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The Spectres Haunting Europe: Reading Contemporary Catalan Nationalism through The Break-Up of Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2018

Jerry White
Jerry White*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Dalhousie University, PO Box 15000, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4R2, Canada. Email: jerry.white@dal.ca
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Abstract

This article reads contemporary Catalan nationalist discourse through the lens of Tom Nairn’s polemical classic The Break-Up of Britain. First published in 1977, that text presents key issues for understanding contemporary Catalonia. The first is the emergence of a national sentiment that is separate from that of anti-colonialism because it is characterized by a higher level of economic development than the place it is seeking to break from, but is the repository of a legitimate claim to self-determination. That is how Nairn sees the Northern Ireland–Éire relationship, and that is a good analogy for Spain–Catalonia. The second is the tension between what he sees as ‘indifferent’, that is to say strictly civic-political nationalism and a more linguistically or culturally-driven nationalism. This is also a key tension in Catalonia, where immigration has transformed the national movement towards an interculturalist ideology and a de facto bilingualism (with Catalan and Spanish) remains a key but strategically unacknowledged element of that movement. The third aspect of Break-Up, and the synthesis of the comparison, is the importance of federalism, which is key for Nairn in seeing a way forward for the constituent countries of the UK and long a crucial, if not the crucial, political element of catalanisme.

Type
Articles
Information
European Review , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 600 - 615
Copyright
© Academia Europaea 2018 

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References

References and Notes

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