ASPIRATIONAL VACUUM

Not a few for­eign­ers won­der, what’s up with those Cata­lans? Claim­ing in­de­pen­dence in today’s West­ern democ­ra­cies seems noth­ing short of caprice; bar Scot­land, which ben­e­fits from some le­nience, maybe be­cause they play rugby against the Eng­lish, some­times suc­cess­fully, or per­haps be­cause of whisky. Never mind that leg­end says Irish monks were the first to dis­til the “water of life”, or that the smaller is­land pro­duces an equal or bet­ter sort of whiskey, spelt with an “e”. Ob­vi­ously, this col­umn does not deal with dis­till­ing… it’s about try­ing to elu­ci­date “why Cat­alo­nia?”, be­yond the sim­ple re­sponse “why not?”

The ques­tion can be seen from many lev­els, one being the “as­pi­ra­tional”, ac­cord­ing to this au­thor. Let’s take Italy and France; both cen­tralised states with a lin­gua franca that some­how goes undis­cussed, per­me­at­ing north to south, east to west. Yet this evo­lu­tion was nei­ther pain­less, nor com­pletely ac­ci­den­tal in na­ture.

In con­ti­nen­tal France, “re­gional” lan­guages (i.e. all those spo­ken, bar the langue d’oïl, which be­came today’s French), such as Bre­ton, Basque, Oc­c­i­tan, Cor­si­can, Flem­ish, or Cata­lan, have been largely mar­gin­alised dur­ing a large chunk of the re­pub­li­can years. Yet French was also “as­pi­ra­tional”: it al­lowed every­one, what­ever their ori­gin or so­cial class, to ben­e­fit from the sta­tus of “citoyen”, a mem­ber of a re­pub­lic that voted (in­clud­ing the king) for the “Décla­ra­tion des droits de l’homme et du citoyen” way back in 1789. Never mind the spi­ral of ter­ror that fol­lowed, chop­ping off heads with a very French rev­o­lu­tion­ary fer­vour, or Napoleon’s mes­sianic dreams to “civilise” Eu­rope.

Italy had its own path to a shared ethos. Tus­can was just one of the lin­gua vul­garis that ap­peared after Latin, the Roman em­pire’s own lin­gua franca. To an ex­tent due to the Duchy of Firenze’s clout, in trade and in­dus­try, al­ready in the Mid­dle Ages, as well as in cul­ture (Dante, Pe­trarca), Fiorentino, or Tus­can, “turned” into today’s Ital­ian. The Risorg­i­mento had an as­pi­ra­tional tone, too, of re­volt against for­eign rulers, while restor­ing the old pri­macy of Roma (even if Firenze was ini­tially taken as the uni­fied Italy’s cap­i­tal be­tween 1865 and 1870). Again, Italy’s path has had its ups and downs: a south­ern half in which the dif­fer­ent mafia clans re­tain rel­e­vant power, or the po­lit­i­cal car­i­ca­tures of the likes of Mus­solini and Berlus­coni, and pos­si­bly Mel­oni today. Nev­er­the­less, there is ro­bust iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the “tri­col­ore”, and “i val­ori re­pub­bli­cani”, through­out the penin­sula.

The reader might won­der what Madrid’s pos­i­tive ideals should be, be­yond sun, cerveza, and beaches (which are not in the cap­i­tal). Spain was sup­posed to be a model of de­mo­c­ra­tic tran­si­tion; no mat­ter the near thou­sands of deaths dur­ing it, or that it still has the du­bi­ous label as being sec­ond only to Cam­bo­dia in mass graves.

Its re­ac­tion to the peace­ful Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence move­ment (not a bit of lit­ter on the ground, is one of the mot­tos of Cat­alo­nia’s mass ral­lies of late) was a wake-up call to many: mass beat­ings by the po­lice merely for vot­ing, ex­tor­tion of sig­nif­i­cant fig­ures in the move­ment, prison and con­fis­ca­tory fines is­sued to many (they have not abated), cases of tor­ture and threats to de­tainees, etc. These gen­uine fea­tures of the state, its for­mer monarch es­cap­ing jus­tice, the lat­est one threat­en­ing and tak­ing sides in favour of in­sti­tu­tional vi­o­lence, would shame any truly de­mo­c­ra­tic West­ern par­lia­ment. This all sets Spain’s as­pi­ra­tions at a very low bar, un­for­tu­nately, and sets the will of most Cata­lans to fol­low a very dif­fer­ent path.