Is Catalonia a Nation?

Spaniards like to say over and over that there is only one nation in Spain because their 1978 Constitution grants juridical recognition and sovereignty just to the Spanish state as a whole, despite mentioning other nationalities and languages. 

The Constitution was seen at first as a gigantic step towards the recognition of Spain as a state composed of several nations, but the ruling by the Constitutional Court against Catalonia’s new Statute of Autonomy in 2010 left it quite clear that such interpretation was not at favored any more. This ruling argued against the very concept of Catalonia as a nation by saying that Catalans are just the Spanish citizens who happen to live in a region of Spain called Catalonia, and nothing else. 

Conversely, in Catalonia, anyway, most people think of themselves as Catalans living in their own land, and theirs a distinct territory with its own culture, and they just want to keep being Catalans because they think they have the right to be so and should therefore, as a nation, decide on their own future.

Today, thirty-five years after the Constitution’s approval, the two major political parties in Spain do not accept Catalans as having any right to decide on their own collective future. They assert that the only one nation is the Spanish one which, according to the constitutional dispositions, is also indivisible. Besides, Catalonia, according to the Constitution itself, is considered to be, just and only, a nationality. So they think this should close any debate. End of the debate. 

How, then, could anyone consider Catalonia to be a nation when the Spanish Constitution does not say so?

Well, just because being a nation does not depend on any given juridical document, but on having several specific requirements which along centuries of history conferred to any given human community the basic conditions we all have in mind as to define a nation and the right to be considered as such: a language of their own, a distinctive culture and law, a land of their own, a distinctive history, an idiosyncrasy, and some degree of economic structure and organization—all of these (as it is the case of Catalonia) or at least some of them, but in a quite significant degree. 

More recently another fundamental condition has also been introduced: the required consciousness of most members of such a community of being a real nation. This is a crucial factor that makes all the difference between a people and a true nation. All peoples can exist in a natural way while nations do have an effective consciousness of their own elements of identification. A nation, therefore, is always the result of a historical evolution.  

What does Catalonia have then in order to be considered a nation?

We have our own language, Catalan, and it has been so for one thousand years.

Catalan culture includes literature and fine arts, scientific and philosophical research, our own legal tradition, folklore and gastronomy. Catalonia has a distinctive culture which has also been able to integrate elements from various other cultures.

After the ancient Roman legacy, Catalonia’s distinctive history begins in the early years of the Middle Ages. It has a long political tradition of pactism between its early Parliament and the Catalan kings. Catalonia became even an early maritime empire around the shores of the Mediterranean sea. Its political institutions and self government were only abolished in 1716 following the military occupation by Spanish and French armies. 

It certainly has its own idiosyncrasy, what dictionaries define as somebody’s peculiar physical or mental constitution, something we might call a national character of calmly passionate and industrious people.

The always dynamic Catalan economic structure is now mainly based on the services sector and small industry, with a thick network of small and mid-sized companies alongside some larger ones.  An economy that for the last decades has become endangered by legal and political regulations from the central government who is ever trying to increase the great economic powers of Spain.

Catalans nowadays are involved in the creation of a new independent state in order to guarantee our country’s economic and social development in the future. 

And Catalonia is, finally, well conscious of being a European nation from old and has shown a clear will of becoming again, once more, a free one.