A CITY OF TWO FACES

One Bar­ney Jop­son posted an ar­ti­cle called “How Barcelona lost its way” in the Fi­nan­cial Times last month. Now I should clar­ify a thing or two be­fore pro­ceed­ing: Bar­ney Jop­son is not my nom de plume, I was as sur­prised as any­one to know there was an­other Bar­ney in Barcelona. But then after read­ing the ar­ti­cle, I re­alised that Mr Jop­son is in fact based in Madrid, as most for­eign cor­re­spon­dents who write about Barcelona, and Cat­alo­nia, are. That is not to say that Mr Jop­son’s ar­ti­cle was not based on local knowl­edge; as you would ex­pect from an FT jour­nal­ist, his sources were many and var­ied, as well as, I should say, as un­bi­ased as you can prob­a­bly get. So kudos to him.

The other point I should make is that the Seat CEO Wayne Grif­fiths men­tioned at var­i­ous points through­out the ar­ti­cle is no re­la­tion, al­though cu­ri­ously, and I doubt Mr Grif­fiths re­mem­bers this, our paths did cross at Audi in the late 1980s when I was doing an in­tern­ship and he was just start­ing out on the jour­ney that would take him to be­come head of Seat in Spain. As two of the only Eng­lish­men in In­gol­stadt – where Audi’s Bavar­ian head­quar­ters are lo­cated - at the time, we did share a beer and a youth­ful con­ver­sa­tion or two, though again, I doubt he re­calls that some 30 plus years later.

Wist­ful rem­i­nisc­ing aside, I men­tion the ar­ti­cle here be­cause it is well worth a read, whichever side of the po­lit­i­cal di­vide you are on. It clearly out­lines the ef­fects on Barcelona that busi­ness lead­ers, whether local, Span­ish or in­ter­na­tional such as Mr Grif­fiths, be­lieve to be a re­sult of the po­lit­i­cal wran­glings Cat­alo­nia has been sub­ject to in re­cent years. Per­haps one of the main take­aways for me as a res­i­dent was the quote from for­mer mayor Xavier Trias, that “there are two Barcelonas. For­eign tourists who come for the week­end ex­pe­ri­ence one of them: ‘They visit, they’re de­lighted and they leave.’ The other is the city of its res­i­dents, who tell him it is a ‘dis­as­ter’.”

There are also plenty of opin­ions on cur­rent mayor Ada Colau, in­clud­ing the fol­low­ing: “Try­ing to pin­point the cause of the city’s ills, busi­ness peo­ple iden­tify sev­eral things they say the sep­a­ratist move­ment has in com­mon with Colau, who is not pro-in­de­pen­dence: a pop­ulist mis­di­ag­no­sis of the causes of eco­nomic dis­con­tent; a lack of co-op­er­a­tion across po­lit­i­cal di­vides; and an in­tro­ver­sion that re­sults in lead­ers turn­ing their backs on the world.”

Reg­u­lar read­ers will have spot­ted a word that I have men­tioned often in this col­umn over the years and one that im­me­di­ately res­onated with me upon read­ing the ar­ti­cle: in­tro­ver­sion. It is a crit­i­cism one hears again and again in re­la­tion to my adopted coun­try. And al­though it is one that I have con­stantly and pa­tiently at­tempted to ex­plain to other for­eign­ers, guiris, ex-pats, call them what you will, as being a re­sult of a peo­ple whose cul­ture, lan­guage and his­tory have long been sub­jected to re­pres­sion, the sad fact of the mat­ter is that until that in­tro­ver­sion is trans­formed into a will­ing­ness to more openly allow peo­ple from other cul­tures into their inner cir­cles, then the crit­i­cism, and with it the con­flict and di­min­ish­ing in­vest­ment, is likely to con­tinue.