Nations, Emotions, Identities in a Late-Modern World
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Nations, Emotions, Identities in a Late-Modern World: Reflections on the Catalonian Quest for Independence Ana Marta González[1] “A fatal vote is cast everyday in the ineffable secret of hearts that decide if a nation can really continue to go on... A nation is ultimately a huge community of individuals and groups that rely on each other. This relying on one’s neighbor does not necessarily imply having sympathy for him”. (José Ortega y Gasset, La España invertebrada, 1921) “Catalans’ competent administrative capacity was subjugated by a false conception of the State considered as a foreign phenomenon, which entailed, in some circles, accepting narrowly defined pragmatism and, in others, developing a kind of mysticism around direct action. And this dualism is one of the main reasons for the political and social sub-versions present in Catalonia... We mobilize en masse, in a social chain reaction. At that moment, we start to get angry collectively. All the selfishness that makes us surly and sullen infiltrates our love for the noblest ideals. We draw strength from weakness and make ourselves admired all over the world through the strength of our collective mobilization. And so we continue forward, irresistible, euphoric, and capable of landing on the Moon”. (Jaume Vicens i Vives, Noticia de Cataluña, 1954) 1. Independence in the contemporary context Until recently, the most appropriate context for speaking about nation-states was a class on nineteenth-century thought and history, or on the decolonization process. In the context of late modernity, marked by sharp individualization processes and the advance of neoliberal orthodoxy, the use of terms such as nation, state or nation-state, with which modern subjects used to think and project our reality and political aspirations, had been gradually stripped of their reference to problematic collective subjects, coalesced by virtue of race, history, language and culture (Requejo 2005, 110). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, it seemed that the era of the nation-state was coming to an end, replaced by higher-level political structures, such as the European Union, which was gradually absorbing sovereign prerogatives from their member states; these, on the other hand, were giving way to federal structures underneath (Maíz 2003), in principle better equipped to manage local needs. Certainly, the Yugoslav Wars at the end of the last century served as a wake-up call for the persistence of national sentiment beyond decades-long communist structures. Nevertheless, the globalization of markets, the development of international corporations that operate transnationally, and growing mobility, made our societies more mixed and plural; all this seemed to lessen the centrality of the modern nation-state, requiring an update of liberal thought in order to accommodate the reality of a burgeoning cultural pluralism.[2] Yet, partly as a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis, and with greater intensity since the 2015 migration crisis – this movement has reversed, and states seem to claim back greater control on many issues. We see this in Europe, where consensus on economic and migratory policies breaks down at times, as well as on a global level, with the United States withdrawing from international pacts and organizations. Nationalist sentiment – America first, Brexit, Italy first, … – has returned and taken to the streets, channeling an ambiguous popular response in which discontent over political management of the economic crisis is mixed with fear that has grown out of threatened cultural identities. Pressured from within by popular demands that in various ways break with the former, liberal consensus, states are less willing to enter into transnational deals that might effectively address problems whose roots are usually global, but whose negative consequences are irremediably experienced locally. The idea that the best foreign policy is domestic policy thrives. From this perspective, appeals to “national identity” and controversies surrounding national symbols (Moreno Luzon & Nuñez Seixas 2017) can be explained as more-or-less stalled popular reactions in the face of consequences of globalization that are experienced as negative and substantiated in ongoing economic and migratory crises. In times of uncertainty, human beings seek assurances in the most unlikely of places. Of course, it would be appropriate to ask whether national identity, insofar as it involves raising borders where it might be necessary - 1 - to build bridges, is what a global, culturally diverse and changing world needs. But that question goes beyond the confines of this particular contribution. The more limited, but no less complex task entrusted to me involves examining whether the desire for independence from Spain that a considerable part of the Catalan population has expressed can be understood simply as another case of nationalist upsurge in the global context described above, or if it responds to more complex, specific causes. It is a real challenge to talk about current realities on which events and people make a different mark every day. Here I have tried to distance myself from that immediacy, with the aim of achieving a relatively balanced view. I do not consider it my task to speak about recent events, such as the October 2017 Referendum, or the symbolic – for many frustrating – unilateral declaration of independence, which attracted the interest of international public opinion.[3] Concerning these facts,[4] as well as their legal consequences, political controversy continues. My interest is to understand how we got in this situation and the underlying reasons for some of the claims that could be the subject of a reasonable political dialogue, but which, since the beginning of the process, seem to have lost importance, stuck in an emotional whirlwind whose end point we still cannot make out. In any case, the desire for independence that approximately half of the Catalan population manifests is not necessarily based on nationalist positioning. Certainly, the term “nationalism”, insofar as it suggests identification with a certain culture and politics, is by definition divisive.[5] But, as we will shortly see, that is not the whole reality of the Catalan independence movement, in which different visions of Catalonia as a nation coexist. The word “nation” is not employed here in its old and medieval sense (Suárez 2016, 15-16), but rather in the sense that it has acquired in the modern age, when it came to replace absolute monarchs as subjects of sovereignty – which, despite a division of powers, was still understood as indivisible. It is precisely in this framework where “national sentiment” came to play a socially unifying function, analogous to religion’s role in modern states with the principle “cuius regio eius religio”. Throughout the nineteenth century, already in full romantic swing, “national sentiment” and its characteristic symbols (Thiesse, 2017, 12) came to be considered an expression of the historically differentiated identity of communities that, for various reasons, had not “acquired” their own political personality, which is why they were still in the process of fulfilling their “historical destiny”. This thought promoted the construction of a collective subject based on the confluence of political reason and sentiment. Although the role of the latter in the configuration of modern political spaces varied depending on whether it was a “state-led” or “state-seeking nation”, (Tilly 1994, 133) the nineteenth century became for everyone the century of national histories in search of a national essence. More or less shared stories, built by subjects who wanted to inhabit a world that suited them, flourished. However, it is not easy to specify the geographic and temporal scope of “national sentiment”. As Henry Kamen (2014, 199) writes, “the problem of trying to define a specific set of feelings (identity) when speaking of a ‘nation’ is that said feelings are by no means exclusive, especially when people have feelings rooted in very different places”. To paraphrase Kant, we could say that sentiment without reason is blind; in particular, a sentiment cannot even be called “national” if it is devoid of political reason. However, in the order of foundation, the relationship between sentiment and political reason can be articulated differently. Namely, when liberal principles prevail, the work of political reason precedes the appeal to sentiment; when sentiment prevails, it indicates a preexisting identity, configured over the course of a history that, assumed in the present by a certain community, is conceived of as legitimizing a constituent process in the political sphere. Although contemporary processes such as the construction of the European Union, or the political- administrative decentralization of different states, allow us to qualify and question both the indivisibility of sovereignty and the cultural homogeneity of nations, we are currently witnessing a new rewriting of both uses of the term “nation”. In some cases, national sentiment that ideally converges with the state as an already constituted political-administrative structure has reemerged; in other cases, differentiated outbreaks of national sentiment that are not necessarily compatible with the former have emerged within already-constituted nation- states. It is a fact that Catalan society is currently divided over this issue, whose evolution and outcome also affects the whole of Spanish society. Catalans who feel “they have