Paisos Catalans

By conventional standards, the Paisos Catalans is not a nation. The New Principality of Catalonia (including the provinces of Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, Tarragona, and Balears) does lie at the core of the Paisos Catalans and is certainly a highly visible Catalanophone polity. This principality, however, does not include the region of Valencia (Valencia, Alacant, Castelló), much less the French region of Pyrénées-Orientales, the Principality of Andorra, or the Sardinian city of L'Alguer. The Principality itself is not a proper nation-state, but rather a self-governing territory of the Kingdom of Spain. Despite this extreme political fragmentation and lack of complete political independence, however, the Paisos Catalans constitute the homeland of the thriving Catalan nation, and the Principality of Catalonia its core.

The lands that make up the Paisos Catalans share a long and cosmopolitan history. The native Iberians were followed by Phoenician, Greek and Phoenician immigrants who established trading cities along the Catalonian coast. In the 3rd century BCE, the area fell under Roman rule and remained Roman until the future Paisos Catalans' conquest by the Goths and Alans circa 470 CE. After an interval of Muslim rule in the 8th century, most of the region was conquered by Charlemagne in the early 9th century. Frankish counts subsequently ruled Catalonia and made it an independent domain. Under Frankish rule the city and the surrounding region became integrated into the rule of the powerful Counts of Barcelona. In 1137 the Principality was united with the kingdom of Aragón, and was joined in 1319 by Valencia and the Balearics -- both conquered from the Moors and resettled mostly by Catalan immigrants. (At this time, Andorra was placed under a joint protectorate of the Roman Catholic Church in the person on the Archbishop of La Seu d'Urgell and the Count of Béarn, later supplanted by the King of France.) This Barcelona-centered federation developed into a major industrial and trading center in the Mediterranean, while the young Catalan language became widely used throughout the Mediterranean by the 14th century.

After the union of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile in 1479, the Spanish crown maintained a loose administrative hold over its component realms. Neither the Crown nor Catalan separatists managed to break this loose administrative hold until the early 18th century despite notable armed conflicts such as the War of Catalan Separation (1640-52) until the War of the Spanish Succession, when Catalonia sided with the Anglo-Hapsburg coalition against the Spanish crown. The signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 opened the way for the reincorporation of Catalonia into the Spanish state with the support of some Catalans. In September 1714, after a long siege, Barcelona fell, and Catalonia's formal constitutional independence came to an end as Philip V abolished Catalonia's existing government institutions, implemented Spanish laws, and stripped the Catalan language of its official standing.

Catalonia remained quiescent until the second half of the nineteenth century, when the region experienced a dramatic resurgence as the focal point of Spain's industrial revolution. A period of economic, cultural and national recovery began, known as the Renaixença (Renaissance). Catalan was reborn as a language of literary culture through the poetry contest known as the Jocs Florals and the works of distinguished figures, not least of which was Buenaventura Carlos Aribau, whose 1833 Oda a la patria is one of modern Catalan's best poems. Other celebrated Catalan writers of the era included the epic writer Mosén Jacinto Verdaguer and the poet and dramatist Ángel Guimerá. Through these works, a new emphasis was placed on the Catalan language as the key to Catalan cultural distinctiveness. Catalan nationalism was supported by the nascent Catalan bourgeoisie as a solution to Catalonian particularism that coupled political and cultural autonomy with economic integration with the rest Spain. (The non-Spanish Catalans -- in Roussillon, in Sardinia, in Andorra, and in the growing Catalan immigrant communities of France and South America -- were largely unaffected by this growing nationalism.)

The Renaixença raised awareness of the need to draw up rules on spelling and grammar. The 1907 founding of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans (Institute of Catalan Studies) led to the language being codified through the publication of Normes ortogràfiques (Spelling Rules) in 1913, the Diccionari ortogràfic (Spelling Dictionary) in 1917, and the Gramàtica catalana (Catalan Grammar) in 1918. The net result of these reforms was to establish a homogenous written and spoken Catalan language, despite the persistence of certain regional dialects of Catalan. Outside of Valencia, where unique circumstances have created a distinct Valencian-Catalan identity, all Catalans share a common literary standard with idiomatic preferences that reflect usage in Barcelona and the Principality, a language entirely capable of serving the needs of a modern people. This, in turn, spurred demands for the Catalan language to be placed on a position of complete equality -- or even superiority -- to Castilian Spanish inside the frontiers of the Spanish Paisos Catalans. Despite the existence of a violent anarchist fringe to Catalan nationalism, by and large Catalan nationalists were peaceful and not opposed to the federalization of the Spanish state. There were few outright separatists as there were in Ireland and Poland: Although Spanish centralists remained quite powerful into the 20th century, metropolitan Spain's steady democratization of made it increasingly difficult for Spain to resist moderate Catalan demands.

The First World War gave Catalan nationalism the chance to mature. As Spain's economic competitors elsewhere in Europe were forced to divert their industrial production and agricultural goods towards the needs of the war, advanced industrial Catalonia prospered as never before. By the time that the war ended, Catalonia had made permanent economic gains through its thriving agricultural peasant cooperatives, modernized corporations, and family-owned conglomerates such as that of the Selforts. This new wealth made it impossible for Madrid to ignore the demands of Catalan nationalists, particularly after the 1922 sale of Cuba to the United States alienated the Catalonian industrialists who had been the major pro-Spanish forces in the region. Accordingly in 1928, under the terms of that year's liberal federalist constitution, Catalonia was granted the right to have its own chief minister and autonomous parliamentary government -- this latter known as the Generalitat -- within the framework of the Spanish state. Following a referendum, the decision was made to include the Catalan-populated Balearics province along with the four traditional provinces of Catalonia to form an entity known as the New Principality of Catalonia. The New Principality constituted one of 15 different autonomous regions inside Spain; unlike many others, though, not only did Catalonia have a strongly distinctive culture but it had a large population and a modern economy, each more than adequate for financing a self-governing region. Under the terms of the 1928 constitution, the Generalitat was given administrative authority over the Principality's internal affairs as well as the right to collect taxes both for the Spanish government and for the Principality, to finance the Generalitat's own programs. Perhaps most importantly, the Generalitat was also given authority over language policy, in particular, the power to promote the Catalan language as co-equal inside the Principality with Castilian Spanish.

As the 20th century progressed, most matters proceeded in Catalonia as in the other industrialized areas of Europe. In the 1930's, the Paisos Catalans shared in both the sufferings of the Great Depression and in the gradual Europe-wide Keynesian economic reflation, while in the Second World War Catalonian industry played a vital role in equipping Spanish and Italian military forces. The Principality enjoyed, in the quarante glorieuses, an unbroken period of economic growth that soon placed the region in the forefront of European affairs and attracted (over the entire period) some 1.4 million immigrants from elsewhere in Spain. Throughout these periods, though, the Principality was marked by the struggle to improve the status of the Catalan language. This task, though popular internally, was complicated by Catalan's historical marginalization and the very large number of Hispanophone immigrants attracted to prosperous Catalonia; later, the development of French and Spanish into leading lingua franche threatened Catalan, still a relatively minor language. Tensions also existed with the Spanish state, which often accused the Generalitat of trying to establish the Principality as unilingual in Catalan.

The first linguistic policies adopted by the Generalitat were well within the powers granted to it in 1928. Since the Catalan language had complete equality with Castilian Spanish, the Generalitat required that all government officials be able to communicate with the public in Catalan. Unilingual Hispanophones were accordingly either educated in Catalan or replaced by bilinguals. This principle, in turn, was used to establish Catalan as a language regularly used by courts and the police, while the Generalitat and the regional parliament conducted their internal affairs and public debates only in Catalan. One major step was the creation of a public Catalan-medium education system to which all children resident in Catalonia had a right to attend, while the initiation, in 1948, of a program of subsidies to Catalan-language mass media spurred the development of Catalan-language mass media. Though these measures contributed greatly to the linguistic normalization of the Principality, a wave of Hispanophone immigration in the 1950's and 1960's awoke new fears for the Catalan language's future even as Catalan nationalism grew. In 1965, a broad majority of the Catalan parliament approved the Language Policy Law (la Llei de Politica Linguistica). This law promoted the use of Catalan in all significant sectors of society: public administration, the legal system, the mass media, culture and entertainment industry, business and commerce, and education. Among other measures, the law called for: Catalan-language quotas in the electronic mass media; an increase in films dubbed in Catalan; mandatory Catalan-language signage for all public and private entities operating in Catalonia; and, the promotion of Catalan in labour relations. This law caused enormous controversy, not only in the Principality but in Spain as a whole, owing to fears that an exclusionary language law might signal the beginning of the Spanish state's dissolution. The Generalitat and Catalan nationalists responded by arguing that since there was no fear that the New Principality's residence would lose their fluency in Spanish, the Generalitat was obliged to promote Catalan in order to ensure the basic fluency of all residents of the Principality in both of the Principality's official languages, and appealed to the New Principality's rapidly growing autonomy.

Elsewhere in the Paisos Catalans, the Catalan language had widely varying statuses. In the French département of Pyrénées-Orientales and the Spanish autonomous region of Valencia, the Catalan language had gradually acquired official status and government recognition in the 1930's and 1940's. However, Catalanophones in both regions were wary of identifying their language as "Catalan," owing to fears that such an identification might cause the Principality to make unjustified claims upon their loyalty. In Valencia, the local dialect of Catalan was officially called "Valencià" in an effort to emphasize the language's indigenous roots, while some local patriots even tried to create a Valencià literary language distinct from the Catalan. In Pyrénées-Orientales, the French government and the sizable Francophone population were willing only to allow Catalanophones to organize their own, parallel, Catalan-language institutions; every effort was taken to avoid any role for Catalan in public life. In both regions, Catalan remained the main language of almost half of each region's population, but remained exposed to the possibility of extinction. In L'Alguer, linguistic consciousness among that city's Catalanophones was late to form, even with the arrival of self-proclaimed language advocates from elsewhere in the Paisos Catalans in the 1950's; all Sardinians, Italophones, Sardophones, and Catalanophones alike, were simply too poor to develop much of an interest in language politics.

Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, the status of the Catalan language varies between the different component regions of the Paisos Catalans. Out of the total regional population of 11 million people, almost 9.5 million are estimated to be fluent in Catalan. In the Principality, out of a total population of 6.3 million people, census figures report that 6.1 million (97%) understand Catalan, 5.3 million (84%) can speak Catalan, 4.9 million (78%) can read it, and 4.3 million (73%) can write it. Fluency in Catalan is highest in the provinces of Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona, with their relatively small immigrant populations, and lowest in the provinces of Barcelona and the Balearic Islands owing to their large immigrant populations (respectively, 29% and 38% of each province's population). Nonetheless, throughout the Principality Catalan remains the dominant language of education (88% of schoolchildren are instructed either mainly or entirely in Catalan) and government, as well as in some sectors of the mass media such as publicly-owned broadcast media. Privately-owned broadcast media, Euronet sites, and newspapers are as likely to be published in Spanish as in Catalan, though the thriving Catalonian publishing industry did produce, on average, almost seven thousand different Catalan-language titles in each year of the 1990's. Too, recent immigrants to the Principality -- Algerians, West Africans, Puerto Ricans -- quickly gain fluency in the Catalan language. The situation for the Catalan language in the New Principality seems to be quite healthy.

Circumstances in Valencia, Roussillon, and Andorra are less favourable to Catalan. Each region has been marked by historical patterns of bilingualism, usually with a Catalan-speaking peasantry and an urbanized population of either Hispanophones or Francphones. As a consequence of this and large-scale immigration over the past half-century, in each region barely 40% of the population professes fluency in Catalan. The situation is marginally better in Andorra, where Catalan is the official state language and a Catalan-language public education system has been in operation since the 1950's, but if it was not for the presence of the Principality the situation of Catalan would be quite bleak. As for L'Alguer, despite the rapid growth of ties between that city and the rest of the Paisos Catalans that include bilateral migration, the Catalan language is severely threatened by its status as a vanishingly small minority language without (like Italian) a recent historical legacy of power.

As elsewhere in the industrialized world, Catalan identity has moved away from earlier criteria of biological descent to the adoptive model -- the conscious choice first defined by Renan -- of Catalan identity. In the Principality and elsewhere, modern Catalans generally define as Catalans those people who are fluent in the Catalan language and who feel an identification with their Catalan homeland (whether one of its component regions or the whole Paisos Catalans). This Catalan identity can certainly coexist with other national identities, if unexpectedly: The same poll in August of 1999 that 58% of the Principality's population felt more Catalan than Spanish also revealed that 73% of the Principality's population nonetheless felt proud to be Spanish. Despite growing concerns over the new, non-Spanish immigrants present throughout the region, Catalans feel confident in the ability of their culture to absorb these.

Since the 1970's, the Paisos Catalans have seen substantial changes, thanks in large part to the consolidation of the European Confederation. The dissolution of the British and Italian federal states into their component units in the early 1970's was not repeated in the western Mediterranean. However, the rapid growth of trans-frontier regionalism did affect the area quite significantly. The Initiative Pyrénéen, launched in 1973 by the Spanish regions and French districts on either side of the Franco-Spanish frontier with the blessing of both national governments, was but the first of numerous pacts and accords signed between different regional governments under the aegis of the Confederation. The Accords des Pyrénées Orientales, signed by the Principality, the département of Pyrénées-Orientales, and Andorra, established for the first time since the Middle Ages a common regional political framework.

To be sure, none of these accords bypassed the nation-state level; each component of the Paisos Catalans is more dependent (financially, politically, economically) on its respective nation-state than on the other, while Spanish, French, and Sardinian sovereignty over their respective Catalan territories remained unchallenged. Nonetheless, these pacts created a new decentralized linking between the different parts of the Paisos Catalans that allowed at least an attenuated form of unity. In the past quarter-century, this unity has been strengthened by the growing unity of the area of the European Confederation's western Mediterranean regions (Spain, southern France, Italian states, Algeria), both in the prosperity that fueled the creation of a prosperous consumer society and in the post-War privations common to the entire world. Ever since the Renaixença, Catalans knew that for their nation to survive they had to embrace modernity and join worldwide dialogues. As it turned out, this knowledge allowed the Catalans to become preadapted to the new environment of the Confederation.

In the early 21st century, the Paisos Catalans is a prosperous region by world standards. As always, the Principality leads in economic development; not only does it possess a highly diversified agriculture that includes wine making, grains, citrus fruits, and livestock, but its industrial sector centered upon the production of textiles and construction materials remains lively despite foreign competition, and the Principality's thriving advanced manufacturing sector that produces plastics, consumer electronics, and precision instruments. Tourism is newly important, based as much on the beach resorts of the Costa Brava and the ski resorts of the Pyrénées (Catalan Pirineus) as upon the architectural beauties of Barcelona and Tarragona. Moreover, the Principality's metropolis and capital Barcelona is the most important financial and publishing center of Spain and a Mediterranean major port and cultural centre. Roussillon and Valencia are marginally less developed, but each region prospers handsomely from tourism and vinticulture, while Andorra (sovereign and a Confederation member-state since 1978) has a modest financial industry stemming from its status as a tax shelter. Although long-term economic prediction are, as always, more of an art than a science, economists are generally confident that the Paisos Catalans will share in Europe's rattrapage to ITA-standard First World living standards, indeed that it might well lead Europe owing to its extensive trade and growing links with the Union's Aragonese.

Over time, the influence of the Paisos Catalans -- in Spain, in the western Mediterranean, and beyond -- seems likely to grow. The gradual development of Spain since 1928 -- particularly after the 1966 constitutional reforms -- into a true federation of regions has given both the New Principality and Valencia effective internal independence, complete with near-complete fiscal autonomy and direct representation the European Confederation's institutions. Along with other regions of Spain -- in particular, Bascongadas, Madrid, and Asturias -- these two major components of the Paisos Catalans successfully resist the demands of the poorer regions of Spain for the Spanish government to force the richer regions to provide larger subsidies to the poorer, and to strip the powers of the autonomous regions to force their cooperation. The Girona Proposals set forth in 1997 by leading Catalan nationalist Jordi Pujol, which would effectively transform the Spanish federal state into a confederation of sovereign regions akin to the Confederation of the Isles, are becoming even more plausible.

Further, demographic changes are reinforcing the strength of the Paisos Catalans. In the period from 1962 to 1982, the New Principality of Catalonia increased its share of the population by seven points (from 18.1 to 25.3) as Spain's population shifted dramatically from the poorer rural regions to the much richer and more urbanized ones. This population shift has lately been accelerated by the high birth rate in the New Principality; unlike in the rest of Spain, where fertility rates remain far below replacement, in the Principality the average fertility rate over 1995-2000 is 1.78 and continues to increase. Thus, even with extensive immigration to the rest of Spain, it is easy to predict that there will emerge a growing gap between a relatively young Principality, and a rapidly aging rest of Spain. Current demographic projections suggest that in 2030, out of an estimated total of 37.6 million Spanish, at least nine million will live in the New Principality of Catalonia. (Valencia is expected to undergo similar demographic trends to Catalonia; combined, the New Principality and Valencia will have a combined population of 12 million in 2030.) This population shift, along with the Paisos Catalans' anticipated accelerated economic growth and growing European profile, cannot help but to make the Paisos Catalans even more prominent than they already are.