Self-determination and national liberation struggle in the Catalan Countries, Speech by the organisation Endavant from the Catalan countries in the panel: Perspectives of (national) self-determination and autonomy in the 21st century
The Catalan Countries are geographically located in the south of the European continent and the west of the Mediterranean Sea. Administrative mainly under the Spanish State and partially in the French State they are divided in different historical territories; Catalonia, Northern Catalonia, Valencian Country and Balearic and Pityusic islands. There are substantial differences in these territories due to their historical background and current social context, so in our case we talk about the Catalan Countries as a country of countries and our national construction project as one that has to build country while building countries.
A short description of the historical context
Its historical roots are an element that explains the political situation we are facing and the social and cultural configuration of the Catalan Countries, but history is not the central element that explains a national liberation project like ours. It is the persisting need of the popular classes for that liberation that does give the legitimacy to our movement. As most of the national conflicts is a phenomenon of modernity, of our contemporary, historically placed in the last three hundred years with the modern appearance of contemporary national identities. This is a permanent process characteristic of the liberal state as a way of domination of the capitalist system. New exploitation relationships produced the need of domestication of certain national identities for the extraction of income extraction, monopoly of violence and appropriation of one national identity as a way of legitimacy. In the Spanish case, the Castilian identity was the one to be imposed to the rest of group consciences in the peninsula. This process has been far from perfect, and certain group identities were not fully digested and domesticated by the liberal state. As Catalans, we are a surviving national group from this logic, which constitutes us as a way of opposition to the logic of installation of the liberal capitalistic state. We are an element of resistance towards assimilation, a persisting conscience linked to the ways the common interest of the popular classes have organized. The maintenance of this conscience is directly connected to the practices of the popular classes.
As we previously mentioned, we place the beginning of the national conflict in the Catalan Countries parallel to the building of the Spanish and French nation-state with the development of capitalism in Europe. This modern concept of nation-state needed to achieve the subsequent conditions:
a) The correspondence between society and nation, which means, society as a nationally homogeneous group of individual citizens.
b) The correspondence between nation and state, which means, the state as the political form of the nation, as the institutional expression of national sovereignty upon a defined land, that implies the idea that a nation needs a state to be considered one. The project of the Spanish nation-state responds to the will to build a centralist state in one of the most diverse territories in Europe. It is an intent of nation building that is partially a failure because it doesn’t accomplish the aim to make the hole population identifies themselves as Spanish citizens.
This Spanish nation-state is drawn in the XVIII century as a very centralistic state that concentrates all social power of the peripheries to the center and from the lower classes to the dominant ones. It is exactly thought to protect and maintain the power of the dominant classes of the time, and it based its ideological and political rule in an idea of Spain that is timeless, essentialist, catholic and mimicked to what was “Castilian”. It was then opposed to the social interest and demands of the subordinated classes, the colonies and opposed to the social and cultural reality of the peripheral nations, and identity and structure that left out a big part of the diversity of the land that was under its rule. This process was much more successful in the French state. This state configuration was heavily questioned by forces that wanted to push an alternative idea of the state, as the federal republicans, that imagined a democratic and republican Spain without national oppressions. The inability of this federalist republicans aims and the victory of the Borbonic Restoration, paved the way for the appearance of a popular catalanism that was to mingle with the growing worker’s movement in the basis of the new capitalist social relations. From then on, the national conflict would become one of the structural knots of social and political conflictuality in the Spanish Kingdom to this day.
If we were to divide the history of the conflictuality in the case of the Catalan Countries, we would do it in four periods:
I) The imaginary of the succession war and the federalist attempts:
Originally there were different kingdoms coexisting in the current territory of Spain, being the two main ones the Castilian Kingdom the Catalan-aragones Crown. Coming closer to the modern era, this to crowns had already agreements that pulled them together but with a big autonomy that lead to different social structures. The Castilian Crown was becoming more and more centralist, which drew to the war of succession that had the Catalans giving support to the Austria dynasty to maintain their autonomy from the rule of the bourbons that wanted to erase Catalan particularities such proto-democratic institutions and communal lands. With the defeat of the pro-Austria forces in 1714 and the imposition of the “Nova Planta” decree, the first steps towards a Spanish nation-state were made. It was around these times that different popular revolts took place to defend these Catalan particularities such as the “Germanies”, “Revolta dels Segadors” that gives name and content to the Catalan national anthem or the “Revolta dels Maulets” as well as the resistance in front of the bourbons in the Succession War. The “Nova Planta” decree established the division of the territory in provinces without any relation between them and effort to erase Catalan culture and language. These lead both to the growth of this republican federalism and popular catalanism linked to the working class movements and to the growth of a bourgeois catalanism that was trying to build a identity in front of the centralist Spanish elite without denying tough the sovereignty of the king and the Spanish identity of the Catalan Countries.
II) Civil War and “franquisme” (Francoist dictatorship)
With the Second Republic, political catalanism brings back the “Generalitat de Catalunya” which is a liberal democratic institution that governs the autonomy of Catalonia. This is possible due to the strong growing in the late XIX century and early XX century of different movements that demanded greater autonomy and a specific national status from federalist to independentist that were part of the strong working class and revolutionary left movement of the time. The political differences between the Catalan Countries and other parts of the Spanish State were evident during the Civil War, in which this land was a focus of antifascist and republican resistance and where the social revolution that came after defeating the military coup was stronger. This gives us a clue to why the repression that came with the new fascist regime had in this nation, the revolutionary movements it sustained and its culture and language as one of the main focuses. Being one of the main enemies of the regime meant, together with other focus of resistance, a great deal of killings, exile and imprisonment.
Demonstration with independentist flags and the flag of PSAN Socialist Party for National liberation founded in 1969. On the back “For freedom and against fascism”. Image from 1980.
III) The “democratic” transition to the new autonomic regions configuration:
The late 70s and early 80s are the period known as the transition from the Franco’s regime to the new monarchic liberal democracy. The outline in which this transition came through heavily explains the persistence of the national conflict today. A transition without any rupture to the previous regime, with the dictator dying in bed and being the one appointing the king as the new warrant of the state and the other conditions under which this new system should work. With an idea of a Spanish identity and symbols very much linked to the ones of the regime, no reparation and memory for the atrocities committed and its victims and strong figures of the regime being part now of the democratic institutions. It is a transition done under the threat of a new military coup that brought most of the democratic and leftist forces to undergo the impositions and adapt to a new democratic system that had everything as the dictatorship said “well tied”. The Catalan Countries were divided in three autonomous communities with a constitution that prohibited the federation between them and very limited competences.
IV) The rise of the independentist process in Catalonia:
In the boom of the economic crisis in 2008 that had a major effect in the south of Europe, Catalans responded with two popular responses that are strongly intricate; the 15M movement and the social movements that rise from it (specially housing, public services and the global feminist movement) and the independentist movement. These two responses can not be putted aside, as they were part of the frustration of the impossibilities to transform the 78th Regime (which is the characterization we’ve done of the current system in Spain). Huge corruption cases, the state saving banks before than the people, privatizations, cuttings in rights and social spending and in the Catalan case the cuts to the new Autonomy Status gave the right breeding ground for such a movement to emerge. The independentist left, and its multiple organizations, were one of the resisting spaces to the idea and consensus of a democratic transition, therefore was one of the elements that lead the movement to keep out from assimilation on the new order. Its idea of a national and social revolution being something inseparable causes in the Catalan case had its movement with this breeding ground. That brought a big swift from a movement that was on the margins, with the idea of a liberated nation being non-majority at all and few social struggles all through the 90s and early 2000, to suddenly being able to make huge steps with the strenght it had accumulated throughout that years.
As it had never happened before, sectors of the small and medium catalanist bourgeoisie get involved in the claims of self-determination; partly out of conviction, partially as a way to control the movement. The tensions between this sector that expected and demanded a legal and non-insurrectional path for it and independence that was not inseparable to better conditions for the working classes and a popular based movement that had the ability to overflow them in several moments was a constant of this process. These tensions tended more than ever to the popular and disobedient drive in the celebration of a unilateral referendum in the 1rst of October 2017. After that, state repressions, the lack of stronger organizations and popular institutions and the willingness of the Catalan elite to cancel the most radical elements gave place to a progressive moment of top closure that has been now definitely consumed.
Our idea on the Catalan nation and national liberation:
With the overruling advance of globalization it seemed as the importance of nations and national identities were to necessarily loss weight and meaning, with the lack of sovereignty of nations, to give way to a certain cosmopolitanism of “citizens of the world”. The reality proves us tough that around the world there are still vibrant conflicts around national rights and liberation, being the Catalan Countries one of them. The national question has not lost centrality in the lives of the peoples.
It is national liberation that’s a key element of the strategy and goals of our revolutionary movement, as we understand it as a central element of class struggle in our territory. We are independentist as a consequent way of being socialist and communists. Nations have a symbolical component, they are ideological constructions, but also a very material component in the measure they determine forces, institutions, legal and political structures that are very much concrete and play an important role in the organization of social relations.
The nation has constitutive element such as history, culture and language that are part of the history of resistance of the nation. The free development of these communities and the of the way they deserve to live (language, culture, memory) that it’s denied by the oppressive nation has to be a goal for all revolutionaries. Exactly these elements are the ones that help us build a common project of rupture based in the collective attitudes of the popular masses. We understand this nation building process as the construction of an alternative that is antagonist to the Spanish and French nation-state project, that are the ways in which capitalism unfolds in our territory. It is because of its antagonism that questions such as destroying or folklorising the Catalan language are part of the program of reactionary Spain to pacify the traditionally unruly provinces that still today show very different attitudes in important questions, like the institutional structure of the Spanish state, being the republic still the preferred option in the Catalan Countries. A non-coincident opinion with the rest of Spain. Or as it was the majority opposition to the membership in NATO in Catalonia.
Demonstration of the Youth wing of the Left independentist organization, Arran Jovent.
We don’t conceive the nation as a static concept, not from a romantic vision, but as a social and historical process, related to the material conditions and product of class struggle and political domination dynamics. National identities are an expression of collective identification that produces a society in a determined moment. They don’t always exist, and its existence will not be eternal. We want to confront them in concrete terms because we don’t share essentialist views that understand national identities as a natural phenomenon. That, showing it as a natural phenomenon, is what Spanish ideology tries to do. Explain itself in a naturalized way to hide its character of imposition.
Being Catalan is a diverse identity that doesn’t have a beginning or and end, it’s not written or codified because it is Catalan who wants to be so. It is a subjective element that has heterogeneous expressions throughout the country. The Catalan Countries have to be a non-excluding voluntary identification in a political project that is based on a national resistance culture and a national community in struggle.
In front of the unquestionable unity of Spain as a force to maintain the instruments of domination, exploitation and capital accumulation, the Catalan Countries have to be synonyms with a revolutionary project that has the aim to articulate a collective subject searching political and social transformation. This project is not opposed at all to an internationalist point of view, as has to be the contribution of an international socialist movement and building solidarity between all oppressed people, including the Spanish working class and their struggles.
Current strategies and concepts as well as challenges in practice
The truth is we are in a moment of stagnation on the national conflict, even tough as always it is still latent. As we previously mentioned, there has been an up to bottom closure of the conflict. Posterior to the moments of popular overflow, the tactical unity between the different independentist forces was broken, and several paths were open. At the same time, the Spanish government led by the Socialist Party and Pedro Sanchez took a strategical turn in the approach to the Catalan conflict. The will of certain elements of the independentist leadership to recover stability and control of the situation and the intention of the PSOE to cancel the independentist movement with tools of negotiations and agreements, giving a slow resolution to the repressive situation of the independentist institutional leadership and other small concessions, brought the two main independentist parties in support of this new “progressive government” in Spain. The growth of extreme-right tendencies that was strongly feed by the Spanish narrative towards the independentist process of the treat of a broken Spain that had the participation of the liberal Spanish left of the PSOE, also putted pressure on joining the democratic front to stop fascism. We have characterized this process as the “Operation Reform” that describes this up to bottom closure and passive revolution.
Popular mobilization has deflated between tiredness and lack of results, but mainly for the lack of a strategic horizon that gives meaning to the struggle. After the 1rst of October, the canceled declaration of independence and the response to the imprisonment of the Catalan leaders in 2019 there has not been a clear path to move forward and as for us, the Independentist Left, we haven’t been able to generate an alternative narrative and proposal. We have been stuck between a magical demand of implementation of independence that has brought tones of anti-political perspectives and the pragmatism of the main independentist parties that have abandoned the paths of national conflict for self-determination.
Politically, we can analyze specific lacks of the prior process that explain the current situation. One is the main role of the petite bourgeoisie in the leadership of the process, event ought this has been constantly disputed. That has had as consequences the will of a process that was done with order, under the law and without disobedience, despite they have been forced to do otherwise at some points. That explains the political denouement of resignation to self-determination, as the Spanish state is not willing to give it for free. The other has been the alienation of parts of the working class that has strong links with the Spanish identity, for which the narrative of these sectors made the conflict a matter of an essentialist national identity dispute. This has also been feed from parts of the Spanish left that have characterized this process as a strategy of parts of the Catalan bourgeois to guarantee its rule, situation that does not describe the complexity of the mater. Changing this class correlation of forces is a need for any new onslaught that has tot have popular leadership, as it is the popular classes who have everything to win and nothing to lose in this process. Related to that, the other need is for better preparation towards repression and imposition, with popular institutions and organization in the center.
It is important to take into account the democratic character of the demand for self-determination and the important role the denial of the Spanish state to express the popular will has had in bringing together sectors of the popular classes that might not identify so much culturally and linguistically with catalanism and that is an approach we should not abandon.
Lastly, this has been a process centered around Catalonia that has had different expressions in the other territories that conform the Catalan Countries, with the apparition and then defeat of more progressive governments that demands more autonomy. We need to spreed and build this process all around the country as a way to strengthen ourselves and the political project, that is also disobedient to the imposed frontiers of Spanish and French state.
We are in a moment of doubt on how to proceed, but we maintain strong and clear ideas and goals such as the need of a Socialist and Feminist Republic of the Catalan Countries, the path of self-determination and social revolution to accomplish it and the importance of the Independentist Left as a motor force of this movement.
