SPECIAL EXPORT

Franco once fa­mously said (in a meet­ing with for­eign jour­nal­ists to­wards the end of the Civil War) that ’Cat­alo­nia has been one of the fun­da­men­tal causes of our up­ris­ing’. A ’cause’ he would deal with by turn­ing its very ex­is­tence into a state se­cret, through the ex­e­cu­tion of its most vis­i­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tive (1940); the ban­ning of its na­tional flag well into the post-war pe­riod; and by mak­ing the spo­ken - let alone writ­ten - use of Cata­lan in­ad­vis­able out­side the home. In a nut­shell, Cat­alo­nia qua Cat­alo­nia was ren­dered in­vis­i­ble, whereas Cat­alo­nia qua a-Span­ish-re­gion-like-any-other was suc­cess­fully pro­moted. With the ad­vent of democ­racy, the cover-up of Cat­alo­nia con­tin­ued, it being made es­pe­cially in­con­spic­u­ous abroad (I still re­call an ad from the 1980s, placed in Eng­lish Sun­day sup­ple­ments by the Span­ish Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture to pro­mote Span­ish wines: on a map of Spain, each pro­duc­ing re­gion is cor­rectly named, Gali­cia, La Rioja, etc. but the dreaded C-word is nowhere to be found, the area that cor­re­sponds to Cat­alo­nia hav­ing been la­belled: ’North-East Spain’).

But the last seven years of mas­sive peace­ful pro-indy demon­stra­tions, the Oc­to­ber 1st ref­er­en­dum, the im­pris­on­ment of civic lead­ers and elected politi­cians and the exile of sev­eral oth­ers, have not just put Cat­alo­nia on the map, they’ve en­graved it there: never since its me­dieval apogee has it been so easy to see. Yet as knowl­edge of Cat­alo­nia spreads, so does a con­sid­er­able amount of in­ter­na­tional baf­fle­ment about one key ques­tion: given the se­ri­ous­ness of the con­flict, why weren’t there any on­go­ing ne­go­ti­a­tions be­tween MAD and BCN? The world, of course, still knew noth­ing of yet an­other well-kept se­cret: the Cata­lanopho­bia that has been suc­cess­fully fed to im­por­tant (but by no means all) sec­tors of the Span­ish pop­u­la­tion by var­i­ous Span­ish regimes and which now makes it po­lit­i­cal sui­cide for a state-wide party to sit at a table with a Cata­lan gov­ern­ment on equal terms. A Cata­lanopho­bia which has, sadly, led to many hate-filled spin-offs, such as the tweets fol­low­ing the 2015 Ger­man­wings tragedy, in which all 144 pas­sen­gers lost their lives shortly after tak­ing off from Barcelona (one of the mildest went: ’So what? They weren’t peo­ple, they were Cata­lans’). In short, anti-Cata­lan aver­sion, be it ex­treme or main­stream, has not been re­ported abroad. Or at least not until last month, when Ger­man judges threw out the charges of vi­o­lent re­bel­lion against Car­les Puigde­mont, the Cata­lan pres­i­dent-in-exile, and re­leased him from the Neumünster jail where he’d been placed in tem­po­rary cus­tody thanks to a Madrid-is­sued Eu­ro­pean Ar­rest War­rant. The of­fi­cial Span­ish re­sponse was not fully adult: a cross let­ter was sent to each and every Euro MP, the For­eign Min­is­ter grum­bled that the de­ci­sion was ’un­for­tu­nate’, etc. Not only that, but in cer­tain media out­lets a vis­ceral nas­ti­ness - com­pa­ra­ble in its dis­play of ha­tred to the Ger­man­wings tweets - was also in ev­i­dence: on es­Ra­dio (au­di­ence: 400,000) a well-known Span­ish jour­nal­ist urged that the 200,000 Ger­man res­i­dents on Ma­jorca be ’held hostage’ and that bombs should be placed in Mu­nich brew­eries. On top of which, the day after Puigde­mont was re­leased, the far-right (but fully legal) on­line news site Alerta Dig­i­tal headed its re­port on the re­cent truck at­tack in Mun­ster (3 dead, dozens in­jured) with the words: ’Karma ex­ists!’. For a brief in­stant, then, Ger­mans have had a per­sonal taste of what it means to be a pro-in­de­pen­dence Cata­lan, in a state and a so­ci­ety (or rather, part of it) whose loathing seems to know no bounds.