Ulster’s No and Catalonia’s Sí

Much of The Break-up of Britain was originally published in New Left Review, a journal to which Nairn contributed over the course of 45 years (from 1962 to 2007); his centrality in the British left would likely lead a casual reader to guess wrong about his position on Northern Ireland. For decades (arguably since partition) the basic position of that political community has been to see the Unionist majority as some sort of artificially maintained leftover of imperialism who would eventually have to give up any false consciousness about their identity as a people distinct from the whole of the island of Ireland. Nairn, though, dismisses this as part of ‘The Myth of Anti-Imperialism’, in the words of a section head early in The Break-up of Britain’s chapter on Northern Ireland. Rather, he posits the place as a region whose economic vibrancy and cultural heterogeneity would never fit into the southern State. He writes of northern Protestants that ‘The reasons why they were not “Irish” in the sense that Catholic-based agrarian nationalism had established, are clear enough. But they were not really ‘British’ either … What distinguishes the Protestant North-East in such company is its massive industrial development’ (Ref. Reference Nairn1, pp. 196–197).

Obviously many political and economic details are different, but nobody versed in the tensions between Spanish and Catalan nationalisms can fail to find this formulation strikingly familiar. Catalonia is well-known as one of Spain’s most prosperous regions; a common joke about the movement is that in terms of oppressed minorities, Catalans make unlikely victims. More precise formulations of this dynamic generally invoke the well-known fact that, in the opening words of the OECD’s backgrounder on the country, ‘With more than 7.5 million inhabitants, the Autonomous Region of Catalonia is the second most populous region in Spain, representing 16% of its total population. Catalonia is the main contributor to the Spanish economy with nearly 19% of Spain’s GDP. The GDP per capita is higher than the European Union average.’ ^{5 , 6} Small wonder that it is very uncommon to come across analogies with other national liberation movements, either historical (such as Algeria) or contemporary (such as Corsica). Part of the infrequency of comparison there clearly has to do with Catalonia’s lack of an armed or violent paramilitary presence; part of this, though, is also clearly to do with the relatively prosperous quality of the national territory to be liberated.

The nineteenth-century roots of catalanisme are in the Catholic conservative discourse that predominated in other ‘small nations’ of Europe, such as Flanders or Hungary. The second quote that opens this article is from Enric Prat de la Riba, one of the key early figures of Catalan nationalism, himself basically a figure of the Catholic conservative bloc. It is in that bloc that we find the roots of the centre-right Catalan nationalism that consolidated a majority in the post-Franco era via the ideology of Pujolism. I refer there to Jordi Pujol, the founder of the party Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya, which was the leader of the electoral coalition known as Convergència i Unió, (CiU) and which subsequently re-formed in 2016 as the present-day PDeCAT. Pujol’s Convergència didn’t start out as explicitly separatist, but CiU/PDeCAT has long been synonymous with a mainstream, majority-friendly form of catalanisme. Albert Balcells’ Breve historia del nacionalismo catalán arguably allows us to trace the consolidation of a centre-right, bourgeois quality of the movement to the early 1980s, once the new Spanish constitution had fully taken hold and the wave of post-Franco unity began to recede.Reference Balcells ⁷ Balcells recalls how

Seen from the outside, Catalan nationalism would seem to share some of the same basic political ground with Unionism in Northern Ireland. That is also, of course, what we have historically seen in Northern Ireland. That is to say, it is a political movement that, although containing some liberal or centre-left elements, is basically on the right, drawing its support from the bourgeois and relatively well-off working class in a prosperous, industrialized area that abuts a region defined by economic underdevelopment (‘the south’ in both cases). This, of course, reached a new high in the wake of the 2017 UK elections, when the Democratic Unionist Party, the dominant voice of Unionism in Northern Ireland for the last decade or so, entered into a ‘Confidence and Supply’ agreement with the British Conservatives (whose official name is ‘The Conservative and Unionist Party’).

With this in mind, Nairn was calling for a new kind of category of country, one that is not defined by an imperial dynamic as such but is nevertheless the repository of legitimate aspirations towards self-determination. At the end of his chapter on Northern Ireland, he has this to say:

That is precisely the question with which Catalonia finds itself faced today. Nairn laments that a longstanding resistance to English liberalism, which many in Northern Ireland saw as complicit with a Republican desire for Protestant assimilation, was defined by a hostility that meant that ‘this resistance was never conducted as the real or straightforward expression of that community. That is, as the assertion of its own distinct identity and rights, its own capacity for national self-determination in a separatist sense’ (Ref. Reference Nairn1, p. 198). A similar hostility to modern Spanish socialism, which has been generally unionist, is a defining part of the modern Catalan nationalist movement, on both the left and right. For Nairn, this legacy has unfortunately meant that self-determination in Northern Ireland ‘was fought over a desperate battle for the frontier: for imperialism, “British Ireland” in the old sense. Protestant Ascendency over the natives, and so on’ (Ref. Reference Nairn1, p. 198). But the dynamic in Catalonia is very different. The hostility to a metropolitan progressivism that would ignore national specificity has instead moved Catalan separatism towards a ‘big tent’ movement and away from something that is easily synonymous with a left-wing programme of anti-imperialism (which may have been the case until the civil war but has been a minority part of catalanisme since the 1970s).

What this Northern Ireland section shows us is that The Break-Up of Britain’s greatest contemporary value lies in the conceptual framework that it provides, and part of this is the description of a sub-state formation that, while clearly not following the traditional contours of a decolonizing possession, is nevertheless the home of a national distinctiveness and thus the bearer of some form of rights around self-determination. As Nairn himself says, The Break-up of Britain’s ‘predictive side’ is in many ways mistaken, and writing now in the twenty-first century we can see that this is as true for Northern Ireland as for the rest of the United Kingdom. But in terms of a framework for the understanding of ‘small nations’ of a variety of historical pedigrees, it is quite durable, as the experience of contemporary Catalonia makes clear.

Scotland, Wales, Indifference and Modernity

In many ways Nairn is more convincing overall on the matter of Scotland. Despite the recent turning-back of Scottish independence in the failed referendum of 2014, The Break-Up of Britain’s analyses of the broad-strokes ideological tensions in Scottish nationalism have proven durable. And they are just as illuminating of the situation in Catalonia as the conceptualization of Northern Ireland. The crucial matter has to do with immigration and the gradual rise of a non-ethnic nationalism; Nairn could see this emerging in Scotland as early as the 1970s, and that has become a characteristic element of the separatist movements in both Scotland and Catalonia (as it has in Quebec). Scotland forms a kind of conceptual centrepiece for a political project that seeks a nationalism that reconciles the left’s historical commitment to collective action and collective belonging with a liberal-leaning vision of modernity that seeks to protect not the sovereign individual of classical liberalism but rather its conceptual cousin, the diversity that naturally flows from that seminal experience of modernity: global migration.

Nairn’s analysis of Scottish nationalism, much more than what he says about Northern Ireland (or for that matter Wales or England), lays out the emergence of a long-term tendency of small nationalist movements: that of civic over ethnic approaches to belonging. In his long opening chapter, ‘The Twilight of the British State’, he invokes implicitly an emerging Catalan self-awareness as he argues that the rise in peripheral nationalism has nothing to do with ‘the Celtic bloodstream’:

Part of this ‘devolutionary attack’ is meant to bring that system into something resembling modernity, an issue that is key in many analyses of the United Kingdom’s unusual governance frameworks. Distinguishing it from a unitary state such as France, John Loughlin has written, for instance, that ‘the United Kingdom is more accurately described as a union (or multinational) state, thus keeping the “pre-modern” state structures while becoming a society with a modern public administration.’Reference Loughlin ⁸ Nairn argues that the modernized, technocratic latter can hardly make up for the backwardly pre-modern former. The degree to which Nairn specifically identifies ‘the declining Spanish state’ as being an issue is, of course, also a key concern for this essay.

Even the most zealous language advocate must address, however reluctantly, Nairn’s sense of the Welsh movement’s shortcomings, his desire ‘to push the national movement leftwards – in this case, away from the cultural-linguistic nationalism focused on North and West Wales, and towards the socialism rooted in industrial South Wales’ (Ref. Reference Nairn1, p. 341). One need not agree on the inevitability of socialist politics as such to see the basic point to be made here: a devastated-but-recovering language (the 2011 census puts the number of Welsh people able to understand the language at 19% of the total population of Wales) ⁹ will only carry a movement so far before it hits the solid brick wall of bilingualism with a dominant tongue. An open, territorial movement may retain and genuinely profit from the idealism around language that should accrue given language’s elective, learnable quality, but the reality of governance will entail bringing into the fold those who, for whatever reason, simply haven’t acquired it. Evidence that this is happening in Catalonia would be difficult to acquire absent polling data that takes into account language ability. There is such work on a parallel consideration, which is ethnic identification and voting behaviour; Ivan Serrano and Albert Bonillo’s 2017 article closely examines the 2010 and 2012 Catalan elections with an eye to tracing ethnic affiliation (especially that connected to the internal migration from other parts of Spain, such as Andalucía) and voter behaviour, and conclude overall that ‘in contexts of growing political polarization, a primary conception of ethnicity such as birth [inside or outside of Catalonia] can regain importance in explaining electoral behaviour.’Reference Serrano and Bonillo ¹⁰ That is fairly intuitive, although it would be incorrect, I think, to conclude from this something like ‘Spanish speaker = Spaniard = Unionist’ or ‘Catalan speaker = Catalan = separatist’. One way I have seen the complexity of this embodied, however fleetingly, was in Barcelona at demonstrations around the general strike for 3 October 2017, in the wake of the police brutality that marred the 1 October 2017 referendum on independence. Among those demonstrations, there were a lot of placards written in Spanish, especially in the student-led demonstrations at Plaça Universitat around the University of Barcelona, such as the punning, hard to translate ‘Respecto a los Catalanes, voy a ser muy Franco – Rajoy’ or ‘Rajoy says: As far as the Catalans go, I’m going to be very frank/going to be very Franco’. To elaborate on the analogy with Quebec (very common in discussions of Catalonia), it is near-impossible to imagine seeing sarcastic, anti-Jean-Chrétien placards written in English at demonstrations in the wake of the 1995 referendum on independence. This kind of bilingualism is more present in Catalan identity, even the nationalist variety, than is widely acknowledged.

This bilingual reality has been a sticky matter in the legalities of devolution and the political aftermath of that devolution. The 2006 Estatut d’autonomia de Catalunya’s Article 6.1 begins with ‘La llengua pròpia de Catalunya és el català’, but its Article 6.2 reads

To an outside viewer this would seem to be a model of bilingual practice. Indeed, it seems strongly influenced by the Irish model. Article 8.1 of the Constitution of Ireland (1937/2013) reads ‘The Irish language as the national language is the first official language.’ As in the Catalan case (although much more so) this is still aspirational rather than a reflection of the sociolinguistic facts on the ground, ¹¹ and so Article 8.2 reads ‘The English language is recognised as a second official language’ and Article 8.3 reads ‘Provision may, however, be made by law for the exclusive use of either of the said languages for any one or more official purposes, either throughout the State or in any part thereof.’ Nevertheless, a sense of bilingualism that assumed ‘el dret i el deure de conèixer-les’ or ‘the right and the duty to know them’, that is to say both Catalan and Spanish, was one of the aspects of the 2006 statute that wound up undone by the 2010 ruling of the Tribunal Constitucional. This is somewhat ironic given the way the statute explicitly imitates the language of the Spanish constitution’s Article 3, which reads ‘El castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. Todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla’ or ‘Castillian Spanish is the official Spanish language of the state. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it’. The Tribunal, however, found that

The report of the Catalan government’s Grup d’experts per encàrrec MHP replied to this ruling in equally acidic terms, more or less making the case that bilingualism was already in the spirit of the 2006 Estatut d’autonomia de Catalunya, and that this can only be undone by a radically centralizing Hispanophilia that is not at all part of the post-transition tradition of Spanish politics. ¹³

It may also seem that the 2006 Estatut was trying to translate Quebec’s Charte de la langue française / Loi 101 (1977) into Catalan, but that is not really the case. Indeed, it is worth offering some caution here regarding the preponderance of analogies between Catalan and Quebec in the discourse around both nationalist movements. No doubt in Quebec bilingualism is widespread, especially in Montreal, but monolingual French-speakers are in fact a near-majority in the province, ¹⁴ and Quebec is legally a monolingual, French-speaking jurisdiction (the only constitutionally bilingual province in Canada is New Brunswick). These Quebec analogies tend to obscure the reality of Catalan bilingualism; in terms of the language–nation nexus, Catalonia is nearly as close to Wales as it is to Quebec.

The important place that the Spanish language has in Catalan identity is by no means uncontroversial. Pau Vidal’s 2015 book El bilingüisme mata, for instance, made the case that Spanish was displacing Catalan to the point in which it had become a kind of dialect, which he calls catanyol: ‘a kind of written and oral Catalan that, because of the excessive presence of Spanish-isms [castellanismes], provokes a certain comic effect […] or, more seriously, an inability to speak or express oneself genuinely.’Reference Vidal ¹⁵ This was a controversial book and its thesis that an independent Catalan republic should be officially monolingual was by no means a consensus position, but the fact that the official language of a state should be in question does speak to the widespread quality of bilingualism. It was, in some ways, a more pessimistic version of Francesc Vallverdu’s seminal 1970 book, Dues llengües: Dues funcions?, which made the case that Catalan and Spanish coexisted in an uneasy dance between bilingualism and diglossia, and that this constituted something fundamental about the Catalan society that, in that late Franco period, was beginning to emerge.Reference Vallverdu ¹⁶ That book painted a portrait of the Catalan language that could be seen as objectively a bit grim. Such assessments included the memorable recollection, so well-known to minority language speakers everywhere, of the experience of ‘meetings of neighbourhood associations, student groups, or lawyers, all of whom speak or at least understand Catalan, at the moment that they need to make formal presentations, adopt Spanish as the only language’ (Ref. Reference Vallverdu16, p. 74).

Crucially, this shift away from ethnicity and towards territory, at the expense of language where necessary, has not only made these nationalist movements seem more virtuously modern, but has strengthened many aspects of their specifically separatist claims. Ricard Zapata-Barrero has been clear about this, writing in his essay ‘Building a public philosophy of immigration in Catalonia: the terms of debate’ that

That action has to do with understanding legally defined territories as the repository of citizenship, and making it more difficult to define someone’s nationality in a way that is separate from the territory where they live. ¹⁸ We can see in some reaches of catalanisme, then, a vision of national identity that is, to return to Nairn’s sense of Scottish nationalism, ‘indifferent to themes of race and cultural ancestry’.

Such a vision has also taken hold in Scotland, of course, most explicitly manifested by the insistence on the part of the Scottish National Party that only those resident in Scotland could vote in the 2014 referendum on independence; being a ‘Scot’ who lived in England or Canada or Kenya did not allow you to decide on the fate of the nation, that is to say the fate of the territory. But it is still not easy to imagine a Scottish scholar asking, as Gracia Dorel-Ferré did in 2011 in the venerable Quebec nationalist journal L’Action nationale,

Lest anyone think this is just making nice for a foreign audience where interculturalism is undeniably important to the nationalist movement, Zapata-Barrero has, writing in Catalan, made the dynamic even clearer. His 2005 research report on interculturalism in Quebec, Flanders and Catalonia partially concludes by saying that

The migrations that Zapata-Barrero is referring to are not only those of the recent immigration from the post-colonial world, but also ‘internal’ migrations, especially the large number of Andalusians who migrated to a more prosperous north, not only to Barcelona and environs but all over Catalonia as well as Valencia and the Balearic Islands, in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these migrants ‘became Catalan’ in the manner of nineteenth-century Irish migrants to Quebec; that was certainly true of the children of these migrants, who, as children of the post-Franco era, would have been schooled in Catalan and thus socialized naturally into a revitalized Catalan culture.

I may at this point seem to be far from anything proposed in The Break-Up of Britain, but I do not think that to be the case. Indeed, it is by turning towards the Marxism of Nairn that we can see the degree to which his evaluation of the United Kingdom synthesizes a political analysis that is, essentially, that of contemporary Catalonia. I made the case in the previous section that the Northern Ireland Nairn presents is in fact an excellent analogy for contemporary Catalonia. Something similar can be said for the synthesis of the antithetical nationalisms found in Wales (cultural/linguistic) and Scotland (political/state-power); these find a kind of synthesis in the experience of Catalan nationalism. They incorporate details of each, but an analysis of the material realities reveals that problems in the constituent parts (bilingualism, a fully open national identity with a strong base in immigration) have been fully taken on board and transformed into something new. Earlier in this paper I tried to downplay the specifically socialist politics that Nairn is agitating for throughout The Break-Up of Britain. I did this not because I reject that kind of politics but because I wanted to claim the overall analysis for a country whose nationalist movement has, since the 1970s, had a clear centre-right majority (much in the manner of Unionism in Northern Ireland). We can make up for that partial erasure of a specific political project, I hope, by returning to the ideological fundamentals, that is to say, Marxist-inflected dialectics, to see the degree to which Nairn’s sense of both Wales and Scotland can clarify as much about contemporary Catalonia as his sense of Northern Ireland can.

The Spectre of Federalism

I will invoke that broad ideological pattern one more time by way of offering an overall synthesis, and suggest that a spectre is indeed haunting Europe – the spectre of federalism. As the quote that opens this paper illustrates, Nairn’s analysis is thoroughly federalist in spirit, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. Indeed, one of the ways that The Break-Up of Britain most closely anticipates the current state of Catalan nationalism is in its relative EU-philia. Although Brexit is now widely associated in the popular press with the political right, most of the British left would have opposed the United Kingdom’s 1973 entry into what was then the EEC on grounds that closely resemble what is now known (and is too little discussed in that popular press) as Lexit. On the matter of that original entry, Nairn writes:

It is precisely this multi-national reality that has made the European Union popular in nations where the ‘big unit’ (Spain, the UK) is able to sometimes ignore the sovereign existence of ‘smaller units’ (Catalonia, Scotland/Wales/Northern Ireland). That practice of studied ignorance is literally impossible in an entity such as the European Union (no less than it was in the days of the EEC), and so it is not hard to see what makes that, at least conceptually, attractive for small nations. But in fact it has been fairly easy for the European Union to ignore ‘small units’ when they come in the form of sub-state nations, and that ability to ignore was on vivid display in the days following the 2017 Catalan referendum on independence. Supporters of independence issued call after call for the European Union to intervene and lead efforts towards Catalonia–Spain dialogue, only to find that the EU was not interested in undercutting one of its member states. This was true of both the European Council president Donald Tusk, who Daniel Boffey, writing for the Guardian, quoted speaking directly to the Catalan president ‘as a member of an ethnic minority and a regionalist, as a man who knows what it feels like to be hit by a police baton,’Reference Boffey ²¹ but who did so by way of urging him not to declare independence, as well as the European Commission, which issued a statement on the day after the referendum on independence that opened by saying

In terms of advancing the actual outcome of an independent Catalan state, faith in the European Union may seem to have been misplaced.

At a larger conceptual level, though, the model of the European Union remains important in a way that brings us back to the realm of Nairn and the politics of which The Break-up of Britain was part. I am referring there to federalism, broadly conceived. To return to the quote that opens this paper, Nairn believed that ‘To those who have learned anything from recent history, then, the only possible safeguard must be to make an Alternative Strategy fully and freely federative in principle’ (Ref. Reference Nairn1, p. 346). That federalist principle not only animated Nairn but a lot of the British and Irish Left in the 1970s. On the Irish side, Desmond Fennell would be the best-known of these voices; his 1995 article ‘Solutions to the northern problem: a federal Ireland and other approaches’ was basically a précis of work that he had been publishing in a variety of venues over the previous two decades.Reference Fennell ²³ Fennell, a columnist for the now-defunct Irish Press and a regular contributor to the Irish Times, had also been an informal advisor to both the centre-right Fianna Fáil (for whom the Irish Press was something of a house organ) and the ostensibly socialist Sinn Féin. It was the latter political party that adopted some of his federal proposals, in the form of a platform published in 1974 under the title, Peace with Justice: Proposals for Peace in a New Federal Ireland. Fennell’s two-part article in the Irish Times ran under the titles ‘A new look at federation’Reference Fennell ²⁴ and ‘The Federation of Man’,Reference Fennell ²⁵ a reference to the Isle of Man, where Fennell argued that the capital of a federated British Isles should be located. He published a second two-part article on ‘A Federal Ireland’ in the Irish Times in February 1978. Federalism was an animating force behind much of the innovative thinking around Irish nationalism and the rights of northern unionists in the 1970s, and much of that thinking had a distinct, if likely unwitting, Catalan flavour to it. Alain-G. Gagnon has written of

Gagnon is referring to a key figure of the late nineteenth century, and the spirit of federalism also had roots in the regionalist debates in Spanish overseas colonies of that period, especially Cuba (as Lluís Costa has discussed).Reference Costa ²⁷ This line of thinking represented some of the earliest flourishing of what we would now recognize as modern Catalan nationalism. Antoni Rovira i Virgili would become catalanisme’s most important political thinker of the first half of the twentieth century, and in his 1917 book Nacionalisme i Federalisme he has an essay entitled ‘Institucions autònomes’, wherein he argues that

That sense of the possibility of federalism, the doors that it can open not just for countries stuck in centralized kingdoms (such as the UK and Spain) but also the way that it can accommodate very robust forms of national difference and the political difference such robustness often demands, defines much of the argument of The Break-up of Britain.

This sense of the possibilities of federalism has been remarkably long-lived in Catalonia as well. Ferran Requejo Coll, for instance, has vigorously defended the idea of federalism in works in Catalan (especially his 2009 anthology Liberalisme polític i democràcies plurinacionals),Reference Requejo Coll ²⁹ French (in a 2011 article for a special issue of the aforementioned Quebec journal L’Action nationale devoted to Catalonia)Reference Requejo Coll ³⁰ and English (in a 2015 article for the Oxford University Politics Blog).Reference Requejo Coll ³¹ His argument throughout is that the reason for the rising separatist feelings is, more or less, that there has not been enough federalism on the part of Madrid. This is a common analysis across the Spanish left as well, and the PSOE (the Spanish socialist party) has called for the Spanish state to ‘Include the principle of loyalty between the State and the Autonomous Communities.’ ³²

A de facto federalism has long been the political reality of the Kingdom of Spain, but, as in the UK, it has not been its constitutional reality. It was perhaps an act of provocation, then, for Luis Moreno and César Colino to include a chapter on Spain, written by them, as part of the volume of the series, A Global Dialogue on Federalism, which they edited together.Reference Moreno and Colino ³³ There they note that

Part of the problem here, and the crucial point of difference between the United Kingdom and Spain, is the number of such communities. In Spain there are 17 in all, including Madrid. This has had the effect of undercutting the claim that the ‘historical nationalities’, which is to say the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia, can make to distinct status, since they are autonomous in some of the same ways that Andalusia, Murcia or Navarre are. Luis Moreno had outlined a version of this argument in his 2001 book The Federalization of Spain, where he described in greater detail a state deeply split between the centralizing tendencies of Spanish nationalism and the multinational reality of the country.Reference Moreno ³⁴ That sort of discourse, really, is the inheritor of Tom Nairn’s work on the United Kingdom, itself the product of a 1970s discourse around federalism and regionalism in the British Isles and elsewhere. ³⁵ The Break-up of Britain, Nairn’s most famous and long-lived work, may seem dated inasmuch as the Good Friday Agreement or the fate of the present-day Scottish independence movement mean that ‘Ukania’ didn’t turn out quite as he expected. But it is dated in a positive way too. That is to say, it brings us back to a period whose debates around national belonging, self-determination and the spirit of federalism explain a great deal about the contemporary situation, of Catalonia especially, but of places further afield as well.