Chemicals from biomass: Basic and specific data of the Life Cycle Inventory .1 Poplar

In the 1980s, no political party actively sought to politicize the language issue apart from the Catalan section of Alianza Popular, whose direct link with the Franco Regime – the party was founded by no less than seven former ministers – considerably diminished its credibility. Besides, the collapse of UCD in 1983, and the difficult re-composition of the electoral space of the state-wide right throughout the 1980s seriously limited its capacity to play a prominent role in Catalan politics (Hopkin 1999). From 1989 onwards, the Catalan section of PP, whose first leader, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, was notoriously known for his uncompromising Anticatalanism, took the lead of a virulent campaign against the Generalitat’s linguistic policy. He was assisted in his crusade by some conservative newspapers of the Madrid press. In 1993 ABC joined the fight with an unambiguous and provocative headline: “Como Franco pero al revés: la

137. ‘Non-native Catalan speakers’ is the official category used in the bill.

144 Persecución del Castellano en Cataluña.”¹³⁸ In 1995, Vidal-Quadras published a pamphlet in which he denounced how “linguistic nationalism, in its segregating obsession, finds itself confined in cultivating an impoverished, vacillating, unsatisfying and insecure identity, and cannot accept that what constitutes the best and most noble aspect of Catalonia, is what we share with the rest of Spain, and beyond with Europe”

(1995: 8). However, Vidal-Quadras was evicted from the leadership in 1996 after a series of increasingly virulent rows over the linguistic rights of Castilian speakers in Catalonia, a concession made by José-Maria Aznar to Jordi Pujol against its parliamentary support in Madrid. Paradoxically, the intransigent position of PPC has served nationalists’ interests rather than undermined them. Indeed, to date, the PPC has never managed to depart from its pro-Madrid reputation, partly because of its internal organization, more centralized than PSOE (Astudillo et al. 2010). Hence, the Catalan leadership is more dependent upon central elites for whom a reasonable degree of Anticatalanism serves an electoral purpose, by keeping alive the old separatist fear and alleged Catalan conspiracy against the integrity of the Spanish nation state. But in the Catalan political arena, its regular attacks against the policy of linguistic normalization are immediately criticized by all political parties, whose ideological differences suddenly evaporate and who sing the century-old ‘Lerrouxisme’ tune with one voice and coherence. In other words, it provides nationalists with tangible evidence that the survival of the Catalan language is still hypothetical, subject to the twin challenges of internal dissenters adopting the language of the state, and the remnants of Spanish nationalism – embodied in PPC – that has not abandoned its assimilationist ambitions.

In Michael Billig’s idiom (1995), these are the sporadic and yet necessary moments when ‘banal’ nationalism turns ‘hot’, when the flags are being waved again, when differences are being put aside and national unity momentarily restored to face a common challenge.

By the mid-1990s, the progression of the Catalan language seemingly hit a glass ceiling (Crameri 2008). This pressed the CiU government to deepen the strategy of linguistic normalization. However, some cracks in the consensus became noticeable, and the law passed in the Catalan Parliament in 1998¹³⁹ only brought cosmetic changes to the

138. Meaning literally ‘Like Franco but the other way around: How Castilian is being persecuted in Catalonia’, ABC, November 12, 1993.

139. Law 1/1998 of Linguistic Normalization. For a normative critique from a liberal standpoint, see Costa 2003.

145 existing legislation. Besides, the reform failed to gain the support of ERC, for which the law was not going far enough, and PPC, for which it was going too far. On the other hand, a civil society association – foro Babel – was created and achieved much greater visibility than its predecessors had. However, its explicit aim is to defend bilingualism and its members have endorsed most existing policies and institutions aiming at diffusing the use and knowledge of Catalan. One of its most prominent members defines what ought to constitute a ‘Catalan’ in terms that most nationalists would have no difficulty appropriating themselves: “a Catalan is a citizen who lives in Catalonia, freely uses the language he or she wishes to use, and respect the language used by others.”¹⁴⁰

In fact, whether or not there exists a linguistic conflict in Catalonia is unclear, as the overwhelming majority of its residents are bilingual and see no inconvenience in shifting from one language to the other according to the audience in a situationist mode.

Besides, Catalan nation-builders have not employed coercive means to achieve their aims, but have successfully encouraged and provided adequate opportunities to Castilian speakers, who by and large consented to assimilate. Catalonia has officially remained a bilingual territory where opportunities to speak Castilian in most social fields are not constrained. Last but not least, the main virtue of the principle of non separation resides in the fact that, as the pool of bilingual speakers ineluctably grows, it becomes very difficult to identify two mutually exclusive communities, separated from one another by the insurmountable wall of incomprehension. Ultimately, the development of stable and democratic institutions over the past decades consolidated a territorial conception of membership, which competes, cuts across, overlaps and at times supersedes linguistic and ethnic criteria. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the question of ‘immigrants from the rest of Spain’ was little more than an episode of the collective memory, providing institutional and discursive opportunities and constraints to political elites and policy-makers now confronted with the large-scale settlement of ‘immigrants from abroad’, a phenomenon discussed at length in subsequent chapters.

140. Francesc de Carreras, Professor of Constitutional Law at the Universita Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) and member of the Foro Babel . ‘La verdadera normalización del Catalan’, in El País, May 1, 2003.

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