Catalans Recast Spanish History in Drive for Independence
BLOOMBERG
Catalans Recast Spanish History in Drive for Independence
By Ben Sills and Esteban DuarteNov 7, 2014 12:01 AM GMT+0100
Photographer: David Ramos/Getty Images)
Demonstrators march during a pro-independence demonstration as part of the celebrations... Read More
In a former market hall in Barcelona, Catalans are busy championing a historic defeat.
A
museum and cultural center built around the 300-year-old ruins of the
city aims to educate visitors about the 1714 siege during the War of
Spanish Succession. The battle lasted more than a year and destroyed the
old neighborhood amid “epic and heroic resistance,” according to the
center’s pamphlet.
For Catalan nationalists, the defeat marks the end of their region’s freedom and the beginning of their domination by Madrid.
For others, there’s a catch: the version of events on display at the
museum, funded by the regional government that’s been pushing for an
independence referendum, is unrecognizable to most historians outside
Catalonia.
“It’s science fiction,” said Alejandro Quiroga, a lecturer in Spanish history at Newcastle University in England who comes from Madrid. “The distortions are tremendous. That’s part of the process of nation building.”
As
they develop a narrative around national identity, arguments over the
interpretation of history have for decades dogged the Catalan
nationalists. Barcelona’s leadership gained control of education under
the constitutional settlement that followed the death in 1975 of General
Francisco Franco, who had banned the use of the Catalan language.
Photographer: Juanjo Perez Monclus/Bloomberg
A museum and cultural center built around the 300-year-old ruins of the city aims to... Read More
The movement has transformed into a full-blown campaign to
leave Spain over the past three years. This weekend, activists will hold
an unofficial independence vote in defiance of a Spanish court ruling
and the Madrid government.
Economic Importance
“It fits in with my nationalistic feelings,” said Eugenio Suarez, 61, an industrial engineer who visited the museum
on Oct. 14, a little over a year after it first opened. “I am a
nationalist for other reasons, so I come here to remember what Barcelona
and Catalonia was and still is.”
In the northeast of the
country, Catalonia is the largest economic region, where output per
capita is 17 percent above the European Union average compared with 5
percent below for Spain as a whole. The risk of political upheaval temporarily halted a rally in Spanish bonds last month.
Unionists
and some historians say that successive regional governments have
contributed to building a Catalan majority by promoting a partial, at
times false, version of the region’s history through its schools and
cultural institutions.
In Spanish history books, Felipe V’s
troops overran Barcelona at the end of a 14-month siege, bringing an end
to the war. The way the Catalan nationalists tell it, that defeat marks
the end of a golden age for Catalonia.
Using History
The
attack “led to the capitulation of Barcelona and the loss of
Catalonia’s freedoms,” says the leaflet handed out to visitors at the
center in the El Born district. The museum shows “the vibrant and
dynamic Barcelona of 1700,” while the defeat “is a symbol of the
historic fight of the citizens to defend the constitutions and
institutions of the country.”
“All these exhibitions they are
doing are really trying to mobilize public opinion,” said James Amelang,
a Spanish historian from the U.S. who works at the Autonomous University of Madrid. “Like most politicians, they are using history.”
Modern-day
nationalists have built a legend around the defeat. The anniversary on
Sept. 11 is marked each year as Catalan National Day and the date has
become the focus for pro-independence demonstrations. More than half a
million people turned out this year.
“Every word is based on the
work of a Catalan historian,” Quim Torra, the director of the center,
who is employed by the regional government, said in a telephone
interview. “We have used the maximum rigor.”
Both Fighting
The
idea that the War of Succession pitted Catalonia against the rest of
Spain is a distortion, according to historians from outside the region
like Quiroga, Amelang and Nigel Townson from the Complutense University in Madrid.
“Catalan
society was divided between the Hapsburg and the Bourbon options,”
Townson said. “They were both fighting over who was going to rule from
Madrid.”
While Quiroga said that the official history textbook
produced for high school seniors this year is factually sound, he also
pointed out how it organizes its account to promote a nationalist vision
of Catalan history.
The cover illustration of 19th century
seamstresses at work plays to the stereotype of the industrious Catalan
versus poorer regions, he said. Inside, the account of the modern period
begins with the War of Succession, the fall of Barcelona in 1714 and
the “repression” of Catalan society.
Not Stupid
The
1808-1814 war to oust Napoleon’s French forces, known as the War of
Independence in the rest of Spain, becomes the War of the French. The
name of the subject itself also changes. While students in Madrid,
Seville or Valencia study “Spanish History,” in Barcelona, it’s simply
“History.”
“This gives a lot of importance to the influence of
education, and much less to the influence of families,” Jaume Clotet, a
Catalan government spokesman, said yesterday. “If that were true, you’d
have thought 40 years of education under Franco would also have
manipulated the Catalan people. But it didn’t. Why? Because people
aren’t stupid.”
The regional government’s education policy is under scrutiny from wider Spain. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s
government tried to readjust the emphasis in a 2013 law by giving
students across the whole country, including Catalonia, the right to be
taught in Spanish.
“Our objective is to ‘hispanicize’ Catalan
students so that they feel as proud of being Spanish as they are of
being Catalan and they are capable of having a balanced experience of
those two identities,” Education Minister Jose Ignacio Wert told the
Spanish Parliament in October 2012.
Beneath the cast iron and
glass structure of the El Born market, the facts and images of the siege
speak for themselves, according to museum director Torra.
“We
haven’t had much opportunity to explain ourselves over the last 300
years of Catalan history and now we have a chance,” he said. “We don’t
aim to indoctrinate anyone.”
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