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VIA Num. 6 / May'08

Summary

Editorial: Referents

Miquel Calsina

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Catalonia, an old European loyalty

Jordi Pujol

Former Catalan president Jordi Pujol wished to link up his speech, given last October in Frankfurt at the 2007 Book Fair, where Catalan culture was the guest of honor, with another speech that he gave twenty-two years before, in 1985, to the Town Council of Aachen, just a few months before Spain joined the EEC. Both speeches may be considered an assessment of Catalonia’s European vocation and sense of attachment. The history of Catalonia is also a history of demonstrable loyalty to Europe and of a spirit that is open to the world, these being the flipside of Catalonia’s loyalty to its own identity, its linguistic and cultural personality.

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Eight remarks concerning populism

Ralf Dahrendorf

The complexity of populism (or rather, of populisms) and some of the difficulties with regard to how these may be identified mean they are, in their full scope, a phenomenon of difficult definition. This article, divided into eight brief commentaries, attempts to reach an understanding of the true nature and raison d’etre of those populisms, very much present throughout the political history of the 20th century, underlining a number of contradictions, as far as possible isolating their most individual and distinctive characteristics and variables, and presenting some of the most common misconceptions that arise in approaches to this question.

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Television and national identity. The splendour and decline of Catalan autonomous television

Salvador Cardús

In spite of such difficulties as may have arisen since its early days, for twenty years now Televisió de Catalunya (TVC) has managed to achieve its purpose of institutional representation, allowing for a certain public representation of Catalan linguistic normality, although this may only be because it has enabled an absolutely contemporary television register to come into being. It can also be said, and with all the certainty in the world, that taken globally, the enterprise of autonomous television, with its two channels TV3 and C33, has been one of the greatest political successes of the government that brought it into being. In spite of some (unquestionable) weaknesses, the author states that TVC can claim a fundamental role in the creation of a Catalan communication area, i.e. a sphere of language, culture and political community that has, to a certain extent, encouraged “the redistribution of cultural power, seen as the capacity of collective identities to be recreated within a context of economic and cultural globalization, and of a power that, nowadays, is applied chiefly by controlling the geopolitical communication area”. Nonetheless, beyond this necessary balance, what are the weak points, the challenges, such as the persistence in Catalonia of a still hegemonic Spanish communication area, and the questions, such as the role of TVC as an instrument to reconstruct a nation in today’s world? This article analyses these and other issues.

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Building your house upon the shifting sands

Antoni Puigverd

The idea of a Catalonia basically configured on the pillars of the two leading trends of the 19th and 20th century, Modernism and Noucentisme (“1900-ism”) (the first eminently cultural and the second of a social and political origin) is today in crisis. According to the author of this article, the clearest proofs of this conception’s demise, “which everyone has in their head, even today, when they talk of Catalonia”, are cultural weakness (particularly evident in language) and economic frailty. According to Puigverd, the historical driving force behind the self esteem of Catalans, namely economic strength, is disappearing. This is a critical view that, beyond the successes of the basic formulas of recent Catalanism (spelled out by Jordi Pujol when he said that “he who lives and works in Catalonia is Catalan”), explores the pitfalls and failures, such as the incapacity of Catalanism as a whole (he says) to actively incorporate new Catalans. The author states that the dream of Noucentisme should be abandoned or, at least, we should have the courage to reconsider it, from top to bottom.

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Can the minority nations of plurinational states be politically accommodated through federal agreements?

Ferran Requejo

At present, there is no clear answer to the question raised in the title. It is easy to offer arguments, either for or against, of a more or less theoretical or generalist nature in order to provide a quick answer. But in order to provide reasoned answers we need to consider, on the one hand, the contributions of current theories of democracy within contexts of national pluralism and, on the other hand, the conclusions of the practical experiences offered by analyses of comparative politics. And these two fields have established that federal states do not allow an effective accommodation of the internal pluralism of plurinational states. In fact, all plurinational federations today have problems in accommodating their internal national communities. And we may ask ourselves why this is the case.

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Challenges to the Union, today

Joaquim Llimona

Europe is a project that has been capable of creating and offering its members an extremely solid framework of peaceful coexistence, democratic stability, progress and economic growth, cohesion and social and territorial balance, etc. At the same time it is also a project that given political leaders set up within an extremely specific context and based on very highly historical experiences and circumstances. Fifty years after its birth, and having undergone many different processes of enlargement and institutional change, the EU today is faced with a significant number of challenges in terms of the economy, society, institutions, politics, culture, of the legitimacy of its citizens and of security, challenges that are largely determined by global transformations and by the change or shifting of the key geo-strategic centers that set the pace of international relations. The author of this article analyses and debates the nature of some of these challenges and examines the strengths and weaknesses of the EU today in terms of meeting these challenges.

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The happiness of citizens

Raimon Ribera

Does the state have anything to say about the happiness of its citizens? This issue has recently come up in public debate and warrants some consideration. First of all, it’s easy to have two opposing spontaneous reactions. The first would be that, “Happiness is purely subjective and personal, something that each person is responsible for achieving, and with which the state has nothing to do. The last thing we need is for the state to interfere in people’s private lives”. The second reaction would be that, “Happiness is the great aspiration of human beings and therefore of all citizens. The purpose of the state is to serve its citizens, it is an apparatus designed to facilitate co-existence and one that allows people to develop their own path in life. The purpose of the state is to advance the wellbeing of its citizens and wellbeing goes beyond material issues, including the most basic aspirations, the desire to live a successful life”. Let us not rush to classify these reactions as liberal, in the case of the former, and social democratic, for the latter, rather let us consider that both are right, which will lead us to look at the issue a little more closely.

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Joan Sales, Esprit and the war in Spain. the reappearance of Incerta glòria

Xavier Pla i Olivier Mongin

The republication, in this revised translation, of the foremost novel of Catalan literature, namely Incerta glòria, originally published in 1956, is an opportunity to once again highlight the important role played by the Spanish Civil War in the history of our century, as well as to highlight the work of literary representation that is signified by such an historical event. We present two analyses, one after the other, the first by Olivier Mongin, placing the event of the war within the framework of the philosophical and literary debate in the magazine Esprit; and the other by Xavier Pla, describing the context of the publication of this novel, its importance under Franco’s regime and the repercussions it had in France when the first translation was published.

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May ‘68, forty years on

Agustí Pons

The riots of May ‘68 broke out at a time when certain material and technological advances had been occurring and which would lead to a shift in the concept of wellbeing, social relations and the role of women in society. However, the events of May forty years ago cannot be compared to, nor are they at all comparable with, other historic events such as the French Revolution. Although (according to the author) the revolt of May ‘68 was the last European uprising, with its tenuous yet actual link to the October Revolution, it is also true that its failure marked the beginning of the end and the downfall of that ideology. For one fundamental reason: those that took to the streets in May ‘68 had not established any plan nor did they have any real alternative to the democratic system, the only system within which such a rebellion is possible.

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The paradise of the “soixante-huitards”

Francesc-Marc Àlvaro

The author tackles, in a succinct but highly revealing way, the keys to explaining the appeal and influence of a part of the events and characteristics of May ‘68 (the most ideological) on “our own” soixante-huitards (“sixty-eighters”), a generation of young people who, under the same conditions in which the transition to democracy took place, would very soon (too soon) find themselves occupying positions of power and political responsibility. The fundamentalist, ecology based trends entrenched in the “no” culture, the culture of rejection, the radical immobility of a part of the educational world and variable geometry pacifism are some examples of what has happened. Dogma has replaced rationalism in many spheres of our society or, to put it another way, there has been an exaggeration of the influence and coherence of certain discourses, particularly due to the untimely protagonism of our own Catalan version of the generation of May ‘68.

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Education after may ‘68

Luc Ferry

There is an approach that has proliferated in our society (and which can be extrapolated to Western Europe as a whole throughout the last thirty years) that, although originating in the school education plan, has had repercussions on the social habits of extensive layers of society. This is a model based on the four great illusions that the French philosopher and former minister Luc Ferry analysed in the talk, which we have reproduced here, organised by the CEJP and given in Barcelona in November 2007. These are four great mirages arising from the most naive aspects of trends resulting from the ideological uproar represented by revolutionary movements nurtured in the shadow of May ‘68 in France. The four illusions, namely “everything can be invented, nothing is passed on”, “replace work with play”, “motivation is a greater value than work” and “being young is brilliant whereas being old is a catastrophe”, have left an indelible mark on western societies, especially those that are most advanced, and have now revealed themselves to be what they are: pure illusion. As the years have passed the mirage has evaporated, leaving us to face the vast and cruel expanse of the desert.

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France’s may ‘68: another event in an eventful decade

Damià Pons

Endless images, changes and events of a social, economic, technical, political and cultural nature all converge in the 1960s and can, to a very large extent, be found in the origin of a number of references that are still applicable today in the West. Some of these facts, and their consequences in terms of the change in mentality that followed them, penetrated into the sphere of the Països Catalans (“Catalan Countries”), albeit with a certain delay. This was not only due to the ideological and moral censorship of a well-established, authoritarian regime, it was also because priorities focused, for obvious reasons, on basic issues such as how to regain democracy and its institutions or Catalan language and culture. What does the Parisian student revolt of May ’68 represent within the context of this eventful decade? Was it any more influential than other events that were objectively as, or perhaps more, remarkable and significant? One of the answers suggested by the author of the present article is that, beyond any judgments of a diverse nature that might be made, the movement in ‘68, which particularly involved lower middle class and culturised university students, was a representative act that led to young people incorporating themselves to the political agenda of liberal democracies as the subject of public policies per se.

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Where is the rage, where is the joy of those days?

Salvador Giner

May ‘68 was an event of some complexity, and ought to be contextualized within the framework of other phenomena of diverse consideration, some of which may be considered even more decisive and far ranging than the very events to which they refer. Four decades are not enough to grasp the consequences of these and the reactions are probably more easily perceived than the results themselves. Neither is it possible to establish parallels between May ‘68 and the violent disturbances that took place in the suburbs of several French cities in 2005, or the outburst in 2006, during which millions of young people (more than in 1968) demonstrated in France for more specific and less ideological reasons than those of that May forty years previously. Probably the sole heir of that movement is today’s anti-globalization, and this is only true to a certain extent, such as the simplicity of a number of its analyses or the banality of a number of its slogans. In spite of all this, however, we must not underestimate the events of spring 1968.

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May ‘68 in perspective

Carles Llinàs

There is no doubt that May ‘68 cannot be considered as an event at the same level, or with the same status, as other historical events that have represented a watershed or a turning point, or that have proved to be decisive in the way historians separate historical periods, so as to make the passage of time easier to understand. If we look at some of the most characteristic slogans of May ‘68, for example concerning “imagination” or the climate of liberation, emancipation or spontaneity, as opposed to the supposed asphyxia induced by traditional institutions, or even by the dominance of reason in modernity, we notice, so the author says, that these are elements, all of them, that have a history that predates 1968 and are not exempt from significant contradictions. Moreover, attempting to find a parallel to what we might call the essence of May ‘68 leads us to conclude that either it does not exist or that the “transgression” of limits belongs to the real essentiality of the world... and to modernity itself.

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May ‘68: plenitude, repression, nihilism

Jordi Graupera

The historical importance of May ‘68 will, as the years pass, start to lose its importance, if it hasn’t done so already. It was the manifestation of a way of thinking that had been growing for some time beforehand and continued to do so afterwards, while May ‘68 was merely a nucleus of meaning. The driving force behind the revolt was a search for plenitude within a context of routine wellbeing and the consolidation of capitalism. The political response to the revolts, however, was totalitarian and immediately became obsolete. The only original conquest we are fortunately indebted to today is the consolidation of women in the public sphere. Over time, however, the principles defended by the young people in May ‘68 have ended up being mere, and yet another form of, nihilism. A lack of any foundation and empty hypercriticism have gone to make up a pedagogy that has spread to later generations and has given rise to a “circumstantial person”, attentive of the present, adaptable, but impermeable to essential reflections. In just a few decades, May ‘68 has lost its significance for the lives of the most recent generations. Even its leaders and icons have come to an agreement with reality that has rendered them indistinguishable from those that they fought against back in May of 68.

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Diàleg

André Glucksmann / Raphaël Glucksmann

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