Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in Catalonia: the Case of the Esperanto Movement

Student ID: 1560509 Cosmopolitanism and nationalism in Catalonia: the case of the Esperanto movement Student ID: 1560509 INTRODUCTION 3 LITERATURE REVIEW 7 ESPERANTO AND CATALONIA 8 NATIONALISM(S) AND COSMOPOLITANISM(S) 11 CATALAN IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM 17 IDENTITY AND ESPERANTO 21 THE STUDY 24 METHODOLOGY 24 FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE LANGUAGE, KEA AND THE IDEALS OF ESPERANTO 30 CATALAN IDENTITY AND ESPERANTISM 38 NATIONALISM, COSMOPOLITANISM AND ESPERANTO 45 CONCLUSIONS 55 BIBLIOGRAPHY 59 2 Student ID: 1560509 Introduction This essay aims to explore the idea and the practice of cosmopolitanism within the Catalan Esperanto community and its interaction with the strong self- identification of Catalan Esperantists as ‘Catalans’ (Alòs i Font, 2010). More specifically, the study focuses on the members of the Catalan Association of Esperan- to ([eo]: Kataluna Esperanto-Asocio, hereinafter KEA) who reside in Barcelona, where the headquarters of the association are.1 The main research question is the following: How do the members of the Catalan Association of Esperanto balance their nationalistic sentiments towards Catalonia and the Catalan language with the core cosmopolitan ideology of the Esperanto movement they are part of? The question is interesting because the strong nationalism of Catalan Esperan- tists, apart from being in contrast with the traditional Esperanto ideology and culture (Zaft, 2003; Blanke, 2015), is not in line with what seems to be the reality of most Esperanto communities in Europe, as emerged from the available empirical studies on the subject (Rašič, 1996; Alòs i Font, 2010; Puškar, 2015). These studies show that European Esperantists have in general a weaker national identity than the average citizens of their respective countries. The traditional idea of Esperanto as a transnational tool to replace the ethnic identities of the peoples of the world and unite them across the linguistic and national borders (Dasgupta, 1987) seems to be absent in the minds of Catalan 1 Unless otherwise stated, the expression ‘Catalan Esperantists’ will be used in the text to refer to the members of the Catalan association of Esperanto. 3 Student ID: 1560509 Esperantists (Alòs i Font, 2010). They, on the contrary, see Esperanto as a useful tool to protect their linguistic and national identity (Kataluna Esperanto-Asocio, 2018b) and achieve a greater level of linguistic and cultural fairness among nations. Esperanto, unlike Catalan, is associated with a non-ethnic, non-territorial and (mostly) voluntarily speech community (Tonkin, 2015). The membership to this community is, with few exceptions, acquired during adulthood, which makes the native speakers of the language a very small fraction of the total. Taking into ac- count this general difference between the Catalan and the Esperanto speech communities is important to fully understand the distinctive identities tradition- ally associated with the two languages. This general difference still holds true despite the fact that Catalan identity in recent years has progressively separated itself from ethnicity and has been adopted by an increasing number of people with non-Catalan family backgrounds (Urla, 2013). As we will see later on in the essay, the Catalan language, at least for its Catalan native speakers,2 is one of the main vehicles of identity, its use being often tied with some sort of nationalistic sentiment (Bastardas i Boada, 2012). In a similar way, for many Esperantists Esperanto is also a source of identity (Edwards, 2010); unlike Catalan, however, the use of Esperanto by its speakers is tradition- ally linked with a strong cosmopolitan sentiment, as well as with a low sympathy for any form of nationalism (Gobbo, 2017). These two contrasting associations between linguistic identity and nationalism make the identity of Catalan Espe- rantists an interesting study subject. 2 The situation is different in other areas where Catalan is spoken, such as the Balearic Islands or the autonomous community of Valencia. 4 Student ID: 1560509 The quantitative surveys that have been carried out until now on Catalan Espe- rantists have shed some light on their opinions and beliefs, but they have not investigated the subjective reasons and the feelings behind those beliefs, nor the personal biographies that led to their formation. In this study, I employed an ethnographic approach to try and uncover that information. More specifically, I tried to understand how Catalan Esperantists construct and maintain their identity as Esperantists and how this identity interacts with their national and linguistic identity. Does one identity strengthen the other? Do both identities strengthen each other? Or is there instead conflict between them? Based on pre- vious empirical research on Catalan Esperantists’ beliefs, and especially the most recent survey on the subject by Alòs i Font (2010), the first two hypotheses seemed more likely to be true. However, recent political changes in Catalonia have undoubtedly had an impact on the national and linguistic identity of Catalan Esperantists, as they have on the general population (Carbonell, 2018), making the answer more complex. The study used two core research tools: 1) five open interviews with selected members of KEA and 2) participant observation during five of KEA’s weekly in- formal meetings. The meetings take place every Tuesday and involve on average six to fifteen people. The specific participants change with each meeting, but most of them attend at least one or two times a month. The essay is structured as follows. In the first section I review the literature on the topics of identity, cosmopolitanism and nationalism in relation to both Cata- lonia and the Esperanto movement and community, drawing on theoretical sources as well as empirical research. In the second section, after discussing the adopted methodology, I present the findings of the research. Finally, in the con- 5 Student ID: 1560509 clusions I summarise the outcomes of the research and discuss some ideas on how the study could be expanded in the future. 6 Student ID: 1560509 Literature review In this section I will review the available literature on the following core areas related to this research project: 1. Historical and sociological material on the traditional Esperanto movement and community (as opposed to the new wave of Esperantists who learn the language online and do not affiliate to any association). 2. Theoretical material on identity and cosmopolitanism. 3. Studies on Esperanto identity, Catalan identity and Catalan nationalism. Before starting, it is important to note that only about 4% of the academic research on the Esperanto language, movement and community, both theoretical and empirical, is available in English (Blanke, 2015). The majority of it (about 75%) is available in Esperanto, and a good portion of it only in Esperanto. It is also important to note that the empirical research available on the Esperanto community is unfortunately fragmentary, and almost exclusively quantitative (Tonkin, 2015). As for the non academic literature, there has been a recent re- surgence of publications about Esperanto, in part as a consequence of the suc- cess of the online course released on duolingo.com (about 2 million students as of October 2018). One of the most interesting publications from a research per- spective is probably ‘Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language’, by E. Schor (2016), which presents both a history of the language Es- peranto and an analysis of the current state of its speech community. An analysis of the current global speech community is also present in Tonkin (2015). 7 Student ID: 1560509 Esperanto and Catalonia It is impossible to proceed further in our disquisition without first answering an essential question: what is Esperanto, and what is its history in Catalonia? Esperanto is a planned language created by Polish ophthalmologist Ludwig Lejzer Zamenhof in the second half of the Nineteenth century, a time when planned languages were seen by many as a possible solution for communication in a world that was becoming more and more interconnected. Unlike most of the planned languages that preceded it (such as Volapük) and followed it (such as Lojban and Interlingue), Esperanto spread rapidly, first in Europe, later in Asia, America and Africa. So much so that only a few decades after its creation, Espe- ranto was proposed as the official language of the League of Nations. The pro- posal was approved by every member state but France, whose veto was the main reason why it was finally rejected (however, later on the League advised its members to include Esperanto in their national education systems; Zaft, 2003). In the 1930’, Esperanto’s expansion met its first considerable obstacle. Many authoritarian regimes started to see the language as a danger for their respective nationalistic projects, and they actively suppressed its use (Lins, 2016). The association of the language with the Jews (Zamenhof himself was Jewish) contrib- uted to set its destiny in Germany and in all the countries that fell under Germa- ny’s control before and during Second World War. In the same period, the teach- ing and use of Esperanto was also politically obstructed (if not made illegal) in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Japan, and a few years later in the Soviet Union. For Stalin it was the ideal of cosmopolitanism and world peace held by many Espe- rantists which in his eyes made the Esperanto movement a threat for patriotism 8 Student ID: 1560509 and even national security (Lins, 2016). In some countries, the persecution continued well into the seventies, and re- sulted in a significant reduction in the number of Esperanto speakers.3 Yet the Esperanto language and community survived, and in the second half of the Twentieth century the movement was slowly rebuilt. In the 21st century, Internet accelerated the process, providing Esperantists with new means of communication that linked together a speech community dispersed in more than one hun- dred countries (Ethnologue, 2018).

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