A Strange Mirror
An essay on why Catalan nationalists are far too quick to accuse their opponents of being Spanish nationalists
Henry VII of England. By anonymous - NPG, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77050820
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Fact-checking Catalan nationalists can be an odd experience. Supporters of the region’s independence are often insistent that Catalonia is a true nation, in every sense of the word; and that nations need their own states. If you push back against any aspect of their narratives, even a little, they will almost immediately accuse you of being a Spanish nationalist.
The logic behind this claim is a little convoluted. Catalan nationalists think that the Catalan language and everything Catalan is pure and good, while the Spanish language and everything from the rest of Spain is dirty and corruptive. In their heart of hearts, Catalan nationalists realize that nationalism isn’t cool or progressive. At the same time, they are utterly convinced that they are the good guys. That can only mean one thing: Critics of the movement must be the real nationalists.
This is obviously a silly argument. And yet it does contain a grain of truth. Arguing against Catalan independence implicitly implies accepting the continued existence of the Spanish state. Meanwhile, far-right party Vox is clearly a Spanish nationalist organization; and it has provided vigorous opposition to Catalan independence. Having said that, the majority of the people who support Spain’s democratic constitution in the face of an attempted coup in Barcelona have little sympathy for Vox, which had a third of the support of the Socialists in the last regional elections.
In order to drill a little deeper into this issue, we need to understand the different classes of nationalism. Let’s turn to an excellent history of nationalism from Liah Greenfeld, a scholar of nationalism who was born in the Soviet Union, moved to Israel as a child and spent most of her career in the US, with stints as a visiting professor in Paris and Hong Kong. She has done groundbreaking work in the field.
Greenfeld says that nationalism as an ideology was born in England. Playwright William Shakespeare was one of the first great thinkers to notice the join between the medieval world and the modern one during the Tudor era. He projected the change back to a long civil war, which he covered in eight historical plays: Richard II, Henry IV (I and II), Henry V, Henry VI (I, II and III) and Richard III.
The plays follow a war within the Plantagenet royal family, which had its roots in France. In the first scene of the first play, which is a tragedy, different members of the nobility speak of their “sacred blood.” Their world is one of trials by combat and pilgrimages to Jerusalem to atone for their sins. The nobility, who often have territory on both sides of the Channel, stand apart from the commoners of England or France.
One of the most interesting characters is introduced in the second play as Prince Hal. He is presented as someone who enjoys the company of lowlifes and petty criminals, who are scornful of the old-fashioned norms of chivalry. This brings him into contact with ordinary people too. He later redeems himself in the eyes of the nobility in battle.
In the third play, Prince Hal’s snobbish father, Henry IV, describes his poorest subjects as being “vile.” By the fourth play, though, his eldest son has become King Henry V. He makes a famous battlefield speech in France and unexpectedly hails the breeding of the English yeomanry (freemen who owned their own farms):
“For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.”
Shakespeare covers the War of the Roses in the last four plays, which look at the English nobility tearing itself apart as the crown loses its last territories in France. Halfway through the second part of the cycle, Henry V’s battlefield speech is echoed in a rebellion led by a commoner who declares himself a member of the nobility. The commoner who kills the rebel is instantly knighted.
Crossbows appear towards the end of the cycle, with a commoner carrying one of the weapons capturing a fallen king. This signals the beginning of a revolution in warfare that would see heavily armed commoners gain the upper hand over mounted members of the nobility. There are also comic references to pistols and bullets in earlier plays in the cycle, even though pistols were only introduced much later.
Scholars have long debated whether or not Shakespeare had read Niccolo Machiavelli’s notoriously hard-headed Renaissance text on governance, The Prince, which was first published in Italy in 1532. Shakespeare wrote Richard III some 60 years later; and the anti-hero of the last play in the cycle certainly looks Machiavellian to modern eyes.
“Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.”
Richard III is killed at Bosworth Field towards the end of the last play in the cycle, a battle that historians traditionally use to mark the end of the Middle Ages in England. By the end of the battle, the Plantagenets had effectively wiped each other out. The play ends with Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond (the future Henry VII), talking of the “streams of blood” that have flowed through the wars and the need for reconciliation among the survivors.
The old medieval order, which was based on the idea that members of the nobility were different from the lower orders in some innate way carried in their blood, could no longer be sustained, Greenfeld says. The Tudors, a cadet house of the Plantagenets with their roots in Wales, formed a new dynasty. Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had to turn talented and ambitious commoners into aristocrats.
The Tudors proclaimed that the English people were a nation; which justified upward mobility that would have bewildered previous generations. Thomas Cromwell, the son of a brewer from Putney who became Earl of Essex under Henry VIII, is just one example of many. The new ideology of the Tudors was individualistic at its core.
The Reformation played a role in reinforcing England’s new national identity and establishing nascent ideas of sovereignty. “To protect their national dignity, the English began to compete,” Greenfeld writes. The English challenged their neighbours to compete for prestige in ways that their feudal peers found confusing.
Modern capitalism was emerging around the same time and English nationalists competed hard in trade and in scientific development. “By 1700, in every respect, England had raced far ahead of the rest of Western Europe, pulling it behind to the position of hegemony that only today is coming to an end,” Greenfeld writes. The industrial revolution came soon afterwards.
Meanwhile, England, the birthplace of nationalism, merged with Wales during the Tudor reign and later merged with Scotland to form Great Britain. The country’s American colonies, which were first established towards the end of Shakespeare’s life, were also to play an important part of the story.
Greenfeld writes that three countries competed to become the second home of nationalism. These were France, the USA and Russia; and two of them created new forms of nationalism. French nationalism was imported from England, but it wasn’t a copy. It was largely driven by ressentiment, or jealousy at the unexpected success of its neighbour; and developed philosophical themes around the unity of the people while still maintaining a civic (or voluntary) view of membership. American nationalism grew out of English individualistic and civic nationalism, but universalized its values and emphasized pluralism in a giant state. Russian nationalism, meanwhile, was collectivist and emphasized ethnic themes.
At the end of the eighteenth century, there were three types of nationalism, Greenfeld argues. These were individualistic/civic in Britain and the US; collectivistic/civic in France; and collectivistic/ethnic in Russia. German nationalism, which grew out of romanticism, was the launchpad for nationalist movements around the world. Like Russian nationalism, it was collectivistic and ethnic. It was largely based on generalizations about large groups of people; and was troubled by the presence of Jewish people in the heart of Germany. Greenfeld argues that German nationalism spawned both Nazism and socialism (Karl Marx was enormously influenced by German nationalist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel).
Greenfeld’s classification of different classes of nationalism gives us a skeleton key to understand what is happening in Spain/Catalonia. It is true that Spanish dictator Francisco Franco tried to build German-style national consciousness in Spain from the 1930s to the 1970s. However, Greenfeld said that attempts to use the state to impose nationalism in both Spain and Italy failed. Instead, we can see that the post-Franco Spanish constitution embeds the democratic institutions that evolved under British and American individualistic/civic nationalism into Spanish society, along with a healthy dose of pluralism. The competitive spirit is largely missing.
Although it lies outside the scope of Greenfeld’s book, we know nationalism came late to Catalonia. Some thinkers in the late 19th century started rediscovering the region’s medieval history and began thinking about its rebirth as a nation. They were also inspired by German collectivistic themes and theorized that the Catalan national character (or “Volksgeist”) was different from that of their neighbours, despite many centuries of shared history.
The true starting point for Catalan nationalism was the so-called Disaster of 1898, when Spain lost its colonies in Cuba and the Philippines, marking the end of its empire. Barcelona’s textile magnates were dismayed at the loss of their tariff-protected profits in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The first Catalan nationalist party was founded in 1901; and conservative politician Enric Prat de la Riba wrote an influential essay on the need for self-government in 1906.
Even today, the most fervent Catalan nationalists are still concerned with the ethnicity of “the Catalans” and are worried about Spanish-speaking migrants from other regions of Spain or Latin America diluting the region’s identity. The Catalan independence movement is collectivistic at its heart, which means that sob stories about individuals losing their livelihoods after independence fail to cut through to true believers, who are also unconcerned at Russian support for their movement during the coup attempt or at the lack of a real majority. It has ressentiment at the contingent turns of history hundreds of years before Catalan nationalists started to organize at its core.
One of the reasons I am skeptical of the validity of claims that critics of the movement are “Spanish nationalists” is that I think the pluralism nurtured by civic and individualistic nationalism contains a seed that will end up destroying ethno-nationalism, particularly in the European Union (EU). Greenfeld is unconvinced of this point, but I think this is the weakest argument in her book.
As someone who comes from one former member state of the EU and is married to someone from another member state, I have often had the experience of flying between European cities around Christmas. Whenever I do, I see families like ours, where the husband and wife have different passports and the kids switch languages depending on which parent they are talking to. I believe this is a glimpse of a post-nationalist future, at least in Europe.
Data from 2012 showed that about one in 12 married people in the EU were in a mixed marriage, with the partners coming from different countries. If this trend continues over a few generations, ethno-nationalist and nativist tropes will seem very strange to future Europeans, many of whom will have complicated cross-border family histories. Humanity’s fundamental unity will hopefully seem increasingly obvious to future generations. I expect anti-globalists to react badly to this multicultural, pluralist and anti-nationalist vision of the future!
A vision based on cross-border intermarriage is also very different from one dynamic in Catalonia, which was identified by research from 2015 on why social mobility was decreasing in the region. The researchers found associative mating was to blame. This involves well-off and well-educated people who speak Catalan at home tending to marry people from a similar background. Doing so entrenches the privileges of people who see themselves as insiders, while creating a glass ceiling for talented outsiders. It is the opposite of what Henry VII had to do at the dawn of the Tudor era in England.
However, I suspect Barcelona’s emergence as a startup hub in recent years will create an alternative dynamic of increasing openness. Already one in five inhabitants of the city are foreign born. Italians make up more than 11% of the foreigners, while more than 8% come from France, alongside many others from Latin America, China, Pakistan, Morocco and elsewhere. Foreigners punch above their weight in the startup scene. Engineering talent, creating value and speaking English, Spanish and other major international languages have a higher value in the startup world than having the “right” surname or speaking fluent Catalan with a local accent.
The startup scene has yet to make much of a dent on regional or municipal elections in Catalonia or Barcelona (which is still dominated by nativist snobs who think that outsiders are vile), but sooner or later a change is gonna come. As usual, the comments are closed whenever I fact-check Catalan nationalism. Life is too short to deal with nationalist nonsense. See you next week!
Further Reading
Nationalism: A Short History by Liah Greenfeld
Richard II by William Shakespeare
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