Borrowed Models

Why the Spanish left finds it so hard to criticize Catalan nationalist narratives

"Lego Architecture: Tower of Babel" by pasukaru76 is licensed under CC0 1.0

“Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave / A paradise for a sect” (Keats)

Nationalism tends to be a right-wing ideology. People on the left are normally very concerned with solidarity and internationalism, while nationalists draw a sharp line between members of “the nation” and everyone else, including citizens with non-native roots. It is quite strange as a resident in Spain to see members of the hard left regularly find common ground with Catalan nationalists, who want to split from the rest of the country. I struggled to understand why for years.

In 2018, a penny dropped for me when I read The Three Languages of Politics, an insightful book from Arnold Kling. I’ve mentioned the book before, but will briefly summarize it again. Kling, a libertarian economist with an excellent Substack, argues that we should visualize politics as a triangle instead of a left-right spectrum. He says that each point of the triangle uses its own language to frame issues: Left-wing progressives think in terms of one group oppressing another; right-wing conservatives are interested in traditional values; while liberals / libertarians sit in the middle and see issues in terms of individual freedom.

Kling’s approach ties in very nicely with a previous entry on Sharpen Your Axe on foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes, who are able to work with multiple models, tend to be better at making predictions than hedgehogs, who only have one model and often defend it with a sense of utter certainty.

Like Kling, I am biased towards moderate liberalism, but appreciate that any model has its limits. In my opinion, taking the language of the left too far can make people too proud of victimhood; taking the language of liberalism too far can make people unsympathetic to those who need a helping hand from the state; and buying into conservative language means the right can turn a blind eye to historical injustices.

Although Kling doesn’t mention nationalism in the book, his framework helped me see what was happening in Spain. Nationalism can be a right-wing ideology that uses left-wing language. Like progressives, nationalists frame issues in terms of the oppression of one group by another. Populist nationalists in Catalonia talk about the oppression of “the Catalan nation” (defined as Catalan-speaking people with distinctive names and surnames and deep roots in the region) by “Spain” (not including Catalonia) with the help of the region’s Spanish-speaking majority. The use of left-wing language acts as a cover for traditional values and whiny victimism from people who are otherwise free, rich and privileged in the true sense of the word.

Thinking about “oppression” in this context can lead people very badly astray. Close followers of Spanish politics will probably remember multiple cases where a prosperous native speaker of Catalan has complained about a waiter or waitress who struggled to understand an order in the client’s preferred language. In nearly all cases, the waiter or waitress would have had a much more tenuous position in Catalan society than the client. They are often Spanish-speaking immigrants from Latin America, who have begun working before getting to grips with the Catalan language.

In this case, who is oppressing whom? It should be obvious to most people that a rich Catalan speaker trying to get a recent immigrant fired from his or her job because of inadequate language skills is extremely harsh behaviour. Linguistic fines are an authoritarian measure. Unfortunately, framing the issue as the Catalan speaker being a fighter against the alleged oppression of his or her “nation” by a malign collective that happens to include Latin American waiters muddies the waters. The hard left in Spain often fails to spot the sleight of hand.

A previous post has tried to dismantle the nationalist narrative that Spain is a fascist state. To recap briefly, Francisco Franco’s dictatorship oppressed the whole of Spain; and many middle-class Catalan nationalists are descended from supporters of his regime; while many Spanish-speaking migrants are descended from working-class republicans. Contemporary Spain is a free society.

The real source of nationalist grievances is much more interesting than the black-and-white mythology. There have been several massive waves of migration into Barcelona, which was one of the first cities in Spain to industrialize. The first was in the 1920s and involved working-class migrants from other regions of Spain. Most were Spanish speakers, although many came from the area around Valencia, where a dialect of Catalan is spoken alongside Spanish.

The next massive wave came in the 1960s, towards the end of Franco’s regime, when millions of Spaniards moved from one place to another, with many going to big cities like Barcelona, Bilbao and Madrid from the countryside. Spanish-speaking migrants, many from Andalucia, met with a decidedly mixed reception in Barcelona, but ended up transforming Catalan society, particularly many neighbourhoods of Barcelona and satellite towns around it. The future heartland of nationalism in the countryside was less impacted. The third wave involved Latin Americans, mostly native speakers of Spanish, who started arriving in massive numbers towards the end of the 1990s and particularly from 2000.

The Catalan government’s own figures show that Spanish is the first language of 52.7% of the population. It remains the main spoken language of 48.6% of the population. Catalan, by contrast, is the first language of just 31.5%, while 36.1% now speak it every day. Around 7.4% are completely bilingual and switch easily between both languages. The remainder mainly speak other languages, including Arabic, Romanian, English and Chinese. It is interesting to note that the nationalists have worked hard to position Catalan as a prestige language, particularly in the education system, which means some native speakers of Spanish switch their preferred language as adults.

Many of the most fanatical separatists tend to be of a certain age. Imagine what it must be like to have been born around 1950 in Catalonia. Most people of this age probably grew up in a Catalan-speaking environment, but that began to change in their teens as Spanish-speaking migrants from Andalucia began to arrive in large numbers. They might have been tempted to demonstrate against Franco’s regime in their late teens and early 20s, but it was probably much too scary, so most stayed at home. The vast majority would have finished their education and started working by the time democracy was established in 1978, which made it easy for them to accept narratives about Spanish democracy being in some way flawed.

As these people got into their 50s, they noticed it became increasingly difficult to order a meal in Catalan in Barcelona, to their great frustration. Around the time they retired, the independence movement was taking off in a big way following a long recession. They enjoyed the sense of meaning it gave to their lives, along with the chance to meet new Catalan-speaking friends, shout slogans and pretend to be a victim. Their rebellion against constitutional democracy was much safer than a rebellion against a real dictatorship when they were young, but most would never admit this to themselves.

Framing the issue like this helps us understand that the independence movement tends to be backward-looking and reactionary. It uses left-wing language as a cover for right-wing concerns about immigrants failing to integrate into a nationalist vision of what society should look like, along with nostalgia about a lost golden age. We can see clear parallels with both Brexit and Donald Trump.

It is time to meet an unsavoury character called Quim Torra, a fanatical supporter of independence who was Catalan President between May 2018 and September 2020. He was born into a middle-class family in a seaside town in 1962, on the cusp of the second wave of immigration. A lawyer by training, he worked for a Swiss insurance company for 20 years, including two in Zurich. When the company was taken over, he spent a few years as a partisan journalist and activist for Catalan independence in Barcelona before entering full-time politics. Torra unexpectedly found himself on the frontline in 2018.

Former Catalan President Carles Minister Carles Puigdemont fled to Brussels (allegedly in the boot of a car) after a self-coup attempt failed. He hand-picked Torra as his successor. Torra was deeply obscure at the time. Journalists and opponents looked up the articles he had written in his time as a commentator. The result was horrifying xenophobia. The most notorious example described Spanish-speaking residents of the region who didn’t speak Catalan well as “beasts in human form, scavengers, vipers, hyenas” with defective DNA. He described the Catalan nation as being like a sugar-cube, which risked being dissolved in a glass of immigrant milk. He also said it is “unnatural” to speak Spanish in Barcelona - despite the language being widely spoken in the city since the 15th century (long before English was spoken in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa and even before it was widely spoken in Ireland).

Here is Torra’s public homage to the leaders of a quasi-fascist paramilitary militia group from the 1930s, which murdered leftists and anarchists. He also described Daniel Cardona, an ethno-nationalist paramilitary leader who thought that Catalans were genetically superior to their neighbours to their south and west, as “one of the pioneers” of the independence movement.

Sadly, Catalan nationalists reacted with cognitive dissonance to any criticism of Torra by people they perceived as outsiders. Even those who claimed to be progressive or left-wing nationalists made excuses for his excesses and closed ranks. So, once installed in power, Torra continued with his hardline rhetoric.

Torra’s greatest hits include saying that Catalonia should follow Slovenia’s “road to independence” - several dozen people died and it sparked Yugoslavia’s brutal civil war. He also spread deep state conspiracy theories; and complained about the Spanish police investigating radical separatists who were discovered with bomb-making materials. Torra was eventually removed from power for refusing to remove partisan messages from public buildings, triggering an election in the middle of the pandemic.

Clearly, we can see many parallels between Torra and the contemporary far right. The rhetoric of Enoch Powell’s infamous Rivers of Blood speech isn’t too far removed from Torra’s newspaper articles and his subsequent comments on Slovenia. The analogy of “the nation” as a sugar-cube and immigrants as a glass of milk is similar to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Although Spanish hard right party Vox is an enemy of Catalan separatism, its own anti-Muslim rhetoric isn’t too far removed from Torra’s views on Spanish-speaking migrants to Catalonia.

I’ve mentioned Robert Paxton’s definition of fascism before, but it is worth discussing it in more detail. He says fascism is “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood.” This is an exact description of Torra’s views. Luckily, although Torra has flirted with violent rhetoric and dehumanizing migrants, immigrants and their descendants, he stopped short of fully endorsing “redemptive violence.” I agree with the 50 academics who described his views as pre-fascist in 2018.

To be clear, this isn’t to say that all supporters of Catalan independence are on the far right. However, the reluctance of allegedly moderate or progressive nationalists to criticize the likes of Torra makes them complicit in his views. Unity comes at a high price.

To the credit of Spain’s Socialist leader Pedro Sánchez, when Torra became Catalan president, he called him a member of the far right, who was equivalent to Marine Le Pen in France. Sadly, though, he soon dropped the criticism.

Why? Shortly after making these comments about Torra, Sánchez led a no-confidence vote against conservative Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. He decided to govern without a majority instead of calling a snap election. In the two subsquent elections, he failed to gain a majority and tried to put together a ramshackle coalition including the hard left and nationalists. An allegedly left-wing nationalist party, Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), is an important piece of the puzzle.

The problem for Sánchez is that although ERC isn’t quite as extreme as Torra, it voted for him to be Catalan president and supported his administration through thick and thin, despite lots of arguments behind closed doors. The paramilitary militia mentioned earlier had been ERC’s own fascist wing in the 1930s. ERC’s leader Oriol Junqueras had himself paid homage to paramilitary leader Cardona and published an article speculating about innate ethnic differences between “the Catalans” and “the Spanish.” If the Socialists criticized Torra too much, they risked alienating ERC. Sánchez decided to turn a blind eye to the ugliness in Barcelona. Meanwhile, his newfound hard left allies continued to accept many nationalist tropes.

The Spanish left’s failure to recognize hardline ethno-nationalism in Catalonia as being problematic is a textbook example of the horseshoe theory of politics. This is the idea that by embracing populism, the far left and the far right have much more in common with each other than they do with moderates on the same side of the spectrum. Of course, we should be wary of assuming that any model is entirely correct, but in this case it fits the evidence perfectly. Kling’s work on languages shows how people on the right of the horseshoe can borrow rhetoric from the left.

The short distance between the far left and the far right was noticable to many observers who lived through the 1930s. Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer that fascists and communists tried to recruit the same kind of people; and that many switched sides more than once. Benito Mussolini, the founder of fascism, was a former socialist who dropped internationalism; the full name of the Nazi Party explicitly names national socialism; and British fascist Oswald Mosley had previously been a member of both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party.

Luckily, many experts in constitutional law learnt the lessons of the 1930s better than the contemporary Spanish left. The people who wrote the The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (1949) sat down and thought about what would happen if an enemy of liberal democracy gained power in one of Germany’s Länder. They included Article 37 in the constitution, which gave the central government the right to “issue instructions” to regions that fail to meet their legal obligations. The Spanish Constitution of 1978 copied the same principle in Article 155.

In 2017, Rajoy and Sánchez agreed to apply Article 155 in Catalonia after Puigdemont’s self-coup attempt, which was based around a pseudo-referendum -supporters of independence were invited to vote, but opponents were expected to stay at home. Article 155 was used to trigger snap elections. Puigdemont’s party came second, but was able to do a deal with ERC and another allegedly left-wing separatist party. The three parties had a parliamentary majority with just less than 48% of the votes.

Puigdemont, who was by then living in Brussels, picked Torra to lead the coalition after months of talks. The fear of the central government re-applying Article 155 meant that - despite his angry rhetoric and a handful of symbolic acts - Torra refrained from openly disobeying too many laws. Catalonia’s non-nationalist majority can count this as a blessing.

In my experience, Catalan nationalists struggle to cope with any criticism of their baseline assumptions, which makes them very annoying on the internet. For that reason, I will turn off the comments for this week’s post. If you are a passionate believer in independence and you have read this far, you are probably experiencing uncomfortable emotions like anger, denial and the desire to engage me in a week-long debate. May I politely suggest that this reaction implies that you spend much too much time in your bubble? I strongly recommend reading a range of news sources every day, including some that are critical of your movement, to help you cope better with life in a pluralistic society. See you next week!

Further reading

Fact-checking is the core skill of journalism

My experience fact-checking Catalan nationalist narratives led to being attacked by an army of Russian-funded bots on Twitter

Catalan nationalism is often characterized by extreme groupthink

The economic case against independence

George Orwell’s 1948 essay on nationalism identified key themes, including nationalists classifying individuals like insects, their indifference to reality and their prickliness

Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated! If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the first-anniversary post, which includes links to a free book.

[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.