What Catalans Want “Could Catalonia Become Europe’S Next State?”
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Sample What Catalans Want “Could Catalonia become Europe’s next State?” Interviews by Toni Strubell Photographs by Lluís Brunet Cwwatwa.caltoalnoniaaprePssr.ceomss What Catalans Want, by Toni Strubell with Photographs by Lluís Brunet http://www.WhatCatalansWant.cat Published by Catalonia Press http://www.cataloniapress.com Ashfield, Massachusetts, USA Copyright for text © 2011 by Toni Strubell Copyright for photographs © 2011 by Lluís Brunet Notice of Rights All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, record- ing, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information on getting permission for reprints and excerpts, contact liz@ elizabethcastro.com. Notice of Liability The information in this book is distributed on an “As Is” basis without war- ranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of the book, the author/publisher will have no liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book or by the computer software and hardware products described in it. Library of Congress Control Number: 2011930814 ISBN Print - Color edition: 978-1-61150-009-7 Print - Black and White edition: 978-1-61150-011-0 EPUB: 978-1-61150-012-7 Kindle/Mobi: 978-1-61150-013-4 Contents Prologue: Colm Tóibín 5 Note from the Author 13 Culture 131 Jennifer Berengueras 132 Country 17 Bernat Joan 138 Jordi Portabella 144 Carles Boix 18 Oleguer Presas 150 Salvador Cardús 24 Joan Solà 156 Eliseu Climent 30 Xavier Vinyals 162 Joan Laporta 36 Alfons López Tena 42 José Montilla 48 Media 169 Jordi Pujol 54 Montserrat Armengou 170 Joan Ramon Resina 60 Josep Gifreu 176 Pedro Morón de la Fuente 182 Economy 67 Vicent Partal 188 Vicent Sanchis 194 Germà Bel 68 Joaquim Boixareu 74 Josep Mateu 80 Foreign insights 201 Xavier Sala-i-Martin 86 Helena Buffery 202 Elisenda Paluzie 92 Susan DiGiacomo 208 Dr. Henry Ettinghausen 214 Memory 99 Alex Rietman 220 Matthew Tree 226 Dr. Moisès Broggi 100 Josep Cruanyes 106 Hilari Raguer 112 Notes 233 Empar Salvador 118 Eugeni Casanova and Jordi Llisterri 124 About 242 Prologue by Colm Tóibín We sit up straight and feel excited in that moment in the movie If later, in a moment around the campfire, one of the red- when the figure appears behind the boulder on the hill and nar- skins were to sing a song about love in the language which they rows his eyes as the wagons and horses below make their journey all share, there will be silence. They will think at first of love, westward through new and unmapped territory. We know now and then maybe of lost love. And then maybe they will begin to there will be action, there will be arrows and bareback-riding contemplate other things they have lost, or might soon come to and a lot of shooting. The white man, moving slowly with his lose, which the notes of the song seem to suggest more precisely language and his almost innocent need to make fences, will have than any list they could make. Some sense of themselves, who reason and technology on his side. The redskin will have an abo- they are, where they belong. This sense, the emotion involved, riginal relationship with the landscape; he will have a language will be more pressing and powerful than maps, laws, fences, bor- that the microphone can barely pick up. Once the territory has ders. For the white man on his way to victory, this idea of having been mapped by the white man, the redskin language will live a precise place to which you belong will be taken for granted. on only in the names of some places; its grammar will not grace It will not need to be felt because it is not being threatened. the marketplace; since it has no reason to spread, then it will It will seem natural, almost God-given. For others, however, it slowly fade. will mutate into terms with many meanings which will come to And so it begins, the colonial drama. As we watch this scene, haunt the second half of the nineteenth and much of the twenti- some of us, with amusement, perhaps even distance and irony, eth century in Europe and elsewhere, terms such as nationalism, we are allowed to feel that this news from elsewhere has been terms such as identity. dramatized to entertain us; at other times, however, it feels like Take this one, for example. It was Tallinn in Estonia in 1994 something whose contours and emotions we fully recognize. and the Russians had finally gone. I was having supper with an It is easy, then, to remember moments from the places where Estonian family who were relieved at what had happened and two languages have collided, or when one folded uneasily over full of hope for their country. They wanted now to connect with another; it is easy to conjure up those gnarled landscapes of pos- Scandinavia; they wanted to join the European Union. They saw session and dispossession in all their rich and disturbed imagery. Russia as an old dark place which was not progressive. They 8 — Colm Tóibín saw the Russian language as something that had been foisted This idea of a nation being created or imagined from deep on them; they didn’t want to hear it again. They wanted to hear roots in the past and fragile ones in the present by a group of their own language, and maybe Swedish and Finnish but, more writers and artists was something which anyone Irish is acutely than anything, English. The fact that there were just one and conscious of. The songs written by the members of Young Ire- a half million of them seemed only to add to their optimism, land in the years around 1848 inspired a new national feeling: increase their happiness at the thought that they might finally be left in peace. They felt pride in themselves and who they were ‘When boyhood’s fire was in my blood and what they might become. I read of ancient freemen The history of their country has echoes with the history Of Greece and Rome who bravely stood of Catalonia. The publication of the Estonian national epic, Three hundred men and three men; Kalevipoeg, in 1862, and the organization of the first national And then I prayed I yet might see song contest seven years later, managed to re-awaken a national Our fetters rent in twain, spirit, a sense of a shared past moving back into the mists of And Ireland long a province be time. By the 1890s this cultural force had become a political A nation once again!’ force; the movement for autonomy from Russia grew from this newly-awakened national cultural identity as much as from any Such songs would foment a national spirit which would set of economic arguments or needs. help, eventually, to lead to the independence of the south of Ire- The only difficult moment during the supper that even- land in 1922 and its becoming a republic in 1948. But in these ing in Tallinn came when my hosts described the large Russian small countries of ours which have known that complex set of population of Estonia who had suddenly found themselves in a emotions about identity and loss of identity nothing is simple. country whose official language they did not speak. ‘They still In Ireland, in the very years when a national spirit was being cre- believe they are in Russia’, my hosts told me. Soon, they said, ated, the English language was moving slowly into a dominant these Russians would have to learn Estonian or go home, even position. No one has ever fully explained why Ireland did not though many of them had actually been born in Estonia. I could actually become bilingual, why the Irish language began actually feel my hosts’ idealism, their understanding of this as an impera- to disappear. Just as no one can fully explain to me the antipathy tive, something which must happen in a small fragile country if which people feel towards Catalonia in some of the places— its entire identity was not to be lost. But I was uneasy. The idea Mallorca, say, or Valencia—where a language that sounds very of inclusion, the understanding that diversity and impurity have like Catalan is spoken. ‘It seems history is to blame’, as the Eng- rights too, and that tolerance of others who do not fully share a lishman says in James Joyce’s Ulysses. nation’s identity was also an imperative, would take time to seep into the body politic of Estonia. * * * * * * * * * * * Thus we are not quite sure whether to laugh or cry in the exchange about language between Mrs. Rooney and Mr. Rooney in Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall. When he tells her that she sounds like she is speaking a dead language—she is What Catalans Want — 9 speaking English—Mrs Rooney says: ‘It will be dead in time, They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by just like our own dear Gaelic, there is that to be said.’ And just wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonized by. as the languages of the native Americans survive in the names We’re ruled by effete assholes. It’s a shite state of affairs to be of rivers and places, so too in Ireland it is as though two lan- in, Tommy, and all the fresh air in the world won’t make any guages fought and one moved underground to become a set of fucking difference!’ I thought that this was desperately funny signposts.