When Spain begins to look like Serbia

Once again, I am going to borrow an article from somebody else. In this case, it is from the editor and chief of the web portal VilaWeb. VilaWeb is one of the most visited websites in Catalonia and an influential media outlet. It is actually number one news portal in Catalan language, averaging over 300,000 unique visitors per month, and one of the key pioneers (ENG) in the use of Catalan in the internet and of the development of internet in Catalonia. Vilaweb is one of the few truly independent media outlets in Catalonia: a private enterprise not subject to the dictum of party or government politics.

The chief of Vilaweb is Vicent Partal [blog in Catalan]. He is a respected journalist and gets invited to TV and radio programs, etc as a pundit. I have taken the liberty to translate his editorial piece from Thursday 10 July 2008. In this article, Mr Partal highlights the increasing similarities between the pan-Serbian nationalism of the late 80s and the Spanish nationalism of nowadays. It makes some interesting reading but it is unlikely that the bunch of lazy foreign correspondents that work for the English-speaking media in Spain will report on it. They copy and paste from El País and El Mundo, the newspapers of the Spanish left and right respectively.

I have sketched a quick translation. I am keen to get feedback, as I am sure there is room for improvement, so I will keep updating the wording as I receive your comments.

Source: VilaWeb editorial Thursday 10 July 2008 [link]


When Spain begins to look like Serbia 

If for years Spanish nationalism expressed itself in a moderate way, accepting a certain bilingualism and feigning a certain 'kind' image, the mask has fallen in 2008 so spectacularly that we will have to mark it in the history books, The manifesto against the bilingualism or yesterday’s reactions to the document of the (Catalan Government) Finance Secretary Mr Castells about the fiscal plundering mark a new path that brings closer Spanish nationalism to the recent history of Serbian nationalism. With some concrete parallelisms that are terrifying.

This manifesto that claims the superiority of the Spanish language signals a change of social notions. They do not proclaim the convenience of bilingualism any more in the areas with their own native language within the State; what they argue is the backward movement of the native languages. There stops being the formal worry that there was until now for social cohesion, which they in no way appeal to any more. Now the call goes towards the demographic superiority of the speakers of the Spanish language, claiming a pure and simple imposition: demographics. 

And in this sense, the manifesto reminds us of the famous Memorandum published in the year 1986 by the Serbian Academy of the Arts and the Sciences; said memorandum served as an ideological basis for Milosevic and this ended up bringing war, and independence of all, all of them, not purely Serbian areas of ex-Yugoslavia and to the international isolation of Serbia. 

That [Serb] Manifesto, for example, affirmed, against reality, that the only people that did not have right to use their own language were the Serbs that were living in bilingual areas, and it claimed the imposed primacy of the serbo-croat over all other languages; and that whatever or whoever did not subscribe to this idea was 'a particularism' and 'antidemocratic'.

The message that inspired that Manifesto and the one that inspires the pro-Spanish manifesto is the same: a belief that there are cultures or languages that are superior to others, without any regard to speakers of the [other] language, and to request the imposition of their language via discriminatory laws and, if necessary, with recourse to the forces of the law. The [Serb] Memorandum of 1986 also outlined what their authors (intellectuals like in the case of the Spanish manifesto) considered was an economic oppression of Sèrbia by the other republics. And this exact message was also made visible yesterday by most of the Spanish media as an answer to the presentation of the data about the fiscal plunder. It is the same perversion: reality does not matter.

And thus yesterday we could see and hear people who denied it openly, who turned the data upside down or, simply, who reconverted the Spanish nationalistm discourse affirming that that the problem is not that Catalonia, and the rest of the Catalan Countries, suffer fiscal plundering by Spain, but that Spain is being suffocated by the power of Catalan companies, which have colonised Spain. Again, a change of discourse that implies a remarkable change of social notions. Until now nobody, except for isolated groups, had dared saying something like this. Yesterday we heard it in the mass media and from the lips of very violent commentators and very loudly.

I confess that this drift is worrying me. It worries me, especially, because it goes accompanied of a remarkable and visible increase of violence. The attitude of the pro-Spanish is every time more violent and aggressive, and from insults they have already move into threats or disturbances, as we have seen during the celebrations of the Euro 2008 football tournament, despite the silence of the majority of the media.

But it is also necessary to say that the Serbian drift of Spanish nationalism is a threat especially for them. Unlike what happened in the former Yugoslavia, we live in the European Union and here it will not be tolerated or allowed any type of war, or coups, either military or legislative. And this should make somebody think, in Spain. Because Sèrbia has ended up alone, impoverished and isolated. And to explain today this is to make a pure and simple description of how this could end for the Spaniards, if they continue with the supremacist madness that has taken hold of them.