When the Independence Conflict Leads to New Rewritings of the History of the Catalonia-Spain Relationship

By Florent Frasque. 

It is a common feature of nationalist movements that they deploy history to support their claims so that historiography becomes a political battleground. Celebrating the glorious history of Catalonia is a long-standing strategy implemented by the Catalan nationalists. The National Day of Catalonia and the Catalan anthem both refer to historical events marked by a harsh conflict between the Catalan and Castilian authorities. Beyond the celebration of Catalonia, this harnessing of collective history has tended to magnify opposition with the host state, formerly the Crown of Castile and now Spain. Yet mainstream Catalan nationalism was not separatist and had ambitions to work within Spain.

In the last two decades, the constitutional debate has become a severe struggle between pro-independence nationalists and Spanish unionists. The historiographical arguments have polarised accordingly with a spate of books and other public interventions by local academics portraying Catalonia as a historically distinct and oppressed nation. Yet, while nationalists have adopted a shared narrative, unionists offer several different versions of the Spanish nation.

For my doctoral thesis, I conducted an inquiry into the stakeholders on both sides of the current independence conflict to ask pro-independence and unionist political actors about their respective conceptions of the relationship between Catalonia and Spain. This systematic procedure helps to identify the historical narrative each actor adopted and to show how each faction strives to rewrite history in order to defend and promote its own position. To do so, they assign roles of oppressor and oppressed to each stakeholder in the conflict. By designating culprits and victims, they are able to strengthen their discourses of justification.

Regardless of their political party, pro-independence representatives tend to summarize the Catalonia-Spain relationship as centuries of conflict, produced by Spaniards’ hate of Catalans and by continuous state repression against the Catalan people. This characterization enables them to establish independence as the only solution capable of ending a long era of denigration and discrimination.

            “They despise us. Why? I never understood. I believe that it has been going on for centuries and that’s all. We have stayed there.” (Pro-independence right-wing member of parliament)

            “I already knew the visceral anti-Catalanism, which is almost racism, I mean something that is almost similar to what it can exist against the Jews.” (Pro-independence right-wing member of parliament)

In addition to presenting themselves as victims of Spanish oppression, representatives of the Catalan pro-independence movement depict the Spanish authorities as cruel rulers and draw a straight line from the former monarchs of Castile to the current Presidents of government, that also connects with the dictator Franco. By dismissing the significance of the transformations of the political regime that have occurred over the last 400 years, they suggest that repression is a cultural trait of the Spanish authorities.

            “I sincerely believe that the Spaniards have not yet rid themselves of the Francoist political imagination surrounding Spanishness. Transposed here, I believe that it helps the Catalanness to still maintain anti-Francoist values. To me, this is what makes Catalanness more attractive”. (Pro-independence radical left-wing member of parliament)

            “History demonstrates that Spain has always been involved in a conflict with Catalonia and shows that we make them sick. We have always made them sick. They don’t want us to leave, but we make them sick. And when they got an absolute majority, or when it was a dictatorship and they therefore held all institutional power, throughout Spain’s history, regardless of who was in power, they implemented policies aimed at eradicating Catalanism. Catalanophobia is thus an integral part of the structural foundations of the state”. (Pro-independence left-wing member of parliament)

While the pro-independence representatives’ discourses are mostly unified, the historical narratives endorsed by unionists are inconsistent. Unsurprisingly, all the representatives of the unionist movement we met denied the martyr status of the Catalan people. For example, a unionist right-wing member of parliament expressed her frustration with “Catalan independentists [who] tend to present themselves as the small village of indomitable Gauls that still holds out against the invaders”.

Nevertheless, while the unionist representatives try to delegitimize the pro-independence historical narrative, they failed to promote an alternative discourse highlighting the experiences shared by Catalans and Spaniards throughout many periods of history. These times remain in the shadows, and only occasionally do some actors attempt to exploit them for unification purposes. Their national story is never played out in unison, because it reopens historiographical controversies which form the basis of contradictory conceptions of Spanishness. 

When left-wing unionists respond to the claim that Catalans were uniquely persecuted during the Francoist dictatorship, they emphasise the common suffering experienced by all Spaniards and Catalans. Yet it is difficult for the right-wing unionist parties, who have spent decades distancing themselves from their Francoist ancestry, to share in this narrative. Instead, they tend to uphold a historiography that presents the civil war as a fratricidal clash between two belligerents sharing the same level of duty. 

            “Francoism was not only harmful to Catalonia, but to all Spaniards. It was a policy against Spaniards, against Republicans, against all those who were not in favour of Francoism.” (Unionist left-wing member of parliament)

            “Not all Catalans were against Franco, nor were they all with him. Like the rest of Spaniards, some Catalans were on the National side and others on the Republican one. This is the reality and it cannot be falsified. Thus, here [in Catalonia], volunteers from the Tercio de Montserrat [some Carlists] fought alongside the Nationals against the Republicans because they considered the Republicans were burning churches, repressing priests, persecuting… Anyway, each for their own multiple reasons.” (Unionist radical right-wing member of parliament)

This right-wing discourse on civil war is part of a broader historiographical narrative that denies any distinction of Catalonia by asserting that there is only one nation, unified for more than a millennium, which is the Spanish one. Representatives of the political right are wont to cherry-pick historical data to defend this narrative. But they face firm opposition from left-wing representatives who denounce this discourse as fanciful, just like the Catalan pro-independence narrative is. 

            “Catalonia has never been a nation, not even in times of the Marca Hispánica [in the 9th century], never. Already in the year 1000 and even at the Council of Toledo [in the year 589], there was a meeting of bishops, including those from Solsona [a Catalan municipality] and other Catalan ones who joined because they felt they belonged to a greater nation, which did not yet have the form of a modern state but already felt like a nation.” (Unionist radical right-wing member of parliament)

            “Those who describe Catalonia as a thousand-year-old nation and those who dream that Spain was born at the battle of Covadonga [around the year 720] are both making a flawed reconstruction of the past, because the nation of that time did not exist.” (Unionist left-wing member of parliament)

To conclude, it is important to emphasise that political leaders are far from the only ones performing political uses of the past. In various contexts, such as street demonstrations or in football stadiums, popular reappropriations of the past fuel nationalist discourses. As Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani (2006, 108) state, “even where identity appeals to the history of the group and to its territorial and cultural roots, symbolic re-elaboration is always present”. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. 2006. Social Movements : An Introduction. Blackwell Publishing.