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rfmcdonaldRecently, there was an interesting article in the New York Times on Catalonia,"Catalonian Political Rivals Agree on Seeking Autonomy":
By DALE FUCHS
Published: November 16, 2003
MADRID, Nov. 15--Madrid, Spain's official capital, has government ministries and the headquarters of multinational corporations. Fashion-conscious Barcelona, a short train ride from the French border, calls itself the country's most "European" city and cultural heart. It is a longstanding rivalry.
But the regional elections on Sunday in Catalonia--Barcelona is the region's capital--have pushed the competition, usually confined to good-natured ribbing, to a new level. The two top candidates trying to help their respective parties win control of the regional Parliament have both campaigned on promises to break away from the political and financial orbit of the central government.
"Madrid has the monopoly on everything," said Artur Mas of Catalonia's governing right-wing nationalist party. Mr. Mas, 47, was selected to represent the party by the current parliamentary leader, Jordi Pujol, who is stepping down after 23 years.
"Catalonia has a European culture, but few understand that in Madrid, and after 25 years they should," said Catalonia's Socialist Party candidate and its leader, Pasqual Maragall. A former mayor of Barcelona, Mr. Maragall, 62, is known for transforming the city's poor, seaside neighborhoods into a tourist mecca for the 1992 Olympic Games.
Both Mr. Mas and Mr. Maragall have spent the last two weeks stumping door-to-door and complaining about how the central government has cramped Catalonia's style. They contend that the wealthy, industrialized Catalonia region should have a stronger voice in the European Union and exercise more power to attract foreign investment.
"You know why multinationals choose to settle in Madrid instead of here?" Mr. Maragall told foreign reporters at the start of the campaign. "It's not the language. It's the fact that there are no direct flights from New York to Barcelona!" The need for people in Barcelona to change planes in Madrid for flights to North and South America symbolizes the region's frustration, he said.
Mr. Maragall has trumpeted a plan to turn Spain into "a federalist state like Belgium, Switzerland or Germany." Under such a scheme, Catalonia would seek agreements for cultural and economic cooperation with the Valencia region and southern France. This, he said, would improve transportation and commercial
links between the regions, while avoiding Madrid's bureaucracy.
Mr. Mas's electoral platform reaches further. He wants to turn the region of 6.3 million inhabitants into an autonomous "nation" within Spain. Under the plan, Catalonia would gain control of immigration policy and be able to select immigrants in their countries of origin. Foreigners would receive job training and be required to study the Catalán language to enter. Catalonia would also police its borders and establish its own foreign ministry.
Catalonia's nationalist administration has already set up so-called embassies in Poland and Morocco to recruit and train potential immigrants, and it plans to open a third in Colombia. Should the plan move forward, Mr. Mas says, those embassies would also be used to promote trade.
The central government has challenged the establishment of those embassies in the Constitutional Court, which recently ordered them to suspend their activities until the case was decided.
Catalonia already has a certain measure of autonomy. When Mr. Pujol took office, the region was slowly recovering from Franco's dictatorship, when the Catalán language, though widely spoken in homes, was banned from public life.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, the teaching of Catalán in schools has become so widespread that, earlier this year, Prime Minister José María Aznar proposed educational requirements for the study of Castilian Spanish.
As the campaign winds down, recent polls show the Socialist Party candidate with a slim lead. Mr. Mas reacted by reminding voters that his rival's party was based in Madrid, not Barcelona. "Catalonia could be come a satellite," he warned.
Catalonia is, politically, an autonomous region of Spain. It is unique among all of these autonomous regions in that it is a nation, with a distinct history as a social and political entity stretching back to the 9th century, as the core of the late medieval Kingdom of Aragon and as historically one of the wealthiest regions of Spain. (The Basque Country of Spain was assembled from the disunited Basque Provinces after the transition from Franco's dictatorship.)
The Catalan language is very widely spoken in Europe; the Paisos catalans, centered on the modern autonomous region of Catalonia but including adjacent regions in Spain (Aragon, Balearic Islands, and Valencia regions), France (Roussillon, or North Catalonia) and even Italy (the Sardinian communtiy of Alghero), are home to almost 11 million people. The Catalan language is unique among the languages of stateless ethnolinguistic groups in Europe in that it is doing fairly well; Catalan might be fading, giving way to French or Spanish or Italian on the fringes of the Paisos catalans, but in the Autonomous Region of Catalonia the language seems to be doing quite well, with near-universal fluency in the language. The language might not be the home language of the majority of Catalonians, and national legislation requires that all Catalonians know Spanish; on the other hand, the past efforts of the Catalonian government (the Generalitat) to revive the Catalan language seem to have had some success, and Catalonia's current efforts to make Catalan the main language of immigrants.
As the Economist article "Europe's rebellious regions" explains, Catalonia under its post-Franco nationalist government has been strongly European, in the belief that the European Union could serve to encourage the regionalization of Europe generally and the federalization of Spain.
Why the ambitious regions of Europe have lost faith in Brussels
AS JORDI PUJOL, the gnome-like but powerful boss of Catalonia's government, paces his office in his medieval palace in central Barcelona, he does not look like a man on the brink of retirement. But on November 16th, after 23 years in office, Mr Pujol will leave the stage. He has every reason to feel satisfied. He survived imprisonment by Franco in the 1960s, to see fascism fall in Spain and self-government return to Catalonia. The Catalan language has revived and Barcelona has become one of the most fashionable cities in Europe. Yet Mr Pujol does not seem relaxed. He fears that the Spanish government is trying to roll back some of the hard-won powers of regions such as Catalonia and the Basque country. But, he says, the Catalans (and Basques) want more, not less, autonomy. The next few years, concludes Mr Pujol, will be "a critical period".
What happens in Catalonia is of more than local interest. Europe's nation-states are being challenged from above, by the growing powers of the supranational European Union, but also from below, by increasingly assertive regions. Some theorists talk of a new layering of power in Europe. Although national governments continue to dominate such things as the organisation of welfare states, on bigger issues like trade, the environment or monetary policy it is the EU that nowadays decides. But in such matters as education, cultural identity or economic regeneration it is Europe's regions that are coming to the fore. This symmetrical squeeze on the nation-state sounds appealingly neat in theory. But, as the controversies in Catalonia show, the reality can be a lot messier. Across Europe, governments and regions still squabble over how power should be distributed.
Thus in Germany, the only big west European country with a long-established and reasonably settled federal system, the regions (Länder) complain that their powers are being simultaneously eroded by Brussels and Berlin. In France, the government is committed to decentralisation, but its devolution plan for Corsica was messily rejected in a recent referendum. In Italy, the Northern League, which wants more political and economic power for the north of the country, is threatening to bring down the coalition government of Silvio Berlusconi unless regions are given more clout. In Britain, Tony Blair's government set up a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly in its first term in office; it is now, somewhat reluctantly, adding elected assemblies for some of the regions of England. In Belgium, Dutch-speaking Flanders continues to demand ever-greater autonomy from the rest of the country.
Where does the EU fit into this back-and-forth struggle? Many European regionalists have long seen it as a natural ally against the centralism of nation-states. In Scotland, nationalists have seized on the idea of Scotland's European vocation as a way of counteracting the idea that independence might lead to isolation or poverty. Visitors to the office of John Swinney, head of the Scottish Nationalist Party, find two flags prominently displayed, Scotland's cross of St Andrew and the yellow stars of the European Union. Elsewhere, however, regionalists are beginning to have their doubts about Brussels.
Thus Mr Pujol, a passionate "pro-European" for all his political life, now believes that "the EU is no longer encouraging regionalism". Efforts by Catalonia, Scotland, Flanders and the German Länder to have a bigger role for regions written into the draft of the new EU constitution were rebuffed by the convention on the future of Europe, partly thanks to pressure from Spain and France. The Committee of Regions, based in Brussels and headed by the suitably named Sir Albert Bore from Birmingham, England, is a byword for tedium and toothlessness. Its weakness owes something to its unbalanced nature: genuine powers, such as Mr Pujol's
Catalonia or Edmund Stoiber's Bavaria, sit alongside feeble local councils from Britain and Sweden.
The enemy in Brussels
Some regional enthusiasts now see the European Commission as an enemy. The Länder complain loudly that EU competition rules are eliminating their traditional practice of dishing out aid to local industries. In Italy, Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League, who once saw the EU as an ally in his struggle against the Italian state, now dismisses it as a plaything of big government, multinational corporations and paedophiles. The League, whose attempt to preserve the cultural purity of northern Italy (Padania) has entailed virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric, fears that the EU is trying to impose political values that may lead to a direct clash with the aims of the party.
The European institutions in Brussels have reasons of their own to be wary of regionalism. On a theoretical level, Eurocrats may be attracted by the idea of a layering of levels of political power (with the EU naturally at the apex). But the commission dare not overtly encourage regionalist ambitions, for fear of antagonising powerful member governments. And, as one official points out, "it's already a nightmare trying to secure agreement between 15 member states, and it's going to get worse after enlargement to 25. It will be totally impossible if we have to deal with more powerful regional governments as well."
The expansion of the EU is undoubtedly contributing to the feeling of rebelliousness in the European regions. Some new member countries, such as Malta and the three Baltic states, are both smaller and poorer than such regions as Catalonia or Flanders. Mr Pujol admits that it has been a "psychological shock" to see these midgets take their place at the EU's top table, while Catalonia must content itself with being represented by Spain. He wants Catalan to become an official working language of the EU, pointing out that it is more widely spoken than several others. But Mr Pujol still stops short of demanding that Catalonia take its place in the EU as an independent country. Whether his successors will be as moderate is an open question.
This has changed. This probably shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, for the regions of the current fifteen member-states of the European Union are distinct. The Länder of Germany and Austria fall in an entirely different category from the counties of England and the provinces of Sweden, and these are in turn different from the autonomous community of Spain and the regions of France. (The new member-states of the EU circa 2004 will be rather centralized.) Catalonia is distinct from all of these regions; in all of the rest of the European Union, it is probably most similar to Scotland. Catalonia has no parallels in post-Communist Europe, but in the 1980s its situation was most similar to that of the republics of the Socialist and Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, particularly Slovenia and Croatia.
Catalonia, in short, is rather more than a simple region, being in fact a nation in the process of self-constitution. Only time will tell whether Catalonians will decide to take this process to what might once have seemed its inevitable conclusion in independence.
By DALE FUCHS
Published: November 16, 2003
MADRID, Nov. 15--Madrid, Spain's official capital, has government ministries and the headquarters of multinational corporations. Fashion-conscious Barcelona, a short train ride from the French border, calls itself the country's most "European" city and cultural heart. It is a longstanding rivalry.
But the regional elections on Sunday in Catalonia--Barcelona is the region's capital--have pushed the competition, usually confined to good-natured ribbing, to a new level. The two top candidates trying to help their respective parties win control of the regional Parliament have both campaigned on promises to break away from the political and financial orbit of the central government.
"Madrid has the monopoly on everything," said Artur Mas of Catalonia's governing right-wing nationalist party. Mr. Mas, 47, was selected to represent the party by the current parliamentary leader, Jordi Pujol, who is stepping down after 23 years.
"Catalonia has a European culture, but few understand that in Madrid, and after 25 years they should," said Catalonia's Socialist Party candidate and its leader, Pasqual Maragall. A former mayor of Barcelona, Mr. Maragall, 62, is known for transforming the city's poor, seaside neighborhoods into a tourist mecca for the 1992 Olympic Games.
Both Mr. Mas and Mr. Maragall have spent the last two weeks stumping door-to-door and complaining about how the central government has cramped Catalonia's style. They contend that the wealthy, industrialized Catalonia region should have a stronger voice in the European Union and exercise more power to attract foreign investment.
"You know why multinationals choose to settle in Madrid instead of here?" Mr. Maragall told foreign reporters at the start of the campaign. "It's not the language. It's the fact that there are no direct flights from New York to Barcelona!" The need for people in Barcelona to change planes in Madrid for flights to North and South America symbolizes the region's frustration, he said.
Mr. Maragall has trumpeted a plan to turn Spain into "a federalist state like Belgium, Switzerland or Germany." Under such a scheme, Catalonia would seek agreements for cultural and economic cooperation with the Valencia region and southern France. This, he said, would improve transportation and commercial
links between the regions, while avoiding Madrid's bureaucracy.
Mr. Mas's electoral platform reaches further. He wants to turn the region of 6.3 million inhabitants into an autonomous "nation" within Spain. Under the plan, Catalonia would gain control of immigration policy and be able to select immigrants in their countries of origin. Foreigners would receive job training and be required to study the Catalán language to enter. Catalonia would also police its borders and establish its own foreign ministry.
Catalonia's nationalist administration has already set up so-called embassies in Poland and Morocco to recruit and train potential immigrants, and it plans to open a third in Colombia. Should the plan move forward, Mr. Mas says, those embassies would also be used to promote trade.
The central government has challenged the establishment of those embassies in the Constitutional Court, which recently ordered them to suspend their activities until the case was decided.
Catalonia already has a certain measure of autonomy. When Mr. Pujol took office, the region was slowly recovering from Franco's dictatorship, when the Catalán language, though widely spoken in homes, was banned from public life.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, the teaching of Catalán in schools has become so widespread that, earlier this year, Prime Minister José María Aznar proposed educational requirements for the study of Castilian Spanish.
As the campaign winds down, recent polls show the Socialist Party candidate with a slim lead. Mr. Mas reacted by reminding voters that his rival's party was based in Madrid, not Barcelona. "Catalonia could be come a satellite," he warned.
Catalonia is, politically, an autonomous region of Spain. It is unique among all of these autonomous regions in that it is a nation, with a distinct history as a social and political entity stretching back to the 9th century, as the core of the late medieval Kingdom of Aragon and as historically one of the wealthiest regions of Spain. (The Basque Country of Spain was assembled from the disunited Basque Provinces after the transition from Franco's dictatorship.)
The Catalan language is very widely spoken in Europe; the Paisos catalans, centered on the modern autonomous region of Catalonia but including adjacent regions in Spain (Aragon, Balearic Islands, and Valencia regions), France (Roussillon, or North Catalonia) and even Italy (the Sardinian communtiy of Alghero), are home to almost 11 million people. The Catalan language is unique among the languages of stateless ethnolinguistic groups in Europe in that it is doing fairly well; Catalan might be fading, giving way to French or Spanish or Italian on the fringes of the Paisos catalans, but in the Autonomous Region of Catalonia the language seems to be doing quite well, with near-universal fluency in the language. The language might not be the home language of the majority of Catalonians, and national legislation requires that all Catalonians know Spanish; on the other hand, the past efforts of the Catalonian government (the Generalitat) to revive the Catalan language seem to have had some success, and Catalonia's current efforts to make Catalan the main language of immigrants.
As the Economist article "Europe's rebellious regions" explains, Catalonia under its post-Franco nationalist government has been strongly European, in the belief that the European Union could serve to encourage the regionalization of Europe generally and the federalization of Spain.
Why the ambitious regions of Europe have lost faith in Brussels
AS JORDI PUJOL, the gnome-like but powerful boss of Catalonia's government, paces his office in his medieval palace in central Barcelona, he does not look like a man on the brink of retirement. But on November 16th, after 23 years in office, Mr Pujol will leave the stage. He has every reason to feel satisfied. He survived imprisonment by Franco in the 1960s, to see fascism fall in Spain and self-government return to Catalonia. The Catalan language has revived and Barcelona has become one of the most fashionable cities in Europe. Yet Mr Pujol does not seem relaxed. He fears that the Spanish government is trying to roll back some of the hard-won powers of regions such as Catalonia and the Basque country. But, he says, the Catalans (and Basques) want more, not less, autonomy. The next few years, concludes Mr Pujol, will be "a critical period".
What happens in Catalonia is of more than local interest. Europe's nation-states are being challenged from above, by the growing powers of the supranational European Union, but also from below, by increasingly assertive regions. Some theorists talk of a new layering of power in Europe. Although national governments continue to dominate such things as the organisation of welfare states, on bigger issues like trade, the environment or monetary policy it is the EU that nowadays decides. But in such matters as education, cultural identity or economic regeneration it is Europe's regions that are coming to the fore. This symmetrical squeeze on the nation-state sounds appealingly neat in theory. But, as the controversies in Catalonia show, the reality can be a lot messier. Across Europe, governments and regions still squabble over how power should be distributed.
Thus in Germany, the only big west European country with a long-established and reasonably settled federal system, the regions (Länder) complain that their powers are being simultaneously eroded by Brussels and Berlin. In France, the government is committed to decentralisation, but its devolution plan for Corsica was messily rejected in a recent referendum. In Italy, the Northern League, which wants more political and economic power for the north of the country, is threatening to bring down the coalition government of Silvio Berlusconi unless regions are given more clout. In Britain, Tony Blair's government set up a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly in its first term in office; it is now, somewhat reluctantly, adding elected assemblies for some of the regions of England. In Belgium, Dutch-speaking Flanders continues to demand ever-greater autonomy from the rest of the country.
Where does the EU fit into this back-and-forth struggle? Many European regionalists have long seen it as a natural ally against the centralism of nation-states. In Scotland, nationalists have seized on the idea of Scotland's European vocation as a way of counteracting the idea that independence might lead to isolation or poverty. Visitors to the office of John Swinney, head of the Scottish Nationalist Party, find two flags prominently displayed, Scotland's cross of St Andrew and the yellow stars of the European Union. Elsewhere, however, regionalists are beginning to have their doubts about Brussels.
Thus Mr Pujol, a passionate "pro-European" for all his political life, now believes that "the EU is no longer encouraging regionalism". Efforts by Catalonia, Scotland, Flanders and the German Länder to have a bigger role for regions written into the draft of the new EU constitution were rebuffed by the convention on the future of Europe, partly thanks to pressure from Spain and France. The Committee of Regions, based in Brussels and headed by the suitably named Sir Albert Bore from Birmingham, England, is a byword for tedium and toothlessness. Its weakness owes something to its unbalanced nature: genuine powers, such as Mr Pujol's
Catalonia or Edmund Stoiber's Bavaria, sit alongside feeble local councils from Britain and Sweden.
The enemy in Brussels
Some regional enthusiasts now see the European Commission as an enemy. The Länder complain loudly that EU competition rules are eliminating their traditional practice of dishing out aid to local industries. In Italy, Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League, who once saw the EU as an ally in his struggle against the Italian state, now dismisses it as a plaything of big government, multinational corporations and paedophiles. The League, whose attempt to preserve the cultural purity of northern Italy (Padania) has entailed virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric, fears that the EU is trying to impose political values that may lead to a direct clash with the aims of the party.
The European institutions in Brussels have reasons of their own to be wary of regionalism. On a theoretical level, Eurocrats may be attracted by the idea of a layering of levels of political power (with the EU naturally at the apex). But the commission dare not overtly encourage regionalist ambitions, for fear of antagonising powerful member governments. And, as one official points out, "it's already a nightmare trying to secure agreement between 15 member states, and it's going to get worse after enlargement to 25. It will be totally impossible if we have to deal with more powerful regional governments as well."
The expansion of the EU is undoubtedly contributing to the feeling of rebelliousness in the European regions. Some new member countries, such as Malta and the three Baltic states, are both smaller and poorer than such regions as Catalonia or Flanders. Mr Pujol admits that it has been a "psychological shock" to see these midgets take their place at the EU's top table, while Catalonia must content itself with being represented by Spain. He wants Catalan to become an official working language of the EU, pointing out that it is more widely spoken than several others. But Mr Pujol still stops short of demanding that Catalonia take its place in the EU as an independent country. Whether his successors will be as moderate is an open question.
This has changed. This probably shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, for the regions of the current fifteen member-states of the European Union are distinct. The Länder of Germany and Austria fall in an entirely different category from the counties of England and the provinces of Sweden, and these are in turn different from the autonomous community of Spain and the regions of France. (The new member-states of the EU circa 2004 will be rather centralized.) Catalonia is distinct from all of these regions; in all of the rest of the European Union, it is probably most similar to Scotland. Catalonia has no parallels in post-Communist Europe, but in the 1980s its situation was most similar to that of the republics of the Socialist and Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, particularly Slovenia and Croatia.
Catalonia, in short, is rather more than a simple region, being in fact a nation in the process of self-constitution. Only time will tell whether Catalonians will decide to take this process to what might once have seemed its inevitable conclusion in independence.
