VIA Num. 11 / December'09

Editorial

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Lobbyism, governance or participatory democracy in producing EU policy?

Justin Greenwood

In order to respond to new challenges, to structure the wide range of demands and preferences of citizens and to increase the legitimacy of public policy, democratic political systems attempt to combine “representative democracy” with formulas of “participatory democracy”. In the case of the European Union, this goal is even more necessary if we take into account the progressive distancing of European citizens from their institutions and the low participation in elections to the European Parliament. For this reason the EU has been designing a structured framework of relations and dialogue with lobbies or pressure groups in order for the latter to play an active role in the decision-making process. Moreover, according to Profesor Greenwood, these representatives of different interests have come to play a key role in the workings of the European Union, as they have become actors of accountability and a sort of “unofficial opposition”. Despite this, it would be a mistake to conclude that lobbies act on behalf of public interest given that, in most cases, their purpose is to defend private interests. Hence the most one can aspire to is “participatory governance” rather thsan true “participatory democracy”.

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Digression based on 'Life of Galileo', by Bertolt Brecht

Jordi Pujol

In his inaugural speech for the theatre season this year in Barcelona, which we transcribe here, Jordi Pujol explains his personal relationship with the work of Bertolt Brecht, starting with Life of Galileo, which he considers to be, both in terms of its themes and its dramatic structure, “the least Brechtian play by Brecht”. Not only does he examine issues raised by the play’s argumentative plotline, such as the relationship between science and the Church, but also notes the context within which Germany was immersed at the time Brecht started to write, reflecting on his political commitment to communism. Both questions must be taken into account when approaching the German author’s work. “Theatre” he says “has always been a political weapon, and Brecht’s theatre was. But I believe his theatre aimed to describe and attack situations of injustice rather than to propose a new, more just society”.

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The 'Diputació del General' in the medieval and modern centuries (1359-1714). A key institution in the Catalan, pact-based, model of state

Antoni Simon

Six hundred years after the birth of the Generalitat, we asked Professor Simon for an article on the medieval and modern genesis of this leading political institution in Catalonia. The resulting portrait is that of an institution rooted in its social and nacional context, the representation of a desire for democracy and self-government that, throughout the centuries, came up against the powerful centralist force embodied in the figure of the Spanish monarchy. Throughout its three hundred and fifty years of history, we witness a gradual process of consolidation, recognition and identification with Catalonia that is translated into greater power, representativeness and legitimacy. Its end, resulting from the political divergence that started with the Catalan Revolt (Guerra dels Segadors) and ended with the War of the Spanish Succession, must be seen both as a defeat of the pacifist trend in Catalonia but also as the establishment of a top level historical and institutional reference that survived as a symbol until its return in 1931.

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The Catalanist conversion of José Luis L. Aranguren. Letters with Maurici Serrahima

Josep Poca

Maurici Serrahima, Catalanist and catholic lawyer, literary critic, writer and intellectual, engaged in extensive correspondence with José Luis L. Aranguren, philosopher, sociologist and one of the most internationally renowned thinkers, with an immense influence on the 1960’s student movement in Spain. A journey through their letters reveals the mutual influence they had on each other, as catholic layman, and how their positions were brought closer through an understanding of their two peoples, Castilians and Catalans, an aspect that is subject to particular analysis.

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Francesc Maspons i Anglasell, jurist and man of action

Ferran Armengol

This article presents us with a complete biographical note for a man who may be considered one of the leading Catalan jurists from the first half of the 20th century. Still rather unknown, even today, Francesc Maspons i Anglasell (1872-1966) is outstanding for the extensive and wideranging academic, political, social and cultural work that brought him great renown in Catalan and Barcelona society at the beginning of the last century. Originally associated with the constellation of ideas and approaches of Christian humanism, the subject of the present essay was an active defender of Catalan civil law and of Catalonia’s own legal personality. Also outstanding at an international level, he took part in the work done by the Society of Nations concerning national minorities, in complete harmony with the principle of selfdetermination.

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Debate. The state of culture

Jordi Amat

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Classics, art and kitsch. New notes to define western culture

Rob Riemen

While Nietzsche described his experience of the Herbst der Kultur, Steiner describes his experience of “post-culture”. He stresses that knowledge of the classics and classic virtuosity have become almost irrelevant in today’s world. “Le dur désir de durer” (Paul Éluard), the anxious desire to recreate something that lasts, has disappeared. The silence without which the vita contemplativa cannot exist has become rather a scarce commodity in a world that basically cultivates noise. In this text, Riemen follows the line set out by his master Steiner: a new counter-culture has emerged because there’s been no answer to a crucial question: why should we make an effort to refine and disseminate culture when this very culture has often (i.e. throughout the 20th century) been so ineffective in dealing with inhumanity and barbarism?

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A formula to become Catalan. The strategy of basing identity on culture and language

Vicenç Villatoro

The writer Vicenç Villatoro reflects on the role that could be played by culture as a means of integration in the Catalonia of the future. His thesis, however, is based on looking at successful formulas from the past. If the identity of Catalans has traditionally been based on language and culture, thereby allowing the integration of migrants that have successively settled in Catalonia, then in times of transformation and fragmentation of identity, language and culture can once again become the mechanism to avoid those conflicts arising from non-porous bubbles of identity coexisting, side by side, in the same territory.

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The word

Joan Solà

In this text, Professor Joan Solà explains his diagnosis of the status of the Catalan language and describes the reasons why he believes its health is far from good, from a triple point of view: political, social and philological. To reverse this situation, which is the result of an inadequate agreement reached during the Transition, as well as entrenched prejudices in a large part of Spain, he claims that Catalan speakers should remain firm in order to normalise the intimate relationship established between individuals that contributes to the make up of a community and its language.

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Between resignation and frustration

Jaume Vidal

Based on the claim that artists today are talking with their colleagues around the world and creating in a global village, the lecturer and critic Jaume Vidal reflects on how contemporary art has become institutionalised in Catalonia. The article, far from being stereotypical or complacent, decisively criticises a number of the deficits of a process that has ended up blurring the Catalan cultural project and revealing the faults of a museum-based policy that has turned the powerful vitality of Barcelona’s art into resignation and frustration.

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A paradoxical cultural diplomacy?

Carles Torner

The author of this essay, formerly the director of the Catalan culture’s literary programme, when Catalan culture was guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007, positively reviews the internationalisation of Catalan literature and culture over the last few years. In this respect, he believes that an active policy supporting the translation of Catalan literature (declared as a decalogue in these pages) has been apt. Torner talks to us of translation not as a static principle, of selfconcentration and self-sufficiency, but as a dynamic process: literatures mutually transform through translation. Within this universal process, he claims there is a reciprocal reconfiguring of cultures within the international and European context. Catalonia and Catalan culture are experiencing a great paradox, that of maintaining a certain cultural diplomacy without embassies, that of having, despite the limitations, the considerable power of a literature that is in dialogue with other European literatures.

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The Barcelona brand. A prêt-à-porter modernity

Joan Ramon Resina

Barcelona is still far short of its posibilitéis of becoming an enviable hub of cultural and urban dissemination, something that cannot be conceived outside its role as the capital of Catalonia. We are far from the ideal and the more ambitious goals of the Catalan and Barcelonese artisans and bourgeoisie of the 19th century. The whims and prejudices of cultural progressism that has held sway over the city’s official discourse during the last few decades have resulted in a non-project, built around a series of “myths” that are relatively easy to identify as a common ground closer to abstract universalism (multiculturalism, loose cosmopolitanism, the vacillating avant garde of the eighties and nineties, an erroneous way of understanding the nature of the Mediterranean, etc.), whose only goal was to maintain a certain intellectual status quo. Barcelona –says the author – has ended up resembling Naples, an ultra-Mediterranean city that is always half done or half undone.

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The nature of commitment

Àngel Castiñeira, Josep M. Lozano i Raimon Ribera

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Interview with Avishai Margalit

Joan Vergés

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La poésie catalane. "La Nouvelle Revue Française"

Jaume Subirana

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CULLA, Joan B. La dreta espanyola a Catalunya. Ed. La Campana

Manuel Milián Mestre

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Full Journal

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