| Review of: |
Foundations of National Identity: From Catalonia to Europe by Josep R. Llobera
Berghahn Books, New York, 2004
Pages: 224. £15 |
| Reviewed By: |
Enric Ucelay-Da Cal |
| Reviewed in: |
Nations and Nationalism |
| Date accepted online: |
02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 13, Issue 2, Pages 341-367 |
Book Reviews
This is, as they say, an insider job. Catalan nationalists, in their unceasing self-preoccupation and persistent vagueness about what they fondly call the 'Catalan Fact', like to speak of 'Catalanism', which both can mean and be understood as the most hard-line nationalism or, if need be, something far softer (such as regionalism or simply cultural dedication). Professor Llobera's book is very much a product of the years before the upset of the longstanding 'Pujol régime' in Catalonia. The book's context, at the end of a prolonged period of nationalist domination of Catalan politics and culture, is indicated clearly by its original Catalan-language edition (De Catalunya a Europa: fonaments de la identitat nacional, Barcelona: Empúries, 2003).
To speak of a 'Pujol régime' is possibly mischievous, but nevertheless a graphic way to describe the kind of intellectual mood that for more than two decades was sustained by all 'Catalan national' institutions. In practice, President Jordi Pujol ruled the Catalan autonomous government with an iron hand from April 1980 to December 2003, while exercising sufficient electoral solidity, given his peculiar permanent coalition of two parties (Convergència i Unió). Locally, the 'régime', as I term it, was called 'pujolisme'. Welded to power, 'pujolisme' was held to incarnate the essence of 'Catalan-ness', and, needless to say, was used to control the debate regarding selfhood, its past, present and future.
Professor Llobera begins the Foundations of National Identity with 'The Building Blocks of Nationhood', a clear résumé of 'Catalanist' cliches that is, however, politically ambitious. Pessimism regarding the survival of language is dismissed, as 'the history of the Catalan language shows that these Cassandra-type predictions have been disproved by the sheer determination of an often small but extremely committed group of people who fought against the 'current of history' and managed to turn its direction' (p. 24). 'National Sentiments as the Ultimate Reality' then offers empiricism as a way out, a locally much-admired doctrinal solution to Catalan (and not simply 'Catalanist') conundra: 'the issue at stake is not whether primordialists are right, but the complexity of nationalism' (p. 45). But what about the even greater complexity of society outside the nationalist conception?
This is not to say that Llobera is not correct in many of his analyses. In the chapter 'Distant Splendours, Latter-day Miseries: the Role of Historical Memory', he rightly criticises the superficiality of Edward C. Hansen's Rural Catalonia under the Franco Regime: the Fate of Regional Culture since the Spanish Civil War (1977). Next, Llobera takes on, in a frontal attack, the neo-Marxist theses of E. J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (The Invention of Tradition, 1983) and Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1983). Both these works, in the early 1980s, offered a systematic re-elaboration of what was then known in nationalism studies as 'primordialism'. More than twenty years later, this is not exactly timely stuff: by now surely one can doubt neo-Marxist confidence in the selective use of the half-paradox, by which the Nation is demonstrably a spurious and manipulative reification, but social class, despite the glaring need for 'class consciousness', is presumed to be hard fact. Llobera's solution to this dated challenge is topical but scarcely convincing: he merely has recourse to the Wunderwort of the last decade, the magical term 'identity', which means exactly nothing, but which has served to create an operative, 'live and let live' consensus of sorts between Marxists, nationalists, feminists, queer theorists, and many, many others. Despite the notion's convenience, even its usefulness for simplifying matters like plastic surgery or 'identity theft' in credit cards, identity as a common denominator between diverse social interpretations goes nowhere. It can be shown with ease that identification exists, as a subjective but provable fact. But identity implies something more, a reality beyond belief, something tangible, solid, at least 'out there'. No 'solidarity', not national, class, sexual, religious, or other, has that solidity that compels acceptance as fact: any identity can only be understood, at best, as a hypothesis for which no evidence can be marshaled beyond the felicities of narration.
With complete 'Catalanist' reliabilty, Llobera covers such matters as 'Does Nationalism lead Inevitably to Conflict and Violence?', a topos of the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s in European and American political essay, which he puts paid to by indicating that there are good and bad nationalisms, some of them - like the Catalan version - safely pacific, if not downright pacifist. Much the same can be said of the rest of his chapters, really a sequence of related essays. Significantly, this book has had little repercussion inside Catalan debate. While Professor Llobera's essay might seem fresh when read in Britain, its arguments seem very familiar indeed when examined in Barcelona. Here, sadly, we've heard all this before, and at some length. Paradoxically, if this is a clear limitation to my enthusiasm, it also represents the book's main strength. Despite its taste for reiterative and solipsistic formulations, Catalan nationalism has a strong doctrinal tradition, with considerable capacity for original thinking within somewhat narrow bounds. To present 'a Catalan perspective' in English might be useful for the international reader, as it spares him/her the need to learn Catalan (truthfully, not that much of a burden), and offers an interested and/or interesting resume of ideas about nations and nationalism that specifically reflect 'Catalanism' and the truths the movement as a whole holds to be self-evident.
