POL114 Final Podcast

The transcription discusses the revival of the Catalan independence movement in the 2010s, examining its causes and failures. It delves into the historical context, including the War of Spanish Succession and the banning of Catalan language. The research draws parallels with Hindu nationalism and explores events leading to the movement's resurgence. It highlights the role of key political parties like CIU and ERC, focusing on their strategies and shifts towards independence. The 2010 court ruling triggering a shift in nationalist party strategies is emphasized, with CIU evolving from seeking autonomy within Spain to advocating for independence, while ERC maintains a strong pro-independence stance. The summary underscores the political dynamics, strategic shifts, and public sentiment driving the movement. Good evening, Professor Lenton. My name is Clay Christensen, and this is my Political Science 114 final presentation, or in this case, a podcast, where I will be going over my research question of what were the key causes in the revival of the Catalan independence movement in the 2010s, as well as why did they fail? To answer this question, it's a question of Catalonia and Spain. The connection between the two requires us to look into a little bit of the history of Catalonia within Spain. Where it starts, really, is the War of Spanish Succession, where the Spanish had a siege on Barcelona, and it led to the Barcelona falling on September 11th, which is still celebrated today as Diada Nacional holiday, which will be more significant when we look deeper into the 2010s. After this, Catalan was banned as an official language, started Spanish, and started Spanish oppression on the Catalan people. When researching this, this really reminded me of when we were in class talking about Hindu nationalism, and them not comparing it to the British invasion, but to the Sultanates and Caliphates that were present in the area, and that's where they get their Hindu nationalism from. We'll see when we get into the 2010s and start really diving into the research question that this seems to be another example of this. Going into the late 1900s, the Catalan industrial economy and textile industry was rising, leading them to want more political authority. I will, unfortunately, pronounce this wrong, but the Renaixena was a cultural revolution that revived the Catalan language, literature, and national consciousness. This also led to the formation of parties advocating for Catalan autonomy within Spain, and then in 1932 led to the first statute of autonomy under the Second Republic, which led to the restoration of the Catalan government. Catalonia at this time, in the 1930s and 40s, tried to declare independence, but it was quickly suppressed by Spain and Madrid, which led into the Franco dictatorship and the Spanish Civil War, in which their autonomy that they received in 1932 under the Second Republic was abolished, and Catalan language was abolished from schools, government, and public life, trying to promote the Castilian language over the Catalan language. As we transition to democracy, a new statute of autonomy in 2006 granted broad self-government to Catalonia, as well as letting them govern or have Catalonian governorship and allowing them to speak Catalan in schools and other places, as well as in public life. As we transition to politics, it was mainly dominated by the CIU, led by Jordi Puyol, which is a political party that we'll talk a lot more about in the 2010s, and their core goal is they want autonomy within Spain rather than independence. The independence movement at this point in time was marginal, but led by the ERC, who we'll also talk about a good amount. It's a lot of comparing the CIU and ERC, as well as nationalism starts to build again through education and Catalan language use in Catalan media, and forming their own nationalist thoughts again after the transition from the Franco dictatorship to democracy. So now we'll really hone in on the causes of the revival of the independence movement, and we're going to start with the change in the nationalist party strategy in the 2010s, which is one of the key causes. So the main cause that led to a lot of the different public and political movements in Catalonia in the 2010s was the 2010 court ruling from Spain itself, from a constitutional court in Spain, which rolled back some of the key parts of the 2006 Catalan Statute of Autonomy. This made language use less prominent in Catalonia and in the country as a whole, and it felt like a hit to the Catalan people. This court ruling shocked Catalonia for both its people and its political institutions, forcing parties to shift with the rising independence movement of its people. This angered the people of Catalonia, as we'll see later, and because of that, parties had to shift in order to keep up with the people and the rising demands. This breakdown focuses on the shift in strategy used by key political actors and parties, which is crucial to reignite the claims for independence. So first we'll start out with the CIU, which historically sought to increase Catalonian autonomy within the Spanish state, rather than an outright cry for pro-independence. They used a tactic called subsuming, which meant all the policy issues, including left-right politics, were framed in the terms of territorial dimension, or Catalan nation-building. They weren't really a pro-independence, but they wanted their autonomy within Spain while staying a member of the Spanish, staying a key part of the Spanish state. The CIU was the leading party in Catalonia from the 80s to the 2000s. They lost government in 2003. And then in 2008, the financial crisis deliberately focused on greater fiscal autonomy, framing the economic crisis in explicitly territorial terms, which again, the subsuming strategy, putting all of this under Catalan nation-building, rather than independence and trying to leave Spain. But then this 2010 court ruling happened. Economic outrage became the norm. Movements and other communal arguments was an outcry from the Catalan people, and it became unpopular to want to be an autonomy within Spain. Now the CIU knew that they had to have a reason to move into these pro-independence claims, and their leader, Artur Mas, had a trigger event in 2012, where the Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy dismissed Mas' proposal for an economic pact, which was their excuse into getting into the pro-independence claim. So this is where the shift happened from wanting an autonomy within Spain to actually being pro-independence in the CIU. So Mas abandoned the CIU's historical commitment of nation-building without a state into declaring a personal commitment to pro-independence. Again, because of this party's past, this was a remarkable change for the leader of a party rooted in the Catalan bourgeoisie with a history of moderate nationalism. Mas then, in later 2012, called a snap election, an early election to secure an extraordinary majority for a referendum on independence. Their campaign goal, the CDC, which was the dominant party within the CIU, the CIU is a coalition of parties, starts to present itself as the only party capable of leading Catalonia to independence. The CIU as a whole started out as a moderate party that wanted autonomy within Spain. They still wanted to be within Spain, but they wanted to do their own thing. With the 2010 Constitutional Court ruling that rolled back some of the 2006 Statute of Autonomy proceedings, this caused outrage within the people and forced the CIU to shift their goals into becoming into that pro-independence stance, which was contrary to what the party had been about for a while, and it got them the quick vote and the quick agreement for what they need, but we'll see later on when we compare it to the ERC, it was not sustainable for lasting and actually pushing this idea of independence through to really becoming an independent state outside of Spain. Now we'll compare that to the ERC, which was the third party in Catalonia in the 2000s behind the CIU and the PIP, the People's Party, which was more right-wing, and the ERC was well equipped to lead the independence charge with its history as a party being based on independence. The PIP has always been a party that has been pro-independence. There was some shift in leadership in the early 2000s that kind of pushed it away from independence, but previously in the 20th century had been pro-independence, so this is where they kick off their strategic renewal. They see this coming early in 2010, and they shift their ideology from what was, we were independence, but some leadership change stopped that, and to we are committed and we are pro-independence. This was a more aggressive strategy for securing independence, and it opposed moderation. The ERC had previously opposed Spanish Parliament's watered-down version of the Statute of Autonomy, and since some of those have been rolled back, now that they were really charged and ready to attack the pro-independence angle of the Catalonian people. The ERC also had an austerity advantage that, unlike the CIU, the ERC was not saddled with popular discontent over austerity measures of the first MAS administration. The CIU had some political scandals, including Jordi Pujol and MAS, and at the time the popular discontent wasn't, the popular discontent kind of hurt the CIU, even though after they claimed pro-dependence, their approval rating shot up, but the ERC was the new fresh party that most people believed in the longer run could really convince and bring the people the pro-independence that they needed. So from the electoral surge, the support from the ERC surged from 7.2% in 2010 to 13.7% in 2012. Its number of seats more than doubled, rising from 10 to 21, and this surge deprived MAS, which their approval ratings went up, but in the actual elections didn't perform as well as the ERC did, and deprived them of the majority government. Because of this, the voter perception, those that switched from the CIU to the ERC, did so out of the belief that the ERC was a more reliable vehicle for securing independence. So we'll look at the shift of these two parties. The CIU is mostly framed off of their opportunism. Some observers saw the move as political opportunism to rebrand the CIU, divert attention away from the austerity policies, the corruption scandals of Puhl, and to capitalize on the public sentiment demonstrated in the Diadas previously, and resentment over Rajoy's rejection. So the people saw this as taking an opportunity, taking an opportunity to capitalize on a trend by the people, and to get quick votes in quick elections, rather than realizing that, oh, this is what the people really want. And if you try to fake it and try to claim the opportunity, even though your values and your history doesn't really align with that, the people are going to choose the option that can really, that they think can really get them what they want, which was the ERC. And we see this in the outbidding, as I call it. It was an attempt to outbid the resurgent ERC party in promoting national interests. So trying to win votes and say, oh, the CDC or the CIU as a whole can do this better than the ERC, although people didn't believe it. The ERC had the historical pro-independence backing that they believed that they could, or that the people believed that the ERC could really bring them what they want. And the CIU, quite frankly, really didn't have many other options left, although others argue that Rajoy's outright rejection of the fiscal pact may have left Moss with no other credible option remaining other than independence. So again, at this point, the CIU is kind of in the standstill, went for the trend of pro-independence, and seeing the rallies and thinking, we need to capture these people to stay relevant. And it just turned out not working for them. For the ERC, however, the overall outcome was the ERC successfully reestablished its credibility and is the party most reliable for radical constitutional change and independence, becoming an indispensable force for government formation in Catalonia. So this is where we kind of see the difference between the ERC and the CIU. And we can see it in a quote right here, a quote from page 96 of The Causes and Consequences of Catalan Nationalist Party Strategic Behaviors, but this revision has not been easy to maintain. Pressures for adopting a clear commitment to Catalan independence have come from society at large, from within nationalist movements as a result of ERC's reassertion of its core commitment to Catalan independence, and from within the party organization itself. In a political context that is increasingly polarized between extremes of succession and centralization, the CIU is struggling to present itself coherently and credibly as the best party to stand up for Catalan interests. It says it right here. The CIU was not properly set up with its historical backing, with its resentment and ideology within this time period in the late 2000s, early 2010s, to really capitalize off the interests and they tried to be opportunist and grab the people rather than sticking to their core beliefs, and it alienated their population. And in the end, the CIU in 2015 had to, or disintegrated. It dissolved into nothing, and the ERC party was the real party that stood up and fought for pro-independence movements in the 2010s. So from now we switch over to my second major point, which was media and public pressure. So the first main reason that this played into a factor of the revival of the Catalan interests in the 2010s was the Catalan linguistics in schools between 1992 and 2012, which was an explanation for the rise in pro-independence. In 1992, Catalonia put in linguistic immersion policy, which meant Catalonian, which made the primary language in lower and secondary education Catalan. The kids that were learning in lower education and secondary education in the 1990s were growing up to be the ones protesting in the mid 2000s. The largest support of pro-independence for Catalonia by far in the 2010s was the younger group, the 18 to 24, who were all learning Catalan, developing the prideful eyes of a Catalonian that wanted Catalonian independence. They spoke it in school, they spoke it at home. Those were the people that really wanted Catalan independence, and we see that as a reverberating effect. Those kids taught Catalan in the 90s were the same group protesting for independence in the 2010s. As we can see here, Professor Lendon, I'll put this in my transcript, is a graph showing the immersion of Catalan, and for the people, the parents' choice, and those that began learning the language in the mother tongue, or whatever language their mother spoke, the majority of parents agreed that Catalan should be taught, and we see the time distribution that parents and kids think that they should be learning in. Catalan is by far the favorite in primary education, it's at 43.9 percent, secondary it's at 41.9 percent. We can even see it in the secondary time distribution, which is English rather than Castilian, showing that English, they want 28.6 percent of the hours being taught to their students being taught in English, and secondary they want it at 31.2 percent. They want it to be a Catalonian, well, first they want it to be multilingual, but they prioritize learning Catalan in schools rather than Castilian, or English, or any other language. And from here, we move on to Elias Kennedy's theory of crowds. This was from a secondary source, a journal source, or a scholarly source, and it described the effect that the open crowd has on the Catalonian independence movement. Kennedy theorizes his crowd as a dense, leaderless, egalitarian collective that briefly frees the individual from hierarchy and everyday commands, what makes crowds and public pressure successful. This is important to remember in the mass movements of Catalonia, because this definition and the four main features that I'll go over in a second, you can see play a role in the fall of the Catalonian independence movement as a reason why it didn't work. So first, we'll start off with the four main features of the natural crowd characterized by Kennedy. First is the unlimited urge to grow, its supreme attribute, the crowd disintegrates when growth stops. Second being equality, no one is greater or better than another in a crowd. Density, the liberation from the fear of being touched, bodies feel like one body, one collective group, and has a direction towards a goal. We'll go over the unlimited urge to grow and equality, but the direction was clear, direction was independence, and the density at times was huge. I mean, the scale of these protests were massive, and we'll go over that in a bit. So what caused the massive support for independence in Catalonia to the people, again, was this 2010 constitutional court ruling. It comes back to this. It was a major factor that kick-started independence movements for the people of Catalonia, as we just talked about, the shift in political identity. Now there are some other key factors that might have played a role for the people, this being the 2008 economic crisis, as well as Catalonia's slowing economic prowess within Spain itself. So it might be a combination of the 2008 economic crisis, as well as the Catalonia's slowing economic prowess within Spain might have been reasons, but the main reason was this discrimination and prejudice they felt during this 2010 constitutional court hearing. Because of this, this led into big civic associations trying to create protests and mass movements within the people of Catalonia, and it worked for a while. So one, especially being the Assemblea Nacional Catalana, the ANC, as I will call it during this podcast, as well as the Unión Cultural, were critical. Their role was used in critical events, or they used critical events like the court ruling to mobilize public opinion and pressure political parties to change the narrative, which they did with the CIU and ERC, because the ERC didn't really change. The timing of the surge, it began to rise slightly in 2011, but the real surge hit in 2012, the year the ANC was formally established. Before the ANC's campaign, support was 34% in June 2012 for independence. Just one month after the ANC and Unión organized the massive Diada demonstrations in September 2012, pro-independence ideology surged to 44.3%. This went on for a while, and they were successful in growing and increasing Catalan independence support throughout the referendum, until the leaders of these groups, Jordi Sánchez and Jordi Cuixart, were both arrested in 2019 during the sentencing of Catalan political leaders by the Spanish state, by Rajoy. This ignited even more anger and resentment toward the Spanish state from Catalonia, and this is where we see the rise in the Tsunami d'Unicratique. The Tsunami d'Unicratique was a campaign that coordinated mass protests using crowd imagery and social media following the 2019 sentencing of political leaders involved in the failed unilateral declaration of independence. Again, these arrests included the ANC and Unión Cultural leaders, Jordi Sánchez and Jordi Cuixart, but they also included Vice President Oriol Junqueras, former ministers, parliament speakers, as well as the two activists. Their strategy, the Tsunami d'Unicratique, launched with the motto of rights, freedom, self-determination, and the image of a menacing wave. The TD wanted to define itself as a constant, continuous, and inexhaustible campaign with the central motto of, you are the tsunami, directly interpolating individuals into civil disobedience. Their use of the tsunami is very interesting in all of this, as it is a metaphor that adds violence and force to the immensity and how constant the sea is, so they wanted it to be a constant force of the sea and the waves, but with the violence of a tsunami. They wanted these protests to be constant and violent, not in their fighting, but in their ideology. Use the imagery of waves and drops, drops being people in a larger sea. Everyone is as one, as Kennedy would describe. They wanted everyone, the mass, becoming one, as Kennedy would describe. This quote, which discusses what the tsunami means in terms of people, it not only presents the social movement as a force of nature, but also foregrounds the sea's most deadly face. Even though Catalan independence movement was avowedly nonviolent, according to Kennedy, the sea is one of the most powerful mass symbols, and it's characterized by persistence as well as its immensity. It can never be filled. So the methodology was it operated in both physical and virtual space, using social media and telegram accounts to announce its next protest or next rallies, or just to get the people more engaged, something that social media use in independence movements wasn't available 10 years before this. It wasn't available in 1932 or the Franco dictatorship. It was something new, but it had a flaw, and Kennedy will hammer this home. The flaw was the campaign portrayed itself as self-organized citizen networks, but there was someone working these Twitter accounts and telegram accounts. There was an invisible nucleus that organized everything and became powerful in the decision, deciding actions of this communication. For a while, the TD or Tsunami Democratique was very successful, successful in blocking all activity at the Barcelona airport in 2019, the day that the sentences were announced. This garnered international attention and repercussions, and successfully dissolved internal follower discontent over the secrecy of the plans and growing density of the crowds. The crowd's getting bigger. Other actions as it blocked highways at the French border, which was a symbol of isolating the Spanish state from Europe, events during general elections, and planning for an event in the Barcelona versus Real Madrid football match. Those were three of its biggest events, but there's a reason that the Tsunami Democratique failed. As Kennedy would put it in his first reason, or his first feature of the up and crowd is the unlimited urge to grow. Unfortunately, the Tsunami Democratique stops growing. The progressive but inexorable fading of the Tsunami Democratique after its high-profile events attested directly to the Canadian observation that the quote, the disintegration of the crowd starts as soon as it stops to grow. The reason that the crowd stops was because the Tsunami Democratique posted one of its rallies or messages on Twitter, but in English, and the true core of the Tsunami Democratique space wanted, like, you want those to be in Catalan. You want those to represent the pro-independence, you want it to be in your language. And this caused the Tsunami Democratique to take a back step, and once they took that back step, they were never going to get it back. And as well as in the Barcelona Real Madrid football match, it's their demonstration failed to achieve the desired effects, which, again, marked the beginning of its decline. So in conclusion, the ANC, Omnium Cultural, and Tsunami Democratique all disobeyed a key component of Canadian theory. This is supposed to be a dense, leaderless, egalitarian collective. The ANC had Jordi Sanchez leading it, Omnium Cultural, Jordi Couchard, and Tsunami Democratique, this invisible leadership that changed what it meant to have leaders and host crowds. They all had their own agendas that they were trying to push, rather than just freedom of independence, which was the direction, again, one of Kennedy's four major features. It washed away the direction that the group wanted to face, that the collective of people wanted to face and take down, and changed it into being the agenda that the leaders wanted to take. As well as the observations we just talked about, the crowd must keep going, that disintegration of the crowd starts as soon as it stops to grow. Tsunami Democratique started with a tweet, and it failed to achieve the desired effects, or the fading of the Tsunami Democratique as a whole. The Omnium Cultural and the ANC, they had a little bit of a different story with their leaders being jailed. The crowds waned and the intensity dropped once those leaders, which they shouldn't have had for a collective and a group and a mass protest and movement, but crowds waved and intensity dropped, causing effectiveness of the movement to slow. So moving on to our overall conclusion, the key causes of the Catalan independence movement revival in the 2010s was due to, one, the 2010 constitutional court ruling that rolled back certain parts of the 2006 Statute of Autonomy in Catalonia. This was the biggest spark that led to both the political and mass movements of Catalonia independence in the 2010s, as well as the strategic changes in attitude from the policy of Catalonian parties. CIU completely 180'd from pro-autonomy with Spain to pro-independence, done in order to keep with the ideology of the people. Again, this failed in the end. Historically it wasn't pro-independence, rubbed off on the people as opportunistic and trying to stay in power and relevant, and that led to the split in the CIU. The ERC, historically pro-independence, gained the massive majority away from the CIU as the true independence party, and it also gave the crowds of people that were searching and wanting this independence, it gave them legitimacy. By a political party backing them and gaining a ton of support, it gave them legitimacy. The ERC was the main guiding political force in the search for independence. The political aspect of this is the story of one party trying to seize their moment, or the story of one party, the ERC, seizing their moment while others followed the trends that weren't as sincere to what they believed. People saw that and chose the party that they believed that could get them to their goal. The ERC party grew, the CIU party dissolved. And then we'll look into the power of the crowd and linguistically, the linguistic immersion policy that led 90s kids that grew up learning Catalan to start to gain pride for being Catalonia and wanting to have a Catalonian state. Those, again, 18 to 34 year olds were the people most pro-independence, and they got this from this linguistic immersion policy, which has gone through their history as long as we can remember. I mean, they've always, or the Catalonian, no matter what, throughout history, has always wanted their language to be spoken, and their language being spoken incites pride in Catalonia as a whole. And as for some of the reasons it failed, well, we'll look at Kennedy's ideology of a dense, leaderless, egalitarian collective, both leaderless, or leaderless being a key aspect of this. Jordi Sanchez, Jordi Cuchart, and the Invisible Corps of the Tsunami Democratique undermined the effectiveness of mobilizing great crowds at Diada presentations or other mass-mobilized groups or protests. The ANC and Omnium Culture L, as well as the Tsunami Democratique, they were effective for a time, but Kennedy's ideology of, you have to keep growing, and you have to be leaderless, they both disobeyed, and it's a reason that they fell and were unsuccessful in Catalonia becoming an independent country. These changes, both from the people and the political parties that resumpt them, were the true reasons for both the rise and revival in Catalonia, in the Catalonia independence movement, as well as the fall of the movement itself and Catalonia staying a part of Spain. Professor Lenton, I thank you for having me in class this year, and I really appreciate your class. You have been probably my favorite teacher at Wake, and I hope to have you again when I take another politics class. Have a great winter break, and I will see you later.