DOUBLE standards

This au­thor re­cently crossed the penin­sula west­wards to reach San­ti­ago de Com­postela, the charm­ing Rome-like vil­lage on the verge of the At­lantic Ocean. After the Cata­lan speak­ing re­gions (Va­len­cia, Balearic Is­lands and Cat­alo­nia), Gali­cia and the Basque Coun­try are so-called “na­cional­i­dades históricas” with their own work­ing lan­guages. Gali­cia is often taken as the bench­mark for the re­la­tion­ship be­tween a (his­tor­i­cal) com­mu­nity and Madrid. Last No­vem­ber, The Econ­o­mist pub­lished an ar­ti­cle with self-ex­plana­tory head­lines, “Us Gal­le­gos-Gali­cia shows how de­vo­lu­tion can work-An idio­syn­cratic re­gion that re­mains com­fort­able in Spain”.

Mag­a­zines are not meant to be aca­d­e­mic pa­pers, yet se­ri­ous ones should avoid mak­ing up a re­al­ity to jus­tify a fore­gone script. This is an ap­proach shared by most for­eign cor­re­spon­dents based in Madrid; i.e. blindly toe­ing the line that the cen­tral power dic­tates. We are told that the nor­mal­ity of Galego con­trasts with the “lan­guage wars in Cat­alo­nia”. The fact is that the 1998 law reg­u­lat­ing the of­fi­cial use of Cata­lan had huge con­sen­sus, only op­posed by the suc­ces­sors of Franco’s regime, the Par­tido Pop­u­lar (PP). Most re­cently, only the hyper (Span­ish) na­tion­al­ist Ciu­dadanos, with its bull­dozer strat­egy against Cata­lan in­sti­tu­tions, has worked hard (with lit­tle suc­cess) to blow apart the gen­eral con­sen­sus on the lan­guage issue.

In fact, any a vis­i­tor to Gali­cia can straight­away grasp the ex­tent to which Galego has been dri­ven away from Por­tuguese, the lan­guage it shares roots with, while bring­ing it closer to Span­ish. Galego-speak­ers them­selves will agree on that mat­ter; some even re­gret­ting the cul­tural loss it en­tails, con­sid­er­ing that the “lu­so­fo­nia” (the Por­tuguese speak­ing world) in­cludes 300 mil­lion speak­ers through­out the five con­ti­nents, from Macau to mighty Brazil. In­deed, sim­i­lar pol­i­tics of “folk­lori­sa­tion” were em­ployed by the cor­rupt arm of the PP in Va­len­cia, con­tin­u­ing the dic­ta­tor­ship’s pol­i­tics of friendly and colour­ful re­gion­alisms. To take just a glimpse, today, after a Supreme Court rul­ing, of­fi­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tions be­tween in­sti­tu­tions from Cat­alo­nia and Va­len­cia can­not be con­ducted in their com­mon Cata­lan lan­guage!

The in­bound jour­ney via the north­ern shore of the penin­sula al­lowed for su­perb sight­see­ing, es­pe­cially in As­turias, as well as in Cantabria and in the Basque Coun­try. Euskera, the dis­tinc­tive lan­guage there, is also spo­ken in Eu­skaler­ria, which in­cludes the three provinces of Guipúzcoa, Alava and Viz­caya, plus Navarra and the French Basque Coun­try. Be­sides their unique non-Ro­mance lan­guage, the Basque Coun­try and Navarra share a spe­cial re­la­tion­ship with Madrid; so much so that they are often com­pared to “con­fed­er­ate states”. Ac­cord­ingly, the Basque Coun­try “concierto” is an at-par agree­ment be­tween the three provinces to­gether with Madrid. Under it, they keep the keys of the trea­sury, just need­ing to pay a “cupo” (quota) to the king­dom’s cof­fers, cor­re­spond­ing to their share of pop­u­la­tion.

The Cata­lan speak­ing re­gions have a long col­lec­tion of re­but­tals in their aim to blow the dust off fis­cal mis­treat­ment from Madrid, dat­ing back to the oc­cu­pa­tion by the cen­tral­ist forces in the War for Suc­ces­sion of 1701-1714. Re­cently a group of Cata­lan econ­o­mists have reck­oned that a “concierto”-like agree­ment would en­tail an ad­di­tion of more than nine bil­lion euros to Cat­alo­nia. Once more, this is an­other of the self-im­posed taboos by most for­eign media, and one which thwarts many from un­der­stand­ing events, in­clud­ing the al­ready 10-year strug­gle for Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence. It is re­gret­table this de­priv­ing the pub­lic of a nec­es­sary trans­par­ent de­bate on such key po­lit­i­cal top­ics, for when a pre­sumed democ­racy needs to con­ceal and lie, it be­comes noth­ing more than an au­toc­racy in the mak­ing.