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The Regional Problem in Spain
Raymond Carr
The results of the elections of 1 March 1979 show the abiding importance of the regional issue in Spain and the necessity of finding a constitutional solution for the regional problem. In these elections the historic party of Basque nationalism, the PNV (Partido Nacionalista Vasco) which supports a generous grant of autonomy to the Basque Provinces, gained eight seats; the national Spanish parties, the socialists and the UCD - the centre party of the present Prime Minister Señor Suárez - gained twelve seats between them. Even more alarming, from the central government's point of view, was the relative strength of the extreme nationalist left: Herri Batasuna, the extreme left-wing separatist, nationalist party which supports the ETA militar (Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna) advocates of the armed struggle, won three seats and the left-wing nationalist party Euskadiko Ezquerra a single seat. Even more surprising was the victory of the Andalusian Socialist Party, PSA (Partido Socialista de Andalucía) with five seats, marking the emergence of a new brand of left-wing regionalism. In only one region - Catalonia - did the nationalist thrust show signs of weakening. Convergencia i Unió, which was a coalition of parties committed to autonomy for Catalonia, dropped one seat from ten to nine. But this must not be interpreted as a weakening of the Catalan demand for autonomy: the Spanish parties of the left, the communists and socialists, and the UCD (Unión de Centro Democrático) in Catalonia are committed to autonomy, even though with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
This pattern was intensified in the recent April local government elections. In Andalusia the PSA was a decisive factor; in many towns its elected municipal councillors held the balance between left and right in a multi-party system, and were consequently the decisive factor in the election of mayors. In Seville itself, the capital of Andalusia, a PSA mayor was elected. Most significant of all is the position in the Basque provinces. The PNV captured control of the municipalities in the provincial capitals of Bilbao, San Sebastian and Vittoria. More alarming for the government was that Herri Batasuna in many municipalities came second to the PNV. In Navarre, the odd man out in the Basque provinces, while the PNV has collapsed Herri Batasuna, was within an ace of conquering the pro- | |
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vincial capital of Pamplona. Thus in the Basque provinces the PNV emerged as the dominant party and Herri Batasuna threatened to replace the socialists as the second party.
In the Spanish case two regional demands deserve especial attention: that of Catalonia and of the Basque provinces, and I shall deal at some length with Catalan nationalism as a model. Both are cases of peripheral nationalisms contesting the control of the central State over the life of the regions. In the case of Catalonia I shall use the word Catalanism to cover every manifestation of what the nineteenth century called the ‘differential factor’ of Catalonia: from folklore and mild conservative regionalism, through the demand for autonomy (I often use the English-Irish term home rule), to separatism. Secondly, I shall use Castile in the sense that Catalans use it: that is, to describe the Spanish State centred on and administered from Madrid, whether that State was in the hands of an absolute monarchy or a liberal constitutional régime.
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I
We can only understand the force of movements for regional autonomy in modern Spain if we remember that nineteenth-century Spanish liberals inherited from the absolute monarchy the desire to impose a uniform, centralized government on a country which was composed of units which retained a sense of separate cultural or linguistic identity, and which had once possessed historic institutions which guaranteed a certain degree of self-government. Thus the Basque provinces possessed their ancient fueros (customs) and regarded their relationship with the crown as a purely contractual relationship; royal decrees were only applicable in the Basque country if they were judged by the foral institutions as compatible with the fueros. Such restrictions on royal authority were regarded by the civil servants of the absolute monarchy as intolerable. ‘Modern Spain’ wrote one of them
can be considered as a monstrous republic formed of little republics which confront each other because the particular interest of each is in contradiction with the general interest.
The liberals, like the absolute monarchs before them, were influenced by French example; but they were doctrinaire centralists in the sense that the absolute monarchs were not. Thus it was the liberals who, with the Constitution of 1812 and later in the 1830s, destroyed the historic identity of Catalonia by dividing the principality into four provinces identical with the other fifty provinces of Spain. It was the liberal State which fought two bloody civil wars against the Basque
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carlists. The Liberal Party did not begin to abandon its defence of the sovereignty of the Spanish State and opposition to regionalist demands as ‘tearing the nation to tatters’ until 1910.
There were two reactions against what its opponents called the ‘jacobin centralization’ of the liberals. One was in the tradition of radical democracy: the so-called junta tradition which goes back to the War of Independence and was taken up by urban radicals, particularly in the great cities of the south. The other was a reactionary movement against liberalism and all its works.
The classic example of the radical democratic strand are the so-called junta movements; of the reactionary protest, carlism. Thus the Basque carlism was a populist peasant protest of a deeply catholic region against the secularizing legislation of the liberals; they hoped to erect a theocratic counter-State based on the traditional fueros. In Catalonia it was distaste for liberalism, as much as love of Catalonia, that flung the influence of the Church in Catalonia behind some of the Catalanist demands. The see of Vich became a centre of diffusion of Catalan culture; Morgades, restorer of Catalan monasteries and advocate of Catalan in the pulpit, was succeeded as bishop by Torres y Bages, one of the most widely read early theorists of regionalism. As a thomist he defined Catalonia as a ‘true entity, capable of its own life... indivisum in se et divisum ab aliis’; he posited a national school of thought, a national style evident in every activity from philosophy and poetry to architecture. Like many other early Catalanists, he recognized that its informing spirit must be re-awakened; but, once awake, it could not be denied a right to live. This spirit was conservative. Thus the region would be a vehicle to preserve social patterns and a religious spirit threatened by liberal securalism the urban civilization of ‘sensual man’. Christ was the Orpheus of the Catalan nation and only Christ could restore her.
As I shall try to point out, the enduring problem for regionalists was to unite the radical and the conservative reactions to centralism in a single regional party.
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II
I will first examine the radical left-wing tradition. In every nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolution (up to and including the so-called ‘spontaneous’ revolution of July 1936 in the Republican zone against the army pronunciamiento of General Franco), the collapse of central government authority was accompanied by a series of local take-overs in the form of municipal committees or juntas. These were subsequently absorbed or repressed by the central government once it had recovered its authority; but there was always a stage of de facto federalism in all Spanish revolutions. Thus the military oligarchs and politicians who ‘made’ the revolution of 1868 in support of a constitutional monarchy which they would
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dominate, were confronted with an urban radical revolution of provincial extremists which they suppressed in 1869. After July 1936 the Catalan autonomous government ‘robbed’ the Republican State at war with Franco of many of its powers; in May 1937 Republican Assault Guards restored the authority of the central government.
The only attempt to translate this de facto federalism into a federal constitution came with the Federal Republic of 1873. The collapse of the constitutional monarchy in 1873 was the result, not of the strength of republicanism, but of the political feuding of the monarchists. This left a vacuum which was filled by an unspecified republic; but the republicans were federalists and their task was to turn, by constitutional means, this unspecified republic granted them as a gift of political circumstance into a federal republic.
When one asks why were the republicans extreme federalists, the answer would seem to be that federalism was popular in European radical circles, and one cannot avoid the conclusion that it was adopted by the nascent Spanish party simply because it represented what appeared to be one of the latest advances in European thought. Certainly federalists were aware of the strong local loyalties of an imperfectly unified country, and federalists had been active in the radical municipal take-overs of 1868. It has been often observed that the intensity of a Spaniard's loyalty is in inverse proportion to the area to which it is applied: first comes the patria chica, last the nation-State. The polymath Pi y Margall (1824-1901) who became the foremost theorist of federalism and the ascetic patron saint of federal republicanism, was a Catalan, perfectly aware of the separate historical identity and traditions of Catalonia. But he regarded federalism as the only logical deduction from the premises of individual liberty; he had translated Proudhon's Du Principe fédératif in the late sixties. Pi's federalism, which became the sacred dogma of his party, though it might absorb peripheral nationalisms based on a sense of separate historic and cultural identity, was itself based on abstract principle: the right of each individual to make his own social contract.
The aim of professors who became presidents of the republic - including Pi himself - was to establish a federal republic by constitutional means (i.e. by a vote of a constituent cortes or parliament). This intention was defeated by provincial enthusiasts who where unwilling to wait for the legal installation of a federal republic from above (arriba-abajo). They sought, by a revival of the junta tradition, to impose a federal republic by revolutionary élan from below (abajo arriba). This produced the cantonalist revolt of the cities of Andalusia and the Levante which the federal republican politicians in Madrid repressed by military force, shooting those who shared their own federalist convictions but not their legalism.
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The result of the cantonalist revolt was to plunge much of Spain into near anarchy, ended only by the military coup of General Pavia in January 1874 which installed a unitary republic. The federal republican experiment discredited federalism as a political doctrine that led inevitably to anarchy.
The restoration of the monarchy in 1875 meant that the constitution of 1876 that was to govern Spain until 1923 represented a return to liberal centralism. Cánovas del Castillo, author of that constitution, maintained ‘centralism is liberty’; by this he meant that the carlists, who had once more risen in revolt in 1873 and continued under arms after restoration of the monarchy, had used the defence of the rights of self-government enshrined in the medieval fueros of the Basque provinces as part of an attack on liberalism as such in the hopes of erecting what the socialist Prieto was later to call ‘a Vatican Gibraltar’. The Basque fueros were abolished; the historic principality of Catalonia remained divided into the four provinces identical with all other Spanish provinces.
It is as a protest reaction to this re-imposition of centralism that we must examine the regional movements of the late nineteenth century.
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III
There is nothing uniquely characteristic about the Basque and Catalan protest movements of Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: they fall into the pattern of peripheral nationalisms throughout Europe. They share similar cultural and economic roots and move along the same road from a cultural and linguistic renaissance to a demand for some form of political autonomy, developing a separatist wing as autonomy is either delayed by the central government or too limited in content when conceded.
I will briefly examine in the Catalan case these common cultural and historical roots and the developing sense of economic grievance. The linguistic and literary revival of the nineteenth century was closely connected with the Romantic movement and entailed a particular vision of Catalan history. The early heroes of Catalanism were not politicians, but philologists, poets and historians. The philologists and poets raised the Catalan language from the status of the popular dialect which it had become, to that of a European tongue, restoring the medieval glories of Catalan literature. The Catalan language was and is the living core of Catalanism, and for this reason the linguistic issue remains central to Catalanism. Hence the difficulties encountered by Catalanism due to the massive influx of non-Catalan speaking immigrants to the industrial zone of Barcelona.
As in the case of other peripheral nationalisms, the literary revivalists and historians created a vision of history that conflicts with that of the State of which the peripheral nation is a part. Catalan historians have passionately - and it must be
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confessed with considerable distortion in the process - maintained the view that Spain was a multi-national society reduced by Castile, i.e. the Madrid government, to a barren uniformity. In Unamuno's words: ‘Unity for the sake of unity. A hollow unity. Unity without content’. To Castile, it was precisely the creation of the Spanish nation-State that was the supreme achievement of Castilian history - a view consistenly held by the Spanish Right.
But the conquering heroes of Castilian history are the foreign devils of Catalan historians. The process of Castilianization begins with the compromise of Caspe in the early fifteenth century which installed the Castilian dynasty, and culminates in the conquest of Catalonia by the Bourbon King Philip V and the imposition of ‘French’ centralism by the civil servants of the monarchy (the Decree of Nueva Planta in 1716). Catalans saw this as the destruction of their ‘liberties’, the medieval privileges which had recognized the separate existence of the principality of Catalonia and which had severely limited the powers of the crown of Aragon of which Catalonia, above all Barcelona, was the dynamic core. Catalan historians emphasize the medieval glories of Catalonia and hold that the destruction of its great trading empire in the fourteenth century, which extended from the Sea of Azov to Bruges, was the work of the Castilian devils. This is a characteristic exaggeration: it was in fact due to over-expansion and demographic decline.
Catalanism has therefore been in a sense backward-looking. Its anti-centralist rebellions that are the great epics of Catalan history (1640; 1714-15) are part of what has been called a conservative revolution. The sense of the loss of these ancient liberties was the historic memory that haunted Catalan nationalism. When Catalonia was granted a ‘modern’ Statute of Autonomy in 1932 it christened it with the medieval term: the Generalidad. The strand of backward-looking nostalgia in Basque nationalism was even more pronounced. The defence of the Basque fueros is still central to the political philosophy of the Basque Nationalist Party. Originally intended to ensure the dominance of the rural communities (thus a small village had the same representation as a great industrial city like Bilbao) the PNV maintains they must be ‘modernized’, though what form modernization can take is obscure.
The literary and linguistic revival in the romantic tradition, the work of an intellectual élite, could not create mass support for Catalanism. The third ingredient in Catalanism is the sense of separate economic interest, disregarded by the centralist State.
There are two recipes for peripheral nationalisms. There is the belief that a prosperous, dynamic peripheral region is attached to a moribund central State which sucks away, via taxation, the self-generated prosperity of the peripheral State (and this was the contention of Catalanism). There is, on the other hand, the complaint of a depressed and impoverished region (and this is the case with Gali- | |
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cia and more recently Andalusia) that the central State neglects its needs, e.g. for investment in railways in the nineteenth century and motorways today.
Here is one of the fundamental contradictions of peripheral nationalisms. They can be competitive: Galician autonomists, as inhabitants of a depressed region, now argue that Galicia's natural resources in men and, for example hydro-electric power, are exploited by other, richer peripheral nationalisms - e.g. the industrialized Basques and Catalans. Andalusian autonomists argue that they, likewise, are exploited as suppliers of cheap immigrant labour to another ‘national’ region, e.g. Catalonia.
Catalonia acquired a sense of separate economic interest, distinct though parallel with a sense of unique cultural identity, through the supposed conflict of interests between the industrialist society of Catalonia and what were seen as the interests of an ‘agrarian’ Castile. This first took the form of a bitter agitation for high tariff protection for the textile industry on which Catalan prosperity was based. Even after the agrarian interests welcomed protection in the depression of the 1880s, the conflict between agrarian Castile and industrial Catalonia remained a live issue. It flared up in 1916 with the proposal to tax industrial profits made by a Minister of Finance, Alba, who represented the cereal producers of Castile. Again it was Madrid which long refused to make Barcelona a free port. It was these factors that brought the bourgeoisie into an alliance with Catalanism and underlay the demand for some degree of political autonomy as the best instrument to protect economic interests.
Political Catalanism grew in strength precisely because of the failure of the ‘moribund’ central State to defend the economic interests of the Catalan bourgeoisie. In 1898 Spain was defeated by the United States and lost the last remants of its colonial empire, including Cuba, a most important market for Catalan textiles. Increasingly Catalans felt attached to ‘something dead’: the ‘corrupt’ Spanish State that could no longer fulfil the role of a nation State in the modern world. Political Catalanism was the Catalan component of the so-called regenerationist movement which was a reaction to the ‘failure’ of the Spanish political system in the war of 1895-98: the protest of the ‘live forces’ i.e. the middle class, against a political system supported by widespread electoral corruption which denied it any claim to represent the vital interests of the country. It was the republican Salmerón who argued that if Spain had been a dynamic, modernizing State then political Catalanism would never have emerged.
The Bible of political Catalanism was Prat de la Riba's Catechism written in 1894. Note the tone which so grated on Castilian ears. Catalonia was the true patria of Catalans; the Spanish State ‘one of the great mechanical units formed by violence’, keeping Catalonia in a slavery as vile as the Turkish rule in Greece. (This was one of those palpable exaggerations characteristic of peripheral natio- | |
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nalisms in its defensive stages; in fact, as the success of the protectionist campaign was to show, Catalonia would force its demands through the ‘blanket’ of a corrupt political system.) Prat's programme, which became the programme of political Catalanism, was autonomy for Catalonia with Catalan as the official language and posts reserved for native Catalans. Catalonia would be a unit in an Iberian (i.e. including Portugal) federal State. This programme was to be achieved by an all-party, pan-Catalan alliance.
It is important to emphasize this last point. Prat was a disciple of Almirall, the father of the political nationalism of a subject nation whose subjection was shown by the fact that it was governed in a ‘foreign tongue’, i.e. Castilian Spanish. Almirall came from the federal republican left. From the collapse into chaos of the federal republic of 1873 Almirall and Prat drew two conclusions:
| 1. | That to attach Catalanism to the extreme left would discredit it, alienate bourgeois and peasant support in Catalonia and make it impossible to exact concessions from conservative, monarchist governments in Madrid. |
| 2. | That the federalism of the republic, of which the ideologue par excellence was the Catalan Pi y Margall, was based on contracts between individuals, not on the existence of ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’. Federalism, Almirall argued, could not accommodate the ‘fact’ of Catalan particularism: a defined, self-sufficient body; a patria demanded specific treatment, not a place in a general federal scheme. |
Catalanism must therefore be based on ‘love of Catalonia’ embodied in a movement extending from carlist rural right to the urban republican left. Prat's dream of a great Catalan party committed to autonomy became a reality only with Solidaridad Catalana in 1906 when the Catalan right and left united in defending civil liberties against the concessions made by Madrid liberals to the army's claim to judge political cases involving its honour in military courts. The army was the defender par excellence of the historic unity of Spain against what its chief periodical called the Catalanist canaille.
By 1909 Solidaridad Catalana had collapsed after achieving nothing, leaving Catalanism deeply divided.
| 1. | On the right in the Lliga founded in 1901 and organized very efficiently by Prat and Cambó, a financier and representative of the grand bourgeoisie of Barcelona. A great pragmatist, he sought a home rule solution ‘within Spain’, i.e. by negotiation with the monarchical Madrid politicians using the pressure of an organized demand in Catalonia. |
| 2. | The left was republican and ‘all or nothing’, tot o res. To negotiate was to betray the purity of the nationalist movement and republican principle. It was a group of petty bourgeois intellectuals to whom the prohombres of the Lliga were reactionary collaborationists who had very little to show for collaboration. The impatient young Catalanists in the Lliga were to form their own party Acció Catala in 1922. |
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Cambó's fate was the fate of all home rulers seeking autonomy from a central government and hoping to use the bargaining (or threatening) weight of a peripheral party in parliament to achieve it. Like Parnell in the English parliament, he was accused of separatism by Madrid and of betrayal by the Catalan nationalist left. Like Parnell, he was forced to use two languages: a moderate tone in Madrid and a more nationalist tone in Barcelona. Like the Irish question, the dualism of Castile/Catalonia involved the clash of two stereotypes. To Castilians, Catalans were penny-pinching entrepreneurs unwilling to make any contribution to Spain, either in men or in money, a nation which, in Unamuno's terrible indictment, would sell its soul for a tariff and behind whose claims for home rule lay the ultimate threat of separatism. To Catalans the Castilians, of the ‘parasitic’ capital Madrid, were incompetent drones, incapable of understanding ‘progressive’ Catalonia and the needs of a modern industrial society and whose insistence on unity and the indivisible sovereignty of the Spanish State represented a claim of an oligarchy to political hegemony.
The weakness of Catalan nationalism until the 1930s was that it was almost exclusively a bourgeois or petty bourgeois concern. Neither the Lliga on the right nor the Catalan republican left succeeded in attracting working-class support for Catalanism. Why?
Romero Maura has emphasized the cultural gap between the working class (composed increasingly of poor non-Catalan immigrants) and the gent de bé, the Catalan bourgeoisie who until the 1950s despised and feared the non-Catalan immigrant workers; the Catalan demographer Vandellós prophesied in the 1930s that the immigrants with their higher birth rate would, by sheer force of numbers, destroy the Catalan identity. The mixture of fear and contempt felt by the well-to-do Catalans of the fifties for the poor immigrants is reflected in Juan Marsé's novel Ultimas tardes con Teresa. Teresa, a young progressive university student, forms an attachment with the anti-hero of the novel - a Murcian immigrant layabout. To the parents he is an untouchable; class distinction is, in his case, reinforced by his non-Catalan origins. Basque nationalism was originally virulently hostile to the racially impure ‘foreign’ workers, i.e. immigrant casual labour from Castile. Both Catalan nationalism and Basque nationalism have turned from hostility to ‘foreigners’ (reflected in the use of deprecatory terms: xarnegros in Catalonia; maketas in the Basque provinces) to a policy of assimilation; anyone who accepts the postulate of an autonomous Catalonia or an independent Basque nation becomes an honorary Catalan or Basque. Peripheral nationalism could only be survive on such terms.
The Barcelona working class was first attracted to the Radical Republican Party of Alejandro Lerroux (1864-1949) with its recognition of working-class dignity and grievances and the validity of its subculture, particularly appealing to its in- | |
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stinctive anti-clericalism; then, when Lerroux's attractions waned, to the anarcho-syndicalist labour union, the CNT (Confederación Nàcional de Trabajadores) founded in 1910. The strength of the CNT lay in Catalonia, above all in Barcelona, and it had a particular appeal to the non-Catalan immigrant workers.
Lerroux was the great popular opponent of Catalanism on the left in constant competition with the Lliga; his hold over the Barcelona proletariat did not weaken til 1914. To the relatively moderate CNT leader, Salvador Seguí (assassinated in 1923) the bourgeois nationalists of the Lliga were ‘gentlemen’.
We are and always shall be opposed to those gentlemen who claim a monopoly of Catalan politics, not so as to achieve freedom of Catalonia, but the better to defend their class interests. I assure you that these reactionaires who call themselves Catalanists fear nothing so much as the rising up of a Catalonia that is not subject to them.
The division between the Catalan nationalist left and the Catalan right became acute between 1917-23. To the left, the Lliga stood revealed as a ‘collaborationist’ right-wing pressure group interested primarily in economic concessions. The old Castilian accusation of selfishness was brought up when, in 1916, the Lliga organized a campaign to resist Alba's war profits tax - an attempt to capture some of the large profits made by Catalan industrialists during the Great War. More important, the Catalan bourgeoisie increasingly seemed mainly concerned with the suppression of organized labour. During the acute social struggles between organized labour and employers 1919-23 the Catalan employers appealed to the army of the ‘hated’ Spanish State in order to suppress the CNT; and finally, in September 1923, it supported a military coup of Primo de Rivera, by the army which had been the historic enemy of Catalonia, because they saw the opportunity to end the power of organized labour once and for all. In other words, the nationalist bourgeoisie, as Seguí had prophesied, put its economic and social interests above Catalan liberties.
Apart from using the ‘threat’ of nationalism - or so at least anti-Catalans maintained - to extort the highest tariff barriers in Europe and to resist taxation, what had the Catalanism of the bourgeoisie - occasionally in an uneasy alliance with the left as in 1906 and again in 1917 - achieved?
It had in 1913 extracted the concessions of the Mancomunidad: the amalgamation, for local purposes, of the administrative functions already possessed by the four Catalan provinces into one unit. This more or less reconstructed the geographical boundaries of the old historic principality of Catalonia without granting any new powers from the Spanish State.
Catalanism has always had a ‘progressive’ strand, particularly on the left, emphasizing the European connections of Catalonia and its modernizing role in Spain, and a contrasting conservative strand brooding on the lost glories of the
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medieval principality. It is characteristic of the dual nature of Catalan nationalism that the Mancomunidad used its limited powers, on the one hand, in order to foster the Catalan language and Catalan culture and to celebrate the memory of medieval Catalonia and, on the other, to modernize the telephone system.
The failure of the conservative ‘collaborationist’ Catalanism of the Lliga to achieve more than the limited autonomy of the Mancomunidad, its alliance with the Barcelona Employers Federation in a war against organized labour, strengthened the left-wing nationalism.
The rapprochement of Catalanism and republicanism, and therefore the possibility of broadening the social base of Catalan nationalism, was the work of the young enthusiasts of Acció Catala (1922), which laid the foundation for an understanding with republicanism that was to give Catalonia victory in 1931. Spain, according to Acció was ‘an oppressor country in a State of moral and ethical inferiority to the nation it oppresses’. Cambó was still the most powerful man in Catalonia, but the emotional leader of Catalan nationalism was Maciá. Maciá despised the Lliga as ‘an appendix of monarchical conservatism’. Catalonia would have to fight for her recognition as a free republic within a federal republican Spain. He rejected the Lliga's monarchism, its moderation, and its ambivalent nationalism. For Maciá autonomy was not enought. He demanded separate representation for Catalonia at the Peace Conference of 1919.
An army officer who had sacrificed his career to Catalanism, resigning his seat in the Cortes in protest against the ‘frivolous futility’ of Spain where Catalonia was concerned, Maciá possessed the austerity and personal simplicity of a nationalist hero. Simplicity in politics means violence, and it was violence which this quiet man brought to Catalan youth and to Catalan intellectuals weary of the realism of the Lliga. It was the alarm inspired by the separatist violence of the younger Catalan nationalists which helped to turn the older politicians of the Lliga into backers of an army coup in 1923. They paid for this folly with the electoral defeat of the Lliga in 1931. Catalanism had finally deserted its conservative origins and flowed into the rising torrents of the left.
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V
If the Catalans who supported Primo de Rivera's coup of 1923 hoped to find sympathy for Catalanism from the dictator they were sadly mistaken. During his dictatorship (1923-30) he came to regard Catalanism as a sedition of intellectuals which it was his mission to destroy.
Firstly he demolished the Mancomunidad just as Philip V had abolished the medieval liberties of Catalonia. Secondly he tried to destroy Catalanism at its roots by the suppression of the Catalan language. The results of this policy were what
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the results of Castilian authoritarianism always had been and would be once more under Franco.
The dictatorship proved incapable of suppressing a revival of the Catalan language and the concentration of an opposition to Primo de Rivera in Catalonia itself. There was a massive output of Catalan books during this period, and this cultural revival again provided the basis for a renewed demand for political autonomy.
The repression of Primo de Rivera consolidated and accentuated the shift of Catalanism to the left, taking it out of the hand of the Lliga and making the main vehicle of Catalanism the Esquerra (Catalan republican left) - the party of Maciá and his lieutenant Companys (1883-1940). Since the CNT was not a labour union with an associated political party, CNT members voted for the Esquerra and Companys who in his capacity as a lawyer had defended CNT militants in the courts. This movement to the left initially strengthened the separatism of Colonel Maciá, who invaded Catalonia from his exile in France in 1926. More important, Catalan resistance to the dictatorship gave Catalanism the alliance of the Spanish republican left against the monarchy; in the Pact of San Sebastian (August 1930) the republican conspirators promised the Esquerra that the republic would grant Catalonia autonomy.
The victory of the Esquerra over the Lliga in the 1931 municipal elections which brought down the monarchy gave left-wing political Catalanism its first great opportunity. In combination with the left-wing republican and socialist coalition that dominated the republic after 1932, Catalonia got its Autonomy Statute which allowed it to control a much wider sphere in local government than the old Mancomunidad. But Maciá, a separatist at heart, wanted much more than the Statute of Autonomy offered and had declared on 14th April 1931 for a Catalan Republic in a federal Iberian Republic, apparently in the belief that the conspirators of San Sebastian, who became the Provisional Government of the Republic, had agreed on a federal Republic.
This extreme solution was unacceptable to Madrid: the sovereignty of the republican State must be preserved and the draft of an Autonomy Statute submitted to the Spanish Cortes. Maciá accepted the promise of autonomy. The Autonomy Statute which set up the Generalidad was bitterly debated in the cortes. With the Spanish left committed to autonomy, the old liberal defence of the ‘unity of Spain’ fell into the hands of the right. Again it was the linguistic issue which aroused most passion: a university teaching in Catalan was ‘a means to de-espaniolize (desespañolizar) Catalonia’; yet it was the demand for equality of Spanish and Catalan in the educational system that was the emotional core of Catalanism.
Maciá accepted the compromise solution of the Autonomy Statute; but he clear- | |
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ly intended to push regional self-government beyond the powers granted to the Generalidad. ‘Ja som llivres’ he told the crowd on the eve of the passing of the Statute. ‘At last we are free! No human power will be able to thwart the will of the Catalan people’.
The history of the Generalidad shows clearly some of the essential defects of a home rule/autonomy solution. Firstly, quarrels developed over the nature of the powers to be transferred to the autonomous government. The socialists, for example, refused to transfer to the Generalidad the central government's powers over labour and social questions. This was to have important results. Secondly, if autonomy is to work, then either the same political parties must be in power in the central State and the region, or a political party sympathetic to autonomy must be also the dominant power in the central government. This was the case until the victory of the right in the elections of November 1933. The left republican-socialist government had been sympathetic to Catalan demands. The right was hostile to Catalan autonomy and a crisis developed in September/October 1934.
Companys and his party, the Esquerra, which controlled the government of the Generalidad, sought to consolidate the support of the tenant farmers (the main bulwark of the Esquerra outside Barcelona and the main towns) by a law which gave them security of tenure and the possibility of purchasing their farms.
The law on leases was attacked by the conservatives of the Lliga in Catalonia and by the conservatives in the Madrid Cortes who challenged its constitutionality. Compromise failed, and when the socialists revolted against the ‘fascist’ government which included members of the catholic party - CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autonomas) - (October 1934), Companys declared for a Catalan Republic in the Spanish federal Republic (Maciá had declared for an Iberian federal Republic). Companys' rebellion - he was pushed into it by a fascistoid nationalist right - was easily defeated and the Autonomy Statute suspended.
The victory of the Popular Front in the elections of 1936 meant the immediate restoration of the Autonomy Statute. The history of Catalanism in the Civil War gives some strength to the anti-Catalan assertion that the Generalidad and Companys sought to use the weakness of the central government in order to extend the powers granted to Catalonia under the Statute. Companys declared that Catalonia was a unit in a de facto federal State; it only remained to convert this de facto federalism into a de jure federal State.
To reiterate one's conclusions on this period:
| 1. | If a peripheral nationalism fails to create an all-Catalan coalition (as in 1906) then to be successful it must break out of its bourgeois elitist bondage and become a mass party, as the Esquerra became in 1930-31. |
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| 2. | For a home rule solution to work, there must be similar parties in the central government and the peripheral government, or at least a party in Madrid that is not hostile to autonomy. |
| 3. | One of the limits on peripheral nationalism is set by the functional, economic connection with the central State. As Graell, the spokesman of Catalan business interests, warned the Lliga in the euphoria of its electoral victory in 1901, to separate from Spain was to invite economic disaster. Once Cuba had gone, Catalonia was flung back on the Spanish domestic market; only during the war boom of 1914-19 could Catalan industry capture a foreign market and dream of an economic independence which could support a separate political existence. With the post-war depression Catalan industry had no outlet but Spain. Perhaps the economic revival in Spain in the 1960s has weakened Catalanism as a separate political movement by providing Catalonia with a ‘dynamic’ national market. Hence the success of the Spanish national parties in Catalonia. |
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VI
The history of Catalonia under Franco is an intensified repetition of the experience of Catalonia under Primo de Rivera. ‘Unity’, Pradera, the carlist leader assassinated in 1936, told Franco who wrote the preface to Pradera's collected works, ‘impose unity on them all’. Franco adopted the usual procedures with the usual results.
Firstly, needless to say, the Autonomy Statute of 1932 was revoked.
Secondly, he made a much more determined attack on Catalan culture and language than ever before. He pulped Catalan books, and enjoined Catalans to speak what he called ‘the language of the empire’, i.e. Castilian Spanish. The results were predictable.
After the forties he could not suppress a Catalan cultural revival which in turn became the basis for a revival of Catalan claims. The Catalan cultural revival extended from a youth addicted to Catalan pop protest to the lower clergy which, as in the case of Basque nationalism, was sympathetic to Catalan demands, particularly after Vatican II.
The opposition to francoism repeated the constellation and opportunities of 1931 in an even stronger form. Because both the democratic and proletarian left in Spain were against Franco, and because Catalonia - like the Basque provinces - became a conspicuous area of opposition to Franco, the democratic opposition accepted and adopted autonomy in its programme. Hence in the elections of June 1977 all parties of the left (i.e. the mass parties, including the socialists and communists) supported autonomy as did, with less enthusiasm, the centre party, the UCD, which emerged as the strongest party and allowed Señor Suárez
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to remain as premier. Thus the victory of the left in Catalonia was a vote for autonomy. It was opposed only by the conservative right.
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VII
I now want briefly, as it were in contrast, to refer to Basque nationalism.
If we turn to its origins, Basque nationalism is a clear case of defensive nationalism; anxiety that the Basque nation, as represented in its language and peculiar customs and way of life, was in danger of disappearing. This sense of decline haunted Sabino de Arana, the prophet founder of the Basque nationalist party, the PNV, and who died in 1903. The contrast with Catalonia is striking.
I believe (it would be severely contested by Basques, who are reviving the use of the Basque language) that the cultural basis of Basque nationalism is still insecure. The Basque cultural heritage is the creation of peasant farmers: there is nothing to correspond to the medieval literary tradition of Catalonia. ‘They [the Basques]’ wrote George Borrow ‘have never produced among them a poet with the slightest pretensions to reputation’. Unlike Catalan, Basque is not spoken by a large proportion of the inhabitants of the Basque region (compare a walkabout in Bilbao and Barcelona), nor is that archaic language easily capable of becoming - as has Catalan - an instrument for modern culture, though its obscurities are useful to terrorists in confusing the police.
Basque nationalism was much more racist in its origin than Catalan nationalism. Catalan nationalism is based on historic memories and on the language; Basque nationalism was based on blood. In its origins it was a ‘National Front’ movement directed against the ‘defiling’ of the race by immigrant workers. Modern Basque left-wing nationalists have been forced to re-define the Basque nation on non-racial grounds as simply the workers who live in the Basque provinces. This allows a combination of the rhetoric of separatist nationalism and marxism.
In contrast to Catalonia, Basque nationalism lacked widespread middle class support, especially upper middle class support, the kind of support from the local rich which had patronized the Catalan cultural revival. Basque nationalism was originally hostile to industrialization as a threat to the family farm - the ideal of the nationalists - and as responsible for the importation of ‘foreign’ workers on whom Basque industry was dependent.
The Basque cultural revival of the late nineteenth century was the work of local priests and enthusiasts. The Basque upper middle class were monarchist and pro-Spanish for they had come to dominate the financial world of Madrid, whilst Catalan bankers had remained encapsulated in the narrower world of Catalonia itself. There was less sense of injured economic interest; on the contrary, the Bas- | |
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que industrialists would and did regard themselves as the ‘conquistadores’ - the phrase is Unamono's - of the Spanish economy.
Until the Franco period Basque nationalism was explicitly and enthusiastically catholic: whereas the Catalan Lliga could ally on occasions with the republican left, this was an inconceivable step for the PNV. As Juan Pablo Fusi points out, the PNV chose during the Second Republic of 1931-36 to ally with the right, thus denying itself the support of the left sympathetic to autonomy. It achieved its Statute only after the Civil War had broken out, in October 1936. Moreover, it was further weakened by the fact that two Basque provinces (Navarre and Alava) put the catholic unity of Spain above the claims of Basque nationalism. Thus in the Civil War Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya supported the Republic in return, as it were, for autonomy. Navarre was the one region in Spain which rose to support Franco and the crusade for catholic unity. After the war Franco rewarded Navarre by allowing that province to retain a semblance of self-government. Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya were declared ‘traitors to Spain’ and stripped of all privileges.
Why, one must ask, did Basque nationalism achieve such enormous and enthusiastic support throughout the Basque provinces in the last few years? The revival of Basque nationalism, I must confess, has surprised me more than any other phenomenon in recent Spanish history. There is one simple answer. It was indiscriminate repression of the Basque population by the police forces of francoism in their campaign against terrorism which created widespread support for nationalism, including tolerance, if not support, for its terrorist wing. Terrorism can be justified when a brutal dictatorship suppresses the general will which the terrorists can claim to represent. It was the impossibility of proceeding by nonviolent means that led the young enthusiasts to break away from the PNV to form ETA and proceed to the ‘armed struggle’. But the ‘armed struggle’, i.e. terrorism, is not an acceptable posture in a democratic State where terrorists become a self-appointed moral and political élite, ready to push their demands through against the general will manifested by regular democratic means. Hence Herri Batasuna rejects parliamentary democracy and the party system as a distortion of the general will of the people, thus justifying its continued support for the armed struggle of ETA militar.
Until recently the attitude of the PNV was ambiguous. It would only condemn the violence of the terrorists if at the same time it could condemn the ‘violence’ of Madrid. Yet it must be obvious to the PNV that Basque terrorism, apart from the deleterious effects it has on the economic life of the Basque provinces, is the most serious threat to democracy in Spain. Its continuance, with repeated killings of policemen and soldiers, will force a right-wing reaction and may have dangerous consequences, particularly in the security forces. I believe the political weekly
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Cambio 16 is correct in asserting that unless the government isolates Basque terrorism by the grant of an autonomy statute as extensive as that of 1936, Basque terrorism will destroy democracy.
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VIII
Where Catalan and Basque regionalisms were protest movements of a developed region, Galician regionalism is the protest of a backward region neglected by the central State. Galicians wanted State subsidies for railways which alone could bring prosperity to a backward rural region cut off from the national market. From the 1860s a group of intellectuals had pressed the claims of Galicia only to find them ignored by deputies with no interest in or connection with their constituents.
All that the liberal State had brought to Galicia was crippling taxation which fell on a semi-destitute peasantry whose conditions had been made even more precarious by the great liberal land sales of the mid-century. The peasants had lost their common rights of pasture and wood-gathering: their blind protest took the form of the burning of tax registers and the houses of local officials and ‘powerful ones’. Against the other imposition of centralist liberalism - conscription - their protest was equally the outcome of despair: self-mutilation and emigration.
The Galician regionalists never gathered the strength of the Catalan protest. The journalists and intellectuals could make no effective alliance with peasant discontents though Galician poets produced the first ‘social poetry’ in Spain. Nor could they interest the conservative bourgeoisie in regional protest; to the ‘respectable classes’ Galician was a peasant dialect which no self-respecting citizen would wish to use.
Hence, without the social base that Catalan nationalism had built up, the regionalism of the Lliga Regional Gallega remained a literary protest in the hands of intellectuals, lamenting the loss of Galician menfolk by emigration overseas - again something that the liberal State tended to regard as part of a self-regulating economy rather than as the mark of destitution. They took refuge in the glories of the medieval kingdom and in a misty ‘celticism’ - not without connection with the current debate about the inferiority of Latins to Germans. At least, as Celts, the Galicians were not Latins.
Valencian regionalism, like Basque regionalism, failed to win the enthusiastic support of the prosperous local agrarian bourgeoisie. Bitterly opposed by the radical republicans - led by the writer and journalist Blasco Ibañez, one of whose widely read realist novels describes the wretchedness of the rural poor of the region - it remained an affair of intellectuals concerned with the cultivation of the local Catalan dialect. It emerged, in the thirties, like Catalanism, divided be- | |
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tween a republican left and a catholic right. Andalusian regionalism existed only in the mids of a few eccentrics, to be resurrected in the 1970s by the founding fathers of yet another autonomous region.
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IX
I will now return to the situation today. All the main parties supported autonomy in the constitutional debates of 1978. The right of nationalities are recognized in the constitution - a semantic innovation opposed only by the right-wing Alianza Popular and the remnants of francoism as defenders of the historic unity of Spain. The Constitution recognizes the right for regions to demand statutes of autonomy, and the Basque provinces and Catalonia have pre-autonomy bodies - the Generalidad in Catalonia and the General Council in the Basque provinces which will be responsible for the negotiation of autonomy statutes.
Will the new constitution ‘solve’ the regional problem? In the case of Catalonia, though there will be the usual conflicts over the transfer of powers, one can be optimistic. What has changed the political landscape of Catalonia, as opposed to the situation under all previous regimes, is that the national Spanish parties are strong in Catalonia and sympathetic to Catalan demands. They can no longer be convincingly accused by Catalanists of sucursalismo, i.e. of being mere branches of national parties manipulated from Madrid as a local bank (a sucursal) is dependent on head office. Given that no party in Catalonia supports separatism and that no significant Spanish party opposes autonomy, a solution of even the difficult language question can be worked out.
In contrast to Catalonia, the Basque problem remains the most difficult problem confronting the new democracy. Firstly there is an extremist wing, absent in Catalonia, whose programme cannot be accommodated by any Spanish government and whose methods of implementing that programme are unacceptable in any democratic system. The programme of Herri Batasuna is an independent socialist/marxist State including the French Basque provinces; it supports the armed struggle of ETA militar and the ‘revolutionary’ taxation which, between them, are destroying the morale and economy of the Basque provinces. Yet this party gained four seats in the March elections and the left-wing nationalists of Euskadiko Ezquerra (which does not support ETA militar and the armed struggle) won a single seat.
In the referendum on the constitution the PNV counselled abstention, the nationalist left rejection. This meant that the rate of abstention in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa ran at 50 per cent and, of those who voted, 20 per cent voted against the constitution. This was a disappointing result from the government's point of view. Even more disheartening, in the General Election 10 per cent of the popula- | |
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tion in Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya proved by their votes that they supported terrorism. Only a rapid concession of autonomy as demanded by the PNV can hope to weaken this support for the extremist nationalists.
The trouble with the historic party of Basque nationalism, the PNV, is its ambiguity. As we have seen, its attitude to terrorism has tried to combine protest against the violence of the terrorists with protests against the violence of Madrid, i.e. the continued refusal of the government to grant a statute of autonomy which, among other things, would grant the Basques control over the armed police forces. The PNV continues to be based on the historic fueros seen as an expression of the sovereignty of the Basque nation. The failure of the PNV to come to a settlement with the present government of Señor Suárez seems to me to be the result of the obstinacy on symbolic issues of both the government and the PNV.
This was evident in the constitutional debates: the government repealed the legislation of 1839 and 1875 that had abolished the fueros, opened up the possibility of autonomy larger than that granted in 1936; yet the PNV rejected the phrasing that autonomy should be granted ‘within the constitution’; it insists on the ‘sovereignty’ of the Basque nation. If sovereignty of the Basque nation means anything it means the right to secede; yet the PNV does not want an extreme separatist solution.
Apart from the gains made by Herri Batasuna, the surprise of March 1979 was the emergence of the Andalusian Socialist Party. Andalusia has no peculiar literary tradition; its ‘language’ is a dialect of Castilian Spanish. Nor has it ever enjoyed, as have the Catalans and Basques, separate traditional, historical, political institutions. In the popular mind the identity of Andalusia was concerned with ‘flamenco’ folklore. The Andalusian Socialist Party rejects this folkloric image and treats Andalusia as a depressed region. Andalusan ‘nationalism’ considers Andalusia as part of the third world, as a ‘colony’ exploited by the rich provinces of Spain. It represents a combination of marxism and ‘nationalism’ typical of the third world - there are even wild rumours that the PSA is subsidized by Libya.
Under its new constitution Spain can become a brand of multinational State based on the concession of statutes of autonomy. This may well result in a twotier system: autonomy statutes on the model of the autonomy statutes of the Republic of 1931 (the Basque provinces - with or without Navarre - and Catalonia) and those provinces with a more limited form of autonomy which may be pushed towards the fuller autonomy enjoyed by the Basque provinces and Catalonia. These concessions will be contested by the right as the destruction of the historic unity of Spain. What the precise shape will be is still uncertain, but the rigid doctrinaire centralism which Franco inherited from nineteenth century lib- | |
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erals - themselves the heirs of the absolute monarchs - is a thing of the past.
Since this paper was written both the Basque PNV and the Catalan parties have agreed with the government on statutes of autonomy for their respective regions. This is a great tribute to the negotiating powers of Señor Suárez and the moderation of the main nationalist groups. There is now some hope that Basque terrorists will be isolated and the Basque extremists cast into disarray.
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Select bibliography
The classic history of Catalanism by a Catalanist is A. Rovira i Virgili, Resum d'historia del catalanisme (Barcelona, 1936). Its doctrine is set out in V. Almirall, Lo Catalanisme (1886). The first treatment during the Franco period was M. García Venero, Historia del nacionalismo catalan (Madrid, 1944), with useful documents. The best modern history is A. Balcells, Catalunya contemporanea (2 vols, Madrid, 1974).
For the economic background J. Vicens Vives, Industrials i Politics (segle XIX), ed. Terde (1950) is valuable.
The history of the Lliga has been written by Isidre Molas, Lliga Catalana (2 vols, Barcelona, 1972), and there is much material in Jesus Pabón, Cambó (3 vols, Barcelona, 1952-69). J. Harrison treats the relation of the Lliga to the business community in ‘Big Business and the Failure of right-wing Catalan nationalism 1901-23’, The Historical Journal, XIX (1976) 901-18; its economic performance in C.Pi y Sunyer, L'Aptitud economica de Catalunya (1972). The relationship between nationalism and the bourgeoisie is examined in A. Jutglar, Historia crítica de la burgesia a Catalunya (Barcelona, 1972); and Borja de Riquer, Lliga regionalista: la burgesia catalana i el nacionalisme 1898-1904 (1977).
For the Catalanist left see J. Pous i Pages, Pere Corominas i el seu temps (Barcelona, 1969). Prat de la Riba's ideas are examined in Jordí Solé-Tura, Catalanisme i revolució burguesa. La sintesí de Prat de la Riba (Barcelona, 1967); and Enric Jordi, Les doctrines juridiques, polítics i sociales d'Enric Prat de la Riba (1974). A Joaniquet's Alfonso Sala Argemi (Madrid, 1953) is useful for the attitudes of a conservative Catalan.
For the relationship of Catalanism to the non-Catalanist left see Octavio Ruiz Manjón, El Partido Republicano Radical (1976), and especially J. Romero Maura, La Rosa de Fuego (1974). The Tragic Week is examined in J.C. Ullman, The Tragic Week (Cambridge, 1968). A Ossorio y Gallardo's Vida y sacrificio de Companys (Buenos Aires, 1945) is a sympathetic biography of the Esquerra leader and President of the Generalidad. For the social question in general see E. Giralt and A. Balcells, Els moviments socials en Catalunya 1800-1939 (1967).
The journal Recerques has a volume devoted to Catalan nationalism (No. 2, 1972).
The best general history of the Basque Provinces, both political, economic and social is J.M. Azaola, Vasconia y su destino (Madrid, 1976). M. García Venero, Historia del nacionalismo vasco (Madrid, 1968) reproduces early texts and was the first history of Basque nationalism published in Spain during the Franco regime. There is a general history of Basque nationalism by Stanley Payne, Basque Nationalism (Lincoln (Neb.), 1975). For the origin of Basque nationalism see J.J. Solozabal, El primer nacionalismo vasco (Madrid, 1975) which analyses the attitudes of Sabino Arana, founder of Basque nationalism. There is a more detailed description in J.C. Larronde, El nacionalismo vasco, su origen y su ideologia en la obra de Sabino Arana-Goiri (1977).
The extreme left view is represented in ‘Beltza’ (pseudonym), El nacionalismo vasco, 1876-1936 (San Sebastián, 1976). The debate on the Basque Statute and its evolution are described in F. Zavala, De los Fueros a los Estatutos. Los conciertos economicos (San Sebastián, 1976); and J.M. Castells, Elestatuto vasco (San Sebastián, 1976).
For the fortunes of Basque nationalism in the Republic of 1931-36 see J.A. Aguirre, Entre la libertad y la revolucion 1930-35 (1970).
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There is a good study of ETA written with inside knowledge in ‘Ortzi’ (pseudonym), Historia de Euskadi: el nacionalismo vasco y ETA (Paris, 1975).
A. Elorza, Ideologias del nacionalismo vasco (1978) studies the work of Basque priests in the 1920s, and X. Tusell, Historia de la Democracia cristiana en España (Madrid, 1974) II, 13-119, the modern evolution of the PNV as a Christian Democrat party.
A short summary of the problem is contained in A. Elorza, ‘El nacionalismo vasco: de los fueros a la dictadura’, Historia-16 (April 1978).
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