Civ 26 ok revisat

Catalan International View A European Review of the World

The Nord Stream, the Arctic and the new glocal European hegemony Special Issue 26 · spring-summer 2017 · € 5

by Víctor Terradellas

The diplomacy needed for the twenty-first century

by Arturo Sarukhan

A happiness index to compare social progress between countries

by Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell

Catalonia: A New Independent State in Europe?

by Jordi Muñoz

Cover Artist:

sections:

Jordi Belver

Europe · Opinion · Africa · Asia · The Americas · Business, Law & Economics Sport beyond Sport · Barcelona Echoes · A Short Story from History · Universal Catalans Green Debate · Science & Technology · The Artist · A Poem

PUBLI

Contents Positive & Negative Editor

Víctor Terradellas

vterradellas@catmon.cat

Director

4 Catalonia’s legislation on the referendum / Spain’s dark underbelly

by Francesc de Dalmases To Our Readers

Francesc de Dalmases

6 The Nord Stream, the Arctic and the new glocal European hegemony by Víctor Terradellas

Editorial Board

Europe

director@international-view.cat

Martí Anglada Enriqueta Aragonès Jordi Basté Enric Canela Salvador Cardús David Fernàndez August Gil-Matamala Montserrat Guibernau Marta Lasalas Manuel Manonelles Eva Piquer Ricard Planas Clara Ponsatí Arnau Queralt Vicent Sanchis Mònica Terribas Montserrat Vendrell Carles Vilarrubí Vicenç Villatoro Chief Editor

Judit Aixalà

1 0 Observing policies on historical memory: the European Observatory on Memories by Jordi Guixé 18 Catalonia: A New Independent State in Europe? by Jordi Muñoz

24 ETA’s disarmament, an important step towards peace

by Pernando Barrena Opinion

2 8 World Happiness Report by Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell

34 The diplomacy needed for the twenty-first century by Arturo Sarukhan 40 The craft of intelligence and the gift of democracy by Pol Serrano Africa

4 4 The Congo’s villes mortes by Laura Cartanyà Asia

5 0 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a flamboyant spaghetti western

by Joan Vicens Sard

Language Advisory Service

Nigel Balfour Júlia López Coordinator

Ariadna Canela

The Americas

5 4 Trump’s come and Castro’s gone by Jordi Fexas

administracio@catmon.cat

Business, Law & Economics

Designer/Webmaster

62 Informal insurance networks in rural villages by Pau Milán

Cover Art

7 0 Catalonia’s first circular economy project by Josep Maria Tost

Gemma Lapedriza Jordi Belver

The reproduction of the artwork on the front cover is thanks to an agreement between Fundació Vila Casas and Fundació CATmón Headquarters, Administration and Subscriptions

Fonollar, 14 08003 Barcelona Catalonia (Europe) Tel.: + 34 93 533 42 38 www. international-view.cat

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Printed in Catalonia

Published quarterly With the support of: Departament de Presidència

Barcelona Echoes

7 4 The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya: a world leader by Joan Fontserè Sport beyond Sport

7 8 FCBarcelona Photo Awards winners A Short Story from History

8 0 Ali Bey Universal Catalans

8 2 Jaume Nunó Green Debate

8 6 It’s the governance, stupid! by Sergi Tudela Science & Technology

9 0 Electric mobility strengthens the ties between Catalonia and the automotive world The Artist

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Jordi Belver

A Poem

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cynical three by Laia Martinez

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Positive & Negative

by Francesc de Dalmases

Catalonia’s legislation on the referendum On 4 July, 88 days before the referendum scheduled to take place on 1 October, the Government of Catalonia passed a law governing the referendum on self-determination. Legislation that sets out the referendum’s legal framework. The message was clear: the referendum will go ahead, it will be a vote with maximum democratic guarantees and it will be legally binding.

In the words of President Carles Puigdemont ‘on 1 October, the votes will decide’.

Article 4 of the law stipulates that if the ‘yes’ vote wins, independence will be 4

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proclaimed ‘within two days’ following confirmation of the result. The referendum will have democratic guarantees thanks to the Electoral Office, answerable to Parliament, which will act as an Electoral Board; the international observers that the Electoral Office will organize, and by the legislation’s 34 articles, which adopts aspects of Spanish electoral law.

The government and political parties took pains to point out the law’s legal basis: the referendum is protected by the right to self-determination, governed by international treaties to which the Spanish state is a signatory.

Positive & Negative

Spain’s dark underbelly Certain illegal practices started by the Franco dictatorship continue under the democratic governments of the PSOE and more recently with the PP. The documentary Las cloacas de Interior [lit. The Home Office’s Sewers] directed by Jaume Roures, released in July, includes testimonies by some of those involved in various police investigations. The cases originally came to light thanks to the work of investigative journalists, back in March 2014, with Operation Catalunya, in which the police investigated pro-independence politicians.

The documentary includes recordings of conversations between the Home Secretary, Jorge Fernández Díaz, and the then Director of the Anti-Fraud Office, Daniel de Alfonso, detailing their attempts to harm the PP’s political rivals.

The recordings were brought to light by

the newspaper Público in June 2016, thanks to the work of the investigative journalists Patricia López and Carlos Enrique Bayo. It is worth remembering that former minister Fernández Díaz continues to hold a seat in the Congress of Deputies.

Some of the more shocking revelations in the documentary produced by Mediapro are the interviews with two employees of the Andorran Private Bank (BPA), which was reported for having revealed information concerning the Pujol Ferrusola family. Jaume Bartumeu, the former lawyer of the Cierco Brothers, the BPA’s owners (which has ceased operations and is accused of money laundering), declared that the Spanish police ‘accessed the BPA’s clients’ files’, without the permission of the Andorran public prosecutor.

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To Our Readers

The Nord Stream, the Arctic and the new glocal European hegemony: pointers for a new era of geopolitics Víctor Terradellas by

The recent G20 summit in Hamburg was noteworthy for Trump and Putin’s apparent solitude, in contrast with a certain degree of agreement between the European leaders –including the United Kingdom– despite a Brexit that many still see as reversible. Once again, however, in international relations appearances may have little to do with the underlying reality, which as everyone is aware is strictly determined by the vested interests of the states concerned. I would like to analyse three background issues that help us understand the vested interests beyond the surface appearances.

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oint one: Russian gas. On 8 November 2011, Germany and Russia inaugurated a new gas pipeline across the Baltic. The mammoth engineering project, Nord Stream, received little public attention.

The gas pipeline completely changed the flow of gas traffic as it had existed up until then in Europe since it came to Germany directly from Russia, without passing through other countries, such as Ukraine. Aside from the route, it was also a unique engineering project due to its capacity: the pipeline delivered gas to 26 million European households.

Mostly in Germany and France.

When it was inaugurated, the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, speaking in Berlin, announced that it was a ‘first class’ pipeline for the benefit of relations ‘between Russia and Ger-

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many and between Russia and Europe’.

He went further, affirming that the new infrastructure ‘guarantees Europe’s energy supply’.

The construction of these future alliances is still continuing, thanks to Germany and Russia’s determination to go ahead with a new gas pipeline: Nord Stream II. The Nord Stream II project represents a key pillar in the Euro-Asian, Russo-German strategic alliance. However, America’s fear of losing an ally such as Europe, and its fear of being left on the sidelines, have encouraged it to look for the weakest, most porous links within the European framework. Those who for historical reasons are fearful of the prospect of this possible new hegemony or alliance.

Thus, on 8 June this year, the first liquefied natural gas tanker arrived in Poland

To Our Readers

from the port of Louisiana. Under this new arrangement Poland has managed to reduce its dependence on Russia almost completely, and has taken the first step towards achieving energy independence from Russia.

These rather significant details presage a new reality that could, if we so wish, become the norm: neither Germany nor the European Union have agreed to increase sanctions on Russia at the United States’ behest.

Point two: the Arctic. In 2013, Rune Rafaelsen, head of the Norwegian Secretariat of the Barents Sea, responsible for an area located within the Arctic Circle between Norway and Russia, ignited a global environmental debate when he declared that the Arctic thaw caused by global warming could be a goldmine. ‘The poor countries in the

south are the losers in climate change and I won’t say that we, in the north, are the winners, but there are obvious positive effects’, he stated. Global warming causes chunks of Arctic ice to melt at high speed, opening up new shipping lanes through an area that until recently was impenetrable. ‘The Suez Canal is still a much more important route, as it’s used by some 18,000 vessels a year, whereas in the Barents Sea we are talking about a few hundred, but their numbers are on the increase. Going from Europe to the Pacific in less time means using less oil and emitting less CO2. It’s possible that by the summer of 2050 we might be able to sail across the North Pole, without having to go round it’.

40% of the world’s undiscovered gas and oil reserves are located in the Arctic. But the Arctic is not solid ground, Catalan International View

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To Our Readers

it is nothing more than frozen seawater and, as such, it is governed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. However, certain states would prefer to see it governed by the Maritime Border Treaties. Which ones exactly? Precisely the five who would have the possibility of exercising their sovereignty: Russia, Norway, Denmark (acting on behalf of Greenland), Canada and the United States (by Alaska).

Point three: the fight for global hegemony in this new order. There is an unprecedented model that right now would have a chance of succeeding; I am referring to a complete Europe from the base up, a glocal Europe. A model based on diversity and the combination

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of small, key states together with the Russo-Franco-German axis, and the increasing Euro-Asian integration. A model which allows each of the parties to assume every aspect of its role as a global player without renouncing any of the local dimensions of its European roles. A European model that could, once again, become a global model.

A federal model that, in order to exist, must recognize European identities that have been buried. Until now.

Catalonia would be a prime example of such a state. Europe has been timely for Catalonia and now Catalonia is timely, and necessary, for Europe. This (new) idea of ​​Europe, a glocal Europe, is the strong Europe that we need, the deci-

To Our Readers

sive Europe that we need in this new world order that is being created. It could bring a dose of common sense, of wisdom and boldness to a world which, apparently, is only engaged in the struggle for hegemony between China and the United States.

It is a struggle that exemplifies the fight between a liberal, essentially democratic world, and the other of authoritarian dependence. And in this struggle for hegemony where neither China nor the United States await us, Europe must not remain immobile. I believe it is vital that Europe builds a third option rooted in Europe, which draws on our own geography, with a glocal approach, since the global Europe we have tried to build up to now has not worked. This federal Europe, this ‘new’ idea of ​​Europe, essentially democratic and committed to human progress, with the conservation of the welfare state and with the promotion, appreciation and recognition of human rights, is the third actor which neither China nor the US are waiting for, engaged as they are in an all-out war for hegemony.

Glocal Europe reconciles us with our respective identities and estab-

The inalienable promotion, appreciation and recognition of essential democratic principles is part of a continental brand lishes us as a political entity with the capacity to interact with the planet as a whole, while simultaneously being attentive and respectful towards what we are and we have always striven to become.

Having taken a closer look at these three points, is there anyone who truly believes that Europe will not undergo substantial change in the coming years and that it won’t act as an international actor of the first order? In my opinion, the answer is no. Once again, the decision is in the hands of we Europeans.

In this too, we have to decide.

Finally, as ever, we would like this transformation, which is largely determined by economic and commercial interests, to take into account, from Europe, the inalienable promotion, appreciation and recognition of essential democratic principles as part of a continental brand that does not admit U-turns or cutbacks.

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Observing policies on historical memory: the European Observatory on Memories

by Jordi Guixé*

In Europe, historical memory is a phenomenon of both the present and the future, but not the past. The reference is in the past but the examination of these memories bursts onto the most fervent present.

Our doubtful, fleeting present, which is also violent. The complexity of investigation into historical memory is based on a constant multiplicity and the permanent mutation of its concepts, uses and consequences.

We see how ‘non-historical’ memories are a combination of the work of chronicling past events and a consideration as to how to remember the catastrophes of the twentieth century.

T

he spontaneous transformation of the facts into a collective tribute is thought-provoking in the acceptance and interpretation of the facts –revisitation– with a dual purpose: the pursuit of the major, root causes of the atrocities on one hand and a reflection on the transformative potential of their knowledge on the other.

Thus work on historical memory must not be limited to historicising facts and recording them in books or on digital and audiovisual platforms. Work on memory must transgress, transforming the present and acting as a reference for future generations. Work on memory must be related to the current use of the revisitation of the past; whether it be spontaneously, for group identification, in order to denounce, for sentimental reasons or in order to mourn. A memory 10

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that deals with social, cultural and civic interactions which we experience in relation to our distant and not so distant atrocities.

It is therefore difficult to focus such an appraisal on a single point. Those who are dedicated to ‘observing’ which policies evolve and how they do so, in both local and international spheres, not solely European, we see how the approaches greatly multiply and diversify. Perhaps we are seeing the end of the ‘memory boom’, of the ‘saturation of memory’, or even the ‘hypertrophy of memory’ (Huyssen, Robin, Traverso, Todorov, Sarlo). There exists a public and political obsession with commemorative ephemeris at a time when there is still much to be done and where in some countries, such as Spain, there are many victims in need of reparation and many anonymous

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bodies to be unearthed and rescued from oblivion (Ferrándiz, 2014). It is a much-needed debate, but in certain instances the political uses of memory processes have alerted commentators and academics to the need for prudence, rigorous analysis and social sensitivity to the uses of the past.

Since 2004 the defence of memory has increasingly been seen as a common European value, following the eastward enlargement of the EU to include countries of the former Soviet Union, among others. New political currents are in favour of seeing memory as a symbol of common identity. Between 2002 and 2006, the European Parliament itself decided to introduce a series of laws, decrees and resolutions, in accordance with one of the parliament’s underlying principles, ‘to learn from history and to build

for the future’ (Decision No. 1904/2006/ EC, European Parliament and European Council, 12 December 2006. Order approved OJEC L 378/32.27, December 2006).

Nevertheless, these principles and declarations conceal a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the use of the term historical memory for political ends and, more importantly, the reinterpretation of historical processes out of vested interests. And on the other, the opportunity to give a new European identity to the millions of citizens who are joining the European Union, and who solely recognize themselves in their national identity and the concept of ‘European identity’. It is here that we find some of the current problems in the use of European memory: we speak of European integration based on the victimization of Catalan International View

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Living Memorial, Budapest, 2014. A spontaneous, participatory counter-memorial in front of the official monument to the Nazi occupation (photo courtesy of the author).

The construction of our social and democratic future is based on a critical examination of the past the countries that suffered the barbarity (in other words Nazi occupation and Soviet occupation) and ignore the role of the citizens themselves in relation to their own past and the said barbarism.

The construction of our social and democratic future is based on a critical examination of the past. This critical look undoubtedly strengthens democratic structures in the present, including transnational relations of old powers that are in conflict (Martí Grau, 2014).

This leads to an almost imperative need to strengthen a critical analysis of our past, when faced with what appears to be a permanent ‘multi-factorial crisis’ (political, economic, social, cultural and geostrategic) at the heart of the construction of the common European space.

European identity has shaped itself against the most execrable of wars, civil wars and repressive dictatorships from 12

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west to east. While trauma, experience and memory are the foundation of our collective identity (Ramoneda, 2014).

The social, cultural and political crises that affect the citizens of ‘Old Europe’ partly affect us due to the lack of truly widespread European public policies in the social, political and cultural spheres.

Historical memory is demolished and subdued by what is called ‘good memory’: an intrusive concept originating in political correctness. This ‘good memory’ is attributed to an à la carte usage of historical memory, to meet particular ends, depending on the political interests of the moment and according to the strategic whims of certain pressure groups.

No doubt the supposed victim is closely related to the ‘good memory’. It has also been referred to as ‘complete memory’ by some Latin American authors when analysing memory policies in Southern Cone countries and in reference to their recent dictatorships (Elisabeth Jelin, 2012, Beatriz Sarlo, 2005). Another factor influencing such ‘good’ historical memory is ‘equivalence’, whether positively or negatively in the interpretation of every conflict, where there are always two or more opposing sides. Such equivalence –as we in Spain are well aware– is done with the intention of presenting the violence of the past as an anomaly that ought not to be repeated, in an attempt to strip contemporary political history of all ideology.

The result is the victimization of an entire society; it collectivizes historical memories and assigns the label ‘victim’ according to the whim of official bodies that are unable to address the inherent conflict in the uses of the past. A recent example is found in what I call ‘the Spanish and Catalan labyrinth’. Much work remains to be done on the politics of memory in our country and there is the need for some reflection and public professionalism in addressing such issues

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with the necessary rigor and determination. On numerous occasions precipitation and improvisation have produced an outcome which is the opposite of that which was originally intended. Nevertheless, even if there are political options which are clearly opposed to memory processes, the trauma inflicted on our country by the Civil War and one of the longest-lived and repressive dictatorships, such suffering cannot be overlooked or ignored as certain individuals would wish. Memory is eternal, it is always there and it will revisit us in various forms and unexpected moments1.

Another politically unstable trend is the analysis of the past and the present as ‘black and white’. ‘We all have a ‘dark past’, however, we –in Europe– also have a brilliant present and / or future (Markus J. Prutsch, 2015). The perplexity of current conflicts prevents us from situating Europe in a peaceful oasis, although intention is to frame said idea within the current need for Europeanization.

Analysing the current military and political conflict in Ukraine or the constant flood of immigrants towards the Greek, Italian and Spanish coasts as the gateway to a bright and peaceful Europe.

Two current realities that have their origin in the poorly resolved political and conflictual, imperial and colonial past.

A reality that the highest European institutions are unable to resolve with dialectical emergency summits, but rather with serious political groundwork and historical analysis of –perhaps colonial, imperial and economic in this instance.

I subscribe to Timothy Snyder’s current analysis on the interpretation of twentieth century Europe as a permanently diverse, multiple process of colonization and decolonization between states, political territories and former empires (Snyder, 2015). But the reality of European memory of colonialism is an

uncomfortable reality. A memory which is uncomfortable for the states which practiced it, and not solely as an analytical metaphor.

The current programs and projects at the European level have been derived from this, in attempt to defend the public’s values ​​based on catastrophes of the past. A past that is intended to be common to all European citizens in a failed attempt to create a common identity. It is a past that at the local, European and national level continues to be a rough diamond in terms of its capacity to promote transformation and social growth.

These brief reflections contribute to the analysis and the need to ‘observe’ public policies on historical memory in Europe in a horizontal, comparative and transnational manner. Applying them to local and national instances serves as a precedent for the treatment of memory in the present and the future. It confirms the conflicting and transgressive practices in memorial processes and warns us against the use and abuse of the victims of violence and conflict for instrumental means. Comparative memory is present-

1. See the different historical memory laws – unapplied and inapplicable– and certain decrees by autonomous regions which are undoubtedly erroneous, to have been passed both in Spain and in Catalonia.

Locomotive by Leonhard Lapin. Museum of Occupations, Tallinn, 2015. Showing Nazism and Communism as equivalent (photo courtesy of the author).

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ed as a transformative agent that may (or perhaps should) serve more than as a case study to create debate and counterargument. If we limit the momentum of national memories without transnational practices it could generate national –and indeed nationalist– tropes which produce effects which are the opposite of historical connectivity. This entails the current challenge of acting with transnationality, transculturally and multidirectionally (Aline Sierp, 2015, Michael Rothberg, 2009) in order to obtain a new ‘ethics of transcultural’ memory to help processes of: connectivity, complementarity, solidarity and the participation –or involvement– of the public.

Mobilizing memory also generates mobilization (Marianne Hirsch, 2013).

If we limit the momentum of national memories without transnational practices it could generate national tropes Examples of ‘participatory memory’ have also been conducted locally. This has happened for the first time here in Barcelona with a number of projects such as the process of the recuperation of memory involving the now defunct Les Corts Women’s’ Prison; or the joint project concerning the historical memory on the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. Activities will be taking place in both Barcelona and Sa-

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rajevo within the framework of the new European Observatory on Memories’ (EUROM) European network.

THE OBSERVATORY AS A NETWORK OF MEMORIES IN EUROPE The European Observatory on Memory is a project which was conceived by the University of Barcelona’s Solidarity Foundation. It is intended as a research project but also as a means to promote and manage memory relating to conflicts of the twentieth century and other historical periods which have a public impact on memory in the twenty-first century. The project, which began in 2012 and aims to expand and create a European network to analyse and disseminate the multiplicity of reports in Europe, was validated and agreed with the Education, Audiovisual, Culture Executive Agency of the European Commission as part of its Europe for Citizens program.

Our first experience with memory policy in Europe was via the project entitled The European Democratic Memory: Beyond Nazism and Stalinism (2012); which analysed the resolutions of the European Parliament related to memory such as the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Simultaneously work was begun on creating a robust network of partners collecting the opinion of experts, institutions and politicians, as well as testimonies and organisations.

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The project continued to grow under the permanent prism of cross-cultural work, analysing local, national and international instances.

The Observatory is a true bridge connecting institutions, professionals and researchers from Europe and other continents, with a special emphasis on Latin America, where memory policies have had a very significant presence in the political and social sphere in recent decades. It also takes particular interest in countries which do not yet formally belong to the EU but are and have been European. The current decade is full of challenges involving memory policies, while it is also a decade of analysis, compliance, learning and transnational effort. Europe is the best example of the multiplicity of memories. They shape our current democratic reality and socio-political map of today’s Europe. The very concept of Europe is a juxtaposition and multiplicity of memory built on a daily basis. This wealth, compared to parallel processes, as we have seen in South America, allows us to state that the diversity of memory ought to shape public policies on memory at the European level. Without ignoring or forgetting the great weight of the consequences of Nazism and Stalinism in terms of building democratic stories, other processes such as the struggle against fascism, dictatorships, civil rights, peace and justice processes, democratic movements in the East, resistance

movements and struggles for freedom, have also spawned transformational values ​​that cannot be categorized on a secondary level. The different national histories are far more connected than one might imagine, but accepting and working from multiplicity and diversity saves one from the temptation of falling into competence and competitive memory often seen in certain groups and countries.

One of the major goals of the Observatory is to address the variety of historical memory in the twenty-first century without taboos or political pressures.

There is clearly a need to establish a network of European memory, taking into account and respecting the diversity of memories, each with its unique characteristics. It is difficult or almost impossible to do so without a wide-reaching, multi-disciplinary perspective. All manner of academic specialties are represented (art, architecture, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, ethnology, literature, work with new technologies, etc.). We can count on a robust network of professionals who have worked on the transmission and patrimonialization of historical memory on different levels. It is imperative we address work on memory from different disciplines in order to connect them: art, history, sociology, political science, law, architecture, anthropology, ethnology, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies and cultural heritage, etc. Transnational and multidisciplinary networking is horizontally coordinated by the Observatory, Catalan International View

2. Foundation Universitat de Barcelona –EUROM– ; Universitat de Barcelona, group Memòria i Societat; Chair in Historical Memory, Universidad Complutense de Madrid ; LABEX : Les passées dans le présent; Stituto Storico de Modène, Módena –Italy–, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, CRHISM –Univ. Perpingnan–, ISOCAC –Universitat Rovira i Virgili–, Wilfrid Laurier University –Canada–, University of Limerick –Ireland–, Université de Lyon 3 ; CNRS Centre Max Weber –Lyon– ; Brighton Research in Memory –Brighton University- ; and the University of Tallinn. IC MEMO (International Committee of Memorial Museums for Remembrance); Museum of Free Derry (Northern Ireland); Maison d’Izieu.

Mémorial des enfants juifs exterminés (France); Finnish-Russian Citizens’ Forum (Finland); Istituto nazionale per la storia del movimento di liberazione (Italy); Stiftung Topographie des Terrors (Germany); Associació Conèixer Història (Catalonia); KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen (Austria); The Museum of Occupations (Estonia); Gedenkstätte Wewelsburg 1933-1945 (Germany), City Council of Predappio (Italy), City Council of Lisbon –Museo Aljube– (Portugal), Granollers City Council and Barcelona City Council (Catalonia); Memory Lab (Croatia), Getho Museum, Riga (Latvia); Fundación Cipriano García de Comisiones Obreras (Spain), Living Memorial (Hungary), Cultural and Art Foundation (Denmark); Museo de la Paz de Gernika (Euskadi); Sarajevo History Museum and Local Democracy Foundation (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and other new members (check the website).

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while nurtured and promoted with the support of its partners2.

The program revolves around research, debate and education. Initially, we were interested in analysing emerging issues in memory, those working from different perspectives, putting them in contact with one another in a network. The different viewpoints should generate debate but also approaches from different perspectives, from intertwined memories. Some work has already been carried out, such as interviews conducted in different European regions, which can be accessed on the Observatory’s website (the new website helps us share and also work in a network, since each partner has their own space for interaction, in which to invest digital, topographic, documentary or awareness-raising resources).

The network operates on three interactive levels:

1. The institutions leading the project: The University of Barcelona’s Solidarity Foundation, ​​with the help of the European Commission and a steering committee with the participation of Barcelona City Council.

2. The members of the network: public and private institutions, research centres, universities and organisations which adhere to the cooperation agreement and who share common objectives with the observatory and the other members. The partners also propose activities and projects aimed at research and the promotion of memory.

3. Indirect partners: those professionals, organisations and institutions that are involved with the Observatory through one of the direct partners, or which perform a specific activity or a specific research project or diffusion, with which specific agreements can be signed.

(*) Jordi Guixé is a researcher and a Professor in Modern History from the Universities of Paris and Barcelona. His specialism is Franco’s repression against political exiles in the period of the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Cold War. He is also an expert in public policy regarding historical memory and has worked in the creation and as project leader of the Democratic Memorial of Catalonia (2005-2012). Director and coordinator of various international conferences on the politics of memory, an exhibition curator and consultant on documentaries, he works on the debates and conflicts between memory and heritage in Spain and Europe (comparative models, public interventions, uses and abuses). He has directed three EACEA European projects on historical memory policy. He has published numerous works on history and memory, such as La República Perseguida. Exilio y represión en la Francia de Franco [The Persecuted Republic. Exile and repression in Franco’s France] (Valencia, Publicacions Universitat de València, 2012) and Políticas Públicas de Memoria, I Coloquio Internacional [Public Policy on Memory, First International Symposium] (Lleida, Ed. Millennium, 2009 and Eumo Editorial, Vic, 2009).

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Catalonia: A New Independent State in Europe?

by Jordi MuĂąoz*

Catalonia: A New Independent State in Europe, edited

by Xavier Cuadras-MoratĂł, is a multi-disciplinary book in which Catalan scholars from different branches of the social sciences analyze the debate on Catalan independence and discuss potential future scenarios. The book is a great accomplishment in that it shows how the analytical tools of different academic disciplines can work together to offer a wide and multi-faceted analysis of a complex sociopolitical issue. In the volume, the reader will find contributions by political scientists, economists, legal scholars and historians, all written with a wide audience in mind. This is a good example of how the social sciences can aid in the public debate, and provide pointers for an international audience which wishes to better understand a political debate that is becoming increasingly complicated to follow even for Catalan and Spanish citizens.

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W

hile several of the contributors have taken an explicit public stance on the issue, the volume is by no means partisan, and when relevant, every chapter carefully deals with arguments from both pro and anti-independence sides.

The result is an incredibly useful volume that, for the most part, will outlive the specific context in which the contributions were written.

In the first chapter, Toni Rodon and Marc Guinjoan summarize the evolution of Catalan public opinion with regard to independence. The two political scientists chronicle the fundamental realignment which has taken place in Catalonia in recent years, and show the key role played by specific critical junctures in which expectations of further decentralization were frustrated and many who were sympathetic to the cause swung towards open support for full independence from Spain.

Rodon and Guinjoan also convincingly argue against an argument that states that this realignment was entirely elite-driven, and show the importance of grassroots mobilization in shaping the public discourse and public opinion on the issue. Importantly, they also qualify the purely economic interpretation of the change, that links it primarily to a reaction to the economic crisis.

They underline the role of mobilization and the persistence of the change.

In chapter two, the economists Enriqueta Aragonès and Clara Ponsatí analytically dissect the bargaining process that underlies the recent developments in Catalan politics. They characterize the traditional negotiations on self-government, and the implications of their outcomes, which they argue were increasingly unsatisfactory to the median Catalan voter. While under the traditional bargaining scheme between the majority Catalan party and the main Spanish parties (the so-called fish in the

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bag strategy) the Catalan government obtained increased powers, it was far less successful in financial negotiations.

This asymmetry led to increased stress on the Catalan government as the primary service provider, which found itself with greater responsibilities while being severely underfunded. Without a structural solution to the financial issue, further decentralization is not feasible.

The volume addresses the key issues in the debate on Catalan independence from a diverse set of academic approaches Aragonès and Ponsatí also discuss how the increased mobilization of the pro-independence movement was boosted by the technological changes that reduced the costs of coordination, and the geopolitical changes, that made outright repression from the Spanish government much less feasible. However, the crucial argument that is put forward in the chapter is that, given their genuine policy preferences, and specifically the preferences of their median voters, the optimal strategies for Catalan and Spanish leaders do not overlap. Therefore, disagreement becomes a form of equilibrium.

From the normative political theory perspective, Marc Sanjaume’s essay addresses the morality of secession.

Sanjaume presents the main theories on the issue, which he characterizes as adscriptive (nationalistic), remedial the20

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ories (based on the violation of rights by the state as a justification for secession) and democratic. He analyzes how these different justifications have been present in the discourses in favour of and against independence in Catalonia. Then, in the most revelatory part of his essay, Sanjaume characterizes the current situation as a ‘non-reasonable and thick’ disagreement between two liberal perspectives that hold starkly different, albeit legitimate views. He contends that only a solution placing the discussion in a full framework of equal respect for rights would address the core problem of the Catalans as a permanent minority within Spain. Otherwise, if the disagreement persists on its current terms, this would place Catalonia in a ‘tyranny of the majority’ type of situation, which might add to the remedial arguments in favor of (unilateral?) secession.

Pau Bossacoma and Hèctor LópezBofill provide a legal perspective. They go over the arguments used to sustain demands for independence, and track their evolution from the traditional selfdetermination claims, that were limited when applied to non-colonial situations in which basic human rights were not being systematically violated, to the subtlely different arguments, that lean more towards the democratic principle rather than the principle of nationality. This evolution lies behind the Quebec arrangements, and is also behind the increasing use in the Catalan context of the concept of the ‘right to decide’ as opposed to the right to self-determination.

Meanwhile, Bossacoma and LópezBofill, in their chapter, devote sever-

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al pages to a thorough analysis of the nuts and bolts of the legal arguments put forward by the Spanish institutions, and especially the Constitutional Court, at various times. This is crucial, since the legal argumentation has been the main tool used by the Spanish institutions. They underline how the Spanish Constitutional Court, has argued that holding a referendum would only be possible after a reform of the constitution using the most demanding procedure (Art. 168) which is remarkably strict, enough to turn the Spanish constitution into a constitutional straitjacket. The authors also review the different legal strategies attempted or discussed by the pro-independence camp, underlining their limitations in terms of feasibility and adequacy. Finally they outline the idea of conceiving secession as an instance of ‘revolutionary’ constitutional reform à la Bruce Ackerman.

Xavier Cuadras-Morató reviews the debate on the economic consequences of independence for Catalonia. He subsequently analyses the fiscal consequences of secession resulting from the so-called fiscal dividend, given the current negative fiscal flows from Catalonia to Spain. However, though the fiscal question has dominated the debate, he analyses several other issues in the chapter: debt sustainability, the benefits of having autonomous policies, especially in the realm of transportation infrastructures and general economic policy. Cuadras-Morató argues that these benefits, especially the latter, are elusive and hard to evaluate exante. He goes on to address the trade

implications, and specifically discusses the likelihood of a consumer boycott from Spain directed at Catalan products, and the potential harm from the so-called ‘border effect’ on trade. He concludes that a large-scale boycott is unlikely, since it imposes costs on the boycotter and is subject to a collective action problem in which freeriding is highly likely. Also, based on previous studies, he concludes that the actual costs of such a boycott would be modest, at best. With regards to the border effect, he reviews the arguments that have been put forward by other economists, and underlines their omission of the crucial question of the time necessary for these effects to materialize. The chapter then discusses monetary issues and additional questions, related to the costs associated to political instability

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and the costs of setting up new institutions. Overall, Cuadras-Morató concludes that independence would provide Catalonia with sizeable economic opportunities, linked to the end of negative fiscal flows and the possibility of improving economic policy-making, but that the political uncertainties associated with the transition years pose challenges and potential economic threats that should not be disregarded, especially in the short term.

In the final chapter, Fernando Guirao takes on one of the debate’s crucial issues: the hypotheses with regards to the relationship between Catalonia and the European Union in the case of secession. Guirao critically assesses the arguments on both sides.

While the pro-independence camp insists on the hypothesis of continuous membership or, in any case, almost immediate membership on a moral and practical basis, the anti-independence camp argues that Catalonia would find itself in a form of permanent ‘international apartheid’, or exclusion from international institutions. These arguments are based on legal and, especially, political grounds: since the accession of

new member states requires unanimity, Spain would de facto have veto power over that decision.

Guirao reasonably concludes that both sides present feasible possibilities, and that neither of them should be taken for granted since the hypothesis of a secession within the EU is, up until now, terra ignota. Guirao also argues in favour of ‘unpacking’ the question of EU membership, and separately analyzes its components: access to a single market, membership of the Eurozone, European citizenship and formal membership. Guirao argues that the situation of each of these might be different, and therefore foresees a complex and evolving arrangement, the specific contours of which would depend on the specifics of the process.

Overall, as can be seen, the volume addresses the key issues in the debate on Catalan independence from a diverse set of academic approaches. This makes the book an extremely useful guide to navigating the complexities and subtleties of a political debate that, undoubtedly, will remain of paramount importance in the coming years.

(*) Jordi Muñoz is a political scientist. Ramón y Cajal research fellow at the Universitat de Barcelona, and Fellow at the Institutions and Political Economy Research Group. Previously, postdoctoral researcher ( Juan de la Cierva) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Democracy, Elections and Citizenship Research Group), and PhD student at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where he graduated in 2009.

He has also been a visiting researcher at the University of Gothenburg (2012) and Yale University (2007-08). Muñoz contributes regularly to Ara newspaper and, occasionally, other media outlets.

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ETA’s disarmament, an important step towards peace

by Pernando Barrena*

On 7 April ETA announced that it had handed over its weapons to Basque civil society. On Saturday 8 April, ‘Disarmament Day’, the Basque ecologist Txetx Etcheverry, on behalf of Basque civil society, handed over a list of 8 weapons depots to Ram Manikkalingam, President of the International Verification Commission, IVC; the Archbishop of Bologna Matteo Maria Zuppi and the Reverend Harold Good attended the exchange, while the mayor of Bayonne and President of the Basque Municipal Community in France, Jean-René Etchegaray, served as host.

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he IVC passed on the information to the relevant French authorities, while 174 peacemakers monitored the 8 locations until their arrival. The IVC considers ETA’s disarmament to have been carried out and verified.

Following the disarmament process that took place during the morning, a sober, dignified and respectful event took place with the participation of two peacemakers: Mixel Berhokoirigoin and Michel Tubiana, who were accompanied by the Reverend Harold Good. Finally, a manifesto was read out in four languages. According to the AFP, a crowd of some 20,000 people gathered in the square and the streets 24

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adjacent to the main stage to witness the event.

INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT

The process had the support of the Basque and Navarrese Parliaments, and political parties on all sides in the North and South of the Basque Country, with the exception of the French National Front and the Spanish PP. On 7 April, the Portuguese Parliament adopted declaration 276/XIII/2, in support of the disarmament process: ‘Without ignoring the memory of all the human suffering caused by the conflict, the future of peace depends on this historic opportunity, which opens the way to the resolution

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of other problems related to the conflict’.

Meanwhile, Bertie Ahern, former Irish Prime Minister and signatory of the Aiete Declaration, welcomed the news with the following: ‘Since the 2011 statement announcing a permanent internationally verifiable ceasefire, much progress has been made, and today’s announcement at a ceremony in the French city of Bayonne, where an inventory of weapons and their locations was handed to judicial authorities, is a significant step forward. I welcome this progress and wish all parties concerned about it the best in the near future’.

A few days earlier, the Financial Times published an article by Jonathan

The process had the support of the Basque and Navarrese Parliaments Powell, who was also a signatory, stating: ‘(…) but even now the Spanish government is unlikely to welcome the handing over of ETA’s weapons. Instead, they have tried to portray it as a surrender, and demand an apology and for the organization to be wound up. I was attacked in the right-wing Spanish press for arguing there should be no winners and losers if there was to be a lasting settlement. But if one side feels it has lost, it will in the end return Catalan International View

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There is a real and urgent need to resolve the situation of the prisoners and to seek with the greatest urgency a humanitarian solution to the situation

to the battlefield. Whatever the grumbling in Madrid, the events in France this weekend are historic’.

Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Féin and signer of the Aiete Declaration, recorded a video to show his support: ‘The Basque people have repeatedly demonstrated in elections and on the streets their support for a peaceful resolution of the conflict in that region. The initiative by ETA is an opportunity that must not be squandered. I would appeal to the Spanish and French governments to respond positively to this very important development with generosity and imagination in their response to this step and for the Spanish government to address the issue of political prisoners’.

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ETA’S DISARMAMENT, AN IMPORTANT STEP TOWARDS PEACE

The International Verification Commission has confirmed that ETA is no longer an armed organization, we hope that this announcement will be a turning point in the progress of the process and that it will allow for further progress.

For all this we welcome the disarmament of ETA as an important step towards peace. We thank the artisans of peace and the ICV, as well as all the forces and agents who have made ETA’s disarmament possible, for their work.

We note that there are still important matters that need to be addressed and that require a solution, such as the issue of prisoners, the recognition of victims and topics related to the legacy.

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We commend the attitude of the French government and we hope that it will continue in the future and we ask the Spanish state to review its position and adopt a positive and proactive approach on these important issues.

We stress that there is a real and urgent need to resolve the situation of the prisoners and to seek with the greatest urgency a humanitarian solution to the situation of prisoners suffering from serious illnesses and to put an end to the policy of dispersion.

THE FUTURE IN OUR HANDS

The turning point generated by the fact that ETA has decommissioned its arsenal highlights the need for proactive attitudes in favour of a frank and sincere dialogue on behalf of both the Spanish and French states.

However, these events also demonstrate that the Basques’ future lies in their own hands and that they are the principle means of deciding what form it shall take.

(*) Pernando Barrena is Sortu’s head of Political Relations. Founded in February 2011, Sortu is the first political party belonging to the Basque nationalist ‘abertzale left’ that openly rejects any kind of political violence.

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World Happiness Report: a happiness index to compare social progress across countries

by Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell*

In recent years both governments and international institutions have increasingly begun to understand and recognize the importance of subjective well-being and happiness in assessing social progress. Living a satisfactory and happy life is a key facet of citizens’ aspirations and it has been gradually but slowly introduced into the political agenda over and above other goals such as economic progress. The UN has published its World Happiness Report since 2012. This year’s report ranks 155 countries according to a happiness index, in line with the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission Report of 2008 which highlighted the need to include subjective measures of well-being (happiness) in the assessment of social progress. The latter states: ‘measures of both objective and subjective well-being provide key information about people’s quality of life. Statistical offices should incorporate questions to capture people’s life evaluations, hedonic experiences and priorities in their own survey’.1

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1. Stiglitz, J.E., A. Sen, and J.P Fitoussi, 2008. Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (page 16). http://library.bsl.org.au/ jspui/bitstream/1/1267/1/ Measurement_of_economic_performance_and_ social_progress.pdf

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he World Happiness Report (Helliwell, Layard, and Sach, 2017) ranks countries by taking the average of individuals’ self-reported life satisfaction. Although several measures are available, the World Happiness Report uses the Cantril question, which reads as follows: ‘Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top.

The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you Catalan International View

stand at this time?’. This question has been termed life-satisfaction or happiness interchangeably. There is enough evidence to be confident that individuals are able and willing to provide a meaningful answer to this question, a question that psychologists have long and often posed to respondents of large questionnaires.

Subjective measures allow the study of a wide range of theoretically and politically relevant questions. Economists, for instance, have focused on understanding individuals’ tastes and dislikes over a large set of variables,

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such as income, working conditions, unemployment, health, or inequality, to name but a few. While some of the results are unsurprising (for example, healthy, employed and ‘married’ individuals are happier than single, unhealthy, and unemployed), others reveal something unknown. The new insights regarding individuals’ preferences increase our understanding of individuals’ behaviour. For example, examining the role of uncertainty on happiness might contribute towards explaining investment or job market decisions.

Furthermore, subjective questions can be used to evaluate and design public policies, and to assess poverty and inequality from a new perspective. Rather than solely taking income into account, using happiness questions would allow the poverty definition to be embedded with important aspects such as wheth-

Comparing average happiness across countries provides a unique opportunity to understand and design public policies to promote global justice and equity, and to fight poverty er individuals live in a country with free education and a well-developed safety net or whether individuals have positive health status (for a similar argument see Ravallion, 2012). Including subjective perceptions into the poverty and inequality agenda would open up the concept of poverty to aspects other than income.

In this article I will focus on another relevant line of research that studies the evolution and differences between well-being levels across individuals and Catalan International View

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Public policy should continue to increasingly focus its attention on the happiness reports insofar as we are concerned with equity and justice regions over time. In particular, I will discuss the cross-country comparisons of self-reported life satisfaction or happiness, an issue that has gained much attention since the first World Happiness Report was produced in 2012.

When comparing self-reported happiness across countries and over time two main concerns arise: (i) whether happiness levels are comparable across people from different cultures, and (ii) whether people adapt to negative circumstances, which may render happiness comparisons across individuals meaningless. Regarding these two concerns, the World Happiness Report argues that ‘[…] average life evaluations differ significantly and systematically among countries, and these differences are substantially explained by life circumstances’ (page 11). In other words, we can be confident that

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cross-country comparisons are meaningful, as average happiness reports differ across countries and do so consistently depending on the objective situation of the country. Let us however go deeper into analyzing these two concerns. First, there is a set of studies that test the existence of a universal shared concept of happiness and conclude that individuals do indeed share a very similar understanding of the concept happiness (Diener and Lucas, 1999 and Sandvik et al., 1993). Nevertheless, this evidence is much stronger when comparing individuals within the same culture, which hampers the conclusions of the World Happiness Report. The second concern is related to the deterministic nature of happiness. Some economists criticize the potentially perverse effect of averaging self-reported happiness to compare and make welfare judgments across countries, if people are able to adapt, that is, if there were a weak link between psychological conditions (feeling happy) and material achievements. For example, if people were to completely adapt to poverty and reported the same happiness levels whether poor or not, income redistribution from rich to poor would not be optimal from a happiness perspective. Current evidence, however, shows that although happiness strongly depends on personality traits and therefore it is to a large extent inborn or genetically determined, life circumstances also affect individual reported happiness levels. More recent research using improved data and methodology shows that individuals’ capacity to adapt depends on the type of individual and on the life-changing event. For instance, while individuals do eventually adapt to losing a spouse, they seem to be unable to adjust to unemployment (Lucas et al., 2004) or to poverty (Clark et al., 2015). The empirical evidence to date concludes that there is a link between

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individuals’ objective situation and their happiness reports, which would not exist with complete adaptation. In addition, by using self-reported happiness the researcher allows the individuals themselves to define their level of wellbeing. This contrasts with the indicators of social progress in which the policymaker defines (imposes) a common set of variables and their relative weight for all individuals, as in the Human Development Index.

Without taking the limitations and criticisms too lightly, comparing average happiness across countries provides a unique opportunity to understand and design public policies to promote global justice and equity, and to fight poverty. The results presented in the World Happiness Report are not surprising, though they are nevertheless useful for

establishing well-being as a global priority. For example, looking at the happiness distribution (0 to 10) across the 10 different regions in which the report divides the world (Figure 2.1 ), I have no doubt that under the veil of ignorance most people would like to be born in ‘Northern America & ANZ’ or in ‘Western Europe’. Moving from the happiness distribution to the levels, the report shows that the top 20 happiest countries in the world (Figure 2.2 ) are all in these two regions, with the exception of Israel, Costa Rica, and Chile.

Out of the 155 countries, the lowest ranked within these two regions are Southern European countries: Portugal (89), Greece (87), and Italy (48). While the bottom 20 countries have an average life satisfaction below 4, the average is 6.7 for the top 20 countries. Similar-

2. The report divides the world into ten regions: Northern America & ANZ, Latin American & Caribbean, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Commonwealth of Independent States, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Middle East & North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

3. http://worldhappiness.report/wp-content/ uploads/sites/2/2017/03/ HR17.pdf (page 16).

4. http://worldhappiness.report/wp-content/ uploads/sites/2/2017/03/ HR17.pdf (page 22).

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ly, the average happiness of the top 10 countries is twice as high as that of the bottom 10 countries.

This data clearly shows that happiness inequalities across countries are enormous, and in much the same way as researchers strive to understand the causes of income inequality, we should aim at understanding how to reduce happiness disparities across countries.

The World Happiness Report also addresses this concern. The empirical results suggest that a large part of the cross-country happiness disparities can be accounted for by differences in GDP per capita, social support (having someone to count on in times of trouble), healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, corruption in government and business, and generosity 32

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(percentage of people who have given money for a charitable purpose within the past 30 days). Of these six variables, GDP per capita is the one that accounts for most of the explained happiness gap between countries. As with individual data, a part of the gap remains unexplained. For instance, Latin American countries report greater happiness than predicted by their objective situation, while the opposite is true for countries in East Asia.

Public policy should continue to increasingly focus its attention on the happiness reports insofar as we are concerned with equity and global justice. To the extent that happiness enhances productivity (Oswald, Proto, and Sgroi, 2015), this is desirable not only from a social justice point of view,

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REFERENCES

but also from an efficiency perspective.

Happiness reports will become an important measure of progress, a complement to other measures of social progress and GDP. If GDP and happiness were to go hand in hand, there would be no need for new indicators to guide public policy. However, this is certainly not the case (as Chapter 3 of the World Happiness Report by Easterlin, Wang and Wang, discusses).

Clark, A., C. D’Ambrosio and S. Ghislandi, 2016. Adaptation to Poverty in Long-Run Panel Data. Review of Economics and Statistics, 98: 591–600.

Diener, E. and R.E. Lucas, 1999. Personality and subjective well-being. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz (eds.). Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology. Russell Sage Foundation, New York.

Chapter 11.

Easterlin, R.A., F. Wang, and S. Wang, 2017. Growth and Happiness in China, 1990-2015. In J. Helliwell, R. Layard, and J. Sachs (eds). World Happiness Report 2017, New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Chapter 3.

Helliwell, J., R. Layard, and J. Sachs, 2017. World Happiness Report 2017, New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Lucas, E.R., A. Clark, Y. Georgellis, and E. Diener, 2004. Unemployment alters the set-point for life satisfaction, Psychological Science, 15, 8–13.

Oswald, A.J., E. Proto, and D. Sgroi, 2015, Happiness and productivity. Journal of Labor Economics, 33: 789–822.

Ravallion, M., 2012. Poverty lines across de world. In P.N. Jefferson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Poverty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 75-98.

Sandvik, E., E. Diener, and L. Seidlitz, 1993. Subjective well-being: The convergence and stability of self-report and non-self-report measures, Journal of Personality, 61, 317–342.

Stiglitz, J.E., A. Sen, and J.P Fitoussi, 2008. Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. http://library.bsl.org.au/jspui/ bitstream/1/1267/1/Measurement_of_economic_performance_and_social_progress.pdf

(*) Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell is tenured scientist at the Institute of Economic (IAE-CSIC) and is affiliated of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, IZA and MOVE. She holds an undergraduate degree in Economics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (1994), a Master (1998) and a PhD (2003) in Economics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, New York), and another PhD (2003) from the University of Amsterdam. Her main research line is the analysis of welfare through subjective measures. Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell has published together with Bernard Van Praag the book Happiness Quantified: A Satisfaction Calculus Approach (Oxford University Press, 2004 and 2008).

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The diplomacy needed for the twenty-first century

by Arturo Sarukhan*

With over twenty years’ experience as a career diplomat in the Mexican foreign service, I would like to share various reflections regarding the changes which are taking place in the world of diplomacy. We are at a significant moment in history because a series of events are unfolding which are fundamentally altering the way in which diplomacy is conducted.

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irstly, digital disruption and technology have dramatically changed the way diplomacy is conducted. I was the first Mexican ambassador to the US to open a Twitter account and I started to use social media and tweets to interact and communicate with the country where I served.

Clearly, this not only has an impact on how one conducts diplomacy, it also affects international affairs between countries.

Secondly, and obviously as part of this impact but also as part of the developments which have been underway since the end of the Cold War, the nation-state no longer has a monopoly on diplomacy or on the foreign policy of non-state actors, such as cities, NGOs and businesses. Currently, these ‘alternative’ actors play an important role in diplomacy and international relations across the world.

And finally, the third major change is the fragmentation of the international system, a process that is occurring unevenly and which represents a transition from globalization to regionalization. Increasingly, countries and international actors are forming regional or sub-regional groups as a solution to the multiple problems facing society and politics in general. Global issues which have a local impact on many regions of the world.

Once these three changes are established we can see a series of tendencies which have a great impact on the international system. Below I shall outline what appear to be the ten most relevant points, although obviously it is not meant to be an exhaustive list.

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Diplomacy is not dead. Ten years ago, it was claimed that the chanceries, diplomats, ambassadors and embassies were disappearing, that there were a whole series of connections that made the role of diplomacy less important or relevant. However, over the last five or six years the international system has shown that diplomacy is very much alive and there is an even greater need for it. Moreover, there is a need for an even more intelligent form of diplomacy. This becomes apparent if we observe what has happened in Eastern Europe or what is happening in the South China Sea. And the outcome of the numerous problems that will doubtless arise as a result of the US elections, and the role the country decides to play –or not– in relation to a number of international issues. In some ways America has always served as the needle on the scales, the fulcrum of an international liberal system.

As I said earlier, the nation-state no longer monopolizes foreign policy and diplomacy. Increasingly, the public, businesses, civil society organizations, NGOs, mayors and governors of provinces or states play a key role in building networks. We are currently witnessing a situation similar to that which occurred to city states during the early Renaissance and the

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Historically, the countries that have been successful are those which have benefited from human connections and interconnections

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Nowadays, a country’s importance and relevance is not measured by the number of F-16s in its air force but by its ability to provide human capital and to innovate Late Middle Ages. Whereas before we had Pisa, Genoa and Burgos, to name a few, we now have London, Shanghai, New York and Los Angeles. Cities are undergoing a radical change with respect to the way they interact; in fact, cities are where innovative policies are being discussed, ranging from the field of urban development to social inclusion. Whereas ten years ago, mayors were considered unimportant or irrelevant actors on issues of national security, nowadays if a mayor of a large city or a metropolis is not involved in issues such as radicalism, social integration and the impact these have on security (at the state, regional or global level), it is seen as a problem. The monopoly held by embassies and the traditional manner of conducting diplomacy is therefore breaking down and undergoing significant change. To this we should also add the significant tensions in the Westphalian paradigm, which has been the backbone of the international system for decades, since sovereignty is increasingly influenced by these inter-

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national networks that alter the way the state interacts with global trends and phenomena.

We are living at a very interesting moment in time in terms of the confrontation between different worldviews. Making a historical comparison and simplifying, obviously, the crucial confrontation my grandparents’ generation faced was the clash between democracy and totalitarianism (or in my grandfather’s case, between fascism and democracy), whereas for my parents’ generation it was the clash between communism and capitalism.

Nowadays, however, the fundamental struggle our generation is facing is between open societies and closed societies. And not only in relation to the free flow of information or how people react to said information but also with regard to freedom and access to it. In the United States, which has always been the paradigm of an open society, following a long campaign lasting eighteen months we have witnessed the results of what has happened together with certain political and ideological types which have emerged from this highly complex process. We therefore look forward to the many implications that this will have for the future. Perhaps for Catalonia, which is a little further away and which is separated from the US by the Atlantic, these effects will be somewhat less

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powerful than what is being felt in my country, Mexico, where social narratives as to how to interpret these conditions may have enormous consequences. One must remember that Mexico shares a three-thousand-kilometre border with the US, that thirty-five million Mexicans live there and bilateral trade is worth $1.4 billion dollars a day.

In recent years, mainly in Europe but also in the United States, there have been a number of phenomena that have taught us that the best answer to rising levels of insecurity is more freedom, more equality and fraternity. In my opinion, this paradigm is closely linked to the issue of a conflict between open societies and closed societies. If someone thinks that a foreigner or refugee is different from them, they clearly don’t understand what is happening in the world.

If someone thinks that the answer is to build higher or longer walls, they don’t realise that, historically, the countries that have been successful are those which have benefited from human connections and interconnections. After what happened in the US, we must be attentive to what may happen in other countries such as Austria and Italy.

Power is now much more widespread and multidimensional. Economic, military and diplomatic factors are all highly signifi-

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cant, but increasingly the power of attraction is a factor, what Nye referred to as soft power. The power of attraction has become a highly significant weapon in world diplomacy. Mexico, for example, is not a military power. It has the twelfth largest economy in the world and, although it is not an economic power, it is a global cultural superpower, as is Catalonia. The ability to articulate and convey Mexico’s long-standing gastronomic, literary and artistic wealth or Catalonia’s creative industries is a tool that every day, in a globalised world, becomes a key component of any diplomatic endeavour.

The world’s diplomacies are also increasingly understanding that we must work for the sake

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Digital diplomacy ought to lose the adjective, since it is, after all, a form of diplomacy of the common good. Whether the construction of these issues is in the environmental field or in respect to poverty and development, they are highly important letters of presentation for chancelleries and diplomatic missions.

This construction is what is behind the Good Country Index, for example, created by Simon Anholt, who also coined and developed the concept of Nation Branding. The Good Country Index measures a state’s performance based on a series of principles that act on common public goods, and evaluates the effectiveness and contributions of countries to the international community. Certain countries, especially those which don’t have the political and military might possessed by some of the world’s great powers are beginning to understand that their diplomatic activity ought to be increasingly articulated in reference to such factors.

Diplomacy is being radically modified, though not destroyed, by technology. One of the challenges facing us is how we interpret the role of technology and its impact on foreign policy. Those who

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are involved in diplomacy need to ask themselves the following questions: Is my country, my province or my city able to work with and understand the role of big data? Is my country, my province or my city able to compete with other countries, provinces or cities for areas dedicated to investing in technology and innovation? Nowadays, a country’s importance and relevance is not measured by the number of F-16s in its air force but by its ability to provide human capital and to innovate. Gradually, the world of diplomacy is beginning to understand that it has an important part to play in this area. The impact that technology has had on diplomacy has resulted in digital diplomacy which, when used properly, is an incredible source of open intelligence: it allows one to feel, listen and understand. It is a tool for social interaction that allows one to generate human contact and connections, and it also allows one to build or change narratives. I have always said that it ought to lose the adjective, since ‘digital’ diplomacy is, after all, diplomacy.

The challenges of diplomacy nowadays are both domestic and foreign. It is not only what is happening in Ukraine or the Crimean Peninsula, but what is happening within nation-states. One of the changes we may also see as a result of

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the US elections of 8 November 2016 is that the country will become much more inward-looking, becoming more isolationist and far less involved with a whole range of key international issues in which the United States has always participated up until now. And this is not just because this reflects Donald Trump’s world view, but because a significant proportion of the American electorate does not want their country to participate in a series of regional or global conflicts or situations. As a result, this exerts significant pressure with respect to the design of US foreign policy.

Increasingly, foreign policy will be ‘intermestic’, a mix of international and domestic, suggesting that, increasingly, diplomacy is much more linked to domestic pressures and political agendas, which will have a fundamental impact on how states manage their diplomacy.

The empowerment of the individual and society makes diplomacy a much more complicated task for states. Now there are ways to interact, respond, criticize, ask for answers and information that did not previously exist. The number of journalists, business people and ordinary citizens who demand information, question and

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criticize what is done has changed significantly, which in turn has a huge impact on how chancelleries and foreign services are designing and conducting diplomacy.

F inally, one of the reasons why we have seen what we have seen in the United States is that people are fed up with traditional politicians and political parties. It is very interesting and thought-provoking to see how, in numerous opinion polls, most Americans were convinced that Hillary Clinton was better qualified to be president and that she has a better temperament than Donald Trump for the job. However, unexpectedly, people have opted for change, and this is partly because they are tired of the status quo. This will in turn have an impact on the way diplomacy is conducted and the way in which services and the diplomatic corps, who are traditionally very secretive, very hierarchical and bureaucratic, will need to interact, not only with their own public but with the countries and societies where their embassies or ambassadors interact. Once again, the role the United States will play in this regard will have a huge impact on the entire international system.

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(*) Arturo Sarukhan Former Mexican ambassador to the United States and President of Sarukhan & Associates in Washington DC.

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Opinion

The craft of intelligence and the gift of democracy

by Pol Serrano*

The democratic system compels those who are in government to exercise power in accordance with the principles of transparency and accountability. Since the government emanates from the people, the government in turn also tries to regulate the abuse of power by the private sector directed against the citizens. Politicians can be sacked in a case of malpractice, and most important of all, they can be removed from office through elections.

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n the other hand, intelligence works in a completely different way; democracy and intelligence are antithetical concepts. The intelligence apparatus, by definition, needs opacity to function properly. And thus, opacity makes accountability and public scrutiny almost impossible. Only a handful of politicians exercise oversight of the intelligence services. But even with the scrutiny of politicians, the door is open for the intelligence practitioner to hide facts from political oversight, thus taking advantage of the aforementioned opacity. This is what makes intelligence a murky business.

Why then would states with deepseated democratic values develop and finance intelligence services? It would seem rather odd when democracy is all about implementing a moral filter to power; and intelligence about amoral, raw, and unrestrained power.

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But first, what is intelligence? Why is it so necessary, that all states have it?

The intelligence service has two main tasks: one is information gathering, the second counterintelligence.

These are the two main aims of the services, meaning that countries defend themselves from spies (the task of counterintelligence), but they also spy on foreign nations (information gathering). So agencies have an offensive and a defensive perspective.

And the ultimate objective of defense and offence, –make no mistake– is to advance a country’s national interest, and protect it from foreign aggression.

Working towards the national interest is a noble endeavor and it ultimately makes citizens wealthier and more secure. The dilemma lies in the pursuit.

Whilst democracy rests on the bedrock of moral Christian values, it is not at all clear whether the practice of intelligence

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is on the same page. We can affirm that the objectives of intelligence are for the good of the country in terms of accumulating power and wealth; however, power is never static (it either accumulates or decays), so ‘good for the country’ will almost always mean bad news for the one who loses this power. And even if a country does not profit from the action of intelligence, harm is done to a competitor, and the relative gain is always appreciated.

The permanence of the intelligence service regardless of the government, the opaqueness they enjoy, their information-gathering capacity, makes the service a powerful and robust, semi-accountable force. Add to that the capacity for covert operations and you have

Why then would states with deep-seated democratic values develop and finance intelligence services? an organization with almost unlimited power. Hence, democratic oversight is key to deter the service from pursuing its own agenda. But again, the fact that intelligence operations cannot be shown in public makes the politician in charge of the oversight, weak. By way of example, Her Majesty’s Government of the United Kingdom only officially acknowledged the existence of MI6 (Military Intelligence, Section 6) in 1994.

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Though every how-to manual regarding intelligence cautions against its practitioners getting involved in dayto-day politics, the truth is that intelligence professionals also have something to say about government matters. Their role is not only limited to information gathering and counterintelligence. They can also exert a tight grip on the decision-making of national governments.

Not to the extent of forcing governments to cave in to the wishes of the services. However, they enjoy a major influence over the decision-making process, mainly because presidents come and go, but the service is always present, like a secular force, gathering information, forging alliances, and passing the know-how down to the next generation. This makes it a vital tool for governing a country’s foreign policy.

The main friction between democracy and the intelligence service, however, is “plausible deniability�. It allows a politician to deny certain facts, when 42

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an intelligence operation is wrongly executed, or intelligence as such has crossed the democratic line. In such circumstances, politicians and the intelligence apparatus are in cahoots, cheating the democratic system all the way. Nevertheless, the political system has a way of uncovering such collusion. Denouncing the ruling party, as a means of putting pressure on them, in an attempt to win the next election. Notwithstanding the electoral gains that might come from denouncing any misdeed, it is highly unlikely that an opposition party would publicly denounce any malpractice due to plausible deniability. Essentially because in doing so, they would be harming the pursuit of the national interest, and when it comes to interests, it is the objective that matters, not the means. As a result, it is rare for any mainstream opposition party to denounce intelligence scandals, as it would probably harm the interests of certain economic powers, whether private or public.

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Intelligence can help defend noble causes, such as democracy and self-determination To have a functioning intelligence service, there needs to be mutual understanding between the politician, and the intelligence practitioner. The politician has to understand the brutishness of power in the international arena, and the intelligence practitioner has to understand that there are moral limits to what power can do on a domestic scale. There has to be a quid pro quo, an exchange of worldviews between the gift of democracy, and the morality that comes with it, versus the immense power given by the craft of intelligence.

The power of intelligence is demonstrated by the fact that it has even aided the creation of a country, against

the odds, and in defiance of the British Empire. Major Benjamin Tallmadge created the Culper Ring, to help the cause of independence of the United States. George Washington was in command of the ring. It was an avant la lettre Defence Intelligence Agency, aimed at providing information on the British troops in New York. It is a good example of how intelligence can help defend noble causes, such as democracy and self-determination. And a cautionary tale of how a good cause without power behind it, is nothing but a dream.

Ultimately, intelligence is like fire in the home. It can provide warmth, cook food, or it can burn the house down.

(*) Pol Serrano (Barcelona, 1988) holds a degree in Journalism from the Universitat Abat Oliba CEU and an MA in Politics and International Relations from the University of Kent. His dissertation was focused on defence and nation building. Currently a Research Fellow on European Affairs and Security Policy at the Fundaciรณ CATmรณn, he specializes in security and regionalism issues. He has extensive experience in the field of economic forecasting and geopolitical analysis.

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Africa

The Congo’s villes mortes

by Laura Cartanyà*

 Alors il faut appliquer l’article 15 de la constitution, vous le connaissez? [In that case you have to apply Article 15 of the constitution, have you heard of it?], the taxi driver said with a mischievous smile. I was worrying about how to get out of Bukavu by the same land border I’d crossed a week earlier from Rwanda.

I don’t remember if I had a problem with the entry stamp or I was more concerned about the M23 rebel group –a militia operating in eastern Congo– who at the time, I’m talking about the end of 2012, were advancing on Bukavu, South Kivu’s capital, from Goma, the capital of North Kivu.  L’article 15 vous dites? Pas du tout [Article 15 you say? Never heard of it] – I don’t know a single article of my own venerable constitution, so I can only imagine what articles the Democratic Republic of Congo might have.  Tout est possible, si rien ne va, employez l’article 15, chacun se débrouille.

Ici, c’est comme ça [Everything is possible, if nothing else works, use article 15, everyone gets by. That’s how it goes here], he added.

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hat you have to get by, that anything goes, that you make do. An imaginary article, a popular saying that may have originated in the separatist state of South Kasai in central south Congo, which due to ethnic conflicts and political tensions linked to diamond mining declared itself to be the independent Mining State of South Kasai, a few days before the decolonization of the Belgian Congo. It didn’t last long. Thanks to a mili-

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tary campaign that led to the deaths of thousands of civilians, the government of Congo retook the region. Legend has it that during the year and a half that independence lasted, as a result of the difficulties they faced since they only had colonial laws, Albert Kalonji, the President of South Kasai, ruled that the citizens would need to apply Article 15: Il faut se débrouiller. In other words, you have to get by. This was ‘diamond-mining politics’.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the second largest country in Africa after Algeria. A country of 2.5 million km² with 10,000 km of borders –of which only 37 km are coastal– shared with some of the most problematic countries in Africa such as South Sudan and the Central African Republic. A country with a population of 75 million and over 200 ethnic groups and languages, with no rail link between the capital and the provinces, and also a Catalan International View

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Cities that are very much alive but which sometimes undergo a transformation, out of necessity, outrage, fatigue, obligation, because of history or tradition non-existent road network between its major cities, and airlines that are not allowed to fly to Europe. The DRC is also home to 50% of Africa’s forests and the value of its natural resources extracted annually exceeds the GDP of the EU and the US combined. Welcome to the DRC. A country that has been at war since who knows when, in a war which has killed at least five million people, plus innumerable rapes. A war which has not only been fought by the nation’s soldiers but also Rwandan and Burundian, plus Ugandan rebels and Tanzanian, South African and Angolan mercenaries. The ‘African World War’, in search of the mighty dollar, particularly around the Great Lakes in the country’s east. A border some two thousand kilometres long which produces 60% of all the world’s technology metals (gold, copper, diamonds, tin and coltan), which are exported to the rest of the world. Se débrouiller [Fend for yourself ], you say? Too right, every day.

While in Europe daily life takes place mainly in offices, in Africa it unfolds on the street, selling, buying, trading. Kinshasa, the capital, with a population of 10 million (nshasa means market): stalls selling fruit, fish, shoes, fast food to eat now or take away, suitcases, backpacks, bras, open-air tailors with their old sewing machines, water

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in fragile plastic bags, bicycle repairmen, makeshift car cleaning in places where it would seem impossible to fit a motorcycle, imported goods, humanitarian aid, seventh-hand books, taxi drivers and motorcyclists, the latest mobile phones. And not far from this hive of activity, wide boulevards and residential neighbourhoods with houses that wouldn’t look out of place in Hello magazine and skyscrapers where European, Chinese and American multinationals trade in the country’s raw materials.

Cities that are very much alive but which sometimes undergo a transformation, out of necessity, outrage, fatigue, obligation, because of history or tradition. It is the phenomenon of the villes mortes [Dead City Day, a stay-athome strike]. They are nothing new.

They already existed at the time of the genocide in Bujumbura, Burundi’s capital, sometimes at the bidding of the opposition, who threatened a town with attacks and forced everyone to stay indoors. It was a means of destabilizing the government while terrorising the population. At the time the villes mortes probably had many supporters, but there was also fear, a lot of fear.

Now, at the close of 2016, the Congo’s villes mortes are due to the population’s refusal to comply with President Kabila’s attempts to remain in power secula seculorum [lit. ‘unto the ages of ages’].

Kabila ought to have held elections last September but failed to do so. He claimed there was a shortage of funds and that the census needed updating, that it was better to wait. He would voluntarily remain in power until elections could be held and a new president

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could be found to occupy his post. Such a manoeuvre is known as a glissement in the Congo, which means the President does whatever he can to stay in power.

Glissement, sounds so sophisticated in French!

The villes mortes organized in September 2016 appear to have been the most successful. Success varies from town to town, with participation being lower outside the capital. They are organized by the opposition (united under the Rassemblement, or ‘Rally’ umbrella opposition group) and, naturally enough, the government declared

them to have been a failure. Some critics also say that many shopkeepers wanted to open but did not do so for fear of reprisals or so as not to look bad in the eyes of their neighbours.

It is possible. However, a large part of the population wants change, they want Kabila to resign. They don’t want to be like neighbouring Rwanda and Burundi. Pierre Nkurunziza, President of Burundi, chose to loosely interpret the constitutional article that stipulates that a president can only be re-elected once and in defiance of basic arithmetic, is currently presiding

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Health and education rates continue to show DRC’s sorry state, and excessive foreign debt leaves the economy in the hands of foreign multinationals over his third term. The villes mortes wish to avoid such a situation in the Congo. The people stay off the streets, they empty the markets, everything stops. By doing so they may also avoid being killed, since demonstrations are very risky. So who won? If in my country no one can agree if there were 1,000 protesters or 100,000, imagine what it’s like in the Congo. But whatever the final number, part of the population has found a way to say no. Il faut se débrouiller, they have to fend for

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themselves, and in the Congo, they are well aware of the fact.

When Mobutu came to power, his goal was to unify the country, to make as much money as possible and stay in power. He joined forces with the Hutu militias that passed through the DRC’s Kivu region, fleeing possible reprisals after the genocide they had committed in Rwanda against Tutsis and moderate Hutus. When Mobutu declared that the Congolese Tutsis had to leave the country or face the death penalty, Kagame, the President of Rwanda, stood up to him. Laurent-Désiré Kabila, father of the current president, saw an opportunity and with the backing of Rwanda and Uganda took over Mobutu’s post, who fled with 6 billion dollars in his pocket and leaving behind a debt of 10 billion. But Kabila father was unable to satisfy his partners’ expectations.

Instead, he sought other allies, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola, leading to what is known as the African World War, a war that has still not been completely resolved and that has resulted in millions of victims on all sides. The current president, Joseph Kabila replaced his father when the latter was assassinated in 2001, subsequently going on to win a dubious election in 2006. The 2011 elections were even more questionable, yet Kabila once again emerged the victor in spite of his critics, the chaos and the violence surrounding the electoral process. ‘Like father, like son’, as the saying goes. Joseph Kabila’s father put off holding elections the entire time he was in power. The current Kabila doesn’t appear to want to take any more chances, preferring that the country continues to see the

Africa

same faces in Parliament, the same as twenty years ago, or more. Meanwhile health and education rates continue to show DRC’s sorry state. Women are absent from the institutions and excessive foreign debt leaves the economy in the hands of foreign multinationals.

Kabila addressed the nation on 5th April. ‘There is no doubt that elections will take place’, he declared. However, the two houses must first pass a law on the distribution of seats and then, ‘nothing will prevent the elections from being held’. Well... we shall see. Meanwhile the villes mortes continue, with varying degrees of success.

The horror of Conrad? Article 15?

Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes

of our forefathers, whereby greed erases all traces of humanity, as shown by Casement in El Sueño del Celta [Mario Vargas Llosa’s Dream of the Celt]? Some time ago I read that whoever controls the Congo controls Europe and perhaps even the world. I don’t remember who said it or where I read it. But I remember another phrase from the driver, the same one who told me about Article 15. Imagine if your president didn’t know all of your country. There are places where Kabila will never go. It’s impossible to govern that way. It [the country] needs to be divided, if it isn’t, it won’t work. Without a government there will be no development and there will be no future.

(*) Laura Cartanyà holds a degree in Political Science and Nursing and an MA in Humanitarian Action and Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She has worked in development and humanitarian aid since 1999 in numerous countries in Africa, Central America and South America and the Middle East.

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Asia

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: a flamboyant spaghetti western

by Joan Vicens Sard*

Like the changing of the seasons, with the arrival of spring, the international press once again turns its attention to the People’s Republic of Korea. It thereby serves to normalise a situation which is anything but normal, in which, as usual, what ought to be seen as extreme becomes the order of the day –war drums, uncertainty, brinkmanship, a tragedy waiting to happen. Meanwhile, those who make the decisions that affect us all are once more carried away by a form of temporary alienation, involving us in an unnecessary struggle. Furthermore, everything suggests that Pyongyang’s umpteenth return to the eye of the storm will end in another lost opportunity: we will fail to better understand the reasons for the conflict, and simultaneously fail to put into place mechanisms aimed at resolving the situation.

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t present, it seems clear that everyone involved, –with the possible exception of President Trump, newly arrived in office, who if he didn’t know before, he soon will– realises that these periodical rises in tension with no real possibility of a resolution or catharsis –aside from a war or a nuclear holocaust that is– only end up forcing all of those involved to become more entrenched in their respective positions.

Nevertheless, there is a risk that sparks flying from these disputes could cause a fire with the intention of obtaining a (limited) political gain.

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Apparently, the reason for the current Tarantinoesque escalation are the recent provocations by the Kim Jong-un regime, which seems determined to build a nuclear missile that will be capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States. According to the experts, such a goal seems to be getting closer, although the outcome of the countless attempts is an embarrassment to the majority of the international scientific community. Kim Jong-un –’the madman’– was attacked right and left for openly displaying his new missiles in the parade commemorating the one hundredth anniversary

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of the birth of his father, Kim Jong-il.

However, taking a careful, objective look, the parade seems to be little more than an instrument for domestic consumption: a demonstration of power in order to impress and intimidate its people, rather than the rest of the world. Instead of demonstrating, once again, the (apparent) delusions of grandeur of a nobody, what these disproportionate reactions show is the status quo’s obsession with everything that gets in its way.

A totalitarian regime like the one in Pyongyang is troubling, naturally; no one is pleased with the fact that there are powerful weapons in the hands of unstable leaders who have a tendency to pursue foolish policies. And yes, the technological developments of the Pyongyang regime need to be carefully monitored.

However, considering the effects on the local population of the Kim clan’s policies, plus the never-ending economic sanctions imposed on the country, it is

abundantly clear that the position the international community has adopted with respect to the People’s Republic of Korea is motivated more by ideological goals than fundamental humanitarian interests.

While it may be problematic to apply the term New Cold War to the present circumstances, it is also difficult to argue otherwise Selective historical amnesia and the prevailing hyper-presentism are blatant to the point of being absurd. Not only are the circumstances that gave rise to the conflict long forgotten, we don’t even appear able to recall that just a few months ago, when Trump was a candidate he said if he were to win he would base his policies on an America First strategy and that in terms of forCatalan International View

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eign policy, the US would cease to be the world’s police force. However, some months later, with Trump in the White House, he has not only bombed Syria, he is threatening the North Korean regime with an all-out war.

The international community’s position is motivated more by ideological goals than fundamental humanitarian interests It is essential, therefore, that we take a step back and see Asia, and in this case Korea, in a geopolitical framework that includes the constantly evolving historical context in which it is immersed. Asia was harmed by its dealings with the exterior from the very beginning. The region, like many others, was affected by the changes resulting from the arrival of the European powers and, above all, in North Korea’s case, from those resulting from the ideological disputes that marked the twentieth century. The lack of care and the complexity of the end of the three successive military conflicts arising from these disputes: World War II (1937-1945), the (second half of the) Chinese Civil War (1945-1949) and the Korean War (1951-1953).

In chronological order, these conflicts ended with the Japanese surrender as a result of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent American occupation of the country led

by MacArthur, an end which frustrated Stalin’s Asian ambitions; the Communist victory in China, which left the nationalist Kuomintang cornered in Taiwan –which, like the Korean Peninsula, 52

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has been condemned to a form of limbo from which it is yet to escape–; and the partition of the Korean peninsula along the 38th parallel after the first war –a disgrace. A war in which the United Nations were used to achieving ideological objectives through the use of force. The combination of these conclusions to the conflicts and the circumstances surrounding them have remained fossilised until the present day.

The resolution of the three conflicts put an end to fascism –at least temporarily– and left the world like a chessboard for a game between two opposing sides: the US and the USSR. The battle on a global scale between the representatives of these two ideologies was always marked by the fact that the United States ended WWII in a dominant position and the fact that both ideologies tend to expand, therefore leading to friction.

Mutual pressure combined with the initial imbalance –and the superiority of the capitalist system, some would say– ended some four decades later with the demise of the Soviet Union and the supposed arrival of the End of History.

An end that didn’t count on the fact that the real world, which exists beyond the struggle between the Americans and the Soviets, would follow its course, and the ideological struggles, like history itself, do not end until they truly end. Thus, Washington, and its consensus, uses this new milestone to take advantage of their way of operating and of understanding the world, and takes the opportunity to broaden their spheres of influence in all areas where a vacuum was left by the Soviet Union. It does so, however, with no regard for the new reality, a reality marked by changes on a global scale re-

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sulting from decolonization (and a new phase of technological modernization), encouraged by local, nationalist movements, which in many cases are reluctant to accept the dominant ideology without filters. The Americans found themselves facing more resistance than expected, in general, and open hostility in some instances, denying the US its coveted unilateral victory. Many, though, largely agree to enter the game when they perceive it may have economic advantages.

The rare exceptions neatly coincide with those which the international press features on their front pages almost on hard rotation. The People’s Republic of Korea is a case in point –even though the father of the current leader participated in promising negotiations, a strategy that the new US president seems not to even want to consider.

Given a certain perspective, it is clear that the instances of heightened tension are used by all sides for their own ends, though usually it is the most powerful who set the agenda. Until Trump’s arrival in office, the US used Kim Jong-un as a smokescreen and to continue with the strategy they’ve been using in Asia– to varying degrees and success– since at least the end of the Second World War; others, such as the Chinese Communist Party, for example, use him to show the world that a foreign policy based on dif-

ferent principles –non-interference, for example– is also possible, and also to increasingly distance themselves from the North Korean regime (while, yes, also sneakily continuing to collaborate with what appears to be the intention of protecting themselves from the consequences that would arise from the collapse of the neighbouring regime).

While it may be problematic to apply the term New Cold War to the present circumstances, it is also difficult to argue that the Cold War ended with the end of the Soviet Union. Especially if we consider that the forgetful official narrative only lets us choose what is presented as the sole possible alternative, which would ensure their prophecy is fulfilled: the neoliberal world as paradise. Indeed, a paradise primarily based on markets.

Never mind that on both sides of the 38th parallel companies have created two aberrant societies in which on one side they are suffering the consequences of a society that never reaches utopia, while on the other they have created a hypertechnological postmodern world –without mentioning all its miseries and, judging by the recent episodes involving the former Prime Minister Park, there are more than a few– which is presented to Asia in particular, but also to the rest of the world, as an example of a society to which we should all aspire.

(*) Joan Vicens Sard (Cala Ratjada, Majorca, 1984) holds a degree in Business Administration from the Universitat de Barcelona, an MA in International Relations from the Macquarie University of Sydney and an MA in Chinese Studies from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

A passion for contemporary politics led him to live for a time in Sydney (Australia), Nuremberg (Germany) and Kaifeng (China). In late 2016 he settled in Hong Kong, where he works in the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Chinese Studies. His interests include the theory of international relations –particularly with reference to post-colonialism and international security–, Chinese foreign policy and the relationship between the state and margins.

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The Americas

Trump’s come and Castro’s gone

by Jordi Fexas*

History teaches us that what happens in the Oval Office has an effect on what happens in Havana and vice versa. Cuba has always been a key component in American foreign policy while also in many ways being a matter of domestic affairs. While for Havana, what happens in Washington has had a decisive impact on its domestic and foreign policy.

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The Americas

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he death of Castro, the last major historical figure of the twentieth century, was no great surprise, though the same cannot be said for Trump’s arrival in power. One event was predictable, while the other exceeded anything previously considered remotely possible. The regime had studied and planned for the inevitable death of the Cuban leader and the political consequences of this eventuality throughout the preceding decade. The passing of the mantle of the political leadership of the Cuban Revolution to Castro’s (86-year-old) younger brother, some ten years ago, effectively signalled the beginning of a process of change in the little-changing world of Cuban socialism. Fidel Castro was already absent in the wielding of power but his iconic presence had a unifying influ-

ence. When the maximum leader of the revolution withdrew from power it provided more room for making changes while at the same time his existence as a symbolic figure, while acting as a brake on undertaking profound changes, also ensured those in charge did not get carried away.

Back in the nineties those close to Castro’s inner circle always told me that Raúl Castro, who had ruled the FAR (Revolutionary Armed Forces) with an iron fist since 1959, always said sarcastically that personally he had no problem with the United States, that it was all down to his brother. Whether it was sarcasm or a declaration of intent, the fact is that the thawing of relations began to be a possibility the moment that General Raúl Castro Ruz took over the role of President of the Councils of Catalan International View

‘The most important prerequisite for attempting to interpret Cuban reality and way of life is to live it, because only then can one begin to understand a part of it, though one will never understand it all’

Leonardo Padura, Cuban journalist

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State and Ministers on an interim basis in 2006 and permanently in 2008 and First Secretary of the Communist Party in 2011.

It remains to be seen whether Donald Trump is able to comprehend that the changes in Cuba are transitional Nevertheless, any political, economic or legislative changes that may occur in the crusty Cuban regime, tend to be rather drawn out affairs and are always subject to be overturned at any time if the outcome is not as expected or if they generate potentially uncontrollable side-effects. Since 1986, during the Third Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba and before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, Cuban socialism spoke of reforms and changes in direction. But these have always been shy, fearful, lacking in both ambition and depth and executed in a frustrating manner.

THE PRICE OF SOVEREIGNTY

The Cold War logic that prevailed in bilateral relations for over five decades has been adjusted, at a tropical pace one could say, especially in the last decade, culminating in the restoration of formal diplomatic relations in July 2015. Now Fidel Castro’s death has removed the final iconic vestige of the paradigm of the Cold War between the two nations. A war that has a winner, Fidel himself, but also some victims; his own people. History has granted Fidel a great posthu56

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mous victory. But this in itself ought to serve as an opportunity and a lesson in order that the new Trump administration is not tempted to once more insist on imperial coercive pressures which history has shown us are doomed to fail.

It remains to be seen whether Donald Trump and his advisers on national security issues are able to comprehend that the changes in Cuba are transitional and no longer depend on whether the revolutionary leaders are actually alive or not. Instead they depend on the will and the collective imagination of new generations of Cubans, especially those who have replaced the old guard.

A generation that probably identifies with the legacy of ‘Fidelism’ more for its patriotic, jealous respect for the Cuban people’s sovereignty over their own destiny than for the socialist, anti-imperialist rhetoric of the late leader.

Those who have even a limited understanding of the Cuban reality know that Cuba’s Castro was forged, and has been sustained for over five decades, in a society which was actively pro-Fidel, which is somewhat revolutionary while not in the least communist. For those who support the regime, Fidelism is more a patriotic doctrine than an ideology. A doctrine bound by Martí nationalism (of José Martí) that has been internalized by most of society, and that will undoubtedly survive beyond the expiration date which the Revolution and socialism in Cuba might eventually have.

Castro dared to claim that history would judge him to have been right, knowing full well that the trial would not start until he was no longer around.

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And the lights and shadows which form the legacy of his character are currently in the pre-trial phase. If we take into consideration the respect for individual liberties or the capacity to guarantee the prosperity, welfare and material progress of the Cuban people, undoubtedly history won’t judge Fidel so lightly. Since while it is true that he laid the foundations of their welfare, prosperity, education and healthcare, he also created mechanisms that prevented them from realising their true potential.

Education, health and sovereignty have been the three tangible, undisputed pillars of Castro’s Cuba. Achievements which even the non-revolutionary segments of the island’s society have ended up acknowledging and adopting. This is something that for decades has won admiration for socialist Cuba from a part of the world that has never enjoyed any of these three things in the manner and intensity that the Comandante’s revolution guaranteed it. Fidel’s rule, despite having many shadows, was the great architect of the construction of a Cuban national consciousness. An undertaking which was pending in post-colonial Cuba. It was not to be until after the arrival of the barbudos [as the bearded revolutionaries are known], with a revolution tinged with patriotism and the defence of national sovereignty against external interference, that it ultimately took shape.

Despite the fact that in the second half of the twentieth century Cuba was a key element in the power-play between the blocs that governed the world, paradoxically one cannot deny that its status as a small country resisting the designs

and pressures of the major global actor in international affairs has for decades contributed directly and indirectly in building a multipolar world and establishing the concept and development of multilateralism as a system of arbitration and management of international affairs and the global agenda.

THE NEW PARADIGMS OF AN OLD CONFRONTATION

For this reason, the crux of the matter is whether to persuade or coerce Cuba to change. Obama chose the former, what Trump will do remains unknown. The Obama administration, with the help of Benjamin J. Rhodes, Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, took significant steps to lay the foundations to begin to dissolve and disentangle the legal web surrounding the commercial blockade; the Cuban Assets Control Regulations (CACR), the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act (CDA), the 1996 Freedom Act and the 2000 Trade Sanctions

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Export and Reform Enhancement Act (TSRA)... Since the reopening of their respective embassies, there have been 24 high-level visits, 12 agreements have been signed in areas of common interest such as civil aviation, the environment and health and some 40 technical meetings and 1,200 academic and cultural exchanges have taken place.

In the closing months of Obama’s tenure there was frantic activity to accelerate numerous procedures, regulatory changes and the granting of trading licences. Ben Rhodes [Obama’s NSA] travelled in person to Havana following Castro’s demise in order to ‘discuss the implementation of normalization policies’. It appears that big American corporations such as Google and General Electric are ready to sign agreements with Cuba, if all goes to plan. Although certain of those responsible for Washington’s ‘normalization policy’ often lament the lack of decisiveness and reciprocity in Havana in compliance with the agreements, it appears as if the outgoing administration wanted to speed up many actions and decisions in order to hinder or prevent the possibility of reversing the process of the normalization of relations in case the new republican government are tempted to do so.

In the event that Donald Trump decides to be true to his campaign slogans and the commitments he made to certain Republican lobbies in Florida and opt for coercion or pressure to precipitate policy changes of a greater magnitude, the Pentagon will have to face up to the fact that the Cuba of today is breaking one of its historic curses: mono-dependencies.

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The former colony, the Pearl of the Antilles has been given a rough ride by history, perpetually being smothered in the arms of a single ally, protector and friend overcome by the vagaries of geopolitics. Likewise, its economy has also been the story of a monoculture. In the homeland of José Martí, diversification in its relations with the world and in its economic model has always been elusive, thanks to the vicissitudes of history and its own shortcomings. And this is where the new leaders sheltering in the shadows of Raul Castro’s leadership have made significant progress in recent years.

Nowadays, Havana has a solid regional integration and it is a key player in the area. It has increasingly close ties with American allies in Europe and with Japan. It has also signed a new agreement with the EU to strengthen bilateral cooperation, and it has good relations with Washington’s strategic rivals such as Russia and China. Cuba wishes to decide for itself, without interference or compromises, its relationship with the world. Likewise, it also wishes to decide its relations with its closest neighbour, without interference and coercion. Havana has been able to sell its transition and the world is buying it.

THE VIETNAM OF THE CARIBBEAN

Cuba, this dual island, geographically and politically speaking, what the controversial Cuban writer Cabrera Infante labelled mierda fascinante [fascinating shit], once again finds itself centre stage in terms of geopolitics and international affairs. And as I mentioned earlier, re-

The Americas

cent events such as the death of Castro and Trump’s arrival in office mean the world is paying closer attention to the island’s future. In particular the world of investors and economies and international companies seeking new potential markets. For some Cuba represents capitalism’s final frontier, the last great little El Dorado in which to invest. For others, it is the final illusion of an alternative that was not to be. And for the long-suffering residents of the largest island in the Antilles, it is perhaps their umpteenth opportunity to escape from the scarcity that seems to have no expiration date.

But where is the Cuban economy really headed? What is the ‘sustainable and prosperous socialism’ that looks towards the Vietnamese model of which Vice President Diaz-Canel speaks?

Which criteria should Cuban military movements adopt, which in the last ten years have taken control of the instruments of economic policy and the major companies and strategic sectors? In 2007, 64% of foreign exchange earnings were generated in companies linked to the military and this figure has increased in recent years.

Vietnam, China, Miami, Ecuador... what does post-Fidel Cuba aspire to be, or will they let it be, when it grows up. Its streets are not populated with Vietnamese, Chinese and Americans, but rather Cubans, and the resulting model will be a mirror of what Cuba is today and a reflection of how it relates to the world. From a distance, the news emerging from Cuba for some time now appears to be more or less accurate.

The New Port of Mariel Develop-

ment Project aimed at creating a maritime hub, the Special Development Zone, a free-trade zone to attract foreign investment, the authorization of real estate purchase between Cubans, negotiations regarding Cuba’s longstanding debt with Russia, indications that sooner or later the Cuban convertible peso (CUC) will be phased out pending the Cuban peso being allowed to float once again, without which the opening of the economy would be impossible, the normalization of diplomatic relations... These are just some of the steps that lead one to believe that the authorities in Havana have long since decided not to align Cuba’s fate with its ally in the Miraflores Palace, Venezuela. And that they are planning, at a Caribbean pace, to open up Cuba’s economy.

The Cuba which is leaving behind the generation of the barbudos is aware that change is unstoppable On 16 April 2016, in the 7th Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba’s Central Report, Raúl Castro Ruz clearly and firmly declared that small and medium-sized enterprises and micro enterprises will form part of the economy of socialist Cuba. He added that ‘in socialist, sovereign Cuba the people’s ownership of the fundamental means of production is and will continue be the main structure of the national economy’. These words give a clue as to what the Cuban regime wants to hapCatalan International View

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pen or at least says it wants to happen.

By the fundamental means of production we can take to mean state control of strategic sectors of the economy and at least in principle they will not allow the presence of large companies and major economic actors in the process of opening up the economy.

It is not yet clear whether this restriction on the presence of big business will affect large multinationals or whether it is only designed to create an economic model whereby there are no large domestic private businesses.

In any case, for the moment the message and the conclusions are clear: the Cuban regime wants foreign capital to invest in Cuba. The state will regulate these investments, and changes will be slow and measured. In short, Cuba is an 60

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opportunity but it is not a case of ‘anything goes’.

It represents an opportunity in which it could be said that the delay gives them an advantage. The existence of an obsolete and inefficient productive and economic model allows a Cuba of the twenty-first century to completely rethink a new model and design its economic future based on the new paradigms that are changing the global economy.

Thanks to its backwardness, poor, agrarian Ireland of the late twentieth century was able to transform itself, in a single decade, to an economy backed by technological development without the need to undergo an industrial revolution. Therefore, although Cuba has been impoverished by a stagnant economy for over two decades, if it learns

The Americas

how to make the most of its potential, its human capital and its strategic position, it could undergo a transition to an economy adapted to the challenges of the twenty-first century speedily and successfully.

In December 2016, the Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, declared at a conference in Havana that ‘the changes in recent years have been dramatic and we have to rethink the economy, but Cuba is well positioned. And its economic development will depend on

it. Global economic development will lie in the service sector with skilled labour, and this is where Cuba has the advantage’.

In any case, the Cuba which is leaving behind the generation of the barbudos is aware that change is unstoppable.

Nevertheless, it is still difficult to discern precisely the extent, pace, rate and eventual outcome of the shift towards opening up its economy, even more so than the political changes, in which post-Castro Cuba is involved.

(*) Jordi Fexas (Barcelona, 1966) holds a degree in Contemporary History from the Universitat de Barcelona, specialising in Anthropology and African History. He conducted his doctoral studies at the Institut d’Història JVV (UPF). He has a wide range of experience in the private sector having also worked as an anthropologist, undertaking fieldwork in Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As a journalist he has contributed numerous articles to magazines dealing with contemporary issues.

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Business, Law & Economics

Informal insurance networks in rural villages

by Pau Milรกn*

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Business, Law & Economics

Deep in the Bolivian Amazon, among the thick growth of the rainforest between the tributaries of the Maniqui and Quiquibey rivers, the Tsimane’ –an indigenous people of some 15 to 20 thousand individuals– till the ground for rice, manioc, and plantain; hunt for tapirs, monkeys and coatis, and fish the abundant rivers with bow and arrow, just as their ancestors have done for centuries. This isolated community of foragerhorticulturalists subsists primarily on its own food production, which implies that families are heavily exposed to extensive sources of risk in the form of crop failure, illness, skill, bad luck and so on.

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o cope with these unpredictable fluctuations in income, the Tsimane’ may not turn to formal institutions that procure legal insurance contracts. Instead, they organize themselves into complex social arrangements that involve the transfer of resources (often food) across pairs of households over time. Informal insurance mechanisms like these have been documented in a vast number of very different communities around the world, including Indian villages, semisedentarized Baka communities in the Congo Basin, or across rural communities along the coast of Thailand (see [4], [6] and [7]).

Although these elaborate social agreements fascinate anthropologists and environmental scientists for their role in shaping language, nutrition, and the surrounding environment, we economists tend to ask ourselves about efficiency –that is, how well do these arrangements perform in alleviating risk? Indeed, if a community is able to develop efficient exchanges across households in order to minimize risk, then a family’s consumption (once in-

come is shared with others) should not depend on fluctuations in that household’s income. In other words, the consumption of any one family should not depend on its own production but only on the aggregate production of the entire community. This statement can be expressed formally as a statistical test of efficient insurance in these environments that is sometimes referred to as the Townsend Test. Starting in the early 90s, mounting empirical evidence suggests that risk sharing in these communities is not efficient and, even after controlling for aggregate shocks, fluctuations in individual income remains relevant to explain movements in consumption (see [3] and [9]).

Several explanations have been put forward to explain inefficiencies in informal insurance arrangements. For instance, the lack of commitment and enforceability, or the presence of information asymmetries, have often been suggested as principal reasons why efficiency is ruled out (see [1] and [7]).

However, until recently, most research has ignored the fact that risk sharing occurs bilaterally –in the form of Catalan International View

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exchanges across pairs of households– and therefore that the social structure of interactions should be studied in detail as a potential impediment to efficiency.

In recent work with Attila Ambrus (Duke University) and Wayne Gao (Yale University), I analyze a theoretical model of informal insurance where risk sharing occurs bilaterally along a given network of connections. In this context, we provide a detailed prediction of the type of exchanges we should Figure 1

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observe (under any network structure) in order to reduce everyone’s risk, subject to a constraint that the network structure imposes on how income can be exchanged between pairs.

To understand the constraint imposed by the network, consider the example of a community described in Figure 1. In this case, household 1 is connected to households 2 and 3, but households 2 and 3 are not connected to each other. This implies that only 1 and 3 –and 1 and 2– can exchange part of their random endowments (which are denoted by the e’s). The arrows show the ensuing net-transfers from 1 to each of its neighbors.

Now, in principle, none of this should matter if the transfer from 1 to 3 can depend freely on the endowment of all households. In that case, the fact that 1 and 3 are not connected would not actually restrict the type of transfers that can be made, and the network structure would not matter at all for

Business, Law & Economics

efficiency. However, we think the network should matter and thus we model risk-sharing contracts with local information. This essentially means that we assume that transfers between 1 and 3, for instance, may only depend on the information that is commonly known by households 1 and 3, and therefore may not depend on any information that is only known by one of the parties but not the other. Going back to Figure 1, this means that t13 cannot depend on the endowment of household 2, e2, and therefore the network’s structure now imposes a limitation on the type of contracts that can be sustained.

It should be no surprise that this assumption will automatically rule out the efficient benchmark for almost all networks because only a network in which everyone is connected to everyone else can guarantee transfers that depend on everyone’s income –notice that anything short of the completely connected network will necessarily contain some household that is not privy to the income realization of some other household. Therefore, the relevant question is whether this model of partial insurance (i.e. inefficient insurance) can effectively explain the behavior of risk-sharing communities and whether it is a viable model to understand the type of obstacles that keep households away from full efficiency. To answer these questions, a group of anthropologists and I analyze data on Tsimane’ patterns of food exchange over time to track similarities between the theory and observed behavior (see [8]). Before I talk about the exciting relationships between theory and observations in

The social structure of interactions should be studied in detail as a potential impediment to efficiency the field, allow me first to describe the theoretical results in more detail.

In our model of local risk sharing with local information, Attila Ambrus, Wayne Gao, and I provide a number of results that examine the environment described above in terms of constrained efficiency, consumption volatility, and their relationship to network statistics that capture households’ social position (see [2]). The main theoretical result fully describes the complete set of transfers across any pair of connected households, strictly as a function of their relative position in the social network. What is interesting is that the position of each family depends not only on direct, but also on all the indirect connections that it sustains.

To see this, let’s go back to the community described in Figure 1. 1 and 2, and 1 and 3, share income directly.

However, the larger the share of the production that 1 gives to 2, the lower the part of the production it has available to share with 3. Therefore, 3 interacts indirectly with 2 through 1. So who will get what? It turns out that the transfers that a household receives depends on the particular identity of the families that household is connected to. This is so because, by the above argument, transfers depend not only on a family’s neighbors, but also on the neighbors of one’s neighbors, and so on and so forth along the entire network.

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Accounting for incomplete social structures explains the type of partial insurance mechanisms operating in village economies In fact, it turns out that the appropriate way to predict transfers across families for any given network is by compiling all possible ‘social paths’ that connect these two households with everyone else –think of ‘degrees of separation’ as in John Guare’s renowned play.

Having found the full set of efficient transfers across households, we also describe the implications for recent work on empirical risk-sharing tests. In particular, the development literature has recently modified the definition of risk-sharing groups when performing statistical tests of efficiency –for instance, by testing risk sharing along caste lines in rural India, rather than at the village level. The problem with this approach is, first, that often it may not be obvious how to partition a particular community into sub-groups, and, secondly, that these approaches assume sub-groups (such as castes) are perfectly insured amongst themselves, but have no interaction between them.

Our approach allows us to consider a far more general setting where local sharing groups may overlap in complicated ways along any given social structure. In fact, the partition models discussed above can readily be accommodated within the general network model defined by the author.

Moreover, our model provides an economic interpretation of the existing results of empirical tests of risk sharing.

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Figure 2

In particular, we show that the average response of household consumption to income can actually be decomposed into an underlying heterogeneity in responses that have to do with the varying insurance possibilities of households across the network. Moreover, it shows that these measures can be mapped onto meaningful economic measures, such as consumption volatility.

Can this framework explain the food-sharing patterns in real Tsimane’ communities? Figure 2 shows the interaction structure of one Tsimane’ village. It is orders of magnitude more complicated than the network in Figure 1, and it is therefore important to know if this behavior can be predicted from the simple theoretical predictions in the model.

To test the model, Michael Gurven (UCSB), Paul Hooper (Santa Fe Institute), Hillard Kaplan (UNM) and I use the data from the Tsimane Health and Life Story Project. From 2004 to 2009 researchers surveyed 243 Tsimane’ families to gather information on the demographic and social composition

Business, Law & Economics

of the family and village, the time they spent farming, fishing, hunting, and which neighboring households consumed the goods produced. This final information was transformed into an unbalanced panel of production and caloric exchanges across nuclear families for 8 different Tsimane’ villages over a 5-year time span (see [4]).

Using this unique data set, we perform a number of empirical tests of the theory and evaluate their implications for classic empirical tests of risk sharing. As with most empirical studies of social networks, we confront the usual questions regarding how to define the appropriate underlying (and unobserved) social structure. In this case, network structures were generated from data using kinship, distance, and interaction data. Results were shown to

be fairly robust to these definitions.

Once the social networks are built from data, we can test the theory’s prediction as to the percentage of income that should be exchanged between any two families by fitting the theory’s equation to the data. More specifically, we can construct the network statistics (also known as centrality measures) that the theory claims are relevant predictors for bilateral exchanges. We can then fit these statistics to the observed exchanges across Tsimane’ families and test how good a fit we obtain. We show that the fit is remarkably good, and that other alternative measures perform much worse in describing the behavior of Tsimane’.

Among a number of other tests of the theory, we also show that the underlying heterogeneity in consumption

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opportunities of households, as predicted by the theory, can be observed in the Tsimane’ data. To do this, we order households according to the theory’s prediction on consumption response to income and we split the ordered sample into groups of equal size, ordered according to the theory. We then measure the observed relationship between consumption on income within each group –controlling for village-level shocks– and we show that indeed the data exhibits the same upward trend that is predicted by the theory.

Overall, the evidence from the Tsimane’ suggests that accounting for incomplete social structures explains the type of partial insurance mechanisms operating in village economies.

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Moreover, this theory goes beyond the mere rejection of full insurance and provides a more detailed variation on the exchanges generating consumption streams. From a policy perspective, these patterns could be used for identifying vulnerable households and determining social arrangements that would improve the welfare of the community.

External validity is always a concern in these types of analyses. Indeed, one may wonder why a theory that can explain behavior of indigenous communities in the Bolivian Amazon should also work in other remote environments. I am currently performing similar tests on other data from diverse communities in Cameroon and Indonesia to test the model’s external validity. Prelimi-

Business, Law & Economics

nary analysis already anticipates that the theory can similarly account for observed exchanges across households in these other environments as well.

Finally, the results presented here give rise to a very exciting line of future research that adds to recent efforts to identify the relevant barriers to efficiency in these risk-sharing communities. In particular, Kinnan (2011) uses Thai data to select the hidden income model among a number of competing explanations (see [6]). She considers a dynamic contracting model with truth-telling constraints and finds that it alone generates the type of historical dependence that is observed in the data. However, one could ask what a dynamic hidden income model like the one in Kinnan (2011) would look like if the network structure was taken seriously. Indeed, the local information story in Ambrus, Gao, and Milán (2017) can be thought of as a very extreme localized version of hidden income. Therefore, it would be interesting to test whether the empirical test used in Kinnan (2011) to select the hidden income would select the local information model as well. In that case, we would need a new test that would be able to distinguish between both models of informational frictions.

REFERENCES [1] Ambrus, A., M. Mobius, and A. Szeidl (2014): “Consumption Risk-Sharing in Social Networks”, The American Economic Review, 104, 149–182.

[2] Ambrus, A., W. Y. Gao, and P. Milán (2017): “Informal Risk Sharing with Local Information”, Working Paper.

[3] Cochrane, J. (1991): “A simple test of consumption insurance”, Journal of Political Economy, 99, 957–976.

[4] Gallois S., Duda R., Hewlett B., Reyes-García V. (2015): “Children’s daily activities and knowledge acquisition: a case study among the Baka from southeastern Cameroon”. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine.

[5] Hooper, P. (2011): “The structure of energy production and redistribution among Tsimane’ forager-horticulturalists”, Phd dissertation, University of New Mexico.

[6] Kinnan, C. (2011): “Distinguishing barriers to insurance in Thai villages”, Mimeo. Northwestern University.

[7] Ligon, E., J. P. Thomas, and T. Worrall (2002): “Informal insurance arrangements with limited commitment: Theory and evidence from village economies”, The Review of Economic Studies, 69, 209–244.

[8] Milán, P., Gurven, M., Hooper, P., and Kaplan H. (2017) “Partial Insurance Networks: Food Sharing in Tsimane’ Villages”, Working paper.

[9] Townsend, R. M. (1994): “Risk and insurance in village India”, Econometrica: Journal of the Econometric Society, 539–591.

(*) Pau Milán joined MOVE and the faculty at the Economics department at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in 2016 after receiving his PhD in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research interests include economic theory and development economics, particularly as it relates to the theory of social and economic networks. He is currently working on questions related to informal insurance in village economies, social information considerations in strategic decisions, and the optimal design of online platforms.

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Business, Law & Economics

Catalonia’s first circular economy project: ‘Symbiosis in Manresa’, connecting industries and improving waste management

by Josep Maria Tost*

Fitaller is a Manresa-based company that manufactures names, letters and silhouettes for the craft and fine art market. They had never considered using waste plastic and cardboard from another company in the territory to manufacture the packaging for their products. Since they have started doing so they have saved money. In turn they help contribute to smart waste management which therefore reduces its environmental impact.

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his is one example of the work being done in Manresa, as part of the Symbiosis in Manresa project, which has the backing of the Waste Agency of Catalonia and Manresa City Council. It is the first instance of an industrial symbiosis project to be carried out in Catalonia and an example of the model which is promoted by the European Union: the circular economy.

Symbiosis in Manresa began in May 2015 and is designed to create favourable conditions for businesses to make the most of the resources in their production cycles. It offers a program that identifies possible partnerships, largely based on arranging the buying and sell70

Catalan International View

ing of surplus resources, thereby obtaining both economic and environmental benefits. These resources can be of many kinds: unusable (such as by-products), lost (such as waste heat), unused (such as rainwater) and sharable (such as storage).

An interesting example of such synergies are by-products. The surplus material resulting from production cycles represents a cost for companies since it needs to be disposed of as waste. If another company can take advantage of said waste by using it in their production process, then there is a mutual benefit and lower environmental impact because it avoids waste ending up in a landfill. The best way to eliminate

Business, Law & Economics

waste is to re-use it. Catalonia currently produces between 200,000 and 250,000 tons of by-products. These ought to be managed properly and made use of in order that they don’t end up in a landfill.

Symbiosis in Manresa is a country-led initiative which forms part of a wider European strategy. The project has the backing of the Bages Waste Consortium, and the collaboration of the Barcelona Provincial Council, the Bufalvent Association of Entrepreneurs and the Manresa Technology Centre.

The project released its first set of results this year. It estimates that it has made annual savings in excess of €1.35 million. It has served to identify a local source of power generation with a value of €1.2 million by implementing

Symbiosis in Manresa is a country-led initiative which forms part of a wider European strategy energy synergy and has made savings of €135,000 in waste management.

The analysis was made with the participation of 27 companies, involving 50 technicians and entrepreneurs. The project has identified eight synergies –four which have already been implemented plus four which are at the study phase– involving resources such as energy, plastics, organic matter, as well as excess stock.

The study shows improvements in the management of 12,000 tonnes of Catalan International View

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waste, of which 256 tonnes no longer end up as landfill, together with saving 11 tonnes of raw materials.

The project originated when the city of Manresa (through its Department of Environment) volunteered to participate in a Waste Agency of Catalonia initiative to help the region’s manufacturers improve the management of resources. The work was supported by the Bages Waste Consortium, an organization with an innovative approach to waste management.

The Catalan government took a keen interest in such a project since industrial symbiosis had never previously been tried in Catalonia, though it is not new in other European countries. In the territory as a whole there are almost 2,000 industrial estates and, therefore, there is a pressing need to take a further step in preventing the generation

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of waste and minimizing the use of raw materials.

The project started with an awareness-raising drive among some 600 companies in the Pla de Bages area.

There were also visits to private companies in the Manresa area that were thought to have a good potential for synergies and improvements in their production process. Subsequently the various phases of the project itself were implemented. First there was an initial identification of potential synergies via an IT platform provided by the consultants Symbiosy –specialists in this field.

The tool was used to create a map of the various businesses in the area, classified by activity, in order to find out what types of waste they generate and what resources they need. The map also includes nearby businesses that share common interests.

Business, Law & Economics

It is hoped that the project can be replicated in other municipalities and the knowledge acquired retained in order not to repeat the work already done

The second stage was meeting with business leaders in order to generate synergies, evaluate them technically and financially, and ensure they fit into the business strategy. This was followed up by a workshop concerning the implementation of partnerships, then a third and a final meeting to evaluate the benefits of the partnerships (whether economic, environmental or social).

It is hoped that the project can be replicated in other municipalities and the knowledge that has been acquired can be retained in order not to repeat the work already done. Currently there are local organizations that are beginning to undertake initiatives in industrial symbiosis. They are: Gavà Council, Viladecans Council, Granollers Council, Montmeló Council, the Zona Franca Consortium and the Berguedà Development Agency.

In the Pla de Bages area there are municipalities with powerful industrial networks that could sign up to the project: Sant Joan de Vilatorrada,

Artés, Pont de Vilomara, Sant Vicent de Castellet and Santpedor. Symbiosis in Manresa serves as a mechanism for strengthening the Bages’ industrial base, but it can be replicated elsewhere in Catalonia.

The Waste Agency of Catalonia provides grants to companies and groups of companies to implement industrial symbiosis projects. In 2016, the Agency granted €118,000 in aid to partially finance six circular economy projects in Catalonia involving industrial symbiosis. These included the continuation of the Symbiosis in Manresa project. This year it will contribute €20,000 to continue its activities to promote industrial symbiosis in Manresa, as part of the framework of 2016 subsidies to promote the circular economy.

(*) Josep Maria Tost Director of the Waste Agency of Catalonia

Catalan International View

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Barcelona Echoes

The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya: a world leader

by Joan Fontserè*

The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya was opened nearly 26 years ago and since then has gone from strength to strength. Thanks to the good intentions and hard work over recent years, the Circuit has positioned itself as a world leader for motor racing fans, for society as a whole, and for businesses and organizations involved in the sector. Nevertheless, the Circuit also aims to become a leader in terms of its surroundings and demonstrate its commitment to society at large. It is not only a great, emblematic facility which holds motor racing events: the Circuit is also an important economic engine for the area, an institution which is committed to charitable works and the environment, home to non-stop activity.

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ormula 1 and MotoGP races have been the highlights of the Circuit’s sporting calendar since 1991. These world-renowned competitions distinguish us from other tracks and position the circuit in a league of its own. In addition, the Grand Prix are accompanied by exciting supporting races: the GP2 and GP3 Series and the Porsche Supercup in the case of F1, and Moto2 and Moto3 in the case of MotoGP. Other events of note are the Formula One Test Days, the preseason Formula 1 tests held entirely at the Circuit and the Rallycross Championship, an event which was added to the calendar in 2015 and which is gaining popularity both worldwide and at the Circuit.

In addition to Formula 1 and MotoGP the Circuit has an outstanding

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sporting calendar full of extremely exciting events and competitions. International championships held at the Circuit include the FIM CEV Repsol International Championship, the Barcelona Festival of Speed, the International GT Open and the V de V Endurance Series, endurance tests such as the 24 Hours Motorcycling Catalonia, 24H Barcelona - Trofeu Fermí Vélez and the CER (the Spanish Endurance Cup), together with competitions which promote grassroots sports like the Catalonia Automobile and Motorcycle Championships. All these events add up to an intense racing calendar that this year comes loaded with new features such as the introduction of electric cars in the Electric GT Championship or the return of the Spirit of Montjuïc for fans of nostalgia.

Barcelona Echoes

The Circuit held events on 328 days in 2016, which represents an 89% occupancy for the year. Aside from holding the Formula 1 and MotoGP Grand Prix and other races that take place throughout the year, such a high occupancy rate is also due to other events in its sporting calendar. In addition to these competitions, all kinds of activities make use of the Circuit’s facilities on a daily basis, from the leasing of space to organizations and private companies for team-building exercises or presentations, to driving courses, through to BiCircuit events, where cycling enthusiasts can ride around the track with their own bikes.

A COMMITMENT TO THE ENVIRONMENT AND TO SOCIETY

Aside from sporting events and leasing out its facilities, the Circuit is commit-

ted to activities with a social function.

A commitment to society and the environment is behind the Circuit’s desire to hold events such as fundraisers to fight diseases, such as La Marató de TV3 or the Lap Against Cancer organized by AECC-Catalunya contra el Càncer, food donations and fun runs such as Mulla’t i Corre for Multiple Sclerosis.

The Circuit is also synonymous with sustainability and environmental quality. The numerous awards it has received from official bodies and sporting organizations are a sign of the institution’s commitment to the environment.

Recently, the Real Federación Española de Automovilismo honoured the Circuit with its Environmental Sustainability Award. The International Motorcycling Federation (FIM) has twice awarded them the FIM Environmental Award, Catalan International View

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in 2012 and 2016, while in 2015 the FIA Institute acknowledged the Circuit’s good work by granting them its Excellence Award as part of its sustainability program. In addition, since 2008 the circuit has been ISO 14001 certified for environmental management. The Circuit is pursuing the aim of reducing its environmental impact to the point where it will become the first track in the world with a zero carbon footprint.

With the intention of becoming a platform which supports up and coming talent in the world of motor sports, the Circuit launched its Young Driver program in 2005. In conjunction with the Generalitat of Catalonia’s Secretariat General of Sports, the RACC and the Catalan Automobile Federation, the Circuit is dedicated to promoting young drivers in order that they make the most of their professional careers by competing at the highest level. A total of 22 drivers have taken part in the program, including Jaume Algu-

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ersuari, who competed at Formula 1 level with Scuderia Toro Rosso in the 2009, 2010 and 2011 seasons, Dani Juncadella, who was a reserve driver for the Sahara Force India F1 Team and Dani Clos, who was the third driver for the HRT F1 Team in 2012. Currently two drivers are participating in the program: Àlex Riberas, who is DH Racing Ferrari’s official driver in the Asian Le Mans Series 2016/2017 and Àlex Palou, who competed in the GP3 Series 2016 season with the Campos Racing team.

ECONOMIC IMPACT

One of the Circuit’s major attractions is its location: it is situated in Montmeló, a town in the Vallès Oriental located just 30 km from Barcelona. For fans visiting the Circuit, it is easy to reach both by private and public transport. Thanks to its excellent location and its proximity to the Catalan coast and points of interest in Barcelona and its surround-

Barcelona Echoes

ings, the Circuit’s economic impact on the area was 340 million euros in 2015. In addition, it is estimated that thanks to activities at the Circuit, more than 10,000 employment contracts are signed annually.

Thanks to its big competitions and its busy racing calendar, the Circuit has become internationally famous, receiving the attention of the media from many corners of the planet. In

addition, the large volume of visitors to the Circuit throughout the year generates a significant amount of income and jobs. Overall, the sporting and the social aspect of the Circuit together with its commitment to the environment mean that the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya is a valuable institution that focuses its efforts on continuing to consolidate its position as a world leader.

(*) Joan Fontserè (Sant Feliu de Codines, 1974) holds a degree in Business Administration and Marketing. With a distinguished career in the sporting world, he has worked for companies such as TopFun and Octagon Esedos. In 2011 he became Director of the Centre d’Alt Rendiment [High Performance Centre] in Sant Cugat, where he worked until his appointment as General Manager of the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, in June 2015. He is also councillor for Sant Feliu de Codines.

Catalan International View

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Sport beyond Sport

Craig Easton and Cristina de Middel win the first edition of the FCBarcelona Photo Awards Well-known Scottish photographer Craig Easton and Spanish artist Cristina de Middel have been chosen by an internationally acclaimed jury as the winners of the first edition of the FCBarcelona Photo Awards.

The jury rewarded the winning pieces for their ability to unite the world of sport and visual arts. This is one of the objectives of FC Barcelona, who have held the awards for the first time, with the support of Agbar and in collaboration with the Foto Colectania Foundation.

The jury of the FCBarcelona Photo Awards, with President Josep Maria Bartomeu and Vice President Carles Vilarrubí.

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aston, with an image that belongs to his ‘Sixteen’ project, was chosen in the Photo Award category, which focuses on photographs which express sport’s positive values. Meanwhile, the Project Award category is aimed at projects that express sport’s contribution to current so-

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Catalan International View

ciety, as is the case with Variations on the Podium, produced by Cristina de Middel.

FC Barcelona’s photography awards seek to create a global photographic platform that communicates the importance and the contribution of these universal values to contemporary so-

Sport beyond Sport

ciety. The awards also aim to support the photography industry and create a favourable environment for the development of projects at the highest level.

CRAIG EASTON AND THE STORY OF ARSHIA

Craig Easton is a well-known Scottish photographer, winner of the Cutty Sark Award for the Travel Photographer of the Year 2013, and most recently the Travel Photographer of the Year 2016 Landscape Award. His work is closely linked with the documentary tradition, and he is known for his ability to combine spectacular landscapes with intimate portraits.

The winning image shows Arshia, a young Iranian asylum seeker who lives in Liverpool, in anticipation of his refugee status assessment. Not only is he trying to integrate into his new environment by learning English and continuing his education, he also plays for Kingsley United FC in Toxteth, known as ‘Liverpool’s most diverse team’. Football helps him to find new friends and feel accepted. Arshia is 16 years old and tells his own story in a handwritten text in his native language, Farsi, which is presented in the image next to his portrait.

CRISTINA DE MIDDEL AND THE ‘VARIATIONS ON THE PODIUM’ PROJECT

Cristina de Middel was chosen as the winner for her project Variations on the Podium, which explores the idea, form, connotations and history of the ‘podium’ project. Through this exploration the work reflects on the paradox of sports, where the balance between selfimprovement and professional competition is fundamental. The jury took into account that the project ‘is positive,

but with a touch of irony, and becomes a universal symbol of sport in a highly cheerful creative process’. Another reason why this project was chosen was due to its ability to meet with FC Barcelona’s objective of ‘unifying the world of sport with the world of visual arts’.

The project will run from May to December 2017 and again in 2018, alongside the winning photos of the Photo Awards category, in next year’s edition of the Awards.

AN INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED JURY

The two winners were chosen by an internationally renowned jury. Figures such as Vicente Todolí, former director of the Tate Modern London and artistic director of Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan; Ayperi Karabuda Ecer, former vice president of photography at Reuters; Azu Nwagbogu, founder and director of African Artists’ Foundation (AFF); Sandra Phillips, SFMOMA’s senior curator; Christopher Anderson, member of Magnum Photos and winner of the Robert Capa Gold Medal, and Stephen Mayes, with over 25 years’ experience managint projects and artists from different sectors, have endorsed the Club’s ambitious project, as part of its Barça Cultura initiative, organized by the Club’s Department of International and Institutional Relations.

Carles Vilarubí, Vice President of International and Institutional Relations, said that ‘here at FC Barcelona, we are very satisfied with how this first edition of the FCBarcelona Photo Awards went. There were a large number of entries and the quality of all the work presented was extraordinary. Photographers from all over the world took part, and we are very pleased with this initiative, which we embarked on two years ago’.

Catalan International View

Reproduction of Craig Easton’s photograph, winner of the Photo Awards category.

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A Short Story from History

Ali Bey: travels of an erudite explorer Although he came to call himself Ali Bey ben Uthman al-Abbasi and Ali Bey el Abbassi, his original name was Domènec Badia i Leblich.

An Arabist and Catalan explorer, Badia never attended university.

However, he was a magnificent example of an Enlightenment scholar who showed an astonishingly broad knowledge in many different areas: he was equally capable of drafting a map of a geographical area, or of scientifically describing aspects of its fauna and flora, social and religious life, music, geology, architecture, archaeology or military techniques.

His major work was Voyages d’Ali-Bey el Abbassi en Afrique et en Asie pendant les années 1803, 1804, 1805, 1806 et 1807, published in Paris in 1814.

Domènec Badia was born in 1767 in Barcelona, ​​son of Pere Badia, the secretary to the governor. He was already working as a civil servant by the age of 14, and soon became a military accountant with the rank of commissar, but it was evident that such a cultivated spirit would not be content with spending the best years of their life behind a desk.

FIRST JOURNEY

Domènec Badia was introduced to Simón de Rojas, as passionate a botanist and orientalist as himself. He invited him to join him on a scientific-botanic expedition to North Africa. In 1801, Badia presented the project to Prime Minister Godoy, who showed a keen interest.

Badia and Simón de Rojas were circumcised in London, where they purchased luxurious Arab costumes. Simón de Rojas was unaware of the fact that Godoy had forbidden Badia from accompanying him on his journey. The

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A Short Story from History

latter avoided him by setting off for Morocco, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar in 1803.

Between 1803 and 1808, Badia travelled throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East taking an interest in such diverse disciplines as religion, botany, fauna and the local inhabitants.

In the correspondence he exchanged with Simón de Rojas, both men used their Muslim names. Badia went by the name Ali Bey el Abbassi, Prince of the Abbasids, son of Othman Bey. To this end he had falsified documents and genealogies written in ancient Arabic which served to authenticate his origins and holy lineage: he was a descendant of one of the Prophet’s uncles, and as such warranted special treatment.

According to his memoirs, Badia instigated the rebellion of the tribes opposed to the Sultan, creating the optimal conditions for a Spanish military invasion. Nevertheless, Godoy’s plan failed due to Carlos IV’s misgivings, who did not wish to know about new problems and military campaigns. Interested solely in hunting, he refused to concern himself with matters of state.

Godoy wrote to Badia cancelling the project, leading him to begin operating alone. He asked the Sultan for permission to move to Mecca, which he granted, resulting in a tearful send-off.

JOURNEY TO MECCA

Months later Badia arrived in the Great Mosque in Mecca and kissed the Black Stone of the Kaaba, carried by Archangel Gabriel. He circled the Kaaba six times, returning the next day to do so seven times more. He was the first European to enter Mecca. The story of his journey includes other lands: Damascus, Cairo, Constantinople and the Holy Land. His correspondence details

his intentions regarding the Moroccan Empire. It appears he tried to gain the crown in a failed coup, halted before it could take place.

Between 1806 and 1814, certain members of the order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem had revealed the difficult situation faced by those who performed missionary duties in the Holy Land. The Turks increasingly demanded higher taxes and Christians were generally held in contempt and marginalized in the region. Distinguished individuals spoke out against the situation, including the Count of Chateaubriand and Ali Bey himself, who on this occasion went under his real name, Domènec Badia. Chateaubriand and Badia came to know each

He circled the Kaaba six times, returning the next day to do so seven times more. He was the first European to enter Mecca other. In his itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem, the renowned French writer mentions ‘a rich Turk, traveller and astronomer named Ali Bey el Abbassi’.

SECOND JOURNEY

With the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis XVIII’s ascension to the throne of France, Domènec Badia began to operate as a colonial agent in the king’s service. He died near Damascus in 1818.

Badia’s account of his travels were read throughout Europe, leading to a great interest in Islamic culture. One of his most illustrious admirers was the explorer, the German naturalist and geographer, Alexander Von Humboldt.

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Universal Catalans

Curated by Francesc de Dalmases

Jaume Nunó Jaume Nunó i Roca was born in Sant Joan de les Abadesses on 7 September 1824. He was the son of Francesc Nunó and Magdalena Roca, a family of weavers with a musical background: Nunó’s brother, Joan, was an organist in a monastery, while another relative, Josep Nunó, composed chamber music for Ferran VII. Nunó was orphaned soon after moving to Barcelona, resulting in his uncle Bernat taking care of him.

He joined Barcelona Cathedral’s choir and, thanks to his musical ability, he was given the opportunity to travel to Naples to study with Saverio Mercadante a composer of operas.

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pon his return from Italy, Nunó lived for a time in Terrassa and Sabadell, where he conducted orchestras and local ensembles until he was appointed director of the Band of the Queen’s Regiment in 1851. He travelled with them to Cuba, which at the time was still a Spanish colony. There he met General Antonio López de Santa Anna, who was on his way to Mexico to assume the post of president. On seeing Nunó’s obvious talent, Santa Anna offered him the position of general director of Mexico’s military bands, with the rank of captain and excellent remuneration.

Shortly after arriving in Mexico, a contest was held to put music to verses written by Francisco González Bocanegra, in order to create Mexico’s new national anthem. Nunó entered the competition anonymously in order that his work was judged on its own merits.

On 12 August 1854, he was declared the winner. The anthem was presented to the nation on 15 September 1854 in a lavish celebration in Mexico City.

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Nonetheless, his success proved to be short-lived, since Santa Anna’s government was overthrown at the beginning of 1855 and Nunó’s position, close to the government, forced him to emigrate to the United States.

After leaving Mexico, Nunó spent 15 years living in New York and touring the country as the director of various opera companies, and accompanying distinguished soloists visiting from Europe. Due to the low wages and strenuous nature of the travelling, Nunó took the advice of the publisher G. Schimer and decided to settle in Buffalo, near Niagara Falls, devoting himself to teaching music. During this period, Jaume Nunó came to be a respected member of the musical community, founding a number of choirs and directing several philharmonic societies.

Before leaving for America, Nunó had married Dolores, who subsequently gave birth to a daughter, Dolores Nunó, who also devoted her life to music. Once settled in Buffalo, he married Kate Cecilia Remington in 1873, with whom he

Universal Catalans

Catalan International View

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Š Wikipedia

Universal Catalans

© Wikipedia

had three children: Cecilia (who died at an early age), Christine (who was a decorated nurse during World War II) and James Francis (who became a businessman). Only James had children, meaning to this day there is a direct living descendant of Jaume Nunó (though with a different surname): Edwin B. Cragin, his great-grandson.

During the Pan-American Exhibition held in Buffalo in 1901, a Mexican journalist was surprised to read on a plaque ‘James Nunó – Studio’. Like the majority of Mexicans, the journalist supposed that Jaume Nunó, of whom nothing had been heard since 1864, had died. When President Porfirio Díaz heard news of Nunó’s reappearance, he invited him to visit Mexico. His recep-

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tion was overwhelming and, for several weeks, the maestro became the most celebrated individual in Mexico. A few years later, in 1904, on the occasion of the national anthem’s fiftieth anniversary, Nunó once again visited Mexico.

On 18 July 1908, Jaume Nunó died in Bayside, New York, at the age of 83.

He was buried in Buffalo. His death made headlines in both Mexico and New York. In 1942 the Mexican government, in recognition of Nunó’s importance, exhumed his remains in order to lay them to rest in Mexico City’s Rotunda of Illustrious Persons, the final resting place of many key figures in Mexico’s history. Jaume Nunó is the only foreigner to have received such an honour.

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Catalan International View

85

Green Debate

It’s the governance, stupid!

by Sergi Tudela*

How the government of Catalonia is building a unique model with a decentralized, multi-actor decision-making approach to the seas

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he fisheries industry in the Mediterranean is currently at a crossroads. Despite having implemented the Common Fisheries Policy in the region for decades, most assessed fished stocks –over 90%– are considered overexploited and most fleet segments struggle for economic viability. Prompted by this dismal situation, following a conference in Catania, Sicily, last year the EC initiated a process aimed at leading to a permanent recovery in fish stocks and the creation of much improved conditions for the fishing industry. The recent Ministerial Conference on Mediterranean Fisheries, held in Malta in late March 2017, resulted in an important Declaration reaffirming this political commitment at the highest level.

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Catalonia, with a fishing fleet of roughly 800 boats, still harbours a robust fisheries sector, which is vital to the economic fabric of coastal communities and is needed to form the backbone of its future national maritime strategy.

The Catalan government, with a view to rising to the challenges presented by this important moment in time, has been working for over a year on a highly innovative and unique fisheries management approach tailored to the country’s fishing characteristics.

Based on previous successful experiences, it was first identified that the focus had to be placed on the management approach –what can be referred to as the governance system. Indeed, ensuring co-responsibility in management among the major stakeholders through

Green Debate

bottom-up decision-making processes is absolutely crucial to achieving the required buy-in for management measures which, in turn, will benefit compliance with the rules.

The upcoming Decree on the Governance Model for Professional Fishing in Catalonia, which is expected to come into force by mid-2017, foresees local fisheries management plans run through multi-actor ‘co-management committees’ fully empowered by the administration through a formal power devolution procedure. Co-management committees are to be composed of members representing the administration, the fishing sector, the scientific community and civil society, and will have full powers to manage fisheries in a real-time adaptive manner within

The Catalan fisheries administration is designing training courses on fisheries management and participatory decisionmaking the sustainability framework determined by the EU Common Fisheries Policy.

Alongside this system, involving the devolution of fisheries management power to multi-stakeholder committees, unique at a global scale, the new Decree includes a comprehensive fishing effort management scheme based on total annual fishing days per fishery determined scientifically and individually allocated to each fishing vessel. This will Catalan International View

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Green Debate

allow for a more intelligent use of fishing days by fishermen and will take us closer to a sorely-needed bioeconomic management of fishing activity, seeking to maximize profit from the harvest through a more qualitative approach. In this regard, co-management committees are allotted the task of drafting management plans for the fisheries under their remit and an accompanying socioeconomic programme with specific objectives, targets and progress indicators.

The new management scheme paves the way for the use of innovative tools for conservation. In this sense, the new Decree includes ‘conservation incen88

Catalan International View

tives’ as extra fishing days to be allocated to those fishing vessels that voluntarily adopt certain technical measures aimed at benefitting the environment.

No doubt the generalized implementation of a model of fisheries comanagement will be more demanding in terms of human capacity at different levels. To rise to the challenge, the Catalan fisheries administration is currently designing specific training courses on fisheries management and participatory decision-making aimed at civil society representatives and other stakeholders potentially involved in co-management committees. Furthermore, the govern-

Green Debate

ment of Catalonia has established a new body to strengthen the involvement of scientists, the Catalan Research Institute for Governance of the Sea, which is born as a joint venture between the Catalan fisheries administration and the Spanish National Research Council.

All these measures, innovative as they are, haven’t appeared out of the blue when it comes to Catalonia’s fishing reality. Actually, the last few years have seen the emergence and implementation of new approaches and ideas, often spearheaded by the stakeholders themselves. These include the establishment back in 2012 of the first co-managed fisheries plan, north of Barcelona, for a small-scale fleet targeting sandeel (sonso). This management plan, run via a first multi-stakeholder committee, has been a resounding success and has received a prestigious international award.

Similar approaches, including elements of co-management, have also been tested for certain bottom trawl (demersal) fisheries targeting red shrimp and hake, in the province of Girona (Palamós harbour and Roses harbour, respectively).

The success of the co-management approach applied to fisheries has led the government of Catalonia to further extend it to the broader field of maritime governance. The government of Catalonia adopted a Maritime Action Programme last December within the general framework of the EU’s Maritime Integrated Policy. It was charged with paving the way for a national maritime

policy and strengthening the current maritime administration. The establishment of a multi-sectoral national maritime strategy lies at the core of this programme.

To steer the new strategy, including overseeing its timely implementation and adaptive readjustment, a new participative governance body, the Catalan Council for Maritime Co-management (CCMC), has recently been created.

Alongside its main function of governing the maritime strategy, the CCMC is also tasked with running a new Laboratory of Sustainable Maritime Initiatives with a focus on maritime best practices both in Catalonia and abroad.

In Catalonia we are convinced that only a people-based governance focus can win the future Time is running out, particularly in the Mediterranean region, to secure sound and resilient marine ecosystems able to fully deliver their potential for the blue economy as valuable ecosystem services. Placing the emphasis where it matters most –on governance– is instrumental to achieving this. And even more crucial is choosing the right governance approach –in Catalonia we are convinced that only a people-based governance focus can win the future.

(*) Sergi Tudela Director General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries for the Government of Catalonia

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Science & Technology

Electric mobility strengthens the ties between Catalonia and the automotive world Electric vehicles are transforming the automotive industry. Catalonia, a country which has long been connected to the automobile industry, is participating in this process: its unique business environment and its commitment to a new energy model make it a prime location for the electric mobility sector.

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atalonia has had a long love affair with the mobility industry. The Catalans’ obsession with vehicles, as demonstrated by the popularity of motor sport events, has always been reflected in the industrial arena: since the start of the twentieth century, Catalonia has hosted a large number of pioneering business projects in the automotive industry. Car manufacturers (such as Hispano-Suiza), industrial vehicles (such as Pegaso), motorcycles (with brands such as Montesa, Bultaco and Derbi), buses and parts manufacturers have competed internationally from their factories in Catalonia. Catalonia’s love affair with the internal combustion engine has always remained strong thanks to its popularity among the public and the adaptability of the numerous companies involved in the industry.

Recently the automotive world has seen the arrival of new players from the tech world that are destined to transform the business models developed over the last 100 years. Mobility is moving towards the reduction of emis-

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sions and the number of accidents, as demonstrated by the development of autonomous vehicle and car-sharing.

Electric vehicles are the natural platform for such autonomous vehicles. As a result, much of the investment within the sector is aimed at developing and optimizing the performance of this new type of vehicle.

The emergence of electric vehicles and autonomous technology is converging around photovoltaic cell technology. New EU directives mean that buildings must incorporate solar energy to generate electricity for vehicles and charging stations in their garages. Catalonia is rich in solar energy resources.

A ROBUST ECOSYSTEM

Catalonia’s powerful industrial sector, both in the automotive industry as well as in electronics, benefits from plentiful solar resources and the Catalan government’s proactive stance, making it an ideal ecosystem for the electric mobility industry. The automotive sector is comprised of vehicle manufacturers (being home to two

Science & Technology

large factories, Seat and Nissan, and two small manufacturers specializing in sports cars), numerous small and medium-sized motorcycle manufacturers (who specialize in trial bikes and electric bikes) and a powerful and diverse parts industry, made up of more than 230 companies. The automotive industry directly employs 40,000 people in Catalonia, with revenues of more than €15bn and exports close to €11bn.

Catalan businesses are closely involved with every level of the automotive industry related to the internal combustion engine, from design to quality product testing facilities, –the IDIADA facilities are seen as worldclass– and increasingly its reputation is spreading to include the infrastructure associated with electric vehicles: Catalonia not only has leading tech businesses involved in the manufacturer of charging equipment but also companies which are working on telematic management systems for electronic charging networks, engineering companies specializing in providing global

solutions to electric mobility, and companies specializing in solar photovoltaic technology. Catalonia has an energy efficiency cluster comprised of more than 120 companies, encouraging the generation of synergies, as is the case of Ficosa’s merger with Panasonic and the collaboration between Nissan and Circutor.

DYNAMIC BUSINESS

Catalonia is a dynamic environment for the automotive industry. On one hand, it is able to attract large international projects such as Thunder Power, a Hong Kong-based manufacturer of electric vehicles, which has decided to build its R&D centre in Catalonia –with an investment of €80 million and the creation of 200 local jobs– with a second phase planned, involving a production facility. On the other, this dynamism generates ambitious domestic projects, such as the electric motorbike company SCUTUM, which has had to expand its plant, or Torrot, who have evolved from making bicycles to making electric bikes and motorbikes using their own technology, and which acquired the Gas Gas motorcycle company in order to achieve the scale and capacity needed to supply new markets.

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Science & Technology

Catalan businesses are closely involved with every level of the automotive industry related to the internal combustion engine In addition, the Catalan government is working on various fronts to overcome the barriers to the introduction of electric vehicles and to promote their widespread use. The main mechanism is their Action Plan for the Deployment of Charging Infrastructure for Electric Vehicles 2016-2019 (PIRVEC), which is aimed at extending the charging network throughout Catalonia, in order to facilitate the circulation of electric vehicles on its roads. The Catalan government has enlisted the help of more than 70 companies and organizations in the development of PIRVEC. Many of them are also involved in the development of domestic photovoltaic consumption, due to the high levels of synergy between the two technologies.

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The spread of electric mobility is another key element in this ecosystem.

Catalonia is home to Expoelectric, the most important electric mobility fair in southern Europe, which is held annually in Barcelona, and which in its last edition brought together 45 exhibitors and over 16,000 visitors. In addition, the semi-public platform LIVE brings together businesses and government agencies to work jointly on promoting the spread of electric vehicles from a technical, specialist standpoint.

TOWARDS A NEW ENERGY MODEL

The electric vehicle is one of the main pillars of the new energy model which Catalonia is aiming to create. This new, cleaner, more democratic, distributed and sustainable model revolves around the private citizen and is based on the use of renewable energy and energy efficiency –and the domestic production of electricity through photovoltaics in particular–, and the use of electric mo-

Science & Technology

THE PUBLIC, A KEY ROLE

The consumer is the key to boosting electric mobility and the consumption of solar power. In Catalonia, in order to facilitate the choice of an electric vehicle instead of a conventional vehicle the Catalan government has introduced various measures favouring the former. To promote intercity or longdistance mobility, a network of fast charging stations is being implemented in cooperation with local councils. The plan is to ensure that the entire country is within 75 km of a charging station which can recharge the battery sufficiently for a 120-km journey in less than 20 minutes. These will be strategically placed near road network hubs. At present, the network already has 30 service points, with a further planned to come online this year, thanks to a joint effort between the Catalan Energy Institute (ICAEN) and local councils. The network will be interoperable, accessible from smartphones and will use open-access data regarding its status and occupancy. Other incentives have also been introduced, such as free tolls on motorways run by the Catalan government and allowing electric vehicles to use the BUS-VAO-ECO lane, reserved for high-occupancy vehicles. bility. In this model, the role of electric vehicles is manifold. Firstly, they help to reduce oil dependency in the transport sector, which represents 42% of Catalonia’s total energy consumption –of which 96% comes from oil–, and to eliminate atmospheric pollution.

Electric vehicles are up to 70% more efficient than vehicles equipped with internal combustion engines in terms of energy consumption.

Second, thanks to the storage capacity of their batteries, electric vehicles will play a role in the regulation of supply and demand for renewable energy. The public can use their vehicle’s

Thanks to the storage capacity of their batteries, electric vehicles will play a role in the regulation of renewable energy battery to store the energy generated by their photovoltaic systems for domestic consumption or as a source of energy for their home when needed. By doing so, they will also help to integrate renewable energy into the electricity grid, making it more efficient, since overnight charging will help to smooth out electricity demand.

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The Artist

Gaze Gesture and

50 artists

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Jordi Belver

Photographs: Jordi Belver Text: Daniel Giralt-Miracle

As a photographer, Jordi Belver (Barcelona, 1950) has two obsessions: one is architecture, and the other, artists.

With the first, he is drawn to the articulation of spaces and their light and shade. With the second, he is interested in the person –their character, thoughts and surroundings– and in going beyond the portrait to capture what they have experienced, rather than what they have seen. These two interests have been two constants throughout his professional career. Nevertheless, we have focused on only one of these two aspects for this exhibition: the portrait. Even more so, because we met thirty years ago when I went to interview artists and he went to photograph them. This is our motivation for choos-

ing the fifty artists that make up the main part of this exhibition.

The first photograph in this series is from 1977, and the last one is from 2007. None of the photos have been chosen for their aesthetic or documentary value alone, nor is the intention for them to show the best or most popular side of the artists. Instead, the idea is to show an aspect of their personality, something that most attracted us to them, because they are portraits of artists who we have talked to, met in their own surroundings and seen them at work. We have tried to reflect and express to all of you that moment that we shared with the artists –Jordi Belver, by way of images, and me, through words.



Jorge Oteiza by Jordi Belver Catalan International View

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The Artist

A creative mutual understanding

by Glòria Bosch*

The image and the word penetrate people’s psychology. It is a way of opening the gaze to augment, combine and complement the potential interpretations of gesture, based on a creative mutual understanding. In this instance, the act of sharing is what gives meaning to the tandem of voices from Jordi Belver, photographer, and Daniel Giralt-Miracle, art critic. They both –each with their own skills– transform perception into gesture and the reflection that each artist’s essence can give us, but they also give us something else: the author’s own reflections.

The collection entitled Mirada i gest. 50 artistes [Gaze and Gesture. 50 Artists] – which was shown at the Fundació Caixa Manresa exhibition hall, in Plana de l’Om, in 2011; and also at the Museum of Rural Life in Espluga de Francolí, in 2014– has now become part of the Fundació Vila Casas thanks to the generosity of the two artists. Through the combination of fifty artists and photographs taken over a period of thirty years (1997 – 2007), we can see how a testimonial dialogue has been created, based on difference and multiplicity. The images act as a kind of radar which explores emotions, attitudes, background and context, among others; in the same way as words are able to accurately express features and synthesize attitudes which are as diverse as the way in which each of them work.

This collection of works are unique moments, of great documentary value, and join the ranks of other perspectives by important photographers, such as the collection of portraits by Francesc Català-Roca, Leopold Pomés, Pere Formiguera and Antoni Bernad. We can enrich our interpretations of many

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of our artists from different creative perspectives. Furthermore, we can promote culture and bring it closer to everyone through the project Itiner’ART (a travelling exhibition project), from the Fundació Vila Casas, which is committed to the need to stimulate intellectual and sensitive awareness, and knowledge; which makes us contemplate and experience art, in places far beyond the physical limitations of museums.

One of our two featured artists is alert to gesture and gaze –that, at times, hides; at others, reveals itself– while the other refines words which, escaping, build an interpretation of a thought: but they both need each other because observation penetrates further than what we see and goes deeper into the interior silence in each portrait. And it all balances itself out in the moment of trying to transmit the unforeseen, which one can only live in the depth of a gaze and the gesture which betrays itself. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to grasp a unified element which we have made from a duality or, even more so, with all the others that surround us. According to Giralt-Miracle, the work carried out

The Artist

Perejaume by Jordi Belver

Barcelรณ by Jordi Belver

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The Artist

Miralda by Jordi Belver

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The Artist

by Belver ‘is the noun and the text is the adjective’. The photographs are ‘the product of an immersion in the creative world of each artist’ and the texts that accompany them are ‘neither critical acclaim, nor dictionary definition, journalistic article or poetic text.

They are a small synthesis of the essence of a person in their world’1.

The journey through the images and texts occurs in different ways. If, as Giralt-Miracle says, Oteiza has the extraordinary ability to explore space and manage chaos with sensitivity, as we saw in the light-gesture of a hand that leaves the background of the material in half-light; Miró, on the other hand, has been surprised at his silent tracing of daily life which, far from appearances, wants to make visible that which we cannot see. And so, from Oteiza –according to Giralt-Miracle’s comments about the Basque artist when he observes that he ‘knows how to manage chaos with sensitivity’– I cannot help but move on to such a completely different gestural attitude like that of Brossa, an author who captivates me due to, among other things, his ability to manage chaos in a surrounding with a kind of magician’s wizardry. Sitting in his island chair as if it were an actual observatory, while he is surrounded by a world of piles of books, objects and papers, he lets the energy of the spirit flow between thresholds that search for the game; you have to listen, discover and empty out until you achieve the desired visual poetry. But if we focus once again on

The most interesting thing is to realize how life opens up from places and paths Oteiza, when the trace is made from inside, between the ideas of an immediacy that articulate a thought with the hand; if we make a leap to the exterior journey of Alfaro, then we find that the part follows the methodology of forms; and if we continue on to Chillida, movement transforms into contention, a silence between emptiness and fullness.

The thresholds for all those who pass through these images always start from a singularity. It is interesting to observe Alfaro walking between the emptiness of a depth and the open shapes of a material; Frederic Amat who takes us to an opaque depth, the wall as a network of symbols and signposts to go to and then return back to the shape; while, in another place, the portraits by Eugènia Balcells or Perico Pastor integrate clearly into the space that is created. When they deal with the face there is an energy that bursts out from a gaze and introspection that hides behind a gesture –moments that are brought together by, among others, Tàpies, Cuixart, Tharrats, Eduardo Arroyo, Guinovart, Corberó, Gudiol, Ràfols Casamada, J. M. Sicilia, Susana Solano, Perejaume, Evru and Cruspinera.

The importance of architecture in Belver’s world, his interest in the arCatalan International View

1. From the informa-

tion leaflet for the exhibition Mirada i gest. 50 artistes, shown at the Fundació Caixa Manresa exhibition hall, in Plana de l’Om, 27th May 2011.

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This collection of works are unique moments, of great documentary value, and join the ranks of other perspectives by important photographers

2. Giralt-Miracle, Daniel. Crítica i crítiques.

Escrits d’art [Critique and Critiques, Writings on Art], Vic, Eumo Editorial – H.AAC, 2005.

3. Altaió, Vicenç.

Pròleg. El mitjancer, [Preface. The Mediator], op.cit. pages 10-13.

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ticulation of spaces, lights and shades, explains this fluidity when he comes to construct, but above all his extraordinary ability to create gestures and the way in which he draws us directly to the person who has been portrayed, to humanity that emerges from an experience where, more than just the gaze, it is the hearing and silence that act. We cannot ignore the intellectual journey of Giralt-Miracle and, although I could reference many aspects of his work, I want to highlight a book published in 2005, Crítica i crítiques. Escrits d’art [Critique and Critiques. Writings on Art]2, with texts about artists who are featured in this exhibition: Miró, Clavé, Tàpies, Cuixart, Brossa, Tharrats, Antonio Saura, Chillida, Oteiza, Alfaro, Basterretxea, Ràfols Casamada, Guinovart, Hernández Pijuan, Yturralde, Xavier Corberó, Zush and/or Evru.

Vicenç Altaió, with his customary analytical depth, spoke about Giralt-Miracle and the never-ending need to ‘share his observation with that of others’, while a psychological portrait also emerges from the text: his ‘Mediterranean heart that moderates with a great deal of practical service, far from any baroque rhetoric’ without evading ‘the tallest and most demanding heights’. He bases his writings on three points: ‘the philosopher’s ability to understand and question the quality Catalan International View

of the mystery and the aesthetic principles that inspire these radical artists’ works; the journalist’s ability to inform with an objective clarity and to synthesize; and the communicator’s ability to not avoid the practical and functional meaning of the uselessness of art, combining artwork and biography, history and exception’. Yes, Altaió was right when, from that ‘first reinstated Generalitat [Catalan government]’, Giralt-Miracle ‘transformed the taste and aesthetic training of certain leaders and political representatives,… who, though they promise culture – just as they do nowadays– they kind of avoid it, not persecuting it as occurred under the dictatorship, but instead they simply do not really understand it, and they try to govern it from a distance’3.

When I read Belver and Giralt-Miracle’s biographies I see in them axes of a structure that connects together to build a whole. The most interesting thing is to realize how life opens up from places and paths –that may or may not cross– but almost without realizing at which moment we have taken different means of expression from those we expected to take; the initial multiplicity that it can bring, to the design and history of art, as in the case of Belver, or to philosophy, journalism, design and communication, in the case of Giralt-Miracle. At the end of the day, they all form part of this important breadth of experiences which, from a common starting point, stick with the clarity of the gaze and the gesture to elucidate the background of all the things which have been shared in each place, with each person.

The Artist

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Curated by Enric Bou Professor in Iberian Studies, Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

cínica tres Em regales una rosa que és la més bella del món, i fa olor, i no està ni massa closa ni poncellada del tot; prô la seva perfecció és imperfecta per mà de l’home, com les nimfes que surten a les revistes per a dones; que les roses, amor, han de tenir-hi espines, al cos.

cynical three You give me a rose Which is the world’s most beautiful and it is scented, And is neither too closed Nor in full bloom; But its perfection is imperfect By the hand of man, Like the nymphs in women’s Magazines; Because roses, My love, Must have thorns, On their body.

[Translated by Enric Bou]

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A Poem

LAIA MARTINEZ i LOPEZ (Berga, 1984), also known as ‘Laia Malo’, is a relatively young poet, singer and translator. She performs with Jaume Reus in the electrovèrsia group Jansky. Her writing seeks to achieve total communication through music and poetry while speaking about the body.

In her first book, L’abc de Laia Martinez i Lopez (2009) she writes punk verses about blood and erections. L’estiu del tonight, tonight (2011), her poem that won the poetry prize Art Jove, fixates on the relationship with others and the need to travel. Sex is important through a musical and

mystical conception: creation is seen as language and words as instruments. Cançó amb esgarrip i dos poemes (2015) i Afollada (2016) are her latest books. The parallelism between artistic creation and animal reproduction, human and literary motherhood, are characteristic of her poetry. These are often unreservedly combined with parallelism between poetry and life, verses and children. She speaks of her own body, umbilical cord, vagina and consciousness. With Gerard Adrover she has translated a collection by Max Voloixin, Dels troncs d’oliveres velles (2011).

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Editorial Board Martí Anglada Former foreign news editor at TV3 (Catalonia Television). He has been foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Italy and Great Britain (1977-1984) for the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia and TV3’s foreign correspondent in the United States (1987-1990), Brussels and Berlin (2009-2011). He has also been an international political commentator. His books include Afers no tan estrangers [Not So Foreign Affairs] (Editorial Mina, 2008), Quatre vies per a la independència: Estònia, Letònia, Eslovàquia, Eslovènia [Four Ways To Independence: Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia] (Editorial Pòrtic, 2013) and La via alemanya [The German Way] (Brau Edicions, 2014). He was named the Government of Catalonia’s new delegate for France and Switzerland in September 2014.

Enriqueta Aragonès A research professor at the Institut d’Anàlisi Econòmica (IAE-CSIC) and affiliate professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. She holds a degree in Economics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a PhD from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Most of her research takes place on the frontier between economics and political science. In particular she examines questions concerning political science using the instruments of economic analysis and game theory. Her articles are published in leading journals in both political science (American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science) and economics (American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Theory).

Jordi Basté (Barcelona, 1965). Journalist. ​H​e worked at Catalunya R​àdio, collaborating on Joaquim Maria Puyal’s football broadcasts​ (​1982​-​2004​)​. He also r ​ eported on basketball matches and presented ​the programs La Jornada and No ho diguis a ningú. ​ Later h​e joined RAC1 radio station, where he presented the sports program​​Tu diràs ​(2004​-2007​)​. S ​ ince then he has been the director and presenter of the morning magazine El món a RAC1 ​(currently the leading program in Catalan radio history)​ f​ or which​​he received the Premi Nacional de Radiodifusió in 2010 and the Premi Òmnium Cultural de Comunicació​​in 2012. O ​ n TV, he has w ​ orked on Basquetmania and a ​ s a c​ odirector and presenter of Gol a gol for Televisió de Catalunya (2001-2003). In 2010 Basté received the Protagonistas award f​ or communication and in 2011 he r ​ eceived an Ondas award i​ n recognition of his distinguished career in broadcasting.

Enric Canela (Barcelona, 1949). Holds a degree in Chemistry from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and a PhD in Chemistry, specialising in Biochemistry. He has taught at the UB since 1974, where he is currently professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and collaborates on research into intracellular communication. He also conducts research on theoretical Biochemistry and regularly publishes in scientific journals of international repute. He is a member of numerous scientific societies. Between 1991 and 1995 he was vice-president of the Catalan Society of Biology. Between 2007 and 2009 he was president of the Circle for Knowledge.

Between 2007 and 2011 he was a patron of the National Agency for Evaluation, Certification and Accreditation (ANECA) in Spain.

He is currently vice-rector of Science Policy at the UB.

Salvador Cardús (Terrassa, 1954). PhD in Economics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, Cornell University (USA) and Queen Mary College of the University of London. Currently he is professor of Sociology at the UAB and the former Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology. He has conducted research into the sociology of religion and culture, media, nationalism and identity. His published works include, Plegar de viure [Giving Up on Life] with Joan Estruch, Saber el temps [Understanding Time], El desconcert de l’educació [The Education Puzzle], Ben educats [Well Educated] and El camí de la independència [The Road To Independence]. In the field of journalism he was the editor of the Crònica d’Ensenyament magazine (1987-1988) and was deputy editor of the Avui newspaper (1989-1991). He contributes to ARA, La Vanguardia, Diari de Terrassa and Deia newspapers. He is a member of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. www.salvadorcardus.cat

David Fernàndez (Vila de Gràcia, 1974) is a journalist at La Directa and a member of Coop57. He has been a member of alternative social movements since the 90s, is a member of the Amical de Mauthausen, the Intersindical Alternativa de Catalunya, Entrepobles, and the Coordinating Committee for the Prevention of Torture. He was an MP for the CUP-Alternativa d’Esquerres in the parliament of Catalonia during the 10th Legislature (2012-2015), where he chaired the Commission of Inquiry on Tax Fraud and Corruption. He currently works in the fight against poverty and social exclusion and as an activist is involved in the anti-corruption project llumsitaquigrafs.cat. He is the author of numerous books, including Cròniques del 6, Cop de CUP and Foc a la Barraca.

August Gil-Matamala Has been a practising lawyer since 1960, specialising in the fields of criminal and labour law. He has taken part in numerous cases in defence of those on trial for their demands in favour of people’s rights, as well as hearings before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Gil-Matamala fought the first successful case against the Spanish state for the violation of basic rights. He is a founder member of the Commission for the Defence of Individual Rights of the Col·legi d’Advocats de Barcelona [the Barcelona Bar Association] and the Catalan Association for the Defence of Human Rights, which he presided over from its foundation in 1985 to 2001. Gil-Matamala has also been president of both the Fundació Catalunya and the European Democratic Lawyers organization. In 2007, coinciding with his retirement, he received the Creu de Sant Jordi (St. George’s Cross, the highest honour awarded by the Catalan government).

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Montserrat Guibernau Professor of Politics at Queen Mary College, University of London. Holds a PhD and an MA in Social and Political Theory from the University of Cambridge and a degree in Philosophy from the Universitat de Barcelona. She has taught at the universities of Warwick, Cambridge, Barcelona, the London School of Economics and the Open University. Guibernau has held visiting professorships at the universities of Edinburgh, Tampere, Pompeu Fabra, the UQAM (Quebec) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Currently she holds a visiting fellowship at the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, London School of Economics. Montserrat Guibernau is the author of numerous books and articles on nationalism, the nation-state, national identity, and national and ethnic minorities in the West from the perspective of global governance.

Manuel Manonelles A political scientist specialised in international relations and human rights, he has been Director General for Multilateral and European Affairs of the Catalan Government since June 2014; a position he combines with that of associate professor of International Relations at the University Ramon Llull (Barcelona). Member of the Steering Committee of the Jean Monnet Centre of European Excellence on ‘Intercultural Dialogue, Human Rights and Multi-level Governance’ located at the University of Padua (Italy), he has participated in the work of the Leading Group on Innovative Financing for Development (2009-13) under the coordination of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in support of the International Commission Against the Death Penalty (2011-2). He has been special advisor to the Co-chair of the UN High Level Group for the Alliance of Civilizations, as well as director of the Foundation Culture of Peace and the World Forum of Civil Society Networks (known as the Ubuntu Forum). He has been an international electoral observer and supervisor for the OSCE and the EU on many occasions, and has participated in several international intergovernmental and non-governmental processes. He is currently the Government of Catalonia’s Director General of Multilateral Affairs.

Eva Piquer (Barcelona, 1969).Writer and cultural journalist. Works for several newspapers and magazines. Has been a lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a New York news correspondent. Won the 2002 Josep Pla prize for her novel Una victòria diferent [A Different Victory]. Also author of several books, including La noia del temps [The Weather Girl], Alícia al país de la televisió [Alice in Television Land] and No sóc obsessiva, no sóc obsessiva, no sóc obsessiva [I’m Not Obsessive, I’m Not Obsessive, I’m Not Obsessive]. Her latest book is called La feina o la vida [Life or Work].

Ricard Planas (Girona, 1976). Journalist, art critic and cultural promoter. Studied Philology and the History of Art at the Universitat de Girona. In 1999 he founded the magazine Bonart, dedicated to the contemporary art scene in the Catalan Countries.

More recently he created and directed the Catalan art fair INART in 2005 and 2006. Has worked as the curator for exhibitions by important artists such as Arranz-Bravo, Lamazares, Formiguera, Cuixart, Ansesa and Grau-Garriga. Ricard has collaborated with Ona Catalana, Catalunya Ràdio, iCatfm and Onda Rambla radio stations. Has also worked for the Diari de Girona, El Punt and El Mundo newspapers, among others.

Clara Ponsatí Professor of Economics at the University of Saint Andrews. Holds a degree in Economics from the Universitat de Barcelona, a Masters in Economics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and a PhD from the University of Minnesota.

She is a research professor and director at Institut d’Anàlisi Econòmica-C.S.I.C., affiliated faculty and research fellow at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. She has been senior researcher at C.S.I.C., associate professor and assistant professor at UAB and Postdoctoral research associate at Bell Communications Research, Morristown, NJ. She is a member of the editorial boards of The International Journal of Game Theory and The Review of Economic Design.

Arnau Queralt Holds a degree in Environmental Sciences from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and a Masters in Public Management from ESADE, the UAB and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Since October 2011, he has been the director of the Advisory Council for the Sustainable Development of Catalonia (CADS), an advisory body of the Government of Catalonia attached to its Presidential Department. Since October 2012, he has been a member of the Steering Committee of the European Environment and Sustainable Development Advisory Councils (EEAC). From May 2010 to October 2011 he was secretary general of the Cercle Tecnològic de Catalunya foundation. He has been on the board of the Catalan Association of Environmental Professionals since 2004 and was its president from 2010 to 2012.

Vicent Sanchis (Valencia, 1961). Holds a degree in Information Sciences from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In his career as a journalist it is worth highlighting that he has worked and collaborated on many publications and with numerous publishers; he is director of El Temps magazine, and he has been director of Setze magazine, the Catalan supplement of Cambio 16, and director of the newspapers El Observador and Avui. He has also excelled as a scriptwriter and director on different TV programmes. At present he is president of the editorial board of Avui, and vice-president of Òmnium Cultural. Vicent is also a lecturer in the Faculty of Communication Sciences at Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona.

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Mònica Terribas (Barcelona, 1968). Holds a degree in Journalism from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Stirling (Scotland). She is a lecturer at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. From 2002 to 2008 she presented and subsequently directed the current affairs programme La nit al dia for TV3 (the Catalan public television). From 2008 to 2012 she was Director of TV3 and the following year, the CEO and editor of the newspaper Ara. Since September 2013 she has presented El matí de Catalunya Ràdio, Catalonia’s public service broadcasting flagship current affairs programme.

Montserrat Vendrell (Barcelona, 1964). Has been BIOCAT’s CEO since April 2007. As a cluster organization, BIOCAT’s goals include promoting the development of biotechnology companies and research institutions. Vendrell has been the Chairwoman of CEBR (the Council of European Bioregions) since 2012. She holds a PhD in Biology (Universitat de Barcelona), a Masters in Science Communication (UPF) and a degree in Business Administration (IESE, PDG). Before BIOCAT she was linked to the Barcelona Science Park, where she held several posts such as Scientific Director (1997-2005) and Deputy Director General (2005-2007). Among other tasks, Dr Vendrell led the design and implementation of the Park’s Strategic Plan, as well as the organization and management of scientific activities and technological platforms. She was a member of the Steering Committee of the Park’s Biotech Incubator, and in charge of international relations.

Carles Vilarrubí (Barcelona, 1954). Businessman. He is currently Executive Vice-President of Rothschild Spain Investment Bank, specialising in key mergers and takeovers in the financial sector on an international scale. President of CVC Grupo Consejero, an equity and investment advisory firm, with a portfolio of shares in consulting and service companies from the world of communications, the media, marketing, technology and telecommunications. President of Doxa Consulting Group, independent consultants on technology, media and telecommunications, leaders in the sector and with a presence in Spain and Portugal. He is a member of the advisory board of the Catalan confederation Foment del Treball Nacional [National Employment Promotion] and patron of the Fundació Orfeó Català - Palau de la Música. He has also been a member of the governing council of ADENA WWF (World Wild Fund for Nature), and sat on the boards of the Fundación Arte y Tecnología, Fundesco and Fundación Entorno. He is vice-president of F.C Barcelona.

Vicenç Villatoro (Terrassa, 1957). Writer and journalist. Holds a degree in Information Sciences. He is director of CCCB (Barcelona’s Center for Contemporary Culture). Former president of the Ramon Trias Fargas foundation and the former director of the Institut Ramon Llull. As a journalist he has worked for numerous organizations. He was the editor of the Avui newspaper from 1993 to 1996 and head of the culture section of TV3. Between 2002 and 2004 was director general of the Catalan Radio and Television Corporation. He has contributed to a range of media companies, such as Avui, El Periódico, El País, El Temps, Catalunya Ràdio and COM ràdio. He has written a dozen novels.

Francesc de Dalmases (Director) (Barcelona, 1970). Journalist and consultant in humanitarian aid and cooperation and development. Has been president (1999-2006) of the Association of Periodicals in Catalan (APPEC); coordinator for the delegation to the Spanish state of European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages (1995-1999); coordinator for the third conference of the CONSEU (Conference of European Stateless Nations) (1999); and coordinator for the publication Europa de les Nacions (1993-1999). Has acted as a foreign expert in aid projects in such diverse locations as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mongolia, Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mexico, Guatemala, Morocco and Congo. He is a member of the Cooperation Council of the Catalan government. In 2011 he joined Barcelona’s Council’s Aid Commitee and is a board member of the Federation of Internationally Recognized Catalan Organizations.

Víctor Terradellas (Editor) (Reus, 1962). Entrepreneur and political and cultural activist. President and founder of Fundació CATmón. Editor of Catalan International View and ONGC, a magazine dedicated to political thought, solidarity, aid and international relations. Víctor has always been involved in political and social activism, both nationally and internationally. The driving force behind the Plataforma per la Sobirania [The Platform for Self-Determination] as well as being responsible for significant Catalan aid operations and international relations in such diverse locations as Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Albania, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Pakistan and Kurdistan. He is the former General Secretary of International Relations for Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya.

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