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 Barcelona 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. Jordi Pujol, 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. (Lleida in Catalan), and Gerona (Girona). 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 vic- 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.