Spanish Nationalists : Catalonia: A Benign Bid for Change

A visitor may have a difficult time these days finding the Plaza of Spain and its bullring in Barcelona, the great metropolis of the Spanish region of Catalonia. Catalan nationalists, armed with spray paint, have blacked out the objectionable noun Spain from many street signs directing traffic to the plaza.

The vandalism is symbolic in two ways. Relations between the Spanish government in Madrid and the Catalan regional government in Barcelona are tense. Yet dissatisfied Catalans, unlike extremists in the Basque region of Spain, show their anger in benign and democratic forms of protest like speeches and graffiti.

Catalan nationalists do not murder Spanish policemen and soldiers. Catalan nationalism is as strong a force within Spain as Basque nationalism, but Catalonia has been spared all the violence and terror of the Basque provinces.

‘Different’ Spaniards

“We accept, we agree that we are Spaniards, but we are Spaniards in a different form than the other Spaniards,” said Jordi Pujol, president of the Generalitat, as the Catalan regional government is known. “We are Spaniards, being Catalans.

“We want to remain Spaniards,” he went on during an interview in his office in the 15th-Century Palace of the Generalitat. “But we also want that our language, our culture, our traditional political institutions, and our reality as a different people be accepted in Spain.”

Basque leaders may say much the same thing, but they usually speak with a bitterness that comes out of a desperation over the weakening of their culture.

“Comparing Basques and Catalans is like comparing Finns and Italians,” said Judge Alfons Quinta, the former director of the region’s Catalan-language television. “We are two very different people. We Catalans have been an open, Europeanized, sophisticated people. They have been a closed society, very rural, only partly schooled.”

Extremely Confident

Despite all of their troubles with Madrid, the Catalans seem extremely confident about their culture and place in history. Most Catalans will speak to a visitor in Spanish, but they speak to each other in Catalan. It does not seem phony on Sunday evenings for several hundred Catalans to form circles in the Plaza Sant Jaume in the old Gothic Quarter of Barcelona, lift their clasped hands high and slowly dance their traditional sardanas.

Language explains a good deal about the place of the Catalans in Spanish society. For most of the four decades of his dictatorship, the late Francisco Franco tried to stamp out Catalan, a Latin language closer to the French dialect Languedoc than to Castilian Spanish. Catalans were even forbidden to baptize their children with Catalan names or chisel Catalan names on tombstones.

Despite this oppression, the Catalan language survived with strength. Survival was helped by Catalonia’s easy acceptance of immigrants who came from other parts of Spain to work in the factories of Barcelona. Unlike Basques, who turned their backs on outsiders from the rest of Spain, the Catalans encouraged the immigrants to speak the Catalan language and absorbed them into Catalan culture.

More than 40% of Barcelona’s 3 million people were born outside Catalonia. Some of the proudest Catalans today, in fact, are the children and grandchildren of non-Catalan Spaniards.

After the death of Franco in 1975 and the grant of some autonomy to Catalonia, the Catalan language won legal status. The 1979 Statute of Catalan Autonomy states that “the Catalan language is the official language of Catalonia in the same way that Castilian Spanish is the official language of all of Spain.”

Catalan officials insist that use of the language is widespread. According to Joan Carreras i Marti, the editor of the Grand Catalan Encyclopedia, 68% of the 6 million people in Catalonia speak Catalan and 85% understand it. But not everyone has the same command or comprehension.

Spanish Speakers’ Complaints

Some complaints are being heard from Spanish-speaking residents who have difficulty communicating with their regional government or from Spanish-speaking officials and teachers who fear they may lose advancement because of their weak Catalan.

“The problem is a serious problem and a dangerous problem,” said Pujol. “It could cause fracture in the community.” He said the regional government does not want to force older people to learn Catalan but prefers to concentrate on educating the young in Catalan in schools. In 10 or 15 years, he estimated, the problem would then disappear.

The relationship between Catalonia and Madrid has been worsened by the relationship between the easy-going and personable 55-year-old Pujol and Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez of Spain. The Gonzalez government has started legal proceedings against Pujol and some of his business associates on charges that they mismanaged funds and defrauded investors in their running of Pujol’s Banca Catalana before he became president of the Generalitat.

Pujol, who heads a right-of-center Catalan nationalist party called Convergence and Unity, accuses Socialist Gonzalez of trying to crush him politically. Many Catalans agree, insisting that Pujol may be guilty of mismanagement but not of dishonesty.

“The problem of Jordi Pujol as a banker,” said an official who who knows Pujol well, “was that he could never figure out that a dollar is worth more than a quarter.”

Instrument of Nationalism

Others point out that Pujol, who started the bank with his family wealth after serving a prison term for anti-Franco activities, always used the bank as an instrument of Catalan nationalism, not as a business enterprise.

A professor recalled, for example, that, when he needed money to start a special faculty in a Barcelona university to rival another faculty controlled by the Franco dictatorship, he went to the bank and received a grant from Pujol. “I do not know whether it came from his pocket or from the bank,” the professor said. “But he gave us the grant.”

Even without the Banca Catalana issue, Catalonia has its problems with Madrid. Most Catalans feel that the Gonzalez government has delayed full implementation of Catalan autonomy out of fear of upsetting the right-wing Spanish army with its traditional contempt for regional autonomy. Even a Socialist like Mayor Pasqual Maragall of Barcelona seems to agree that the Socialists in Madrid allow less autonomy than promised.

“Most of the (Catalan) people would accept the Spanish Constitution and the Catalan Statute of Autonomy as they are,” Maragall said in a recent lecture at Oxford University in England, “provided that the central government interpreted them open-mindedly.”

The Pujol government complains that it has no taxing power. Madrid collects taxes in Catalonia and then hands out a share to a supplicant regional government. This allows Catalonia little bargaining strength.

Must Beg for Money

“We must negotiate each year,” said Pujol, “but with the money in the pockets of our interlocutor.” The Generalitat spends more money than it receives and must either issue bonds or beg for more money from Madrid.

In the March referendum on keeping Spain within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Catalonia joined the Basque area as the only regions rejecting NATO. The Catalan vote, like that in the Basque region, was obviously directed far more against Gonzalez and Madrid than against NATO.

The Catalan quest for autonomy is deeply rooted in history. In the middle ages, Catalonia was a powerful trading nation with consulates throughout the Mediterranean. When King Ferdinand of Aragon (which included Catalonia) married Queen Isabel of Castile in 1479, Catalonia had a status equal to the rest of Spain.

In the 18th Century, however, the leaders of Catalonia chose the wrong side in a war of succession to the Spanish throne. A suppression of Catalonia’s autonomous rights followed its defeat.

The force of the idea of nationalism in the late 19th Century revived Catalonia’s demands for autonomy. But these were not satisfied until the Spanish Republic of the 1930s. Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War then quashed the autonomy.

Nationalism Revived

Catalonia fought bitterly to the end of the war in the doomed defense of the republic. Franco decided to punish and purify the region later, hoping to tear out Catalan culture. Franco failed, and a revival of Catalan nationalism and culture has accompanied Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy in the last 10 years.

The revival of Catalan culture, however, may have hurt the reputation of Barcelona as a great European city. Barcelona was long regarded as the main cultural center of Spain, overshadowing Madrid. This was especially true during the Franco Era when Madrid was a backward city closed to the ideas of Europe. Barcelona, open and progressive, was the center of Spanish music, literature, and art.

But the transition from dictatorship to democracy has transformed the life of Madrid, setting off a cultural boom. Many outsiders, in fact, now look on Madrid as the center of Spanish culture. This may be a hasty judgment, but there is little doubt that Barcelona is losing its dominance. Some analysts believe, in fact, that Barcelona, a city with half the population of Catalonia, will be regarded in a few years mainly as the cultural center of Catalonia, not Spain.

Many Catalans believe this trend will be reversed if Barcelona is selected as the host for the Olympics in 1992, the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. The Barcelona world’s fairs of 1888 and 1929 led to huge construction programs and heady economic times here, and many Catalans hope that the Olympics will do the same.

There might be some poetic justice in the choice of Barcelona. Barcelona had been selected to host the 1936 Olympics. But, when the Spanish Civil War erupted, the International Olympics Committee shifted the site to Berlin.

Stanley Meisler, Times bureau chief in Paris, was recently in Catalonia.