THE RISE OF EUROPE'S LITTLE NATIONS

BY DAVID T. GIES

t their outset at least, the 1992 lieved an advertisement, designed and paid Summer Olympics in for by the Generalitat, the governing body of appeared to be organized by Catalonia, that appeared in several interna- people who had nationalism, not tional magazines. This provocative piece of sports, foremost in mind. Consider the curious self-promotion located Barcelona in Catalonia, fact that the three official languages of the "a country in Spain," the copy read, "wit11 its games were English, French, and Catalan. own culture, language, and identity." In case Why Catalan and not Spanish? Because Olym- readers missed the point, the advertisement pic Committee rules allow for the use of Eng- depicted the "country" of Catalonia in sharply lish, French, and the language of the country colored relief on an otherwise borderless map hosting the games. More to the point, the or- of Europe. ganizers had no doubt that Catalan was the The advertisement was only part of a language of their country. campaign by the Catalan organizers of the But Catalonia a count;y? Yes, if one be- Olympic Games to inform the world of their

ICH COUNTRY WOULD YOU PLACE THIS POINT?

70 WQ WINTER 1994 independence from the Spanish state-the cartoonists. In the first block of the cartoon, the very state that had contributed nearly 70 per- question, "In which country would you place cent of the funding for the games. To be sure, this point," was reproduced as in the original. the Spanish language was heard throughout In the second block, the point, Barcelona, is the games, but the Catalan national anthem revealed to be a livid boil on the backside of played before the Spanish anthem as the Spain's president, Felipe Gonzhlez. Less imagi- games got under way each day. native responses simply wrote the ad off as an Even the timing of the advertisement was imbecilic mistake, a betrayal, the latest idiotic provocative, appearing as it did just two days effort by the Generalitat to fan the flames of an before King Juan Carlos's scheduled mid-July old and often bitter controversy. visit to the Olympic Village. , the president of the Generalitat, did little to t the center of the controversy is smooth matters when he proclaimed, "We are the autonomous region of Cata- a small country, but we are moving forward." lonia, which lies in the northeast And when tourists finally arrived in Barcelona corner of the Iberian Peninsula. for the games, they were greeted with signs Occupying some 32,000 square kilometers, it that read, "Catalonia: A Country in Europe." is roughly the size of Belgium, and consists of Madrid reacted with official indigna- the provinces of Barcelona, Tarragona, L6rida tion-and a smattering of unofficial humor. ( in Catalan), and Gerona (). It Cambia 16, Spain's leading newsweekly maga- looks, in writer Ian Gibson's words, somewhat zine, published a parody of the Generalitat like a fan opening upward toward France, advertisements by two well-known political with its base perched southward near

NATIONALISM 71 Valencia. Its six million inhabitants constitute tance itself from the central government about 16 percent of Spain's population, and should come as no surprise to those who many of them carry in their heads a rich and know the record of Madrid's past dealings complicated history of their region. with the region. Felipe V, the first Bourbon king in Spain (reigned 170046), was so in- nvaded by the Arabs in A.D. 717 and re- censed at Catalonia's support of the Haps- covered for Christianity in A.D. 801 with burgs during the War of the Spanish Succes- the help of Charlemagne, the area be- sion that he organized a campaign against the came first the County of Barcelona and ancient kingdom that included the elimination eventuallyI an independent kingdom. In the of the Generalitat, the suppression of the Cata- 11tl1 century, an expansionist Barcelona con- lan language, and the closing of the University quered territories south and west of the city. of Barcelona in 1714. But this and subsequent In the 12th century, allied through marriage to attacks over the centuries only stiffened the the daughter of the King of Aragon, the Count backbone of Catalonians and fed enthusiasm of Barcelona (Ramon Berenguer IV) became for separatism. Catalonia has always had in- the King of Aragon and Catalonia. Further dividuals eager to rally support for indepen- conquests in Valencia, Mallorca, Sardinia, and dence, the most articulate of these in the 20th Sicily strengthened the power of the kingdom century being E. Prat de la Riba, who pub- and extended the influence of the Catalan lan- lished his La Nacionalitat Catalana in 1917, re- guage. By the 13th century, the local powers energizing the debate over regional rights. The (mostly the aristocratic elite) had created a fall of the Bourbon monarchy in 1931 and the parliament whose main function was to dic- proclamation of the Second Republic, whose tate laws, defend local rights and privileges, Parliament approved the Statutes of Au- and check the powers of the king. This parlia- tonomy for the region in 1932, seemed to bring ment eventually gave way to what is now the full autonomy closer to reality. local government, called the Generalitat. When the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon fused ut Francisco Franco, for reasons shortly after the marriage of Ferdinand and similar to those acted upon by Felipe Isabella, in 1469, and later, when their daughter V (the Catalans sided with the Re- Juana married the son of the Holy Roman publicans in the Spanish Civil War), Emperor Maximilian, Catalonia came increas- squashed those hopes of autonomy in 1939. As ingly under the will of the Hapsburg rulers. Robert Hughes observes in his hugely enter- While the central government, soon to be perma- taining Barcelona, the civil war had been more nently located in Madrid, outwardly respected than a class struggle. Franco saw clearly that the area's local rights, it refused to grant it per- the Catalans were also animated by strong mission, for example, to trade with the New feelings of local nationalism and that these World. The cession of the French side of the were bound up with the preservation and use Catalan area in 1659 in the so-called Treaty of of their language. The repression was extreme, the Pyrenees and the loss of central-govern- if uneven. A Barcelona student in his early ment support following the War of the Span- thirties recently related to me an incident from ish Succession reduced Catalonia to the status the mid-1960s, one that had decisively marked of a mere province in the larger nation-state. his attitude toward the Francoist state. One That Catalonia today should wish to dis- day he and his grandfather were having a chat

David T. Gies, Co~~zi~zoiziuealthProfessor of Spanish and chairman of the Departinent of Spanish, Italian, and Portugueseat the Uiziuersityof Virginia,has written or edited six booksand numerousarticles on Spanish literature and c~~lt~~re.His latest book, The Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Spain, iuill be published by Cambridge University Press this war. Copyiglzt @ 1994 by David T. Gies.

72 WQ WINTER 1994 on the street in downtown Barcelona. A po- axis of Barcelona's economic and cultural life liceman happened to overhear them and turns to Paris rather than to Madrid. "Well, promptly slapped the young man's grandfa- Barcelona is Europe," announces one of the ther with a stiff fine. The crime was "deviant characters in Manuel Vhzquez Montalbkn's activityu-speaking Catalan, a language that 1977 novel, The Manager's Solitude, and that Franco had banished from all public dis- statement reflects a broad-based popular sen- course, from the public schools, and from the timent. Many of Europe's major philosophical media for years following the Nationalist - and political movements entered the Iberian tory in the civil war. Everyone was supposed Peninsula via Barcelona in the late 19th and to speak in Christian, that is, in Spanish. Thou- early 20th centuries (republicanism, anar- sands of books were burned, and even the chism, federalism, communism). And Cata- Catalan national dance, the sardana, was for- lonians point with pride to their great artists, mally banned (although the fiercely indepen- including Antonio Gaudi, Salvador Dali, Joan dent Catalans danced it frequently and defi- Mir6, and Pau Casals. Of course, such pride antly in spite of the ban). Inconsistently, by the can sometimes get the better of a people. With mid-1960s, Catalan was tolerated in the uni- little real justice, many residents of Barcelona versities and in private secondary schools. claim to be culturally superior to their coun- However unevenly applied, though, repres- terparts in Madrid, whom they view as dis- sion inevitably backfires, and today the re- tant, slightly less sophisticated relatives. claiming of Catalan rights and privileges forms the background of a game of political uch feelings are not discouraged by cat-and-mouseplayed between the politicians Jordi Pujol, the undisputed leader of in Catalonia and those in Madrid. Catalan regionalism today. "Region- The idea that Spain is synonymous with alism is not something which is Castile is one that the Franco regime repeated anachronistic or romantic or pure folklore," he ad nauseam during the first decades of the declared to the press in January 1993. "It is a dictatorship, but it was never as deeply em- modern movement and a movement of bedded in Iberian history as Francoist histori- progress." ans would have had people believe. In fact, it Pujol has been the president of the Gener- was developed a mere century ago by a gen- alitat since 1980, and his popularity still runs eration of writers struggling to find an iden- high, even though his political organization, tity in a world that was changing more rapidly Convergencia i Uni6 (CiU), has faced compe- than they might have wished. The Spanish tition from other groups championing inde- Empire hi America finally crumbled by 1898, pendence. (Terra Lliure, a terrorist group ac- and intellectuals began to propagate the belief tive in the 1970s and '80s, disbanded in 1991, that the essence of Spain, its soul, was to be but Esquerra Republicana, the Partit Socialista found in the dour, self-negating, stoical Castil- Catalan, and the Partit Socialista Unificat de ian farmer. Even philosopher Jose Ortega y Catalunya still push hard for independence.) Gasset (1883-1955) thought that Castile had To underscore Catalonia's serni-autonomous made Spain what it was in his day. status, Pujol's Generalitat has set up quasi-dip- Residents of Catalonia, where nationalist lomatic offices in many large cities outside sentiment was on the rise, had a decidedly Spain, and Pujol himself often travels in the differentview. Their resistance to the idea that manner of a head of state, giving lavish din- Castile somehow meant Spain ran deep, and ners to which the Spanish ambassador in the it encouraged them to turn their eyes away host country is pointedly not invited. When from the center. Many residents of Barcelona Pujol speaks of the federal government, he considered themselves to be more European more frequently refers to it as the Spanish state than Spanish-and many still do. To them, the rather than as Spain to underscore his convic-

NATIONALISM 73 tion that Spain is merely an administrative a penny. Despite such frugality, per capita structure, a political entity, an invention. consumption is higher in Catalonia than in any other region of Spain. Some people contend, ut finally, these are minor provoca- not entirely unjustifiably, that the industrial tions, skirmishes in a war of words, area around Barcelona, which produces 25 because neither Pujol nor his party percent of the peninsula's total industrial em- really believes in Catalonia's full in- ployment (in textiles, electronics, plastics, au- dependence from Spain. Convergencia i Uni6 tomotive products, and chemicals), has more is a minority party that controls only the in common wit11 Germany's Rulv Valley than Generalitat, not the Barcelona n~ayor'soffice. it does with any other part of Spain. In fact, it does not even speak for the majority Spain's loose federal arrangement, estab- of Socialist-leaningresidents of Catalonia, who lished in the post-Franco Constitution of 1978, vote for Pujol on local matters but for the rep- gives Catalonia and other autonomous regions resentatives of the Spanish Socialist Workers' significant latitude in making laws and spend- Party in national elections. "Catalanism does ing funds for culture, infrastructure, and gov- not necessarily mean separatism," Jordi Sole- ernment services. The central government Tura, a Catalan law professor who rose to collects all tax monies and redistributes them become Spain's minister of culture in 1990, based not on who gave and how much, but wrote in 1970. Pujol agrees in principle but according to other formulas that are more geo- plays what writer David Rosenthal once called graphic than economic and more in keeping "a perpetual game of chicken wit11 Madrid." with the pl~ilosophyof the main national Money and language are the two keys to party, the Socialists. The result is that Catalan politics. Catalonia is the strongest eco- Catalonians feel that they receive less than nomic region on the Iberian Peninsula. While their fair share and that their region subsidizes it occupies just six percent of the landmass, it poorer areas (particularly Andalusia). Pujol's produces 19 percent of the gross national harping on this issue creates tension not only product and ships 23 percent of Spain's ex- between his Generalitat and the central gov- ports. Twenty-three percent of Spanish bank- ernment of Felipe Gonztilez but between the ing is controlled by Catalan interests, and Generalitat and the mayor's office of nearly one-quarter of foreign investments in Barcelona, which is held by a member of the Spain are made in Catalonia. Pujol himself Catalan Socialist Party, Pasqual Margall. rose to prominence by founding the Banca Catalana in the 1960s and enjoyed enormous anguage is at least as much an issue success wit11 it until the mid-1980s, when huge as the wallet, for Catalan, unlike losses and suggestions of financial misman- Basque, has a long and distin- agement forced it into restructuring. The guished literary history completely Banco de , Catalonia's oldest bank separate from Castilian language and litera- (founded in 1891),is one of Spain's more prof- ture. In fact, nothing was more irritating to itable financial institutions, and La Caixa sav- Catalans than the Francoists' insistence that ings bank is the second largest in Europe. Per Catalan was a mere dialect of Castilian. The capita income in Catalonia is 20 percent lugher first book printed on the Iberian Peninsula, than the national average. Tirant lo Blanc, a chivalric romance by Joanot Catalans save more than their Spanish Martorell, was published in Catalan in counterparts (not a difficult achievement, Valencia in 1490, but well before that great given that most Spaniards save nothing at all), thinkers and writers from Catalonia had ex- which gives them a reputation as money-con- pressed themselves eloquently in their native scious and tight. According to one local joke, language. In the early 13th century, the kings wire was invented by two Catalans pulling on of Catalonia were ordering the production of

74 WQ WINTER 1994 chronicles in Catalan. Ramon Llull (1235- education and also because Spanish is where 1316),known as Doctor Illuminat throughout the market is. (Some 600 million people speak the medieval world, used Catalan brilliantly in Spanish throughout the world; six million his encyclopedic works of science, pldosophy, speak Catalan.) religion, and literature. His Bla~zqz~er~zahas been called one of the first modern European he language issue still provokes novels. Other writers, including the pre-Re- heated debate. Although the Law of naissance humanist Bernat Metge (1343-14131, Linguistic Normalization of 1983 and the poets Anselrn Turmeda (1352-1430), stipulates that Catalan is the domi- Jordi de Sant Jordi (1400-24), and Ausiis Marc11 nantT language of instruction in the region, it (1397-1459) created a tradition of contemplative also provides for Spanish to be used in the lyric in the Catalan language which, however, classroom. In the autumn of 1993, however, seemed to fall into disfavor as Castilian lan- the department of education of the Generalitat guage and politics grew to dominate the Ibe- decreed that Catalan would be used exclu- rian Peninsula. All were fully conscious of sively in all public scl~oolsfor children ages themselves as Catalans, not Spaniards. three through eight. This touched off howls of Not until the mid-19th century, during protest from a small group of parents who what has become known as the Renaixenqa of insisted on their right to have their children Catalan letters, did the use of Catalan, as a educated in Spanish. The parents' association means of literary expression come back into adopted the unfortunate tactic of comparing favor. Bonaventura Caries Aribau (1798-1862) Pujol's "repression" of Spanish to Franco's initiated a new wave of nationalist sentiment attempted extermination of Catalan. This com- with his tendentious but stirring poem "Oda parison in turn roused El Pais to denounce the a la Pitria" (1859), "To the Fatherland," and ultra-Right for ignoring the more than 10 years poet and essayist Jacint Verdaguer i Santal6 of civil peace and social consensus built up in (1845-1902) led the rebirth of Catalan litera- the country. ture, behind which pulsated the recognition of The Generalitat's move underscores the Catalonia as a separate state. Other poets, reality that Catalan has not yet reached equal philologists, dramatists, and novelists fol- status in Spain. The recently published Dictio- lowed the lead of Verdagneri i Santal6 and nary of Spanish and Spanish-American Literature created an important flowering of Catalan let- (1993) never mentions Catalan language or lit- ters that has lasted to this day. Among the erature, and last summer's opening of most widely read Catalan authors today are J. Madrid's first Catalan bookshop and cultural V. Foix (1893-1987), Joan Salvat-Papasseit center-called Blanquerna, after Llull's (1894-19241, Tomas Garces (1902- ), Merce novel-was cause for widespread comment in Rodoreda (1909-83), and Salvador Espriu the Spanish-languagenewspapers. The book- (1913-85). shop bills itself as a bridge of dialogue between However, wlde Catalonia dominates the the two cultures, underscoring just how differ- publishing industry in both Spanish and Cat- ent they are considered to be both by propo- alan, only 5,806 of the 51,000 titles edited on the nents of Castilian and by defenders of Catalan. peninsula last year were published in Catalan. (Anyoneinterested in seeing how these differ- Still, it must be recognized that many of the ences play out in fiction should read Juan peninsula's best-selling novelists (such as Mars's riotous recent novel, El amante bililzpd Eduardo Mendoza, Manuel Vfizquez Montal- In attendance at the ribbon-cutting ceremony ban, Juan Goytisolo, Juan Marse, and Esther was a who's who of the cultural and political Tusquets), although born and raised in Cata- elite, including Pujol himself, Pere Gimferrer lonia, write in Spanish rather than in Catalan (who began his career in poetry writing in because the former was the language of their Spanish, but who now writes exclusively in

NATIONALISM 75 Catalan), the mayor of Madrid, the Catalan trists and separatists alike have bought into cultural attache, a representative of the Autono- the ideal of consensus and cooperation that mous Community of Madrid, and the president was outlined by the king in his very first post- of the Spanish Royal Academy, who pro- Franco speech in 1975 and subsequently writ- claimed that Blanquerna would "help us get ten into law by the Constitution of 1978. to know Catalan cultural reality better." Juan Tomas de Salas, editor of Cambia 16, Just why this creative tension between the probably reflected the entire country's mood center and the periphery seems to be working when he noted that at the Olympic Games in contemporary Spain is difficult to establish. "Catalan and Castilian fused together harmo- While Pujol's views on Catalonia as a separate niously as a symbol of the fact that both "country" are immensely popular in his re- peoples have lived together for over 500 years. gion, they are, when all is said and done, mere The great mayor of Barcelona, Pasqual Mar- chin music. He does not want real indepen- gall, symbolized better than anyone the Cata- dence for Catalonia. Nor does he attempt to lan who is as Spanish as he is Catalan, or who maneuver the political structure toward that is Spanish precisely because he is Catalan." He goal. In fact, he has recently agreed to collabo- challenged his country's new generation to rate informally with Felipe Gonzalez's minor- ensure that such harmony continue and that ity government in Madrid, guaranteeing not Spain not fragment itself into what he called only stability in the central government but a "bicephalic, cuatrilh~gualMediterranean arid also the continuation of the Socialist lock on Atlantic" state. power. (GonzAlez and the Socialists have ruled Spain since 1982.) Because of his long pain seems to have learned how to and intelligent leadershipno Spanish politi- balance the obligations of a modern cian has ever served in elective office longer nation-state with the requirements than Pujol-Catalonia has settled into a re- of regional- rights.- The federal system laxed stand-off with the federal government. of autonomous regions is working nicely in It has been able to do so because many of post-Franco, post-Constitution Spain, al- its immediate objectives-the teaching of Cat- though each year brings new tensions to test alan language and history in the schools, the the resolve of frequently disparate interest use of the language in print, on TV, and in of- groups. But now at least those tensions can be ficial government business (the Generalitat expressed in Catalan as well as in Spanish. drafts its documents and makes requests in Amusingly, the Olympic Games as conceived Catalan, and the central government answers by Pujol-that is, as a glorification of Catalan in Spanish)-were achieved without the autonomy-became a worldwide celebration armed conflicts that have marked dealings of Spain, with Spain winning an. unexpected between Madrid and some extreme separat- number of gold medals. By the time the clos- ist movements within Spain, notably that of ing ceremony was broadcast to millions of the Basques. Observers credit this levelhead- viewers around the world, more Spanish flags edness to what the Catalans call seizy, that is, were in evidence than Catalan flags, and the a sense of balance, perspective, and common real hero turned out to be none other than wisdom which they claim has always ruled King Juan Carlos, king not of that country, their lives. For all intents and purposes, cen- Catalonia, but of all of Spain.

76 WQ WINTER 1994