Catalan negationism
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Catalan negationism refers to a tendency on the part of some historians to deny or downplay the history of Catalonia as a nation with a strong means of self-government. The topic is controversial in some parts of Spain, including Catalonia, as it has been used primarily as a propaganda tool to support or discredit political confrontation from political parties.
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[edit] Antecedents
The roots of Catalan negationism can be traced back to the 15th century. Owing to the 1469 marriage between Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, the two dynasties were unified and the Kingdom of Castile and the Crown of Aragon were ruled together. However, during the early years of their rule, most of the political decisions in each kingdom were de facto taken separately by each ruler. There is, at present, widespread agreement between historians that the unification of the two crowns did not become complete in this moment.
As this lack of strong central power became evident to each local community, an effort was made to give the new joint kingdom some sort of "holy history", that is, some foundational myths for the people to consider the validity of Spain as a whole instead of as fragmented entities. One of the first contributors in that direction would be Antonio de Nebrija, who by 1492 published the first grammar of the Spanish language (titled Gramática Castellana in Spanish), which was the first grammar produced for any Romance language. By command of the monarchs, he would invent their official motto Tanto monta, monta tanto ("It amounts so, so it amounts"), to symbolize that both monarchs were in fact co-rulers of the great new kingdom.
During the following centuries, from the 1500s to the 1600s, efforts were made to give Spain some sort of traditional cultural inheritance as a bond between the peoples comprising it. Official history tended to note the noble sense of grandeur of the immediate history, namely the Reconquista period, owing to the spirit of martial unity demonstrated by the defeat of the Moors at the hands of Christian knights and people. Local heroes like El Cid were praised and the whole Reconquista defined as a movement with a sense of "unity". This was favoured by the Imperial policy of the Crown in connection with the European discovery of the Americas in 1492 and thereafter and the attempts of the monarchy to grow as the prevailing trans-Atlantic empire throughout the following century. Another effort in the cause of unity was made with the expulsion or forced conversion of Jews and Moors to Catholicism, sanctioned by the Spanish Catholic Church and its Holy Inquisition. Despite this, no real effort was made to unify the politics of Spain. Most contact between the Castilian, Catalano-Aragonese and other people were made merely at regular (large) commercial markets, but no deep interaction occurred for centuries. Each community spoke its own language, followed its own economic model and had its own market (viticulture and the Mediterranean Sea for the Catalan and cattle and America for the Castilian).
During the following centuries economic power was increasingly polarised between noble landowners from Castile and pre-bourgeois businessmen from Catalonia, but political power moved to the Castilian centre. Complaints were made by Catalan institutions and individuals to the central administration, but little or no response was made by the Crown. Tensions arose between the central administration and Catalan people and institutions during several military episodes involving the conscription of Catalan men (and their reluctance to be conscripted, forming armed gangs instead) in times of conflict.
The most critical was the War of the Spanish Succession which resulted in the Nueva Planta decrees in 1716, abolishing the Catalan constitutions, institutions and organs of government (and in fact removing nearly every local government institution and reworking a real central bureaucracy) as a punishment for revolting against Philip V of Spain during the war and the installation of a stable military force in Barcelona represented by the Citadel military fortress.
Another major conflict was the Peninsular War against the French Napoleonic troops in 1808. The effects were disastrous for the Catalan territory and for Spain at large; a very important part of the fighting was done by Catalan men who nevertheless refused to join a regular army. But as Spain as a whole ultimately won the war, traditionalist forces clashed with liberals in the Carlist Wars, as the new king Ferdinand VII "the Desired one" (later "the Traitor king"), revoked all the social advances made by the independent Cortes, which were summoned in Cádiz acting on his behalf to coordinate the provincial juntas and resist the French. He restored absolute monarchy, prosecuted and put to death every one suspected of liberalism, and, as his last misdeed, altered the laws of royal succession in favour of his daughter Isabella II, thus starting a century of civil wars against the supporters of the former legal heir to the throne. Ferdinand VII thus reinforced control over the more peripheral parts of Spain, in this case Catalonia, ignoring the proactive part the Catalans had taken in the resistance against the French and leading to a vicious circle of repression against dissidents, Carlists and the like (each of the subsequent conflicts reemerging in Catalonia with force during several years).
[edit] Negationism
It is, though, for the decade or so beginning with Franco's ruling in the Spanish Civil War (that is, approximately 1939-1950) that most of the Negationist issue arises. Having won the war against the enemies of the left and the "separatists", intellectuals sympathetic to Franco's regime ultimately stretched the Spain vs. Catalonia problem and made a new theoretical model of the problem. Where previous administrations empirically acted from a centralist point of view, largely (though not totally) excluding Catalonia from the debate, the new intellectuals forged a corpus of fundational myths and exotic theories that, in one manner or another, justified Franco's military coup. In their accounts of the "facts", Spain was founded by the Goths and has a secular tradition of Catholicism. The "communist-separatist forces that threaten to break the unity of Spain" (a central motto for Franco) were culpable for the civil war. In that line of events, historians emerged who negated the rich and complex reality of the disparate regions/nations that constitute Spain, and disregarded their secular institutions and traditions as "unimportant folklore".
Among others, the arguments discredited the validity of the Treaty of Corbeil (1258) ([1] [2] [3] and many others, which could create controversial issues surrounding the legality of the Spanish kingdom). The validity or importance of the Diputació de Barcelona, Generalitat or even the real extent of the use of Catalan as a language was also put in doubt. Franco's supporters also denod any central role of the army and Franco in crimes during the Civil War, referring instead to their role as Glorious Saviours of Spain.
Since the subject emerged abruptly during the civil war period and has continued ever since as a dialectical conflict between Spanish and Catalan nationalists, one must be careful in dealing with sources from either side. Nowadays, it is commonly agreed that the idea of nationhood was developed by the French intellectuals of the Enlightenment and entered the collective mind during the years of the French Revolution, with the doctrine of popular sovereignty and the implementation of a government chosen by the common will of the "citizens" (formerly subjects). According to the standard view, before the 19th century people had local, regional, or religious loyalties, but no idea of nationhood. After the Congress of Vienna (September 1814 – June 1815), the monarchies redrew Europe's political map and tried to remove the ideas exposed during the expansion of the Napoleonic France. But, since the new map did not respect physical or cultural frontiers, nationalist revolutions and uprisings arose in several countries of Europe along the 19th century.
Nationalism, a somewhat new idea, determined a large part of the political life of 19th century Europe. Where the nation was part of an empire, the national liberation struggle was also a struggle against older autocratic regimes, and nationalism was allied with liberal anti-monarchical movements. Where the nation-state was a consolidation of an older monarchy, as in Spain, nationalism was itself conservative and monarchical. Most nationalist movements began in opposition to the existing order, but by the 20th century, there were regimes which primarily identified themselves as nationalist. The term "nation" tended to be substituted for "God" as a justification for the power on behalf of rulers, who tried in many cases to search or even forge a support in the past history as a representation of the will of "the Nation" (that is, of the people, the new "actors").
[edit] Catalan Negationism Nowadays
Examples of revisionism/negationism are a major issue at the present day in Spain, since contemporary politicians still make use of similar arguments. Negationism criticism is known to come mostly from Catalan scholarship, catalanist parties and Catalan people, while negationist views, the ones prevailing until the softening of Franco's regime, often come from political "heirs" (the ones with closest political point of views) of Franco, members of the People's Party, representatives of the Catholic Church most conservative trends or media journalists, like Federico Jiménez Losantos. Some writers supporting the negationist view are Cesar Vidal and Pio Moa. A major problem in Spain is that no real effort has been done by the whole society to clarify what the real history was; thus, this continues to be a strong tool for propaganda between proponents of negationism or their critics involved in political parties of either centralist or decentralizated conception.
