As we have seen throughout this study, social and political revolt is a frequent expression in Catalan society and we witnessed a new phase between 2017 and 2019. We have seen also how so often in the political culture of the country, these rebellions and protests have been defeated. A movement that began an explicit push for the independence of Catalonia from Spain experienced a dramatic political defeat in the autumn of 2017. Whilst a sustained series of protests irrupted in the autumn of 2019 following the sentencing of the political leadership of independence to imprisonment by the Spanish Supreme Court, this protest cycle represented the end of a phase of the movement rather than a new beginning. The full range of memoirs and political analysis that has been published since 2017 has demonstrated that the goal of Catalan independence was certain to fail given the existing correlation of forces. These were a state order in Spain that refused to countenance secession; a parliamentary majority for secession, yet one comprised of less than 48 per cent of the vote and the complete absence of international support for an independent Catalonia. It remains the case that the declaration of independence remains universally unrecognised. Furthermore, pro-independence Catalan political elites had differing interpretations of what the push itself signified. For many it represented an authentic attempt at breaking with Spain, whilst for others, the purpose of the movement was to act as a mechanism of pressure on Madrid to extract meaningful concessions that might include an internationally recognised referendum. There remained throughout the process a marked mismatch between public rhetoric and private belief. Whilst Catalan independence was proclaimed in the Catalan parliament on 27 October 2017, within 24 hours, some of the political leadership had fled the country to avoid imprisonment whilst others who remained submitted to arrest warrants. This was one of the least credible declarations of independence in modern history. Not even the Spanish flag was lowered from the Catalan government building.
Explaining the rise of independence
From the late 1970s, it seemed that Catalonia was embarking on a new direction, with autonomy re-established, wealth maintained and self-confidence restored in a Spain that was seeking to build a new democracy. The Europeanisation of Spanish political culture from the mid-1980s seemed also to provide new potential opportunities within the context of European Community membership. The institutional status of Catalan language and culture was transformed post-1980. The new middle class that emerged in Catalonia over the course of the 1970s and 1980s held both the resources of cultural capital and a degree of political power. They were found across newly emerging economic sectors and professions. They were a social cohort who dominated the culture industries. This social sector had disproportionate influence in Barcelona and its dominance was unchallenged in the small towns and countryside. The new cultural elite that emerged in Catalonia post-1975 had been forged in opposition to the state. Many of the leading cadres of cultural and other activism were rapidly incorporated into the new institutional terrain. Thus, political demobilisation and institutionalisation were marked features of the transition and new period of regional autonomy.
For most of the period from 1980 to 2005, the Catalan question seemed to be resolvable within the contours of Spain’s semi-federal autonomous regime. It was political violence in the Basque Country that attracted the greatest national and international attention. As we have noted, sources of discontent had gradually been growing in some sectors of Catalan society but as late as 2005, fewer than 15 per cent of Catalans expressed support for the independence of the country. A left-liberal Catalan coalition government which displaced the Catalan nationalists in 2003 began a process known as the revising of the Catalan statute of autonomy. Due to the unexpected political victory of Spanish socialism in March 20004, in the context of a terrorist attack, an embittered conservative Partido Popular began to use the Catalan question to erode the PSOE government in Madrid. Thus, what in many respects were technical aspects of Catalan autonomy became highly politicised. Popular interest in the autonomy debate were low and barely half of the Catalan electorate approved the measure in a referendum in June 2006. The Partido Popular requested the Supreme Court adjudicate on the constitutionality of the revised autonomy statute in Catalonia. In the midst of this political impasse, the global economic crisis broke out in 2008 and the Spanish economy was one of the hardest hit in Europe. In the context of an increasingly paralysed Catalan political class, nationalist social movements began to take the initiative. Between 2009 and 2011, self-organised micro-referendums were organised throughout the Catalan interior and seemed to demonstrate that support for independence was rapidly growing. In early July 2010, after four years of deliberations, in the context of a major economic crisis profoundly disrupting Catalan society, the Spanish Supreme Court declared a number of elements of the Catalan statute to be unconstitutional. This judgement also touched on important symbolic areas such as the Catalan language and the right of Catalonia to call itself a nation. A broad cross-party and collective societal response interpreted this judgement as an affront and soon after over one million people marched in the centre of Barcelona proclaiming: ‘We are a nation. We decide’.
15M and sovereignty
Catalonia has long been one of the richest regions of Spain and the middle classes within the region enjoyed comparative privilege. The province of Girona, deeply imbricated with pro-secessionist sentiment, is the richest region in all of Spain. This social sector, comparatively privileged, was traumatised between 2009 and 2010 by the arrival of the intense economic crisis. With the arrival of the crisis, Spain became a laboratory for new forms of political organisation, culminating in the mobilisation that began in the city of Madrid, becoming known as the 15M movement, due to its foundation on 15 May 2011. The movement rapidly spread throughout Spain, and Barcelona became one of the primary locations in terms of the movement’s influence. The 15M emerged in a context of crisis, property bubbles and their subsequent implosions, corruption and conflicts over urban re-zoning and land use. Broadly middle class in terms of their activist and organisational base, these movements also reflected the fact many of new forms of employment, including that of once stable professional sectors, were precarious. Although the 15M movement and Catalan sovereignty did not seem to have much in common, they did share the rejection of the status quo and an ability to mobilise the citizenry. 15M and Catalan independence became in scale some of the most important social and political movements in contemporary Europe. The 15M had a much shorter duration whilst the Catalan sovereignty movement lasted a decade. Finally, between 2012 and 2020, electoral support for Catalan independence movement consistently obtained between 35 per cent and 48 per cent of the vote in a range of elections. In 2021, independence did obtain 52 per cent of the vote, but this was also with the loss of over half a million votes, with a substantially reduced turnout in an election held in the context of the Covid pandemic.
The ritual of independence
The Catalan movement for independence was highly unusual until 2017 in its construction of an optimistic culture of prediction with its claim that the independence of Catalonia was not just a probability but was imminent. Whilst the response and mobilisation of July 2010 can be termed reactive, the development of the Diadas from 2012 can be framed within this optimistic narrative of the future. The street became the stage and the central location of pro-independence protest after 2012. The Diada became the annual ritual of Catalan independence. This was a unique and innovative form of display, visual vocabulary and political communication through the annual Diadas. The Catalan secessionist movement had at its disposal a ready-made toolkit of mechanisms of communication and organisation. The professionalised choreography of patriotic performance was used to express the organisation’s power and mobilising capacity. The broader Catalan sovereignty movement until 2017 represented a romantic revolt in politics. It was notably lacking in sophistication or rigorous political assessment, and its intellectual cheerleaders were remarkably naïve in their relentlessly upbeat analysis. Seven successive and vast mass mobilisations, usually totalling one million, each September since 2012 demonstrated their political limitations in the autumn of 2017. The movement had often seemed to interpret its successful annual mobilisations as themselves providing the legitimacy to break with Spain. The Catalan sovereignty movement finally reached a strategic end point in October 2017.
The autumn of 2017
Although it had not formed part of the electoral programme of the pro-independence coalition that won the Catalan regional elections in September 2015, a referendum on independence later became government policy and was promised for 1 October 2017. The Spanish government immediately declared such an action to be illegal and invalid. Prior to this event, a non-binding consultation on independence, held on 9 November 2014, had revealed there was overwhelming pro-independence sentiment in the interior and small towns of Catalonia. However, turnout was around 40 per cent, which was broadly replicated on 1 October 2017. The greater Barcelona area and the city of Tarragona remained the main zones where support for independence is clearly a minority political position. Given the demographic transformation of Catalonia in the 1950s and 1960s, this is not surprising. On both occasions, consultation and referendum, voters against independence simply did not participate. However, the event in 2014 had been tolerated by the Spanish authorities; in 2017, the full weight of the Spanish state was used to prevent a referendum. Yet in a situation where some two million or more Catalans turned out to vote, 1 October 2017 was a political triumph. Spanish police violence not only made the event a global news story but also seemed to give an international moral victory to the Catalan cause. In Catalonia itself, outrage and collective shock at the police violence and the subsequent imprisonment of the civic and political leadership led into a late radicalisation of the movement. The logistics for the referendum on 1 October 2017 was supported by political activists who began to develop a strategy of resistance which occurred with varying degrees of intensity in the next two years. New participatory actions including transport disruption, minor acts of sabotage and a more confrontational political style emerged. Civil disobedience, which had been deemed unnecessary by the pro-independence movement through its repeated affirmation of its peaceful values, became an increasing part of the repertoire of the Catalan sovereignty movement after 2017.
Backlash from Spanish nationalism
The events of 2017 in particular and during the political cycle until 2019 also had a profound societal impact across Spain. One consequence was the explicit re-emergence of an intolerant Spanish nationalism. On the evening of 3 October 2017, King Felipe VI gave a belligerent televised speech against Catalan independence and notably never mentioned the hundreds injured in the Spanish police violence. This speech by the Spanish king seemed to provide the tone for the years to come as much of the Spanish media landscape and the country’s political and legal authorities interpreted the Catalan events as an affront to the honour and integrity of Spain. Anger was also expressed at the framing of Spain internationally as a country of harsh police repression. The Spanish government, for the first time in the history of the autonomous system, removed the Catalan government from office and called new elections. By 2019, a newly emergent political force, Vox, had capitalised on the Spanish nationalist backlash and become a new and influential actor in the party system in Spain. The Spanish legal authorities, often acting as a parallel power structure, have been unending in their pursuit against apparent threats to Spanish unity. In this context, the options for political accommodation between Madrid and Barcelona and a meaningful overhaul of the Spanish Constitutional settlement of 1978 have receded. The early 2020s are marked by a period of stasis in terms of reform and wars of position between resurgent Spanish nationalism and a Catalan independence movement on the defensive.
Endgame or pause?
The movement for Catalan independence, that was already able to mobilise hundreds and thousands in 2006 and 2007 in two separate protests, has had a marked impact on Catalan political culture. All political parties must articulate their position on the sovereignty question. The issues that produced the rise of independence: concern at the erosion of the Catalan language, economic deficits, comparative decline, middle-class discontent, remain unresolved. However, the dramatic and rapid growth experienced by the movement reached a ceiling and the independence cause remains unable to craft a sustained and clear social majority. With a Spanish state system unwilling to consider the independence of Catalonia, it remains difficult to envisage the achievement of secession without what is termed in the literature a super-majority. Yet support for secession amongst for the young had stalled by the early 2020s, which closes off the possibility of an inevitable demographic route to independence. Voters under 30, like their counterparts elsewhere, are moving away from traditional fixed identity categories. This may be temporary or may mark a permanent shift in identity construction. It is evident that issues such as climate change are increasingly of much greater concern to this cohort. Over 40 per cent of the Catalan population live along the Catalan coast and rising sea levels have grave potential for upheaval. Loss of flora and fauna has intensified whilst forest and other fires have increased in frequency and intensity. Whether this period of the early 2020s marks a permanent end to the hope for independence of Catalonia or merely a pause before the re-appearance of re-vitalised political programme for secession will ultimately depend on the character of the political system in Madrid and its willingness to accommodate difference. Spanish political reality is plural and multi-lingual and the return to political power in Madrid of an intolerant Spanish nationalism can only increase Catalan alienation from Spain. Throughout this book, we have seen how reactions to specific events, grievances and causes can produce dramatic political reactions. We have also seen that Catalan society has internalised a number of social and political values, including a collective sense of justice and the demand for recognition. Should many Catalans feel further political humiliation in the future, historical tradition points to a renewed expression of the deeply rooted Catalan tradition of revolt.