02 May 2012 Altre cop davant la Morta?
In October 1898, while Spain was in the midst of its colonial disaster, the Catalan poet Joan Maragall wrote the following in a letter to Joaquim Freixas: “For Catalonia, the question is to become European, cutting more or less slowly the rope which ties it to The Dead One. Living is the first duty. Those who do not want to follow, do not have to follow. For Spain has reached the point of: “it’s every man for himself”. Despite the many huge differences, it is inevitable to draw parallels between that far-away moment and our troubled current situation. Today’s Spain is not a country which has just been defeated at a colonial war but a State which is under threat of being bailed out by the European Union and which is ruled by a government with little credibility, weighed down by internal confusion and lack of political leadership and bravery. The Dead One described by Maragall was obviously the rotten and decadent Spain of the Restoration. Is Spain the Dead One again?
Firstly, it must be said that Spain has entered the 21st century with almost all its “homework” done. It put an end to its international isolation, it modernised its civil service, it buried militarism, it saw religious conflict disappear and it created a society of middle classes. The major pending structural problem of Spain is nowadays the sharing of political power in accordance with the existence of different nations within one same State. Of all the factors which gave rise to the Civil War, the conflict of nations and identities is the only one which still persists and it is obvious that the country’s organisation into autonomous regions did not solve it. Strictly speaking, is it possible to talk about Spain nowadays as the Dead One? It might feel like an exaggeration, especially when used by Catalan nationalists, if one takes into account that, as Professor of History Vicente Cacho Viu once put it, Catalan nationalism is one of Spain’s main elements for dynamisation and openness. Catalan interventionism – whose last chapter was written by the tandem Jordi Pujol-Pasqual Maragall – did work hard, but did not enjoy the wide recognition it expected. The limitations of the current autonomy illustrate this bitter paradox.
Nevertheless, listening to most of the Spanish elites and reading the press from Madrid it is clear that the underlying mentality regarding Catalonia has not changed much since 1898. Nowadays, the Dead One is the mental Spain, a collective awareness which stays loyal to the prejudices and beliefs from one hundred years ago. In the centre of this Spanish collective awareness is the notion of anomaly applied to the Catalan nationality. Anomaly implies malfunction: Catalans are faulty Spaniards; such strange people that they speak a different language when they could speak “the common language”. For starters: how many Spaniards accept that Catalonia is a nation? The Spanish Constitution of 1978 talks about nationalities. Extremely serious is the fact that the political culture of democracy has not modified in the slightest the centralism and unitarianism of the Spanish society. For this reason, any claim from Catalonia is automatically perceived as unbearable blackmail.
The loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines had a very serious impact on the relations between Barcelona and Madrid. The Catalan elites, which sympathised with Cánovas’ system and with his protectionism, started to see the light after the ill-fated end of the imperial dream. Before that, the Catalan bourgeoisie had wrapped itself in the Spanish flag to fight against the tariff autonomy granted to Cuba by Sagasta’s government. The Catalanist press, which favoured the freedom of the Cuban people, criticised the Catalan industrialists of caring only about their businesses. “La pela és la pela”: business was -and still is- business.
The Catalan politician Enric Prat de la Riba – who has gone down in history as a conservative man – wrote some harsh but clear-thinking articles criticising the short-sightedness of the ruling classes, which refused to show any interest in the autonomy of Catalonia and accepted being governed by incompetent and corrupt politicians. They were clinging numbly to the Dead One. The man who would become president of the Commonwealth of Catalonia, saw the 1898 disaster as “the beginning of the punishment which the exaggerated industrialism of our people and their contempt for all interests which are not strictly material have come to deserve.” These words are vividly current and, probably, many today would consider Prat de la Riba to be naive and radical. But he was eventually proved right and he is the one who did the most to convince the bourgeoisie that the only way to face the 20th century with dignity was Catalanism.
The clash between the Catalan bourgeoisie and the agonising politics of Madrid intensified and not even the reformist promises of General Polavieja were able to contain the trend of change. As Francesc Cabana explains, Villaverde (the Finance Minister of Francisco Silvela’s government) rejected Catalonia’s claims of an economic agreement such as the one in the Basque Country and Navarra while increasing the fiscal pressure in order to pay for the war debt. This led to businesses closing down in Catalonia in order to stop paying taxes, a protest led by Dr Bartomeu Robert, Mayor of Barcelona. Does this ring any bells?
The Dead One back in Maragall’s days was not completely dead. Although badly wounded and humiliated by the United States and the Cubans, it still had some strength left to deny Catalonia of what some sensible and well-respected men were demanding without any separatist intentions. In today’s Dead One, closely monitored and humiliated by Germany and Brussels’ implacable bureaucracy and with even less sovereignty than one hundred years ago, Villaverde’s heir (the loquacious Montoro) insists that the Catalan government fulfils its duties which the central government cynically breaches the agreements previously reached with the Catalan people. What shall we do? What advice would the young Prat de la Riba give?