BARCELONA: GLOBAL V CAPITAL?

In terms of the local elec­tions in Cat­alo­nia next May, dif­fer­ent pro­pos­als are being put for­ward. In the case of Cat­alo­nia, the mu­nic­i­pal vote in Barcelona is of par­tic­u­lar im­por­tance.

And Barcelona is not only now be­come the focus of at­ten­tion, but has been es­pe­cially so in the pre­vi­ous elec­tions. For ex­am­ple, in 2015, amid the ef­fer­ves­cence of the Cata­lan lib­er­a­tion process, Spain played its cards. Thus, a few months be­fore the polls, the deep state leaked to the news­pa­per El Mundo that the mayor Mr Xavier Trias, from a party that stood for in­de­pen­dence, had a bank ac­count in Switzer­land, hint­ing at a case of pos­si­ble cor­rup­tion. This in­for­ma­tion was shown to be com­pletely false. But this op­er­a­tion served to in­flu­ence Ms Ada Colau win­ning the mayor’s of­fice by a coun­cil­lor. De­spite her head­ing a rad­i­cal left­wing coali­tion, it was en­dorsed by the pro-Spain Podemos party, which suited the Span­ish state in its ef­forts to hin­der the Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence move­ment.

The 2019 elec­tions were also mem­o­rable, with the full re­pres­sion of the pro-in­de­pen­dence move­ment un­der­way, and with po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers and ex­iles. The Span­ish forces trusted the can­di­dacy ini­tially called “Barcelona cap­i­tal of Eu­rope” headed by Mr Manuel Valls, for­mer prime min­is­ter of France. De­spite an over-fi­nanced cam­paign, Mr Valls failed to cap­ture the mayor’s of­fice, ob­tain­ing just six coun­cil­lors out of 41. The love for Barcelona on be­half of Mr Valls and those who sup­ported him be­came clear when he left the Barcelona City Coun­cil two years be­fore the end of his man­date.

Among the pro­pos­als for Barcelona, the one that stands out is to turn it into a global city. In some as­pects, Barcelona is al­ready a global city: in 1992 it hosted the Olympic Games, since 2006 the Mo­bile World Con­gress has been held there among many other fairs and con­gresses, it has an im­por­tant port, and so on. If we were to look back over its long two-thou­sand-year his­tory, we would see that in the Mid­dle Ages Barcelona was the “global” city of the Mediter­ranean dur­ing the Cata­lan-Aragonese Con­fed­er­a­tion. But now it is said that the fu­ture be­longs to global cities.

Some­times cities are thought of as if the states in which they are lo­cated are not rel­e­vant. But this is not so. And it is even less so in the case of Barcelona, which has al­ways had the Span­ish state against it, since it was formed only a few cen­turies ago. In par­tic­u­lar, the data since 1980 in­di­cate that Barcelona has lost con­sid­er­able eco­nomic weight in re­la­tion to Madrid. This has been be­cause a hyper-cen­tral­ist Spain has favoured its cap­i­tal fi­nan­cially and with many in­vest­ments, much more than in the case of Barcelona. In­deed, its com­pet­i­tive­ness is un­der­mined when the nec­es­sary rail­way works are not car­ried out on the com­muter net­work and the Mediter­ranean Cor­ri­dor, and when the man­age­ment of the in­ter­na­tional air­port is atyp­i­cal and cen­tral­ist, among many other rea­sons.

Barcelona has im­por­tant as­sets and great po­ten­tial. How­ever, this po­ten­tial can only be de­vel­oped when it is, once again, the cap­i­tal of the Cata­lan Re­pub­lic. On Oc­to­ber 27, 2017, the Cata­lan Re­pub­lic was pro­claimed in Barcelona, validly ac­cord­ing to in­ter­na­tional law. It was the sixth in the mil­len­nial his­tory of Cat­alo­nia and the Span­ish re­pres­sion neu­tralised it. How­ever, Barcelona can only be re­ally global as the cap­i­tal of the Cata­lan na­tion, be­cause within Spain it would be con­demned to in­creas­ing de­cline. This is the re­al­ity with­out any false glob­al­ist il­lu­sions.