8
The establishment of the Franco regime in Catalonia represented the harshest experience of the modern period for much of Catalan society. The Francoist state sought to obliterate dissent, which was pursued with brutal violence, including the violent repression of organised labour and the Republican supporting peasantry. Cultural and linguistic repression was but one additional element in this process. The full incorporation of Catalonia into the Spanish fatherland began with the prohibition of all that marked out Catalonia as culturally and politically distinct. All cultural and political symbols associated with the Republican period were eliminated. This was compounded by a public erasure of the Catalan language. This was the language then used by over 80 per cent of the population. The Franco political project sought to create in years what had taken the French state more than a century to achieve, a culturally homogeneous, monoglot population. The regime’s view of Spanish unity was premised on the assumption that there existed a historic Spanish nation which incorporated all within the frontiers of the Spanish state. Recognition could be permitted to regional sentiment on a folkloric level, but any suggestion that Catalonia possessed the attributes of a nation was anathema to those that rallied to Franco.
Local support for the new regime
Yet a view that Francoism was imposed on an overwhelmingly resistant Catalonia is a simplification, as the civil war as fought in Catalonia has already shown. There were important social sectors that remained deeply hostile to Republican ideals. Even so, few Catalans were found at the highest level of the new regime partly because there was a weak Catalan tradition of enrolment in the Spanish military officer corps and because the Falange was weakly rooted. Even those who supported Franco in the civil war were often held in suspicion due to their Catalan origin. In the third component of the new regime, the Catholic church, adherence to the new regime occurred with almost complete normality, which can be partly explained by the experience of the civil war and the mass executions of the religious within Catalan society. The Francoist victory of 1939 meant not only the destruction of cultural Catalanisation but also the reversal of democratisation that had accelerated in the 1930s. The dictatorship brought with it the return of property, order, an end to working class protest and the restoration of the Catholic religion. There is abundant evidence of extensive collaboration of certain sectors of Catalan society with the Franco regime, with Catholic sectors, landowners and the business elites the most notable examples.1 Rule at a local level throughout Catalonia would have been impossible without their input.2 Therefore, social sectors that had been represented by the Lliga Regionalista had been subject to revolutionary persecution in the first year of the war now welcomed the Franco regime. However, the political tradition that represented conservative and traditional Catalanism since 1901 was abruptly ended. Thus, by renouncing all political activity, a certain restoration of their social prestige became possible.
Culture and exile
Franco’s dictatorship abolished the main support mechanisms for the language and Catalan culture. This began with the dismantling of institutional support, from regional and local governments to cultural organisations. The Catalan language disappeared from education and from official life, publications in Catalan were limited to religious pamphlets or to the occasional re-edition of an older work, almost always in small print runs and usually in an archaic variant of the language. A new process of the adoption of Spanish on the part of Catalan elites began, particularly in the richest areas of Barcelona. Many workers and most peasants, as well as middling sectors, continued to speak the Catalan language but there began a near universal process of bilingualism. Education was in Spanish alone but Catalan remained the language of the home and was used with a degree of frequency amongst those with a shared familiarity. However, all public and official relations were to be only in Spanish. Large numbers joined the exodus to exile in 1939. This comprised a diverse group from anarchist activists, ordinary soldiers and their families, political and administrative officials and the majority of intellectuals. The number of Catalans who crossed the French border during January and February 1939 has been estimated as being as high as 100,000.3 Until the mid-1940s, the task of preserving Catalan high culture was a role of those in exile, in particular amongst those based in Mexico. By 1943, there were already 12 periodicals in Catalan. Political unity was much less effective as pre-war and civil war divisions maintained. From the mid-1940s, the exiles play a diminishing role in both oppositional and cultural activity.
Political repression and opposition
The long-lasting Franco regime is marked by distinctive phases. The first of 1939–1944 is marked by extreme violence and mass executions. In this immediate post-war period, the anarcho-syndicalist CNT suffered the most repression in the urban, industrial context and Esquerra Republicana in the rural and small towns of the Catalan interior.4 ERC remained extremely weak throughout the dictatorship. The anarchist movement was subject to sustained repression and at least 11 CNT organising committees were captured by the regime’s secret police. By 1950, the historic anarchist movement as a mass movement was no more. It also failed to adapt to new times and new social forces. Organised protest against Francoism came from two main areas. Firstly, a transformed left led by the Catalan communists of the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC). The PSUC became, during the Franco regime, the hegemonic anti-Francoist force in Catalonia. Secondly, the nationalist movement would be rebuilt by a new generation from within sectors of Catholicism. The PSUC was, in 1936, weak and unimportant in the Catalan political spectrum. However, the circumstances of the Spanish Civil War and the role of the USSR and International Communism transformed its status. The PSUC was a Catalan communist party, as it repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to Catalan identity during the course of the dictatorship. Its major publications, Treball and Nous Horitzons, were published in Catalan and it played an important role in the incorporation of Spanish-speaking immigrants into Catalan society. The party structure aided it in conditions of clandestinity, in spite of many of its leading figures being captured and executed by the dictatorship.
Maquis and strikes
In the early phase of the dictatorship, the only meaningful response from sectors of the opposition was to meet regime violence with that of the anti-Franco guerrilla, known from their participation in the French resistance as the maquis. This type of resistance began almost as soon as the civil war ended and was separately organised by anarchists and communists. Catalan anarchists began to take violent action against the new regime from its very beginning, many of whom had their base of operations in the Pyrenees border zone and crossed the border to carry out military action. One of the most significant groups was led by Quico Sabaté, who together with Josep Lluís Facerías became symbolic of the guerrillas of the anarchist movement. Spanish and Catalan communists also organised armed forces and on a much larger scale. The PCE, in 1944, after the liberation of France, set out to carry out the largest post-war action: the military invasion of Spain. The operation consisted of sending about 6,000 armed men through various Pyrenean valleys in Navarre and Aragon. The central action would be played by about 3,000 men in the Aran Valley. But the invasion of the Aran Valley was a complete failure as local people showed no enthusiasm to join the action. Despite this failure, however, small-scale guerrilla warfare increased and was especially intense during the years 1947–1948, at a time when it is estimated that more than 200 guerrillas were acting, in small groups, throughout the territory. From 1952 onwards, the PCE gave the final order for the total evacuation of its guerrillas. From the 1950s onwards, only a small number of anarchist guerrillas continued their struggle in a situation of growing isolation. Ramon Vila Capdevila, another prominent Catalan anarcho-syndicalist, continued the clandestine struggle in the Catalan mountains until he was killed in action by the Civil Guard in 1963.
In early 1946, a strike in the Manresa textile industry began a series of unprecedented labour conflicts. Strikes then spread to all of the towns in the greater Barcelona industrial belt such as Sabadell and Terrassa. The most important labour conflict was in Mataró, with a general strike lasting three days in March 1946. The notable feature of these strikes was the important role of women.5 The strikes were accompanied by protests against food shortages and rationing, with low wages adding to the poor living conditions of workers. Internal migration to urban areas had also worsened general conditions with the authorities making no provision for new arrivals. As these strikes were interpreted as being non-political and rather simply economic in origin, concessions were made to the strikers. Price increases applied to Barcelona but not to Madrid in early 1951 had a different impact. Popular unrest in Barcelona led to a widely supported boycott of trams followed by an extensive strike in the spring of 1951. The mobilisation lasted two weeks and spread throughout Catalonia, becoming the most extensive popular protest since the civil war ended.6 Leading regime officials in Barcelona including the city mayor were forced to resign and the price rises were annulled. This was a reminder to the regime that a culture of protest in Barcelona and amongst Catalans had not been destroyed.
Modest changes in cultural policy
The end of the Second World War represented a major blow to the Franco regime as its former allies, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, were defeated. The regime was forced into making some modest reforms as well as those that there were simply cosmetic. A monolithic political and repressive structure began to allow scope for some local expression. The Catalan national dance, the sardana, was increasingly evident in public and it was invoked as a religious cultural expression.7 The use of the Catalan language and some cultural symbols in a religious ceremony at the monastery of Montserrat in April 1947 had been allowed, though this permission led to the removal of the civil governor. As an indication of the opening undertaken by the regime after the end of the Second World War, some of the propaganda for the referendum on the Law of Succession of July 1947 was produced in Catalan. A co-option of a Catalan religious culture was underway. It was an indication that pious, Catholic and conservative components in Catalan culture could escape proscription if they embodied regional or local features. Emblematic of the lifting of restrictions imposed at the beginning of the dictatorship was the re-emergence in December 1946 of the Orfeò Català (Catalan Choral Society), most of whose repertoire was sung in Catalan. The previous year had been celebrated as the centenary of Jacint Verdaguer, poet, author and theologian, and 100,000 copies of his works were published during the year. Similar patterns were evident in other areas of high culture. Whilst this did not mean the return to some kind of cultural normality, the Francoist attempt at the complete extirpation of Catalan culture was being slowly abandoned. What remained of course beyond consideration was any political expression or association with this culture. As the regime entered a new consolidated phase, it needed to adapt to prevent the turn to opposition from the lower middle classes and other middling sectors in Catalan territory. Whilst the Catalan language was not recognised, it was tolerated. The process of modest Catalanisation was also reflected in a process of regionalisation of cultural groupings and movements of civic society. As a further significant step, from 1958, the Floral Games of the Vertical Syndicates of the Spanish fascist Falange awarded a prize to the best poem written in Catalan. However, schooling and mass media remained solely in Spanish and these changes, though important, remained symbolic.
Economic change
Throughout the Franco regime, the Catalan economy retained its primacy within Spain. Between 1955 and 1975, the size of the Catalan economic region grew from 17.7 per cent in 1955 to 19.1 per cent by 1975. Over the course of the 1960s, the Catalan economy and society underwent a profound transformation. Major economic reforms had an important Catalan input as the leading architects of the new liberalising economic model came from Barcelona and local elites welcomed the new economic approach.8 With the enactment of the Stabilisation Plan in July 1959, the regime abandoned the autarkic model in force since 1939. This led to a massive influx of workers from other regions of Spain. Expansion took place without urban planning or democratic control of the economic model. Catalan industry became a supplier of consumer goods to the Spanish market and experienced enormous growth. This was best symbolised by the SEAT 600 car, which began production in Barcelona in 1957 and became representative of private consumption. Road building was broadly welcomed with little concern expressed around environmental degradation or urban planning visions which prioritised the car. Car prices dropped every year between 1959 and 1973 and the regime sought to craft car ownership as a symbol of societal success.
The Spanish state authorities actively promoted a consumer society as it was believed it would produce a de-politicised and de-mobilised population. Yet consumerism had paradoxical effects. It began a process of individual patterns of consumer behaviour, which impacted across the social structure, including with the emergence of a counter-culture. The owning of consumer goods began a rapid process of narrowing of the cultural distinctiveness of the Catalan countryside with urban areas. New social values also appeared with a marked reduction in popular religiosity. The Catalan church began a lengthy crisis marked by a dramatic fall in vocations and declining church attendance. Catalan traditionalists also expressed concern as the young rushed to consume music and fashion that had little to do with Catalan traditions. The advent of television and a modern advertising system produced new social demands, as did the rapid growth of a mass tourist industry aimed at northern Europeans. Cultural practices were now subject to ever greater international impact, with the Beatles performing in a Barcelona bull ring in 1965. Rapid diffusion of international patterns of consumption impacted on cinema, music, radio, fashion and the cultural impact of cities such as New York and London.9 For a period from approximately 1960–1965, economic demands were the key element in strike activity but growing regime concern at apparent communist involvement in union activity led to repressive policies which politicised activity that began as economic demands. The emergence of a consumer society meant, however, that even a resurgent labour movement did not seek a revolutionary transformation of society. It is this fact that enabled the broad acceptance of a capitalist economic form.10 The working class changed in social composition and, whilst highly mobilised for democratic rights, it also sought clear and direct material improvements.
Demographic transformation
The Catalan economy not only continued to grow in importance but it also became a pole of attraction. Over the course of the twentieth century, Catalonia tripled its population, with about three million people arriving between 1915 and 1975.11 As we have seen, early patterns were marked by internal migration from the Catalan interior and this began to change over the 1920s and 1930s, meaning around 20 per cent of the population in Catalonia in 1939 came from non-Catalan-speaking areas of Spain. Barcelona concentrated by far the largest balance of immigrant inflows, receiving some 75 per cent migration from other parts of Spain to Catalonia. Urban concentration also depopulated areas of the Catalan countryside. It is estimated that in 1975, the year of Franco’s death, more than half of Catalan residents were born outside Catalonia. Population growth occurred with little preparation in terms of urban planning and had negative consequences for the environment, particularly amongst rivers and the coast. Towns on the outskirts of Barcelona such as L’Hospitalet, Badalona, Santa Coloma de Gramenet expanded rapidly. The first phase of population arrival was marked by the construction of shanty towns followed by rapid construction of often poorly built urban estate tower block estates, with few amenities. Though a separate phenomenon, the arrival of mass tourism from the late 1960s irreparably damaged the Costa Brava.
This vast migration brought to an end a culturally homogenous Catalonia. All subsequent cultural expressions and voting patterns were testimony to the territory’s transformation and social complexity. Migration produced cultures of displacement for both new arrivals and receptor communities. Some Catalan towns on the edge of Barcelona saw populations of around 4,000–5,000 rapidly transformed by the arrival of some 20,000 new arrivals. The personal impact was varied with some arrivals experienced cultural dislocation in a large city, whilst for others, new opportunities were provided for personal liberation from traditional social mores. Contrary to some nationalist myth-making that migration was state policy to dilute Catalan society, the authorities in Franco’s Catalonia often turned back new arrivals and demolished their temporary accommodation. Catalan employers were the principal beneficiary as such vast numbers arrived in boom conditions ensured not only economic growth but also the payment of low wages. For the native Catalan population, this vast infusion of new labour partly provided opportunities for social advancement whether as factory foreman or a shift from blue to white collar employment. Some zones of urban Catalonia heavily concentrated overwhelming number of Spanish speakers, meaning many had little everyday encounter with the Catalan language.12
As early as 1960, Catalan ceased to be the majority language of those born in Catalonia.13 Societal transformation had great implications for the future development of the political and cultural movement of Catalanism. The questions of integration and assimilation of half of the population became a constant theme in Catalan nationalist reflection.14 The arrival of mass migration from the 1950s led to a new labour movement which was principally organised by the forces of communism. The emergence of the Workers Commissions, the CCOO, developed a unitary ideology around the defence of workers, irrespective of national origin. A new sociology of labour in Catalonia was underway. Furthermore, the dominance of Catalan communism prevented the emergence of hostility towards Catalanism, which had certainly existed prior to 1936. Though the new labour movement was hostile to nationalism, it also sought to defend Catalan language and identity as well as offering a broad cross-class programme of democratisation. In spite of outbursts of anxiety and sometimes hostility to this Spanish-speaking migration, the newly emerging nationalist movement was forced to adopt to the postulates crafted by the communists.
Cultural revival
The Catalan cultural revival that became increasingly visible over the course of the 1960s was based on the activities and organisations that bourgeois Catholics had carefully constructed throughout the 1950s. Catalan-language publishing, having its origins in Church-led and Catholic publications, expanded into all areas of cultural life. Prior to 1936, the Catalan church had been deeply unpopular in many sectors of society, and strong anti-clerical traditions culminated in persecution during the Civil War.15 However, the restoration of the Church after 1939 gave it relative autonomy, allowing it to slowly rebuild and, to some extent, mould a new version of Catalanism. By the mid-1950s, almost all cultural expressions of Catalanism were possible due to Church patronage. Furthermore, from 1965 to 1975, communists and Catholics co-operated, as churches and other religious buildings become sanctuaries for trades union and cultural meetings. For the first time, social issues emerged amongst new Church sectors, in particular through younger urban priests, a generation that had no experience of the pre-war Catholic church or anti-religious persecution. In ideological terms, a proto-liberation theology can be discerned. Symbolic of the breach made with the regime by bourgeois Catholic sectors were the events of the early 1960s. In 1960, Catholics sang publicly a Catalanist song in the presence of regime dignitaries. This resulted in the imprisonment and torture of some individuals including the future president of democratic Catalonia, Jordi Pujol. Catholics also led a boycott of the Barcelona daily, La Vanguardia, when the editor, Luis de Galinsoga, speaking to a parish priest who had given a sermon in Catalan, described all Catalans as ‘shits’. The boycott led to his removal as editor. In 1963, the Abbot of Montserrat was forced into exile after describing the regime as ‘un-Christian’ in Le Monde. Finally, a group a priests demonstrated in Barcelona in 1966 against police torture and were subject themselves to beatings by the police. Whilst the church began to align itself more closely to Catalan society, it was also noticeable that church attendance continued its decline to the point that in Barcelona in 1970, only 6 per cent attended Sunday service. This decline also occurred in rural areas, though at a slower rate.
Permissive tolerance towards Catalan conservative culture culminated in the authorisation of Òmnium Cultural in July 1961, an organisation whose explicit aim was the promotion and support of all areas of Catalan language and culture. Òmnium played a key role as an intermediate organisation, and its directors brought together figures from both sides of the civil war, which allowed it to pivot between regime institutions and sectors of the opposition. In September 1964, Spanish Television announced the creation of a monthly Catalan language programme. Yet a few months earlier, the regime had reversed permission for Òmnium Cultural and closed it down. The prohibition of Òmnium was an indication of the stop–start approach that reigned within the regime, as technocrats and reactionaries jockied for pre-eminence. From 1965, growing social pressure was taking place for the campaign known as ‘Català a l’escola’: the introduction of the Catalan language into the schooling system. This was partly expressed in the approach towards the incorporation of Catalanism, as the ban on Òmnium was removed in 1967 and the entity remained legal thereafter. The position of the Catalan language remained one of a spoken language with little written presence. In this period, a children’s publication Cavall Fort, inspired by the French and Belgian comic book traditions, was launched to encourage familiarity with the language amongst the young. Further opening towards Catalan culture was facilitated by the modest liberalisation associated with the Press Law introduced in April 1966. In the same year, for the first time since 1939, the National Literature prizes of Spain was opened to entries from the Catalan language and other languages of the state.
The second half of the 1960s was marked by enormous international investment in the Catalan economy, drawn by low labour costs. An increasingly affluent society was able to support a variety of new cultural forms. These developments, in terms of social change and evolving class composition, came to explain the re-crafting of Catalanism in the 1960s. By this time, the worst of the persecution of Catalan culture was over and the language increasingly found a presence on the radio, particularly local stations. 1966 remains an important year in the history of popular music through the electrification of folk embodied by Bob Dylan. In Catalonia, this inspired the Nova Cançó, the new song movement. This movement combined cultural expression with an explicit anti-regime message. From this period of the mid-1960s, we see an explosion in cultural production. New publishers emerged such as Edicions 62, which as well as new work written in Catalan, produced numerous translations of European and other works. Though this revival continued unabated until the end of the dictatorship in 1975, even by that year, the number of books published in Catalan remained well behind the pre-war figure of 1936.
Protest and late Francoism
By late Francoism Catalonia had become the centre of cultural revival and also maintained its role as Spain’s main industrial city. The city of Barcelona concentrated more urban workers than any other which further explains the intensity of the anti-Francoist struggle in Catalonia. The highly mobilised working class, even if now a majority of Spanish speakers, came into ever-increasing situations of conflict, where it inevitably experienced the brute force of the security forces. The dominant role within the opposition of the PSUC and CCOO ensured that, in the 1960s and 1970s, during the mass mobilisation of protest, both native and Spanish-speaking workers shared a political identity of both opposition to the dictatorship and defence of the rights of Catalonia as a national entity. The PSUC was a Marxist-Leninist party that published in the language of the country: Catalan.16 Thus, potential division between Catalan- and Spanish-speaking workers was prevented by the unitary strategy of the Catalan communists. The political dominance of the PSUC culminated in the creation of the most important platform of the Catalan opposition, the Assemblea de Catalunya in 1971. Its creation symbolised the transformation in Catalan political culture that took place over the course of the Franco regime. The Assemblea, which brought together almost all sectors of the anti-regime struggle to devise a common programme, was communist-led yet took place under the protection of a monastery, at Montserrat. The absence of an ideological rupture in the Catalan relationship to Spain found expression in the simple demand from the Assemblea for the restoration of a Catalan autonomous government, as had existed in the 1930s. The Catalan national project that emerged into the transition in the mid-1970s had a clear vision: to pick up from where it was abruptly broken in 1939. By the early 1970s, the goals of Catalanism were more widely accepted than at any previous time, a marked contrast with the pre-civil war period. By 1973, the Catalan language was being incorporated into the school system where collaboration was sought with the cultural organisation Òmnium Cultural to facilitate it. Catalan cultural revival shifted over the decades from being excluded to inclusion. The main concern of the Franco regime was of course its self-preservation, but it also sought to maintain the economic boom and to prioritise the repression of the labour challenge. By October 1975, the state referred to all of the languages of Spain as ‘national languages … whose knowledge and usage will be protected and encouraged’.
The transition to democracy in Catalonia
Organised labour protest and strikes strikingly grew in every year from 1969 to 1976. The working class in Catalonia, now composed predominantly of native Spanish speakers in the greater Barcelona area, was more radicalised than at any time since the 1930s, though it should not be seen as a revolutionary agent. The sophisticated political culture developed across the opposition had created schools for democracy.17 Catalan protest, combining Catalanist demands with calls for popular and civic rights, continually mobilised the largest numbers of any protest culture throughout Spain. Popular pressure ultimately forced the transitional government in Spain to go further than projected and restore the full autonomy of 1931–1939. Equally, though democratic local elections were not held until 1979, the organised popular forces extracted meaningful concessions from officials who owed their authority to the regime. The transition in Catalonia built on pre-existing cultural, economic and political trends, concessions and accommodations that had emerged by the late 1960s. Resolution of the Catalan question post-1975 occurred with comparative ease in the transition period, unlike the escalating conflict in the Basque Country. A broad consensus on recognition towards Catalan culture and identity was visible. In September 1977, on Catalan national day, over one million people protested in Barcelona calling for freedom, amnesty for political prisoners and the restoration of a Statute of Autonomy. Only in Catalonia did a political representative of the republican period, Josep Tarradellas, return as the embodiment of pre-Francoist political legitimacy. Catalan autonomy was provisionally restored in 1979 and the first elections to its parliament took place in 1980. Victory went to conservative Catalanism and the left, which had been dominant under Francoism, was defeated. The Catalan question, with varying degrees of intensity, has remained central to the politics of democratic Spain since the end of the Franco dictatorship.
Social change and de-industrialisation
Under the Franco regime, Catalan society underwent the most important and fastest transformation in its history. In just 30 years, Catalonia consolidated itself as a highly industrialised country and doubled its population. The population was concentrated around the city of Barcelona, so that by 1975, two out of three Catalans lived in the metropolitan area. This entailed a culture that was predominantly urban, which experienced patterns of social modernisation comparable to all other urban zones of Southern Europe. An incipient feminist movement became visible during the transition era, with a congress on women’s rights organised in May 1976. New social movements also appeared such as locally based environmental campaigns and those against compulsory military service. The end of the Franco regime broadly coincided with a number of structural changes that determined subsequent social and political development. Catalonia ceased to be the economic leader of Spain and embarked on an intense process of de-industrialisation. Structural unemployment intensified in the late 1970s and gradually undermined the historic strength of the Catalan labour movement. Whilst industry never ceased to be an important component in the post-Franco Catalan economy, white collar and services employment played an ever greater role in the labour market. The population, after the vast demographic change of the 1950s and 1960s, entered a period of some 30 years with little in terms of internal migration, a phase we can term stabilisation. By 1986, only 5.8 per cent had arrived to live in the city of Barcelona in the previous eight years. In this period, for the first time since the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona lost population. This was also a population that was increasingly ageing. The relative stability of the population was also determined by there being little population mobility: most were educated and worked close to where they had been born. There was also in this period an increasing homogenisation of sectors of the population in terms of their cultural habits and practices. Following the de-industrialisation of the late 1970s and beyond, the industrial working class declined in Barcelona. The dominant working class culture of the twentieth century, centred on the self-educated working class activist and the workers cultural centre, the ateneu, was eroded as most workers sought to improve their material living standards and embraced consumerism.
Nationalism in power
The Catalan national project, as it emerged in the late nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth century, not only sought autonomy for Catalonia but also to lead Spanish modernisation. Under the new post-Franco political dispensation, the sources of Spanish modernisation came from Madrid and Europe. This determined a historic re-appraisal of the political project of Catalanism. This partly explains why the new Catalan nationalism no longer sought the leadership of Spain. For the movement led by Jordi Pujol, the close imbrication of the Lliga Regionalista with governments in Madrid had been a historical failure and ended in the disaster of collaboration with the Spanish Nationalists during the civil war. Furthermore, the cultural and linguistic destruction of a long-lasting dictatorship determined that political priorities should be centred on Catalonia. Whilst the Catalan regional government could never ignore developments in Madrid, it sought to craft a new political culture from Barcelona. Whilst for most commentators, the transition to democracy in Spain is seen to have ended with the landslide victory of the Spanish socialists in November 1982, for Catalonia, March 1980 marks a new moment in its contemporary development. In an election campaign marked by an employer-led red scare at the prospect of communist influence in a leftist government, the nationalist coalition Convergència i Unió, CiU, obtained victory and held power until 2003. The process that had been developed intellectually since the 1960s in terms of the national re-construction of Catalonia was now implemented. CiU ruled during a successful transition to a western parliamentary democracy and Spain’s accession to the EEC. The new Generalitat obtained greater powers in health, education, finance, public works, planning, tourism, language and cultural policy and the media. Compared to the 1932 Statute, however, the Catalan government obtained fewer powers in public order and justice.
Yet in contrast to the views held in much of Spanish political culture that the emergence of the new semi-federal regime marked a dramatic overhaul of the Spanish political system, for the Catalan national movement, the power obtained was simply seen as a starting point. No opportunity would be missed when Spain was governed by minority governments for Catalonia to obtain and accumulate new powers. It was to be this differential reading of the compromises of the transition to democracy that produced small-intensity conflicts between Madrid and Barcelona post-1980 and after 2010 political crisis. The unexpected victory of the nationalist coalition in 1980, cemented by an overall majority in 1984, meant that Jordi Pujol, who attained symbolic importance due to his imprisonment by the dictatorship, came to embody the new Catalan nationalism of the post-Franco period. Pujol’s political movement often combined radical rhetoric with pragmatic practice, a combination necessitated by the transformation of the Catalan population under the Franco regime. Pujol constructed a broad-based dominant political coalition that sought to emulate the dominant position of the Basque nationalist party within its territory. This coalition was built on the Catalan middle classes, from shopkeepers in the small towns to urban professionals in Barcelona but was unable to extend its reach into the upper elites of the richest areas of Barcelona who had developed a transnational capitalist identity. Weak support was also evident amongst most Spanish speakers, particularly those in the industrial and post-industrial zones found between Barcelona and Tarragona. Differential voting behaviour also enabled the repeated victories of CiU. The first refers to the fact that a significant percentage of the Spanish-speaking Catalan population who voted socialist in the general elections tended to abstain in the regional elections, whilst other socialist voters for national elections voted CiU in the regional ones. Thus, whilst CiU averaged figures of over 40 per cent in Catalan elections, its vote fell by an average of 10 per cent in Spanish general elections. Until 2003, CiU was the most important nationalist formation in the Spanish State and the most electorally successful representative of state-less nationalism in Western Europe, winning six consecutive Catalan elections between 1980 and 1999. At various times since the restoration of democracy, CiU played a pivotal role at a Spanish level. CiU’s support of minority Madrid governments was instituted in the late 1970s with its external support of Adolfo Suárez and the UCD and was replicated first with the Spanish Socialists (PSOE) from 1993 to 1996, and again from 1996 to 2000, in support of the conservative Popular Party (PP).
Language and cultural policy
On 18 April 1983, the Parliament of Catalonia overwhelmingly approved the Law on Language Normalisation. This was priority legislation whose purpose was not simply to revive the Catalan language but to transform its status within the educational system and thus, throughout society. It established the use of Catalan as the language of instruction in the classroom through a model known as immersion. In 1975, only 14.5 per cent of the population could write Catalan, whilst only around 35 per cent of secondary school teachers had sufficient competence in the language. Thus, extensive teacher training was an important mechanism for the transformation of the school system. Comprehension of Catalan in the populace rose to 95 per cent by 1996, with some 45.8 per cent then having written ability in the language.18 Radio and television in Catalan became essential components to not only the transformation of the cultural position of the language but also as mechanisms for the crafting of national narratives. These new channels and stations also displayed a high degree of professionalism and sought to be competitive within the audio-visual market.19 The post-Franco period saw a range of new publications in Catalan, from the historical and cultural monthly L’Avenç to a daily newspaper Avui, all of which in the late 1970s gave an explicit commitment to a Catalanist cultural space. From the 1980s, publications in Catalan expanded and an extensive literary culture was ever more evident.
Urban culture
The Spanish Constitution of 1978 transformed the territorial structure of Spain, leading to increasing regionalisation and the emergence of a tier of sub-national government. The territorial formula adopted was the State of Autonomies, which led to the creation of 17 Comunidades Autónomas (Autonomous Communities). This regionalisation of the Spanish state model was followed by the profound democratisation of the municipal level. Cities and their mayors became part of the vanguard of the civic culture of Spain’s new democracy with Barcelona, Madrid and the other urban areas of Spain electing left-wing governments. By 2012, half of Spanish state spending was managed at a regional and municipal level, whilst these two tiers employed 70 per cent of state employees. In European terms, Paris and London are rather unusual in the extent of their overwhelming political, administrative and economic dominance: most European societies have seen competing rivalries between two major cities: Rome/Milan, St Petersburg/Moscow and, in the case of Spain, Madrid/Barcelona. In these cases, it is often only in the latter part of the twentieth century that the political and administrative capitals also became the cultural and economic capitals. In some cases, such as Rome/Milan and Madrid/Barcelona, the second city has often maintained an economic dominance into the contemporary era.
Barcelona is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. By 1975, the greater Barcelona metropolitan area comprised 70 per cent of the total Catalan population. This greater area was comparable in European terms to Milan, Rome and Madrid. There is then a marked demographic and spatial contrast in terms of the size of Barcelona in relation to Catalonia, and the size of Madrid in relation to the rest of Spain. One of the deeply rooted debates that has determined the discourse of political Catalanism has been the dialectic between city and wider territory, the political relations between Barcelona and the rest of Catalonia. With the nationalists of Convergència i Unió dominant in the national terrain and the Catalan socialist party (Partit del Socialistes de Catalunya—PSC) dominant in the main cities and urban areas, it was thus possible to speak of rival parallel power structures rather than alternation. Catalan socialism (urban and municipal) and nationalism (regional and rural) held sole power, respectively, for over 20 years from the late 1970s, and, in the case of the socialists, they continued to hold the most important municipal position, the mayorship and administrative control of the city of Barcelona until 2011. The city council is the second most important in all of Spain and historically Barcelona vied as an alternative capital of Spain. It was to counter socialist strength that in 1987, Jordi Pujol’s nationalist government abolished the Área Metropolitana de Barcelona (Metropolitan Area of Barcelona), the body responsible for municipal oversight, believing it to represent a regional counter power. This move deepened hostility between the two largest Catalan political forces, the socialists and the nationalists. The abolition of this authority was rooted in the new narrative of Catalan nationalism, centred on the small towns of the Catalan interior, that the city of Barcelona, metropolitan and multi-cultural, was a challenge to its nationalising project. Thus, a battle for cultural hegemony occurred between these two forces. However, with the comparative decline of industry and its part replacement by services and the knowledge economy, the political culture began to be less threatening to Catalan nationalism by the 2000s, with the city becoming the central location for the pro-sovereignty mobilisations.
1992 and change of model
During the 1980s, CiU’s political dominance in Catalonia had grown as regional self-government consolidated, even following the attempted clawing back of powers to Madrid after the failure of the February 1981 coup. PSOE majority governments in Madrid from 1982 to 1993 produced periodic disputes between Barcelona and Madrid. With the loss of the absolute majority of the PSOE in the elections of 1993, CiU was able, until 2000, to obtain direct concessions from Madrid in exchange for ensuring parliamentary stability in Spain. Whilst a push for direct participation in the Spanish cabinet came from some sectors in the nationalist coalition, this was strongly resisted by Jordi Pujol. The coming to power of a renewed Spanish conservatism in 1996, without an overall majority, again gave leverage to Catalan nationalism. However, this period was also marked by a resurgent and confident Spanish nationalism, in part produced by the economic transformation of Spain and in particular of Madrid. This Spanish nationalism increasingly questioned the accumulation of concessions obtained by Basques and Catalans in the 1990s and sought to prevent any further devolution of powers to the regions. It also embarked on challenges to language policies in those regions and sought to harmonise the educational curriculum, partly around areas such as history and geography, where it advocated the teaching of a shared Spanish national story.
The economy
The territory once termed the Manchester of the South, the city of Barcelona, has seen its once enormous industrial strength and comparative weight in Spain eroded. In 1933, Catalan income per capita was 80 per cent higher than the Spanish average and this fell to 19 per cent by 2000. As elsewhere in Europe, the Catalan economy has seen structural transformation since the early 1980s. The industrial sector in Catalonia has seen its importance within the economy fall from 41.1 per cent of Catalan GDP in 1975 to 28.9 per cent in 1996, and just under 20 per cent by 2020. This fall in the industrial sector has brought with it sustained structural unemployment and a weakened trade union movement. The decline in industry has been partly offset by the growth of the service sector. Barcelona has not been completely displaced, remaining important in terms of industry, culture and city of design and tourism. Barcelona obtains 12 per cent of its GDP from tourism. In the post-Franco period, the city, following a crisis associated with de-industrialisation, re-emerged through its hosting of the Olympic Games in 1992. As host city, the urban landscape of the city was re-configured under the terms of what became known as the Barcelona model. This began with the urban revival necessitated by the decline of textiles and other traditional industries in the early 1980s. In this phase, with an ambitious modernising socialist council, with strong communist support, the transformation of the city sought to address the great deficits in terms of infrastructure that the dictatorship had shown little concern with.
The Olympic Game in 1992 initiated the transformation of the city of Barcelona into one of Europe’s leading centres for tourism. Within a decade, the city had become one of the most visited in Europe. The city’s art and architecture attained ever greater international projection. This cultural rebranding has entailed a cleansing and purification of the social conflicts of the past with the city developing a new urban model as an ‘entrepreneurial city’ built on the new tourism, with numbers expanding from 2.4 million visitors in 1993 to 9 million by 2019. At the same time, economic change brought about the shift to a new service industry. However, this employment growth occurred in sectors notorious for low wages, little innovation and low productivity and evidence of ever greater social inequality. Since the Olympic Games in 1992, Catalonia attracted substantial foreign investment. Catalonia continues to have the highest share of exports throughout Spain. Catalonia has become one of the most important tourist regions in Europe and its hospitality industry has also made it a prime location on the international conference market.20 The city as theme park and playground of a tourist industry was not without consequence. The perception of tourism increasingly became viewed as a problem with growing concern that its massification in Barcelona would lead to the city becoming a new Venice in terms of the erosion of its physical environment. Mobilisation against the prioritisation of tourism over the citizenry has regularly produced organised protests in the historic centre of the city.
Comparative economic stagnation
For most of the twentieth century, Catalonia maintained its economic advantage over nearly all other areas of Spain. Calculations have shown that of 173 European regions, in 1900, Catalonia was placed 39th, a placing which had risen to 31st by 1925. However, from the 1970s, the difference between the poorest and richest regions narrowed, a process which has intensified by membership of the European Community, which has ensured a narrowing in economic position amongst the Spanish regions compared to Catalonia. In 1955, Madrid represented just 11 per cent of Spain’s GDP. In 1980, Madrid’s share had risen to 15.6 per cent but it still remained behind Catalonia at 18.8 per cent. Yet by the early 2020s, Madrid had displaced Catalonia with a figure of 20 per cent. The capital city also surpassed Barcelona as that with the highest per capita income. The ongoing expansion and consolidation of Madrid have major political implications not only for Spain but also for a Catalonia that is having to become accustomed to comparative decline. Madrid enjoys advantages due to its location in the centre of the peninsula and radial Spain, and that it receives privileges derived from public spending and the location of public and private decision-making centres. At the European level, Catalonia’s competitiveness has also slipped. By 2020, the Catalan region had fallen to 70th in the overall ranking of European regions. Madrid and Barcelona have transformed their roles since the 1970s, crafting new identities for themselves in the process. Madrid’s project to be a great European city has inevitably meant the downgrading of Barcelona’s role in the wider Spanish polity.
Societal impact of new economic models
For 120 years Catalonia was the most advanced society in Spain. The Catalonia of industrial and bourgeois textile workers began its decline during the transition to democracy. Whilst Catalonia continues to be an important economic region, it is no longer so in a disproportionate way. Thus, we can begin to trace the emergence of a Catalan existential crisis as its comparative importance in the Spanish political system began to decline. Simply put, Catalonia had lost its leading role in the political and economic development of Spain, which had been a central element to the narrative of political Catalanism since its emergence in the 1880s. Catalan society has converged not only with the broad patterns of much of Spain but also in other areas of Europe, where working patterns combine security and precarious conditions. Poverty is extensive in Catalan society, comprising some 21 per cent by the early 2020s. Child poverty is consistently higher than the European Union average.21 The older bonds of social solidarity have faded in now post-industrial areas with individual expression increasingly important and dominant. Furthermore, the working class barrio became an ever more heterogenous social area, with new immigration and new middle-class arrivals transforming its make-up. However, class position, in particular middle-class position, were strong indications across the greater Barcelona area that the individual was more likely to speak Catalan in the home and have Catalan ancestry. This was even more strongly evident amongst the business class.22 As elsewhere in other European societies, immigration has been concentrated in the poorer areas of Barcelona and other Catalan cities. Barcelona received the largest number of immigrants of any Spanish city impacting on society in ever greater demands on transport, schooling and health care. 700,000 new arrivals were added between 2000 and 2005, and by 2020, the overseas population comprised some 16 per cent of the overall Catalan population. This immigration has brought with it ethnic, religious and cultural differentiation and poses a greater cultural change than the extensive Spanish migration of the 1950s and 1960s. The principal way this new international immigration is framed is in terms of its potential impact on the project of what is termed the normalisation of the Catalan language across society.
Language crisis
Though Catalonia experienced vast demographic transformation under Francoism, the learning of Catalan remained a clear aspiration amongst Spanish migrants and ensured broad support for the language policies introduced in the early 1980s. By the mid-1990s, concern was increasingly expressed that the expansion of Catalan had stalled. This was linked to a growing sense amongst international immigrants to Catalonia that the Catalan language had limited utility. This deepened following the economic crisis after 2008, where the prospect of social mobility through knowledge of Catalan halted.23 Language practice beyond certain social sectors has changed little though the 1983 normalisation law has achieved substantial progress in the status of Catalan. Societal consensus that made the law of 1983 is no longer evident across Catalan society. The impact of the programme of language normalisation has stalled and ever greater evidence emerged of a linguistic situation where the language remained the primary means of communication within the classroom, yet it ceased to be so in a number of social contexts. New social media platforms and an associated internationalisation of cultural production meant that younger cohorts were increasingly attracted by the global reach of the Spanish language. By 2018, only some 36 per cent of Catalans described the Catalan language as their primary source of identification, whilst the figure for Spanish was over 46 per cent. It is in this context of a growing sense of crisis around the prospects for the Catalan language, together with the consolidation of Madrid, the comparative decline of Barcelona and Catalonia and, the disruption produced by the economic crisis after 2008, that we should situate the turn to independence.24
Notes
1. Molinero, C. (2001) ‘Les actituds polítiques a Catalunya durant el primer Franquisme’, Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d'Estudis Històrics, no. 12, pp. 97–106.
2. Marín i Corbera, M. (1995) ‘Franquisme i poder local. Construcció i consolidació deIs ajuntaments feixistes a Catalunya, 1938–1949’, Recerques, Història, Economia, Cultura, no. 31, pp. 37–52.
3. Morales Montoya, M. (2009) ‘L’Exili a Catalunya al segle XX’, Butlletí de la Societat Catalana d’Estudis Històrics, no. 20, pp. 169–202.
4. Solé i Sabaté, J. M. and Dueñas i Iturbe, O. (2007) El franquisme contra Esquerra. Els alcaldes i diputats afusellats d’Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, Barcelona: Fundació Josep Irla, pp. 35–36.
5. Nadia Varo, N. (2007) ‘Mujeres en huelga. Barcelona metropolitana durante el franquismo’, in Babaiano, J. (ed.) Del hogar a la huelga. Trabajo, género y movimiento obrero durante el franquismo, Madrid: los Libros de la Catarata, pp. 139–187.
6. Vázquez de Prada, M. (2003) ‘La oposición al régimen franquista en Barcelona: algunas muestras entre 1948 y 1951’, Hispania: Revista española de historia, vol. 63, no. 215, pp. 1057–1078.
7. Dowling, A. (2006) ‘The Catholic Church in Catalonia: From Cataclysm in the Civil War to the “Euphoria” of the 1950s’, Catalan Review, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 83–100.
8. Balfour, S. (2012) ‘La modernització autoritària franquista a Barcelona: arrels intel·lectuals i contradicció’, in Balfour, S. (ed.) Barcelona malgrat el franquisme La SEAT, la ciutat i la represa sense democràcia, Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, pp. 13–26.
9. Manel Tresserras, J. M. (2000) ‘Els sistemes de comunicació i cultura a Catalunya durant el segle XX. Una proposta d’interpretació’, Cercles: revista d’història cultural, no. 3, pp. 59–73.
10.Kocka, J. (2016) Capitalism. A Short History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 119.
11.Cabré i Pla, A. and Pujadas i Rúbies, I. (1989) ‘La población: inmigració i explosió demogràfica’, in V.V.A.A., Història económica de la Catalunya contemporània s. XX Població, agricultura i energia, Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, pp. 111–128.
12.Marín i Corbera, M. (2006) ‘Franquismo e inmigración interior: el caso de Sabadell (1939–1960)’, Historia Social, no. 56, pp. 131–152.
13.Vila i Moreno, F. X. (2004) ‘Hora de fer balanç? Elements per valorar les polítiques lingüístiques a Catalunya en el periode constitucional’, Revista de Llengua i Dret, no. 41, pp. 243–286.
14.Domingo i Valls, A. (2014) Catalunya al mirall de la immigració: demografia i identitat nacional, Barcelona: L'Avenç, pp. 94–97.
15.Dowling, A. (2013) Catalonia Since the Spanish Civil War: Reconstructing the Nation, Portland: Sussex Academic Press, pp. 74–76.
16.Molinero, C. and Ysàs, P. (2010) Els anys del PSUC. El partit de l’antifranquisme (1956–1981), Barcelona: L’Avenç, p. 49.
17.Andreu Acebal, M. (2015) ‘Barcelona, els moviments socials i la transició a la democràcia: hegemonia gramsciana, referent espanyol i ruptura catalana’, Segle XX. Revista catalana d’història, no. 8, pp. 105–134.
18.Milian i Massana, A. (2013) ‘La llei de normalització lingüística: el camí cap al redreçament’, in 30 anys de política lingüística, Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, pp. 11–20.
19.Guimerà i Orts, J. A. (2018) ‘El papel de la comunicación en la construcción nacional de Cataluña: Jordi Pujol y la instrumentalización política de los medios (1968–1989)’, Historia y política: Ideas, procesos y movimientos sociales, no. 40, pp. 363–387.
20.Maluquer de Motes, J. (20111) ‘El turismo, motor fundamental de la economía de Cataluña (1951–2010)’, Historia Contemporánea, no. 42, pp. 347–399.
21.Flaquer, L. (2008) ‘Diversitat familiar, benestar de la infància i cohesió social a Catalunya’, Nota d’economia, no. 91, pp. 71–86.
22.Subirats, M., López, P. and Sánchez, C. (2010) ‘Classes i grups socials a la Regió Metropolitana de Barcelona’, Papers: Regió Metropolitana de Barcelona: Territori, estratègies, planejament, no. 52, pp. 8–37.
23.Subirats Martori, M. (2020) ‘Catalunya endins:: una comunitat estructuralment esquerdada’, Idees: Revista de temes contemporanis, no. 50, pp. 1–9.
24.Dowling, A. (2014) ‘Accounting for the Turn Towards Secession in Catalonia’, International Journal of Iberian Studies, vol. 27, nos. 2–3, pp. 219–234.