this to mean exactly was always left for the future.
Cosmopolitan and Pro-European
The progressive side of the deal did not challenge many of these aspects: after all, a significant part of its representatives came from the Catalan bourgeoisie as well, and it was their language, or one of their two languages, which surely they favoured for not being the Francoist one. They had a more cosmopolitan vocation. They founded and leaded institutions as the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona, the CIDOB —a foreign policy think tank— or MACBA, Barcelona’s museum of contemporary art. They were first-rate institutions: cosmopolitan, pro-European, with a clear ambition for modernity. They did not have the sanctimonious whiff that we frequently associated to whatever came from Convergència —Catholicism is never too away in Catalonia, though.
El Ciervo, the journal for Catholic progressive Spanish-speakers, was their most intellectualy sophisticated journal, although almost nobody read it. If my experience is any useful, for a xarnego college student, fairly leftist, in the middle nineties, this progressive strand of the cultural hegemony could not be any more exciting. Barcelona was cool, and we —those of us that soon after ended up working in the city’s vigorous publishing or media industry— felt we were cool too. We were European, we dressed in modern style and believed we were enjoying and enlightening ourselves as in Berlin or Amsterdam.
Tolerable Annoyances
Of course, while it was tolerable, it was annoying. But I do not know if any more annoying than the experience of living in any other democratic place ruled by people you do not like. It was not normal the scarce presence of dissidents in that hegemony, neither the scarcity of conservative or pro-constitution thinkers in the public debate, nor the growing similarities between Convergència and the PRI —with a Catalan Socialist Party (PSC) that settled for that by thinking that Barcelona would always be theirs. However, our vocation was rather to be intellectuals instead of politicians, after all. Our business —we believed— would be to be right, not to seduce majorities and wining the election. We knew nationalism was a bad idea, and it was enough for us, even while our seniors kept shouting —quite correctly— that the theatre was on fire. And we kept on dancing in the Sidecar to the music of all those indie bands that —we were sure, but we had not the faintest idea— did not play in Madrid, because in Madrid the public was not so modern as in Barcelona.
I do not know if today Catalonia is a different place than it used to be was when I was young, but I do not have any doubt that Barcelona is. The books are not less good, the newspapers are not less good, the music is not less good, but I have the impression that the most important thing —conversation— is indeed worse: more monothematic, bitterer, more revengeful. If I were asked about who have been responsible for this, I would say the nationalists who, in a time when the world was on danger of plunging into anti-liberal chaos and global ungovernability, they chose to deepen into both things instead of fighting them. In the past, it might seem that their goal was to overcome the supposed Spanish cultural backwardness, but now has become clear that it was only an effort to prove they were better. They had a window of opportunity to achieve what they had been dreaming of since for forty years, and they just wanted to take it. Probably it will go wrong for them, but who knows. And I can not imagine which coalition could be made up after that to make life, once again, only slightly less annoying and reasonably carefree. And to assume that we were not better, but more narcissist.
