COMPROBACIÓN DE LAS HIPÓTESIS

The MPs who were elected in Catalonia in 1977 enjoyed an electoral legitimacy which transcended the immigrant/native cleavage and were united around the common aim to recover political autonomy. In consequence, they approached the constitutional debate in a relatively strong position. The 1978 constitution struck a fragile balance between the “indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation, the common and indivisible homeland of all Spaniards”, and “the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions that form it…”¹²³ Josep Taradellas, the leader of the Catalan government in exile, was invited to return and appointed as the provisional president of the Generalitat, charged with the task of elaborating a new Statute of Autonomy. Its terms were not to be imposed from the outside, but negotiated with political elites deemed as sufficiently legitimate to

122. The data is taken from the 1st Congress of the PSC held in 1978, and the 2^nd Congress of the CDC held in 1976.

123. 1978 Spanish constitution, article 2, my emphasis.

133 speak on behalf of the Catalan ‘nationality’, however moribund Catalan institutions in exile were at the time.

The 1979 Estatut provided that Spanish nationals who have taken up administrative residence in one of the municipalities located within the jurisdiction of the Generalitat should be considered as Catalans for a ‘political’ purpose. One year earlier, the second Congres Juridic de Catalunya decided that the term ‘ciutadania’ (literally citizenship) should be preferred to that of ‘regionalidad’ to designate the legal bond between the Generalitat and individual citizens (Raluy 1980). Hence, the Statute consecrated a definition of Catalan citizenship based on residency, and derived from Spanish nationality according to a clear hierarchy of legal norms. The Catalan condition was defined according to the veïnatge administrativo, which translated a conception of political membership that could accommodate residents irrespective of their place of birth and their degree of attachment to the land. As a result, those born elsewhere in Spain could become ‘political Catalans’, in very much the same way as the 1997 establishment of a democratically elected Parliament in Edinburgh allowed Britons born in England to become ‘political Scots’.

While this decision proved to be instrumental in building a broad coalition of support cutting across ethnic lines, it nonetheless did not go unchallenged, as some sought to derive the political condition of Catalan from civil rather than administrative residency.

In accordance with the Catalan civil code, the status of civil resident is granted to everyone born in Catalonia and extended to their spouses, but not to immigrants, who are nonetheless eligible after two years of residence. Defining Catalan citizenship on the basis of the veinatge civil would have meant that a sizeable proportion of immigrants would have been entitled to vote in their province of origin, but not in Catalan elections.

Reciprocally, individuals born in Catalonia and residing elsewhere in Spain would have retained their electoral rights in their community of origin. The amendment was supported by a handful of politicians who, while agreeing on the means, differed radically in their motivations. One of them was the leader of the Andalusian nationalist party PSA, who defended the right of those living in what he referred to as the “9^th province of Andalusia” to vote in their municipality of origin. On the other hand, some among the Catalanist party UDC feared that this arrangement would primarily benefit PSUC, whom they accused of “forcing immigrants to become Catalans with the sole

134 aim of getting their votes.”¹²⁴ But the mainstream media, intellectuals and politicians accused them of Lerrouxisme, a term that made its way into the political idiom to denounce any attempt to divide Catalan society on ethnic lines, which proved to be particularly useful after the transition when the need came to defend the Generalitat policy of ‘linguistic normalization’.¹²⁵ Eventually, the amendment was rejected and the political and democratic idea of the Catalan nation prevailed, recognizing the civil unity of a plural territory, blurring to a considerable extent the antagonism between natives and immigrants.

4.3. 1980 – 1998: integration into a single bilingual community

Defining the boundaries of Catalan citizenship on the basis of residency was the consequence of a self-conscious strategy, facilitated by the instrumental role of PSUC and to a lesser extent PSC in bringing together working class interests with nationalist demands for political autonomy. However, an inclusive conception of citizenship represented only one side of the equation, as the linguistic issue was carefully left aside during the debate that preceded the re-establishment of the Generalitat. This concern was soon to re-emerge in the Catalan political arena, as CiU, controlling the Catalan government for 23 consecutive years, consistently considered ‘linguistic normalization’

as the backbone of its broader nation-building agenda, with important ramifications in the cultural, economic and political realms. In his investiture speech in 1980, Jordi Pujol announced his ambition in unequivocal terms: “[w]e are a people in danger of denationalisation and internal, deep and radical rupture. One of the fundamental objectives of the programme of this government will be the normalization of the Catalan language”, the long-term objective being to ensure that “in Catalonia, the own language and culture of the country are Catalan.”¹²⁶ Likewise, the 1980 CiU Manifesto explicitly listed among its priorities the “Recatalanization of Catalonia.”¹²⁷ The policy of linguistic normalization has intervened along four axes. First, in the toponymy of the

124. ‘El Lerrouxismo tampoco concurrirá el 1-M a las urnas’ in Triunfo, Manuel Campo Vidal, February 12, 1978

125. Rafael Aracíl defines Lerrouxism with these words: “political doctrine based on the diffusion of Anticatalanism among the working class and immigrants, with the aim of driving Catalonia into two distinct linguistic communities”

(2000: 389).

126. First Acceptance Speech of Jordi Pujol, April, 24, 1980. Original text available at:

http://www.lavanguardia.com/19800424/54068046330/discurso-de-investidura-de-jordi-pujol-i-legislatura-24-de-abril-de-1980.html

127. CiU Party Manifesto, 1980, p. 100.

135 territory, by changing streets names and indicators in order to multiply the “unwaved flags” of nationalism in all possible settings, “which are easily forgettable and yet at least as important as the memorable moments of flags waving” (Billig 1995: 10-11).

Second, in the cultural realm, the Generalitat pursued an ambitious arts policy meant to turn Catalan into a language of high culture (Crameri 2008: 110-13). Third, linguistic policy-makers intervened in the administration by making eligibility to the civil service contingent upon applicants’ ability to speak Catalan. Last, Catalan became the dominant language of instruction, so that in a few years, pupils went from receiving education in Castilian with Catalan taught as a second language, to a system of maximum

‘Catalanization’.

The literature has emphasized three complementary arguments to account for the rapid diffusion of the Catalan language in the 1980s and 1990s. First, Catalan and Castilian, as two Romance languages, grammatically and phonetically close to one another, can be understood and learnt without great difficulty. The Catalan case is usually contrasted with the Basque Country, where becoming proficient in Euzkadi requires a much greater investment (Conversi 2002). Second, Catalan carried significantly greater prestige than Castilian, an unusual characteristic for a minority language deriving from the superior economic position of native Catalan speakers, which provided immigrants with an incentive for second language acquisition (Woolard 1989, Woolard et al. 1990). In a slightly different vein, David Latin applied game theory to the socio-linguistic landscape of Catalonia, and identified a pattern of “competitive assimilation” (2007: 35-38). In his account, language entrepreneurs made credible the “threat that all future job openings would require facility in the Catalan language […] through a solidarity pact among businessmen that the language of all big businesses would be conducted in Catalan” (ibid: 37). In turn, immigrant families, fearing that their children would be discriminated on the labour market and expecting that their neighbours would strategically shift to Catalan for the same reason, faced compelling incentives to invest in the acquisition of a second language.

While these theories convincingly account for the diffusion of the Catalan language among non-native speakers, they only partially explain why linguistic divisions never turned into a salient boundary, in spite of the ever-more coercive institutional pressures aimed at privileging the Catalan language and those who were able to speak it. The

136 argument I wish to deploy here has to do with the specificities of the party system and the dynamics of party competition. In particular, I contend that PSC has been instrumental in keeping the linguistic issue away from competitive politics, by channelling and partially resolving conflicts within its own party structure. Furthermore, the only party that actively sought to exploit these divisions has been the right-wing PPC, which never managed to mobilize more than a fraction of the electorate.

Paradoxically, it strengthened the solidarity of Catalanist parties, who consistently put aside their ideological differences in defence of the linguistic arrangement.