Spain ’92 / A Medal Year : Culture : Catalonia: A Nation Within a Country : It’s more than a Spanish region. It’s a way of life with a 1,000-year history.

The 11 musicians make reedy sounds with bulbous oboes and bright horns from folding chairs on the steps of Barcelona’s massively Gothic cathedral. The dancers come in all sizes, ages and degrees of ability. They dance in improvised circles--eight, 10 or 20 friends round--holding hands, gently bobbing, heel-and-toe, with fluid grace and enthusiasm.

The folkloric spectacle, a Barcelona weekend tradition, lends winsome texture to the heart of a great Spanish city.

Yet it also sounds a deeper chord. The instruments are not Spanish. Nor is the music. Nor the sardanas dances themselves. And, as dancer and spectator alike remind all comers, neither are the people or their language. They are all Catalan.

For Spain, playing host to the 1992 Games means international recognition and national celebration for a vigorous young democracy taking its place with Europe’s best.

But for most people in Barcelona, the XXV Olympiad is homage to Catalonia, their nation within a country. A host’s pride is catalyst here this summer for a powerful jolt of nationalism.

Catalans increasingly assert their right to be different--most would be happy to do so without declaring full independence from Spain; others want to break totally.

“The world image Barcelona wants for the Olympics is not as a Spanish city but as the capital of Catalonia, its own nation within the Spanish state,” said Miquel de Moragas, head of an Olympic studies center at Barcelona’s Autonomous University.

It’s Cataluna in Spanish, Catalunya in Catalan: 6 million Mediterranean people in the northeastern corner of Spain, the richest part of the country. Barcelona, the capital, is a bigger port than Marseilles or Genoa, and the people of Catalonia earn 25% more than the Spanish average.

Among the Spaniards, the Catalans are a people apart. Psychologist Miquel Strubell sums up supposed national traits this way: “Compared with Spaniards, we are more pragmatic and less dogmatic. We are harder-working, stingy and a bit colder. That’s the stereotype.”

Catalonia’s singularities, including the language and the sardanas, were repressed during the authoritarian decades when Spain was a tight centralist state ruled by Francisco Franco. He died in 1975. In 1977, regional government returned, and Catalonia now elects its own Parliament under a statute of autonomy amicably agreed upon with Madrid in 1979.

Today, most public instruction is in Catalan, which is also the language of government, two television channels, two newspapers and the street. The Catalan flag, blood red stripes on a golden field, is everywhere. The Spanish flag will wave above the Olympic Stadium, but it is hard to find in Barcelona.

“We have a very strong sense of self. I am a Catalan first, and, in the context of Spain, a Spaniard second,” said Josep Lluis Vilaseca, minister of sports in a regional government called the Generalitat de Catalunya and headed by a president.

Last March, President Jordi Pujol, a pragmatic nationalist in power 12 years, easily won a fourth term as head of a center-right regional party called Convergence and Union that won 70 of 135 seats in Parliament. Pujol seeks to extend Catalan self-rule as far as possible without angering Madrid: “To defend Catalonia within the framework of the Spanish state.”

Whatever their party, an overwhelming majority of voters also want Catalonia to remain within Spain: Pujol’s party scrapped a separatist plank before the last election. A minority of independence supporters back the Republican Left Party, which doubled its vote to 8% in March.

“We are not Spaniards but a nation administered by Spain. Madrid is pleasant, but among foreign capitals I prefer Paris,” said party Secretary General Angel Colom, a 40-year-old schoolteacher. Recent polls suggest that 15-30% of the region’s people support eventual Catalan independence. About two of three want more autonomy within Spain.

As Olympic visitors will discover, Catalans’ sense of nationhood is a motherhood issue. It has been for 1,000 years, since Catalans ended Frankish suzerainty.

“Independence is a very weak current in Catalonia. It is not seen as a pragmatic idea among a pragmatic people, but there can be no question of the sense of collective identity,” said historian Joan Culla.

“It is an identity not based on race or religion but on language and culture in the broadest sense--a way of life. The final test is that we think of ourselves as a nation.”

There is no racial or religious component to distinguish Catalans from Spaniards or the French. Indeed, as far as Pujol is concerned, anybody who lives and works in Catalonia is Catalan. The only real test of nationality is language, and that may be what dwells closest to the Catalan soul.

A Latin descendant that sounds like a cross between Spanish and French, the Catalan language was banned in 1714 after Barcelona incautiously sided with Austria against Spain. It survived for more than three centuries as a hearth tongue, mother-to-child, regaining legality only as the Franco era waned. Since then, it has stormed back to fashion.

“Language and nationalism in Catalonia is chicken and egg,” said Strubell, director of the Generalitat’s language office.

Today, Catalan is used as the only language of instruction in about half of the region’s schools, and the rest use a combination of Catalan and Spanish. The 1991 census reports that 68% speak Catalan, up from 64% in 1986, although books and newspapers in Spanish still outsell those in Catalan even in Barcelona.

In addition to Catalonia, the language is also spoken in the Baleric Islands and in neighboring regions of Spain and France. In all, perhaps 8 million people live in a Catalan environment.

Some Catalan patriots, irked because Spain seems to be getting the lion’s share of credit, are agitating for a greater presence at the Games of down-home symbols like the flag and the Catalan anthem. But there is more smoke than fire. “What good is a lot of flags? What is important is to have organized things well. That is what people will notice,” said Generalitat’s Vilaseca.

“We support the Games because they are our Games,” said independentista Colom. Indeed, the canniest visitors to Barcelona this summer will flatter their hosts and profit from the Catalan spirit by simply acknowledging it.

“Anybody displaying even a smattering of Catalan, moltes gracies, can be assured of being even better received,” said language chief Strubell.