Catalan independence leaders sentenced to heavy jail terms

The savage sentences handed down by Spain’s Supreme Court against nine Catalan independence leaders have been denounced by political leaders in Quebec, including Premier François Legault. In the forefront are the deputies of Québec solidaire, who will present a motion this week in the National Assembly condemning the repression and reaffirming the right of self-determination of peoples.

“Jailing elected members because they exercised their democratic duty does not make good sense,” said QS deputy co-leader Manon Massé. She was responding to a letter sent to QS by the president of the Catalan parliament asking them to find a way to help in resolving the political conflict in Spain. Massé, who had visited Catalonia in 2017 at the time of the independence vote, testified by videoconference in April during the trial of Jordi Cuixart, leader of one of the social movements supporting independence.

Campaigning in Canada’s federal election, Bloc Québécois leader Yves François Blanchet called on the leaders of the other parties, starting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to denounce the heavy sentences imposed on the Catalan leaders. Trudeau refused, arguing that it involved an internal Spanish affair. He invoked the same neutrality in 2017 when Spanish police beat Catalan voters who sought to exercise their right to vote. At the time Jagmeet Singh, newly elected leader of the New Democratic Party, denounced Trudeau, saying the right to self-determination was one of the most important rights.

In the article below, Dick Nichols reports on the massive protests that have erupted in Catalonia in response to the court sentences. Nichols is the Barcelona-based European correspondent of Green Left Weekly, from which the article is reproduced, with thanks.

Nichols’ article is followed by extensive excerpts from an article by Viento Sur editor Jaime Pastor critically dissecting the meaning of the Spanish court’s judgment, and in particular the parts in which the court attempts to distinguish the Catalan case from those of other national minority peoples in states of the geographical North, starting with Quebec. My translation from the Spanish.

– Richard Fidler

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Vindictive sentence in Catalan leaders’ trial unleashes tsunami of protest

By Dick Nichols, Barcelona, October 18, 2019

The gap between the 75%–80% of Catalans who uphold their country’s right to self-determination, and the Spanish elites and parts of Spanish society that do not want to know anything about it, was already very wide before October 14.

But on that day, when the Spanish Supreme Court condemned nine Catalan political and social movement leaders to a total of 99.5 years jail, it most likely became unbridgeable.

Following the sentence of the leaders for their role in the October 1, 2017 independence referendum, popular outrage in Catalonia immediately exploded in mass protests involving tens of thousands of people.

They occupied Barcelona airport, imposed road blocks on major highways, demonstrated in huge numbers outside Spanish government offices and began “Marches for Freedom” on Barcelona from five provincial cities.

Every imaginable Catalan social and sporting organisation, from Barcelona Football Club to chess associations, has issued statements condemning the sentences.

On the nights of October 15–16, police and small groups engaged in running battles in central Barcelona, as smoke rose from burning rubbish bins.

On October 16, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) acting Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez appeared on television to warn that security forces would act “firmly, serenely and proportionately” in the face of violence.

To his right, People’s Party (PP) leader Pablo Casado demanded the declaration of a state of emergency in Catalonia, while Citizens’ leader Albert Rivera called for an end to Catalan self-rule under article 155 of the Spanish constitution.

One of the main instruments coordinating these responses is the Democratic Tsunami platform, anonymously run by activists from the October 1 referendum, and coordinated via a Telegram channel that, at the time of writing, had attracted 300,000 subscribers.

Punishment without crime

The unanimous verdict of the seven Supreme Court judges that set off this still expanding wave of protest was that nine Catalan leaders — seven former ministers and social movement leaders Jordi Sànchez and Jordi Cuixart — were guilty of “sedition” in preparing the October 1 referendum.

For this 18th century crime, long deleted from the penal codes of many other European states, they were sentenced to jail terms ranging from 9 to 13 years.

The harshest sentence was handed out to former Catalan vice-president Oriol Junqueras as “leader of the sedition”. Former ministers Raül Romeva (foreign affairs), Dolors Bassa (social welfare) and Jordi Turull (minister of state) came next with 12 years: along with Junqueras they were also found guilty of “embezzlement”.

Former Catalan parliament speaker Carme Forcadell incurred 11.5 years jail for allowing the chamber to vote on the referendum’s enabling law, after being instructed by the Spanish Constitutional Court not to do so.

The “sedition” of former Catalan interior minister Joaquim Forn (11.5 years) consisted in undermining the ability of the Catalan police to deliver and enforce Spanish state court orders.

Former territory minister Josep Rull was found guilty of denying a Spanish Civil Guard ship mooring facilities and of making public buildings available as voting centres.

As for Òmnium Cultural president Cuixart and former Catalan National Assembly president Sànchez, their “sedition” was proven by the fact that they had called demonstrations against Civil Guard searches and urged people to defend voting centres against police and Civil Guard attempts to impound ballot boxes.

Along with these nine, who have already been held in preventive detention for up to two years, the court found former ministers Carles Mundó (attorney-general), Santi Vila (business) and Meritxell Borras (education) guilty of “disobedience”, fining each €60,000 and banning them from standing for public office for 18 months.

The nine jailed leaders have been banned from standing for public office for the term of their sentences.

Why this verdict?

The verdict is the predictable result of the pressures operating on the Supreme Court and its chief judge Manuel Marchena.

The chief pressure was for the trial to produce an exemplary punishment of the Catalan leaders. They had humiliated the Spanish state by successfully organising a unilateral independence referendum after 18 failed attempts to negotiate a Scottish-style referendum with successive Spanish governments.

A measure of the viciousness of the sentences is to compare them to those arising from the failed 1981 coup attempt. The average punishment for the military and Civil Guards who tried to reimpose the Francisco Franco dictatorship then was six years jail: the sentences of the Catalan leaders average 8.3 years.

The Supreme Court judges were doing the work set out for them by the previous PP government of Mariano Rajoy.

According to a leaked WhatsApp message by PP Senate spokesperson Ignacio Cosidó, its Second Chamber, which heard the case, was controlled “via the back door”.

There was no way its judges, even their “progressive” minority, were going to find the Catalan leaders innocent, or guilty only of disobedience (which carries no jail sentence).

There was no ‘rebellion’

However, the heavy sentences the court was always going to impose have to be defensible in law, not only within Spain but especially before a European Court of Human Rights — which in 2018 upheld nine out of ten appeals against Spanish court decisions.

This pressure to find a plausible legal foundation for their decision meant the judges had to discard the “rebellion” charge against the Catalan leaders.

This indictment was originally brought by the investigating magistrate Pablo Llarena and was backed by the Spanish prosecutor-general’s office and the “popular prosecution”, the ultra-right party Vox.

(The “popular prosecution” is a Spanish institution originally designed to allow the representation of community or public interest.)

Dropping the charge of “rebellion”, which a majority of Spanish jurists had already declared inapplicable, was also probably the price of a unanimous verdict between judges of different political temperaments.

It was also a political imperative. It will help Pedro Sánchez maintain the myth that Spain is a “law-governed state” with an independent judiciary and it will also help the European Union and its member states, fearful of any Catalan threat to the EU status quo, sustain the same fiction.

In the days after the verdict, spokespeople for the European Commission and the British government robotically repeated the line from Madrid.

Caught in contradiction

The dropping of “rebellion” comes at a price, however, because the whole Spanish-patriotic view of the October 1 referendum, from King Philip down, is that it was a deliberate, rebellious assault on the Constitution.

Sensitive to the angst their appeal-proofed verdict would cause, the judges devoted about 200 pages of the 493-page judgement to arguments against the “rebellion”.

Yet, in adopting the “sedition theory”, the judges fall into a painful contradiction.

Their decision says, for example, that October 1 did not involve “preconceived, deliberate and functional” violence aimed at achieving Catalonia’s separation from the Spanish state, but was rather an attempt to pressure it into negotiations.

“The over-excited citizens who believed that the positive result of the so-called referendum would lead to the hoped-for horizon of a sovereign republic were unaware that the right to decide had changed into an atypical right to bring pressure.”

But if that argument is valid against “rebellion”, how is it not also valid against “sedition”? The only difference in Spanish law is that “rebellion” is a crime against the constitution and “sedition” a crime against public order.

The judges’ answer was to smother the contradiction in lurid fictional accounts of the events of 2017. These are based on the well-rehearsed evidence of Spanish National Police and Civil Guard officers, whom Marchena “spared” from defence cross-examination, backed by visual evidence, during the trial.

In their decision, it is the huge peaceful demonstrations and non-violent protests of 2017 that become “sedition”. This ruling opens the door to any protest activity, like trade union pickets or organised attempts to stop evictions, being regarded as “seditious”.

In an October 16 interview in the Catalan daily Ara, Jordi Sànchez said: “The sentence unequivocally lies. It doesn’t specify any detail of the supposed strategy of sedition. Not one confirmed meeting, not one email, only declarations in public ANC [Catalan National Assembly] events and the calling of demonstrations.

“The Supreme Court judges’ hostility towards us has betrayed them. Their animosity towards us has leaked out in the sentence in the form of false statements to justify the prison terms.”

Offensives launched

The verdict has also been the signal for new offensives from both sides of the Catalan-Spanish State struggle.

The Spanish judiciary immediately banned convicted Catalan leaders from standing in the November 10 Spanish general election and judge Llarena reissued a European arrest warrant for the extradition of former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont from Belgium.

The PSOE government went on an offensive to persuade other countries of the immaculate character of the Spanish legal system. Cabinet members with foreign languages made themselves available for interviews on whatever international channels would have them.

On the Catalan side, the enormous, growing tsunami of mass protest started to roll.

All this is taking place three weeks out from the Spanish general election, in which Catalonia will dominate as never before. In Jordi Sànchez’s words: “They believe that they will terminate people’s sentiments by beheading those they think are leaders of the process.

“They are having the opposite effect.”

A ruling against the right to decide

by Jaime Pastor (extracts)

A reading of the 23 pages of the judgment devoted to rejecting the claim to the right to decide (199-222) reveals clearly the pirouettes resorted to by the Supreme Court (SC) in order to disqualify it. Notwithstanding its statement that “it is not our job to offer — or pursue or insinuate — political solutions to a problem with deep historical roots” (referring obviously to Catalonia’s relation to Spain), it immediately goes on to reject the defence’s allegations, since accepting them “would be used to affirm, in opposition to a monistic vision of sovereignty that is typical of historical constitutionalism, a constitutional pluralism, a diffuse and shared sovereignty including a co-sovereignty transcending rancid concepts affected by the passage of time.”

Well yes, ladies and gentlemen, if we analyze the present and global political reality, it does not support a monistic or unilateral vision of sovereignty, since what we are witnessing is a now irreversible crisis of the sovereign national-state paradigm. In the framework of neoliberal globalization what has occurred is an intertwining of sovereignties and jurisdictions within an hierarchical inter-state system that in turn is increasingly fusing with the major economic powers around a lex mercatoria común under which most states are reluctant to recognize internal national and cultural diversity, and above all are draining it of democracy and popular sovereignty. Is not the reality of the European Union a confirmation of that “diffuse and shared” sovereignty, which has led even the states of the Eurozone to renounce one of their most symbolic powers, that is monetary sovereignty? […]

It is in this reality of an institutional architecture that a multilevel governance is developing and expanding on a global scale, especially around the hard core of politics — economics and finance, civil and military security, etc. — shared by the IMF, the World Bank, the central banks, NATO, the G8 and the United States. So it is truly sarcastic to speak of the exclusive sovereignty of states and, in our case, of the preservation of the sovereignty of the Spanish people when the latter have been excluded, for example, from deciding on constitutional reforms of such huge scope as the reform of the much-criticized article 135 of the Constitution — which annulled the social character of the “social and democratic rule of law” established by that same fundamental law. In reality, unfortunately, there is one area in which that exclusive state sovereignty is exercised, and in an increasingly more repressive form, as we see in the Mediterranean: the border controls imposed on the free movement of persons even while barriers to the entry and flight of capital continue to be eliminated.

In this regard, and to be brief, I take the liberty of quoting what I wrote recently in Le Monde Diplomatique:[1]

“In today's world, moreover, although the sovereign state paradigm continues to exist, we know that we are actually in an increasingly interdependent world on all levels, as well as a hierarchical system of states, in turn merged with major economic powers that seek to impose their interests and decisions over and above the peoples and even their representative institutions. We should not be surprised, therefore, at the rise of popular-based sovereignty movements in very different places on the planet and with quite distinct ideological orientations.

“In what concerns us here, it should be recalled that we have arrived at this point after a long process in which most states, especially since the end of the 18th century, have tended to develop a model of nationalization of their respective populations based on the promotion of a single national identity, a single language and a single culture. This paradigm, according to which access to citizenship rights is linked to belonging — voluntarily or by force — to the official national identity, has generated many relationships of inequality and injustice, due to the lack of recognition of the different ethnic and national identities within the same State.”

That is the crux of the matter and that is why the claim to the right of self-determination within demo-liberal states of the North has resurfaced. The old salt-water theory, which was intended to limit that right to colonies and occupied countries, has long since lost its applicability. That is why the internal and external dimensions of the right to self-determination are seen in cases such as that of Canada and Quebec, challenging the taboo of the “territorial integrity of states.”

Yet notwithstanding this persistent and ever-increasing reality in different places, the Supreme Court clings to the thesis of “the safeguarding of the territorial integrity of the already constituted states as the natural limit to what has been called the external dimension of the right to self-determination.” Aware, however, that this “territorial integrity” has been questioned in the aforementioned cases, it excuses itself by saying that “we cannot go beyond our functional space” only to do so later by rejecting any similarity between the case of Quebec and that of Canada, since “no similarity can be proclaimed between the historical origin of Quebec’s claim and the unilateral act of secession attributed to the defendants.”

Why not? Hasn’t there been a problem of accommodation, both in Quebec and in Catalonia, of their national realities within the respective states? Yes, there is a difference, of course, but it is that while in Canada that conflict was addressed after two referendums, and a political and democratic solution has been sought despite the fact that its Constitution does not recognize the right of secession, in the Spanish state there has been no willingness to find that democratic solution. On the contrary, from the first moment a fundamentalist reading of the 1978 Constitution has been imposed making it a true straitjacket — which is what the Canadian Supreme Court judgment [on Quebec secession] rejected.

Then the SC makes a quick and superficial tour of other cases: Montenegro (“a previously constitutionalized process”), Scotland (“result of a negotiation process” and with the particular feature that the UK constitution is unwritten), or Kosovo (for the unique nature of the conflict and the EU tutelage). Interestingly, with respect to the latter, the Court passes very quickly over the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), forgetting that while it recognizes the specificity of the case, that does not stop it from extracting some general conclusions, among them that while international law does not recognize the right to secession within existing states, it does not prohibit it either. In order to recognize it, the ICJ limits itself to demanding some procedural requirements of the collective subject that is prepared to exercise it: the non-use of force, proof that the process seeking a negotiated settlement must be exhausted, and, finally, that a clear majority of the population concerned has declared itself in favour of secession by peaceful means.[2]

Starting, therefore, from the conclusions of the ICJ, the debate should revolve around the question of whether the negotiated settlement process has been exhausted within the framework of the Spanish State. It seems clear that since the de facto annulment of the substance of the Nou Estatut de Autonomía by the Constitutional Court,[3] there has been a widespread feeling in a large sector of Catalan society (of which about 48% vote for independentist parties, but whose real percentage could only be verified in a referendum that turns on this issue), of non-recognition as a people by the Spanish state. That 2010 ruling was understood as a breach of the territorial constitutional agreement of 1978. It is this that helps to explain the rapid rise of independentism over the almost 10 years since then, which is not to deny that other factors of a secondary order may have been an influence. All the more so when there has not been a single alternative proposal since then for a new type of consensual relationship among the parties of the regime other than the application of article 155[4] and/or the National Security Law.

In these circumstances, and returning to the case of Kosovo, the conclusions of the ICJ should be taken into consideration and the possibility of recognizing the right to secession be accepted […] that is, to recognize that in the last resort, the negotiation routes have been exhausted and to avoid a stagnation of the conflict, it would be legitimate to respect the right to secession of the population of the affected territorial area (in this case an Autonomous Community) provided that it complies with the democratic procedural requirements. It is precisely around this hypothesis that there is a total absence of references in the Supreme Court ruling.

The final answer of the SC is, therefore, that “there is no such right” and, what is worse, that “there is no democracy outside the rule of law,” thus opposing one principle to another and refusing to recognize, as did the Constitutional Court itself, that there is at least a “political aspiration” to which a political solution should be sought. The logical thing, then, would be to adopt an evolutionary interpretation of rights, as was done, by the way, with the recognition of gay marriage, and to consider, as the ICJ did, that there are extreme situations in which the legitimate exercise of the right to decide prevails over the “safeguarding of the territorial integrity of the already constituted states” and, in our case, of the sacred unity of Spain. […]

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[1] Jaime Pastor, “La cuestión catalana y la disputa por la soberanía,” Le Monde Dipomatique (Spanish edition), No. 271, p. 3. Available in Viento Sur: https://vientosur.info/spip.php?article13844.

[2] Iñigo Urrutia, “Territorial Integrity and Self-Determination: The Approach of the International Court of Justice in the Advisory Opinion on Kosovo,” REAF-Revista d’Estudis Autonòmics i Federals Vol. 16 (2012). Available at https://works.bepress.com/inigo_urrutia/5/.

[3] The 2006 Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia was a law passed by the Catalan legislature, then approved by Spain’s parliament and later ratified in a referendum by Catalan voters. Almost immediately, the opposition center-right Popular Party challenged the statute before the Constitutional Court. The court deliberated for the next four years until June 28, 2010 when it struck down 14 of the statute’s 223 articles and curtailed another 27. Among other things, the ruling struck down attempts to place the distinctive Catalan language above Spanish in the region; ruled as unconstitutional regional powers over courts and judges; and said: “The interpretation of the references to ‘Catalonia as a nation’ and to ‘the national reality of Catalonia’ in the preamble of the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia have no legal effect.” (“The Spanish Court Decision That Sparked the Modern Catalan Independence Movement,” https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/catalonia-referendum/541611/.) – Tr.

[4] Article 155 is only two short paragraphs of the 1978 Constitution of Spain. It says that if a regional government “does not comply with the obligations of the Constitution or other laws it imposes, or acts in a way that seriously undermines the interests of Spain,” the national government can ask the Senate to vote on the use of the measure. (“What is Article 155 of the 1978 Spanish Constitution?,” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/10/article-155-spanish-constitution-171019100117592.html.) – Tr.

New governments in both Spain and Catalonia: Will the impasse persist?

On June 1, less than three weeks after a new government was finally allowed to take office in Catalonia,[1] the Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy’s People’s Party (PP) — which had headed the central state’s harsh repression of Catalan self-determination — was defeated in a parliamentary no-confidence vote prompted by a High Court conviction of leading PP officials in a public contracts corruption case.

The vote, initiated by the Spanish social-democratic PSOE, was supported by the left party Unidos Podemos and Catalan and Basque nationalist parties in the Spanish parliament. PSOE federal secretary Pedro Sánchez became Spain’s new prime minister.[2]

These events open a new phase in the Spanish state’s ongoing institutional, social-economic and national-territorial crises, and present the left forces in both Catalonia and Spain with some major challenges.

It remains to be seen whether relations with Catalonia will improve under the new government in Madrid. Sánchez had aligned his party firmly behind Rajoy’s opposition to the October 1 independence referendum and in support of the trusteeship imposed on Catalonia under Article 155 of the 1978 Spanish constitution. However, to win Catalan nationalist parties’ support for its no-confidence motion, the PSOE promised to establish normal relations with the new Catalan government and undertook to revisit Catalan laws blocked by the Constitutional Court on appeal from the Rajoy government.[3]

At minimum, these promises, if effected, would require the withdrawal of charges against the jailed and exiled Catalan leaders and an end to the Madrid government’s control over the Catalan government’s economic policy although the PSOE has not indicated any such intention. The PSOE has now promised to implement Rajoy’s austerity budget, which it had voted against just days before its no-confidence motion. And although the Article 155 trusteeship formally ended with the investiture of the new Catalan government, more than 100 political activists, most of them associated with the grassroots Committees to Defend the Republic (CDRs), were arrested during the last two weeks of May. Some face charges of “terrorism” because of their role in organizing peaceful protests against the repression.[4]

Spain’s left party Unidos Podemos (UP) can play an important role in the period ahead, both within the parliament (71 seats vs. the PSOE’s 85) and “in the streets.” However, it will have to resist UP leader Pablo Iglesias’ offer to join the government. “This orientation,” writes Dick Nichols, the Barcelona-based correspondent of Green Left Weekly, “runs the risk of making Unidos Podemos co-responsible for retrograde policies that the PSOE won’t abandon, especially in regards to not taxing the rich and big business and abiding by obligations to meet European Commission spending limits.

“A more fruitful approach, as already flagged by the Podemos tendency Anticapitalists, would be to adopt the ‘Portuguese approach’ of that country’s Left Bloc and Communist Party: to support all progressive initiatives of the ruling Socialists while fighting for other progressive measures that they are avoiding and mobilising the people in support of them — all the while defending the government from the attacks of the right.”[5]

In the following article, a leader of the Catalan independence movement outlines a strategy for carrying forward the struggle in the months ahead around actions aimed at building popular support for a project of “radical transformation, emancipation and popular empowerment.”

Readers who are aware of the debate in Quebec over the mandate to be given that nation’s proposed constituent assembly[6] may be surprised at Iolanda Fresnillo’s insistence that the Catalan assembly initiated by the pro-independence forces should invite and encourage the participation of “those that do not share the preference for independence.” She points to the fact that there are many working people in Catalonia who have not been attracted by the republican project associated with the pro-austerity capitalist parties that dominate the present independence movement. Many of them have immigrated with their families in recent years from other parts of the Spanish state and elsewhere in search of jobs and better living conditions. In fact, the native Catalan population now forms just less than one half of the autonomous territory’s population.

Fesnillo is convinced that many of these people can be won to support a progressive and inclusive Republican project in the course of a democratic debate open to the widest number. What is key to this process is that the population continues to mobilize en masse for the release of the prisoners and an end to the repression, and finds new ways to build “strategies of social transformation” starting, perhaps, at the local or municipal level. And as the recent arrests of CDR activists indicate, the central state’s opposition to these mass democratic manifestations — if countered with effective defensive struggles — can convince many more in the course of these experiences to support an emancipatory democratic Republic as an alternative social and political project.

This article was first published in Catalan in the on-line publication Sentit CriticOpinió I anàlisi.[7] My translation is based on the Spanish translation published in Viento Sur.

– Richard Fidler

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Five challenges the pro-independence left will have to confront, now that we have a Government

By Iolanda Fresnillo

With the investiture of Quim Torra as the 131^st president of the Generalitat, Catalonia’s government, a new phase of the process has begun. Not the final or definitive one, simply a new phase. A phase full of uncertainties and glitches that are impossible to foresee — not just how the legislature will act and for how long, but also what will happen next week. The legal prosecutions still under way (and those that will probably ensue) and the likely sentencing of the political prisoners to jail terms; the constant threat of a new 155 and the expected prohibition by the Constitutional Court of such proposals as the initiation of the Constituent Process or the recovery of suspended laws; the foreseeable tension between the CUP and the Government within the pro-independence bloc, given the evident ideological distance between the president and the CUPistas; the influence, or the interference, that the Council of the Republic or President Puigdemont may exercise over Torra and the Generalitat government… these are some of the obstacles that will have to be overcome if the new president is not to be derailed.

Some of the challenges we confront in this new phase are of special relevance to the lefts that we have looked to during the sovereigntist process as offering the possibility of radical transformation, emancipation and popular empowerment. The first of those challenges will no doubt be to provide ourselves with spaces in which to construct future strategies that allow us to make reality what now appears as simply a “mantra”: to make a Republic. Right now, thinking of challenges, I will identify five that are, in my opinion, central.

1. Tackle the exceptional nature of the repression

Without a doubt, one of the central issues is how we tackle the climate of repression and deprivation of rights and freedoms that the Spanish state has imposed. The strategy of threats and fears deployed by the Spanish government means it has to make those threats effective and — independently of what the Criminal Code says — keep the political prisoners in prison. We will have to develop strategies gauged to the needs of the prisoners, those in exile and those under siege from the Spanish judicial authorities for having defended the Republic in the streets. The message in the hundreds of thousands of letters and visits and other demonstrations of support must be loud and clear: We have not forgotten you.

Jesús Rodríguez said a few days ago in Crític that October 1 has meant a transformation in the values and mentality of many Catalans, in that the experience of recent months has already helped to build “a society that is more critical, more willing to take risks, more open to new forms of understanding the economy and social relations.” This increased predisposition to risk will encounter a foreseeable rise in the incessant repression deployed by the Spanish state and accordingly a growing number of reprisals. Being attentive to this means building spaces and collective strategies to confront that repression, but also spaces that will help us maintain the predisposition to risk, and not to become entangled in the web of fear. It is only through collective action that we can avert the Spanish state’s attempt to paralyze this process of social empowerment. Thus it will be essential to protect spaces like the CDRs that cultivate this collectivity.

And finally, to confront the repression not only through the necessary solidarity actions but also through the construction of strategies of social disapproval. In this respect, to find a way around the lack of demonstrations of solidarity and indignation by a part of the Spanish, European and international left. The left, traditionally internationalist, will have to redouble efforts to explain to the outside world what is happening in Catalonia.

2. Build an inclusive Republic

Half a year ago we met with a group of left-wing activists from various political spaces and social movements with a proposal to promote the Republic from below and in a form that was not subordinate to the institutional agendas. We issued an appeal to meet, think about and organize ourselves around the theme “Contra la foscor, la llum: el millor del nou i el poder popular. Aixequem la República!” [“Against the darkness, light: the best of the new and the popular power. Stand up for the Republic!”] In this initial meeting, which took place on December 1, 2017, we stated: “The Republic we want is inclusive, democratic, egalitarian, feminist, antiracist and puts a dignified life for all at the center of any politics.”

The proposal of inclusive sovereigntism necessarily clashes frontally with identitarian nationalisms. Against the controversial tweets and articles of President Quim Torra, far from downplaying his words (which we view very seriously) we must reaffirm ourselves in the words that would have to accompany this construction of an inclusive Republic. Not to convince (being inclusive in order to broaden the bases of sovereignty), but because it is correct. Because, if it is not with everyone and for everyone — weaving, not unravelling — it is not our Republic.

An inclusive Republic is at the antipodes of a racist society that undervalues the 15% of the population composed of migrant individuals who, in today’s Catalonia (in the Spanish state and in the European Union) find their rights as citizens denied. An inclusive Republic cannot be built around an essentialist proposal of Catalan identity; instead, it must celebrate our diversity. Nor can it be a

“neoliberal Republic at the service of the new and old elites, or a new country with the old classes, injustices and privileges as usual. It cannot continue to be subordinate to the interests of capital, super-state structures and actors not chosen democratically and holding decisive powers over our lives. Nor can we allow ourselves to perpetuate a society in connivance with predatory exploitation of the territory, racism and male chauvinism,”

as we stated in the opening ceremony of Aixequem la República.

In this sense, as the independentist lefts, both within and without the Parliament, we have to develop a frontal opposition to the neoliberal policies that the new Catalan government may be tempted to implement, and to any attempt to impose an identitarian Catalanism. And we will have to build strategies that make no concession to the blackmail of those who will doubtless, faced with this opposition, put in question our commitment to the republican project.

3. The temptation of the municipal elections

No one can tell whether the new Government will still be intact by May of next year. But in any case the election date of May 2019, which applies to the municipal and European elections (and to the Balearic Islands, Valencia and other autonomous communities throughout the state), can become an important turning point.

The new municipalism that exploded with the May 2015 elections has highlighted the potential to build emancipatory realities and transformative processes from the local level. The experiences in the city councils led by new forces and left political coalitions in cities like Barcelona, Badalona or Sabadell, but also in smaller cities and towns, are showing us that at the local level it is possible to deploy quite strong strategies of social transformation. And even in some municipalities where the right governs, civil society and the leftist opposition find it easier to initiate transformative initiatives like municipal ownership of services, experiences of direct democracy, or policies of transparency (public hearings). These are processes of transformation and construction of spaces of popular sovereignty that follow rhythms and routes that differ from those in the country’s sovereigntist process. I think we have to maintain those different rhythms and routes.

For some time now we have seen how there is a desire among various pro-sovereignty political forces to put the independentist process at the center of the pre-campaigning for the next municipal elections. Proposals like those of Jordi Graupera to present an independentist candidacy for the Barcelona city council have and no doubt will continue to have their reflection in other municipalities. Personally, I think it is a strategic error to try to confine the transformative potential of municipalism within the independentist proposal.

The left must be conscious that the process of building a new country, an inclusive Republic, is a long process that involves a change in hegemonies, as well as transformations in the “macro” but also in the “micro.” Municipalism is a fertile terrain for those transformations, for the construction of sovereignties, that can be the basis for the construction of Sovereignty as a country. Food sovereignties, energy sovereignties, residential sovereignties, health sovereignties, cultural sovereignties, productive sovereignties, reproductive sovereignties, etc. that can develop in the municipal environment without awaiting the winning of full Sovereignty nationally. So I do not share the hypothesis of some that without an effective Catalan Republic there can be no advance in transformation at the level of municipal government. There is some latitude, and I think that making the exploitation of that latitude await the unlikely achievement of the Republic in the short term is a strategic error.

We have to promote the idea that municipal action is the basis on which to build a new model relationship with the territory and between the territories. And for that we must leave some room for this construction of sovereignties to break independently from the path, rhythm and road map taken by the national process. A strategy that is favourable to the view that sovereignties can emerge as well in municipal governments that are not pro-independence. It seems obvious to me that the coalition between the Commons, ERC and the CUP in cities like Barcelona can generate spaces of transformation that are much stronger than an independentist coalition with the PdeCat. Putting independentism at the center of the next municipal elections would radically break with this transformative potential.

4. Guarantee the Constituent Process

Quim Torra emphasized in his investiture speeches the proposal to move ahead with a Constituent Process that culminates in the drafting of a new Catalan constitution. In this respect, Carles Riera has warned that “a Constituent Process cannot be a workshop for bumper stickers.” How the Constituent Process develops and what it will end up being will have to be one of the lefts’ concerns, not only in the institutions (and this is not simply a concern of the CUP) but also in the social movements, including those that do not share the preference for independence. The potential for a change of hegemonies through a Constituent Process should not be disdained by anyone who is fighting for a transformation and for social, political and economic justice.

From the standpoint of the social movements and left political forces we cannot spoil the possibility of carrying out a Constituent Process that actually allows us to debate everything, to change everything. In this sense, the new republican, self-organized reality that has appeared since October 1 around the CDRs and other spaces with a local base, should form part of the matrix of the Constituent Process. A process that we want to be led from below by the people, distributed throughout the territory, in a non-exclusive way with the democratic guarantee of equality for everyone. This means that the “lobbies” represented by academic experts cannot take precedence over citizenship. And that no one can be excluded from citizenship. Immigrants (with or without papers) have to able to be part of the process, with voice and vote. Adults but also young people and children. No one can be excluded because of his or her origin, culture, religion, age, gender or political alignment. If we want to make a country for everyone, we have to look to everyone to make it.

The Constituent Process will no doubt also be the focus of the state’s repressive violence. Faced with this obvious risk, the self-organized people will be predisposed to defend the process, as we defended the ballot boxes on October 1. It is more than a defense of the institutional process as proposed by the Government or Parliament. We will have to be prepared to defend the underlying process, which enables us to advance in the construction of new material aspects, those that make the Republic possible. And we have to be conscious that for a process with these characteristics the worst partners are the over-hasty. We are looking to the future with broadmindedness and we are dealing with a Constituent Process with guarantees, which is another way of saying that we must take the necessary time.

5. Making the Republic without undue haste

For many of us, the Republic is not simply a legal form, the constitution of new borders. The Republic is not built law by law, but by making a reality of republican spaces and materialities. The Republic is not a state but a process of transformation that results in a new, and better, country. A long process that, once again, needs time in which to build the Republic carefully, for ourselves and for the territory. To form a WE that includes the convinced, but also those who are not, takes time. To deploy and reaffirm sovereignties takes time. To construct not only a new country but a better country in which full sovereignty is exercised, from below, takes a lot of time.

Let us give ourselves that time, with strategies that are far-sighted and with infinite patience, so that the process of building the Republic can effectively put life, care and social justice at the center. This is the biggest challenge we confront on the left if we do not want to deny the fact that making the Republic means generating a genuinely emancipative process and that the results will be a country of social justice. The overhasty may be able to ensure that the new country arrives earlier (although there is no guarantee of that), but it will not be the country that we want. Let us give ourselves not only enough space but also time to meet, think, organize and build — together — the Republic.

May 17, 2018

Spanish translation from Catalan: Àngels Varó Peral

---

[1] http://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2018/05/racist-catalan-president-vows-to-build.html.

[2] http://links.org.au/spain-how-why-mariano-rajoy-fell.

[3] Ibid.

[4] http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article44616.

[5] http://links.org.au/spain-how-why-mariano-rajoy-fell.

[6] See, for example, http://lifeonleft.blogspot.com/2017/12/quebec-solidaire-clarifies-its-support.html.

[7] http://www.vientosur.info/spip.php?article13848.

‘Racist’ Catalan president vows to build republic as Spain vetoes ministers

I post below, with thanks, two articles by Barcelona-based correspondent Dick Nichols that were first published in Links, International Journal of Socialist Renewal. Nichols reports on recent developments in the Catalan struggle for national self-determination, and assesses the ideology of the newly installed prime minister Quim Torra. Highly recommended reading for socialists in Quebec and Canada, in particular, seeking to understand the politics of a certain conservative nationalism that is prevalent in movements for independence led by pro-capitalist political parties.

— Richard Fidler

Quim Torra takes office as Catalan’s new president. The yellow ribbons on seats behind him represent jailed MPs prohibited by Spanish courts from attending to their parliamentary duties.

‘Racist’ Catalan president vows to build republic as Spain vetoes ministers

By Dick Nichols

May 24, 2018 —  On May 14, 199 days after the Catalan pro-independence bloc re-won a majority at the December 21 elections imposed by the Spanish government, the parliament of Catalonia finally voted in a new president. Quim Torra, MP for Together For Catalonia (JxCat) — headed by exiled outgoing president Carles Puigdemont — was invested as head of government by 66 votes to 65 with four abstentions. On the first round of the investiture, held on May 12, the same vote was inadequate because an absolute majority of 68 was required.

The votes in favour came from JxCat and its ally in government, the centre-left Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC). Seven of the votes were delegated by jailed and exiled MPs. The votes against were those of the new right, militantly Spanish-patriotic Citizens, the Party of Socialists of Catalonia (PSC), Catalonia Together-Podemos (CatECP) and the Catalan branch of the People’s Party (PP), which rules in the Spanish state.

The four abstentions came from the anti-capitalist pro-independence People’s Unity List (CUP), which in this way guaranteed the relative majority needed for Torra to be invested on the second round. At the same time, the CUP announced that it would be going into opposition against a government whose commitment to “disobedience” and “unfolding the Republic” it doubts.

The day before, the CUP’s National Political Council (CPN), meeting at the request of three of the anti-capitalist force’s 13 territorial assemblies, voted 40 to 24 to facilitate Torra’s accession. A second vote on how to do this — via support or abstention — was 59 for abstention and three for support. This decision reaffirmed the CUP’s position of abstaining on the investiture of any JxCat candidate other than Puigdemont.

Two other potential obstacles to the investiture had previously been overcome. First, the Spanish PP government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy had decided not to appeal against the decision of the Catalan parliament’s speakership panel to allow the delegation of the votes of Puigdemont and exiled health minister Toni Comín. Citizens and the Catalan PP appealed this decision to the Constitutional Court, but it ruled against provisional suspension of this right while their appeals were being heard.

As the court usually suspends the application of laws and regulations when the Spanish government is the appellant, the Rajoy government’s decision not to appeal was attacked by Citizens’ leader Albert Rivera as showing “latitude towards the coup-mongers” because it allowed the pro-independence forces to keep their majority in the Catalan parliament.

Secondly, the membership of the small pro-independence party Democrats, descended from the now defunct and once-ruling Democratic Union of Catalonia (UDC) and part of the ERC caucus, had voted 88% in favour of backing the investiture of Torra.

A win for ‘the law’?

On the surface, the investiture of Quim Torra could be interpreted as a win for the Spanish government. It successfully prevented the investiture of “people facing criminal charges”, Puigdemont and then JxCat’s two replacement candidates — first jailed former Catalan National Congress president Pedro Sánchez and then minister of state and government spokesperson Jordi Turull.

However, after the last two hundred days of vain judicial and political efforts to tame the Catalan movement the political balance is tilting increasingly against Madrid and the political cost of such “wins” keeps growing. At the same time, Spain’s main pro-unionist (“constitutionalist”) parties are engaged in a three-way war to prove who is the toughest and most reliable defender of Spanish unity against the “secessionist threat”.

Winning so far is Citizens, which began life as a “social democratic” party opposed to having Catalan as the language of instruction in the local school system. Since then, it has developed neo-liberal positions on nearly all other issues and attacks the Rajoy government for being too complacent, conciliationist and slow in its reactions to the Catalan rebellion.

The latest Metroscopia poll, published in El País on May 13, gives Citizens 29.1% support, followed by Unidos Podemos and the progressive coalitions forces aligned to it (19.8%), the collapsing PP (19.5%) and the PSOE (19%). If this tendency continues it could well mark the decline and fall of the parties of the 1975-82 transition from the Franco dictatorship, and set up the next Spanish election as a battle between the Spanish chauvinism of Citizens and Unidos Podemos’s plurinational conception of the Spanish state.

An important battle lost for the Rajoy government was the April 5 ruling of the Higher Regional court of the German state Schleswig-Holstein not to implement the European arrest warrant for “rebellion” issued against Puigdemont by Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena. This decision not only put the legal argumentation of Llarena in the spotlight: it also exposed before a broader European audience the Rajoy government’s basic method for dealing with the Catalan crisis — to treat it as a police matter to be processed by a compliant Spanish legal system.

The tactics of JxCat are aimed at increasing that exposure. By proposing first Sánchez and then Turull as substitute presidential candidates for Puigdemont, the lead pro-independence force compelled judge Llarena to produce two bizarre rulings. The first prevented Sánchez from being allowed to leave jail to appear before the parliament (despite a clear precedent to the contrary in the Basque parliament); the second returned Turull to jail to prevent his election.

When the Catalan parliament next passed an amendment to the investiture law that would have allowed Puigdemont to be invested in absentia, the Rajoy government appealed to the Constitutional Court, which provisionally suspended it. Editor, journalist and business lawyer Quim Torra, chosen by Puigdemont, then became JxCat’s fourth candidate, with the goal of his investiture being held before May 22, the day on which new elections would have had to be called.

Torra: ‘xenophobic, racist and supremacist’?

Who, then, is Quim Torra, Catalonia’s 131st president (and tenth of the modern era)? Inés Arrimades, leader of the opposition and head of Citizens in the Catalan parliament, gave her opinion on May 14: “We have before us at the head of the Catalan government a person whose ideology is perfectly clear from his articles: an ideology that defends xenophobia, that defends an exclusionary identity, defends populism.” Arrimades quoted from a 2012 piece from Torra called “The Language and the Beasts”, in which he said:

“You look at your country now and you see the beasts talking, but they are of another kind, scavengers, vipers, hyenas, beasts in human shape that drool hatred … against everything that the language, the Catalan language, represents … [T]hey recoil from everything that is not Spanish and in Castilian.”

Arrimades quoted another line from Torra: “Our nation is threatened by the avalanche of immigration with being dissolved like a sugar cube in a glass of milk.”

Barcelona mayor Ada Colau had previously commented on Facebook:

“For me and millions of people it is important to know if someone who is standing as a candidate for the presidency thinks that there are first and second class Catalans according to where they were born or what language they speak.”

In the first investiture session (May 12) Xavier Domènech, leader of Catalonia Together-Podemos (CatECP), asked Torra: “In Catalonia today around 70% of the population feels Spanish with greater or lesser intensity. What do you think today about ‘the Spanish’? “Torra apologised if his comments had caused offence, but did not answer Domènech’s question.

On May 14, Torra repeated his apology and this time added a further comment:

“What I want [the Catalan Republic] is what I want for everyone, the freedom I want for my own people I want for all peoples. And for the Spanish people and for the Catalan people, freedom has the name of republic, Catalan Republic and Spanish Republic.”

That will not be enough, however. When taken out of context and conveniently edited, Torra’s effusions from before he was elected on the Together for Catalonia (JxCat) ticket provide good ammunition for the parties of the Spanish establishment, intent on denying the Catalan right to self-determination and to keeping the incoming Catalan government on the shortest possible leash.

On May 15, after meeting with prime minister Rajoy to agree a joint approach to the ongoing Catalan rebellion (including maintaining control of Catalan government finances), Pedro Sánchez, leader of the opposition Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), announced this last point in a joint PP-PSOE five-point plan to confront the ongoing Catalan challenge:

“To make known abroad, especially in European institutions and society, that the xenophobic and supremacist writings of President Torra in no way represent the values and principles of Catalan society and are contrary to the European values defended by all European Union member states.”

By May 18, speaking in Extremadura, Sánchez, described Torra as “the Le Pen of Spanish politics”.

“The tweets, the declarations and the reflections of Mr Torra have scandalised European public opinion. It is profoundly disturbed on learning that xenophobia has taken charge of and established control of the independence movement in Catalonia…

“What we are seeing in Europe is the rise of reactionary, populist and xenophobic movements. And in Spain this has taken the form of this reactionary movement in Catalonia…

“As a result Mr Torra should understand that the left of government [i.e. us in the PSOE, not Unidos Podemos] will stand up to his thinking and his policies. The left defends equality of rights and freedoms, and the PSOE is going to defend the rights and freedoms of Catalan society.”

On May 21, Sánchez went even further down this road, calling Torra a “racist”, demanding that the new Spanish law on equality of treatment that the PSOE is involved in elaborating be able to be used to sanction the “xenophobic”, “racist” and “supremacist” actions of the Catalan president.

He also flagged that the PSOE could give support to an extended application of the Spanish government’s article 155 takeover of the Catalan government, a not-so-veiled threat to bring Catalan public media and education under central government control.

Spanish unionism’s manipulation of anti-racist sentiment against the Torra government has been so blatant that SOSRacism Catalonia felt compelled to issue a statement about it on May 18. This declaration clarified a previous May 15 statement which could have been read as implicitly supporting unionist charges of racism against Torra and which “has led to some confusion and manipulation”. The May 18 statement said:

“First of all, we wanted to stop the manipulation of the anti-racist struggle. Using the concept of racism to refer to this type of action banalises racism and trivialises the suffering of its actual victims. We believe that in various circles the concept of racism has been misused in the controversy around the current President in the same way that other circles misuse it to refer to attacks against Catalan citizens. And this misuse of the concept, wherever it comes from, weakens and undermines the anti-racist struggle that we social movements, collectives and associations have been carrying out every day for many years.”

The declaration added:

“The controversial messages of Mr Quim Torra...we consider are not racist, but we consider that this is a dangerous, irresponsible and unacceptable narrative, which other politicians also use. Talking about ‘the Spaniards’ as well as talking about ‘the Catalans’ as homogenous and counterposed groups represents an excessive simplification of a much more complex, diverse and rich reality.”

Ongoing collision

Of course, the problem for the Rajoy government and the “155 bloc” is not Torra’s intellectual positions, rather typical of conservative Catalan nationalism, but his program for government and his refusal — continuing the approach of his predecessor Puigdemont — to accept the legitimacy of any impositions from the Spanish government that flout the December 21 election result. In the May 12 parliamentary session he outlined three essential points:

“First, our president is Carles Puigdemont. Second, we will be loyal to the mandate of the referendum of self-determination of October 1: to build an independent state in the form of a republic. Third, our program of government is the economic prosperity and social cohesion of Catalonia.”

This project will be unfolded in three different political arenas: in the “free space of Europe”, where the Council of the Republic will promote the Catalan case internationally; within Catalonia’s institutions (the parliament, local councils and a new body of elected representatives); and via citizen involvement in the process of developing a constitution for the Catalan Republic.

Torra also committed to reintroducing into the Catalan parliament sixteen laws adopted in the previous legislature — covering such areas as climate change and guaranteed minimum income — that have been held up by Spanish government appeals to the Constitutional Court. He also stated that all public servants who had been fired during the Spanish government takeover of Catalan administration would be reappointed.

A new round of conflict between the Catalan movement and government and the Spanish state is now inevitable, with clashes certain over the planned constituent process, the creation of the Council of the Republic (an illegal “parallel body” according to Madrid) and the ongoing central state monitoring of Catalan government finances.

On May 19, Torra named his cabinet and included in it two existing ministers presently in jail (Jordi Turull and Josep Rull) and two ministers presently in exile (Lluís Puig and Toni Comín), demanding that they be allowed to attend the swearing-in session. The Rajoy government immediately denounced this as a “provocation”, and responded with a declaration that article 155 could be extended and broadened if the new Catalan administration didn’t see sense.

The Spanish establishment’s problems with recalcitrant European courts also continues. On May 16, two days after Torra’s investiture, it suffered a further serious setback when the Belgian courts, after consideration of the European warrant for the extradition of Toni Comín and former ministers Meritxell Serret (agriculture) and Lluís Puig (culture), declined to send them back to Spain because that warrant was not backed by an equivalent, underpinning, Spanish warrant.

The Belgian prosecutors had informed Llarena of the need for a Spanish arrest warrant on which the European warrant could be based but he declined — out of ignorance, arrogance or laziness — to correct the defective procedure, leading to the exceptional scene in the Brussels court of the Belgianprosecutors demanding that the European arrest warrant be declined. The substantive issues — whether Comín, Serret and Puig had a case to answer for as regards “rebellion” and “misuse of public moneys” — didn’t even get discussed.

Next, on May 22, the Higher Regional court of Schleswig-Holstein refused to change its April 5 decision to free Puigdemont provisionally, rejecting a Spanish Supreme Court request that he be held in custody on the grounds of “risk of flight.”

All these conflicts will finally make it impossible for the European Commission to continue pretending that Catalonia is an internal Spanish issue, as effectively conceded on by European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker after being exposed to a heated debate on Catalan rights in the Flemish parliament on May 9.

Any number of scenarios is possible, but one stands out as more probable than the rest: that, in the face of repeated blocking of Catalan government initiatives, the Torra administration goes to an early election with a view to making the Spanish state’s creeping crisis even deeper.

* * *

The conservative Catalan nationalism of Quim Torra

By Dick Nichols

May 24, 2018 — Is new Catalan president Quim Torra just another right-wing xenophobe, as claimed by Pedro Sánchez, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), the equivalent in the Spanish state of Marine Le Pen in France, Gert Wilders in the Netherlands, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Hungary’s Victor Orban and their counterparts in Denmark, Sweden and Finland?

As the battle over Catalonia’s right to self-determination increasingly gets fought out on the European stage it is vital for any democrat to answer this question correctly.

A useful starting point is the Torra essay with which Citizens leader Inés Arrimades sought to horrify the Catalan parliament and Spanish public opinion in the May 14 session of the Catalan parliament (Arrimades nearly always speaks in Spanish when addressing the Catalan chamber because her audience is overwhelmingly made up of Spanish-speakers within Catalonia and beyond.)

The complete essay, which appeared in the December 19, 2012 issue of the pro-independence web-based daily El Món, is translated as an appendix to this article.

What is immediately clear from reading Torra’s piece is that it is not, as Arrimades gave her listeners to understand, directed against the Spanish or Spanish-speakers in general. The “beasts” that feature in the article are not the Spanish as a collective but a particular sociological type: the Spanish individual who recoils from anything Catalan — the Catalanophobe. It was not in Arrimades’s interest to make this clear: her scheme was to take some phrases out of context and imply in them a universal anti-Spanish xenophobia that is not there in the article.

From outside the social and political universe of the Spanish state Torra’s essay — imparting bestial attributes to Catalanophobic behaviour — seems to suffer from the same sort of visceral revulsion that it ascribes to Catalanophobia itself. However, to put the two attitudes on the same plane is to miss the essential point. Catalanophobia is an extreme, sociopathic, expression of the core — the chronic — problem of the Spanish state: the denial by its establishment (main parties, legal system, monarchy and media) of the right to self-determination of Spain’s component nations. It is the result of generations of cultivation of hatred and suspicion towards those whose difference potentially makes them a threat to Spanish unity.

For those for whom this unity is the supreme law, any strengthening of Catalan (or Basque or Galician) specificity simply represents a menace. This is the reason the history of these three national collectives has been one of fighting to maintain their language, culture and customs against direct repression, discrimination and studied indifference from ruling Spanish-nationalist, Castilian-speaking “normality”. This is why Citizens was first established as a supposedly necessary champion of Spanish-speakers who had to suffer their children being educated in Catalan.

Given this fact of life and history, PSOE leader Pedro Sánchez’s assertion that Catalan nationalism of Torra’s type is the same thing as right-wing populism in France, Germany or Sweden is an Orwellian inversion of reality. It paints those whose right to self-determination has been trampled underfoot as the oppressors and supremacists. And, in the case of Sánchez and the PSOE, these Catalan “oppressors” are to be countered with the full force of an organisation which boasts that “we are the left” — even as it competes with the parties of the right to be toughest against the Catalan right to decide.

The fact that Sánchez’s shameless support for the right’s Spanish-patriotic crusade may help the PSOE in the short term in its life-and-death struggle with Podemos for hegemony over the all-Spanish left goes a long way to explaining the enthusiasm with which its leader is accusing Torra and the Catalan independence movement of racism.

‘The destiny of Catalonia above all’

This critical distinction once grasped, what is the character of Torra’s brand of Catalan patriotism?

Torra is a socially conservative Christian Democrat, for whom Manuel Carrasco I Formeguera, founder of the now-extinct Democratic Union of Catalonia (UDC) and executed by the Franco dictatorship, “has always been my maximum political symbol”. Torra was a long term contributor to the web-based bulletin El Matí, which began life as the name of the pro-independence minority within the UDC.

In 2009, he joined the formation Reagrupament (Regroupment), which started as a tendency within the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) opposed to its participation in the 2003-2010 ”tripartite” government led by the PSC and including Initiative for Catalonia-Greens (ICV). Explaining why a social conservative like himself had joined Reagrupament, Torra wrote in 2009:

“The attraction of Reagrupament as an electoral option is precisely this, the turning upside-down of the political discussion in our house. Now it’s no longer a question of ‘Catalanism of the right’ or ‘Catalanism of the left’ (if anyone in Catalonia knows what these things exactly mean), nor ‘liberalism’ or ‘social democracy’, nor even of ‘Christian democracy’ or ‘socialism’: today the battle is between ‘unionism’ and ‘independentism’, Spain or Catalonia, province or State. When the homeland is living through a moment of national emergency, when the risk is being run of the nation dissolving like a sugar cube in a glass of milk,[1] when all the alarms are simultaneously sounding as to our survival as a people, the ideological discussion can in no case be the axis that separates us: above and beyond lies the destiny of Catalonia.”

This remains Torra’s position to this day — the struggle for Catalan independence always comes first and only those leaders who have sacrificed themselves to this goal are worthy of respect. Consequently, the permanent temptation for the Catalan pro-independence left — chiefly the ERC — to form a “social” alliance with Catalan forces linked to the all-Spanish left has to be rejected outright.

At the same time, the socially retrograde positions of Catalan leaders who have stood up to the Spanish state get minimised. Examples are former ERC leader Heribert Barrera (advocate of the progressive expulsion of migrants) because of his “fierce intransigence against giving a millimetre in the conquest of our freedoms”; former president Artur Mas (one time critic of the ruling PP for its lukewarm neoliberalism) because of his commitment to calling a referendum on independence; as well as corrupt Catalan president Jordi Pujol, because ... “wouldn’t the pro-independence movement be irresistible if he fully joined it and led it?”

In the same vein, in the unending debate within Catalan nationalism between the poles of cautious consolidation of social support for independence and bold and hopefully inspiring confrontation with the Spanish state, Torra belongs in the second camp. His heroes include Francesc Macià (in 1931 the first Catalan president of the modern era) who in 1926 conducted a failed liberation invasion of the country from the French Pyrenean town of Prats de Molló. It is clear that Torra regards Puigdemont in a similar light to Macià.

‘The Spanish’

Alien to any class analysis of Catalan and all-Spanish social reality, Torra’s diagnoses of Catalonia’s afflictions in his writings and tweets have featured the crimes of “the Spanish”, who are treated as an undifferentiated horde oppressive of Catalan rights, language, literature and customs. Here are some of the new president’s tweets between 2011 and 2014:

• “Shame is a word that the Spanish eliminated from their vocabulary years ago.”
• “The Spanish only know how to plunder.”
• “Jokes aside, gentlemen, if we keep going down this road many more years we run the risk of ending up as mad as the Spanish themselves.”
• Hearing [Citizens’ leader] Albert Rivera talk about morality is like hearing the Spanish talk about democracy.”

Nonetheless, substitute “the Spanish” with “the Spanish establishment” in the above phrases and they are perfectly accurate, just as is this 2010 comment of Torra’s on Spain’s October 12 “Day of the Race”, celebrating the conquest of Latin America:

“The Spanish conquest [of Latin America] between 1492 and 1650 carried off more than 70 per cent of the 70 million people who were living there when Christopher Columbus arrived. More than 200 languages have disappeared. The archive of the Indies reveals that in 1503 alone 185,000 kilos of gold and 16 million kilos of silver arrived in Sanlúcar de Barrameda from the American colonies. At present prices this gold and silver would liquidate the debt of the entire continent, and there would still be some left over. In short, five centuries later, more than 200 million people are poor and 79 million are poverty stricken, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL)….

‘Spain, essentially, has been an exporter of misery, materially and spiritually speaking. Everything the Spanish have touched has become the source of racial discrimination, social difference and underdevelopment.”

Yet when writing about Catalan history Torra’s nationalism expresses nostalgia for supposed ancient glories that are not sufficiently celebrated in today’s Catalan schools. Here, for example, he deplores the lack of celebration of the 700th anniversary of the Catalan mercenary expedition that took Athens in 1311 (and whose troops pillaged and raped just as the Spanish conquistadors did two centuries later):

“An exceptional opportunity to explain a part of their history to our boys and girls, maybe the only part based on victories and legendary adventures and which should serve to create a collective national narrative … So used as we are to defeats and failures, for once we have glory and triumphs to offer, to explain that names like Llúria[1], Rocafort[2] or Entença[3] are something more than streets in the Expansion[4] and to try to explain that these four provinces [of Catalonia] have been an empire....

“Seven hundred years ago we conquered Athens — Athens no less! — why not revisit the occasion? Let friendly shades, the old ghosts of Catalan culture surround us and under a burning sky, the most burning sky possible, of a blazing red, let’s dream again of the nation we once were, the country of navigators that conquered Mare Nostrum and turned it into our sea.”

In Torra’s writings Catalan history is viewed as the decline of a once-hegemonic maritime power, worthy rival of the Genovese and Venetians, until its rights and freedoms were finally extinguished after the 1714 conquest of Barcelona by the Borbon forces in the War of the Spanish Succession. It is the national sentiment of a ruling elite prone to feel it was cheated by history, betrayed by its supposed allies and never given its deserved role. When he was the director of Barcelona’s Born Historical Centre, Torra said that “1714 was our Year Zero”.

Given this outlook, Torra’s positions on social struggle are no surprise, even as he shows compassion and concern for those stuck at the bottom of the heap (as in a 2011 piece on the struggle to survive in the Barcelona underworld). In June 2011, he described the “Surround the Parliament” action that arose from the May 2011 indignado square occupation movement as equivalent to the February 23, 1981 failed military coup against the Spanish parliament.

The socially conservative Torra is not a neoliberal. On the basis of two decades of experiences in the Swiss insurance industry he wrote the book Swiss Knifings, noting:

“The big corporations and multinationals are under pressure for returns as short term as by tonight or tomorrow at breakfast time. … Confronting this vertigo in an epoch of uncertainty and lack of definition such as the capitalist world has never experienced before is reserved only for the strongest, the most evolved individuals. Today, Darwin would arrive at the same conclusions if instead of boarding the Beagle and spending five years travelling the world he took part in a shareholder AGM for five minutes.”

Catalonia in the Spanish state

Torra’s thinking tends to see everything in terms of conflicts between nations. In the Catalan case, he has also expressed the common sentiment in conservative Catalan nationalism against the injustice of civilized, productive Catalonia’s forced inclusion in the oppressive, backward and bureaucratic Spanish state, compelled to fund its poorer regions, but without the Basque Country’s command over its own tax income.

This sentiment is at bottom due to the peculiar character of Spain, in which the capitalist elites in the most industrialised and most socially advanced parts of the country (Catalonia and the Basque Country) were at best conceded only secondary positions in the Castilian, later Spanish, state machine — made up of the monarchy, armed forces and Catholic church and the judicial and civil service systems with which they maintained their rule.

At the same time, given the fact that large parts of the working class that have generated value for the Catalan (and Basque) economic elites have come from the most poverty-stricken parts of Spain (Andalusia, Castilla-La Mancha, Murcia), it’s inevitable that many immigrant workers identify Catalan national sentiment in its entirety with the Catalan rich and that anti-Catalanism always tries to makes use of class resentment to produce a “social” justification for its denial of democratic rights.

No scientific study of Catalan history would deploy the category of “the Spanish” as Torra does, but it remains perfectly understandable as a reaction to national humiliation, in the same vein as the reaction of other oppressed nations to their oppressors, such as Irish aversion to “the Brits”, or Polish hatred of “the Russian”. Even less are the shortcomings of Torra’s conservative nationalism a justification for denying the Catalan nation its right to self-determination.

Reactions on the pro-sovereignty left

Within Catalonia, some reactions from left supporters of Catalan sovereignty to Torra ascension to the presidency have been sharply critical. For example, historian and journalist Marc Andreu, interviewed in the May 14 edition of the web-based journal Crític commented:

“Torra’s narrative represents an important step backwards for Catalanism. He has an essentialist and ethnicist vision, quite unusual in the history of Catalanism….

“That the pro-independence left should support for president someone who is so far to the right is strange … Torra’s narrative creates a feedback loop with that of Citizens….

“[The] cultural hegemony of the [independence] process has been won by the most conservative right. They used to say that the process was turning the country leftwards, but now we see that not only is it not turning to the left, but that it has ended up strengthening the narrative of the most conservative right wing.”

But is Torra free to implement his conservative nationalism in the present Catalan political context, even if he wanted to? In the same number of Crític Jesús Rodríguez, editor of the web-based daily Directe, noted:

“[A]n identity-based, essentialist personality has been nominated president, someone opposed to the values that have emerged from the republican independence process, values that are mainly of the left. Nonetheless, I ask myself: will that be what be projects in his work of government? I don’t have that clear because the process, especially in its last phase, since October 1, has had an impact on pro-independence people who before were more conservative and reactionary. If the government of Quim Torra follows an exclusionary political line, it will commit suicide. Either he changes his way of seeing Catalan politics and society… or he’ll have a very short term in government.”

In the new context created by the formation of Torra’s government the job of the left outside Catalonia is clear enough: to strengthen support for the country’s right to decide and solidarity with its struggles against Spanish state oppression. Action along this line will in turn give heart to left and progressive people inside Catalonia and contribute to the independence process continuing to move leftward.

In such a context Quim Torra’s ideas as conservative Catalan nationalist intellectual will find less and less space for practical expression.

Appendix: The language and the beasts

Opinion (El Món, December 19, 2012)

“They are here, amongst us. Any expression of Catalanness repels them. Theirs is a sick phobia”

By Quim Torra

At home my parents made sure an old copy of a book that all we brothers had read passed from hand to hand: When the beasts spoke by Manuel Folch i Torres. Father was unbending and considered that one could not grow up without having read it, along with Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring and Josep Maria Folch i Torres’s Bolavà. It was a delightful book where owls, bears, elephants, fawns and bumblebees spoke, a collection of fables for the education of children.

Now you look on your country and you see the beasts speaking once again. But these are beasts of another breed: birds of prey, vipers, hyenas. These beasts have a human form, and drool hatred. A disturbed, nauseating hatred — like false teeth covered in slime — against everything that the [Catalan] language represents.

They are here, amongst us. Any expression of Catalanness repels them. Theirs is a sick phobia. There’s something Freudian about these beasts. Or there’s a glitch in their DNA chain. Poor individuals! They live in a country of which they know nothing: neither culture, nor traditions nor history. They are waterproofed against any event that conveys the Catalan reality. It gives them urticaria. Everything that is not Spanish and in Castilian just bounces off them.

The beasts have names and surnames. We all know one of them. The beasts abound. They live, die and multiply. One of them starred the other day in an incident that has not yet arrived in Catalonia and that deserves to be explained as an extraordinary example of the bestiality of these beings. Poor beasts, they cannot act otherwise.

One of the few airlines that has accepted Catalan as normal is Swiss. If you have taken any of their flights to the Swiss Confederation, you will have discovered how they use our language when it comes to taking off and landing the aircraft. An exception, given that, unfortunately, with the rest of the companies we get treated exactly as what we are, the last colony in Europe.

Well, a couple of weeks ago one of these beasts travelled on a Swiss flight. On arriving at its destination, the typical observations prior to landing were announced in Catalan. Automatically, the beast began to secrete its rabid saliva. A sewer stench arose from its seat. It twisted, restless, desperate, horrified by having to hear four words in Catalan. It had no escape. A mucous sweat, like that of a toad with a cold, was pouring from its armpits. Just imagine the state of the beast, after such a long time — those that can live in their Spanish world without any problems, hearing four words in a language they hate! Outraged, he decided to write a letter to a German newspaper in Zurich, complaining about the treatment he received because “his rights were violated” since Spanish is the «first» official language of Spain. And the complaint of the beast was published and given prominence.

Thank God, the good friends of the Casal Català of Zurich replied and clarified matters (so many [Catalan] embassies and consulates and, look, a small Casal Català is the one that has mobilised thanks to the decency and dignity of his members).

But why do we have to mobilise every time? When will the attacks of the beasts end? How in 2008 can we put up with so much harassment, so much humiliation and so much contempt?

Notes

[1] Roger de Lluria (Ruggiero di Lauria in Italian) was a Sicilan admiral who served with the Crown on Aragon. See here for more infomation.

[2] Bernat de Rocafort was the third leader of the Catalan expedition, from 1307 until 1309. See here for more infomation.

[3] Bereguer d’Entença led the Catalan expeditionary force (almogàvers) after the death of their first leader, Roger de Flor.

[4] The Expansion (Eixample) is the area of Barcelona designed after the original city walls were demolished in the mid-19th century, lying between the old city centre and surrounding villages. See here for more detail.

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[1] Although the metaphor (the sugar cube in the glass of milk) is the same as in the quotation cited by the Citizens leader in the previous article, Nichols informs me that these quotations are taken from different articles by Quim Torra. – RF

Catalan Spring: Which way forward for the independence movement?

‘Free the political prisoners!’ April 15 demonstration in Barcelona.

Introduction

The Spanish state’s prosecution of Catalan independence leaders suffered a serious setback April 5 when a German court rejected Spain’s request that former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont be extradited to face a charge of “rebellion,” subject to a jail term of up to 30 years.

The Schleswig-Holstein regional court freed Puigdemont, saying it could find no evidence that he was guilty of “high treason,” the equivalent for rebellion in German law. And the judges asked Spanish Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena to provide more information on his further charge against Puigdemont of embezzlement for using public funds to finance the October 1 referendum on independence.

Here again, evidence is lacking. On April 19, in response to an order from Llarena, the Spanish treasury minister sent a senior official to the Congress to confirm that not one euro of public money was spent organizing the referendum. Many of the exiled and jailed Catalan political leaders face similar charges of rebellion and misuse of public funds.

“Puigdemont’s release,” writes Barcelona correspondent Dick Nichols in Green Left Weekly,

“has thrown into question at a European level the independence of the upper echelons of the Spanish judiciary, in particular Llarena. His rulings, the subject of caustic criticism by legal professionals within Spain, are now being exposed to scrutiny internationally....

“It is becoming increasingly hard to maintain the line, repeated ad nauseam by European Commission spokespeople, that Catalonia is an internal Spanish concern that will be solved within the framework of a European Union member state governed by the ‘rule of law’.”

The German court decision, says Nichols, “has buoyed the Catalan independence movement, including most Catalan parliament deputies.”

As noted in the article below, mass mobilizations in support of the political prisoners and exiles have revived in Catalonia. On April 15, at least 315,000 demonstrators (the police figure; organizers’ estimate was 750,000) overflowed the two-kilometre route they had been assigned.

The march was organized by the civil-society Catalan National Assembly (ANC) and the 400-plus grassroots Committees for the Defence of the Republic (CDRs). The latter have now become a major target of the Rajoy government’s repression. On April 10, heavily armed Civil Guards arrested Tamara Carrasco, the alleged “ringleader” of the CDRs. She faces charges of “terrorism” and “rebellion.”

In the following article two militants from the Anticapitalists current, which is active in Podemos, analyze the strategic dilemmas now facing the Catalan movements. They call for “a change in paradigm” with a new emphasis on social, political and economic rights that could increase popular “support for a constituent project among those who are not pro-independence” with the prospect in the long term of winning solidarity with this progressive agenda in the rest of Spain.

My translation of the article as published in Viento Sur. The footnotes are mine.

– Richard Fidler

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Blockade or Return to Normality?

by Óscar Blanco and Laia Facet

An icy winter followed the Catalan October that had generated what is surely the greatest crisis of the state since the Transition. The harshest blow delivered by the state to the independence movement and the rest of the bloc looking for how to unfold the mandate of the October 1 referendum was not the repression, the imprisonments or the application of article 155. Those blows fueled the strike of November 8 when, for the first time, the Committees to Defend the Republic (CDR) took the lead over the ANC and Omnium. However, the main blow had less to do with that harsh treatment but was part of the article 155 package: the calling of the December 21 election. An election that the independence movement had no choice but to accept after timid resistance initially by some sectors. How was a movement that since 2012 had been saying the ballot boxes were the solution going to call for a boycott of the election? This signified a recognition of the failure of the Declaration of the Republic and the forcible imposition of the Spanish state. In what state are elections called by the government of the neighboring country?

Electoral interests prevailed, and determined even the mobilization agenda. The CDRs adopted campaign logic, calling for a vote for Junts per Catalunya, ERC and the CUP, which posed ratification of the republican mandate but without being able to put forward a new road map. As in 2015, the polarization between the Yes and No to independence left little space for grays, and the topic of what had happened on October 1 and 3[1] did not gain any traction. There have ensued months of give and take between the political forces, failed agreements on how to install a government and a certain retreat from the mobilization that had absorbed so many intense months.

With spring, the thaw has arrived. The street is heating up again in response to the repression under the baton of Judge Llarena in a sort of judicial Causa General.[2] An entire generation of Catalan pro-independence politicians is being hounded by jail or exile. The CDRs have taken center stage again. First, through confrontations with BRIMO and ARRO (anti-riot and support units of the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police), that are once again displaying their most brutal face. Then by road blocks and slow marches and by an “operation return” on Holy Week, in which they opened toll barriers on various highways. Massive and decentralized civil disobedience actions like those launched previously, which (perhaps because they have affected the interests of a stock-exchange listed company such as Abertis) have unleashed a new criminalization campaign by the Prosecutor’s Office, the newspaper La Razón, and the jerifaltes past and present of the PSOE such as Ábalos or Solana.[3] The arrest of the activist Tamara Carrasco by the Audiencia Nacional[4] has proved that these spaces for popular self-organization are the target and the huge mobilization of April 15 was seen as the great milestone of this spring.

However, with the attempt to install Jordi Turull as Catalan President the countdown to new elections has begun.[5] A complicated tactical dilemma is superimposed: the second investiture, more complicated still without a clear strategic horizon and with the repression hanging like a Democles sword over the Catalan parliament and the new President. Recent weeks have forcefully revived the hypothesis of installing Puigdemont among such actors as the CUP or the ANC (after the latter’s renewal of its leadership) who are relying on the strategy of blockade. The legitimacy of the independence movement to propose the candidate that it considers as the bloc that won the December 21 elections should not be questioned under any pretext. However, the debate should be focused on whether this is an adequate tactic for advancing the struggle for self-determination. To where does the hypothetical institutional blockade lead? Who is really being worn down?

A new frontal clash with the state would now occur without resolving any of the weaknesses that were expressed in the post-October 1 period, which allowed the state to gain the upper hand: the need to broaden the social base in favour of the Republic and to overcome the lack of counter-powers capable of sustaining the conflict over time without leaving anyone behind. Accordingly, the tactic in the investiture debate should be linked to the need for sovereign power to reorganize and explore new ways to force the state to sit down and give concrete form to the rupture with the regime. The other main position in the investiture debate, fundamentally embodied by the ERC, which consists of installing an effective “governance,” suffers from the opposite risk because it seems to abandon the path of institutional disobedience and poses a certain return to normality.

The bulk of the independence and federalist movement up to 2010 had opted for constitutional paths. After the Constitutional Court’s ruling against the Catalan Status the challenge to the regime began to take root for some, but for others it was total disorientation. Paradoxically, the independentist challenge leaves the door to a (con)federalist solution more open than the attempts of most of the federalist forces in recent decades.

October 1 was a situation of bifurcation in which the rupture was on the table. However, Elisenda Paluzie herself (the new president of the ANC) said that the momentum had been wasted. After the defeat it is necessary to think within a medium and long term logic: to think out how to organize ourselves to take advantage of new openings in a better correlation of forces.

It is safe to say that the independence movement today does not have the strength to bring about an independent republic. But it may have the strength to keep open the challenge to the regime and to force negotiation that fights the outcome longed-for by the state — a regressive shutdown and isolation of Catalonia with the conflict festering within. In this context, regaining control of the Generalitat can be another tool in the democratic conflict but the solution does not go through the narrow margin of effective management of an autonomy already achieved prior to the implementation of article 155.

How to find a way that does not hang on the blockade or on a return to normality? What role does disobedience play in this? As the CDRs have been implementing, disobedience must be able to mount actions, campaigns and mobilizations that do not normalize this barbarism and that continue to involve grassroots activists, unlike the pre-October process. On the other hand, institutional disobedience must abandon the phase of symbolism and rhetorical declarations and develop a strategy that prepares the ground to lead in better conditions to another crisis situation.

One of the major challenges of Catalan politics is to think out a social and economic program capable of resolving simultaneously the obstacles and material weaknesses expressed in the post-October 1 period, and the precarious conditions and poverty afflicting the popular classes. That is to say, the pro-sovereignty movement has to stop promising an Ithaca of social rights[6] and put in place mechanisms to guarantee them in conflict with the state. To achieve this, it is essential to recover the spirit of October 1 and 3 when one could sense the possibility of a subject that went beyond the independentism of the last decade with the ability to create spaces of mass self-organization in defense of self-determination. However, a certain tactical rigidity has not helped to maintain that unity and give it a political embodiment with the possibility — who knows? — of reversing the situation.

The Catalan October pointed to a surmounting of the orthodox process: a change in paradigm in which the defense of social, political and economic rights could become the centre of the movement and not an appendix displacing any kind of identitarian considerations. This transformation would help to increase the support for a constituent project among those who are not pro-independence and could have a necessary contagious effect in the rest of the state that would weaken the regime’s positions and therefore its ability to use coercion and impose itself in Catalonia at virtually no political cost.

Óscar Blanco and Laia Facet are members of the Anticapitalists in the Spanish state

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[1] The reference is to the massive public resistance to police attempts to bar voters from the ballot boxes on October 1, followed by the mass general strike on October 3 against repression of the voters and denial of Catalonia’s right to self-determination.

[2] The Causa General refers to the legal proceedings taken by Franco after the Fascist victory in the Civil War against “criminal offenses committed throughout the national territory during the Red domination.” See https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causa_General.

[3] “Jerifaltes past and present” is apparently a reference to Gerifaltes de antaño (1909), the third and last volume of a trio of novels by the Spanish playwright, poet and novelist Ramón Maria de Valle-Inclán (1866-1936) devoted to the 19^th century Carlist Wars between contenders to the Spanish throne, in which the Carlists, defenders of traditionalism and Catholicism against liberalism and later republicanism, were victorious. (Today’s post-Franco Spanish royal family are their direct descendants.) The word “Gerifaltes,” from ancient Spanish literature, is now understood as a synonym for caciques (local despots), entendidos (the cognoscenti) and even ladrones (thieves), but above all jefes (bosses) by the aural similarity of both words. Ramón Maria del Valle-Inclán is generally considered one of the leading authors of 20^th century Spanish literature.

José Luis Ábalos was appointed provisional spokesman in 2017 for the PSOE, the Spanish Social-Democratic party, in the Congress of Deputies. Javier Solana, also a PSOE leader, is a former secretary general of NATO.

[4] Tamara Carrasco is a CDR activist. The Audiencia Nacional is a special high court created in 1977 when the Public Order Tribunal (Tribunal de Orden Público), a Francoist institution, ceased to exist.

[5] Jordi Turull, a jailed PDeCat leader and Carles Puigdemont’s former chief of staff, was prevented by Judge Llarena from attending the Catalan investiture and now faces rebellion charges. See “Spanish court remands Catalan presidential candidate in custody.”

[6] The Greek island of Ithaca is generally identified with Homer’s Ithaca, the home of Odysseus, whose delayed return to the island is the plot of the classical Greek tale The Odyssey.