The language of the Republic

Suso de Toro
4 min
La llengua de la República

One after the other —and by means of the Constitutional Court— the Spanish nation keeps ruling that the laws passed by the Catalan parliament are “unconstitutional”. It declares that political Catalonia is unconstitutional: they did so a few years ago with the Catalan Statute and now they are doing it again. It is its prerogative: it has a state of its own and it rules over Catalonia; and it can’t and won’t do differently. This nation can only affirm its existence through coercion, such is its nature.

As a nation, Spain is a failure. Those who back this political project cannot help but to notice this reality and will have to admit that it was Catalonia who questioned this state model. The main reason for this failure is that it is an essentialist project that neither recognises nor expresses the reality that it intended to span.

There is a Catalan project in progress. It is hard to estimate what percentage of the population demands more or less sovereignty and it is equally difficult to ascertain how far it will go, but we do know where it is headed: it aims to build a nation of its own and force everyone else to recognise its existence. We cannot fathom what legal and political form it will adopt eventually, but it is a democratic nation-building process that is being carried out deliberately by a social majority. It is backed by a majority and has mustered so much support because, besides having a cause, so far it has been an integrative project and —unlike Spain’s— it is not an essentialist one. Its strength stems from the support of the majority and it will remain strong, provided it manages to integrate the diversity inherent to any society.

The structure of Catalonia’s diversity is different from Spain’s. As is the case with the states that derive from the old European kingdoms, the Spanish state’s diversity —which it does not accept gladly— is territorial, whereas Catalonia’s —as with any contemporary society— is structured socially. There are minorities within Catalonia, as they are expressed in the US or in the case of Germany, France and the UK. The origin of those minorities is varied and this will determine the way in which they are regarded.

To be specific, the existing non-Catalan Spanish immigration —which will continue to exist for a period of history— cannot be regarded as “foreign” because those people were not foreigners when they moved to Catalonia from other parts of Spain and they helped to build Catalan society as we know it today. They are unquestionably Catalan. What is more, some of the more valuable assets of Catalonia’s new national product are individuals who stand up for their nation, even though they were not born in Catalonia. Otherwise, this project would have neither the present it has today, nor the future it may attain one day.

Spanish is the mother tongue of this broad, decisive section of the population and they identify individually as Spaniards. A future Catalan Republic will be built by Catalans and by Catalan Spaniards. Therefore, one must accept that you cannot —nor should you— copy a nationalist project such as the Kingdom of Spain, a nation-state. Should this Republic have a state language? There can be no doubt about that: for any language to survive, it requires a state. Those of us who speak a stateless language learnt this through repression and humiliation. Given that the Spanish state has shunned this responsibility, a state for the Catalan language must emerge.

The Catalan model is so innovative that there is no blueprint it can follow and it must create one of its own based on its reality. But it will fail to create a model if those who must picture it remain inside the mental structure of the existing nation-state. In order to exist, the Catalan Republic, must not imitate a bourbon-style state, nor should we believe that the society that will inhabit this state will be a continuation of today’s. The Catalan Republic cannot be a mere continuation of the current devolved Spanish region. For this reason I think that we must envision and anticipate that social matters —and, specifically, language— will have a different status from now.

Needless to say, the Catalan language faces a historic challenge at present: if the current structures and conditions remained in place, Catalan speakers would likely become a minority, headed for extinction. This causes enormous anxiety among the Catalan speaking community, but you cannot legislate the future based on the present circumstances. Catalan must attain its own future legal status within a state that embraces it and guarantees not only the rights of its speakers, but its very factual existence. Undoubtedly, legislation cannot be drafted based on a head count of speakers within the population, as this would merely replicate the current historical status quo. It would make no sense, as far as the language is concerned. The Republic of the entire citizenry must have Catalan as its “own” language: Catalonia is the project and the Catalan language is everyone’s national home, regardless of who speaks it. Taking this as a starting point, a place must be found for everyone.

A few years ago the Catalan government organised the representation of Catalan literature at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Madrid and, in general, the powers of the State unleashed an onslaught against the initial decision to only send a representation of authors who write in Catalan. This was done by those who —day in and day out— ignore the existence of literature written in languages other than Spanish, by those who glorify foreign writers because they write in Spanish, while they ignore and deny others who don’t (but are Spanish nationals). For a case in point, look at the Cervantes Award, a yearly celebration of imperial pride, a prize paid for by all Spaniards alike but that excludes authors who do not write in Spanish. This is Spain’s national model, the failure that can only exist through coercion. The decision of the Catalan authorities was understandable and legitimate from a linguistic standpoint, albeit politically mistaken: the policies of Catalan power must be specifically different, the opposite of Spain’s sectarian essentialism.

A community that is human and political isn’t built by turning statistics into law —which merely replicates what you already have— but by moving on. In order to build a project of their own, everyone must agree that Catalan is the language of this imagined Republic but, if there’s a will, the human, historic evidence that the Spanish language is here must also be recognised. If the nation is conceived as an open, integrative one, then the Republic needn’t be pluri-national, but it will have to be multicultural. This way nobody who wishes to be a citizen of this Republic will feel denied, but recognised.

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