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Book Reviews
In the twentieth century, sport has become an important vehicle for national-identity and nation-building. The Olympic Games provide a forum for demonstrations of national pride as well as an arena of inter-state competition. It is therefore of particular interest when international sporting events are staged in places with a contested national identity. This was the case with the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, which became the focus of competition among Spanish, Catalan and city leaders, each seeking to appropriate the games and gain credit for their success. The Spanish government saw the games as a showpiece of Spain’s new democracy and modernity, while Catalanists sought to Catalanise them and use them to reinforce Catalonia’s position on the world stage. Yet neither side could afford to spoil the event or be blamed for discrediting the image of the whole proceedings. Hargreaves traces this contestation and the way the various interests were eventually successfully accommodated in a paz olímpica. He starts with a review of sport and nationalism, followed by a chapter on Catalan nationalism and one on Olympism, globalisation and nationalism. The remaining chapters chart the progress of the Barcelona Olympics themselves.
The blow-by-blow accounts of the events make interesting reading, although they tend to be a little descriptive and often impressionistic. The main weakness in the book, however, is in the theoretical understanding of nationalism and stateless nations in general. On page 4, Hargreaves cites as a fundamental postulate of nationalism that ‘the nation must possess its own state, so that state and nation coincide’. Yet on page 141 he tells us that ‘the majority of Catalan nationalists are not separatists’. The discussion of civic and ethnic nationalism is similarly confused. He insists that Catalan nationalism is ‘strongly ethnic’, apparently based on the fact that it promotes the Catalan language. On this basis, American and French nationalism would be even more ethnic yet Hargreaves presents these as the archetypes of civic nationalism. Since even speaking the language at all brands Catalans as ethnic particularists (p. 35), it would seem that the only way they can escape the charge would be to abandon their own language altogether. More problems arise when he contrasts this Catalan ‘ethnic’ nationalism with a supposedly more ‘civic’ Spanish nationalism, as though Spanish nationalists were indifferent to language questions. On page 109 he excuses Spanish flag waving because this represents a ‘non-nationalist, civic conception of the nation’. This is, of course, a familiar bias in writing about nationalism, that there is one rule for the majorities and another for the minorities.
Other value judgements are more or less explicit. Hargreaves has a positive view of Juan Antonio Samaranch and the IOC, but he seems upset with something called ‘fashionable thirdworldist ideology’ (pp. 32, 56, 122). The other weakness in the book is a tendency to misspelling, notably of the names of Catalan political parties, and to factual errors. Jordi Pujol was never the president of the Committee of the Regions (p. 124) – but his rival Pasqual Maragall was.
Catalan nationalism is a complex and subtle set of ideas, reflecting apparently conflicting principles and the practice of a small nation sandwiched between two large ones. Since the transition it has sought to play a role locally, on the Spanish stage, in Europe and in the world. The Olympic saga illustrates well the potential and limits of this strategy and the success of the wily Jordi Pujol in playing it to those limits. This book provides a small insight into this wider topic but a deeper exploration of the politics of minority nationalism could have made it a lot better.
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