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Language, Democracy, and Devolution in Catalonia Wright, Sue Multilingual Matters 1853594458 9781853594458 9780585171678 English Catalonia (Spain)--Languages--Political aspects, Catalan language--Political aspects, Language policy--Spain, Democracy--Spain. 1999 P119.32.S7L36 1999eb 306.44/9467 Catalonia (Spain)--Languages--Political aspects, Catalan language--Political aspects, Language policy--Spain, Democracy--Spain.
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Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia
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CURRENT ISSUES IN LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY Editorial Board Dennis Ager, Paul Chilton, Helen Kelly-Holmes, Christina Schäffner and Sue Wright are all members of the Institute for the Study of Language and Society at Aston University, Birmingham. Analysing Political Speeches CHRISTINA SCHAFFNER (ed.) Children Talking: The Development of Pragmatic Competence LINDA THOMPSON (ed.) Cultural Functions of Translation CHRISTINA SCHAFFNER and HELEN KELLY-HOLMES (eds) Discourse and Ideologies CHRISTINA SCHAFFNER and HELEN KELLY-HOLMES (eds) Ethnicity in Eastern Europe: Questions of Migration, Language Rights and Education SUE WRIGHT (ed.) Language and the State: Revitalization and Revival in Israel and Eire SUE WRIGHT (ed.) Language and Conflict: A Neglected Relationship SUE WRIGHT (ed.) Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia SUE WRIGHT (ed.) Languages in Contact and Conflict: Contrasting Experiences in the Netherlands and Belgium SUE WRIGHT (ed.) Managing Language Diversity SUE WRIGHT and HELEN-KELLY HOLMES (eds) Monolingualism and Bilingualism: Lessons from Canada and Spain SUE WRIGHT (ed.) One Country, Two Systems, Three Languages: A Survey of Changing Language Use in Hong Kong SUE WRIGHT and HELEN KELLY-HOLMES (eds) Translation and Quality CHRISTINA SCHAFFNER (ed.) Translation and Norms CHRISTINA SCHÄFFNER (ed.) Please contact us for the latest book information: Multilingual Matters, Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon, BS21 7HH, England http://www.multilingual-matters.com
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Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia Edited by Sue Wright MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD Clevedon·Philadelphia·Toronto·Sydney
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia/Edited by Sue Wright 1. Catalonia (Spain)-Languages-Political aspects. 2. Catalan languages-Political aspects. 3. Language policy-Spain. 4. Democracy-Spain. I. Wright, Sue P119.32.S7L36 1999 306.44'9467-dc21 98-52029 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1-85359-445-8 (hbk) Multilingual Matters Ltd UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7HH. USA: 325 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA. Canada: 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Australia: P.O. Box 586, Artamon, NSW, Australia. Copyright © 1999 Sue Wright and the authors of individual articles. This book is also available as Vol. 5, No. 3 of the journal Current Issues in Language and Society. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd.
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Page v Contents Sue Wright: Foreword
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Miquel Strubell: Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia 4 Sue Wright: Catalonia: The Geographical and Historical Context of the Language Question 39 John Rex: Language and the Devolved Modern State in Catalonia: A Response to Miquel Strubell 48 Stephen Barbour: Reflections on Nationalism and Language: A Response to Miquel Strubell
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Dieter Haselbach: Group Rights, and 'Soft' Nationalism: A Response to Miquel Strubell 57 Alan Yates: Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia: A Response to Miquel Strubell 62 David Atkinson: Normalisation: Integration or Assimilation? A Response to Miquel Strubell
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Dennis Smith: Strategies for Multiculturalism: The Catalan Case Considered. A Response to Miquel Strubell
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Diarmait Mac Giolla Chriost: Issues of Power and Identity: A Response to Miquel Strubell
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Foreword Sue Wright School of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK We have already explored the subject of the re-Catalanisation of Catalan public life in a 1995 issue of Current Issues in Language and Society entitled Monolingualism and Bilingualism: Lessons from Canada and Spain. In that issue, Charlotte Hoffmann gave an overview of the history of language planning in Catalonia since the end of the Franco period and analysed both its successes and the new problems that Catalanisation seems to have brought in its wake. In her assessment of the evidence, she suggests that the Catalonians have succeeded in reversing language shift, but that the process has not been accepted either by Madrid or by all those Castilian speakers who have come to Catalonia to work. On the question of equity she quoted Jacob Mey (1989) and queried whether the new language laws were simply righting the wrongs of the past or installing new injustices. In her conclusion, she recognised that Spain's experience of democracy, devolution and federalism has been relatively short and that the final forms into which it will settle are not yet fixed. This being so, she called for the development of a culture of tolerance towards linguistic diversity and cultural pluralism not only in Madrid but also in the Autonomies. She concluded that, as Catalonians, Basques and Galicians seek to reconquer their cultural and linguistic space, it would be a pity if they were to repeat the mistakes of the past and enforce public monolingualism on linguistically disparate groups. However, the question of language rights is not easily solved. The fundamental conflict between individual freedoms and group rights is nowhere more evident than in the area of language. The freedom to use one's own language means nothing if the society in which one is free to do this makes no provision for it at all, does not use it in official public life, does not teach it in the education system, does not use it in the media, does not permit it in the courts. Without societal support, the freedom to speak a language is empty; it means simply that one will not be persecuted for speaking to oneself. How to ensure individual linguistic rights in the face of society's need to establish a community of communication has not ever been resolved. To permit separate linguistic development, to have institutionalised plurilingualism may be to prevent social mobility, may be to fracture the democratic debate, may be to undermine the solidarity necessary for the well-being of the welfare state. It was in the desire to explore this inevitable tension between the Human Rights position which states that individuals should be able to use their own language, and the empirical recognition that societies need a common language in order to function in a democratic and socially cohesive way, that we returned to the Catalonian question and debate. We invited Miquel Strubell, Director of the Institut de Sociolingüística Catalana, to be our main speaker. As one of the actors in the re-Catalanisation process he makes no claim for impartial objectivity. He is committed to the normalisation process in Catalonia and believes passionately that there must be
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affirmative action to protect small languages from market forces. Of course, as an insider, he is well informed about the Catalonian situation, and, as a collaborator on the Mosaic project, he has insights into the problems, conflicts and successes of other multilingual situations. His paper traces the links that he sees between devolution, democracy and language in the Catalan context. It is, he stresses, not to be taken as the official Catalan view. Nonetheless, given his position and background, it probably is a good indication of what the political elites and cultural opinion formers in Catalonia are thinking. The guests at the seminar were a mix of linguists, political scientists and sociologists. They were invited to reply and six have done so. In the first response, Professor John Rex gives a clear exposition of the Gellner-Smith debate on nationalism. In one model, the nation is presented as an expression of the contract between citizen and state. In the other, the nation is seen as the repository of the shared symbols, traditions, language and culture of an ethnic group. Rex judges the Catalonian situation to be a civic and inclusive nationalism, but which has an ethnic dimension in that it is defined in linguistic terms. Stephen Barbour's piece has a theoretical focus. He attempts to define some of the key terms in the study of language and nationalism and show their force in the European context. Dieter Haselbach's paper illustrates one of the points that Strubell makes in his paper. Strubell argues that the nationalism which already exists is seen as the norm. And certainly, for Haselbach, it is the Catalan nationalism and its attempts at affirmative action which are menacing; he does not discuss the hegemony of Spanish nationalism. Haselbach worries that demographic realities might well push Catalan nationalism into less inclusive policies; he argues that since nationalism has no natural limits, soft nationalism can easily become harder in difficult times. In a very forceful attack on affirmative action, he calls on politicians to let the market decide linguistic issues. Professor Alan Yates is a Catalan specialist and deals with some of the detail of the subject, explaining the actual differences between the Catalan based on the Barcelona dialect and some of the other dialects which can be grouped under the Catalan umbrella. He makes the point that differences between the Catalan of Catalonia and the Catalan of the Balearics and Valencia have been seized upon and exaggerated by right-wing provincialists who support Spanish centralism and the integrity of the Spanish state and that the fractures within Catalan and the stances taken on it should be seen in this context. He also focuses on the difficulties inherent in the latest Catalan language legislation. He makes the point, common in sociolinguistic thinking, that societal bilingualism is usually a staging post to societal monolingualism, particularly in those societies where there is no rigid diglossic division between the languages, but questions whether the paradigm of dominant language A (Castilian) versus subordinate language B (Catalan) could actually be reversed in Catalonia. David Atkinson focuses on the position of Castilian speaking 'in-migrants', resident and working in Catalonia. He reminds us that the policy of assimilating migrants is no longer accepted without question. The inclusiveness of Catalan nationalism is on a French model which is under review. Assimilation is bound to be challenged in a situation such as Catalonia where migrants imagined that
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they were simply moving region within their state and never took a personal/ familial decision to move to a new cultural/linguistic context. He suggests diglossia as the only way to provide stability, equity and cultural protection. Dennis Smith puts forward the argument that in a globalising world, Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia would do well to bury their differences and make common cause against Anglo-Saxon language and culture which threatens to enter the equation and swamp them all. Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost discusses the lack of congruence between the Catalan nation defined culturally and linguistically and Catalonia the polity. He suggests that a 'post-nationalist' Europe might be developing in which different levels of government and different alliances oversee different configurations of territory. He points to the Irish Good Friday Agreement as encapsulating the new approach. He sees porous, overlapping and flexible borders as likely to aid the survival of Catalan as a distinct language, culture and identity. I have added a short piece to give the reader without specialist knowledge of Catalonia some of the geographical, historical and linguistic knowledge necessary to appreciate the issues fully. I repeat some of the points mentioned in the other papers, but I hope that by putting them into a chronological or geographical context I have made relationships clearer. References Hoffmann, C. (1995) Monolingualism, bilingualism, cultural pluralism and national identity. In S. Wright (ed.) Monolingualism and Bilingualism: Lessons from Canada and Spain. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Mey, J. (1989) 'Saying it don't make it so'. In 'The Una Grande Libre of Language Politics'. Multilingua 8 (4), 333355.
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Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia Miquel Strubell Institut de Sociolingüística Catalana, Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain In his paper, Miquel Strubell argues that in Europe in the past few centuries the relationship between democracy and language policy in multilingual countries is very complex; that Catalan has thrived in democratic periods in which devolution has advanced; that the causes of most of the problems facing Catalan are non-linguistic, so the remedies are also non-linguistic; and that the future of Catalaneven in Catalonia properis insecure, because of its weak demographic base: very low fertility rates, plus constant in-migration from Spanish-speaking Spain, often in a hostile media context. He distinguishes between the rights of speakers of territorially stable languages and those of immigrant populations, and like Kymlicka argues that the liberal tradition does make allowance for group or minority rights. Finally, in a situation in which a political dictatorship has been replaced by an economic dictatorship (that of the free market) any demographically weak language needs a firm pro-active policy in order to survive and thrive. Introduction This subject is an extremely thought-provoking one, for while each of the three concepts, language, democracy and devolution, could, in its own right, keep linguists, sociologists or political scientists in business indefinitely, the interfaces bring together the different disciplines in new ways. Seen as a triangle, with a concept at each vertex, it is clear that we can discuss three separate two-way relationships, each of which is fascinating in a context such as the one in which I work: Catalonia. I have often said and written 1 that it is only in bi- or multilingual situations that the relationship between language and, on the one hand, democracy, and on the other, devolution, attains its greatest potential. This is not to deny that language and democracy, for instance, are related in monolingual societies: surely a literate, and therefore linguistically wellequipped populace is better placed to make informed judgements in a democratic environment than is an illiterate one. Surely there is a need in both mono- and multilingual countries for shared meaning in order for citizens to be able to cope with the abstract concepts that a modern society handles and requires. But nevertheless, in power relationships between people who speak different languages, language becomes a crucial element and language choice a very easily observable phenomenon or social variable. And in this context Spain is an excellent case study. In a less enlightened age, people would turn through the pages of their atlas, and on reaching the map of Spain, nicely illustrated in a single colour and clearly different from the colours of neighbouring countries, they would say 'Ah! Spain. Yes: Spanish!'. The stereotype was one of bullfights and flamenco, wherever people actually came from in Spain (even if they were portrayed in Fawlty
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Towers). But such cultural uniformity was far from the truth, as was the myth of linguistic uniformity that used to be transmitted to the outside world: It is frequently forgotten (or entirely unrecognised) that, after the Soviet Union, Spain constitutes the most populous economically developed multilingual country in the world and the oldest multilingual state in the world, predating even the Swiss confederation in that respect. Similarly forgotten or overlooked, is the fact that the Catalan contribution to both of these circumstances is and has long been the major one. (Fishman, 1991: 299) In the present case, language (which can be regarded as the domain of linguists and, I would like to add, language planners), democracy (which, in the sense that it relates the individual to his or her surrounding social environment, can perhaps best be regarded as the domain of sociologists and anthropologists) and devolution (which is undoubtedly the area of political scientists 2) come together in exciting ways, as I hope to convince readers. And if the interfaces are exciting in themselves, they are, I can assure you, absolutely enthralling if we look at the particular case of Catalonia. I therefore intend to structure this paper in the simplest and most logical fashion: after a very brief introductory reference to the language itself, I shall deal in turn with language and democracy, language and devolution, andalbeit more brieflywith democracy and devolution. May I state from the outset some of my main hypotheses: that in Europe in the past few centuries the relationship between democracy and language, in bi- and multilingual countries, has been far from simple; that Catalan has thrived in democratic periods in which devolution has advanced; that the causes of most of the problems facing Catalan, in the past and at present, are non-linguistic in nature; and that the future of the language is far from secure. The Catalan language is probably a unique case in Europe. Not because of any inherent virtue of the language itself: it is a neo-Latin, or Romance language, that is, a member of the same family of languages as Portuguese, Spanish, Occitan, French and Italian, among others. Not because of the extraordinary standard of its literature. Not because it has an inordinately large vocabulary. Instead, its claim to uniqueness lies in the fact that, alone among the languages spoken today by over five million people in Europe, it has survived three centuries of nation-state ideology (one nation, one state, one language) without having had a state to back it (we can discount the weight of Andorra in the international arena), and without at the same time entering an irreversible demographic decline. This is of course thanks to the fact that most of the people who speak the language have continued to do so, despite political or other pressures, generation after generation. In this paper we shall be looking into the causes of this resilience, building on earlier papers (e.g. Webber & Strubell, 1991; Strubell, 1993, 1996) while at the same time highlighting the threats that have constantly assailed the language and the identity of its speakers.
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Language and Democracy On 19 November 1863, Abraham Lincoln gave a memorable definition of democracy (without, curiously enough, using the word) in a speech in which he expressed his hope: that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. (Cohen & Cohen, 1991: 234) Government of the people [...] for the people can of course be undertaken by a benevolent despot. It is the reference to government by the people that associates the statement so clearly with democracy. Yet it is easy to reach erroneous conclusions by attempting simple associations between language and democracy. A language can decline or disappear in a democracy, and it can survive in an autocracy. Several examples can illustrate these points. The French revolution, widely hailed as one of the biggest steps towards (parliamentary) democracy that history has ever seen, quickly brought to the fore those who argued that a single language had to be imposed for all citizens to be equal, and to have equal access to rights and services, in a country in which, at the end of the eighteenth century, about half of the population spoke languages other than French: principally Occitan, which was spoken by the vast majority of the population in the southern half of the country, but also Breton, Corsican, Basque, Catalan, Dutch and German. In order for liberty, equality and fraternity to work in practice, it was felt by those in power that all should learn French as well as or fairly soon, instead ofwhat were known in derogatory fashion as les patois. To be a Provençal speaker was seen as backward and old-fashioned, as ancien regime, and therefore linked to a world which was being swept away without any kind of nostalgia by the waves of modernity and rationality which could only be expressed through French. Curiously enough, the Académie Française was closed for a time. It was felt that before the revolution it had 'promoted the power of the ruling elite by mobilising writers and scholars in support of the regime and by imparting to the language of the elite an aroma of sanctity' (Cooper, 1989: 34). Soon enough, however, the new rulers saw that it could suit the new regime at least as well as the old one, so it was re-opened. At the same time, the Austro-Hungarian empire, run by emperors who were shocked at the fate of their French counterparts and who were not especially sympathetic to the ideals of universal suffrage and the rule of the majority, was a model of peaceful coexistence and mutual respect of a large number of language communities. No attempt was made to impose a single language on all, or to indoctrinate part of the population. On the contrary, a multilingual policy was put into force. A good example of this was the fact that senior army officers in the Austro-Hungarian army had to have a good command of up to five languages, and a monolingual officer was a contradiction in terms. In another multilingual democratic country, Belgium, which is a good example of a linguistically federalised country, it was said that there were considerable casualties among the Flemish troops during the First World War because nearly all of them were led by French-speaking (Walloon) officers (de Vroede, 1975:49). Many of the Flemish speakers had such a very poor command of French, they
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misunderstood orders and lost their lives as a result. Whether or not this is true may be open to doubt. What is not in question are the steps taken later: in 1928 an army bill was passed which meant that recruits would thereafter be trained exclusively in their own language, thus leading to the creation of linguistically separate army units (de Vroede, 1975:53). The contrast between the French and Belgian reactions to multilingualism is significant in terms of political philosophy. In the first case, it is the citizen that is expected to adapt and conform to the (linguistic) model defined by the authorities, and is encouraged and aided to do so, principally through the education system, so that all citizens will as a result be equal. In the latter case, it is the system itself that has to adapt to the citizens and to their linguistic features, that has to be adjusted and altered so as to be able to treat each citizen equally, that is, on his or her own terms and in his or her own language. Both therefore have a laudable democratic 3 aim, but seek to attain it in radically different, even completely opposing, ways. Another of the definitions of democracy is especially relevant in that it links democracy and minorities. In this use, democracy is defined as a 'form of society ignoring hereditary class distinctions and tolerating minority views'.4 This 'tolerance', of course, can be focused in many ways. The Flemings were undoubtedly, in terms of demography and political clout, a 'minority' in Belgium in the early years of this century, and their views were 'tolerated' by channelling them into the political structure of the country until a complex federal system was developed. Yet what was tolerated in France was deliberately limited just to (numerically) minority political views (so long as they stayed within bounds), whereas linguistic (or cultural) minorities as such were regarded as deviant, their wishes not being taken into account, and to this day the Corsicans cannot legally describe themselves as a 'people', as the French constitutional court ruled a few years ago, since there is only one 'people' in France. In this they have sociologists as possibly unwitting allies: there cannot, by definition, be two societies in one country. Whereas this Jacobin view is based on the philosophy that people have to adapt to the state (in order to enjoy the benefits of rational thought and civilisation), the Germanic view, best expressed by Herder, is the opposite: it is the language of the people that forms the nation (and therefore the state) (Nelde et al., 1996). This can and has had two consequences: that the state has to use the language of the people; but also that it is legitimate to fix the boundaries of the state on the grounds of language. The unification of Prussia, Bavaria and the rest of the German states was a logical political consequence of such a philosophy; but so too were the annexations of Austria, Bohemia and Alsace, for instance. Language, democracy and human and minority rights I would not like to move on to the next issue without dealing, albeit in passing, with another point of interest: the relationship between language and democracy from the point of view of human and minority rights. Articles 1 and 2 of the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] establish two underlying concepts that are of great importance when considering issues related to human and minority rights. These are the concepts of
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equality and non-discrimination. They presuppose that all human beings have equal rights regardless of differences; regardless of such considerations as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. (Siemienski, 1998a) I have obviously no objection to these claims, quite the contrary. But let us just take a look at the list of 'considerations'. Nearly all of them are birth-given and singular in nature. Race, colour, sex, religion, political opinion, national or social origin or birth are either things that simply cannot be changed; 5 or are single in nature: one cannot be at the same time of two social origins, birthplaces or religions. However, the reference to language in this list, which I think is perfectly justified, has been rather grotesquely distorted to suit certain ends in recent years. The context is the issue of job vacancies in Catalonia in which Catalan language proficiency is a job requirement, or at least a stated preference by the employer. Some Spaniards (mostly outside Catalonia, to be fair) have claimed that to make such a requirement is an act of discrimination against Spanish-speakers, and even that it goes against the freedom of movement that the Spanish Constitution guarantees all citizens. This claim is absurd; I am sure that the Constitutions of Switzerland and Belgium proclaim the same freedom of movement, yet no-one complains if a job in Zurich requires German (or in Geneva, French). It would, to be sure, be discriminatory to limit access to certain jobs on the basis of a person's home or family languagewhich is what the Universal Declaration renders illegal. It would also be discriminatory to exclude someone because they have a non-native or regional accent.6 But it is to misunderstand and misquote the Universal Declaration to argue that Catalan employers do not have the right to ask that their employees have competence in Catalan. It seems to me (and to the international courts, incidentally) perfectly reasonable to expect an appropriate command of one or more official languages by people applying for many jobs in Catalonia, especially if these jobs entail contact with people who speak one or other language. I say 'appropriate command', and I very much doubt I shall ever come across a case in which only graduates in Catalan philology can apply to become workers in ticket offices! What is at stake is whether it is legitimate to try and defend a discourse which says that Catalans must learn Spanish (of course!) while Spaniards living in Catalonia are under no obligation to learn Catalan. From the viewpoint of a social psychologist, I regard it as highly significant that some people completely fail to accept what most Catalans regard as perfectly reasonable. It clashes head on with the deeply-rooted premises of those we might term Spanish traditionalists or Jacobins, regarding the very definition of Spain. The essentially monolingual, colonial-style attitude is often heard expressed in the incredulous remark by people who simply cannot accept that Catalans can use their language freely in public: '¡Pero estamos en España! (But we are in Spain!). Many Catalans object strongly to the exclusive, impositional and monolithic view of Spain that this short sentence reveals, and it is sometimes used maliciously, to be sure. But usually, I venture to believe, it is quite innocent: it simply reveals a different way of looking at the world, which is clearly incompatible with an acceptance of what that part of the Iberian peninsula which is still called Spain is really like: a place where four languages, not one, have been spoken for many,
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many centuries. Fully 41% of the Spanish population live in areas where there are two official languages (Siguan, 1994). As an afterthought, it is comforting (though we have plenty of other problems) to see that the proportion of the population in Catalonia that claims not to be able to speak Catalan has been declining non-stop since 1975, when prolonged, large-scale in-migration abruptly ceased, and General Franco's death opened the way towards democratic language policies. Between 1991 and 1996 it fell from 32% to 25%, an average annual decrease of over 80,000 people! Monolingualism is indeed a curable disease (as the Brussels-based linguist Peter Nelde says on occasion). Language, identity and political representation Without wishing to distract the reader from the general thread of my argument, I do feel it worthwhile devoting a few moments to the issue of who is a Catalan and who isn't in a situation where close to half the population of Catalonia is a first- or second-generation (mostly Spanish-speaking) in-migrant from another part of Spain. There being no large religious difference, or colour or racial differenceunlike, for instance, the Basques whose nationalism stresses the ethnic (Conversi, 1997)the language has, in social terms, an enormous defining weight in Catalonia, at least for those who are not of recent immigrant origin (I dare not talk about 'real' Catalans, as I am trying to describe the social definition of what a Catalan is anyway!). Often I hear it said that 'We Catalans are the only bilingual people [in Catalonia]: the Castilians are all monolingual'. But in fact many of those who are happily regarded as 'Catalans', as belonging to the ingroup, are in fact native Spanish-speakers who have become fluent bilinguals, whereupon their friends and colleagues will (re)define them as Catalans. May I add that at the political level, ever since the pre-democratic Assemblea de Catalunya in the seventies, and the early writings of the future president, Jordi Pujol, an extremely open definition of 'Catalan' has been adopted in all political debates, largely in order to avert the threat of a social and even political division along ethnolinguistic (and probably urban class) lines. We shall return to this important issue later. This brings us to the interesting point of political representation in Spain. Unlike the former republics of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, where all citizens define(d) their nationality on the census form, the political tradition in Spain is close to the French one. This is not surprising, given France's high political and social standing in western Europe (on the continent at least) and the fact that the Spanish monarchs have been Bourbons for nearly three centuries. No official reference is made to anyone's nationality: it is the place of residence that defines one's political rights: primarily, where one has to vote. The Spanish system is based on the principle of proportional representation, so instead of over 600 constituencies which are represented on a first-past-the-post basis, as in Britain, Spain has only as many constituencies as there are provinces: just over 50. Let us look at the general elections (the elections to the Spanish parliament). Each province returns at least three MPs, and the larger ones return a number which is related, rationally enough, to the size of the electorate. This gives the large provinces (Madrid and Barcelona) over 30 MPs each; but since the small constituencies have a smaller number of electors per MP, the 16% of the electorate
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who live and can vote in Catalonia choose only about 13% of the total number of Spanish MPs, which is 350. A similar procedure is followed to elect the 135 members of the Catalan Parliament. This paper is not the place to get involved into considerations of the pros and cons of different systems of parliamentary representation. Let us return to the language issue. It should now be clear that the Catalans as an ethnolinguistic group have no specific quota in the Spanish parliament. 7 It is the electorate of the territory, as a whole, who are called to decide on its representatives. So let us ask ourselves: what happens when they are? The answer is both complex and fascinating. The three-tier system (Spanish, Catalan and local elections), whereby each election is called independently of the other two, leads to fascinating differences in results. I shall outline them, and then try and associate the results with language, as befits this section. In Spain there are basically (I am forced to simplify, for obvious reasons which I hope will be appreciated) three 'national' parties: the Partido Socialista Obrero Español, or PSOE, the socialist party which held power from 1982 to 1996; the right-wing Partido Popular, or People's Party, which did not win an election until 1996; and the former Communists, Izquierda Unida, or United Left, which usually takes under 10% of votes and has recently splintered. In very broad terms, and as might be expected, the socialists get good results in the industrial cities and in the south, where a semi-feudal society still survives, and where they put into place widespread benefits for seasonal farm labourers. The right wins in 'traditional' Spain, in the north-west (Galicia), and in the capital, Madrid. This picture is quite different in Catalonia, where there are more actors. The main one is a stable coalition in which the leading partner is a liberal nationalist party, Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya, and the other is the historic Christian democratic party founded in 1931, Unió Democràtica de Catalunya. The second is a leftist party, also founded in 1931, which seeks independence from Spain, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya. Finally there is a second coalition, formed basically by the ex-Communists (Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, PSUC, foundedyes!in 1931), with some radical nationalists and several Green parties: Iniciativa per Catalunya. Its formal link with the Spanish Izquierda Unida was broken by the latter several months ago. Who, you may well ask, 'represents' the Catalans? As might be expected, Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya, Unió Democràtica de Catalunya and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya pick up proportionally many more votes from Catalans than from others living in Catalonia, who tend to vote more on 'national' lines, on the Partido Socialista Obrero Espaflol-Partido Popular axis. But it would be completely untrue to say that Catalans do not vote for either of these two parties. Their very leaders are Catalan, and indeed the Catalan socialist party linked to PSOE, the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya PSC-PSOE, has a firm catalanista tradition. All in all, the socialists have hitherto always won the general elections in Catalonia, while second place goes to Convergència i Unió. The thorn in the flesh of Spanish right-wingers is Catalonia, where they win a fraction of the votes they obtain everywhere else (except in the Basque country, where nationalist parties are also very strong). The political antics of Partido Popular in recent years, as regards the language issue, have not been totally transparent. They are widely
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regarded to have been behind the smear campaign led by a section of the privately-owned media, such as ABC (to whom I shall have to return later) and Diario 16 both dailiesthe COPE radio group, and the TV channel Antena 3, among others. After the Partido Popular unexpectedly failed to win the general election in 1993, and Convergència i Unió agreed to support the Socialist winners in the hung parliament to provide the political stability needed for the Spanish economy to fulfil the Maastricht criteria, a verbal onslaught from the Right tried to create the impression that the Catalans were close to committing ethnic cleansing, and that the failure of the Socialists to prevent such atropellos only went to show what a weak government they were. This awoke some Spaniards' latent antipathies towards Catalans in general: the cause of the largest demonstration in the history of Salamanca was the announced agreement by the Spanish government that the part of the Catalan government's archives that had been confiscated by the army in 1939 and deposited in a building in Salamanca was to return to its rightful owner. The nation-wide campaign ended overnight when the Partido Popular won the following (and last) general election in 1996, and was left in the uncomfortable position of having to negotiate a parliamentary agreement ... with Convergència i Unió! It is, however, in the regional elections that the ethnolinguistic identity of the electorate in Catalonia becomes extremely highly correlated with results. I have myself looked into the issue, in an unpublished paper, where I mathematically and graphically correlated various results. To give an example, I took the province, or circumscription, of Barcelona. I did so for two reasons: firstly because it is by far the largest of the four in Catalonia; and secondly, because the people topping the list of candidates each party put forward were also that party's candidate to become President of Catalonia. Figure 1 shows clearly how the percentage vote given to the moderate
Figure 1 Moderate nationalist votes cast in Catalan regional elections, November 1995, per district ('comarca') in Barcelona circumscription, by percentage of population born outside Catalonia
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nationalists, Convergència i Unió, is very highly correlated with the percentage of autochthonous population living in each district. A similar, but negative, relationship is seen to exist if the percentage of immigrants is compared with the turnout: the higher the percentage of immigrants, the lower the turnout. This of course is extremely important in political terms, and is the reason why it has been possible for Convergència i Unió to win a larger share of actual votes in regional elections than in general elections (and perhaps larger than might be expected given the sociological breakdown of the country as well). It may seem surprising that there are no 'ethnic' parties as such, and that both Catalans and 'Castilians' vote for all parties, albeit in greatly differing proportions. The reason is two-fold. Firstly, all politicians in Catalonia are acutely mindful of the tragic effect that the arrival in Catalan politics of a Spanish radical politician had at the beginning of the century. Alejandro Lerroux's party had a very divisive demagogic strategy and did much to confront the earliest Spanish-speaking workers in Catalonia with Catalans. And secondly, after nearly 40 years of dictatorship, the democratic movement in its entirety, of whatever political hue, was basically catalanista, and therefore united in support of promoting the Catalan language. We shall return to this later. This does not mean to say that all parties have the same position as regards language policies, as we shall see: and in fact the differences become evident when it comes to electioneering; the Catalan nationalist parties use more Catalan than the Spanish national (or nationalist) parties. However, though these differences are evident, they are minor: the chief Catalan candidates of all parties will probably make their main speeches in Catalan. This obviously brings the parties closer to the prospective Catalan voter, without alienating the Spanish-speaker, who almost certainly understands Catalan anyway. One final remark on the relationship between language and democracy. There are effects on language itself, on the internal structure of the language, which result from the association (or not) of a language with power, be it democratic or otherwise. The languages of the pays d'Oc which have not had a power base since Provence became part of the French state at the end of the 15th century have become even more fragmented than they were in the medieval period. There is no agreement even on a spelling system: Gascon-dialect speakers defend one system in the west, the Provençal-speakers in the east defend another. Mutual comprehensibility has declined over the centuries. Is this a result of democracy? On the one hand the language has stayed close to the people with all varieties equally accepted. On the other hand without political and institutional backing, fragmentation becomes a likely outcome and both the utility and influence of the language are weakened. The same happened within the Catalan dialect continuum in the 16th-19th centuries, and to this day the language receives many local names, including Majorcan and, most significantly, Valencian. Conversely, once a standard, codified form is projected on to society, local variations will tend over time to diminish and may even eventually disappear. This has been the case with both French and Spanish.
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Language and autocracy I said earlier that language diversity can survive under autocracies. This of course was the case for thousands of years, when monarchs and tribal leaders imposed their authority with little of no reference to the will of their subjects. As a rule, pre-industrial societies were extremely weakly organised in terms of political and administrative structures, so the average person had little contact with central power except perhaps in wartime. Such schooling as was offered was more likely to be offered by the churches than by the state. Under such conditions, language groups could survive virtually indefinitely. The threat to such groups came in tandem with economic and political integration, and with the increasing power and influence of the state upon daily life. To provide an example, let us move closer to Catalonia. Let us recall that the country was divided in 1659 by the Treaty of the Pyrenees, by which the kingdoms of Spain ceded to France northern Catalonia, the plains and mountains north of the line linking the highest ridges along the Pyrenees. That territory, with its capital at Perpinyà (Perpignan) was subjected fairly early on to an increasing onslaught of measures designed to introduce French and to steadily reduce the importance and status of Catalan, and the significant point is that this pressure increased after the 1789 Revolution. The language survived there as an increasingly rural language, and its speakers felt more and more ashamed of their patois. But only (yet significantly) after the two World Wars did Catalan families decide en masse to stop speaking it to their offspring. Today, only a small proportion of the population there can speak the language, and even then with a heavy French influence in their accent and vocabulary. To the south of the Franco-Spanish border, the language, though in a period of literary decline, continued to be the only language spoken and used by virtually all the population well into this century. It was not until the Catalans, who had supported the Habsburgs' claim to the Spanish throne, were conquered by the joint Spanish and French forces under the Duke of Berwick, following the fall of Barcelona in September 1714 after a thirteen-month siege, that the new regime began to seriously design and implement a subtle 8 language policy designed to replace Catalan by Spanish (Ferrer i Gironès, 1985). The victorious monarch, Philip V, abolished the Catalan Parliament (the Corts) and government (the Diputació General or Generalitat), both of which were clearly democratic in inspiration (albeit far from acknowledging or furthering universal suffrage), abolished the University of Barcelona, razing its very buildings along the famous Barcelona Rambla, and imposed the semi-feudal and autocratic system that had been devised centuries earlier to run Castile. Yet in spite of the longer time span, and the lack of democracy in the country, the spread of Spanish in Catalonia was far slower than was the case with the spread of French in France; both the inefficiency of the political and administrative structures and the lack of a generally accepted legitimacy guaranteed Catalan a much greater degree of survival in 'Spanish' Catalonia than north of the border. Language and autocracy in Spain The threat to Catalan greatly increased under the two dictatorships in this century: General Primo de Rivera (1923-30) and General Franco (1938/9-75).
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This was particularly true of the latter where repression was longer-lasting and more virulent. Following the failure of the army coup in July 1936, Spain endured almost three years of civil war. Those who rose against the Spanish Republic (who called themselves, significantly enough, the 'nacionalistas') aimed to overthrow the Catalan institutions of self-government (the Generalitat de Catalunya) which had been restored after two centuries in 1931 by the Second Republic. There were, to be accurate, Catalans on both sides of the conflict, although, of course, far fewer with the Francoists. Many Spaniards feared that Catalonia was moving towards independence, as the Irish had only 15 years earlier. One Spanish right-wing intellectual 9 claimed he would rather a communist Spain than a free Catalonia: 'España, antes roja que rota'. More recently, following Franco's death in 1975, the nostalgic moan of the supporters of his regime, 'Con Franco vivíamos mejor',10 was countered by democrats who said 'Contra Franco vivíamos mejor'.11 Behind the pun lies a firm belief that, among other things, Catalan gained an inner strength by being illegitimately suppressed. The suppression of democracy and Catalan culture and language gave them strong links in the public mind. It is not surprising, therefore, that the prevalent view among Catalan nationalists is that over the centuries there has been, in Catalonia, a closeeven apparently causal relationship between autocracy and Spanish, on the one hand, and between democracy and Catalan, on the other. This opinion deserves great attention because it is central to the whole issue. It would of course be too simplistic to claim that all pro-democratic movements have favoured Catalan or that all proautocratic or dictatorial movements have favoured the spread of Spanish at the expense of Catalan. However, in this century the movement par excellenceFranco's glorioso Movimiento nacional was most definitely a Spanish nationalist movement, aiming to obliterate Catalan along with what they referred to as the other dialects spoken in Spain, and to replace them with la lengua del Imperio. Some Falangistas intended to distribute Catalan books from lorries during the victorious military parade of the Caudillo's army of Spanish, Italian and Moorish troops, to underline the will of the new regime to respect the culture of Catalonia; but the authorities never allowed those books to be handed out, and indeed thousands of books were publicly burnt over the following months, especially in Barcelona. Increasingly, the democratic opposition used the Francoist repression of use of the language in the press, on the radio, in schools, in shop signs, in local councils etc. to mobilise public and world opinion. Many historians and others have written profusely on this clear association between the will for a democratic regime and the will for the status of the Catalan language to be restored (e.g. Benet, 1973; Ferrer i Gironès, 1985; Solé i Sabaté & Villarroya, 1993; Guardiola, 1980). The Congrés de Cultura Catalana (1975-77), an extraordinary, unrepeatable multidisciplinary look at the state of Catalan society, including enthusiastic work in Valencia, the Balearic Islands and in the other Catalan-speaking areas outside Catalonia proper, again related closely the plight of the language to the political oppression it had suffered, the effects of which were noticeable in all fields. A few years later, the same organisers were responsible for the II Congrés
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Internacional de la Llengua Catalana (1986), which took a basically sociolinguistic look at the health of the language and made wide-ranging recommendations to the authorities, many of which have still not been implemented over ten years later. The call for a joint body co-ordinating language promotion in at least the three main areas where the language is official (Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands), along the lines of the Taalunie between Belgium (for Flanders) and Holland or the co-operation between the Scandinavian countries channelled through the Nordic Council, has gone unheeded for reasons which I shall discuss below. Language policies and liberalism All this does not exclude the possibility of someone claiming that there are exceptions to such a clear-cut relationship between language and democracy, that the cops may not in all cases be cops (or else they may be crooked cops) and the robbers may not all be robbers. And indeed in the past few years it has been interestingfrom an academic point of view if not from any otherto observe the emergence of a current of opinion inside Catalonia itself, and with powerful loudhailers helping to broadcast their views in the rest of Spain, which claims that the Generalitat's language policies are not democratic. Sometimes the fight was against policies that were imagined rather than real; sometimes dissent was to forestall or pre-empt policy decisions that were not necessarily going to happen anyway. It would be a gross oversimplification to say that the promoters of such lobbies have been right-wing ex-franquistas. It seems also to be the case that some of these critics have moved over the years away from leftist positions. One particularly well-qualified opponent of the language policies designed by the Catalan government and Parliament is Francesc de Carreras who argues from the standpoint of a liberal. The subject in question is a language bill that was soon to be enacted: Sin embargo, el núcleo de aquello que se pone en discusión no es tanto la ley en sí misma, sino toda la política lingüistica que la ley ha llevado a su culminación. El error de fondo de esta política, y también, por supuesto, de la ley, radica en que se inspira en una concepción nacionalista de Cataluña que, a mi modo de ver, no resulta conciliable con los principios de libertad y pluralismo en los cuales está basada nuestra democracia constitucional. Porque, ciertamente, desde esta concepción, la lengua es considerada como el , aquello que convierte a los ciudadanos en . Como decía un manifiesto nacionalista hecho público hace unos meses, la lengua es . Desde una posición liberal y democrática, una lengua es, sin duda, un rasgo cultural que caracteriza a una sociedad, pero nunca un rasgo cultural que pueda limitar nuestra libertad individual; es decir, nunca una manera de ver el mundo. La lengua no es la esencia de nuestra personalidad o el núcleo duro de nuestra identidad como personas: desde la Ilustración, por lo menos, nuestra identidad y nuestra personalidad sólo tienen un fundamento que no es otro que la libertad.
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Por tanto, el error de fondo que constituye confundir los derechos de las personas con los derechos de las naciones -partiendo de un concepto preexistente de nación, desligado de los derechos de cada uno de sus componentes -se proyecta en el articulado de la ley a dos niveles: por un lado, confundiendo lengua > con lengua ; por otro, confundiendo la legítima protección de la lengua catalana, necesaria por ser lengua minoritaria, con la imposición del uso del catalán a todas las instituciones públicas e incluso a las relaciones entre particulares. (de Carreras, 1998) 12 Much could be said to counter these arguments, and much has. For instance, the history of the Enlightenment in France is precisely the history of the negation of people's right to speak their own languageunless it was French. For instance, Spanish is not official in Catalonia because Spanish-speakers live there. Several authors have pointed out the large number of similar rules and regulations the central government applies vis-àvis Spanish, starting with the obligation of all citizens to know Spanish, without any of these self-proclaimed liberals batting an eyelid, at least in public. Others have argued that a person cannot be truly free, as a member of a minority, unless the political structure takes special and deliberate account of this fact (Kymlicka, 1995; Branchadell, 1997). But in the last analysis I (at least) cannot help feeling that each writer is firmly rooted in his or her own cultural and ideological perspective, and that a true dialogue between the opposing points of view is, by definition, well-nigh impossible. Democracy and language: The rule of the majority Where 'minority language' speakers are actually in a majority, democracy can help redress the power balance. Otherwise democracy can be used to confirm minority status, unless of course international standards on human and minority rights13 are scrupulously respected. Some 'democratic' countries re-define regional boundaries so that the local majority becomes a minority in two new territorial units (e.g. Slovakia). In the 1960s Franco seriously toyed with the idea of lopping the whole of the province of Lleida off Catalonia and adding it to an 'Ebro' region along with the three basically Spanish-speaking provinces of Aragon. It is significant, I am sure, that there is no generally accepted word for languages, or rather language groups, that find themselves in a subordinate position in a given state. They have variously been referred to as 'minority' languages, 'lesser-used' languages, 'stateless' languages, 'lesser-taught' languages, 'unofficial' languages, 'regional' languages, 'dialects', 'minoritised' languages, langues 'moins répandues' etc. The problem is that the simplest word, minority, has a mathematical connotation that is sometimes inappropriate: if Danish and Norwegian are not 'minority' languages, why is Catalan, which is spoken by more people? The answer, of course, has nothing to do with linguistic matters, but is a matter of power: some languages have been adopted by the state and therefore have its backing and enjoy the benefits thereof; while other languages in the same state are either neglected (only sometimes benignly) or in other ways given a subordinate role. In Spain for instance, the general law on the
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judiciary 14 states that Spanish is the language of all court proceedings, and then allows a small space for Basque, Galician and Catalan, though only under certain circumstances. In a situation of 'perfect' democracy, multilingual countries (that is, countries whose borders enclose specific areas where different languages have been spoken for centuries) could accommodate such issues, allowing the majority in each area to decide upon its linguistic regime. This does indeed happen in Switzerland's cantons. It also happens in (coastal) Finland, where (in a remarkably flexible and pragmatic way) municipalities in which the proportion of Swedish-speakers in each census surpasses a certain benchmark become officially bilingual (or cease to be bilingual, when the percentage declines). The question here though is that 'minority' language groups are often not in a majority even in their heartland. Catalonia itself has been subject to periodic surges of immigration from the rest of Spain. Immigrants used to become fully and actively bilingual within a couple of generations; but this has happened only partly in the last thirty years, chiefly on account of the massive scale of recent immigration, which means that under half of the present population are 'Catalans' in the traditional sense. Thus the day may come when a new majority will take over the reins of language policy, and will reject the longstanding entente cordiale (which I am stating far too crudely!) that Catalans will continue to learn Spanish provided incoming Spaniards learn Catalan and use it in their interactions with Catalans, or at the very least ensure that their children do so. This would undoubtedly be 'democratic' in the sense that the local majority would make the decision; but it could also signal the death-knell for the local language by removing it from a favoured institutional position and thus reducing its association with 'power', however limited. It might also lead to social division, with Catalan-speakers reacting strongly against the public use of Spanish, even if the minimum international standards were still respected. Though I do not want to take the simile too far, this issue does remind me of the plight of the American Indians, whose reservations are essential if they are to be truly able to maintain their way of life, including the use of their language(s). Kymlicka (1995) has interesting and to my mind convincing points to make on this. Language and Devolution So much for the relationship between language and democracy. Let us move on to an equally interesting interface, that between language and devolution. Let no-one question the profound relationship between the two, often closely associated with identity and selfaffirmation. Noah Webster, the American linguist, writing in 1789, assumes the relationship in the following: Let us then seize the present moment and establish a national language, as well as a national government ... as an independent people, our reputation abroad demands that, in all things we should be federal; be national; for if we do not respect ourselves we may be assured that other nations will not respect us. (Webster quoted in Weinstein, 1982: 94-95; viz. Cooper, 1989: 147)
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As has already been mentioned, it is often said in Catalonia that the Catalan language has only flourished, in the past hundred or more years, in times of democracy. The two dictatorships (Primo de Rivera and Franco, both army generals) were certainly enthusiastic and thorough about banning Catalan, especially the secondand much longerregime. Yet the Boletín Oficial del Estado of both periods has curiously few examples of repression, because this largely took place without the need for legal measures. Once the Catalans knew what could happen to them if they kept their shop signs up in Catalan, or were caught teaching pupils in Catalan, or tried to publish a newspaper in Catalan, there was scarcely any need to actually legislate! Nevertheless, historians and political scientists have written profusely about the subject, and conclude that the degree of repression, including propaganda designed with the expert advice of leading figures in the Hitler regime, was very severe indeed, especially in the early years (Benet, 1973; Ferrer i Gironès, 1985; Solé i Sabaté & Villarroya, 1993). Yet, if we read through recent legislation governing languages passed by the Spanish Parliament, and through the Boletín Oficial del Estado, the claim that democracy is by its very essence 'good' for Catalan is certainly not substantiated. On the contrary, there has been an unflagging interest in ensuring that Castilian Spanish remains supreme. What varies is the degree to which this supremacy is imposed. The 1978 Constitution is most certainly an historic step forward as regards the recognition of the 'other' languages of Spain, and specifically Catalan, Basque and Galician; yet even then only one language is official throughout Spain, and these other languages have to share their official character inside the historical territories where they have been spoken for centuries. The Swiss or the Belgian models, where the historical language in each territory is the only official one (at least as far as German, French and Italian are concerned), are most certainly not applied. My position may seem unduly harsh, but it is backed up by the existence of a large body of current legislation and statutory regulations which still make the use of Castilian Spanish compulsory. 15 When the Generalitat complained that some seemed to forget that the Constitution obliges all the authorities to take measures to ensure that the linguistic heritage is protected, ministries rephrased later measures. Instead of making the use of 'at least Spanish' obligatory, they now say 'at least the official language of the state', which is simply a euphemism which hides exactly the same state of affairs. What then has given rise to the very widespread belief in Catalonia, that the Catalan language can only flourish in times of democracy? The answer is in the very different conception that Catalans have of democracy, as opposed to the Jacobin centralist and uniformist view. For Catalans, democracy and devolution have meant the same for the whole of this century at least. Let us look into this in a little more detail. 'Llibertat, amnistia, Estatut d'Autonomia' was the slogan that encapsulated the demands of the Assemblea de Catalunya towards the end of the Franco regime. If Llibertat and amnistia represented democracy and an end to political reprisals and repression, Estatut d'Autonomia was a call for devolution. Unfortunately, for many in Spain Llibertat and Estatut d'Autonomia for Catalonia were, and to some extent still are, tantamount to a serious threat to the 'integrity' of the state. To put it another way, many Spaniards are unconvinced
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that Catalans see 'Spain' as an attractive proposition or project, and given the chance, would opt for independence. This immediately raises two issues. One, the inferiority complex that some Spaniards seem to feel, with respect not merely to the French, the British or the Italians, but even to the Catalans. The stereotypical Castilian, the hidalgo, may be extremely proudto the point of violence if need beto defend his personal identity: he is easily insulted and quick to take offence. But his relationship with Spain is much more complex and is a bitter-sweet, or a love-hate one. I insist that I am conjuring up the image of the traditional Castilian, but if there is any truth behind the stereotype this would explain the ferocity of some Castilian reactions to Catalan demands. The second issue is whether or not Catalans really do want to become independent. Field research, and especially surveys, are highly contradictory, particularly when compared with the election results of those parties (the largest of which is Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya) which actively pursue full sovereignty for Catalonia. A good example of this is a study by Antoni Estradé and Montserrat Treserra (1990). When a sample of 2100 people were asked if they considered independence to be desirable, fully 39.4% replied affirmatively. As might be expected, the figure was brought down by the fact that a considerable proportion of the sample were not born and bred in Catalonia; and when the authors looked at the replies given by those interviewees whose parents were both born in Catalonia, the answers were as shown in Table 1. Table 1 Yes, independence would be desirable 55.4% No, independence would not be desirable 31.3% Other replies, indifference 3.0% No reply 10.3% Source: Estradé & Treserra, 1990, Table 50, p. 104 Equally revealing, however, were the answers to another question, in which interviewees were asked whether they thought that independence was possible. Only 37.4% replied that they thought it would be. Significantly enough, the figure is only slightly higher among the interviewees whose parents were both born in Catalonia (see Table 2). There is obviously a fairly high degree of scepticism among those of Catalan ancestry. The average Catalan is very familiar with the definition of politics as 'the art of the possible' and votes accordingly, on a highly pragmatic basis, largely Table 2 Yes, independence is possible 41.3% No, independence is impossible 47.0% Other replies, indifference 3.8% No reply 7.9% Source: Estradé & Treserra, 1990, Table 49, p. 102
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abandoning the independence parties. Not only pragmatism but also a healthy respect for history, which the system has been careful to inculcate over the centuries: Catalonia did not win her independence in 1640, unlike Portugal. Catalonia did not retain her confederal status in 1714, having lost to the Bourbon armies. And much more vividly, Catalonia lost to Franco and was punished for having striven to recover her national identity. These somewhat simplified statements 16 have helped to prevent Catalans from dreaming; ideological feeling, for instance, is much less intense than in, say, the Basque country. So the average Catalan person-in-the-street17 is not prone to seriously contemplate independence, because of memories of the savage repression wrought the last time such an aim was regarded as being a real and viable option. However, the questionnaire included yet another item on independence, in such a way as to allay people's almost genetic fear of violent reactions from the Meseta.18 The question asked was as follows: 'If a referendum was called now to begin a gradual process towards independence for Catalonia, how would you vote?19 The results (Table 3) are quite striking, in my view. Once the fears are removed, and even bearing in mind the quite understandable fact that two out of nine interviewees whose parents are (or were) both Catalan, and two out of seven of the other interviewees either say they would not vote or refuse to give an opinion, those who say they would vote for independence greatly outnumber those who say they would vote against it. Let me add, finally, that the survey was carried out by ICOP, SA, a firm with a well-established reputation in the field of market and opinion research. Table 3 Both parents Catalan All others Total I'd vote 'Yes' 33.0% 44.5% 60.5% I'd vote 'No' 34.6% 26.4% 14.9% I'd cast a blank vote >3.6% >3.1% 2.5% I wouldn't vote >11.8% >9.6% 6.5% I don't know/No reply 17.0% 16.4% 15.6% Total 100% 100% 100% Source: Estradé & Treserra, 1990, Table 51, p. 107 Language and devolution in Catalonia Returning to the main issue of the relationship between language and devolution, Catalan could have been defined in the Spanish Constitution (1978) as a national language with official status in specified parts of Spain. Instead this status was established by the Statute of Autonomy (1979) which was drafted by the Catalan MPs, put to the people in a referendum and given the level of an 'organic law', which forms part of the constitutional legislative package. Article 3.1 of the Statute states that the historic language of the people who have inhabited Catalonia, and have been hegemonic there for over eight
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centuries, is Catalan. A close approximation in English to the expression 'llengua pròpia de Catalunya' would be 'Catalonia's own language'. The second paragraph says that 'Catalan is the official language of Catalonia (...)'. The sentence does not, however, end here, for it continues: '(...) as is Spanish, official throughout the Spanish State'. This means, in effect, that Catalan is not the official language in Catalonia, but one of two. The grammatical mistake was politically intended: it underlines the different origin of the official character of the two languages in Catalonia. Note, as I have already pointed out, that Spanish (it is called Castilian in the Statute and the Constitution, incidentally) is not official in Catalonia because there are Spanish-speakers living there. Leading legal specialists such as Josep Maria Puig-Salellas were quick to point out that the official status of Catalan, alongside Spanish (which is, as I have already said, official throughout Spain) is both autonomous (that is, a Catalan text is valid whether or not it is accompanied by a Spanish version, and vice versa), and indivisible: (a) It is indivisible, so that the official nature of one of the two languages cannot be limited, for example, by reducing it to one particular material or geographic domain of the life of the community, while excluding it from another, even if this domain is the exclusive responsibility of the State or the Autonomous Community. (...) (b) It is autonomous, in the sense that each official language is official on its own, so that if a directive only allowed the autochthonous language if used side by side with Castilian or even imposed this double use of both languages, this would be unacceptable. (Puig i Salellas, 1983: 62-63) 20 Paragraph 3 of Article 3 takes account of the fact that after a period of repression of one language in favour of another, simply declaring both languages to be official will not in itself guarantee that people will be able to overcome their former (imposed) habit of using the language that was allowed, and start to use the other. Affirmative action is therefore necessary. Lacordaire described the reason for this very neatly: 'Entre lefort et lefaible c'est la liberté qui opprime et la loi qui affranchit' (Solé, 1995: 91). It also illustrates the legitimacy of working, within a liberal tradition, to overcome the obstacles that limit, in practice, the free exercise of language rights inside Catalonia.21 The paragraph states that: The Generalitat of Catalonia will guarantee the normal and official use of both languages, adopt whatever measures are deemed necessary to ensure both languages are known, and create suitable conditions so that full equality between the two can be achieved as far as the rights and duties of the citizens of Catalonia are concerned. This is a clear statement of the social contract: both Catalan- and Spanish-speakers are expected to make a balanced and shared effort to integrate in both directions, and the authorities have to work actively in pursuit of this objective. Leaving to one side, for a moment, the issue of the legal status of the language, one of the main novelties of the 1978 Constitution was the transfer of power to the regions. The Constitution devotes considerable attention to the responsibilities that central government may or may not transfer to the autonomous
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governments. Articles 143 to 158 deal with these issues. Article 148, for instance, states that autonomous communities (the official name for regions and stateless nations) can take over responsibility for urban and territorial planning; public works; railways and roads which start and end inside the territory; non-commercial ports and airports; agriculture and livestock; forestry; protection of the environment; hydraulic planning, including spas; hunting, and coastal and inland fishing; internal trade fairs; economic development of the autonomous community, in the framework of general economic policy; handicrafts; museums, libraries and music conservatories; monuments and historic heritage; culture, research and the teaching of the language (where applicable); tourism; sport; social assistance; health and hygiene. Paragraph 3 of article 150 grants the state the right to legislate by defining the principles that have to be applied, so as to 'harmonise' legislation and regulations enacted in different regions. This issue has on several occasions given rise to considerable crises and polemic, because the central Parliament can decide unilaterally on those areas which it is in the state's 'general interest' to 'harmonise'. Finally, the regional governments are entitled to raise their own taxes, above and beyond the general taxation system run (except in Navarre and the Basque community) by central government. The Catalan Statute lists the areas for which the Catalan regional authorities are to be responsible. These include the public health, prison and education services, the arts, public works and the environment, economic and industrial development, tourism, labour relations, internal commerce, etc. All these powers had been administered since 1939 through provincial offices of the Spanish government ministries in Barcelona, Tarragona, Girona and Lleida (broadly equivalent, all in all, to the Welsh or Scottish Offices in the UK) and were handed over, with budgetary provisions, over a period of years (though a few services have yet to be transferred) to the new or rather, restored Catalan administration. This basically meant that the civil servants changed boss, but neither desk nor basic tasks, at least initially. 22 What did change very quickly was the language used at work in these delegations. Whereas very few forms were even bilingual in 1979, the use of written Catalan grew very rapidly. Although the quality of such use was often not up to standard, this is hardly surprising given that many of the civil servants were not even Catalans themselves, and virtually none of the Catalans had had any form of education in or through Catalan. Thus a massive in-service language training scheme was put into effect, involving the Escola d'Administració Pública de Catalunya, the Catalan civil service college. Increasingly, new appointees would be expected to have a satisfactory level of oral and written Catalan, and a language qualification would also be a requirement for promotion. No-one, however, lost their job on linguistic grounds. Not a single person. In 1980 the first elections to the Catalan Parliament gave a clear mandate to Convergència i Unió, under Jordi Pujol. He has been the President ever since. The socialists were shocked at their poor result, having expected to win, and they refused, in my view mistakenly, to join a broad coalition government. Within a short space of time the new government had appointed a director-general for
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language policy, Sra Aina Moll, daughter of one of the most important linguists of this century (author of the tenvolume Alcover-Moll Catalan Dictionary) and a linguist in her own right. During her eight-year mandate there were three main policy objectives: (1) To put into practice the basic legal instruments, and to ensure that the Generalitat itself practised what it preached, in exemplary fashion, as far as the actual use of the language was concerned. (2) To ensure that all school children would become active and literate bilinguals, and that adults would have access to special language training on demand. (3) To encourage the whole population to play an active part in the recovery of the public use of the language, in a spirit of tolerance and peaceful co-existence. Two of the three main elements of this policy were and still are beyond the control of the directorate general (and in the latter case, of the government as a whole): the education system, and the public TV and radio services set up by the Catalan Parliament. The 1983 Language Bill was enacted thanks to the support of all the parliamentary groups (though the Partido Popular, at that time still called Alianza Popular, failed to get a seat). At the time, the Act was not regarded primarily as a Convergència i Unió imposition, though over the years memories fade and more and more often one reads references to the language policy as if it had been designed by the government coalition, instead of being the outcome of a carefully worked out and negotiated parliamentary pact. The 1983 Language Act is far less ambitious than its Quebec equivalent, Bill 101 or the Charte de la Langue française (1977). Yet in one respect, Catalan language planners advanced further than their counterparts in Quebec. The former were anxious to take the public with them and undertook attitude-changing campaigns. Let me give two simple examples, both from the early 1980s: the 'Norma' campaign and the 'Scales' spot. The 'Norma' campaign was a very successful and popular attempt to bring the language question out in the open. Short video films illustrated different ways in which people could contribute to the recovery of the language, revolving around the image of a 10-year-old girl called 'Norma'. A couple of caravans drove round Catalonia, from one market place to the next, showing the films on monitors and distributing material (stickers, posters, etc.) while dozens of lectures were given in cities, towns and villages. The 'Scales' spot was designed shortly after the 1983 bill became law. It consisted of a beautiful 30-second spot in which the metaphor of a set of scales was used to convey the intention of the law, which was to lead to a balanced and just linguistic situation. This time dozens of round-table discussions were organised, mainly in districts in the industrial hinterland of Barcelona, where nearly all in-migrants lived, and where it was felt that demagogic politicking could cause serious social unrest. Alongside the language-status planning work which I have been describing, a great deal of work was undertaken on the language itself, i.e. in the field of corpus planning. Three initiatives deserve special attention. Firstly, a multimedia language course designed for adult Spanish-speakers, under the auspices of the
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Council of Europe. Digui, digui... quickly became a best-seller, and has since been adapted for speakers of other languages, including English. Secondly, the subsidising of a growing number of language courses organised locally either by cultural organisations such as Òmnium Cultural or local councils. Over 40,000 people still attend such courses every year. Thirdly, a terminology research centre for Catalan, called Termcat, was founded. Among other achievements in its early years, it developed the necessary vocabulary, in Catalan, Spanish, English and French, for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. In the years following 1988, under our second director-general, Miquel Reniu, the accent was placed on building structures. Firstly, the teachers and other specialists working locally, and numbering over 300, were contracted by a specially founded consortium (consisting of the Generalitat and most of the main local authorities in Catalonia), which has an annual budget of about £8 million. Secondly, a Social Council for the Catalan language was established in 1991, with a membership of over 40 representatives from most of the main sectors of Catalan society. And thirdly, a great deal of work went into trying to systematise work in favour of Catalan, and to establish objectifiable ways of deciding upon priorities on the basis of strategic analyses of the situation. Our third, and present, director-general, Lluis Jou, has seen the 1983 Act replaced by a new Act (No. 1 of 1998) which renders immersion programmes the regular way of receiving non-Catalan-speaking children into infant schools, unless parents choose otherwise; makes some linguistic requirements of employers; increases the use of Catalan in public registers; introduces quota systems into private radio and TV stations broadcasting in Catalonia, etc. Looking back over these years, there seem to be two periods: one, in which the Catalan population identified very firmly with the aims of the government, and during which the increase in the public use of the language was evident in shop signs, oral use in meetings and consumption of radio and TV in Catalan. Awareness-raising campaigns were fairly frequent. However, after about ten years the wind seemed to cease filling the sails of the process. The easy work was over, the volunteers had been mobilised. Further gains seemed to become harder. The government has not undertaken any further advertising/propaganda campaigns on the language issue for years now. And the process began to be perceived as linked to the will of the government: some parties were seen as becoming less enthusiastic in their support. Many people feel that the present state of affairs is now 'normal' as far as the use of Catalan is concerned. I shall leave this section as it stands, though at the end of my paper I shall refer to the socio-demographic situation, which is critical for the future of the Catalan language and for the Catalans as a people. Before ending, however, let me refer to a separate matter. One sometimes comes across references to the language situation in Catalonia, and particularly to the language policy in the region, in comparison with Belgium or Switzerland. Here is an example: La relativa facilidad con que los hablantes de una lengua pueden aprender la otra ha servido para que Cataluña no sufra la segregación fisica de las dos comunidades lingüisticas como sucede en Bélgica entre las comunidades francesa y flamenca; en Finlandia, entre las comunidades finlandesa
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y sueca, y en Canadá, entre las comunidades francesa e inglesa. (Jackson, 1998) 23 These comparisons are quite inappropriate. If these two multilingual countries are quoted to serve as a model, it must be as a model for the state, not for part of the state. It is Spain, and not Catalonia, that should be compared to policies in Belgium, Switzerland or Canada. And indeed, time and again Catalan nationalists (and recently, Basque nationalists as well) have called for Spain to accept and implement its condition as a multilingual and multicultural country (e.g. Ninyoles, 1977). A recent example is given by the present Catalan minister for Culture, Joan-Maria Pujals: En estos veinte años de democracia se han asumido positivamente la pluralidad política y las alternancias en el Gobierno, y también la redistribución del poder antes centralizado y ahora vertebrado en el Estado de las Autonomfas. Pero existen todavía muchas reticencias para aceptar la pluralidad lingüfstica [...] (Pujals, 1998)24 Until this occurs, and Catalan is treated by central government and institutions at least as well, in Catalonia, as is Castilian Spanish in, say, Extremadura, the balance will be constantly loaded against Catalan. Yet time and again Spanish nationalists use Spanish nationalistic arguments to attack policies in Catalonia, seemingly blissfully unaware that they themselves are as fervently nationalist as they accuse the Catalans of being. Bilingualism for whom? Even highly respectable and respected Spanish liberal intellectuals like Pedro Lain Entralgo, who is widely regarded as a 'friend' of the Catalan cause, insist on the need for all Catalans to be bilingual (in Spanish, needless to say!), even if in the same breath they acknowledge that non-Catalans living in Catalonia should learn Catalan (Laín Entralgo, 1997). Reactions to language legislation in Catalonia, from the traditional, Jacobin, Spanish side, are interesting to analyse. There are several different such organisations, some of which have been founded quite recently (Voltas, 1996). One of the more militant Spanish nationalist groups, Acción Cultural Miguel de Cervantes, founded in the early eighties and with a clear right-wing image, took up the cause of a lawyer, Esteban G6mez-Rovira, whose personal legal war against the Generalitat has been unflagging (he managed to have the 1983 Language Act taken back to the Constitutional Court in 1994, eleven years after the central government had done the same). Realising that no more could be done to try and get Spanish courts to declare that this legislation, particularly its application in schools, is unconstitutional, Acción Cultural Miguel de Cervantes took the case to the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities in Geneva in March 1997, on a human rights ticket, where it was classified under procedure 1503, a procedure designed by the UN Economic and Social Council in 1967 to deal with 'situations which reveal a consistent pattern of violations of human rights'. It remains to be seen whether this case will be referred by the working group to the Sub-Commission, which meets once a year. I had occasion to comment to the UN information officer in
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Geneva that the language policy in Catalonia falls considerably short of the policy in any Swiss canton, so that if Catalonia's policy was censured by the UN Sub-Commission, they could expect demonstrations in the streets by Swiss citizens! Those opposing the Catalan government's policy tend to define themselves as bilingüistas. Significantly, many of them are in fact militantly monolingual. Their view of bilingüismo is in fact a desire to be able to survive anywhere within the Spanish state without having to learn or use any language other than Spanish. Spanish nationalists argue that any legislation which makes knowledge of Catalan a job requirement goes against article 28 of the Spanish Constitution, which guarantees freedom of movement for all citizens throughout Spain. Such a claim was made by the central government when the Catalan Parliament passed its Civil Service Act in 1988; but the appeal was turned down by the Constitutional Court, which ruled that the Catalan Parliament and government are entitled to establish such requirements, provided (reasonably enough) they are not disproportionate with regard to the linguistic needs of the post. The other main legal offensive against the Catalan government was launched against its language policy for public schools. Not only the Spanish Constitutional court, but also several authors (e.g. Milian, 1994), and indeed international courts, have made it clear that there is no basic human right to education in one's own language. There is, however, a basic right to education, and this cannot function unless the child understands the language in which this education is given. In Milian's words (I have chosen the Spanish edition of his successful book): El contenido propiamente lingüistico que encubren tanto el derecho a la instrucci6n como el derecho a la educación es pura y simplemente el derecho del niño a recibir la enseñanza en una lengua que les sea comprensible. Este contenido no significa que los niños gocen del derecho a recibir la enseñanza en su lengua. (Milian, 1994: 443) 25 The highly successful immersion programmes (Strubell, 1996) ensure this, and the fact that Catalan and Spanish are both Romance languages is, of course, a great help. Opposition to the Generalitat's policies in the media is found in its most extreme form in the Madrid daily newspaper ABC, which is known for its Spanish nationalist position. This paper has an extremely long-standing tradition in this regard. One author, in studying the newspaper in the period 1916-1936 concludes that: no solament podia contemplar en tota la seva cruesa i virulència quin havia estat històricament l'abc de l'anticatalanisme, sin6 que també vaig poder entendre millor en què ha consistit la història de Catalunya i d'Espanya durant el nostre segle i quins han estat llurs èxits i fracassos en un procés [...] que sembla encara no resolt. (Medina, 1995: 7)26 The tone of the articles is inflammatory. Here is a selection of extracts from a fairly recent article by none other than the former editor of the paper, Luís María
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Anson (who, by the way, claims British ancestry as the reason for omitting the accent from his surname): La llamada ley de Política Lingüística [...] pretende hacer de Cataluña una región monolingüe. Pretende extirpar el castellano de la Autonomía catalana. Introducir veladuras o matices a estas afirmaciones sería sumarse al pasteleo electoral, a la política desdentada de la componenda y la claudicación. (Anson, 1998) 27 Jordi Pujol [...] ha caido en la tentación totalitaria del poder, al establecer un sistema lingüistico que atenta contra los derechos humanos y perjudica gravemente al sector menos favorecido de la población catalana. (Anson, 1998)28 One might suspect that some believe, at least secretly, that had Spain remained a strongly centralised country, as it was under Franco, none of this would have happened. Language and devolution elsewhere The social scientist's dream (and in fact, any empirical scientist's) is to control all the independent variables but one in an experimental situation, and see how changes in the value of the independent variable affect the value of the dependent variable. Though this is not strictly the casefor there are other variables involvedit is extremely interesting to see how the same degree of devolution, granted to Catalans and Valencians for instance, has not led to the same increaseor rather recoveryin the use of the (same) language. I would like to include the Balearic Islands as well, but there are two large differences in the political context which discourage their inclusion: the Balearic Islands have never seriously contemplated setting up a television (and radio) service of their own, unlike Catalonia and Valencia, which have TV3 and Canal 9 respectively; the government of the Balearic Islands has only very recently taken over responsibility for the school system. It would be perfectly understandable for an outsider to imagine, given that the language is the same, that the Franco (and former) regimes have affected both of them equally, and that both regions have devolved political institutions, that Catalonia and Valencia would have adopted similar language policies, and that the language situation would now be quite similar. A comparative analysis of the Statues of Autonomy and of the basic language legislation (the Language Acts passed by both Parliaments in 1983) gives little inkling of the degree to which the two situations do really differ. The fact that in the region and its legal texts Catalan is called Valencian, should not particularly disturb us. The simplest explanation of the difference might be to point out that whereas Catalonia has been governed since the first post-Franco elections in 1980, without a break, by Catalan nationalists, the Generalitat Valenciana has been governed by socialists (till 1995) and by the conservative Partido Popular since then. Still more significant is the existence of a right-wing regionalist party, Unión Valenciana, whose main feature is its strikingly anti-Catalan character. Following years of parliamentary sniping, since 1995 they have held the balance of power, and in return for supporting the Partido Popular, they have occupied some key
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political posts, including the post of Speaker in the regional parliament, or Corts Valencianes, and several ministries. In these areas, a different spelling system (using, I may add, what all linguists I know regard as quite ridiculous criteria) has been adopted so as to try and further the claim that Valencia and Catalonia have nothing at all in common, and that anyone who claims otherwise (such as the whole of academia) is some kind of a traitor. In fact, Unión Valenciana, though a regionalist party purporting to defend the region's heritage, consists largely of people who speak Spanish and not Catalan. Its heartland is the city of Valencia itself, a city where the number and proportion of speakers of the language has declined dramatically since even before the Franco regime took power in 1939. Several authors have tracked the development of a considerable movement against the Catalans and against the recovery of the language in Valencia (e.g. Bello, 1988; Strubell, 1994). One of the main daily newspapers in Valencia, Las Provincias, has waged a constant campaign, including incendiary commentaries published anonymously almost every day; it would almost certainly have been closed down in any other country for inciting the population to violence and rabid xenophobia. Many Catalans visiting Valencia have learned to their dismay that cars with Barcelona number plates often get scratched if they are left parked out in the street overnight. This is of course nothing compared to the incendiary bombing campaigns directed at book shops and leading intellectuals about twenty years ago. Right now many people are holding their breath while the Consell Valencià de Cultura prepares its report on the whole issue. All the universities and, needless to say, virtually all linguists have put their weight behind the orthography that has been used by virtually all writers in Valencia since 1932, the so-called Normes de Castelló. The secessionists, known locally as the blaveros, have only three 'official representatives' on the Council and are doing their best to influence public opinion through the mass media. In the meantime, the Catalonian channel, TV3, broadcasts the latest Valencian soap opera ... without dubbing it! I have been referring to Valencia for two reasons. One is that in contrast to Catalonia, the language has recovered much less rapidly and sturdily. In practice the language policy in Valencia was much more timid under the socialists, and under the conservatives has all but disappeared; even such trilateral technical agreements regarding the mutual recognition of language certificates issued by the Junta Permanent de Català, the Junta Avaluadora de Valencià and their counterpart in the Balearic Islands, have been unilaterally rescinded, as has the joint publication of books of common cultural interest. The other reason is that in the case of Valencia the relationship between language and devolution was politicised to such a degree that it backfired. The language issue was used, before devolution took place in the early 80s, to try and drive a (political, but also social) wedge between Catalonia and Valencia. Parliamentary democracy in practice: Language use in Parliament and in local councils It might be worth glancing at language use in democratic councils. Here different patterns emerge in Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencia, though
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on paper everyone is free to use either of the two official languages. In the first two, use of Catalan predominates. In Catalonia there are, as might be expected, some MPs whose first language was not Catalan (my impression is that they tend to belong to the socialist or former communist parties, though at least one present Minister of the Catalan government is a Spanish-speaking in-comer who speaks quite acceptable Catalan), but virtually all of them became active bilinguals before entering politics, or even afterwards. 29 All bills and motions are tabled, to my knowledge, in Catalan, and when a bill is enacted, it is translated by the Parliament's language service into Spanish, and sent to the Official Spanish gazette and to the Spanish edition of the Catalan gazette, to be published. On several occasions right-wing MPs who usually make their speeches in Catalan have done so in Spanish, either to make a particular point or to provoke even moderate nationalist MPs. They have certainly succeeded on the latter score, much to the glee of the Madrid right-wing daily, ABC! One of the leaders of the Partido Popular is from south-west Catalonia, and makes his speeches in a very colloquial Catalan rather than a formal register, to the annoyance of linguists with even slightly purist leanings. In the Balearic Islands Catalan again is quite predominant, and curiously enoughas we shall see in a momentthe rightwing MPs (Partido Popular), who are in power, use the language perfectly naturally, though at times (as I have already mentioned above) in a somewhat colloquial register which some judge inappropriate for parliamentary debates. However the scene is quite different, as you might expect, in Valencia. To start with, the President, Eduardo Zaplana is neither Valencian by birth nor a Catalan-speaker. As I have already stated, his Partido Popular defeated the socialists in 1995 and have since then been forced to follow a secessionist policy by the regionalists, Unión Valenciana, who give them parliamentary support. The latter use a different orthography from standard Catalan, though this is only applied in the Hansard-equivalent minutes for some of the speeches (there is no oral difference!), depending on the choice of each speaker. The Speaker is himself the leader of Unión Valenciana. Speeches made by members of both parties are mostly in Spanish, while the socialists and ex-communists are more likely to use Catalan. In local councils in Catalonia, there were problems in a number of dormitory towns around Barcelona, following the first local elections since the war, in 1979: the in-migrant majorities in some cases booed councillors who tried to speak in Catalan at council meetings. My impression is that these problems quickly disappeared and that all Catalan-speakers, and some whose first language is Spanish, use Catalan in meetings without incidents. Virtually all mayors use Catalan in council meetings, except perhaps a few in some of the councils in the Barcelona hinterland. As I have said before, when it comes to election time (be they European, general, Catalan or local), meetings tend to be more bilingual, some Catalan-speaking candidates giving at least part of their speeches in Spanish in districts where most of their potential voters are not Catalan-speakers. Only Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, the independence party, does not to my knowledge hold any election meetings in Spanish. On television and on radio, all parties use Catalan and most use only Catalan. Again, nearly all parties advertise their
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slogans in Catalan in the street (the socialists often do so in bilingual fashion). Campaigns which use both languages do not tend to produce bilingual advertisements, though they may do so for brochures. Serving the public in a democratic system: Language use in the Catalan administration and in local authorities There being two official languages, all administrations in Catalonia use both, but in proportions which range from nearmonolingualism in one language to near-monolingualism in the other language. It is important to distinguish between the language which an administration, as an organisation, uses for its internal functioning, on the one hand, and on the other, the language used for serving the public. There is no better indicator of the gradual change that has been taking place since Franco's death than the language used by the administration. The change indicates that we have moved from a position where the subject was at the service of the administration to the administration being at the service of the citizen. Many Spanish ministry offices in Catalonia closed when the Statute of Autonomy came into effect. Those remaining which include the Income Tax Offices (Delegaciones de Hacienda), the state police stations (Guardia Civil and Policia Nacional), driving licence offices and some others have gradually started using Catalan alongside Spanish. Catalanspeakers can often not be served in their own language, though they are nearly always understood if they insist on carrying on using it. But the greatest change by far has taken place in offices which were transferred to the Catalan government thanks to the Statute of Autonomy. In these Catalan predominates: staff have made great strides to learn or become literate in Catalan, new signs, official forms and notices have been developed, and in nearly all cases the Catalan-speaking public is served in its own language. Devolution and Democracy In the nation-building period in western Europe which started in the 17th and 18th centuries, the idea of centralisation and uniformisation were key concepts. The idea of regional autonomies was anathema to the ruling elites of Spain, France or Great Britain, and any claims in this regard were dismissed as traditionalist nostalgia. As we shall see below, not all empires followed this model, even in Europe itself. However, the experience of the expansionism of the Germans in this century led to careful formulations, after the Second World War, of human rights which excluded references to collective rights. However, the liberal tradition has had to face the fact that individuals cannot be adequately contemplated outside their social context. The reasons for the outbreak of conflicts between ethnic communities, more often than not between majorities and minorities, are numerous and varied. As a rule, however, experience shows that the chances of conflict erupting are increased when a minority, or in the OSCE context, a 'national minority', perceives its future as a community as being at risk. Failure of the majority to act with a view to accommodating the legitimate linguistic and cultural aspirations of national minorities can create the sense that the vital space
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necessary to the community's survival is threatened. It is in this context that the importance for a community of securing the necessary space for its language in the private and public spheres becomes evident. (Siemienski, 1998b) The fact of the matter is that international instruments that have been developed to cope with this issue have usually used the cumbersome phrase 'the rights of persons belonging to national minorities' and have avoided phrases such as 'the rights of national minorities'. This has basically been done to try and deny minorities a legal claim to selfgovernment, autonomy or devolution. Nevertheless, following the death of Franco, the Catalans and the Basques managed to achieve a political model which did indeed contemplate a fairly wide degree of self-government, linking up with the model designed in the 1930s which was crushed by the military uprising. At the same time it is perhaps significant that the regionalisation of Spain designed in 1978 is not an isolated phenomenon in western Europe. There are several countries with a tradition of regionalisation. In Germany and Austria, the Länder are careful to protect their powers against encroachments from their federal governments and the European Commission (to which I shall return in a moment). But neither country has based its structure on existing autochthonous linguistic groups: the East and North Frisians, and the Sorbs, in Germany are small minorities even within their respective Länder, while the same can be said for the Slovenes, the Hungarians and the Croats (as well as the basically urban Czech and Slovak groups) in Austria. In other countries with a long tradition of regionalisation, e.g. Switzerland and Belgium, the regional/sub-national divisions are based on linguistic criteria. In the countries which are moving towards greater regionalisation (e.g. the UK) or who are under some pressure to do so (e.g. Italy) linguistic concerns sometimes enter into the equation, sometimes not. Subsidiarity and devolution We increasingly live in a debate over decentralisation. I have expressed my views on this elsewhere: But there is no strict need to recognise the rights of stateless nations in order to put into effect an intermediate level of regional government to the benefit of citizens. The principle of subsidiarity is used throughout Europe (with the exception of one large island, just off the north-west of the continent) 30 in relation to the general principle of devolving problem-solving to the lowest feasible level, and only referring such problems hierarchically to superior levels when it is only at such levels that they can best be solved. The Brussels level is indeed the top level for European affairs, but it is hardly coherent to call upon the principle of subsidiarity to defend the 'sovereignty' of the state yet deny the sovereignty of the people through a regional structure. What is more, at a time when political leaders are busy 'rolling back the state' (an expression which cannot be easily translated into other languages/cultures) it is worth remembering that to roll back, in Latin, is de-volvere, that is, precisely the worddevolution31that has brought us
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together today! Equally to the point, devolution involves 're-turning' something to the people, something which we should argue firmly belongs to the people! This is all part of a more or less natural process that has taken place all over the world, where formerly autocratic monarchies have gradually and progressively given their power to bodies which, to a greater and greater extent, have represented the people: first just the landowners, then male taxpayers, and finally all adults in universal suffrage. During the whole of this process no-one could forcefully claim that the states have been weakened. Let us then all agree that people should have the right to solve their own problems, rather than having to accept decisions made by much larger populations. In a representative democracy, this obviously means being able to choose their own political leaders and government. This happens, of course, in local government, but as I have just said there are a whole lot of issues which are better resolved at a higher level, because they are of general interest of the whole of the population in the stateless nation. This is where a regional assembly, which elects a regional government, takes on its full meaning. (Strubell, 1997) So we must bear in mind the peculiar meaning attached in Britain to the word 'subsidiarity' especially by the Conservative government under John Major. On the continent it is certainly taken to mean the return of decisionmaking to the lowest tier at which it is possible and efficient, and is by no means limited to the relationship between the state and Brussels. Devolution without democracy? At the same time, a look back over Europe's recent history can also right any impression we might have that devolution could not happen where there was no democracy. In Flanders and Brittany, to give just two examples, attempts were made by Hitler's occupying forces during the Second World War to woo locals towards the Axis' cause by offering degrees of home rule that Belgium and France, respectively, refused to countenance. At the end of the war, the respective nationalist movements suffered a loss of prestige and public support because of this and reprisals were made. I believe that a similar process went on in the Yugoslav republic of Croatia in the same period, and that part of the Serbs' desire for revenge was a result of the puppet Croatian regime which sided with Hitler. Conclusion Identity In reading through my draft text I have found an important element missing: any clear reference to the slippery issue of identity. I made a passing reference to it in comparing the bases for Catalan and Basque nationalism. I also referred to Pujol's widely accepted, though political rather than sociological, definition of 'a Catalan'. I should perhaps say more. Two issues spring to mind, one of a specific nature and one of a more general
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kind. Firstly, I have come across non-Spaniards who are surprised and even shocked that this definition denies nonCatalans in Catalonia their own nationality, when all former USSR republics (at least, to my knowledge) continue to respectfully classify all their inhabitantsbe they the autochthonous population, naturalised citizens, or residents who are still foreign citizensas Russians, Armenians, Ukrainians or Georgians. Even a small country like Estonia publishes lists of such people, numbering 121 different nationalities. In the Catalan case, the broad and generous definition of a Catalan is a way of avoiding politically motivated classifications which could so easily lead to a distinction between first- and second-class citizens. There is no political threat at all to the identity of Andalusians in Catalonia, to take one example. The largest local festival in Catalonia is an imitation of the Sevilla 'Feria de Abril'. It is held on the outskirts of Barcelona, mobilises hundreds of thousands of people, and attracts not only substantial subsidies from the Catalan government, but also politicians of all colours, who flock there like bees to pollen flowers. And secondly, the issue of identity surely pervades all that I have been talking about. We all agree that democracy is desirable. But should the democratic government for which I vote and whose laws I follow be 'my' people or someone else? Do citizens feel that their governments represent their group? Identity is of course a personal issue, but it is the collective aspect, the group allegiance aspect, the belongingness aspect, to which I would like to devote a few moments of attention. In an increasingly integrated society there seem to be two processes occurring in parallel, though in apparently opposite directions. Integration has of course been going on for centuries, if not millennia, in the following direction: huts in a jungle clearing => structured village => metropolitan city => global village In this context, as each person becomes more of a world citizen, feeling more and more comfortable in what were previously perceived as exotic and alien environments, there seems to be an increasing search for the roots 32 of our collective identity. This more intimate collective or group identity can be interpreted as being expressed in political terms, in Europe at least, by an increasing, though gradual, transfer of power from central to regional government: devolution! All of what we have been discussing would be meaningless, or the cause of serious concern, unless the people and the peoples involved felt that these changes and processes are for the better, even in personal (psychological) terms. The sense of threat to one's identity, on the other hand, is one of the most powerful and insidious of social phenomena. Powerful, because it has led to wars (not only in the past but in our own times), and insidious, because it is easy to instil insecurity into a person or a group, and difficult to remove it. At the same time, we live in an age when many claim a multiple identity and multiple allegiances: a fervent Catalan nationalist may celebrate a victory by the Spanish football team: but then, another may not! What is abundantly clear throughout is that people tend to play the role, or the stereotype, assigned them (often unconsciously, and often over a period of generations) by those in power, as portrayed, for instance, in Max Frisch's play, Andorra. I am only touching on this. A full consideration of this claim could in my view merit another seminar.
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The need for pro-active language policies Just before I draw to a conclusion, I would like to quote from a recent report I gave at the presentation in Vienna of the Oslo Recommendations Regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities, where I spoke of the Catalan experience and justified the need for affirmative action by the authorities to overcome a long period of repression. I am grateful to the professor of Mercantile Law at the University of Barcelona, Antoni Font, for a metaphor that helps to explain why the authorities should play an active role in overcoming the previous state of inequality, above and beyond merely declaring the official character of a language. He describes the situation aimed at by the uniformising nation-states [...] as a linguistic monopoly. In free market societies anti-trust measures are foreseen even in the most liberal of states, and monopolies are regarded as undesirable in that they are based on privileges. Affirmative action 33 is therefore legitimate in order to break monopolies, be they economic or linguistic. Among other things, the competitive position of products produced in a demographically stronger language will be measurably better (particularly in terms of costs and prices) than that of those produced for a smaller market. To put it another way: positive discrimination may be needed, at least temporarily, in order to overcome the effects of a pre-existing discrimination, and thus to achieve equality and equity. But there are also social psychological reasons for the authorities to take affirmative action in our case. Social language normsthose that define in what circumstances it is deemed appropriate to speak Catalanwere so defined that only its use in closed social circles among acquaintances was regarded as acceptable during the Franco regime, particularly in the cities. Changing what is regarded as socially acceptable is as vital as it is difficult to achieve: in the last analysis, people have to be freed from the pre-existing social restrictions or constraints so that they can not only use it in public, but also help (indirectly) non-Catalan-speakers to learn the language in a social context. (Strubell, 1998) Changing social habits, and the demographic issue My conclusion is not overly optimistic. Most of the seven million people who can speak Catalan still switch to Spanish more or less unconsciously, in their dealings with people who understand them perfectly and can in many cases converse quite adequately in Catalan. Young people seem to be in general bilingual and biliterate but this again does not lead, at least in the Barcelona metropolitan area, to the Catalan-speakers using their language freely. At the same time, the government seems loathe to do anything about it (though of course there are strict limits to interference in people's social activity which must not be surpassed). An added problem is demographic. Since 1930s the fecundity rate of Catalans has been close to or even below replacement levels (Sarrible, 1987). During the 1950s and 1960s, as so often happens, the first generation of immigrants had a
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much higher number of children per couple. Today the present fecundity rate is well below the replacement level, even when we look at the whole of the population. This will make Catalonia extremely fragile in terms of its ability to integrate newcomers linguistically. It makes the position of Spanish (Castilian) much stronger. Monolingual Spanishspeakers living in monolingual enclaves within Catalonia may grow in number. Why Catalans are having such small numbers of children, if any at all, is beyond my brief on this occasion, but is certainly beginning to have a negative impact on the language. Over a third of bilinguals in Catalonia speak Catalan as a second language, with the effects that interference has on their spoken and written Catalan. A steadily increasing proportion of future teachers in training colleges in Catalonia are from Spanish-speaking families, and theirs will be the responsibility for ensuring that Catalan is adequately learnt in schools, in a few years time. This may have an effect on the language itself. With all this in mind I conclude by saying that I believe it remains the responsibility of the whole of Catalan society to decide and ensure that the language continues to act as a valid and real sign of the identity of the Catalan people, in their everyday lives. Correspondence Any correspondence should be directed to Miquel Strubell, Institut de Sociolingüística Catalana, Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain (
[email protected]). Notes 1. For instance, in January this year during the inaugural lecture of a course on Catalan sociolinguistics, organised by the Escola Municipal de Mallorquí in the Majorcan town of Manacor. 2. Who can certainly stake a claim to discuss a concept like 'democracy' of course. 3. Following one of the definitions of the word given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (7th edition, 1982) in which 'democratic' is synonymous with 'favouring social equality'. 4. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (7th edition, 1982). 5. Though Michael Jackson's gradually increasing pallidness might lead some to question this affirmation, as might the fact that some people go to extreme surgical lengths to change their physical sex. 6. As, someone once told me, happened to a Catalan prospective air hostess awaiting her final interview for the main Spanish airline, who was told that her Catalan accent would rule her out, in spite of her excellent written tests; I must add that General Franco had only recently died at that time. 7. Kymlicka (1995) outlines several examples where quota systems are used, so the idea is certainly not hare-brained. 8. The secret text aimed at the following: 'Que se produzca el efecto sin que se note el cuydado'. 9. José Calvo Sotelo. 10. 'We lived better with Franco'. 11. 'We lived better against Franco'. 12. However, the kernel of what is under discussion is not so much the Act in itself as the whole of the language policy that the Act brings to its culmination. The mistake at the origin of this policy, and also, of course, the Act, is that it is inspired by a nationalist conception of Catalonia which, in my view, is not consistent with the principles of liberty and pluralism on which our constitutional democracy are based. For to be sure, from this conception, language is regarded as the 'nerve of the nation', that which converts citizens into 'Catalans'. As a nationalist declaration made public
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several months ago stated, language is 'a way of looking at the world, a place where myths and desires are configured, a house which helps to convert into a people those who live in it'. From a liberal and democratic position, a language is, without a doubt, a cultural trait which characterises a society, but never a cultural trait that can limit our individual freedom; that is to say, never a way of looking at the world. Language is not the essence of our personality or the hard kernel of our identity as people: at least since the Enlightenment, our identity and our personality only have one fundament, and that is freedom itself. So the fundamental errorconfusing the rights of persons with the rights of nations (starting from the pre-existing concept of a nation, disconnected from the rights of each of its members)is projected in the articles of the Act at two levels: on the one hand, confusing the 'propia' language with an 'only or preferent' language; on the other, confusing the legitimate protection of the Catalan language, which is necessary as it is a minority language, with the imposition of the use of Catalan in all public institutions and even in the relations between private people. 13. Several instruments are devoted specifically to the issue of minority rights: both the Framework Convention on the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages were Council of Europe initiatives that have been ratified by a sufficient number of states to come into force in February and March of this year. In addition, at the request of the High Commissioner for National Minorities of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Foundation for Inter-Ethnic Relations has developed and published the Oslo Recommendations and The Hague Recommendations, dealing with these issues. 14. Ley Orgdnica del Poder Judicial. 15. More than a hundred, according to one count. 16. Some Catalans, particularly members of the wealthier classes, sided with the army in 1936, fearful that the chaotic situation unleashed by the unsuccessful coup d'état would harm them, their families and their businesses: as indeed it did in many cases. 17. I think this is the politically correct term! 18. The central plateau of Spain. 19. Literally: 'Si ara es convoqués un referèndum per iniciar deforma gradual un procés cap a la independència de Catalunya, ¿vostè que votaria?' 20. (a) Es indivisible, de forma que no pot limitar-se el caràcter oficial d'una de les dues llengües, per exemple, reduintla aun determinat àmbit material o geogràfic de la vida de la comunitat, excloent-la d'un altre, encara que aquest àmbit sigui de competència exclusiva de l'Estat o de la Comunitat Autònoma. (...) (b) Es autònoma, en el sentit que cada llengua oficial ho és per ella mateixa, de manera que seria rebutjable una norma, que només admetés la llengua autòctona si s'usa al costat del castellà o, fins i tot, imposés aquest ús doble de les dues llengües. 21. However, once the line dividing this territory from Aragon is crossed, none of the language rights referring to Catalan are recognised, despite the fact that about fifty thousand Catalan-speakers live in Aragon and consider themselves to be Aragonese. 22. In fact, in many ways the new administration inherited the defects of the former system, which had served a totalitarian regime for almost forty years. 23. The relative ease with which the speakers of one language can learn the other have helped Catalonia not to suffer from the physical segregation of the two linguistic communities as happens in Belgium between the French and Flemish communities; in Finland, between the Finnish and Swedish communities; and in Canada, between the French and English communities. 24. In these twenty years of democracy political plurality and alternation in power have been taken on board positively, as has the redistribution of power, which used to be centralised and is now devolved in the State of the Autonomies. But there remains a great deal of reluctance to accept linguistic plurality. 25. 'The strictly linguistic content which is covered by the right to instruction and by the right to education is purely and simply the right of the child to receive instruction in
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a language which it can understand. This content does not mean that children have a right to receive instruction in their own language'. 26. ... I could not only contemplate in its full crudeness and virulence what has historically been the ABC of anticatalanism; I also managed to understand better what the history of Catalonia and of Spain has consisted of during the present century and what their successes and failures have been in a process [...] which seems not to have yet been resolved. 27. The so-called Language Policy Act [...] aims to make Catalonia a monolingual region. It aims to extirpate Castilian Spanish from the Catalan Autonomy. To blur such affirmations, or to add nuances to them, would be tantamount to adding to the electoral plotting, to the toothless policy of shady dealing and backing down. 28. Jordi Pujol [...] has fallen into the totalitarian temptation of power, by establishing a linguistic system which goes against human rights and puts at a serious disadvantage the least favoured sector of the Catalan population. 29. The head of the Unió General de Treballadors de Catalunya, Josep Maria Alvarez, though a trades unionist and not a politician, is a striking example of a person who has learned Catalan as a personal commitment. I myself heard his first speech in Catalan, and his progress in just a few years has been remarkable. 30. Written before the present UK devolutionary process. 31. 'Deputing, delegation, of work or power, esp. by House of Parliament, to bodies appointed by and responsible to it, or by central government to local or regional administration esp. in Scotland and Wales.' (The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 7th edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1982.) 32. I deliberately use the word which was the title of a successful TV series some years ago, on this very subject. 33. Also sometimes termed 'positive' discrimination. References Anson, L.M. (1998) Un vaso de agua turbia. ABC, 10 February. Bello, V. (1988) La pesta blava. València: Edicions 3 i 4. Benet, J. (published anonymously) (1973) Catalunya sota el règim franquista. Paris: Edicions Catalanes de París. Branchadell, A. (1997) Liberalisme i politica lingüistica. Barcelona: Empúries. Cohen, J.M. and Cohen, M.J. (1991) The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations. London: Bloomsbury Books. Conversi, D. (1997) The Basques, the Catalans and Spain: Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilisation. London: Hurst & Company. Cooper, R.L. (1989) Language Planning and Social Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Carreras, F. (1998) El error de fondo. El País, 26 January. Estradé, A. and Treserra, M. (1990) Catalunya independent? Anàlisi d'una enquesta sobre la identitat nacional i la voluntat d'independència dels catalans. Barcelona: Fundació Jaume Bofill. Ferrer i Gironès, F. (1985) La persecució política de la llengua catalana. Barcelona: Edicions 62. Fishman, J.A. (1991) Reversing Language Shift. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Guardiola, C-J. (1980) Per la llengua. Barcelona: Edicions de la Magrana. Jackson, G. (1998) para Cataluña. El País, January 7. Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laín Entralgo, P. (1997) Un catalán bilingüe. El Pais, November 13. Medina, J. (1995) L'anticatalanisme del diari ABC (1916-1936). Biblioteca Serra d'Or 147. Barcelona: Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat. Milian i Massana, A. (1994) Derechos lingüisticos y derecho fundamental a la educación. Un estudio comparado: Italia, Bélgica, Suiza, Canadd y España. Barcelona: Editorial Civitas/Escola d'Administració Publica de Catalunya. Nelde, P., Strubell, M. and Williams, G. (1996) Euromosaic. Production and Reproduction of
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Minority Language Communities in the EU. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. Ninyoles, R. L1. (1977) Cuatro idiomas para un Estado. Madrid: Edicusa. Puig i Salellas, J.M. (1983) La doble oficialitat lingüística com a problema juridic. Revista de Llengua i Dret, 53-78. Pujals, J.M. (1998) Tercera: Más claro que el agua. ABC, February 21. Sarrible, G. (1987) La fecundidad en Barcelona-ciudad en la década del 70 (nativos y migrantes). Perspectiva Social 24, 39-57. Siemienski, G. (1998a) Education, language and identity: The Hague recommendations regarding the education rights of national minorities. Paper read at the Seminar 'East Meets West', European Centre for Modern Languages, Graz, Austria. Siemienski, G. (1998b) The Oslo recommendations regarding the linguistic rights of national minorities: A tool of conflict prevention. Paper read at the Seminar 'East Meets West', European Centre for Modern Languages, Graz. Siguan, M. (1994) Conocimiento y uso de las lenguas en España (Investigación sobre el conocimiento y uso de las lenguas cooficiales en las Comunidades Autonomas bilingües). Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas. Solé-Durany and Joan, R. (1995) Le principe de territorialité des langues et la protection de l'identité linguistique des peuples. Droits linguistiques et droits culturels dans les régions d'Europe (pp. 89-92). Barcelona: Departament de Cultura, Generalitat de Catalunya. Solé i Sabaté., J.M. and Villarroya, J. (1993) Cronologia de la repressió de la llengua i la cultura catalanes, 19361975. Barcelona: Col. La Mata de Jonc 22, Curial. Strubell, M. (1993) Catalan: Castilian. Trends in Romance Linguistics and Philology. Volume 5: Bilingualism and Linguistic Conflict in Romance (pp. 175-207). Strubell, M. (1994) Catalan in Valencia: The story of an attempted secession. In G. Liidi (ed.) Sprach-standardisierung. Schweizerische Akademie des Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften (pp. 229-254). Universitätsverlag Freiburg. Strubell, M. (1996) Language planning and classroom practice in Catalonia. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 17, 2-4, 262-275. Strubell, M. (1997) Regional autonomy. A case study: Spain. Paper prepared for a seminar organised by ECTARC (European Centre for Traditional and Regional Cultures), Llangollen, 11 July. Strubell, M. (1998-forthcoming) Language and diversity: The case of Catalonia. International Journal on Minority and Ethnic Relations. Voltas, E. (1996) La guerra de la llengua. Barcelona: Empúries. Vroede, M. de (1975) The Flemish Movement in Belgium. Kultuurraad voor Vlaadenren/Institut voor Voorlichting, Belgium. Webber, J. and Strubell, M. (1991) The Catalan language. Progress towards normalisation. The Anglo-Catalan Society Occasional Publications 7. Weinstein, B. (1982) Noah Webster and the diffusion of linguistic innovations for political purposes. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 38, 85-108.
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Catalonia: The Geographical and Historical Context of the Language Question Sue Wright School of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK Territory in Political and Cultural Terms Today Catalonia has both a political and a cultural definition. Politically it is one of Spain's Autonomous Communities (Communidades Autónomas) brought into existence by the 1978 Constitution, which also acknowledged the existence of other 'nationalities' (nacionalidades) within the one and indivisible Spanish 'nation' (nación). For former Francoists and conservative elements in the army and administration this was difficult to digest. To reduce the impact of this historic recognition that Catalonia, Euskadi and Galicia had a claim to difference, the Spanish state decentralised wholesale, thus reducing the significance of Catalan and Basque autonomy. There are seventeen Autonomous Communities, some with historical reasons to be treated as separate regions, others, such as Rioja, with little cultural or historical distinctiveness or internal unity (see Figure 1).
1. Galicia; 2. Asturias; 3. Cantabria; 4. Basque Country; 5. Navarre; 6. Aragon; 7. Catalonia; 8. Castille-eon; 9. Rioja; 10. Castille-La Mancha; 11. Valencia; 12. Extremadura; 13.Andulacia;14. Murcia; 15. Madrid; 16. Balearics; 17. Canaries Figure 1 Spain's Autonomous Communities (source: Ross, 1997)
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Figure 2 The languages of the Iberian peninsula (source: Conversi, 1997) The Autonomous Community of Catalonia is only part of a larger area which could be defined as Catalan by linguistic and cultural criteria. Catalan is spoken in Catalonia, Valencia, the eastern region of Aragon and the Balearic Islands. Across the state border, it is the language of Andorra and the regional (non-official) language of Roussillon in southwest France. Thus there is a lack of congruence between the Principality of Catalonia which, as a region with devolved power, is the political representative of Catalan interests, and the area which might be categorised as Catalan according to the dialects spoken by the autochthonous population. This lack of congruence between cultural nation and polity is by no means uncommon. Few state borders in Europe reflect cultural and linguistic cleavages.
Figure 3 The Catalan language area. The shaded area shows the part of Aragon where Catalanis spoken (source: Generalitat, 1996)
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Catalan and the Romance Dialect Continuum Maps such as these shown here, with strict demarcations between languages, are, as all linguists know, a fabrication. In dialect continua, it is impossible to define boundaries exactly. The Romance language continuum has internal linguistic gradations rather than frontiers. Catalan lies between the langues d'Oc and the other Iberian Romance languages/dialects. A more accurate way of presenting the different languages of the Iberian peninsula would be to show the cultural centres of each variety, the extent to which their influence radiates out into the surrounding country and the areas where two or more varieties meet and have influence. If we do this for the Catalan/Aragonese/Castilian border we shall see how complex these frontiers actually are, and how each linguistic indication that we are leaving the Catalan-speaking region and moving into areas where local dialects owe more to Castilian or Aragonese seems to have its own individual frontier.
Figure 4 The Catalan frontier (source: Entwhistle, 1936) The Castilian/Catalan border can be drawn along the line where initial [h] changes to [f], one of the most striking differences between Castilian and Catalan. By this criterion the border is reasonably clear to the south of the Barbastro region. North of Barbastro, in the direction of the Pyrenees, however, the linguistic frontier is much fuzzier. Here Catalan shades into Aragonese over a wide geographical area. The most westerly of the three main phonological indications that we are entering the Catalan area comes from the palatalisation of initial 1 [L] to 11 [1] and takes place between the Cinca and Ésera rivers. Moving east of the Ésera we come to another indication of moving into Catalanspeaking villages, as the dipthongation of o and e ceases. A further criterion for distinguishing between Catalan and Aragonese, the contrast between [z] and [s], occurs beyond the Isábena river, almost on the Noguera Ribargorçana. Of course, linguistic demarcation is not only phonological. When semantic, syntactic and morpho-
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logical differences are taken into account as well it becomes evident that it is almost impossible to establish a single frontier between Catalan and Aragonese. To various extents, this holds for all the Iberian dialects. The same is, of course, true of the linguistic frontier to the north. The point at which Catalan becomes Languedocien is not precise either. The interesting fact here for the present reader is that Catalan is arguably closer to the Romance languages to the north (Languedocien, Provençal etc.) than to Castilian. Catalan, like the langues d'Oc, tends to eliminate unaccented vowels and to dispense with final unaccented vowels other than a. For example, the word for seven is siete in Castilian, set in Catalonian and set in Provençal. As Miquel Strubell's remarks on the Valencian situation reveal, linguistic differences and similarities are not the only criteria by which speakers gauge their linguistic affiliation, and this leads some Valencians to claim that they speak a different language from Catalans. On the linguistic frontiers, linguistic criteria on their own are never enough. The languages claimed by speakers are determined to a very large extent by the cultural centre to which they turn and the political allegiances which they hold. Cultural Centres and Political Allegiances In his study of Catalan nationalism, Daniele Conversi argues that 'No country's politics exists independently of its culture' (Conversi, 1997: 1). Nowhere is this more true than in Catalonia. Here cultural and political life developed in tandem and when Catalonia's independence was under attack, or even when it was eclipsed, a vigorous culture sustained the idea of Catalan identity. Montserrat Guibernau writing on Catalan identity makes the point that 'continuity over time and differentiation from others are the defining criteria of identity' (Guibernau, 1997: 94). In the Catalan context a prestigious cultural tradition, respected and well known internationally has provided continuity. Differentiation from others came from the struggle to retain some independence, both cultural and political, when faced with a centre which for centuries was committed to the idea of Spain as a unified, great and independent state (España: Una, Grande y Libre). In these short notes on the historical background I will show how the cultural and the political dovetail in the Catalan context. Catalan nationalists of an essentialist persuasion would have little difficulty finding a glorious past for Catalonia. The Kingdom of Aragon, in which Catalonia was an autonomous territory, protected the frontier of Christianity against the Muslim invasion, acquired extensive possessions around the Mediterranean and possessed a court which was at times a cultural magnet for much of Europe. Aragon's incorporation into the Kingdom of Spain was by marriage not by conquest and, as a kingdom joining with another through the personal union of their monarchs, each of the component territories of Aragon at first retained complete autonomy (Kamen, 1991). The first Bourbon monarch of Spain ended this state of affairs in 1716, abolishing most Catalan institutions, customs and laws and gradually restricting the public use of the Catalan language, after Catalonia, Aragon and Valencia had backed the losing side in the War of the Spanish Succession. However, the Catalans' lack of political power was compensated by their economic vigour. During the 18th and early 19th centuries,
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Catalonia was the only Spanish region to industrialise on the model of northern Europe. The rise of a strong, affluent, Catalan-speaking bourgeoisie proved a counterweight to the centralists in Madrid with their Jacobin ideas and policies. Catalonia was the industrial powerhouse of Spain attracting those seeking work and opportunity (although the number of non-Catalans was relatively small compared to the influx of the 20th century). At the same time Catalonia experienced a period of cultural renaissance. In the middle of the 19th century Catalan artists and intellectuals went through a period of intense creativity, drawing on Catalan culture and history in the Romantic tradition. The Renaixença re-established the prestige of Catalan and set Catalonia apart from the lethargy of other Spanish regions (Conversi, 1997: 14). Emanating from Barcelona, the cultural movement touched all the Catalanspeaking regions from the Balearics to French Roussillon. The next period of cultural vitality in Catalonia occurred towards the end of the century when Barcelona was the centre of the Modernista movement. Whereas the Renaixença had been, as its name suggests, a return to the glorious Catalan past, Modernisme was committed to 'progress' and 'cosmopolitanism'. It touched all the arts but had its most spectacular and enduring successes in the architecture of Antoni Gaudi and Josep Puig i Cadafalch. It brought Catalan artists and intellectuals into contact with the European mainstream, in contrast to the tendency in Madrid to remain within national circles. Barcelona then demonstrated for the third time within a century that it was the home of creativity and innovation by giving shape to Noucentisme, an intellectual and artistic movement which flourished in the early years of the 20th century. The ateneus, the Catalan equivalent of the workers' educational institutes of the British industrial revolution, demonstrated that this cultural vitality reached all classes of Catalan society (Solà, 1978). The ateneus promoted Catalan tradition, notably the Orfeó Català, the choirs typical of the region, and encouraged literacy among the workers. They had a political function too. Sometimes this was nationalist, sometimes not, as in the case of the ateneus populars founded by Marxist or anarchist groups. Even from this short account it is easy to understand why the power elites in Madrid would be frightened by Catalan economic power and cultural vitality particularly during the crisis of confidence which followed the loss of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898and why the Catalan intelligentsia and industrial bosses would each be frustrated by their political impotence. It was inevitable that Catalan regionalism would flourish in the Spain of the turn of the nineteenth century. It did so in both its right-wing and left-wing varieties and led to frequent clashes between Barcelona and Madrid. The demonstrations of May and October 1906 showed the extent of popular opposition to what Catalans saw as Castilian oppression. The centralist Spanish government had closed several Catalan newspapers and a satirical magazine after the publication of several irreverent articles attacking the army. In protest at this government action, Solidaritat Catalana was able to bring out nearly a quarter of a million people to demonstrate in the streets. In the early 20th century, in a period of high nationalism throughout Europe, Catalanism too moved from a kind of cultural regionalism to a more assertive nationalism. Led by Enric Prat de la Riba who was both the theorist of Catalan
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nationalism, publishing La nacionalitat catalana in 1906, and its political leader, the Catalans wrested a number of significant concessions from Madrid. As president of Barcelona's provincial council, Prat began to negotiate the grouping together of the four Catalan provinces (Lleida/Lérida, Tarragona, Barcelona and Girona/Gerona) into one administration. Previously their political links had been with Madrid and not with each other. Negotiations resulted in the Mancomunitat and gave the Catalans more political leverage in Spain as a whole and a certain amount of political autonomy, from 1913 onwards. This autonomy allowed the promotion of Catalan history, literature and language through the establishment of a private school system with Catalan as the medium of instruction, support for the Institut d'Estudis Catalans which Prat de la Riba had founded shortly beforehand and which provided a Catalan-medium alternative to the state university, and the inauguration of a publishing and library network to stimulate Catalan literature. The most significant cultural achievement of this period was perhaps the work carried out by Pompeu Fabra which led to the re-creation and acceptance of a unified standard for Catalan. This institutionalisation of cultural vitality mirrored and contributed to the Noucentista movement mentioned above. Catalan culture was flourishing but it was a high culture and an indigenous culture. Not all the inhabitants of Catalonia felt they were part of it. For the many workers drawn into Catalan industry from the other parts of Spain, Catalanism was both too bourgeois and too Catalan. Alejandro Lerroux's populist movement harnessed these sentiments and his anti-Catalanism gave a political focus to those workers for whom Catalan nationalism seemed to pose a threat. This period of relative autonomy was short lived. In 1923 General Miguel Primo de Rivera took power in Madrid. His dictatorship gave a foretaste of what would happen under Franco. The Catalans lost all the rights they had acquired. Catalanist organisations were suppressed. Public use of the Catalan language was forbidden. The Mancomunitat was abolished. However, this regime lasted for only seven years and by 1931 Spain was a republic for the second time. With the return of democracy, Catalanism resurfaced. The Catalans agreed to participate in central government as long as the principle of self-determination for Catalonia was accepted. The Generalitat, the autonomous government of Catalonia, was re-established in 1931, and the regional constitution came into force in 1932. Catalonia, dominated by the Left in this period, became a laboratory for all sorts of social experiments, in particular a very progressive school system. Social innovation was, however, to lead to the Generalitat's downfall. In particular, the attempt by the Catalans to carry out agrarian reform brought them into conflict with powerful landowning interests in Madrid. Madrid prevailed and stripped the Generalitat of its powers after a leftist uprising against the newly elected right-wing government in Madrid in October 1934. In February 1936, the Popular Front won the Spanish national elections. From February to July 1936, when General Franco led a military revolt against the government, there was a period of intense social change. Increasingly, Catalonia came to be the heart of this revolutionary movement. After the Francoists won the Civil War, repression was most brutal in those areas which had embraced socialism and regionalism most eagerly. Brutal police repression rooted out the former; harsh policies of cultural assimilation doused the latter. The Francoists
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borrowed from the Fascist and Nazi model. Coercion and persecution were employed to achieve the goal of a strong, unitary state with a single language, a single history and a sense of a single tradition. In furtherance of their aim of one language and one cultural tradition within the Spanish state, the Francoists burnt Catalan books, tore down public signs in Catalan, abolished Catalan in all parts of the education system, the media and the authorities, and punished civil servants caught speaking the language. On a public level, the policy of Castilianisation appeared successful; the execution or exile of the Catalan leaders and the suppression of all Catalan-medium civil society led to a twenty-year period in which Catalonia appeared to have become Spanish in culture and language. But this was only achieved through unremitting coercion; as soon as the repression eased, Catalan culture and language re-emerged from the private domain where it had survived, indeed perhaps flourished, as a symbol for anti-Francoists and as one way of refusing to accept total defeat. In the early 1960s, the Franco government, feeling more secure and wishing to create a favourable impression abroad, relaxed the repression and made some concessions. A Catalan cultural revival began in a modest way. The Nova Cançó, the new song movement, gained recognition even beyond Catalan borders; Catalan classes began again, funded by Òmnium Cultural, a Catalan cultural association; the monthly Catholic magazine, Serra d'Or, was one of a small number of publications in Catalan that were permitted. On the 11th September 1964 a group of Catalans dared to celebrate their Catalan national holiday in a semi-public way. This cultural revival gathered momentum as Catalan civil society reaffirmed itself through a network of associations, many of which by their nature could evade state interference and control; neighbourhood groups, scouts and youth groups, dance troupes, choirs, sports associations and rambling clubs provided settings where the Catalan language could move from the strictly private domain of friends and family into public, although not official, use. In the early 1970s the Catalans began to mobilise to regain their linguistic and cultural rights from an increasingly weak and beleaguered central government. The Assemblea de Catalunya (a broad coalition of clandestine nationalist and leftwing groups) fought for freedom of expression and an end to censorship, an amnesty for political prisoners and a return to the 1932 Statute of Autonomy. Catalan cultural renaissance and a political movement for autonomy were once again occurring in tandem. In 1975 Franco died. In 1978 the new Spanish constitution was approved. Catalonia regained its autonomy. In 1979 the Statute of the Autonomy of Catalonia recognised Catalan as the llengua pròpia of Catalonia, Catalonia's own language. There was, however, a problem to be confronted. Catalonia was not a completely homogenous society of Catalan speakers. Of course it never had been. Catalan industry had long been an attraction for workers. In the early period, immigrants had arrived from both southern France and the rest of Spain. In the Franco period, workers only came from the rest of Spain, and in much greater numbers than before. They came partly to participate in successful industry and commerce, but partly too because government policies encouraged this movement. The Franco government hoped that large-scale immigration into Catalonia would dilute the Catalan population and achieve a melting pot situation which
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would eradicate Catalan difference (Minority Rights Group, 1977). After Autonomy these 'in-migrants' were not necessarily going to wish to be part of a society which seemed set to become linguistically very different and culturally quite different from that of the Spanish nation to which they had been taught they belonged. Many of these castellans were perturbed by the Catalans' clear intention of re-Catalanising public life in the Autonomy. However, the autochthonous population was making it very clear that a failure to move in this direction would push then towards demanding full independence and Madrid had lost the power to contain the momentum. The popular movement, Crida a la solidaritat en defensa de la llengua, la cultura i la nació catalanes, brought thousands out on to the streets in 1981 and 1982 to demand Catalanisation. Catalan culture and language have flourished over the past two decades. In 1983 the Generalitat introduced the law of linguistic normalisation (Llei de Normalitzacio Lingüística) by which Catalan became the language of all official public life, including, most importantly, of education. In 1998, a further language law was passed with the aim of promoting Catalan in the commercial, financial and judicial domains. Political Catalanism has been mainly expressed through Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya and Unió Democràtica de Catalunya, two moderate nationalist parties which have been consistently successful as a coalition (CiU) in regional elections and whose leader, Jordi Pujol, has been president of the Generalitat since 1980. In state elections more Catalans have tended to vote for left-wing than for nationalist parties. A novel compromise has arisen in which it appears that Catalan nationalists do not question the unity of the Spanish state but aim for a significant degree of autonomy within that unity. CiU's role as king-maker in the state parliament illustrates how this group has succeeded in remaining the expression of Catalan nationalism, while making a significant contribution to the governance of Spain. From 1993 to 1995, CiU support kept the minority socialist party in power at national level. When the right-wing Partido Popular found themselves in a similar position, after having failed to win an absolute majority in the national parliament in 1996, Pujol played the king-making role once again. Catalan interests have been easier to promote from this position of power. At the present time Catalan nationalism is nationalism of the 'soft' variety with instances of devolution negotiated both peacefully and piecemeal. Only Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Catalan Republican Left) is calling for immediate independence from Spain. The majority of CiU supporters appear to accept the limited devolution of powers that has already been achieved and rely on negotiated and piecemeal advance towards further autonomy. The cultural and linguistic basis of Catalan nationalism has always been very strong, as this short account has shown. The cultural vigour is perhaps the reason for the very self-assured nature of Catalan identity (Conversi, 1997) and the Catalans' apparent acceptance of multilayered loyalties (Minority Rights Group, 1977). It is also a very inclusive nationalism. Jordi Pujol, the main theorist of Convergència i Unió, defines a Catalan as someone 'who lives and works in Catalonia and wants to be a Catalan' (Pujol, 1980, quoted in Guibernau, 1997:91). Essentially 'wanting to be a Catalan' can be translated into action by learning to speak the language, embracing the culture and taking part in Catalan civil society.
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And those who are willing to be integrated into this cultural and linguistic heritage are, by most accounts, readily accepted. Whether the vast numbers of economic migrants from other parts of Spain who moved into the area believing they were remaining within their own state borders and within their own language environment accept the Catalan offer remains the key question as Catalanisation continues. The outside observer can sympathise with both groups, with the Catalans proud of a rich cultural tradition who held to their language through periods of intense repression, who have achieved their nationalist project peacefully and democratically through the ballot box and who feel justified in the reCatalanisation of Catalonia, and, at the same time, with the Castilian-speaking community who have become de facto immigrants with all the problems that linguistic and cultural displacement brings, and this without ever having made the choice to emigrate. References Conversi, D. (1997) The Basques, the Catalans and Spain. London: Hurst. Entwhistle, W. (1936) The Spanish Language. London: Faber and Faber Generalitat de Catalunya (1996) Catalunya. Information leaflet in Catalan, English, French, German and Spanish. Guibernau, M. (1997) Images of Catalonia. In Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 3, Part 1, pp 89-113. Kamen, H. (1991) Spain 1469-1714. London: Longman. Minority Rights Group (1977) The Basques and Catalans, Report No 9. Ross, C. (1997) Contemporary Spain. London: Arnold. Solà, P. (1978) Els ateneus obrers i la cultura popular a Catalunya. Barcelona: La Magrana.
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Language and the Devolved Modern State in Catalonia: A Response to Miquel Strubell John Rex Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations, University of Warwick Coventry, CV4 7AL UK The General Theory of Nationalism and Ethnicity My own contribution to the debate about language policy in Catalonia is made very much from the outside. I do not claim any detailed knowledge of Catalan history or of the Catalan language. I have however been concerned in my theoretical work on nationalism and ethnicity with two types of theoretical discourse. The first concerns the relation between national groups within a single state, the second with the ethnicity of immigrants. I believe that the general problems posed within these theories may have some relevance to the Catalan case. In crude terms, the debate about nations and nationalism may be seen to have been polarised by Gellner and Smith. Gellner (1983) sees the nation as a new modern creation appropriate to an industrial society. The primary loyalty required of its members is that of citizenship and all individuals must be so educated that they can flexibly move between roles. A nation in this sense has little place for alternative types of solidarity such as those based upon ethnicity and class and may be expected actively to suppress them. By contrast, Anthony Smith (1991) emphasises the ethnic origins of nations. Prior to the emergence of nations there exist ethnies. These are based upon shared history, culture and symbols. They may also be unified by religion and language although both of these extend beyond any one ethnie and create wider trans-ethnic ties. In any case the size of the ethnie will depend upon literacy and the development of printing, so that while, in their initial phases, ethnies involve only relatively small groups bound together by the primordial ties of kinship and neighbourhood, reinforced by shared language and religion, once the population is literate and has access to printed material these primordial ties are projected on to a much wider population, which is imagined to have some of the same characteristics and has the same emotional appeal as the primary community. At this point political control of a territory wider than that of a neighbourhood may become important and will be disputed with other ethnies. The ethnie then becomes an ethnic nation. In response to Gellner's view of the state as a new and modern creation, Smith draws attention to the fact that the state may itself be controlled by an ethnic group, which does not simply have to defend its territory against other nations, but seeks to subordinate other ethnicities to its own. In these circumstances subordinated nations might fight for independence or at least some degree of autonomy over their own territory if they are concentrated in particular territories. In the latter case, the question arises of which aspects of life they may be permitted to control. Usually they will seek to practise their own religion, to speak their own language and perpetuate other customs in non-political matters. To this end, control of education becomes an issue. But apart from defending their
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autonomy in these matters they may have an interest in ensuring that their members have equal rights in the wider society created by the dominant group. They will therefore wish them to be prepared to participate in a modern secular state and to learn to co-exist with the dominant ethnic group. To achieve this their education has not merely to perpetuate their own religion, language and cultural practices, but also to prepare their members for successful participation in the modern more secular order and familiarise them with the culture of the dominant group. This far I have been speaking about ethnic sub-nations who are concentrated in particular areas and who seek limited autonomy within those areas. Rather different is the position of immigrants. These will include immigrants to the various autonomous areas, immigrants from outside into the larger modern state and immigrants from the autonomous areas to other parts of the territory controlled by that state. This is the concern of the second type of theory to which I have referred, that is to say the theory of ethnicity rather than the theory of nationalism. These migrants cannot hope to achieve their aims through any sort of relative political autonomy over a geographical area but have to negotiate to preserve their own ethnic culture (including religion, language and customs) while also fighting for equality in the modern secular society. Instead of fighting for regional autonomy they have to try to influence government policies, whether those of the central government or of the relatively autonomous regions. They will seek to make the policies of these governments 'multicultural'. The Catalan Case Turning now to the Catalan case, the first point to be noticed is that Catalan nationalism is not simply ethnic nationalism. It does not seek simply to win control of a territory for a group united by relatively primordial ties. Rather it seeks to unite all those who live within its territory and to make them members of a Catalan nation, itself seeking to win autonomy from the central Spanish government. The aim of the projected Catalan nation is first and foremost a political one. But it will be better organised to achieve this aim if it can create a cultural unity among all of its residents and citizens and be able to call upon their loyalty. Having a primarily political aim means that the nationalist project is in one sense a modern rather than an ethnic one. But Catalan nationalism may also be 'modem' in another sense. Insofar as the state which it creates is a modern industrial one it will also seek to develop its traditional culture in ways which are compatible with such a modern industrial society. The question of language has to be seen in this context. Of course a nationalist movement can be quite powerful without a distinct language as the Scottish case shows. But where there is a strong surviving language as in the Catalan case it inevitably becomes the major focus of nationalism. Indeed, insofar as the nationalist movement has a language problem to deal with, the protection, fostering and spread of language amongst all the citizens of the territory may so displace other concerns that little attention will be given to non-linguistic matters. The language issue stands in for the cultural one.
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Miquel Strubell's Paper on Language Policy Coming now to Miquel Strubell's paper, one has to ask what is to be expected from someone making language policy for the Catalan government. What are the implications of dealing with language questions as a distinct issue. In the first place, there is the interesting point that Catalan is a not merely a language spoken or expected to be spoken by the residents and citizens of the autonomous region or province of Catalonia. It is also spoken by the people of part of Valencia and of the Balearics. Some of these Catalan speakers may seek to belong to the greater Catalan group and expect the spokespeople of Catalan nationalism to defend their rights. Similarly the Francophone people of Manitoba or Saskatchewan might feel that they need a Francophone movement which speaks for them. But the Catalan speakers of Valencia and the Balearics and the Francophones of Manitoba or Saskatchewan are likely to be disappointed because the nationalist movement which they might like to see has been hijacked by territorially based nationalism in Catalonia and Quebec respectively. From the point of view of language policy-makers in the Catalan government the cause of the other Catalan speakers may deserve sympathy but no more. They have no power to redress their grievances. What those who make language policy in Catalonia are concerned with is the role of the Catalan language in public offices, in education and more widely in literary culture. If their aim was to work for independence they would insist that all public business should be conducted in Catalan, that preference in making appointments or promoting individuals within the government service should be given to Catalan speakers, that the medium of instruction in schools should be in Catalan and that any cultural activities which are supported with public funds should be Catalan. But clearly this is not the policy of a Catalan government seeking only autonomy rather than independence. What it will seek is equality in the relevant matters with Castilian Spanish and it is this moderate aim which is being suggested by Strubell in his paper. Of course it is possible that the present situation will change and that some degree of political independence will become more viable. This may happen in a European Union which seeks to base itself on regions rather than nations. One may therefore expect that in addition to the few who demand independence now there will be others who see the creation of autonomous institutions and assemblies as a springboard towards independence. This is certainly happening in Scotland. In the Catalan case, if this kind of changed politics were to occur, there might well be changes in language policy which would give a new kind of preference and priority for Catalan over Castilian Spanish. The other linguistic problem to which the Catalan government has to address itself is that of the language spoken, read or used by the immigrants to Catalonia from other parts of Spain and from further afield, who may actually form a majority of residents. Insofar as the government of Madrid can be regarded as the 'enemy', these immigrants may be the enemy within. Clearly turning the territorial nation into a cultural nation demands that these people should speak Catalan and that their children should speak it as their first language. This may be more than a romantic nationalist aspiration, it may be a matter of survival for the Catalan language.
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A further word should be said about immigrants from outside Spain, especially the Moroccans. They may see themselves as in transit to larger European opportunities and may prefer to learn not merely their own Moroccan language but other European languages, which will facilitate their onward migration. A sensible policy towards them would be to help them to retain and use their mother tongues in private and communal matters, but to encourage them to learn Catalan as the main means of their participating in the public sphere. Finally, it should be recognised that in the wider European and in the global world all Catalans will be motivated to learn other European languages which will give them access to these worlds. While therefore it would be sensible for all Catalans to learn Castilian Spanish so that they can operate in Madrid, they should also learn French so that they can gain employment across the border and English so that they can easily enter the much wider English-speaking world. References Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Smith, A.D. (1991) National Identity. London: Penguin.
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Reflections on Nationalism and Language: A Response to Miquel Strubell 1 Stephen Barbour School of Humanities and Cultural Studies, Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR, UK Nationalism Nationalism is an important factor in human behaviour. Its significance lies in its power to arouse passionate loyalties and hatreds which motivate acts of extreme violence and courage; people kill and die for their nations. Of course it is not alone in this; people are driven to similar extremes to protect their families, their extended families or kinship groups, their home areas with their populations, and their religious groups and the holy places and symbols of their religions. However, these other loyalties are often rather easier to understand than nationalism. Parents making supreme sacrifices for their children can be seen as obeying a universal imperative in life forms, the instinct to protect one's own genetic material.2 This instinct can also be seen at work in the urge to protect one's extended family or kinship group, but then the extended family, or the kinship group, can also be seen, in perhaps the majority of circumstances in which human beings have existed, as essential for the survival of the individual and of the nuclear family. The nation is not generally essential to survival in this way. In many, perhaps the vast majority of modern nations there is likewise no evidence that in defending the nation one is defending one's own genetic material; the notion that the citizens of modern nations are kinsfolk, while the citizens of (potentially) hostile neighbours are aliens, makes no sense in view of the highly varied genetic make-up of most modern populations. Defence of one's religion can also have a clearer motivation than defence of one's nation, since it may be seen as defence of an entire system of beliefs, a world view; it is difficult in many cases to claim that this is true of the defence of one's nation. There is in fact a good case for seeing nations as 'imagined communities', and such would be the view of many commentators (e.g. of Hobsbawm, 1990 and, particularly clearly, of Anderson, 1991). Nations are particularly important since they are considered in the current dominant political and social order to be those units with which individuals should identify most strongly beyond their families; they are, for example, generally the only units in whose defence the exercise of violence is legitimate. Nationalism can be seen as a movement to defend the interests of a nation, to defend or secure its political independence (see Smith, 1991: 72). I therefore turn now to a closer examination of the concept of the nation.
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Nations and Other Communities Anthony D. Smith (1991: 14) provides a useful definition of a nation as: a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members. (Smith, 1991: 14) From this definition, which would, I think, command widespread agreement, we can see that nations, in the modern sense, can only be relatively recent phenomena. Before the advent of printing a mass public culture is scarcely conceivable. Common legal rights and duties are unenforceable unless relatively rapid travel within the territory is possible. A nation in the modern sense cannot exist without a shared sense of identity, and for people to share an identity a certain minimum level of communication between them must be guaranteed. In the contemporary world there is widespread confusion between the concepts 'nation' and 'state'. 3 Most states describe themselves as 'nations', so why can we simply not take them at face value and say that states and nations are identical? This is not possible since they are abstractions of a different order; a state is a legally defined entity, a nation is a population. While modem populations which consider themselves to be nations generally possess or aspire to possess a state coterminous with the nation, a definition of the nation which demands that it dominate its own state is too restrictive; most commentators would agree that the majority populations of the republics of the former Soviet Union, such as Georgians and Lithuanians, were nations before those republics achieved independence, and that the populations of some well-defined regions of states, such as Scotland, in which a majority consider that they have nation status, should be recognised as such (see Parekh, 1995). Although states and nations are not identical, they are of course closely connected. Anthony Smith (see particularly Smith, 1991) divides nations into those which have developed chiefly from ethnic groups which have modified and extended their ethnic identities to encompass larger populations, and those which have developed within particular states where a common sense of national identity has arisen within the state to encompass a previously diverse population. Nations frequently develop from ethnic groups, and ethnic groups and nations often share names; we can, for example speak of a Greek ethnic group and a Greek nation. The governments of many states (for example Germany and many central and eastern European states) imply an identity of ethnic group and nation in their policies (see Barbour, 1991). Are they not then, simply, the same thing? The answer to this has to be negative. The clearest difference is territorial; both in earlier times, and in certain areas today where a nomadic economy prevails, ethnic groups can be scattered across vast territories, interspersed with other groups, and can practise a nomadic lifestyle, occupying no clearly defined area. But then also in a very different environment, that of the city, ethnic mixes seem to be typical. Cities typically attract in-migration from a wide area, and unite people of different occupations with different backgrounds and skills, all of which favours ethnic mix. Those states which imply identity of ethnic group and nation in their practices can be seen as projecting an anachronistic, rural ideal of
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ethnic purity onto their mixed urban populations, which nowadays often form the majority. 4 Despite the distinction between ethnic groups and nations, the status of a nation confers a particular kind of legitimacy, and since it can lead to political independence with concomitant power for the group concerned, there has been strong pressure on ethnic groups to redefine themselves as nations. This can lead to severe problems, for example in Northern Ireland or Bosnia where two or more ethnic groups with differing national aspirations live together in a single quite small territory. The cultural coherence of an ethnic group or a nation is often partly expressed by language. This works in two ways; a distinctive language may help to demarcate the ethnic group or nation from other groups, and a common language may facilitate communication and hence coherence within a group. Language can hence be extremely important for ethnic identity, national identity and nationalism Languages Since languages can differ appreciably from each other, they can form highly effective markers of different cultures and different ethnic groups and nations. It is therefore not at all surprising that ethnic groups and nations often use distinct languages in a highly conscious and effective fashion as markers of their distinct identities. A superficial glance at parts of the modern world, particularly at Europe, could lead one to make two assumptions: that different languages were universally markers of different ethnic groups and nations, and that they were the most salient of such markers. There are cases where these two assumptions hold. For example the Hungarian, Romanian and Basque languages are markers of Hungarian, Romanian and Basque ethnic groups respectively; they are arguably the most salient markers of these groups, and they are not intelligible to any appreciable extent to speakers of neighbouring languages. Within each of these languages there are different dialects in different regional groups which are mutually intelligible, though not perfectly so. Unfortunately these cases are much simpler than many; in fact while dialects of the same language do tend to resemble each other more than do different languages, the reality of dialect-language differentiation is often highly complex. First of all we do find varieties which are described as dialects of a single language, but where mutual comprehensibility is very low. There is, for example, low comprehensibility between many German dialects (for an impression of the dialectal diversity of German see Barbour & Stevenson, 1990: 55-99). The reverse case is more common; there is for example usually a high level of mutual comprehensibility between spoken Norwegian and spoken Swedish, and between written Norwegian and written Danish, despite the fact that all three are considered separate languages (see Vikør, 1993: 112-137). Why then are certain mutually quite comprehensible varieties labelled separate languages, while others have the status of dialects of a single language? And why are certain mutually poorly comprehensible varieties also labelled as dialects of a single language? There is a copious literature on this topic (see, for
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example, Fishman, 1989; Haugen, 1976) which sees the answers to these questions very much in ethnic and national identities, to which we now therefore return. Language, Ethnic and National Identity and Nationalism Human beings are the most mobile of the larger land mammals, and even if only moving on foot, a single human group can spread out within a few years into an area of hundreds of square miles. Under these circumstances languages, like other human cultural characteristics, become diverse; given the fact that languages change constantly, small and then large differences can develop between different groups of language users, and these differences can then be used to mark regional and social distinctions. Unlike other cultural characteristics, languages fulfil the role of essential media of communication and hence cannot become too diverse if communication is to be maintained. Since, however, until recent times, communication for most people took place almost entirely within a local or family group, or within a small ethnic group, there was little to prevent an original fairly uniform language diverging so much in different groups that communication became impossible between them. 5 If speakers of related but poorly mutually comprehensible varieties consider that they share an ethnic or national identity, they may accept that their varieties constitute dialects of a single language. This seems to be true, for example, for most of those who speak the diverse range of dialects which we label 'German', though some, notably Germanspeaking Swiss, do not accept this common ethnic identity. Conversely speakers of related and mutually comprehensible dialects may consider that they speak separate languages if they belong to separate ethnic groups. This sense of ethnic difference in the face of linguistic similarity may arise from a whole host of causes: for example, Czech and Slovak ethnic groups, speaking very similar varieties, have considerably different historical experiences (see Törnquist-Plewa, forthcoming). The concept of the nation we have been discussing is particularly European, or European and American, and develops particularly clearly from the eighteenth century onwards. The ideal of a nation closely identified with a particular language is even more restricted, being chiefly European, and little more than two centuries old. Conclusions We can see, then, how a whole variety of factors has given language a crucial place in nationalism in many areas. However the position is enormously varied, dependent on the extremely diverse histories of the various regions of the world. The interrelations between language distinctions and nationalism command the interest of linguists and social scientists because of their fascinating complexity, but also because, despite globalisation, nationalism and linguistic nationalism are political forces whose potency seems undiminished in the contemporary world.
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Notes 1. This paper is an abridged version of the Introduction to Language and Nationalism in Europe, edited by S. Barbour and C. Carmichael, to be published by Oxford University Press in 1999. It owes much to discussions and correspondence with Cathie Carmichael, and with the other contributors to the book: Anne Judge, Clare Mar-Molinero, Lars Vikør, Robert Howell, Carlo Ruzza, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa and Peter Trudgill. 2. I do not wish to imply that all altruism can be reduced to selfish motives, or to instincts; this would be a rash claim, and excessively cynical. 3. I am using 'state' here in the sense of 'sovereign independent state'. Note that some sovereign independent states, notably the USA, use the term 'state' for subdivisions of their territories. I avoid the term 'nation-state' in the present paper, since, although useful in some contexts, it implies a coincidence of nation and state, which is not helpful to the present discussion. 4. The idea that rural populations are, or should be, 'ethnically pure' is also mistaken, but it is not so out of step with reality as is the view of urban ethnic purity. 5. It is entirely possible, though unproven, that homo sapiens originated in a single area, with a single language, but that in the perhaps hundreds of thousands of years which have elapsed since that time the hundreds of different languages which we find today could have arisen. References Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities. New York: Verso. Barbour, S. (1991) Language and nationalism in the German-speaking countries. In P. Meara and A. Ryan (eds) Language & Nation (British Studies in Applied Linguistics 6) (pp 39-48). London: British Association for Applied Linguistics, Centre for Information on Language Teaching & Research. Barbour, S. and Stevenson, P. (1990) Variation in German: A Critical Approach to German Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fishman, J.A. (1989) Language & nationalism: Two integrative essays. In J.A. Fishman Language & Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective (pp. 97-175, 269-367). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Haugen, E. (1976) Dialect, language, nation. In J.B. Pride and J. Holmes (eds) Sociolinguistics (pp. 97-111). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1990) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parekh, B. (1995) Ethnocentricity of the nationalist discourse. Nations and Nationalism 1, 25-52. Smith, A.D. (1991) National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Törnquist-Plewa (forthcoming) Contrasting ethnic nationalisms: Eastern Central Europe (Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic). In S. Barbour and C. Carmichael (eds) Language and Nationalism in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vikør, L. (1993) The Nordic Languages. Oslo: Novus.
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Group Rights, and 'Soft' Nationalism: A Response to Miquel Strubell Dieter Haselbach School of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK In his paper, Strubell claims the right of the Catalan linguistic group, the Catalan people, to use their own language and to be protected against the overwhelming influence of Castilian, the official language of the whole of Spain. Strubell is not very explicit as to the final objectives of the proposed language policy. If I understand him correctly, he makes the case for a special preference for the usage of the Catalan language and it seems that in this point he is, in principle, in agreement with the current regional government under Prime Minister, Jordi Pujol. It appears to be the intention of this language policy to roll back the influence of Spanish and to support the usage of Catalan, through positive discrimination or affirmative action. Strubell claims that the Catalan-ness of a given population can be measured by their usage of the Catalan language. In other words, Catalan identity and belonging to the Catalan people is determined by actual usage of the language. Under these circumstances, a policy of positively discriminating for Catalan would be likely to increase the 'Catalan' population in Catalonia, since, in this interpretation, Catalan nationalism is inclusive and demands only that newcomers wish to be culturally and linguistically assimilated. Yet, in other parts of his paper Strubell contradicts his own definition of Catalan-ness. For example, concerned about the constant migration into Catalonia, Strubell distinguishes between those who are Catalan only linguistically and those who are Catalans 'in the traditional sense', i.e. born and bred in the country to an old Catalan family, a status not easily achievable for immigrants. And indeed, Strubell's ultimate concern about the continuity of the Catalan people is only disclosed in the conclusion of his discussion paper. While the struggle for the Catalan case seems to have had quite a few successes in 'Catalanising' Spanish immigrants, Strubell admits that the demographics are still not in favour of Catalan survival. The indigenous stock has a low fecundity rate, while the immigrants propagate more successfully: This will make Catalonia extremely fragile in terms of its need to facilitate linguistic integration of newcomers. The position of Spanish is much stronger and in any case there is a large stock of monolingual Spanish-speakers living in a monolingual society. 1 Strubell's argument is contradictory: he starts with a linguistic concern, and he ends with worries about Volk und Raum. This mode of discourse follows the classical agenda of ethnic nationalism. One might think that this unfortunate demographic projection for the Catalan-bred would make a policy of positive discrimination even more necessary, because otherwise a situation might not be too far away in which the Catalan people would live, at best, in a reservation, just like the North American
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Indians who have been swamped by white immigrants. Yet the reservation seems to be exactly the social scenario which Strubell has in mind when he muses about a Catalan national project within the Spanish state and its given Spanish majority: he tentatively compares the position of the Catalans to the 'plight of the American Indians' and citing Kymlicka (1995) reminds us that 'reservations are essential if they are to be truly able to maintain their way of life, including the use of their language(s)'. One has to note here that the North American Indian bands living in reserves still continue to recognise only a relationship of sovereign states amongst themselves and the countries in which they find themselves. What is the underlying theory of society that guides Strubell's argument? He seems on both sides of the fence that divides theoretical understandings of society. On the one hand, he argues as a social constructivist when he claims that whoever speaks the Catalan language, can be considered a Catalan, can be subsumed under a Catalan identity. On the other hand, Catalan-ness seems to be rooted in biological circumstances, such as descendence: Catalans are only those born to indigenous people of Catalonia. There are indications that the social constructivist argument is only windowdressing. Strubell's position is leaning toward biological determinism. Right at the start of his paper, he discusses equality and non-discrimination as basic Human Rights and at the same time he claims that differences between humans are fixed and exclusive, predetermined for any given individual and by no means open to change or reinterpretation. He says: Nearly all of them are birth-given and singular in nature. Race, colour, sex, religion, political opinion, national or social origin or birth are either things that simply cannot be changed, or are single in nature: one cannot be at the same time of two social origins, birthplaces or religions. What is the interpretation here? Is Strubell an essentialist? Does he subscribe to the belief that 'identity' is both fixed and partially inherited? Or is he simply saying that language is by far the most accommodating criterion for defining nationality, because people can acquire language? If it is the former, I would argue against his assertions; it is not as simple as he suggests. Religion and political opinion are rather flexible. Colour of skin or social origin are not a given, but exist only through interpretation: their significance is negotiated at the very moment when they are claimed. Equally, although sex may be relatively fixed (Strubell himself points to the possibility of sex changes), gender roles are clearly not and so the definition of sex remains flexible. Taking this into account, the foundation of group membership on such 'differences' is problematic, to say the least. Whatever differences may exist between people and groups of people (the possibilities are limitless), they must be given significance, they must be fought for, they must become part of a society's discourse, they exist not in nature, but only in the cultural and political realm. Thus they are, emphatically, not essential but historical, political, negotiated. Strubell claims a right for linguistic survival of his reference group and that is for its survival as an identity group. He wants to pursue this goal by affirmative action for the Catalan language, by actions to officially support the use of Catalan
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and so discourage the use of Castilian. The right for the state to rule on people's choices of language use is justified with the claim that only this can compensate for past discrimination against both the Catalan language and the Catalan people. Parallel to current discussions in North America, Australia and elsewhere, affirmative action is considered necessary to break the vicious circle of discrimination by restoring the status quo ante: past discrimination that has broken the formation of identity in a people has to be overcome, pride has to be restored. Past wrong-doing must be compensated and this happens best by positive discrimination. Several questions arise from this project and from the underlying philosophy of history. First, can a group, for its way of living, claim special rights that are denied to others? Can a group claim supremacy of its idea and its way of living in a given territory, against others living there, denying them such rights? This is the question of whether positive discrimination is justifiable in principle. I shall attempt to argue that this approach contradicts the very nature of the constitution of liberal democracies. Second, when and where was the period before discrimination against which this discrimination can be measured? In post-colonial societies such as the USA and Australia, the act of colonisation is constructed as the original sin and the history of oppression and discrimination is seen as having started with this act. It is forgotten that pre-colonial times were, in all colonised societies, also times of history, that is of conflict and war and discrimination. In a European context such a construction is even more difficult, as European history offers not the one distinct, reprehensible act of colonial conquest, but a succession of conquests, colonisation, oppression, trade, liberation, and other relations between groupings whose composition was always fluid. Here it is even more difficult to answer the question: What is the point in the past against which compensation can be claimed? Third, in identity discourse, group identity is located on both sides of the political equation. On the one hand, identity is claimed as an historical given, as a fact, dating to a point of reference in a grey zone before, or outside history. On the other hand, identity is not a primordial quality of its holders, but exists only as a result of a policy of active identity formation, a policy of inventing a particular identity. The history of the formation of nation states exemplifies this point. The reference to a nebulous past is a deliberate political move made in the present. The real point of nationalist politics is not to find and rebuild a lost past, but to actively construct an identity group, a social constellation with insiders and outsiders. The question of who is in and who is out, is not a problem of descent, but a question of economic chances, careers, jobs; it is the starting point of further political ambitions, for control, for resources, for territory. 2 The differentiation of in-group and out-group is thus a question of current power and actual interest more than it is ever a question of past oppression and its compensation. Who is, and who is not a group member, is a political question. Finally, is positive discrimination compatible with the theoretical and constitutional framework of liberal constitutionalism that is characteristic of member states of the European Union? Arguably, it is not. Affirmative action
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starts necessarily with a definition of a target group. The subjects of obligations and rights in society are not individuals any more, but the group targeted by affirmative action. Only group members become subject to special regulations. Group membership is usually not voluntary, it is prescribed by law. Such group rights contradict a core value of a liberal and democratic constitution: the freedom of the individual. Group rights also contradict equality as an equally essential human right. Members and non-members, in a target group are treated systematically and purposefully, in an un-equal way. The differential treatment is compensatory, it happens for a benevolent purpose. Yet any differential treatment of a group of people opens the avenue for non-benevolent differential treatment, i.e. racism in the case of ethnic groups. A non-discriminatory and lawful society must operate under the assumption that its members are equal before the law, while, of course, actual differences prevail. Positive discrimination, where it becomes the rule of politics, leads away from a liberal and democratic order, to a society divided by hierarchies of memberships and privileges. 3 To sum up, Strubell's position is apparently measured and moderate. However, to me, it seems that the underlying assumptions are those of ethnic essentialism. Nationalism has no limitation within itself, it is only moderate as long as there is no political room for further demands or claims of supremacy. Catalan nationalism appears at present a 'soft' nationalism, but there are no guarantees that it will remain so. It is in this lack of limitation that all nationalism contains seeds of danger. Strubell defends the policy of bilingualism in Catalonia. He is concerned to meet the justified expectation of people that they will be able to choose, in a non-monolingual situation, the language in which they communicate in public. I am convinced that such an expectation can be met without slipping back into Europe's old disease of nationalism. Notes 1. I read this as 'social environment'. 2. Leslie Pal (1993) has made a case study on affirmative action, group politics, and interest formation that illustrates my point. 3. Much more could be said here. The debate on Charles Taylor's suggestion to complement liberal constitutionalism with a provision for groups to articulate their identity and organise around their goal of survival and their definition of what constitutes a 'good life', is highly significant here. Jürgen Habermas insists that such group claims, if made law, would lock group members into a set identity and prevent them from cultural exchange with their environment: 'For to guarantee survival would necessarily rob the members [of a group, D.H.] of the very freedom to say yes or no that is necessary if they are to appropriate and preserve their cultural heritage' (Habermas, 1994: 130). Furthermore, Habermas states that the notion of 'collective rights' is 'alien to the system' of democratic constitutionalism (ibid., p. 116). Anthony Appiah, in the same volume, makes a similar point and adds that the formation of identity groups as collective political actors bears considerable political risks in a liberal constitution: 'Between the politics of recognition [of identity groups, D.H.] and the politics of compulsion, there is no bright line' (Appiah, 1994: 163).
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References Appiah, A. (1994) Identity, authenticity, survival: Multicultural societies and social reproduction. In C. Taylor et al. (ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Chichester: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. (1994) Struggles for recognition in the democratic constitutional state. In A. Gutmann (ed.) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Chichester: Princeton University Press. Pal, L. (1993) Interests of State: The Politics of Language, Multiculturalism, and Feminism in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.
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Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia: A Response to Miquel Strubell Alan Yates Department of Hispanic Studies, The University of Sheffield, Arts Tower Western Bank, Sheffield, S102TN, UK Reading Strubell's paper stimulated for me several interrelated lines of reflection. Had I been able to be present at his talk I should probably have raised these issues as a series of genuinely open questions, seeking clarification, amplification or perhaps an opinion from the speaker. In the form in which this response is now delivered I offer some thoughts on what, from my perspective, are the most salient and probably the most problematical issues addressed in the paper. These thoughts are organised here as four main points, obviously interconnected and with ramifications that go out into broader related areas covered by Strubell. A discursive tone is adopted, but the exposition is still sown with the original question marks which would have punctuated my possible interventions in the seminar. The Context of the New Legislation The 1998 Language Policy Act is certainly more polemical and less 'consensual' than its 1983 predecessor on which it is designed to build. It is too early to try to assess all the practical and political implications of the new legislative framework for language policy, or even the directions in which these might unfold. That it is intrinsically conditioned by serious political tensions and calculations, on the Catalan and the wider Spanish fronts is, however, undeniable. Language policy inevitably implies politics, but the politicisation of language issues in relation to immediately contingent electoral concerns can generate further conflict that may prejudice the 'pure' objectives of language planning, however democratic in spirit. The 1983 Act benefited from being 'a carefully worked out and negotiated parliamentary pact'. This feature was itself in play in the complicated political manoeuvring, dog-fighting and dirty-trickery that went on in the period 1993-1996, when González's Socialists held power in Spain in a sort of loose coalition with Pujol's conservative nationalists. The 'language question' was exploited, often quite cynically, by the right-wing Partido Popular in opposition, by 'patriotic' groups and their supporters/agents in the media. One climax was reached in a much-publicised cartoon in the Madrid newspaper ABC accusing the Generalitat, in matters of language planning, of being 'igual que bajo Franco pero al revés', 1 with implications that ethnic cleansing was on the Catalan government's agenda. I shall return later to this question of the 'reversal of paradigms'. The tune of the Partido Popular had to change quite radically, of course, when they were denied a working majority in the 1996 state elections and found themselves having to depend, as had the Socialists after 1993, on a parliamentary pact with Pujol's CiU party. The cycle of events clearly demonstrates the point that crude electoral politics will suck in the 'language question', with prejudicial consequences for 'democratic' language policy.
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The 1998 Act does not enjoy consensus among the Catalan parties. As a general election once again looms in Spain, politics are again seen to be acutely polarised around the conflicting interests of Catalan vs. Spanish, focusing (or distorting) conflicting claims of devolution vs. 'national' unity. Old spectres are resurrected and manipulated by both sides, and the dialogue of the deaf increases in agitation. The present-day situation is complicated by the experiences (and the ironies) of the last few years, together with the fact that the days in office of President Pujol and his party increasingly appear to be numbered. One can reasonably wonder whether CiU's insistence on pushing through the 1998 Act was not prompted by party-political motives (to embarrass both Catalan PSC and Spanish PSOE socialists, to appeal to language sensibilities among the Catalan electorate in advance of any similar moves, in the other direction, by their political opponents) as well as by the requirements of a still far from complete process of linguistic 'normalisation'. One wonders, then, about the timing and appropriateness of the new Act. Could the measures it envisages not have been effectively introduced through modification of the 1983 Act, retaining the 'consensual' status of that important piece of legislation? The answer to this can realistically only come as part of an eventual answer to the wider question implicit in the second sentence of this section. Progress towards Normalisation was the sub-title of a jointly authored book by Strubell published in 1991. Some tangible progress has been achieved, at a relatively low cost to convivència or social harmony (as opposed to political gesturing) in Catalonia since 1983. A new perspective, one determined by the 1998 Act, will impose a serious review of the rate and extent of the continuing 'social normalisation' of Catalan. And there are implications in this also for the bigger question raised at various points by Strubell and returned to in his conclusion: the language's chances of survival. The Impact of the New Legislation The 1998 Act concentrates on fostering the 'social use of Catalan in commercial, financial and judicial spheres, and in habitual relations with public administration bodies' (Generalitat, 1998). These, together with the media, which the Act also affects, are certainly areas where normalisation under the 1983 provision has been manifestly defective. Preparing the ground for the new legislation, a General Plan for Linguistic Normalisation was approved in the spring of 1995. President Pujol's much publicised speech to launch the Plan 2 emphasised that the objective of his government was not at all to eliminate Castilian/Spanish from Catalonia but rather to bring Catalan to the 'point of no return' which would ensure its future survival (in the implied event of a political involution like that experienced in 1939). Historically, the ambition is understandable; politically, it is perfectly justifiable, for many reasons that Strubell's paper adduces. The interesting thing, to me, is that this official line of argumentation has not been much heard since 1995 (unless I have missed reporting of it). A linked sequence of questions, therefore, occurs to me: (1) Is the idea of movement towards 'the point of no return' still an underlying principle of the Catalan government's language policy? This is relevant to
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Strubell's declaration that 'affirmative action (read: positive discrimination) is ... necessary'. (2) Is this principle reconcilable with the perspective on societal and individual bilingualism that Strubell adopts and, more widely, with general sociolinguistic observations that bilingualism (with or without diglossia) is eventually resolved in favour of one or other of the languages in contact? (3) Are not the reactions and the discourse of those opposed to any further advance in the social normalisation of Catalan fuelled by their calculations regarding the two previous questions? Merely asking this helps to see in true perspective the egregious Luis María Anson's defence of the 'human rights' of Spanish monolinguals in Catalonia and the preoccupation of people like him that the Generalitat's hidden agenda is Catalan monolingualism and (against all the evidence on the ground) the eradication of Castilian/Spanish from the autonomous community. Tensions (Macro and Micro) Arising from the Implementation of Language Policy One major contradiction (not confined to the Catalan context) concerns the delicate issue of identity. Strubell refers to Jordi Pujol's historic and 'extremely open definition' of Catalan-ness as the common feature of 'all those who live and work in Catalonia'. Only the day-to-day politico-linguistic reality of the Catalan context, though, allows this to be squared with the essentialist discourse ubiquitous in nationalist arguments that Catalan, the 'historic language', 'la llengua pròpia', 'la llengua medul·lar' is the primary emblem of differentiation, of collective and individual identity. In practical terms, the contradiction can be translated into the question regardless of declared principles of what definition of Catalan-ness is implied in the politics of language normalisation in Catalonia, in practice and as experienced on the ground. This is an area in which David Atkinson has been conducting some interesting research and I economise by referring here to his contribution (on 'integration or assimilation?') to this forum. I would add that this matter is complicated by a more recent sociological concern which neither Strubell nor Atkinson addresses, that is, the attitude towards, and provision for, 'in-migrants' to Catalonia whose native language is not Castilian, specifically the sizeable population of economic migrants from North Africa. Do the terms of the CatalanSpanish confrontation (language and identity) apply to this sector of the Catalan community (understood for the purpose of the question as being 'all who live and work in Catalonia')? The query, mutatis mutandis, suggests significant, necessarily nuanced, comparisons with related situations elsewhere in Europe (not least in the UK) and in North America. 'Reverse language shift' within a democratic context is obviously what is at the heart of all of this. It was perhaps inevitable that the phenomenon should generate crudely simplified ideas about the reversal of previous politicolinguistic relationships. The old paradigm of the dominant A language (Spanish) vs. the subordinate B language (Catalan) can mischievously be presented as dominant Catalan vs. subordinate Spanish. The reverse paradigm has virtually no historical or sociolinguistic value, but its existence frames both the 'innocent' reaction '¡Pero
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estamos en España!', analysed by Atkinson, and the perverse 'igual que bajo Franco, pero al revés'. By any objective standard, Catalan is still a subordinate language in a process of 'reverse shift', with a long way to go towards normalisation in key social areas. Accurate description and analysis of the process (cf. Lamuela, 1994) use the concept of 'discrimination' to refer to the linguistic interface of the individual with all the complex functions of modem society. Perhaps a different term should be found to deny demagogic ammunition to the shadowy successors of Alejandro Lerroux. These considerations do not, of course, allow the problems raised by Atkinson to be swept under the carpet: sensitive and efficient language planning must take them into account. Normalisation and Standardisation The relationship between normalisation and standardisation is mentioned only briefly by Strubell towards the end of his paper, and I take this opportunity to broaden the discussion. The vast recent literature on the subject, specifically on the Catalan example, demonstrates its relevance to the present-day situation. A unified literary Catalan koine was already well established by the fifteenth century as a consequence of political élan and cultural vitality. With subsequent decline over the ensuing three centuries, awareness of the conventions of this written standard, and of the linguistic and cultural unity of the Catalan-speaking territories it reflected, was gradually dissipated, so that by the early industrial era writers had in mind only a regionally limited audience for written texts in a local idiom. Fragmentation, the consequence of language shift and subordination to Spanish, is reflected in the presentday situation, where, to confine the discussion to the Spanish state alone, three different autonomous communities have three separate language policies, and where many speakers in Valencia and Majorca prefer to call their language valencià or mallorquí rather than Catalan. As Strubell observes, the more wedges that can be driven between the Catalanspeaking communities prevented by the Spanish Constitution from any greater political association among themselvesthe more the interests of Spanish centralism and 'unity' are served. One of the goals of the 19th-century Renaixença (Rebirth) movement and subsequently of Catalan nationalist ideology was the restoration or reconstruction of a Catalan standard language. The standardisation process was initiated as 'normativisation' and crystallised in the work of Pompeu Fabra (1868-1948), whose orthographic norms (1913), grammar (1918) and dictionary (1932) were immediately adopted in Catalonia and quickly became accepted elsewhere. The Institut d'Estudis Catalans, through its Philological Section originally headed by Fabra, became (and still remains) the institutional authority on linguistic matters. The bases of modern standard Catalan were the medieval koine, current educated usage in Catalonia (particularly the Barcelona area), the contemporary dialects, and the purging of lexical and grammatical Castilianisms. Fabra's idea was that the standard language should be open to development and to further incorporation of non-Barcelona usage, but the Spanish Civil War and the Franco period (1939-75) had something of the effect of turning the normative bases into an orthodoxy, deviation from which was regarded by Catalan nationalists as unpatriotic. Reverberations of this situation still have not died away completely.
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Nevertheless, since the 1980s the IEC and associated institutions have regained the authority to expand and modernise standard Catalan, introducing recommendations for terminology, for spoken usage in the mass media, and for regional 'parastandards'. Political developments in the post-Franco dispensation have, moreover, created the need, the spaces and the means for standardisation to evolve, notably in the areas of education and the media with television having a particularly important role. In addition to the Barcelona-based norm which is used throughout Catalonia and to some extent elsewhere, de facto standards for Valencian and Balearic Catalan had already come into being, largely through the practice of a few major publishers. These written 'parastandards' diverge from the Eastern Central norm only in retaining some regional differences of vocabulary and morphology which belonged to the literary tradition. The differences can be compared to those between British and American English: one may easily read a page of text before coming upon a feature which marks it as of one regional standard variety rather than another. In recent years some writers and publishers in Catalonia have argued for, and implemented, modifications of the IEC codification of the standard language, in order to reflect more popular spoken usage, especially that of Barcelona, in vocabulary and syntax. The vehemence of the polemic surrounding these 'deviations' is out of all proportion to the relatively modest scope of the innovations proposed. Potentially much more serious is the recent trend, specifically examined by Strubell, associated with the claim that Valencian is not just a regional variety of Catalan but a separate language. The 'secessionists', aided by changes in local government, have been extremely vociferous and they have won some official backing. Their alternative 'standard', based closely but by no means consistently on the popular speech of Valencia, has been generally opposed by educational institutions, publishers and most creative writers in Catalan. Language fragmentation here, as already remarked, is being exploited, in an atmosphere of anti-Catalanism, to political ends which basically favour right-wing provincialism in the service of Spanish centralism. There is a danger too that the situation in the Balearic Islands is open to 'Valencianisation' in this sense. (Andorra, French Catalonia and Alghero/l'Alguer require separate attention outside the scope of this exposition, but the factors here considered are generally relevant.) Linguistic unity in relation to standardisation runs into the even trickier issue of the ideal political unity of the Catalanspeaking territories, the idea of Paisos Catalans or Greater Catalonia, which runs through the discourse of modern Catalan nationalism. Strubell's general focus of 'democracy and devolution' shows how important are the politics, within the Spanish frame, to his linguistic concerns (e.g. 'the causes of most of the problems facing Catalan ... are nonlinguistic in nature'). I hope I have done enough to indicate the particular complications associated with the full idea of a Catalan standard. Basically, the neutral concept of the standard as a 'supradialectal' norm (an idea emphasised by those, including linguists, of 'Pan-Catalanist' persuasion) is in conflict with the demographic weight of Barcelona and its dominance in the evolution of the standard as it exists, as outlined above. This then accounts for the facility with which anti-Catalan rhetoric can be exploited in Valencia and, to a lesser extent,
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in the Balearics. Even so, the relative closeness and accommodation of the established 'parastandards' with the main Eastern Central norm could well be the basis, in favourable or even neutral political circumstances, for the natural growth of a consolidated, authentic standard. The written version is virtually in place: increasing cultural integration between the Catalan-speaking communities could even allow one to foresee the emergence in the long term of a completely natural oral standard for Catalan (even if closer political association is ruled out for the present). But the circumstances are far from neutral, and a whole series of question marks hangs over this topic. Ultimately, though, as Lamuela (1994) and many others show, standardisation will remain a key issue and a sensitive indicator of the full dialectics of language, democracy and devolution in the Catalan vs. Spanish context. Notes 1. Just like under Franco, but the other way round. 2. Reported, inter alia, in El Temps, 3/4/95. References Generalitat de Catalunya (1998) Ara és demà. Catalunya. Reptes defutur. Barcelona: Official Publications. Lamuela Xavier (1994) Estandardització i establiment de les llengües. Barcelona: Edicions 62. Webber, J. and Strubell, M. (1991) The Catalan Language: Progress Towards Normalisation. Sheffield: The AngloCatalan Society.
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Normalisation: Integration or Assimilation? A Response to Miquel Strubell David Atkinson School of Social and International Studies, University of Sunderland, Forster Building, Chester Road, Sunderland SR 3SD, UK As the spouse of a Catalan and in particular as the father of two primary school-age children growing up in England as English/Catalan bilinguals who have, at present at least, no knowledge of Spanish, I have a strong personal interest in the future destiny of the Catalan language. As a researcher in the final stages of a doctoral thesis whose topic is the situation in Catalonia I am also uncomfortably aware of the very real question marks concerning that future which, as Miquel suggests in his paper, justify at best only the most cautious optimism. The Castellanoparlants Issue My particular interest in the areas covered by the paper is the role envisaged by those responsible for language policy in the Principality for the L1 Castilian community in Catalonia in the longer term. This is an issue which is touched on in the paper but which in my view merits further exploration. Clearly, one of the single most important pieces in the jigsaw of elements which will ultimately determine the future of Catalan is the existence in the Principality of a substantial proportion of the population, indeed, as Strubell says, potentially if not actually a majority, who are L1 Castilian speakers. In this sense one of the most fundamental questions of all is whether or not the longer term survival of Catalan can be compatible with the continued existence of this ethnolinguistically differentiated group; whether or not Catalan can gradually attain a sufficient degree of hegemony in order to assure its future prospects without a classic process of assimilation taking place whereby intergenerationally the L1 Castilian community gradually adopts Catalan as its L1. I take it as axiomatic, as Strubell clearly does, that no such hegemony exists at present (cf. Atkinson, 1997). The New Law of Normalisation Due to the extremely sensitive nature of this issue, it is unsurprising that the Generalitat's official position tends to be one which effectively asserts that the two phenomena are indeed mutually reconcilable. A case in point is the 1998 law of normalisation. While this new legislation goes somewhat further in adopting a proactively protectionist stance than its 1983 predecessor, its text is effectively a charter for indefinite societal bilingualism in Catalonia and is characterised by a pervasive insistence on the 'linguistic rights' of the individual, as indicated, for example, by the following quote:
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Citizens may use Catalan and Castilian, as official languages, without distinction (indistintament) in all public and private activities without incurring discrimination. (Article 3, my translation) All in all, the new law is a very cautiously worded document (too cautiously for Esquerra Republicana and not cautiously enough for the Partido Popular, both of whom voted against it). This is unsurprising given the legislative and political constraints within which it was ratified; indeed it was reliably reported at the time (e.g. Avui 1/1/98) that many or most of those in the 'Catalan' parties who voted for it (see Strubell's article) saw it as merely another interim step on the long road to normalisation. Nevertheless, its orientation is representative of the official (Catalan) discourse which has prevailed since the inception of the transition to democracy and the 1979 Statute of Autonomy. Such discourse clashes sharply with the dissenting position of Esquerra Republicana who see the law as too little, too late, dismissing it as promoting a type of bogus officiality which in reality amounts to nothing more than 'decriminalisation, tolerance or permission (to use Catalan)' (Carod-Rovira, 1998, my translation). Bilingualism This political gulf has a close sociolinguistic and sociological counterpart in Catalan academic writing, notoriously exemplified in the dispute between Prats et al. (1995) and Vallverdú (1992) in which the former insist that in the absence of radical change (by which they mean far more than the provisions contained in the new law) the 'extinction' of Catalan is a real possibility within fifty years. Where such radical change would leave the L1 Castilian sector of Catalan society, what for example its place would be in a fully 'normalised' Catalonia (whether in the form of the independent state envisaged by Esquerra Republicana or otherwise) is often left for the reader to infer rather than stated explicitly. The 'now or never' stance adopted by Prats et al. and many others is based on the conviction, as Prats puts it, that: The history of languages teaches us that linguistic conflicts are resolved either along the path of substitution or that of normalisation. (Prats et al., 1995: 23, my translation) and that bilingualism is always an interim stage in this inexorable process. This is a very frequent theme and one which many writers feel obliged to point out is not meant to be 'monolingualist' (e.g. Strubell, 1994), in order to avert the centralist right's disingenuous interpretation of it as advocacy of a retrograde hankering after earlier periods of history when most citizens were indeed competent only in Catalan. As Strubell puts it: ... we are moving towards a society in which the majority of citizens will know three languages'. (Strubell, 1994: 27, my translation) However, a belief that an end to an automatic expectation of competence in Castilian by the L1 Catalan population is a prerequisite of a sufficiently normalised state of affairs does not in itself tell us what its advocates envisage in the case of L1 Castilian speakers. Castilian monolingualism is clearly not seen as
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a serious option for such speakers by anyone on the 'Catalanist' spectrum and is specifically excluded as an acceptable long-term scenario by the 1979 Statute and, more emphatically, the new law (although it is viewed in the 1978 Spanish Constitution and often too in the centralist media and political circles as a 'right' which individuals should be free to continue to exercise). The question is rather that of whether the combination of a society consisting of bi- or multilinguals in which all citizens are competent in Catalan, some as their L1, others as their L2, but where only L1 Castilian speakers are necessarily competent in Castilian is an acceptable level of normalisation or whether the target needs to be a situation where all citizens born in the Principality have Catalan as their L1 (without of course, again, necessarily knowing Castilian). The first scenario is hugely controversial since it allows for the existence of Spanish nationals who do not know Spanish, thus contravening the stipulations of the Spanish Constitution and clashing head on with the type of España mythology which Strubell refers to in his paper. The second one is of course still more polemical as it envisages what Branchadell calls 'the disappearance of a Castilian linguistic community' in Catalonia, which he describes as 'the aspect of the normalisation process which is most often avoided in public debates on the topic' (Branchadell, 1996: 10, my translation). Clearly this avoidance is motivated in part by the knowledge that when the centralist right sees its interests as best served by a radically anti-Catalan agenda, such as in the 1993-96 period, elements within it may seize upon opportunities to level inflammatory accusations of an 'ethnic cleansing' agenda, as Strubell describes. The Assimilationist Position It must be said, however, that despite the sensitivity of the issue, there is a significant tendency in much Catalan sociolinguistic writing to treat the castellans phenomenon as a process of 'classic' immigration inhibited only by the specific politics, demographics etc. of the Catalan case. Obviously the 'standard' process, whereby the first generation of immigrants is monolingual in x (Castilian here), the second generation bilingual in both languages and the third generation monolingual in y (Catalan), to a point where 'the issue is no longer one of retaining the original language, but of acquiring it' (Edwards, 1984: 278) has clearly not taken place, nor anything remotely like it. For some observers this is simply a problem, and one which can only be satisfactorily overcome by actualising a somewhat longer-term version of the above dynamic as a key element of the normalisation process. My reading of, for example, Bastardas (1988) and Solé (1994) is precisely that. Bastardas claims that, on the basis of an assessment of their best interests, members of the two communities will: decide to transmit one or other language to their descendants and thus make possible either the normalised continuity or the extinction of the autochthonous language. (Bastardas, 1988: 205, my translation) For Solé, language substitution, whereby one group assimilates completely the L1 of another, is a prerequisite of normalisation: Normalisation and substitution are two sides of the same coin; what
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constitutes substitution for one community is normalisation for the other. (Solé, 1994:41, my translation) This type of approach raises two immediate problems. One is the assumption that the castellans phenomenon in Catalonia is, despite its own peculiarities, tractable within the framework of 'traditional' assimilationist approaches to immigration. The second is the failure to problematise such approaches. The first underplays to my mind the importance of a number of factors which include the scale of immigration until 1975 (in which year two million of the 5.6 million inhabitants had been born in regions of the Spanish state other than Catalonia (Strubell, 1988: 58)) and the status of the 'immigrants' then and now as 'representatives' of a world language with hegemonic status throughout Spain. Research tends to show that these factors are of enormous social psychological importance, not least in engendering a type of resistance which Flaquer describes as follows: What unites them all (i.e. his respondents) and the theme which they repeat over and over again is that things must not be forced, that everyone must be offered the opportunity to learn Catalan, but without impositions or obligations ... (Flaquer, 1996:321, my translation) The second problem is that the approach described ignores the fact that on the world stage over the past few decades assimilationist approaches to immigrant communities have been the subject of considerable criticism and have often been replaced, at least putatively, by a 'glad embrace of... multiplicity' (Gleason, 1984: 224). In this respect I am struck by the fact that, while from an objective point of view the ethnolinguistic vitality (in the sense used by Giles & Byrne, 1982) of Catalan is clearly fragile, the subjective perception of many L1 Castilian speakers (for example the respondents in my own research) is that it is they who belong to a threatened minority. However erroneous this may be and however insidious its causes (no doubt the sort of media campaigns described by Strubell play their part), its psychological significance is inescapable. Rights and wrongs of the matter apart, such considerations may mean that just as the unusual nature of the Catalans' history has resulted in them resisting linguistic assimilation by Castilian, the completely different but also highly unusual situation of the castellans in Catalonia may doom to failure and indeed to counterproductive effect any language policy whose goal is, explicitly or otherwise, that described above. Whether or not Strubell subscribes to the view that an indefinitely perpetuated L1 Castilian community bilingual in Catalan, tending to use Castilian in private domains and Catalan in public ones, is a potentially practicable ingredient at least of a threshold level of normalisation, is not made entirely transparent in his paper. However, the overall tenor of his argument, in its insistence on the validity of non-native varieties of Catalan and the implication of a multicultural perspective (e.g. his reference to the Barcelona Feria de Abril) seems to suggest that he does. Certainly, no assimilationist agenda follows automatically from his appeal for a scenario in which 'Catalan is treated by central government and institutions at least as well, in Catalonia, as is Castilian Spanish in, say, Extremadura', a point his critics would do well not to lose sight of.
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I would argue, as Strubell certainly implies, that the new law of normalisation is not enough for Catalan. However, I also feel, and I hope that I interpret Strubell correctly in imagining that he would agree with me, that some of the law's more radical detractors should consider that their most appropriate objective for the foreseeable future might be an end to automatic societal bilingualism in Castilian and an increasing element of diglossia, combined with a continuing presence of an L1 Castilian community. This, an extremely ambitious aim in itself, is a different proposition from full linguistic assimilation. However, it may be that it is all that can be, should be and perhaps even needs to be aspired to. References Atkinson, D. (1997) Attitudes towards language use in Catalonia: Politics or sociolinguistics? International Journal of Iberian Studies 10 (1), 5-14. Bastardas, A. (1988) La normalització lingüística: l'extensió de l'ús. In A. Bastardas and J. Soler (eds) Sociolingüística i Llengua Catalana (pp. 187-210). Barcelona: Editorial Empúries. Branchadell, A. (1996) La Normalitat Improbable. Barcelona: Empúries. Carod-Rovira, J. (1998) No a la llei, sí al català. AVUI, 1 January. Edwards, J. (1984) Language, diversity and identity. In J. Edwards (ed.) Linguistic Minorities, Policies and Pluralism (pp. 277-310). London: Academic Press. Flaquer, L. (1996) El Català, Llengua Pública o Privada? Barcelona: Empúries. Giles, H. and Byrne, J.L. (1982) An intergroup approach to second language acquisition. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 1, 17-40. Gleason, P. (1984) Pluralism and assimilation: A conceptual history. In J. Edwards (ed.) Linguistic Minorities, Policies and Pluralism (pp. 221-257). London: Academic Press. Prats, M., Rafanell, A. and Rossich, A. (1995) El Futur de la Llengua Catalana. Barcelona: Editorial Empúries. Solé i Camardons, J. (1994) Sociolingüistica per a Joves: Una Perspectiva Catalana. Barcelona: Biblaria. Strubell, M. (1988) La immigració. In A. Bastardas and J. Soler (eds) Sociolingüistica i Llengua Catalana (pp. 46-77). Barcelona: Empúries. Strubell, M. (1994) Normalització I normalitat. El paper del professor de català. Com Ensenyar Català als Adults 29, 25-27. Strubell, M. (1998) Language, democracy and devolution in Catalonia. Paper presented at a Current Issues in Language and Society Seminar, University of Aston. Vallverdú, F. (1992) L'ús del Català: Un Futur Controvertit. Barcelona: Edicions 62.
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Strategies for Multiculturalism: The Catalan Case Considered. A Response to Miquel Strubell Dennis Smith Aston Business School, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK Miquel Strubell has indicated the painful dilemmas facing someone whose task is to encourage the use of a specific language in a democracy. In a centralised dictatorship the power elites have plenty of weapons to get their way. As Strubell points out, you do not even need to pass specific legislation to encourage the use of the 'official' language. Disobedient locals who publish newspapers, hold meetings or conduct public business in their 'own' language get treated very roughly if they are caught. This was how Catalan was repressed during the Franco regime. By contrast, people in democratic societies should be able to choose more freely. For about ten years after the death of Franco the language policy experts based in Barcelona had great success in reestablishing Catalan. However, after this initial decade, Strubell tells us, 'the winds seemed to cease filling the sails of the process'. He identifies four problems. The first problem is the persistence, especially in Madrid, of an 'exclusive, impositional and monolithic view of Spain' which prevents movement towards a Belgian or Swiss model. In this model Catalan would have priority as the official language within Catalonia instead of having to share this status with Castilian. 1 The second problem is the recent lack of active support from the Catalan government in the form of advertising/propaganda campaigns promoting the use of Catalan. Thirdly, in Valencia, where many inhabitants speak a variety of Catalan, there is a strong movement in politics and the press 'against the Catalans and against the recovery of the language'. Finally, the massive scale of immigration into Catalonia in the last thirty years means that 'under half the present population are ''Catalans'' in the traditional sense'. As a consequence, Strubell fears, the day may arrive when 'a new majority' may control language policy and end the arrangement whereby Catalans learn Spanish/Castilian as long as incomers (or their children) learn Catalan and use it when dealing with the Catalans. Ironically, then, although democracy and devolution gave Catalan its moment of rebirth and vigorous growth in the late 1970s and early 1980s, since then democracy and devolution have posed a threat to the Catalan language. The politics of 'devolved' Valencia are turning anti-Catalan. Meanwhile, demographic forces are threatening to make support for the Catalan language a minority interest in terms of votes within Catalonia itself. Two questions occur to me in response to Strubell's account. One is: to what extent is the insecurity felt by proponents of the Catalan language also felt by the supporters of Spanish? Entry to the European Union is apparently a boost to the status of Spanish on the European continent. However, this is at the cost of
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accepting a situation in which the Spanish language is, so to speak, just one face in the crowd, along with the many other languages which, in practical terms, have to take second place to English and French. At the same time, Spanish speakers in the United States are failing to give political support to institutions which protect the language. For example, some 40% of California's Latino population recently voted in favour of abolishing bilingual education. 2 If Madrid is reluctant to concede Catalan the status of sole official language in Catalonia, the reason may not be just a 'colonial-style attitude', but also a desire to protect Spanish, a language that is seen as increasingly vulnerable. My second question is: to what extent does the Catalan Principality's language policy mimic the one being followed in Madrid? I am assuming that the official language of a polity is the primary medium of communication between the state and its citizens. When a state insists on a particular language being used in the polity, it identifies itself with a specific culture associated with that language. This means the state can both assert and use the authority vested in the culture when communicating with 'its' citizens. Some of those citizens may resist, in part by insisting that they share neither the state's language nor the state's culture. That is how Barcelona has resisted Madrid. Are some Valencians reacting to Barcelona in the same way? Do they see a sort of cultural imperialism coming from their northern neighbours? Language policies that seem at first sight to be expansionist are quite likely to be survival strategies adopted by threatened local establishments trying to preserve the distinctive bases of their authority. In fact, the principal threat to all these establishments, whether in Valencia, Barcelona or Madrid (and perhaps, I should add, in Brussels also) is the emergence of a homogenised, pre-packaged, globalised culture of commerce tailored to the needs of multinational companies.3 The primary need of these companies is to keep consumption levels high and input costs low. It suits them to see states go into semi-retirement since this keeps taxes low, reduces political interference and leaves paying customers with more money in their pockets. This is indeed what has happened since the early 1980s. Perhaps this helps to explain why the Catalan state has had less money to spend on language awareness campaigns. Not only has the old autocratic Spanish state been cut to size. So have all state functions, at whatever level of government. So, while political establishments in different continental, national and regional capitals compete to see which can beam the strongest signal out to the citizenry, the total bandwidth available is diminishing. For two decades, many people have been switching off from being citizens, turning on to being consumers. This can be seen by comparing figures for electoral turnout (falling) and consumer spending (rising). So what is to be done? I believe it would be very much against the interests of most people if the range of human cultures was radically reduced. Threatened languages and cultures are worth defending. This is because the greater the repertoire of cultures on which we can draw, the more likely we are to come up with innovative approaches to managing the emerging global society. We need alternatives to the strategies emanating from boardrooms of multinational companies or, at least, a way of building in other interests beyond those of capital. Vulnerable ethnic and national minorities have a legitimate claim to collective
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rights, as Strubell, following Kymlicka (1995), argues. However, they would be sensible to make common cause with other threatened minority interests. The point is that over the next half century this is likely to include linguistic and cultural interests which now appear relatively strong, including, say, Spanish, Italian and Greek. Catalonia is in a good position to take the lead. Its nationalism has lost the edge of aggressive exclusivism still found, perhaps, in Flanders. The Catalan language is not yet in intensive care. Its supporters are well placed to begin the task of building bridges across cultures. It is possible that, if this creative approach is taken, some of their strongest allies may be found in Valencia, Madrid and Brussels itself. Notes 1. Strubell uses the term 'Spanish' for 'Castilian'. This emphasises the status of Catalan as a 'national' language alongside 'Spanish', the language of Spain, an 'equivalent' nation to Catalonia by implication. 2. The Economist, 15 August 1998, p 40. 3. Some of these themes have been explored by Zygmunt Bauman, for example in Bauman (1998). For a critique, see Smith (forthcoming). References Bauman, Z. (1998) Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kymlicka, W. (1995) Multicultural Citizenship. A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, D. (forthcoming) Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Issues of Power and Identity: A Response to Miquel Strubell Diarmait Mac Golla Chriost Department of History, Trinity College Carmarthen, Carmarthenshire SA31 3EP Introduction The concluding remark by Miquel Strubell in his paper Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia is very revealing; it reads: ... it is the responsibility of the whole of Catalan society to decide and ensure that the language continues to act as a valid and real sign of the identity of the Catalan people, in their everyday lives. It is very revealing as it draws together a number of issues which, although recognised as crucial by Strubell, remain largely unresolved in his text. These are issues of power and identity, and they remain unresolved because of the nature of devolution in the Spanish state. In other words what Hobsbawm asserts of linguistic nationalism in general still holds true for Catalonia: ... problems of power, status, politics and ideology and not of communication or even culture, lie at the heart of the nationalism of language. (Hobsbawm, 1992: 110) Moreover, it is the case that the manner in which power has been devolved to those nations without states in Spain has the effect of throwing internal cleavages of identity into greater relief. Nationalist Discourse, Identity and Devolution Strubell refers to Catalan society and identity, or the Catalan people, in several other parts of his text. His initial remarks indicate the nature of the dilemma where he describes two levels of identitysocial and political. The former is largely language defined and the latter would appear to be defined in terms of the political institutions of devolution to Catalonia: There being no large religious difference, or colour or racial difference ... the language has, in social terms, and enormous defining weight in Catalonia ... May I add that at the political level ... an extremely open definition of Catalans has been adopted in all political debates. (Strubell, this volume) According to Strubell, Catalan society, on the other hand, includes the regions of Valencia, the Balearic Islands and the other Catalan-speaking areas outside the region Strubell describes as 'Catalonia proper'. This clearly means that, in geographical terms, Catalan society would conform to a map of the Catalan language extending to Valencia in the south, into Aragon in the north, into the western Mediterranean basin and beyond the borders of the Spanish state including Andorra and also North Catalonia in France. In other words Catalan
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society extends beyond the borders of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia. Balcells draws the issues together as follows: Catalan identity is not confined to Catalonia proper since the Catalan language is spoken in a much larger area ... comprising Catalonia itself, the Kingdom of Valencia, the Balearic Islands, the Principality of Andorra, and the Catalan regions annexed to France ... there were [post-Franco] widespread hopes the these three Catalan-speaking areas [in the Spanish state] would achieve some kind of political coordination. These hopes have not been fulfilled, though part of the population remains aware of the linguistic, cultural and historical community to which all the Catalan-speaking regions belong. (Balcells, 1996: 1) This means that democracy has not been devolved within the Spanish state to the Catalan people but rather to a series of administrative units among which the Catalan people are distributed. The same is true for that other nation without a state, the Basques. The Basque Country is similarly divided by the international border straddling the Pyrenees, separating Spain and France. Within Spain the Basques are divided between the Foral Community of Navarre and the Basque Autonomous Community. This brings me to Strubell's second level of identitythe political. For this Strubell turns to Jordi Pujol, the President of Catalonia since devolution. In a recent lecture in London, 1 the President of Catalonia reflected on the inadequacy of devolution in the Spanish state in contrast to the nature of devolved power in the United Kingdom, particularly with regard to Scotland. His recognition of the limitations of devolution in the Spanish state has been described comprehensively by Guibemau (1997) in her study of Pujol's nationalist discourse. In brief, it is argued there that this discourse defines Catalan identity in terms of residence within Catalonia and the will to be Catalan, while recognising the special significance of the language: ... our identity as a country, our will to be, and our perspectives for the future depend on the preservation of our language. (quoted in Guibernau, 1997: 101) As a constitutional nationalist Pujol is bound in his discourse by the 1979 Catalan Statute of Autonomy. In this, Catalonia is defined as a 'nationality' which is a 'self-governing community' whose authority and legitimacy derive, in part, from the Catalan people. On defining the territorial extent of Catalonia, the issue of who the Catalan people are becomes problematic, even leaving aside the fact of North Catalonia in the French state. Under the Statute Catalonia comprises the provinces of Barcelona, Girona, Lleida and Tarragona. This territory excludes substantial sections of the Catalan linguistic community in Valencia, the Balearic Islands and elsewhere. This denies the integrity of a complete Catalan society, the Països Catalans claimed by some nationalists. The Statute does recognise that the Catalan language is a part of the heritage of other Autonomous Communities and also allows for the development of cooperation with other Autonomous Communities, especially in the field of culture. Catalonia is specifically pro-
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scribed from creating political relationships with other Autonomous Communities independent of the consent of the Spanish state. Traditional nationalist discourses are being adapted elsewhere in Europe in the face of political realities. The political agreement of Good Friday 1998 in Northern Ireland has coincided with declarations of a 'post-nationalist Europe' by members of the nationalist parties, the SDLP in particular. The document which forms the basis of this political settlement, known simply as The Agreement, outlines a complexity of political institutions, necessary because of the multifarious features of the political conflict in the region. These various institutions serve in some important respects to undermine traditional Irish nationalist discourse, firstly in recognising the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Irelandinstitutionalised in the form of an Assembly, and secondly in the recognition of the complexity of relationships, other than colonial, between the two islands of Britain and Irelandinstitutionalised in a North/South Ministerial Council and in a British-Irish Council. The Limits of Devolution: Borders and Internal Ethnic Cleavages One effect of the realisation of political realities, largely determined by traditional nation-states like France, Spain and the United Kingdom, is that the multidimensional nature of ethnic or national groups without states becomes ever clearer as traditional nationalist discourse retreats from homogeneity of identity. A difficulty for ethno-linguistic communities who are dispersed across the borders of administrative units of all sizesprovincial, regional and internationalis that these dimensions tend to conform to, and to become exacerbated by, these borders. In some more extreme contexts internal ethnic cleavages arise along such borders. In the case of the Basque Country, for example, data from a number of sociolinguistic surveys (EJ:GV, 1995 & 1997) would indicate that devolution in the Spanish state and subsequent linguistic policies have reinforced traditional nationalist attitudes as regards language and identity in the Northern Basque Country in France, while coinciding with less characteristically nationalist attitudes amongst the younger generation in the Basque Autonomous Community itself. The post-Franco political settlement has also seen a revival of regional identity in the form of Navarissmo in Navarre in the Basque Country (MacClancy, 1993: 94-97). The borders are much more directly relevant to the Basquespeaking community as a whole in a material sense in that language policy varies significantly from region to region. For example, in the Basque Autonomous Community the language enjoys considerable institutional support throughout the territory. In contrast, the language in the Foral Community of Navarre enjoys more limited support and that in zones defined as Basque-speaking by the administration. This situation may be compared with the Països Catalans where borders and Catalan identity are in similar interrelationships. For example it was clear from Strubell's seminar paper that the Autonomous Community of Catalonia offers considerable institutional support to the Catalan language in all parts of its territory, while in the Autonomous Community of Valencia a strong sense of regional identity Valencianista is being asserted and language policy is more
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timid. In North Catalonia, in the French state, the Catalan-speaking community is in a parlous condition and a sense of dual identity, Catalan-French, is prevalent (Marley, 1993: 222; O'Brien, 1993). One might note similar cleavages in relation to the Irish language in Ireland. Recent language surveys (Ó Riagáin & Ó Gliasáin, 1994, 1984) in the Republic of Ireland would suggest that the importance of the Irish language as a feature of ethnic Irish identity is in decline. In contrast it would appear that in Northern Ireland the opposite is the case. Many argue (Maguire, 1991; O'Reilly, 1995) that the revival in the fortunes of the language in the region is due, in part at least, to increased levels of ethnic awareness arising from the political conflict. Moreover, others argue (e.g. Andrews, 1997) that the submergence of the Irish-speaking community in the region in the early part of the century was a direct result of the partition of the island. The isolation of a small section of the Irish-speaking community and the death of Irish as a maternally transmitted language under the indifferent and in part hostile Unionist government of Northern Ireland, coincided with the elevation of the Irish language to the status of national and first official language in the Republic of Ireland and the continued survival of an organic Irish-speaking community in that part of the island. What exact effect the new political arrangements in Northern Ireland and between the region and the Republic of Ireland will have on the Irish language community is too early to say, but in general terms it is clear that The Agreement provides an opportunity to transcend some of the boundaries created and reinforced by partition. No such porous and flexible political arrangements exist for Catalonia. The dangers of this division through devolution of Catalan society for the Catalan language were referred to as early as 1980 (Torres, 1984: 62) and the issue merits serious consideration by policy makers and language planners now, as it did then. Conclusions The matter of Catalan identity and the empowerment of the Catalan people is an issue which lies unresolved in Language, Democracy and Devolution in Catalonia. The resolution of this dilemma is central to the future of the Catalan ethno-linguistic community in order that tensions relating to the various dimensions of Catalan identity do not become broader and more divisive cleavages. At present, Catalan identity is largely defined by the administrative territory and the institutions of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia through the novel nationalist discourse of Jordi Pujol. In the absence of significant cultural institutional relationships with other Autonomous Communities, thereby ensuring the integrity of Catalan society in some senses, the likely effect of devolution is to continue to reinforce cleavages which are internal to Catalan ethnic identity. Possible linguistic effects are the loss of Catalan as a maternally transmitted language in North Catalonia and increasing dialectal differentiation as well as the contraction of the Catalan language community in other Autonomous Communities beyond Catalonia. In short, a condition for the continuity of Catalan society and its language is the greater integration of the two levels of identity identified by Strubell, the social and the political.
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Notes 1. At the London School of Economics and Political Science on the 6th November 1997. References Andrews, L. (1997) The very dogs in Belfast will bark in Irish': The Unionist Government and the Irish language, 1921-43. In A. Mac Poilin (ed.) The Irish Language in Northern Ireland (pp. 49-94). Belfast: Ultach Trust. Balcells, A. (1996) Catalan Nationalism, Past and Present. London: Macmillan. Encuesta Sociolinguistica de Euskal Herria 1996: La Continuidad del Euskera ii [EJ:GV] (1997) Eusko Jaurlaritza: Gobierno Vasco. Euskararen Jarraipena: La Continuidad del Euskera: La Continuite de la langue basque [EJ:GV] (1995) Eusko Jaurlaritza: Gobierno Vasco. Guibernau, M. (1997) Images of Catalonia. Nations and Nationalism 3 (1), 89-111. Hobsbawm, E.J. (1992) Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacClancy, J. (1993) At play with identity in the Basque arena. In S. MacDonald (ed.) Inside European Identities (pp. 84-97). Oxford: Berg. Maguire, G. (1991) Our Own Language: An Irish Initiative. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Marley, D. (1993) Ethnolinguistic minorities in Perpignan: A questionnaire survey. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 14 (3), 217-236. O'Brien, O. (1993) Good to be French? Conflicts of identity in North Catalonia. In S. MacDonald (ed.) Inside European Identities (pp. 98-117). Oxford: Berg. O'Reilly, C. (1995) The company of strangers: Ethnicity and the Irish language in West Belfast. Supplement to Fortnight 336 (February). Ó Riagáin, P. and Ó Gliasáin, M. (1984) The Irish Language in the Republic of Ireland 1983: Preliminary Report of a National Survey. Dublin: Institiúid Teangeolafochta Éireann. Ó Riagáin, P. and Ó Gliasáin, M. (1994) National Survey on Languages 1993: Preliminary Report, Tuarascail Taighde 18. Dublin: Institiúid Teangeolafochta Éireann. Torres, J (1984) Problems of linguistic normalization in the Països Catalans: From the Congress of Catalan Culture to the present day. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 47, 59-62.
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