Medición de valores cualitativos para el experimento 1

While the eighteenth century was a period of progressive state-building, the project of constructing a single nation out of a variety of peoples inhabiting the same state became a major concern in the nineteenth century. The 1812 Cadiz Constitution represents a cornerstone in the history of Spanish liberalism. This frustrated attempt to turn Spain into a democratic nation state came to symbolize the struggle of enlightened forces

106. Rokkan sees some similarities with the Swiss fight against the German emperors, with the important difference that by the end of the fifteenth century Castile had become the dominant player as a result of the Conquista and the opening of the Atlantic trade route, while simultaneously the Aragonese federation was losing ground in the Mediterranean (Peter Flora et al. 1999: 183-84). Pierre Vilar makes a similar point: between 1333 and 1450, the volume of external trade in Barcelona was divided by five (2008: 46-52).

107. Between 1654 and 1660, the plague was responsible for the death of up to 1/5^th of the Catalan population (Tarrés 1969: 40-1).

121 against absolutism (Perez-Garzón 2007). The discussions over the territorial organization of the state that the Constitution was meant to establish evinced important dissensions within the liberal camp. The disagreement opposed the advocates of the rationalist and universalist ideals that brought legitimacy to the 1789 division of France into quasi-geometrical départements irrespective of historical precedents, and what was then referred to as “the spirit of provincialism”, concerned with the preservation of historical divisions inherited from the Union state of the Reconquista, and only partially destroyed in 1715. For the Catalan deputy Felip Aner, aggregating existing territories without any consideration for their customs and languages would not “make Catalans forget that they are Catalans”, a concern to which the president of the court replied: “we are speaking of territorial divisions as if there would be no communication whatsoever among provinces, an impenetrable wall like the one separating the Tartar world from China […]. But what difference would it make for a citizen moving from one province to another? Well, none; he would just move from one room of the paternal house to another, and be subject to the same rules, not to a foreign and hostile land where no one would be concerned with his well-being (quoted in Garcia Alvarez 2003: 76).”

By 1900, what was merely a parliamentary quarrel over a hypothetical phenomenon in Cadiz turned into a salient political issue in Barcelona, where the rise of Catalan nationalism corresponded with a period of significant immigration from the rest of Spain. The Catalan capital had become in the second half of the nineteenth century a major recipient of internal migration pulled into its buoyant industries. At that date, 28% of the population was born in another part of Spain, a figure that rose to 31.5% a decade later¹⁰⁸. In 1887, immigrants represented merely 1.2% of the population of the four Catalan provinces, increasing to 4.2% in 1900, 5.4% in 1910, and up to 14% in 1920 (Termes 1984: 180-89). Besides, the period was marked by formidable movements of populations within the boundaries of Catalonia itself, from the rural peripheries of the hinterlands and the Pyrenees, which suffered a 30% absolute demographic decline between 1875 and 1900, to the province of Barcelona. The consequences bear some similarities with nineteenth century Scotland, where internal migration resulting from radical economic transformations broke the geographical border between the Highlands and the Lowlands and reinforced a sense of territorial

108. While immigration from the rest of Spain was significant in Barcelona, the other provinces were almost entirely unaffected.

122 identity¹⁰⁹. Likewise, in Catalonia, the rural exodus considerably diffused the awareness of a territorial identity, encompassing the four provinces with Barcelona at its core, as

“the duality and opposition between the mountain and the plain, the hinterlands and the coast, that had divided Catalonia ever since thethirteenth century until the third Carlist War, were now overcome” (Balcells 1977a: 88). Hence, natives of other parts of Spain increasingly found themselves in an environment where Catalans were more than ever aware of their collective identity. But more importantly for our purpose, regional elites were increasingly eager to assert this fet diferencial and translate it into a claim of self-determination. In consequence, Spanish citizens migrating from one province to another turned into immigrants in a contested territory, wherein two nation-building projects were to compete with one another.

By then, there was little doubt that the project envisaged in Cadiz of turning Spain into a modern nation state had politically, culturally, and economically failed. The administrative penetration of the state into the periphery had done little but reveal its organizational weakness and the bureaucratic deficiencies of a corrupt system. In 1900, the literacy rate barely reached 30%, with important territorial variations (de Gabriel 1998: 37). The process of cultural homogenization had been if anything counter-productive, especially in Catalonia where the rise of a romantic movement known as the Renaixenca had revitalized the Catalan language, boosted interest in historiography, and provided peripheral elites with a rich usable past on which to build their claim. Perhaps more importantly, in spite of the fact that monetary and fiscal unification had been formally achieved, Spain as a nation in the nineteenth century sense of the term, as a

‘nation-market’, organized around a fully-fledged bourgeoisie, had failed (Vilar 1976:

79).”¹¹⁰ The industrialization of Catalonia, and later of the Basque Country, provoked a territorially uneven pattern of economic development. In spite of the concentration of administrative and cultural resources at the centre, the northern peripheries became economically more powerful, turning Spain into a polycephalic state. The series of political crises that punctuated the century culminated in 1898 with the humiliating loss

109. There is however an important distinction with the Scottish case, where emigration was the continuation of internal movements in the wake of industrialization. In Catalonia, emigration remained limited, especially by contrast with the rest of Spain, except perhaps to Cuba and Puerto Rico where Catalan merchants and navigators settled and maintained strong commercial and political links with the homeland. While they did play a significant role in homeland politics at the turn of the century, this point shall be discussed in chapter 8, section 8.2.1

110. Vicens Vives summarized the reasons for this failure in compelling terms: “Impoverished by internal wars, the selfishness of her ruling class, and the backwardness of her masses, Spain only achieved an underdeveloped stage of capitalism during the 19^th century” (1995: 7).

123 of Cuba and Puerto Rico, the last remnants of the Empire. This traumatic event cast serious doubts on the viability of the Spanish state which, combined with the limited rewards entailed for Catalan industrialists in privileged access to a state-wide market protected from external competition by high tariff barriers, provided strong impetus to the national movement.

4.1.2. 1900-1936: from the Lerrouxist peril to the Civil War

In 1901, the Lliga Regionalista was founded and was to dominate the Catalan political scene until the advent of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship in 1923. The Lliga was both nurtured by the social conservatism of the Carlist movement and the romantic ideas of the Renaixenca. It was equally committed to intervene in Spanish politics and transform the atavistic state from the centre so as to acquire further autonomy in the periphery (Ellrich 2004). It relied on the firm support of Catalan industrialists, who were opposed to progressive labour reforms which could undermine their competitiveness and opportunistically used the repressive apparatus of the state to police an increasingly agitated working class (Balcells 1976b: 5). Besides, immigration from the rest of Spain provided a seemingly infinite resource of cheap labour, which was used as a means to break strikes and weaken class solidarity. But by trying to empty the Catalan movement of its progressive components, the Lliga mechanically reinforced the legitimacy of Alejandro Lerroux, a young and charismatic politician who was charged with the task of reinvigorating Spanish Republicanism in the turbulent region. He successfully capitalized on a working class backlash by presenting Catalanism as an essentially bourgeois ideology, hostile to their interests: “The Castilians, who represent one third of the inhabitants of this city, do not even dare to speak loudly on the Ramblas, because the separatist beast mocks their language with cynicism…”¹¹¹ His demagoguery resonated well among an uprooted proletariat, clustered in the overcrowded slums of Barcelona, whose living conditions were in all respects extremely difficult and separated from the native population along self-reinforcing linguistic and socioeconomic lines. However, while Lerroux did make significant inroads in some neighbourhoods with a high concentration of immigrants, the hostile attitude of the

111. Alejandro Lerroux in a speech from 1905, quoted in Ellrich, 2004: 158.

124 central government towards the working class gave new vigour to the more progressive components of Catalan nationalism.

In 1923, the Lliga, concerned with the radicalization of the class struggle exacerbated by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution and adverse economic conditions, did not oppose General Primo de Rivera’s coup d’état. But the belief that Primo de Rivera was a providential figure, able to re-establish social order and expand the self-governing institutions they failed to obtain through parliamentary means, was soon disappointed.

Indeed, the Mancomunitat was abolished in 1925. Besides, the authoritarian regime he imposed cast serious doubts on the Lliga’s capacity to articulate a territorial interest beyond the defence of the bourgeoisie’s privileges. The period saw the resurgence of immigration as a result of large-scale state-funded investment in infrastructure, public works, and preparations for the 1930 International exposition in Montjuic (Candel 1964:

39). The net migration rate rose sharply to 32,000 on average per year, so that close to 25% of the Catalan population was born elsewhere in Spain in 1930. Yet national and working class interests increasingly conflated into common opposition to the authoritarian central state, thus enabling the Catalanist left to begin the following decade as the dominant political force. The party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), founded in 1930, was able to build a broad coalition of support and retained an almost hegemonic position until 1936. After ERC’s large victory at the 1930 local elections, its leader Francesc Maciá proclaimed the ‘free Catalan Republic’ within a chimerical ‘Iberic federation’, a few days before the Second Republic was officially founded. But the new institutional context encouraged him to negotiate with Madrid and compromise for a solution that fell short of federalism, as Spain was constitutionally meant to remain an ‘integral state’,¹¹² and yet enabled provinces to organize themselves into Autonomous Communities. In 1931, 99% of the Catalan electorate voted in favour of the Statute resurrecting the Generalitat more than two centuries after its dissolution, with an exceptionally high turnout of 75%. In the city of Barcelona, merely 3,000 voters opposed it, although 37% of its million inhabitants were born elsewhere in Spain (Balcells 1976b: 23-25). The change was considerable when compared to twenty years earlier when the Lerrouxist peril had threatened the cohesion of the Catalanist movement. In 1932, Francesc Maciá, then President of the Catalan Parliament, was well

112. 1931 Constitution of the Spanish Republic, article 1.

125 aware of the necessity to ground the legitimacy of the autonomous government in the entire resident population. He addressed the Catalan people with words that emphatically appealed to a territorial identity in-the-making: [a]ll Catalans – whether of blood, language, birth or residence – shall reap the benefits of political autonomy. We consider as Catalans – and I believe it is important to stress this – everyone who lives on our land and feels penetrated by our desires and ideals.”¹¹³

Between 1930 and 1936, not a single MP elected at successive elections for the Catalan Parliament was born outside of Catalonia, although immigrants represented up to 25%

of the Catalan population (Pitarch 1980: 80). From 1936 onwards, Spain and Catalonia were drawn into a revolutionary spiral, which found its denouement in 1938 with the imminent victory of the Franco army over the Republican troops besieged in Barcelona.

In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell relates his experience as a member of the International Brigades. In spite of his rudimentary Spanish, he was able to capture how the “Catalans professed to look down on the Andalusians as a race of semi-savages, (…) rustic-looking men, with faces deeply stained by the ferocious sun of further south,”

which in turn fed rivalries among the Republican camp itself (2000: 84-85). But ultimately, the divide between immigrants and natives at a time of exceptionally high polarization was overshadowed by the prevalence and salience of mutually reinforcing ideological and religious cleavages. This precipitated the country into a Hobbesian war, wherein the extraordinary level of violence achieved on both sides was not directed towards alleged strangers, but fellow-countrymen.

4.2. 1950-1978: the ‘New Catalans’ at the time of anti-Francoist mobilization

This section examines the political developments that led to the definition of Catalan citizenship based on residency in the 1979 Statute of autonomy, irrespective of geographical origin and linguistic criteria. I successively show how the outcome has been facilitated by the politico-institutional context, solidifying a united front of

113. A locution of President Maciá, published in the daily newspaper La Publicitat on December 4, 1932. The original text is available in Ismael Pitarch (ed.) El President Maciá, el Parlament de Catalunya, Parlament de Catalunya, 2009, p.82.

126 ideologically divided actors agreeing on a minimal consensus equating the democratic struggle with the recovery of political autonomy, and by the role of the Catalanist left, and PSUC in particular in bridging immigrants’ social demands and nationalist aspirations.