I was in Barcelona recently and realised I don't really understand left wing Catalan nationalism. I can get left wing Scottish nationalism, but Catalonia is an economically dominant part of Spain, and seems to have as many right wing politicians as anywhere else. Can anyone explain what the leftist supporters of nationalism want to get out of it?
There are certainly left-wing and right-wing versions of Catalan nationalism and I agree that it can seem odd that left-wingers are Catalan nationalists, when you listen to right-wing Catalan nationalists slagging off people in southern Spain as lazy useless inferior types, who 'don't know how to work' and so on, and explaining that they (the Catalans) don't like paying taxes which 'Madrid' then spends on the poorer, less economically developed parts of Spain. It's a view of Spain that's more than a bit lacking in solidarity! Jordi Pujol, the extraordinarily successful thief and long-term leader of Catalanismo, came out with some pretty extreme stuff about Andalusians.
It would be a mistake, though, to think of the left-wing Catalan nats in general as a bunch of people who were left-wing to start with and, after considering the Catalan national question from their chosen left-wing perspective, came to the conclusion that independence would be conducive to left-wingery. In terms of the individuals concerned, I think many will have grown up as Catalanistas and if left-wingery has influenced their nationalism it is to make them more militant, more pan-Catalanista (they want a new state consisting of the 'Catalan countries': Catalonia+the Valencian Region+the Balearic Islands+a strip of Aragon...) and of course more republican.
(There is a parallel with Basque nationalism. It also has left-wing and right-wing forms and it is the very much the left-wingers who emphasise the importance of joining together all the Basque territories. They want to make a new country consisting of not just the three provinces of the existing Spanish Basque Country but also Navarra and the three French Basque provinces.)
The Catalanista I know best is a man - lets call him P - now in his late 60s who has always been Catalanista. He is a moderate left-winger. He has always opposed Convergencia (the party currently led by Artur Mas), because it is right-wing and corrupt. He grew up under the dictatorship, in a very Catalan place where, despite the regime, everything - home, social life, work, school, the Church - was conducted in Catalan, with the sole exception of the times when the school inspector visited from Madrid. When the inspector was there, the schoolmaster would teach in Spanish. P told me that the first time he had to spend all day in a Spanish-speaking environment was when he was doing his military service. He was posted to a Catalan-speaking place, Mallorca, but of course the language of the army was and is Spanish. He said that at first speaking in Spanish all day made his throat hurt.
If that's your experience, I suppose you are very inclined to see the Spanish as a different nationality and to see your own nation as dominated by - oppressed by - these Spanish foreigners. If, on the other hand, you are Catalan, but a lot younger than P, you will have grown up with stories of the dictatorship and also with a school system designed, both in terms of language policy and in the syllabus (eg, in history & geography), to make you staunchly Catalan and resent Spain.
Some PP provocations seem almost designed to turn Catalans into Catalanistas and Catalanistas into supporters of independence ASAP. My favourite, coz it's a cheeky little rhyme, is from some time ago. When Aznar won one of his election victories (1996, 2000), his supporters chanted:
"¡Pujol, enano, habla castellano!" [Pujol, dwarf, speak Spanish!] Though I think it's funny, it expresses an arrogant mentality which upsets and annoys Catalans and the same centralising Spanish nationalist mentality was perceived when, much more recently, the (then and much-hated) Minister for Education explained that he wanted to "españolizar a los niños catalanes" [to make Catalan children Spanish]. That's just a couple of examples, but many Catalans feel disrespected by 'Madrid' and the Spanish right especially.
They also feel they haven't had their fair share of investment in infrastructure and, for example, they have to pay through the nose to drive on motorways, while in the centre of Spain you don't have to.
So what would a left-wing Catalan nationalist, for example a supporter of ERC or CUP, say in answer to your question? I think he or she would say: national liberation, self-determination for the Catalan-speaking peoples, an end to living under a monarchy, a blow against arrogant chauvinist Spanish nationalism and against the 'Spanish state' and a great encouragement for the Basques, and perhaps in the long term others, to achieve their freedom too.
The Second Republic is a very long time ago, but Spanish politics remains shaped by the opposing lines drawn up in the 1930s that led to the ensuing civil war. In a nutshell, the Spanish right is very hostile to Catalan, Basque, Galician etc aspirations to go their own way and the left is less hostile. At the moment, the Socialist Party is talking about federalism and the right is just talking about the importance of obeying the law.
Looking to the left of the left, the right-on types, the would-be revolutionaries, you find people all over Spain who are very sympathetic to the left-wing nationalists in Catalonia, the Basque Country and so on. This is clear in attitudes to languages. There was a time when radicals (I think this was true of the anarchists of the CNT, for example) valued Spanish as the shared language of the working class. Now right-on types, Anarcho-Wotsits included, strongly tend to insist on using Catalan, Basque, Galician whenever possible. Just one little example: I was in Alicante for part of August. In the capital there, the language you hear on the streets, in the shops, on the buses, in the bars etc etc is Spanish. However, the right-on posters stuck on the walls and right-on banners dangling from balconies, both feminist and lefty ones, were in Valencian. Partly this is a matter of respect for those languages and for those who want to protect and promote those languages - and that's fair enough - but it also reflects a certain view of Spain. In right-on publications in Spain, the term 'Spain' barely appears. It is always 'the Spanish state': a reactionary imposition on the various nations of that area.
For that sort of lefty - whether Catalan, Basque or from elsewhere - 'Spain' connotes reaction, oppression, repression, Franco, monarchy, the Civil Guard and the rest of the armed forces, the National Police dressed for a riot, cultural stultification and right-wing philistinism, PP pig-politicians stuffing their pockets, the antique linguistic chauvinism of telling people they have to speak
'cristiano', sexism, racism, antipathy to '
maricones', nasty little pencil moustaches and being beastly to bulls. People with that vision of Spain would like to dismantle it.
