Civ 5

Catalan International View

Issue 5 • Winter 2009-10 • E 5

A European Review of the World

Dossier: Multilingualism: the Catalan experience

by Fèlix Martí, Albert Bastardas, Miquel Strubell

Josep-Maria Terricabras, Isidor Marí, Vicenç Villatoro

and Joaquim Arnau

The quest for financial and economic stability

by Jordi Galí

Human rights and universal jurisdiction

by Gerardo Pisarello and Jaume Asens

Political change in Japan

by Elisabet Cortiles

Cover Artist: Gregori Iglesias

SECTIONS: Europe · Business & Economics · Interview · Asia · Science and Technology Opinion · Green Debate · A Short Story from History · The Artist · A Poem

To Our Readers Editor:

Víctor Terradellas

vterradellas@catmon.cat Director Francesc de Dalmases

Contents

6......... Leadership in twenty-first century Europe

by Víctor Terradellas Dossier: Multilingualism

8......... The democratic option for

director@international-view.cat Art Director

designer@international-view.cat Editorial Coordinator

twenty-first century Europe

by Francesc de Dalmases

Quim Milla

10........ Challenges facing the future of linguistic diversity

Geni Flos

14........ Towards a global model of linguistic ecology

Editorial Board

18........ Discourse on language policies in stateless nations

coordinator@international-view.cat

Martí Anglada Manel Balcells Enric Canela Àngel Font Anna Grau August Gil Montserrat Guibernau Guillem López Casasnovas Manuel Manonelles Fèlix Martí Arcadi Oliveres Eva Piquer Ricard Planas Vicent Sanchis Pere Torres Carles Vilarrubí Vicenç Villatoro Chief Editors

Judit Aixalà Francesc Parés

Language Advisory Service

Nigel Balfour Júlia López i Seguí Webmaster

Marta Calvó Cover Art

Gregori Iglesias

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

Fonollar, 14 08003 Barcelona Catalonia (Europe) Tel.: + 34 93 533 42 38 Fax: + 34 93 319 22 24 www. international-view.cat Legal deposit

B-26639-2008 ISSN

2013-0716

by Fèlix Martí

by Albert Bastardas

by Miquel Strubell

by Josep-Maria Terricabras

22........ Linguistic rights: a belated convention 26........ Multilingualism and universities

by Isidor Marí

30........ The ‘normalisation’ of Catalan: a qualified success

by Vicenç Villatoro

34........ Languages and schools in Catalonia

by Joaquim Arnau

Business and Economics

40........ The quest for financial and economic stability

by Jordi Galí

Interview

46........ Montserrat Abelló

by Eva Piquer

Europe

54........ Alsace and the Franco-German question

by Marc Gafarot

58........ Germany: Land of consensus

by Martí Anglada

Asia

62........ Political change in Japan

by Elisabet Cortiles

66........ A journey through Kabul in a Toyota Corolla

by Nicolás Valle

72........ South Ossetia in Russia’s shadow

by Natàlia Boronat

Opinion

76........ Human rights and universal jurisdiction

by Gerardo Pisarello and Jaume Asens

Science and Technology

82........ The reputation of information in the digital realm

by Vicent Partal

Green Debate

86........ The green economy: reinvention or capitalism in disguise?

© Edicions de la Fundació CATmón.

All rights reserved. Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, protocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Edicions de la Fundació CATmón.

Printed in Catalonia by

A Poem

Imgesa Published every three months.

by Pere Torres

A Short Story from History

90....... The birth of modern submarine technology

by Manuel Manonelles

The Artist

92........ Gregori Iglesias 94........ The blind cow

by Joan Maragall

Catalan International View

Editorial Board Martí Anglada Foreign news editor at TV3 (Catalonia television). He has been foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Italy and Great Britain (19771984) for the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia and United States correspondent for TV3 (1987-1990). He has also been an international political commentator. His latest book is Afers no tan estrangers (Not So Foreign Affairs) published by Editorial Mina (part of Grup 62).

Manel Balcells (Ripoll, 1958). Doctor specialising in orthopaedics, traumatology and sports medicine. Holds a degree in Health Management from EADA and is a member of a number of scientific societies. In his distinguished career in the health sector he has been medical director of Granollers General Hospital (Barcelona); both director and secretary of Coordination and Strategy for the Department of Health of the Generalitat de Catalunya; councillor for the Department of Universities, Research and Information Society; and consultant for the Catalan Hospital Consortium. Since the 27th of December 2006 he has been president of the board of directors of the Private BioRegion Foundation of Catalonia.

Enric Canela (Barcelona, 1949). Holds a Chemistry degree from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB, 1972) and a PhD in Chemistry with Biochemistry as his specialisation. Lecturer at the UB since 1974, he is professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and head of the department of the same name in the Biology Faculty of the UB. He collaborates in research on intracellular communication and theoretical biochemistry. He regularly publishes in scientific journals of international renown. Between 1991 and 1995 he was vice-president of the Catalan Biology Society. He has been president of the Society for Knowledge since September 2007. Since June 2007 he has been patron of the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA) for the Spanish state.

Àngel Font i Vidal (lleida, 1965). Holds a degree in Chemical Sciences from the Universitat de Barcelona and a diploma in Business Management from EADA Business School. Began his career in an environmental engineering company and subsequently joined Intermón Oxfam where he held the post of coordinator on projects in Latin America, fund-raising and public relations and assistant to the director general. Since 2000 he has been director of the Un Sol Món (One World) Foundation financed by the Caixa de Catalunya (savings bank) where he runs projects for social housing and employment for disadvantaged groups as well as the development of microfinance in Spain, Latin America and Africa. Àngel Font is a member of the Cooperation Council of the Generalitat de Catalunya and was the first vice-president of the European Microfinance Network. He carries out teaching duties related to the management of non-profit organisations at a number of business schools.

Anna Grau Journalist and writer. From 1991 to 2005 she worked as a political journalist in Barcelona and Madrid, where she was the correspondent for the Avui newspaper and numerous programmes for TV3, Catalunya Ràdio, Ràdio4 and COM ràdio. In 2005 she left for New York, where she currently works. Author of El dia que va morir el president (the Day the President Died), Dones contra dones (Women Against Women) Endarrere aquesta gent (Reject These People) and the essay Per què parir (Why have a baby?).

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 people on trial for their demands in favour of people’s rights, as well as hearings before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. 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 organisation. 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).

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 professorhips 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.

Guillem López Casasnovas (Menorca, 1955). Holds a degree in Economics (distinction, 1978) and Law (1979) from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB). He obtained his PhD in Public Economics from the University of York (UK, 1984). He has been a lecturer at the Universitat de Barcelona, visiting scholar at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (UK), University of Sussex and at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Stanford (USA). Since June 1992 has been full professor of economics at Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), where he has been vice-rector of Economics and International Relations and dean of the School of Economics and Business Science. In 1998 he created the Economics and Health Research Centre (CRES- UPF), which he directed until recently. Co-director of the Master’s in Public Management (UPF-UAB-EAPC). In 2000 he received the Catalan Economics Society Award and in 2001 the Joan Sardà Dexeus Award.

He is also a member of the Menorcan Institute of Studies, The Catalan Royal Academy of Medicine and a distinguished member of the Economists’ Society of Catalunya. President of the International Health Economics Association and since 2005 one of the Spanish Central Bank’s six independent Council members.

Manuel Manonelles i Tarragó Political commentator specialising in international relations, human rights and democratisation processes. Currently director of the Foundation for a Culture of Peace, Barcelona. He has been special advisor to the Co-chair of the UN High Level Group for the Alliance of Civilisations, as well as advisor to the coordinator of the Secretariat of the World Forum of Civil Society Networks (Ubuntu Forum), which is a member of the International Council of the World Social 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.

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Catalan International View

Fèlix Martí Former president of the International Catholic Movement for Intellectual and Cultural Affairs (Pax Romana), from 1975 to 1984; director of Catalonia magazine (1987-2002), a publication printed in four different languages, aimed at disseminating Catalan culture; director of the UNESCO centre of Catalonia (1984 to 2002) and later its honorary president (from 2003). From 1994 to 2002 he was editor of the Catalan editions of the yearly reports of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, L’Estat del món (The State of the World) and Signes vitals (Vital Signs). He promotes the Declaration on Contributions by Religions to a Culture of Peace, signed by leaders of the great religious traditions in 1994. President of the Linguapax International Institute from 2001 to 2004 and honorary president thereafter. Wrote his memoirs Diplomàtic sense estat (Diplomat Without a State), published by Edicions Proa in 2006. Was awarded the UNESCO Human Rights Medal in 1995 and the Generalitat de Catalunya’s Creu de Sant Jordi (St. George’s Cross) in 2002.

Arcadi Oliveres (Barcelona, 1945). PhD in Economic Science, lecturer in the Department of Applied Economics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and president of the organisation Justícia i Pau ( Justice and Peace). He is also president of the Catalan Council for the Promotion of Peace, the International Peace University Foundation of Sant Cugat del Vallès, the Federation of Internationally Recognised Catalan Organisations (FOCIR) and the Easy to Read Association. He is an expert on North-South relations, international trade, external debt and defence economics and also lectures on aid and development for a number of master’s and PhD programmes.

Eva Piquer (Barcelona, 1969). Writer and journalist. Works for the Avui newspaper where she coordinates the cultural supplement and the culture section. 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).

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.

Vicent Sanchis i Llàcer (València, 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 has been editor and director of El Temps magazine; 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, content director of Grup Cultura 03 and vice-president of Òmnium Cultural. Vicent is also lecturer in the Faculty of Communication Sciences at Universitat Ramon Llull de Barcelona.

Pere Torres Biologist and environmental consultant. After some time spent on research (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), he joined the Government of Catalonia in 1991. He was in turn secretary of the Catalan Inter-university Council (1991-1993), head of the Environment Minister’s staff (1993-1995), general director of Environmental Planning (1995-2000) and secretary for Regional Planning (2000-2003).

Since 2004 he has done consultancy work in public management, sustainability and land use planning and has been a regular contributor to the International Institute for Governability and the Cerdà Institute.

Carles Vilarrubí i Carrió (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.

Vicenç Villatoro i Lamolla (Terrassa, 1957). Writer and journalist. Holds a degree in Information Sciences. Former president of the Ramon Trias Fargas Foundation.

As a journalist he has worked for numerous organisations. 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. As a writer he has written a dozen novels.

Francesc de Dalmases (Director) (Barcelona, 1970). He works as a journalist as well as being a logistician 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). He is a founder member of CAL (the Coordinator of Associations for the Catalan language). Has acted as a foreign expert in aid projects in such diverse locations as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mongolia, Kosovo, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mexico, Guatemala and Morocco.

He is patron of the Reeixida Foundation and the CATmón Foundation. President of IGMAN-Acció Solidària and director of ONGC, a magazine dedicated to political thought, solidarity, aid and international relations. He is a member of the Cooperation Council of the Catalan government.

Víctor Terradellas i Maré (Editor) (Reus, 1962). Entrepreneur and political and cultural activist. President and founder of CATmón Foundation. 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.

Catalan International View

5

To Our Readers

Leadership in twenty-first century Europe

by VĂ­ctor Terradellas

In spite of the impatience of convicted Europeans and the reticence of Euro-sceptics, Europe’s rapid evolution since the end of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first is objectively quantifiable.

The as-yet unfinished European executive project and, consequently, the lack of a common foreign policy, fail to hide the significant advances in the process of European convergence. We have been witnesses to a European Union that overcomes any East-West reticence with the inclusion of the majority of countries on the continent, while advancing towards a legal harmonisation and that has excelled in terms of monetary union, in spite of the current setbacks.

Nevertheless, contemporary Europe is still suffering excessive interference from its member states that continue to block the transfer of sovereignty to a continental level. Interestingly, it is the same resistance that is shown when it comes to proposing new areas of sovereignty for those nations that wish to have their own voice in Europe and speak in the first person.

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Catalan International View

This reflection is pertinent because it seems difficult to separate this situation of stalemate (in spite of the progress that has been made) from the clear lack of European political leadership. It should be clear that when we speak of European leadership we do not mean personalities or media hype. When we speak of European leadership we mean politicians that understand that the best service they can offer their compatriots involves constructing a common European identity with an authentic desire for understanding, cooperation and promotion on a continental scale.

Unfortunately, the traditional party system has not followed the dynamic evolution of recent times and continues to be tied to principles of services that are often incompatible with public service. A present day career politician does not see their career in terms of the benefits they can bring to society, but rather in terms of the benefits for their own party. The party in turn rewards the politician’s loyalty with promotion.

This vicious circle complicates the presence of individuals with a high intellectual capacity from the academic

To Our Readers

or business world, since it does not reward technical, human and professional quality, but rather a strict adherence to the party line.

The current European leaders are, therefore, hostages to a career which produces in them the vices of mistrust and egoism. Since they are incapable of building consensus and creating teams, they are in turn incapable of projecting these skills onto policies on a continental scale.

As in all generalisations, we only seek to illustrate situations that, fortunately, have notable exceptions. Here in Catalonia we can proudly name three Euro MPs who excel in their desire to serve the public and excel in their respective parliamentary groups in terms of their preparation and ability to take on work. In effect, Tremosa, Junqueras and Romeva represent the kind of European politician we are calling for and their work is a credit to their respective liberal and Greens-European Free Alliance groups.

Nevertheless, we would like to go still further. We want to speak of continental leadership, of statesmen (and stateswomen, naturally) and visionaries that have the capacity and the determination to head the European project and place it on an equal footing with the leaders from Asia and the Americas.

This leadership must exist, and national political structures, both public and private, would do well to promote it above their weak party servility. Europe needs to construct a new future.

We need strong leaders who are generous and with a determination to see the job through.

From this point of view, it is easier to interpret Europe’s weaknesses and also its potential, as demonstrated by the election of Herman Van Rompuy as president of the European Council and Catherine Ashton as the new foreign policy and defence chief for the European Union.

Catalan International View

7

Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

Multilingualism: The democratic option for twenty-first century Europe

by Francesc de Dalmases

The French Revolution proposed a model of a nation-state that for two centuries has spread and taken over the political map of the world. This model has brought with it significant advances when it comes to proposing democratic frameworks that themselves have not ceased to evolve. More importantly, it has given the people some inalienable rights. While we are still a long way from respecting and promoting them worldwide, they exist as an ideal reference point for the protection and promotion of the individual.

Nonetheless, it has been precisely the Jacobin, centralist nature of this model of a nation-state that has led to situations we are still experiencing today, at the start of the twenty-first century and which represent a challenge for modern societies. Among those that stand out are the perception, awareness and recognition of collective identities that do not correspond to state boundaries.

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Catalan International View

The inability of a large part of the world’s states to assume a confederal, decentralised model is countered by such brilliant exceptions such as Germany. Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go until well-established states accept their own diversity and, where necessary, respect the right to self-determination of citizens of other nationalities.

The linguistic debate should be seen as falling within this collective dimension of third-generation human rights.

We need to evolve from monolingual states (which use ‘protection’ as an excuse to marginalize other languages) to multilingual societies. Societies that are willing and able to identify, promote and legislate to protect their own language, without undervaluing or rejecting the advantages of a future where languages and their treatment become a thermometer and indicator of a society’s democratic maturity.

Dossier

In contemporary Catalonia, the evolution and manifestation of the linguistic question contains sufficient elements of interest for it to be known and scrutinised beyond our borders. Catalan was a forbidden language throughout a large part of the twentieth century.

Nevertheless, in the last thirty years it has been able to generate sufficient social connections and advances within a weakened politico-institutional framework in order for it to become a linguistic reference point that should be promoted as a workable model. In effect, half way between the challenges and the achievements, we have been able to construct a much-needed linguistic model that we feel may be of international interest in the construction of new linguistic paradigms founded on the much-needed multilingualism that should underpin modern societies.

We have been able to construct a much-needed linguistic model that we feel may be of international interest

The articles that follow explain the keys, present the achievements and more than anything outline the challenges facing multilingualism in Catalonia. At the start of the twenty-first century, they are challenges that differ little from those facing all European countries as a whole.

Catalan International View

9

Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

Challenges facing the future of linguistic diversity

by Fèlix Martí*

The protection of universal linguistic diversity needs to be strengthened through investigation in the field of sociology. We still do not possess sufficient theoretical reflections as to the existence of languages in human beings or indicators that allow us to rigorously study the comparative evolution of linguistic communities in an age of unprecedented contact that serves to make all countries multi-lingual societies. We find it difficult to answer a series of apparently simple questions such as: how many languages are currently spoken around the world? Are the deaths of minority languages inevitable? What relationship can be established between the protection of linguistic diversity, economic development and peace? What should be the focus of linguistic policies made by states and both public and private international organisations? How do new communication technologies affect languages?

In many ways languages are something of an enigma. They form the backbone of cultures, but philosophy and language sciences help us better understand the significance of human language, the shared bases of all linguistic practices as well as the irreducible aspects of every language. We also need to find a balance in our understanding of the communicative function of languages with an evaluation of their epistemological, axiological and symbolic dimensions. Classifications that seek to organise languages into hierarchies and promote disdain for their dialects need to be revised. Psycholinguists should join in the struggle against the linguistic prejudices that have taken hold despite lacking a scientific basis. The linguistic colonialism that was all too common in 10

Catalan International View

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even in democratic societies, should be studied with courage and objectivity.

Universities and research centres should regularly produce regional and universal maps of linguistic communities. The current references, such as the pioneering ‘Ethnologue’ regularly offered by the highly-respected, SIL International, based in Dallas, Texas, should form part of an array of publications from the international scientific community that can allow us to judge more precisely the number of languages in existence and their extent in both their historical territories and in their diaspora. It appears only natural that UNESCO should coordinate serious international research that not only

Dossier

takes into account information provided by states, but also that which arises from academic studies and observations by local and international nongovernmental organisations. A prime example is the 1997 Words and Worlds Report that UNESCO commissioned from a group of independent experts.

The English language version was published in 2005 (Multilingual Matters), followed by versions in French, Spanish and Russian.

The emphasis of research should be on socio-linguistic studies, which is to say an understanding of the use of languages and the evolution of linguistic practices. In the past, a lot of research prioritised the understanding of the structure of every language, the classifi-

cation of linguistic families and lexical and grammatical evolution. At present, more investigation should be carried out into the life and challenges facing linguistic communities. We already have at our disposal interesting research into languages under the threat of extinction, the death of languages, linguistic revitalisation and multilingualism. Nevertheless, there are few examples of research into the impact of state linguistic policies, the effects of a sharp growth in market economies and the effects of the revolution in communication technologies in the life of the majority of linguistic communities.

This is all probably due to the difficulties involved in studying such complex phenomena. It is also common that research into the problems of linguistic Catalan International View

Map of European languages in 1741

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Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

communities frightens governments as it lays bare practices that are largely incompatible with a respect for human rights and democratic freedom.

Psycholinguists should join in the struggle against the linguistic prejudices that have taken hold despite lacking a scientific basis The study of the problems facing linguistic communities highlights the precarious situation of the recognition of the rights of peoples. Languages that are considered minorities lack sufficient defence mechanisms, without the advanced self-determination practices of the various cultural communities within their states. The right to self-determination is still taboo in many parts of the world. States have historically been built upon the hegemony of one of their language groups and until the present time they have tried to assimilate other communities or marginalize them from a cultural and political point of view. Only relatively recently has linguistic colonialism begun to lose prestige. Fortunately, the spread of a democratic spirit has increasingly brought to light the demands of communities that aspire to put an end to domination by those groups that govern with partisan criteria from a cultural, linguistic point of view.

For these reasons, linguistic communities must mobilise themselves, not only to obtain scientific studies as to the use of their language, but also to design strategies in order to improve their situation. Firstly, they need to ensure that objective information reaches their people as to linguistic diversity in the world and their own state. Many who speak languages with a global reach live enclosed within the world of their own language and they find 12

Catalan International View

it hard to believe that other languages are suitable for scientific, technological or professional success. It is vitally important that the media help diverse linguistic communities become known, especially those which exist within the same state. The popular media ought to be encouraged to familiarise the public with linguistic diversity, to portray it in a positive light and create the desire to learn the languages of one’s neighbours and of immigrants. The conditions should be created in which linguistic communities can manage their own media, suited to their own reality and needs, without forgetting the opportunities represented by cyberspace.

The second process that ought to take place in the coming decades is a reform of the linguistic policies of states that are still ruled by criteria that are incompatible with democratic principles and the existence of public liberties. A respect for all languages and the participation of the representatives of all linguistic communities in the shaping of national and international cultural policies are necessary preconditions for security and peace, both within states and in international relations. A fundamental aspect in this process is the promotion of collaboration between groups that speak the same language while being separated by political borders. A third factor is all languages should be considered part of our human heritage. International legal instruments should thus be created in order to best protect linguistic communities, especially the weakest, whether for political, demographic or economic reasons. A prime example is the groundbreaking signing of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights in 1996 by the Pen Club, Ciemen and 61 non-governmental organisations.

The problem of excessive or exclusive responsibility resting in the hands

Dossier

of state governments in matters of linguistic policies needs to be addressed.

It should be kept in mind that there are other participants involved that take decisions affecting the lives of languages: national and multi-national companies, sub-state governments, local councils, academics, writers and artists, professional bodies, religious leaders, unions, social movements, NGOs, commercial networks and, with particular responsibilities, educators and journalists.

All these participants could generate initiatives that help to value linguistic diversity and could collaborate in the design of more advanced linguistic policies. Some international organisations have specialised in the creation of new ideas and new linguistic policies.

Programmes which are especially welcomed are those by the Foundation for Endangered Languages, Linguasphere, Terralingua, Linguapax Internacional, the aforementioned SIL and the Pen Club, writers, editors and language teachers associations, as well as university departments of languages and especially sociolinguistics. Nevertheless, as a whole these groups are too modest in the face of challenges that call for a sufficient response. Civil society needs to develop all these initiatives and networks to their fullest extent. An improved collaboration with certain intergovernmental organisations such as the European Union, the Council of Europe and the African Union and organisations of the United Nations is to be desired.

The problem of excessive or exclusive responsibility resting in the hands of state governments in matters of linguistic policies needs to be addressed According to reliable predictions the twenty-first century may well be the century of linguistic catastrophe, with the loss of 90% of the languages currently spoken. On the other hand, it may be the century that ensures the protection of our universal linguistic heritage. The challenge has undeniable ties to the environmental problems that currently preoccupy the majority of right thinking persons on all continents. All societies that share the planet must take a new orientation in order not to irreversibly destroy the essential equilibrium that forms the basis of life.

A new ecological order needs to be achieved that is simultaneously a programme that allows for the solving of problems which are unjustifiable, such as extreme poverty, the flaunting of human rights, fanaticism, and intercultural violence and intolerance. The recognition of linguistic diversity forms a part of this same project for the future.

It can be confirmed that the premature death of languages is a symptom of the profound disturbances of our time and that the fight in favour of the lives of languages is a key contribution to necessary, possible changes.

*Fèlix Martí Former president of the International Catholic Movement for Intellectual and Cultural Affairs (Pax Romana), from 1975 to 1984; director of Catalonia magazine (1987-2002), a publication printed in four different languages, aimed at disseminating Catalan culture; director of the UNESCO centre of Catalonia (1984 to 2002) and later its honorary president (from 2003). From 1994 to 2002 he was editor of the Catalan editions of the yearly reports of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, L’Estat del món (The State of the World) and Signes vitals (Vital Signs).

He promotes the Declaration on Contributions by Religions to a Culture of Peace, signed by leaders of the great religious traditions in 1994. President of the Linguapax International Institute from 2001 to 2004 and honorary president thereafter. Wrote his memoirs Diplomàtic sense estat (Diplomat Without a State), published by Edicions Proa in 2006. Was awarded the UNESCO Human Rights Medal in 1995 and the Generalitat de Catalunya’s Creu de Sant Jordi (St. George’s Cross) in 2002.

Catalan International View

13

Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

Towards a global model of linguistic ecology

by Albert Bastardas i Boada*

Introduction The current collection of processes we call ‘globalisation’ present us with a new sociolinguistic situation that needs to be thoroughly explored and understood if we wish to control its effects and intervene in its evolution. We are witnessing a significant growth in the traditional areas of communication and human interrelations, which historically have maintained a certain status quo that has allowed individuals and societies to ensure a certain functional monolingualism, at least for those groups that have been able to retain their political self-control.

There is a clear need for the attention of public bodies to be brought to bear on humanity’s contemporary linguistic needs and problems In many individuals this extension of the areas of human relations results in the key phenomenon of bilingualism or functional ‘polyglotisation’. These are a result of the linguistic necessities of the new situation and the advantages (whether real or imaginary) that individuals increasingly feel stems from 14

Catalan International View

having multiple linguistic competencies. Originally, the ability to speak more than one language and be able to use it for various interlocutors and functions was a practice largely peculiar to the elites, minoritized linguistic groups, or those with few speakers. A new factor is that this has now become an everyday occurrence for a large number of individuals from larger linguistic groups and/or those that constitute the majority language in their respective states A vitally important question arising from the current situation of an increase in relations and contact, is what we humans should do in order to understand each other, whichever linguistic group we come from. At the same time there is the question of how we should organise ourselves so we can maintain and develop the language of each group within normal limits.

Furthermore, one effect of the current process of globalisation, economic desperation and the desire for progress, is increasing levels of displacement of groups of people from one linguistic area to another. This has the potential to make a serious impact, depending on the circumstances, both for the migrants and the host societies. This is more the

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case when these groups are politically in the minority or speak languages that are not widely spoken. The phenomenon of migration can also cause the abandonment and the significant loss of linguistic diversity in those cases in which the vast majority of its speakers leave their historic home and disperse themselves throughout other societies, with few possibilities of continuing to sustain there the use of their original language.

There is a clear need, therefore, for the attention of public bodies at all levels, from the global to the local, to be brought to bear on humanity’s contem-

porary linguistic needs and problems.

It is not only a question of undervalued ‘minorities’, but rather a culturally diverse species that wishes to live in harmony and solidarity while facing up to the problematic situations that can potentially occur1.

Diversity and intercommunication: managing linguistic contact with complex ecology I believe there must be something approaching a solution to these current Catalan International View

The Rosetta Stone

1 Bastardas, A., Les polítiques de la llengua i la identitat a l’era ‘glocal’ (The Politics of Language and Identity in the ‘Glocal’ Age). Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Autonòmics, 2007.

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Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

problems if we explore the ideas from a perspective of ‘ecological complexity’, which includes the basic contributions arising from cognitive, systemic, ecological, and/or holistic perspectives. The representations that have hitherto dominated Western thought and continue to do so, subsequently spreading to many parts of the world, are based on the properties of material, physical elements.

They follow Aristotelian logic, based on the principle of identity and the exclusion of the other2. If, for example, an object occupies a space, no other object can occupy that space. Transposed to the world of human relations, as it often is, it supposes that if there is already one language in a state or group, no others can be introduced. If an individual is considered to belong to a particular ‘identity’, they cannot be considered as belonging to another. In the mental, sociocogntive world, however, this is not necessarily the case. Two languages can coexist in an individual and in human societies.

Individuals can distribute the uses of the languages they speak and can identify themselves with different categories.

principles tend to presuppose individuals that are largely monolingual and communities that are mostly homogenous and may fail to solve the problem of intercommunication.

It is important that the international organisms clearly promote human linguistic organisation based on a new ethical framework

This reservation of functions for the ‘local’ language of each group needs to be clear and broad in order that the existent polyglotisation does not lead to the abandonment of the code with the least communicative breadth. In order to achieve this, alongside the principles of polyglotisation and subsidiarity, there is the need to introduce that of ‘specific’ and ‘exclusive’ functions for ‘local’ languages, which are those that may be sidelined by larger languages. In this way there would be a solid, important nucleus of functions to be carried out exclusively and habitually in the language of the group. These exclusive functions of the group’s code should obviously not be limited to informal oral communication, but rather should encompass the maximum number of

2 Morin, Edgar. Science avec conscience. Paris: Fayard, 1982, p. 282. See also: de Bono, E., Edward de Bono’s Textbook of Wisdom. New York: Penguin , 1996, and, New Thinking for the New Millenium, by the same author. London: Penguin, 2000, as to our need to change our way of thinking.

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One of the first aspects in which it is necessary to work is that of overcoming the dichotomies that imprison us in order to promote new principles and visions for the contexts of linguistic contact. For example, in the field of traditional criteria for the organisation of plurilingualism, it will be necessary to go further, in those situations that demand it, away from more traditional principles of ‘territoriality’ or ‘personality’ in the organisation of linguistic rights. In spite of their obvious advantages, both Catalan International View

I therefore propose that investigation focuses more on the study of the application of the principle known as ‘subsidiarity’ (a term already in use in Europe) in the field of linguistic communication. We could translate this politico-administrative principle into a gloto-political one that, in a general manner, would establish the criteria that ‘a more ‘global’ language should not do anything a ‘local’ language can do’. This is to say that we would allow and promote an effective, massive understanding of other languages, while always accepting whenever possible the functional pre-eminence of the language of every historically constructed linguistic group. The languages known as ‘foreign’ would be used for exterior contacts (which they are increasingly having to do) but everyday local functions would be clearly assigned to each group’s own language.

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formal and written functions with the aim that the individual representations and valuations were not seen to be diverted towards other languages that are external to the group. The possibility of the success of this type of organisation is not only limited to those such as Ferguson’s ‘diglossia’ or other multilingual African situations, but also instances such as Luxembourg. In this small European state, languages are organised in terms of a specific functional distribution that allows for the continuous polyglotisation of individuals and the clear conservation of the group language3.

Alongside polyglotisation, subsidiarity and exclusive functions, public bodies on all levels should guard against the tendency that can easily occur of abusive usage by the largest languages. In order to achieve the success of this ecological equilibrium that we need to construct, it is fundamental that the large languages do not occupy more space than they are due, thus taking advantage of the massive polyglotisation of individuals. They should not abusively invade local spaces, thus leaving the group languages without possibilities, or much-reduced ones, in key domains that give value to languages.

This is often where the major languages tend to dominate. Some form of regulation needs to be established on a general level, based on the principle of subsidiarity and a respect for the ecological dignity of all linguistic groups that humanity has produced. Without the existence of organisms on an international scale that

can have authority over these aspects it may be very difficult to maintain an adequate, just equilibrium. The existing organisms on a global scale, and those that we must urgently create, have a high level of decisive responsibility.

It is important that international organisms clearly promote human linguistic organisation based on the perspective of subsidiarity and linguistic sustainability, within a new ethical framework. This new form of ethics should be based on an ecological vision4 of the socio-linguistic situation and not limit itself to the official, normative plan. It should involve the whole of the factors involved in the situation and its evolution, thereby ensuring public authorities act in a compensatory, stabilising manner, favourable to the linguistic groups that are proportionally weaker.

In keeping with the complexity perspective, every human individual, every element needs to be taken in context and seen dynamically as part of an ecosystem from the point of view of ecoself-causality and self-eco-organisation5. This is a viewpoint that will allow us to create the right conditions for the sustainability of every linguistic group.

More than merely seeking equality, we should seek fairness, in order to ensure a sociocultural ecosystem that favours stability and linguistic diversity. As Edward O. Wilson said, ‘soon, we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become’6, both biologically and linguistically.

3 The possibility of a non-hierarchical functional distribution of languages may also produce an interesting, pertinent solution in those cases characterised by the more or less equal presence of two (or more?) linguistic groups, where it may be difficult to agree as to which of the languages needs to benefit from the principle of subsidiarity in favour of the local language.

The non-asymmetric, functional specialisation may mean each group has to know and use the other’s language, something which could contribute to a balanced situation and the resolution of potential conflict that may result from these kinds of situations.

4 Bastardas, A., ‘Linguistic sustainability for a multilingual humanity’, Glossa.

An Ambilingual Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. II, n.

1 & 2 , 2007, ( June), pp.

180-202. Text based on the talk for the conference organised by Linguapax as part of the Universal Forum of Cultures (Barcelona, 2004).

5 Morin, E., Science avec conscience. Paris: Fayard, 1982, p. 114, 186 and 296. See also: Bastardas, A., Ecologia de les llengües.

Medi, contacte, i dinàmica sociolingüística (Ecology of Languages. Sociolinguistic Means, Contact and Dynamics). Barcelona: Proa, 1996.

6 Wilson, Edward O., Consiliency. The Unity of Knowledge. London: Abacus, 1999:309.

*Albert Bastardas i Boada Doctor in Sociolinguistics at Université Laval (Quebec, Canada) and in Catalan Philology at the Universitat de Barcelona. Currently he is Chair of the General Linguistic Department at the Universitat de Barcelona, director of CUSC- Centre Universitari de Sociolingüística i Comunicació (University Centre for Sociolinguistics and Communication) and principle investigator of the Complexity, Communication and Sociolinguistics Group. He is a member of the editorial boards of Revista de llengua i dret (Language and Law Magazine), Treballs de sociolingüística catalana (Catalan Sociolingusitic Studies), LSC – Llengua, societat i comunicació (Language, Society and Communication) and the Montreal-based Diversité Langues (Language Diversity). He is a member of the Catalan Sociolinguistic Society, the International Pragmatic Association, and the Sociolinguistic Research Committee of the International Sociological Association.

Catalan International View

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Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

Discourse on language policies in stateless nations

by Miquel Strubell*

Language issues are often mixed up with much wider ones. Take this quote from The New York Times, which tells of ‘the dislike that exists and has long existed between Catalans and other Spaniards. A Catalan editor of the Diario de Barcelona, asked to explain this feeling, said: ‘If you ask me, if the Catalans hate Spain, I should tell you no; if you ask me if the Catalans love Spain, I should tell you the same.’ 1 This was written over 90 years ago.

These days the wording would not be quite as bellicose, though some studies (e.g. Sangrador, 1999) still identify the Catalans as the least liked people in Spain, behind even the Basques.

1 Catalan Question An Issue In Spain, The New York Times, 22 December 1918.

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In such cases, language is a clear ethnic marker. Few in Spain would be happy with the word ‘ethnic’, but social psychologists speak freely of ethnolinguistic vitality in similar contexts (Bourhis et al, 1981). However, given the Spaniards’ (negative) stereotype of the Catalans, close in many ways to that of the Jews, and given that Catalan International View

some attitudes (such as recurrent calls for boycotts in some parts of Spain on products made in Catalonia) more commonly refer just to foreigners, I use the word without reserve.

Let us return to the main topic, the issue of discourses on language policies in stateless nations. The term ‘stateless nation’, widely used in Catalonia and elsewhere, is of course not strictly accurate: all nations fall within the sovereignty of a state (indeed, a border between states may cut such a nation’s territory in two). To put it another way, every group that defines itself as a ‘stateless nation’ clashes, to a greater or lesser degree, with a state that may or may not have reached a satisfactory and stable modus vivendi.

The tension is largely due to what Michael Billig has so neatly termed ‘banal nationalism’. Billig points out, ‘how elusively familiar nationalism can be: at once, nationalism is obvious but invisible because of its obviousness’ (1995: 15). Let us be clear, though, about who can be described as a ‘nationalist’ or as holding a nationalistic ideology. Billig describes ways in which, ‘social scien-

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tists have projected and naturalized nationalism. Some do both simultaneously: “our patriotism” is made to seem “natural”, and thereby invisible, while “nationalism” is seen as a property of others’. In doing so, ‘they tend to overlook the nationalist aspects of “our” common sense’ (Billig 1995: 15).

To illustrate his points, Billig primarily uses US examples. One may wonder whether Europe also displays such examples of ‘invisible’ nationalism.

Given that no one disputes the claim that nation-states are a very European invention, it should not be hard to find that it does. The exorbitant claim that ‘le français est par excellence la langue de la liberté, de la culture et de la création’ was made by none other than M. Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, France’s Minister for Culture and Communication (Délégation générale… 2004)2.

Anthony Giddens defines the nation-state as ‘a set of institutional forms of governance maintaining an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries, its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence’ (Giddens 1985: 120). Billig (1995: 20) argues that, ‘nationalism embraces ways of thinking – patterns of common-sense discourse – which make this boundedness and monopolization of violence seem natural to “us”, who inhabit the world of nation-states’.

Power brings ‘internal’ violence (also termed ‘symbolic violence’ by Bourdieu, in keeping with Billig’s reasoning). If indeed, forms of thought and perception are imposed on dominated social agents (and stateless nations easily see themselves falling into this category), they may well come to take the social order to be just. Those not conforming to these forms may then be seen - with

righteous indignation - as deviating from the norm.

By its very nature, this process is almost impossible for members of the dominant majority to perceive.

I would argue that nowhere in Europe is language policy as hotly contested as it is in Spain, with regard to Catalonia’s policy If a stateless nation is literally powerless, symbolic violence may be exercised solely against individuals. However, a process of political devolution may easily lead to heated reactions to policies. As the parent of a schoolgirl in Wales asked, for instance, ‘Why should she have to be forced to learn a useless language when the rest of the entire world is learning English!?’ (Lyon 1996: 109).

I would argue that nowhere in Europe is language policy as hotly contested as it is in Spain, with regard to Catalonia’s policy. Though there is arguably a general social consensus supporting the policy inside Catalonia, some of the Spanish media have it as their battle cry. They have given support to a number of groups aiming to save Spanish from what they see as its imminent demise in Catalonia: the conservative Madrid daily ABC was quick to highlight the formation of Coordinadora de Afectados en Defensa del Castellano (CADECA), just a few days after it was set up in the town of Salou, apparently by Spanish employees of a petrochemical complex (Colomer, 1993: 25). Another conservative Madrid paper, El Mundo, gives ample space to organisations such as Acción Cultural Miguel de Cervantes, Asociación por la Tolerancia, Profesores por el Bilingüismo and Convivencia Cívica Catalan International View

2 In his preface to the Rapport au Parlement sur l’emploi de la langue française (2004) written by the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France. He continues: ‘Parce qu’elle exprime le rayonnement de la France et de tous les pays qui l’ont en partage, elle est le vecteur de la diversité culturelle dans un monde où la pluralité des langues répond aux polyphonies de l’esprit. C’est dire l’enjeu de la politique linguistique, au coeur de nos politiques culturelles. D’autant qu’en veillant à la place du français sur notre propre territoire, nous favorisons son usage en Europe et dans le monde. C’est pourquoi la promotion de la langue française et celle du plurilinguisme sont deux causes solidaires, que le gouvernement défend avec détermination’.

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Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

Catalana, which all share the same dominant discourse regarding language (e.g. Cordero, 2008). Perhaps the most grotesque example (from a Catalan perspective) was the ABC cover page on September 12th 19933, entitled ‘Igual que Franco pero al revés: persecución del castellano en Cataluña’ (‘The same as Franco, but in reverse: the persecution of Spanish in Catalonia’). This is not a surprising attitude for this paper. In his book L’anticatalanisme del diari ABC (19161936) Jaume Medina claims that, ‘ABC’s intransigent and intolerant anti-Catalanism is by no means recent; it is inextricably attached to its very nature and has functioned regularly and consistently since its very origin [in 1905] (Medina 1995: 31.

Author’s translation). 4

The international press often tends to allow its reports to be coloured by the Madrid press, rather than by onsite data gathering, or at least by each side being invited to put its case

3 http://hemeroteca.abc. es/nav/Navigate.exe/ hemeroteca/madrid/ abc/1993/09/12/001.html 4 Original text: “L’anticatalanisme intransigent i intolerant d’ABC no és pas una cosa nova d’ara, sinó que és indestriable de la seva mateixa condició i [...] funciona amb regularitat i constància des dels seus mateixos inicis”.

5 Original text: “Nunca fue la nuestra lengua de imposición, sino de encuentro; a nadie se le obligó nunca a hablar en castellano: fueron los pueblos más diversos quienes hicieron suyos por voluntad libérrima, el idioma de Cervantes”.

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Apart from a determined effort to claim that Spanish-speaking parents have a ‘right’ to choose the language of instruction of their children during their schooling (despite a Constitutional Court ruling that Catalonia’s legislation is legitimate), they have protested (despite another Constitutional Court ruling supporting Catalan legislation) because civil service jobs in Catalonia require a sufficient command of both official languages.

Spanish is official in Catalonia (and indeed throughout Spain), regardless of the number of Spanish-speakers living there; nevertheless they claim that Spanish has to be regarded in the same way that Catalan is, as Catalonia’s own Catalan International View

language (llengua pròpia de Catalunya).

Even the King of Spain has fallen into the invisibility trap. On April 23rd 2001, he claimed in a speech that Spanish had never been imposed.

‘Ours was never a language of imposition, but of encounter; no-one was ever forced to speak in Spanish: the most diverse peoples made the language of Cervantes their own, entirely by exercising their free will. (Author’s translation)5 Significantly, press attacks tend to come at times of political uncertainty, especially when the Spanish socialist party has to negotiate a stable parliamentary majority with Catalan (or Basque) parties. Such was the case in 1993, and again in 2008, when a ‘Manifiesto por la llengua común’ was published in a Madrid paper by 18 academics, writers and journalists, some of whom had launched the so-called Foro Babel some years earlier, with the same intention. The media impact of this text has been enormous.6 Basing their reasoning on the fact that according to the Constitution, ‘all Spaniards are duty-bound to know it and have the right to use it’,7 they call on the Spanish parliament to take measures to perpetuate the supremacy of Spanish throughout Spain, a renovated discourse of the long-standing aim of one nation, one language, one culture. The term ‘nation’ also forms part of the offensive: while ‘nationalists’ are defined as those in Basque, Catalan and Galician parties, those associated with Spanish parties (chiefly, PSOE and PP) are portrayed as ‘non-nationalist’ or even ‘constitutionalist’ parties.8 Paradoxically, both the PSOE and the PP cut references to ‘nation’ and ‘national’ from the 2005 draft Catalan statute of autonomy (adopted in the Catalan parliament by a 89% vote in favour), during its passage

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through the Spanish Cortes (Parliament) - almost at the same time as the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a Recommendation on the use of the concept of ‘nation’, calling for tolerance and understanding. Only 2 out of 10 references were retained in the Preamble, and 3 out of 11 in the articles – of which two are the constitutional word ‘nationality’.

What also concerns me is that the international press often tends to allow its reports to be coloured by the Madrid press, rather than by onsite data gathering, or at least by each side being invited to put its case. We read of ‘cultural separatism’, of Spanish losing out, and of ‘centrifugal’ forces, for instance, in a recent Financial Times report:

languages in schools and other areas of public life, particularly in Catalonia. Such policies inevitably implemented at the expense of Castilian, the Spanish language - spark occasional heated protests from Spanish nationalists. Language, though, is only the most visible sign of the centrifugal forces at work in modern Spain’ 9.

Having said all this, the anti-Catalan discourse has long since moved beyond the primitive discourse of the Franco regime, which devised slogans such as ‘No ladres como un perro!’, ‘Habla la lengua del imperio!’ and ‘Habla cristiano!’ (‘Don’t bark like a dog’, ‘Speak the language of the Empire’, ‘Speak Christian’).

6 A Google search for “manifiesto por la lengua común” yields 106,000 web pages!

7 Literally, “Todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla”.

8 PSOE stands for Partido Socialista Obrero Español, that is, Spanish Socialist workers’ Party; and PP stands for Partido Popular, the main Spanish conservative party.

9 Victor Mallet, ‘Flimsier footings’, Financial Times, August 19th 2009.

‘Cultural separatism can be seen in the promotion of local *Miquel Strubell British-born, received most of his education in England, including an Hons B.A. in Psychology and Physiology and an M.Sc. in Psychology of Education. He worked for the Catalan government for 19 years in the Catalan language promotion unit, and has worked as a lecturer at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya for the past ten years, specialising in European language policies, minority language communities and sociolinguistics. He has been on a number of missions for the OSCE Higher Commissioner for National Minorities and the Council of Europe.

Bibliography Billig, Michael. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.

Bourhis, Richard Y.; Howard Giles & Doreen Rosenthal (1981). Notes on the construction of a subjective vitality questionnaire for ethnolinguistic groups. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 2:145–155.

Colomer, V. (1993). ‘Los defensores del uso del castellano en las aulas de Cataluña crean una asociación’, ABC, 15th November, p. 25. http://hemeroteca.abc.es/nav/ Navigate.exe/hemeroteca/madrid/abc/1993/11/15/025. html

Cordero, Dani et al. (2008). ‘Asociaciones que defienden el castellano en Cataluña, Galicia y País Vasco deciden aliarse’, El Mundo, 23rd March. http://www.elmundo.es/ papel/2008/03/23/espana/2351368.html

Council of Europe (2006). Recommendation 1735 (2006). Text adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on 26th January 2006 (7th Sitting),

on the concept of ‘nation’. http://assembly.coe.int/main. asp?Link=/documents/adoptedtext/ta06/erec1735.htm Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France (2004). Rapport au Parlement sur l’emploi de la langue française. http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/ dglf/rapport/2004/Rapport_au_parlement_2004.pdf

Giddens, Anthony (1985). A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Vol. 2. The Nation State and Violence. Cambridge: Polity.

Lyon, Jean (1996). Becoming bilingual: language acquisition in a bilingual community. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Mallet, Victor (2009). ‘Flimsier footings’, Financial Times, 19th August. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ e8f7e700-8c57-11de-b14f-00144feabdc0.html Medina, Jaume (1995). L’anticatalanisme del diari ABC (1916-1936). Barcelona: L’Abadia de Montserrat.

Sangrador, J. L. (1999). Identidades, actitudes y estereotipos en la España de las autonomías. Madrid: CIS.

Catalan International View

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Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

Linguistic rights: a belated convention

by Josep-Maria Terricabras*

Demands for linguistic rights Since 1948, there have been numerous official, institutional documents on human rights and civil and political rights on an international scale. These documents have condemned national, ethnic, religious and linguistic discrimination, with all manner of documents calling for the protection of the linguistic rights of national minorities. There have also been organisations and private groups that have declared themselves committed to the defence of languages and linguistic rights. I feel it is only fair to mention, with some pride, the signing of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights, in Barcelona on the 6th of June 1996, more than thirteen years ago. The Declaration was an initiative by PEN International’s Translations and Linguistic Rights Committee and Ciemen (EscarrÊ International Centre for Eth22

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nic Minorities and Nations), and counted on the moral and technical support of UNESCO. At the Barcelona World Conference, 61 NGOs, 41 PEN centres and 40 experts in linguistic rights from all over the world succeeded in producing a unanimously agreed text. Since then it has been translated into dozens of languages and adopted by many other organisations and institutions who have made it their own. Without doubt it is the most complete and consensual text on linguistic rights to date.

The Follow-up Committee of the Declaration works tirelessly to ensure that linguistic rights are recognised as a fundamental component of human rights. More recently it made representations to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, taking advantage of the fact that the UN declared 2008 the International Year of Languages.

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In keeping with the new ecological concerns resulting from a globalised world, we all have the cultural responsibility and moral duty to defend linguistic rights all over the world. If we work for peace, dialogue and understanding between humans, we need to understand that linguistic rights underpin all our rights. Without language we would not be the humans we are now.

The value of language Our world is a real cluster of languages. Nevertheless, not everyone is happy with the situation, especially when they belong to a language that is demographically widespread. Fortunately, there are many people and institutions that defend linguistic pluralism and who work to preserve the richness of this diversity. So we can affirm both at

once: that linguistic pluralism is a fact, something which is plain and undeniable, but that, instead of being seen as a great opportunity to construct strong, rich cultures, it is often simply seen as a more or less interesting cultural result, originating from geographical and political divisions that have presumably now been overcome. A misguided globalizing instinct brings many people to believe that linguistic unity would be better than diversity. It involves people thinking in terms of the practical management of public life, and not in terms of a true evaluation of what is good and valuable.

Why does this happen? Why are languages relegated to the category of political weapons and not awarded their true value? I would like to propose a hypothesis as to why this is the case. I am afraid that nowadays there Catalan International View

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Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

The United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2008 the International Year of Languages, following a UNESCO resolution.

is a widespread belief that language is only a means to an end, an instrument by which humans understand one another. This is very much the case, but it is not the whole story. If languages were only a means to make ourselves understood, then attempts to make one language superior to another would be justified. While many languages would disappear, the mere existence of a language known by all would sufficiently guarantee that we humans understood each other. The idea that language is only an instrument of communication is the idea behind the lack of respect for linguistic diversity. If we only needed to communicate with others, we would not need many languages, but rather just one, known to all.

Linguistic pluralism is a great opportunity to construct strong, rich cultures

However, language is more than a scale, more than an instrument, more than a means to pass messages from one person to another. Language is not like a telephone that, if it breaks, can be replaced by other methods, such as letters, email or carrier pigeons. Language is not simply a means but rather a medi24

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um (French, among others, also distinguishes between moyen and milieu), it is not simply an instrument, but rather an atmosphere, a medium in which we grow, learn, love, hate, suffer, pray, think, make mistakes and, ultimately die. Language embraces and produces our ways of life. For this reason, languages cannot be simply replaced by another, in the same way that no form of life can be innocuously replaced by another.

Every language reflects our vision of the world, perhaps even a Weltanschauung. Every language produces different ways of interpreting and understanding not only what its speakers say but also what they do, how they react, what feelings they have. Every language is a world, a real world. It is clear that there are connections between these worlds (which is why we translate texts and books, for example), but we should not forget that translating is an art, which means there are no automatic bridges between languages (translators appreciate more than anyone how difficult it is to translate poetry correctly).

It is surprising that we need to repeat it, but we will do so if necessary: all languages spoken by humans are human languages. All of them should be equally promoted and protected. Lin-

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guistic diversity is the best expression of human diversity. Those that wish to make a contribution to a better understanding between humans should not be so naive in thinking that we would be better off if everyone spoke the same language. Well-being depends on the capacity to extend and develop ones thoughts, feelings and experiences. This is what humans do when they exploit all the possibilities offered by the atmosphere of their mother tongue. Obviously, this is not to deny the fact that some people dominate two different languages with an extremely high level of competence. Nonetheless, even in such cases, the key question is: in what language do you write your personal diary, in what language do you pray to your god and in what language do you write a love poem?

Individual and collective linguistic rights Some people often insist on something strange and surprising: that rights are simply individual, that there are no collective rights. This is not the view taken by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, when it speaks of ‘everyone, as a member of society’ (article 22). Certainly, when something is only acknowledged in one person it is not a right that is being recognised, but a privilege. We have the rights established in 1948 precisely because we are human. The same occurs with children, political prisoners, the disabled,

women, believers and professionals of all kinds. Rights are always recognised in one group and then, obviously applied to all members of the group. For this reason, and contrary to what people often think, the justification for a right is always collective, which is why rights are collective, even while the beneficiaries are clearly each and every one of the collective.

All speakers have the right to have their language respected and protected

The same is true with linguistic rights. All speakers have the right to have their language respected and protected. They have the right to use it, teach it, spread it. We should speak up in favour of all languages, even though we do not speak them all. They are our wealth. In part we are human for the very reason that we speak. We are the people we are thanks to the way in which we speak. The defence of languages should be the defence of human identity and dignity. In fact, we should not forget the profound reason behind why we are capable of defending a language: because it has defended us first.

For this reason, at the earliest opportunity we ought to move towards an International Convention that recognises linguistic rights as an essential part of human rights.

*Josep-Maria Terricabras Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Girona.

Chair of the Translations and Linguistic Rights Committee of International PEN

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Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

Multilingualism and universities: an opportunity or a threat?

by Isidor MarĂ­*

1. Have we not always been multilingual?

1 http://www.vives.org/. To consult statistics as to the use of languages in Catalan universities: http://www. llengua.info/continguts. php?seccio=3.6. For the use of languages in doctoral theses, statistics can be found at: http://www. tesisenxarxa.net/index.html (all URLs in this article were current as of October 2009).

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Universities around the world have always been multilingual to some degree since their object of study, universal knowledge, is multilingual by its very nature. Logically, special attention has been paid to those languages most used internationally in the production and diffusion of specialised knowledge (according to the area of knowledge involved) and the languages in the immediate surroundings, especially the first languages of the society in which they are found, and also the languages most used by the society in its economic and cultural relations of an international nature.

It is therefore understandable that the democratisation of the universities during the political transition that took place following the death of Franco brought with it a strong desire to recover a normal usage of Catalan, in teaching and research as well as every area of the universities’ communications and operations. Throughout the 1980s, virtually all the universities in the Catalan-speaking region introduced statutes that named Catalan as the official language of the institution. They also established services charged with promoting a knowledge of Catalan, its use in academic and administrative activities and the drawing up of documents and linguistic criteria relating to specialised vocabulary in Catalan.

In the case of Catalonia, it is worth noting that multilingualism in the universities (as in the rest of society) has been profoundly affected over long historical periods by the uniforming policies of the Spanish state. The use of Catalan was severely restricted during the 1960-1970 period, precisely when large parts of the population were starting to gain access to tertiary education.

In a few short years the linguistic plans of the universities and the technical services charged with their execution soon developed a high level of skill.

They in turn gained in prestige, making them models to be followed by linguistic services involved in recovering the knowledge and use of Catalan in other sectors of society. The coordination between these linguistic services was rein-

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forced with the creation of Xarxa Vives1, in 1994. It sought to group together universities in the Catalan-speaking region and facilitate a concerted effort in many fields of university activity.

At the end of the twentieth century, the multilingual strategies of the universities in the Catalan-speaking region were centred on the restoration of Catalan as a university language, without any special changes in the academic use of foreign languages2.

2. A turning point A new emphasis in university multilingualism emerged from the growing mobility of university students brought about after 1987 under the ERASMUS programme and particularly as a result of the development of the objectives of the Bologna Declaration (1999), in which all the countries of the EU committed themselves to constructing a Higher Education Space towards 2010.

At present, the EU’s university policies are mainly focused on European competitivity in the global knowledge economy, in teaching as well as research and development3. By the same token, European multilingual policies emphasise the desire to overcome the problems of linguistic diversity, opting for integration in the single European market, with the aim of promoting European competitiveness in the global context.

The contribution of universities to the EU’s other strategies of multilingualism is wide and varied4. Nonetheless, in the current context of priorities, university policies tend to see multilingualism as more than anything a factor that contributes to strategic objectives of the universities, the university system and

the country in general. The role of the universities in the construction of an equitable, sustainable multilingualism, one that is in society’s general interests, is clearly relegated to second place.

3. Multilingualism in teaching In terms of teaching, the great importance that is currently placed on indicators of the international mobility of university students5 has a decisive influence on the selection of the languages of instruction. The design of new study plans (especially degree courses) represented a good opportunity for clearly setting the linguistic entry and exit standards of future professionals, both in order to guarantee their abilities in the most usual languages in their immediate surroundings (Catalan and Spanish) and to provide them with a varied multilingual ability that aids their access to the international job market and universal knowledge itself6. The new push for multilingualism at the university level was seen as a suitable occasion for reactivating and systematising the learning of all languages, in the hope of achieving this.

Nonetheless, at present it is not clear whether university multilingualism is evolving in this way. Rather than opting for a systematic design of the acquisition and accreditation of diverse linguistic competencies, some universities have chosen to mainly focus on the learning of English and in its use as the language of instruction7, to the detriment of other neighbouring languages of undeniable economic and cultural interest, such as French or Italian. There is no doubt that a knowledge of English is useful for university students, but a restriction on other languages is a contradiction, especially now that Catalan International View

2 Bulletin no. 4 of Cercle XXI (2006), entitled El català a la universitat (Catalan in the Universities) offers a thorough overview of the topic under discussion: http://www. cercle21.cat/butlleti/04/ index.html.

3 Council of Europe resolution of 23rd of November 2007 on the modernisation of universities (http://www. highereducationmanagement.eu/attachments/155_ st16096-re01.en07.pdf is very explicit in this regard.

4 See, for example, the numerous references to universities in the Commission’s first communiqué (2005), Una nova estratègia marc per al multilingüisme (A New Strategy Framework for Multilingualism) (http://ec.europa.eu/ education/policies/lang/ doc/com596_en.pdf ).

5 See, for example the recent report Higher Education in Europe 2009: Developments in the Bologna Process (EACEA-Eurydice, 2009): http://ec.europa.eu/ education/policies/lang/ doc/com596_en.pdf.

6 Some research supports this, such as the article by Marta Estella, M. Jesús Ferrés and Mireia Calm, Espai europeu d’educació superior: llengua catalana i multilingüisme (European Higher Education Space: Catalan Language and Multilingualism). In Llengua i ús, (Language and Use) no. 33 (p. 12-20).

Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2005. V. http:// www6.gencat.cat/llengcat/ liu/33_525.pdf.

7 In this case, often without paying much attention to the principles that guarantee the success of the experiences of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL, or Aprenentatge Integrat de Contingut i Llengua Estrangera / AICLE, in Catalan).

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both the United Kingdom and the rest of the European Union insist in their multilingual policies that ‘English is not enough’!

8 See Intercat, where these measures are discussed: http://www.intercat.cat/.

9 This is also the question dealt with in the article by M. Jesús Ferrés El procés de Bolonya, una oportunitat o un obstacle per a la llengua catalana?(The Bologna Process, an Opportunity or an Obstacle to the Catalan Language?) In Llengua i Ús (Language and Use), no. 42 (p. 2-12). Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2008. We can observe the evolution of this point of view some years after that mentioned in note 5, in which the author of this article also participated.

10 The appropriate training of language teachers is essential if we wish to progress in the achievement of general multilingualism suggested by the Barcelona objectives: that all residents speak two languages apart from their personal language. It is also worth noting that the indicator of linguistic competence (see Document COM(2005) p356 to end) has until now not taken into account competence in Catalan when measuring the achievement of this objective (a contradiction in the Barcelona objectives, where Catalan is its official language). It remains to be seen whether the indicators that are being drawn up by the SurveyLang consortium (http://www. surveylang.org/) will resolve this issue.

11 Doctoral theses presented in Catalan remains around 25%, while many academic journals are published in Catalan (for example the RACO website: http://www.raco. cat/).

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Not all the effects of university mobility are positive: the presence of ERASMUS students in the lecture theatres of our universities appears to favour the replacement of Catalan as the language of instruction with Spanish and English. In order to counter the withdrawal of Catalan, the universities in the Catalan-speaking region have expended significant effort in providing information and initial, intensive training for their new, mobile students8. A particularly effective measure for stabilising the use of Catalan and promoting receptive multilingualism has been the specification of the main language of instruction of the courses on offer and of the languages allowed receptively by the teaching staff. Such a transparent approach provides linguistic security to both students and lecturers and avoids embarrassing linguistic debates such as shown in the film L’auberge espagnole [English title: Euro Pudding] Another tendency that has been noted is the propensity of postgraduate programmes to exclusively adopt Spanish or English as more widely-spoken languages of instruction, to the detriment of Catalan, which is seen solely as added value, rather than a social commitment.

4. The need for systematic multilingual strategies All these factors highlight the need for a more global, systematic and well thought out multilingual strategy for each university and the university system of the Catalan language area in general. What is more, multilingualism, which should be a stimulating element Catalan International View

that provides new reasons for the acquisition and use of all languages, including Catalan, could end up being a threat to the position our language has gained with difficulty in recent decades9.

The systematic consideration of university strategies of multilingualism would not only allow us to overcome these doubts as to multilingual competencies and the language of instruction, they would also allow us to make a new and improved design of the professional profiles directly related to languages, as is the case of all teachers, especially language teachers10, translators, cultural mediators, sociolinguists and specialists in linguistic engineering.

5. Research and multilingualism If we focus on research, the universities’ other major field of activity, we can highlight the fact that Catalan has achieved a significant presence11. Nevertheless, English is gaining ground as an international lingua franca. We can also observe how a more systematic, diversified and considered examination of the multilingual strategies is lacking.

Instead, they appear to adopt a rather stereotypical view that is not adapted to universities in the Catalan-speaking region.

The totally justified and legitimate objective of giving research carried out in our universities the widest international exposure is not incompatible with the contribution university research ought to make to the priorities and necessities of the society in its immediate surroundings. Ultimately, the host society makes such research possible and finances a large part of the university’s activities. This double commitment with the progress of universal knowledge and the development of the

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host society not only affects priorities for the selection of what to investigate, it also has linguistic implications. The international publication of the research results in the lingua franca common to each field of research should not restrict local publication and the social exposure of said research in Catalan. The marginalisation of a language from specialised knowledge is a factor in its loss of prestige and the risk of being replaced by another language.

Lately, academic voices have been heard that question the tendency of those that evaluate research to mechanically generalise evaluative systems typical of experimental sciences to all fields of research. This tendency has negative effects, both for the recognition of the value of much research carried out in the human and social sciences as well as for the continued use of languages other than English. There have been cases in which very valuable research on a particular cultural area, published in the language relating to this particular cultural tradition by recognised publishers and excellent peer-reviewed journals, have failed to be taken into consideration by the mere fact that they are not in English and therefore do not appear in Anglo-Saxon bibliometric indices.

This prejudice goes against the scientific rigour of university research and is at odds with the intrinsically multilingual nature of universal knowledge.

It does not exclusively affect Catalan, although it is a decisive factor. It could have devastating effects in terms of the

consolidation of an equitable, sustainable multilingualism on a global scale: there are studies12 that demonstrate that the use of a variety of languages in the process of research contributes to richer, more precise results.

Finally I should like to point out the considerable importance of research into sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic questions associated with multilingualism in the Catalan-speaking region13.We should hope that the project announced by the Catalan government14 to group these investigations into a centre of reference will help to strengthen and systematise the existing initiatives.

12 Those by Professor Lorenza Mondada, for example (http://icar.univlyon2.fr/membres/lorenza/ english/publications.htm).

13 This can be confirmed by reference to the periodic reports on research published by the Institute of Catalan Studies: http:// www.iec.cat/gc/ViewPage. action?siteNodeId=323&la nguageId=1&contentId=-1 14 http://www.gencat.cat/ diue/noticies/31257.html.

The publication of the research results in the lingua franca common to each field of research should not restrict the local publication and social exposure of said research in Catalan I hope more than anything that multilingualism at the university level remains an opportunity for students and for society as a whole, and not a threat to Catalan and sustainable linguistic diversity. We need to make advances in the elaboration of systematic multilingual strategies such as those proposed by some European university networks and those carried out by some leading universities15.

15 The research conducted

by Ian Tudor, Benchmarks for a Higher Education Language Policy (http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~enlu/ downloads/TF1_report_final.rtf ) and the linguistic policy of the Copenhagen Business School (http:// uk.cbs.dk/about_cbs/ menu/language_policy) are key works in this field.

*Isidor Marí (Eivissa, 1949). He directed the Department of Catalan Language and Literature at the Universitat de les Illes Balears. He was sub-director of Linguistic Policies at the Generalitat de Catalunya and is currently vice-president of the Philological Section of the Catalan Institute of Studies and director of the Chair of Multilingualism at Linguamón-UOC. His published works include Un horitzó per a la llengua catalana (A Horizon for the Catalan Lanuguage, 1992), Plurilingüisme europeu i llengua catalana (European Plurilingualism and the Catalan Language, 1996) and Mundialització, interculturalitat i multilingüisme (Globalisation, Interculturality and Multilingualism, 2006).

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Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

The ‘normalisation’ of Catalan: a qualified success

by Vicenç Villatoro*

Viewed from a historical standpoint, the policy known as ‘linguistic normalisation’ carried out by Catalan institutions over the last thirty years can be considered a success. It has achieved many of the goals that were established and has partially resolved some of the more pressing problems that threatened the survival and the vitality of the Catalan language. On balance, however, the last thirty years of linguistic policies in favour of Catalan have left a bittersweet taste. While some problems that were correctly identified were solved, other new ones emerged. These problems did not form part of the original diagnosis or else they weakened aspects that were hitherto considered solid and healthy. The Catalan experience, while being a successful one, helps to highlight the difficulties of carrying out linguistic policies. Partly this is because they occur in an ambiguous political framework, where different institutions conduct contradictory linguistic policies.

While Catalan institutions design policies that promote Catalan, the constitutional Spanish framework clearly prioritises the languages present in the state, to the benefit of Spanish. According to the constitution, a knowledge of Spanish is an obligation for all citizens. The other official state languages can be protected and promoted, but they are relegated to a complimentary or subsidiary role.

From the outset, the Catalan case presents us with a relatively exceptional diagnosis, indicating the priorities of its linguistic policies. Many European languages threatened by official languages present a common problem: they are understood by a significant proportion of the population, but they lack social prestige. They are considered to be domestic languages by their speakers and 30

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therefore of less value than the official state language. This is the case in Italy with its so-called dialects, or France with the other languages that have come to be thought of as patois in the minds of the speakers themselves. These are languages to use at home, rural and antiquated, only to be used for unimportant activities. This diagnosis held true for Catalan some thirty years ago in the majority of

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the territory, in Northern Catalonia in particular, the majority of the Balearic Islands and in the Valencian Country.

However, in the Principality of Catalonia the situation was the reverse, leading to different linguistic policies being applied and the varying degrees of success and failure. In the Principality of Catalonia, Catalan had considerable cultural prestige some thirty years ago, having survived the repression of the Franco era with a unique capacity to resist. Catalan was a language that was very common in middle-class urban circles and not simply a rural patois.

Catalan had considerable cultural prestige some thirty years ago, having survived the repression of the Franco era with a unique capacity to resist Catalan’s problem in the Principality of Catalonia was the opposite of Galician, for example, or the so-called Italian dialects and Catalan itself in the Balearics or in Roussillon. In all these cases the language was sufficiently well known but failed to find social recognition. In the case of Catalan in Catalonia, Catalan International View

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Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

while it had prestige, there were wide sectors of society that had no knowledge of it. In the 50s and 60s the country underwent an enormous demographic transformation, with the arrival of a vast number of migrants from Spanishspeaking parts of Spain. When the first

Linguistic normalisation meant self-respect for those that spoke the language and social prestige for the language itself linguistic normalisation policies were designed, there was no urgency in giving prestige to the language, but rather to ensure a large part, or an immense majority of the population knew how to speak it, promoting it in order that it reached the large sections of the population that had no contact with Catalan.

Linguistic normalisation ensured that everyone understood Catalan. This was not the case in Galicia and the Balearics where everyone already knew the local language. Linguistic normalisation there meant self-respect for those that spoke the language and social prestige for the language itself.

Catalan linguistic normalisation currently demands new instruments to face new problems

From this diagnosis of the situation, which was basically correct in its analysis, the resulting treatment can also be considered correct. What were to be the major instruments of the language’s diffusion, the levers with which to increase people’s knowledge of it? On one hand, there was the school system, which had to ensure (and has achieved) that all school-leavers in Catalonia completed 32

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their compulsory schooling knowing Catalan alongside Spanish. In the short and long term, the existence of large sectors of the population with no knowledge of the language, unable to understand and use it, has been eliminated by such means. On the other hand, the media has played a part, in particular radio and television, with popular, competitive programming which is able to enter virtually every household. With an enormous economic and professional effort, the Catalan institutions promoted public radio and television in Catalan ensuring it managed to win the ratings war in Catalonia, thereby achieving a dual objective: sectors that were impermeable to other public uses of Catalan had some contact with the language and the Catalan audience themselves realised that their language was suitable for all social contexts. It is worth keeping in mind that the new developments that occurred in the world while Franco kept Catalan restricted to the domestic ambit meant that many new cultural phenomenon did not have a Catalan tradition, while others had lost it. Imagine the audience’s surprise at hearing the first Western dubbed into Catalan, when both the cowboys and the Indians spoke Catalan. Something previously unheard of. Another instance is how the old formulas needed to be rethought in order to provide radio commentaries of football matches.

Thanks to these two powerful instruments, the objective of the diffusion and the widening of a knowledge of Catalan was achieved with notable success. At present the levels of understanding of the language are high, above ninety percent in terms of comprehension. Nevertheless, this statistic highlights an insufficiency in the initial diagnosis of Catalan’s problems. Once the most pressing problem was solved,

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that of understanding, the Catalan institutions realised almost by surprise that an increase in the understanding of Catalan did not automatically lead to a proportional increase in its social use.

Knowing how to speak Catalan did not bring with it a desire or the necessity to speak it. What is more, it led to a demobilisation of Catalan speakers, who felt they were absolved of any need for linguistic militancy thanks to the institutional commitment to the language.

The arrival of a new wave of immigrants in this context once again produced sectors of adults who had no knowledge of Catalan and who were not directly conscious of the advantages of speaking it or indeed saw any need to do so.

As for the language’s prestige, almost taken for granted in the initial analysis, recent years have seen a transformation and fragmentation. At the time of the ending of the Franco era and the implementation of linguistic normalisation policies, someone defined Catalan culture as a large head on a small body.

A high culture of prestige, especially in a literary sense, but one without populist, mass culture. This situation was to change over the years. A medium-sized market of cultural productions in Catalan was created and diffused to a broad audience. However, it did so by relying on the prestige of high culture, revealing the weakness of the very industrial fabric of culture and how Catalan did not quite manage to be associated with an idea of modernity or innovation in some areas. There is no single source of

prestige even from the cultural perspective. Catalan advances in some areas, while retreating in others. A similar thing happens with social prestige: it increases in some areas (it is clear to all that a knowledge of Catalan can help one to find work or promotion), while other areas appear to be almost impervious to its influence.

Does this mean to say the initial diagnosis was incorrect and that the therapies and instruments that were chosen were the wrong ones? Absolutely not.

If these policies had not been carried out the problem of a widespread lack of knowledge of Catalan (on the increase with new immigration) would have produced devastating effects for the future of the language as the tool of a living culture. Without the aid of the school system and the media, Catalan would have been relegated to being the language of half the country, if that. However, with the passage of time the diagnosis, while being confirmed, has shown itself to be insufficient. New problems have emerged along with questions that were thought to have been answered but have been found to still need a reply. Without giving up the tools that have been so useful, Catalan linguistic normalisation currently demands new instruments for new problems. As a general rule there is no one, magic formula for ensuring the survival of languages. What is needed is a range of flexible, changing, instruments in order to confront problems that can be equally diverse and contradictory.

*Vicenç Villatoro i Lamolla (Terrassa, 1957). Writer and journalist. Holds a degree in Information Sciences. Former president of the Ramon Trias Fargas Foundation. As a journalist he has worked for numerous organisations.

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. As a writer he has written a dozen novels.

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Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

Languages and schools in Catalonia

by Joaquim Arnau*

Catalonia is a country with two official languages (Catalan and Spanish) and with two dominant language groups: Catalan speakers (31.6% of the population have Catalan as their primary family language) and Spanish speakers (55% have Spanish as their primary family language). The former are speakers of a minoritized language and the latter of a dominant language. Some 3.8% are bilingual (Catalan-Spanish), and some 9.7% are speakers of other languages. In the 2001-2008 period Catalonia’s population witnessed one of the greatest growths in its history (16.7%) as a consequence of immigration from abroad. Most of the immigrants are from the Third World, many of whom come from South America and are therefore Spanish speakers (Generalitat de Catalunya, 2009).

In 1978 Catalan was incorporated into the education system. Until then, it had been essentially banned in the public sphere for over 250 years, with the school system operating entirely in Spanish. The consequences for the generations that had passed through the school system during those years were evident: the Catalan-speakers were the only bilingual individuals, in spite of not having competence in writing in their own language; the majority of Spanish-speakers continued to be monolingual due to not having received any instruction in Catalan and from having few opportunities to use it in the social realm. Their language dominated and still dominates to this day, thus decreasing opportunities for learning Catalan.

From 1978 onwards an educational policy that seeks consensus was developed that had as its most important principles the following points: • Not creating separate schools or classrooms for Catalan speakers and Spanish speakers.

• The establishment of an initial, minimum period of time for the study of languages (4 hours), leaving the school community to decide as to the greater or lesser presence 34

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of each language in the curriculum, according to the human resources available and the decisions of parents and teachers.

• The establishment of early total immersion programmes in institutions with a minimum of 75% Spanish-speakers. There was a belief in the beneficial effects of this model created in Canada. It is a system of additional bilingualism, providing the maximum competence in the L2 without a loss of competency in the L1.

• To stimulate the presence of Catalan in the curriculum, taking into account the fewer chances open to Spanish speakers to use Catalan in the social sphere.

• To raise awareness in the educational community, particularly among parents of Spanish speakers, in order that they believe in the benefits of the new educational proposals, particularly the immersion model.

• To develop resources and programmes in order to train teachers who are competent in teaching Catalan.

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Immersion programmes: expectations and results

rooted in the Catalan cultural reality (Arenas and Muset, 2007).

The policy brought about a complete change in the educational model. While in 1978 only 3% of primary schools were considered to be of ‘maximum Catalanisation’ (schools where Catalan was the main language of instruction), by 1993, 88.8% of schools were of this type.

The results obtained have lived up to the predictions that were made. Two studies conducted on a wide sample of school pupils (Ribes, 1993; Serra, 1997) confirmed the expected results.

In 1983 the first Catalan immersion programme was started in Santa Coloma de Gramanet, a city in Barcelona’s industrial belt where more than 90% of the population is Spanish-speaking.

Ten years later, in 1993, more than two hundred thousand pupils were enrolled in the programme (Artigal, 1995).

In contrast to immersion programmes operated in Canada and other places, the immersion programme in Catalonia is not an enrichment programme that is offered to pupils as one option among many. It is a model that was planned and developed by the educational administration based on evidence that other school models directed at Spanish speakers are not as effective as the immersion model (Alsina et al.

1983; Arnau, 1985).

It is the most important educational experience of its kind in the world, taking into account the number of pupils involved and the national objectives that are proposed: ensuring that the entire school population of Spanish-speaking origin are fluent in the two official languages, Catalan and Spanish, in a school

In contrast to immersion programmes operated in Canada and other places, the immersion programme in Catalonia has been planned and developed by the educational administration When compared with pupils of the same linguistic group who attended a programme where Spanish predominated, Spanish-speakers that participated in the immersion programme had a much better written and spoken competence in Catalan in all subjects (from the second to the fifth year at primary level). The results as to their competence in Spanish show that the participants in the immersion programme had a similar level of competence in their language that was on a par with pupils of their linguistic group that had not followed the programme. The study by Ribes (1993, ob. cit.) further demonstrated that the pupils who were less cognitively competent were those that made the best progress. The explanation is that immersion is a method that offers many opportunities for the natural acquisition of a language, far removed from those that propose teaching that is excessively focussed on its formal aspects.

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Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience

These same evaluations indicated that the Spanish-speaking pupils had a favourable ‘attitude’ to Catalan and also Spanish, whichever programme was followed.

A study as to the degree in which the programme promoted the ‘spontaneous usage’ of the language (Vila, 1998), showed that both Spanish and Catalan speaking students systematically addressed the teachers in Catalan both inside and outside the classroom. In contrast, the Spanish-speaking pupils’ use of Catalan with their classmates (Catalan and Spanish speakers) was very rare, occurring only in very ritualised activities, such as a class debate. The Catalan speakers persisted in maintaining this language, not only with the teacher, but also with a certain number of classmates.

The study concluded that, in relation to the community’s predominant uses, the programme provided opportunities to practice Catalan with the teachers and sometimes with their classmates. If this had not occurred at school, the pupils of these contexts would have missed all possibility of using Catalan.

The specific, long-term effects of the programme on language competency, usage and people’s attitudes towards the languages are unknown. A small-scale study of this kind (Morera and Teberosky, 1998) was conducted on third-year secondary school pupils from a working-class background who had followed a primary immersion programme. They were attending a school located on the outskirts of Barcelona where their schooling was predominantly in Catalan. The study required the pupils to write two essays based on their experiences in reading. The rubric for the tasks was in Catalan and the researcher always used this language with the pupils, but without a specific requirement that the pupils wrote in Catalan. Some 52% of the pupils wrote 36

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the essay in Spanish and some 48% in Catalan. The dominant usage of Spanish in communication with classmates and in extracurricular context, were favourable to its usage in situations in which restrictions were in favour of Catalan. In order for immersion to be more effective it should include, ‘the need to live immersed in a social context that operates in this language’ (Navarro, 1998: 405).

The situation is different if one speaks of linguistic competencies. Educational policy has had a decisive effect on the development of the population’s competencies in Catalan, thanks to the creation of immersion programmes as one of its more important instruments.

As we have seen, in 1978 the majority of the Spanish-speaking population was monolingual and the Catalan speakers themselves were only competent in Catalan in its spoken form. Nowadays, the generations born after ’78 are competent in both languages. The results of the 2008 Study on Linguistic Usage (Generalitat de Catalunya, 2009, ob. cit.) indicate that the population over fifteen years old can understand (99.9%), speak (78.3%), read (81.7%) and write (62.3%) Catalan. These results would undoubtedly be higher if the study only included those generations who had attended school.

The competencies of this population in Spanish are above 95% in all four skills.

From the immersion model towards a school entirely run in Catalan It was previously mentioned that in 1993 some 88% of schools were of ‘maximum Catalanisation’, which is to say, schools where Catalan was the major language of instruction, including those schools following the immersion programme.

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For some years the Llei de Normalització Lingüística (Linguistic Normalisation Law) (Law/1, 1998) has established that Catalan is the sole language of instruction at all educational levels below university level. Subsequent decrees have reserved Spanish and a foreign language a space of three hours per week for each.

Catalonia’s teaching model is often referred to as ‘monolingual’, by which we mean a school where all non-linguistic subjects related to the curriculum (maths, sciences, humanities and so on) is taught in Catalan.

The existing educational legislation has made official a situation that was already in existence, since many schools already followed this model, thanks to moves by the administration.

During this period, immersion programmes have fallen from sight in terms of specific projects. Nevertheless, teachers have employed immersive techniques in those schools where the majority of pupils are Spanish-speakers.

As a consequence of these changes, the options parents have of choosing a particular school model have been restricted, but this has not created any particular conflict. Only a handful of Spanish-speaking parents who are preoccupied by the situation have taken a case to the Spanish Constitutional Court, which has ruled that the Catalan educational model is constitutional.

The court has reminded parents that they have the right for their children to receive special support in their language in the initial period of schooling, as stated in the Llei de Normalització Lingüística. This right has been exercised by very few parents (some fifteen in the 2009/2010 academic year), since the majority trust the model offered by the school.

The right-wing political party, both in Spain and Catalonia (the Partido Popular, or People’s Party) have criticised the current educational policy as they see it as limiting a knowledge of Spanish. They propose the creation of educational models with bilingual teaching in order to give parents the option of choosing a school model. They also argue that at least four hours a week should be dedicated to Spanish in order to improve the pupils’ competence in this language.

The studies that have been carried out do not support this viewpoint. Two statewide studies on written knowledge of Spanish indicate that pupils in Catalonia have an average of basic competencies in Spanish that are equivalent to pupils in the rest of the state (INCE, 1999, 2000). The study was carried out on pupils at the end of primary school and compulsory secondary education and was conducted on a very large sample. An international evaluation of reading comprehension on fifteen year-old school pupils from thirty-two countries (28 of which belong to the OECD), carried out here in Spanish, indicate that Catalonia occupies a position slightly above Spain. Nevertheless, the results are not encouraging as Catalonia and Spain occupy positions 17 and 19 respectively in the rankings, according to the study (OECD, 2001).

Some research carried out in Catalonia has compared linguistic competence in Catalan and Spanish according to the languages of the pupils’ families (Catalan or Spanish), the socio-professional position of the family and schooling model being followed, when still applicable (schooling completely in Catalan, immersion or bilingual) (SEDEC, 1998).

This study shows that Catalan speakers are significantly more competent in Catalan in nine out of the fourCatalan International View

Bibliography Alsina, A. et. al. (1983). Quatre anys de català a l’escola (Four Years of Catalan at School).

Generalitat de Catalunya (Department of Education).

Arenas, J. and Muset, M. (2007).

La immersió lingüística a Catalonia. Un projecte compartit (Linguistic Immersion in Catalonia.

A Shared Project). Vic: Eumo Editorial Arnau, J. (1985). ‘Catalonia: influencia del contexto sociolingüístico y del modelo de escuela en el dominio y uso de las lenguas’ (Catalonia: the Influence of the Sociolinguistic Context and the School Model in the Control and Use of Languages). In: Actas del segundo Congreso Nacional de Lingüística Aplicada. Las Lenguas en España: Adquisición, Aprendizaje, Uso (Acts of the Second National Congress of Applied Linguistics.

Languages in Spain: Acquisition, Learning and Use). Granada: University of Granada Arnau, J. (2005). El modelo catalán de atención educativa a los escolares inmigrantes (The Catalan Model of Educational Attention for Immigrant Pupils), Cultura y Educación, 17, 3, 265-282.

Arnau, J. et al. (1994). ‘A comparative study of the knowledge of Catalan and Spanish among 8th-grade school in Catalonia’.

A Ch. Laurén (ed.). Evaluating European Immersion Programs.

From Catalonia to Finland, Research Papers, Proceedings of the University of Vaasa, 185/27, 107-127.

Artigal, J. M.(ed.) 1995). Els programes d’immersió als territoris de parla catalana (Immersion Programmes in Catalan-speaking Areas). Barcelona: Fundació Jaume Bofill.

Coelho, E. (2005). Ensenyar i aprendre en escoles multiculturals. Una aproximació integrada (Teaching and Learning in Multicultural Schools. An Integrated Approximation). Barcelona: ICE/Horsori.

37

Multilingualism: the Catalan Experience Department of Education (2008).

Evolució de les aules d’acollida i del seu alumnat des del curs 2004/5 fins al curs 2008/9 (The Evolution of ‘Reception Classrooms’ and their Pupils from Academic Year 2004/5 to 2008/9). (Unpublished document) Generalitat de Catalunya (2004).

Pla per a la LLengua, la Interculturalitat i la Cohesió Social (The Language, Interculturality and Social Cohesion Plan).

Generalitat de Catalunya (2009).

Enquesta d’usos lingüístics de la población 2008 Survey into the Population’s Linguistic Habits).

INCE (National Institute of Quality and Evaluation) (1999).

Evaluación de la Educación Primaria (Evaluation of Secondary Education). Madrid: Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (Source of Data: Higher Council for the Evaluation of the Catalonian Educational System.

Knowledge of the Two Official Languages).

INCE (National Institute of Quality and Evaluation) (2000).

Evaluación de la Educación Primaria (Evaluation of Secondary Education). Madrid: Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport (Source of Data: Higher Council for the Evaluation of the Catalonian Educational System.

Knowledge of the Two Official Languages).

teen tests undertaken, when compared to Spanish speakers. The comparison as to the level of Spanish indicates that the former group are also significantly better in three tests that refer to written text and are only inferior in terms of spoken accuracy. The study confirmed earlier studies (Alsina et al., ob. cit.; Arnau, 1985, ob. cit.; Arnau et al., 1994), that indicated that the social level of Catalan speakers (who are more represented in the middle and higher socio-professional classes) and the environmental presence of Spanish can influence fluency in this language especially in terms of academic knowledge (reading and writing).

Neither the model of schooling, nor the family language decisively influences the knowledge of Spanish. On the other hand, the model of schooling (predominantly in Catalan) is a decisive factor of linguistic competence in Catalan of Spanish speakers, given the low public profile of Catalan outside of school.

It is worth noting that the current school system does not produce a large imbalance in the competencies of pupils of either language Morera, M and Teberosky, A. (1998). ‘Les experiències lletrades a secundària en un context bilingüe’ (The Experiences of Arts in Secondary Education in a Bilingual Context). A: J. Arnau and J. M. Artigal (eds.).

Els programes d’Immersió: una perspectiva europea (Immersion Programs: a European perspective) (pp. 238-250). Barcelona: Edicions Universitat de Barcelona.

Navarro, F. (1998). ‘La normalització de l’ús social del català: món socioeconòmic i indústries socioculturals’ (Normailsiation and the Social Usage of Catalan: the Socio-Economic World and Sociocultural Industries). A: J. Arnau and J. M. Artigal (eds.).

Els programes d’Immersió: una perspectiva europea (Immersion Programs: a European perspective) (pp. 405-409). Barcelona: Edicions Universitat de Barcelona.

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Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the current school system does not produce a large imbalance in the competencies of pupils of either language.

linguistic backgrounds unlike another other country in the world and in a very short period of time. The number of immigrants in the classrooms has gone from 0.58% in 1999 to 12.5% in 2008. The pupils have joined the schools at any stage of the academic year, which has created serious problems in educational terms.

The Generalitat de Catalunya developed its Plan for Language, Interculturality and Social Cohesion (2004) in order to serve the immigrant population.

The Plan defines the aims and objectives, area of operation and predicted resources.

So-called aules d’acollida (‘reception classrooms’) are essentially places where students who are late in joining the education system learn Catalan. For the remaining time they are integrated into the ordinary classroom, following a transition programme that begins with attending subjects with a more comprehensible input (physical education, music, art, workshops), to go on to subjects that require a more complex linguistic input (social and natural sciences and so on).

During the 2008/2009 academic year there were a total of 24,505 pupils attending 2,236 aules d’acollida (Department of Education, 2008) in compulsory schooling.

A new immersion

An important part of the Plan are the so-called Plans d’Entorn (‘Surrounding Plan’), support networks in the educational community (municipal services, organisations in the cultural, social and sporting sphere). They are a space where schoolchildren and their families can socialise in a different way from at school. It is a very important and necessary initiative in a context in which Catalan is barely present in the places where immigrants live.

As I have mentioned, in recent years, Catalonia has witnessed an increase in immigrants from different cultural and

An evaluation of the definition of the principles and actions of the Pla per a la Llengua, la Interculturalitat i la Cohesió So-

The results represent general tendencies among the school population and one can always find subjects that are exceptions and, for whatever reasons, have a lower level of competency in their second language.

Catalan International View

Dossier

cial (Plan for the Language, Interculturality and Social Cohesion) (Arnau, 2005) indicates that it incorporates many indices of quality, in keeping with the ‘standards’ proposed by an education system that is truly inclusive (Coelho, 2005).

The Generalitat has assigned a lot of resources and effort to the assessment and training of teaching staff, particularly the tutors in the aules d’acollida.

While the plan has still not been fully appraised, it is necessary to see what its effects and results are.

The accumulated experience throughout so many years of teaching in a second language via immersion programmes should make attending to the needs of the immigrant population in a more effective way.

Perspectives for the future The profound transformation that has occurred in Catalonia’s schools in terms of the incorporation of Catalan has been investigated.

The current situation is of schools that operate entirely in Catalan and face two important challenges, among others: · Provide quality multilingual competence to the entire school population.

This is something that is very necessary in a global society. · Create inclusive schools that achieve the necessary integration of new arrivals.

The first objective can be achieved by:

· Planning a school model that takes Catalan as the basic language of instruction, while progressively incorporating the teaching of the other two languages (Spanish and a foreign language). This is done via the offer of attractive content (of the conventional curriculum or another), completely rejecting the teaching of sterile versions of the languages, based on a formal, exclusively grammatical teaching, which limits the possibilities for participation and communication. · Integrating the teaching of the three languages, such that the teachers of each share optimal teaching principles and strategies. ·The development of a certain linguistic conscience based on a reflection on the similarities and differences between various linguistic systems.

As for the second goal, it is evident that it is necessary to safeguard the attention to the diversity represented by immigrants and to consider this diversity as a possibility to understand one another.

The key to confronting these two challenges is to be found in adequate teacher training and in spreading and valuing the experiences that are already emerging in the current context.

OCDE (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) (2001). Regard sur l’Education. Published in: Higher Council for the Evaluation of the Educational System (2002). Sistema d’indicadors d’Ensenyament a Catalonia (Educational Indicator Systems in Catalonia). Barcelona: Department of Education.

Ribes, D. (1993). Els programes d’Immersió al català: avaluació d’alguns aspectes del rendiment escolar (Immersion Programmes in Catalan: Evaluation of Soem Aspects of School Achievement). Doctoral thesis. Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona.

SEDEC (Catalan Educational Service (1998). Competència lingüística en català i castellà de l’alumnat de sisè de primària, curs 1997/98 (Linguistic Competence in Catalan and Spanish of Pupils in the Primary System, Academic Year 1997/98). Barcelona: Department of Education (Unpublished document).

Serra, J. M. (1997). Immersió lingüística: rendiment acadèmic i classe social (Lingusitic Immersions: Academic Achievement and Social Class). Barcelona: Horsori Torres, J. (2005) (coord.). Estadística sobre els usos lingüístics a Catalonia (Statistics on Linguistic Usage in Catalonia). Generalitat de Catalunya: Linguistic Policy Secretariat.

Vila, F. X. (1998). ‘El model de conjunció en català: impacte sobre les normes d´ús lingüístic’ (The Conjunction Model in Catalan: the Impact on Norms of Linguistic Usage). A: J. Arnau and J. M. Artigal (eds.).

Els programes d’Immersió: una perspectiva europea (Immersion Programs: a European perspective (p. 381-390). Barcelona: Edicions Universitat de Barcelona.

Obviously we are speaking of competencies in the school context. The weight given to the use of languages by the different social actors in the future is another issue entirely. *Joaquim Arnau

Titular Professor of the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology of the Faculty of Psychology at the Universitat de Barcelona. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and Art from the Universitat de Barcelona. Director of various projects on the evaluation of bilingual education and immersion programmes. His current field of research is centred on the processes of teaching and learning of immigrant children in ordinary classrooms. He was president of the 3rd European Conference on Immersion Programmes, Barcelona, September, 1996. He is a numerary member of the Catalan Institute of Studies and president of the European Institute of Immersion Programmes (Catalan-speaking territories delegation).

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Business and Economics

The quest for financial and economic stability

by Jordi Galí*

The global financial crisis of 2007-2009 A widespread consensus has gradually emerged on the origin and nature of the financial and economic crisis that has shaken the global economy since the summer of 2007. One can summarize this consensus view as follows: • Many industrialized economies experienced a large and prolonged increase in housing prices before the crisis. The price rise could be partly accounted for by ‘fundamental’ factors, including robust income growth, declining unemployment rates, and low interest rates. Yet, an important component of the housing price boom was likely a ‘bubble’, as a result of the investors’ willingness to pay a price above the fundamental value, based on the belief that the price will continue to rise.

The bubble component is reflected in the disproportionate rise in housing prices relative to rental rates.

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• The housing boom was supported by an extraordinary increase in the volume of credit allocated to real estate developers, construction firms, as well as the ultimate house buyers.

This credit boom had two key underpinnings: (i) the apparent safety caused by expectations of continued appreciation of the houses serving as ultimate collateral for the loans, and (ii) the ability to transfer the loans beyond the banking system proper, through widespread securitization.

• The positive feedback loop linking the credit and housing booms came to an end and turned into a negative feedback loop when US housing prices started to decline in 2006. Low income, high risk borrowers found it difficult to refinance their mortgages, and the rise in loan delinquencies (subprime first, prime later) began to bring down the market value of mortgage-backed securities. This

Business and Economics

led to losses by banking institutions and investors across the globe. Furthermore, it triggered a collapse of money markets, starting in August 2007, as a result of the simultaneous attempt to hoard liquidity by all financial institutions, in an environment in which there was extreme uncertainty about the value of any institution’s asset portfolio and, thus, unwillingness to lend to each other at rates not involving a huge risk premium. Given the huge volumes of cross-holdings among institutions/investors located all over the globe, the crisis rapidly spread beyond the US borders and became a global financial crisis.

• The magnitude of the losses experienced by banks and other fi-

nancial institutions worsened their capital positions. Given the difficulties (and cost) of raising fresh new capital, restoring the desired/ required capital ratios forced banks to contract their loan portfolio and to try to sell some of their assets.

The simultaneous effort to do so lowered their market prices even further and hence the financial system’s losses.

• The decline in housing demand, and the fall in consumption resulting from (i) the loss of wealth (stocks, housing), (ii) the collapse of confidence experienced by households and (iii) the harder access to credit, led to a reduction in aggregate demand, output and employment. In other words, the financial crisis got Catalan International View

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Business and Economics

transmitted to the real economy, triggering the deepest economic downturn experienced by the industrialized world since the Great Depression. The worsening of the real economy led to a further rise in loan delinquencies, and greater losses for financial institutions, with the consequent contraction of credit. Thus, an adverse feedback loop between the financial and real sectors got underway.

It is worth stressing that the anatomy of the crisis of 2007-2009, summarized above, closely matches that of the numerous crises with a financial origin that capitalist economies have repeatedly experienced over the past 300 years, as documented in Kindleberger’s classic book Manias, Panics and Crashes. The details, the actors, the instruments change over time, but not the substance. In the past, financial crises occurred quite frequently in the most financially developed nations.

That frequency has declined, largely as a result of (i) the widespread adoption of deposit insurance and (ii) an active role of central banks as lenders of last resort.

Despite the progress made, Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhardt identify as many as 18 financial crises in industrialized countries during the post-war period before the current episode, with the Scandinavian and Japanese crises of the early 90s being among the most significant recent ones.

The case for pre-emptive government intervention The nature of the current crisis and its similarities with past episodes raises two natural questions: Should governments intervene pre-emptively to forestall the credit and asset price boom that invariably precedes every financial crisis? And, if so, what form should that intervention take?

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Modern economic theory justifies public intervention in economic matters in cases of market failure. In the case under consideration, the rationale for pre-emptive government intervention hinges on the existence of externalities in financial institutions’ portfolio and investment decisions: those decisions are based exclusively on considerations of private profitability and do not take into account their possible consequences on other economic agents or on the economy as a whole.

This may lead to a situation of excessive systemic risk, i.e. one in which the decisions of a large number of players (when considered jointly) or of an individual player (when large), generate significant risks for the system as a whole. In the case of a financial crisis, those externalities take different forms. Most prominently, during the boom that characterizes the run-up to the crisis, no individual institution takes into account the consequences for the system of a default on its loans (beyond its own losses), or the impact of its portfolio decisions on the asset valuations and leverage constraints of other institutions. More often than not, the simultaneous unwinding of positions that invariably accompanies a financial crisis leads to an overall reduction of credit and a collapse of asset valuations that trigger an economic recession.

Empirically, recessions caused by a financial bust tend to have a longer duration and larger magnitude than the average recession. The best way to prevent them would be to fight the market failure that was at the root of the speculative boom preceding the crisis.

One can think of two main strategies in order to attain that goal: (i) the prevention of bubbles through the stabilization of asset prices, and (ii) the stabilization of bank credit. I shall briefly discuss them in turn next.

Business and Economics

The stabilization of asset prices through monetary policy To the extent that the overvaluation of prices of one or more asset categories is a key feature of the boom that precedes any financial crisis, it is often argued that central banks should preempt the bust (or at least contain its damage) by actively seeking to stabilize asset prices and ‘pricking the bubble’ before it grows too large. Under that proposal, monetary policy would no longer focus exclusively on the stabilization of inflation but should also seek to prevent excessive fluctuations in asset prices.

One can think of several difficulties being associated with this strategy,: • The identification of bubbles in asset prices is not a trivial task, since their fundamental value is by its very nature unobservable.

• Interest rate adjustments motivated by the desire to limit the excessive growth in the price of certain assets would necessarily affect all asset prices, including those that do not contain any bubble.

• It is not necessarily true that an interest rate rise would contain or eliminate the bubble component of an asset price. Instead, it may just increase the bubble’s rate of growth, since investors would then require a higher return on any asset, including their bubble component.

• Many asset price booms do not end in a financial collapse. According to a recent IMF study, only 25% of the stock price booms and 40% of housing price booms lead to a subsequent financial crisis and a recession. For instance, the stock market boom that led to the crash

of October 1987 did not have any significant implications beyond the stock market itself.

• Assigning the objective of asset price stabilization to monetary policy, on top of its current objective of inflation stabilization, would violate the well-known Tinbergenian rule of ‘one instrument, one target’. By doing so it would likely create difficulties in the communication of monetary policy decisions. Most importantly it could imply a step back in the ‘conquest of inflation’ achieved by most industrialized countries over the past decade, which has relied on a clear mandate for central banks to focus on the attainment of low and stable inflation.

The implementation of financial stability policies faces a serious practical problem: the lack of incentives The stabilization of bank credit The empirical evidence, much of it conducted by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), suggests that asset price booms end up in financial and economic crises only when they are accompanied by a strong growth of bank credit and household and corporate indebtedness (often financed by foreigners). This observation would seem to justify a greater focus on bank credit and leverage ratios as potential sources of financial instability.

This focus also has a theoretical justification. An individual bank’s decision to expand its credit or to expose itself to greater portfolio risks has some externalities, as discussed above. If we Catalan International View

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are dealing with a small individual entity, such externalities can be ignored.

However, in the case of a large entity or many small ones making decisions in the same directions, the potential for non-negligible systemic risk arises, due to the feedback loop between credit growth and asset prices on the one hand, and those two variables and overall economic activity on the other.

No individual entity will find it ‘in its interest’ to take such external effects into account when making its decisions.

It may thus be necessary to ‘tax’ the expansion of credit by individual banks, with a penalty rate that varies over time as a function of the degree of systemic risk built-up in the economy.

The natural instrument to play that role is the capital ratio, i.e. the fraction of bank assets that must be maintained in the form of capital (including shareholders’ equity and accumulated reserves). Thus, in periods of excessive growth of asset prices and bank credit that may contain the seeds of an eventual financial collapse, it would be desirable to see the required capital ratio increase, in order to dampen credit growth (by making it more costly in terms of own resources used) and leverage and, as a by-product, enhance the overall solvency of the system in the event of an eventual collapse, making the risk of default smaller for any given size of asset losses. On the other hand, in periods of asset price deflation and credit stagnation, the capital requirements could be relaxed in order to dampen and hopefully overturn the associated adverse feedback loops.

The counter cyclicality of capital ratios implied by the above proposal, contrasts with the likely consequences of the Basel II Accord, whose implementation was underway across the globe when the current crisis hit. The Basel II 44

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regime implies that the asset base used in the computation of capital ratios has to weigh assets by their current risks.

As a result, the effective capital requirements tend to decline during economic booms, when the ratings of assets generally improve, and to increase during recessions, when the ratings worsen.

The consequence is an effective capital ratio with procyclical properties, which can only enhance the feedback loops between credit, asset prices and economic activity described above.

In addition to the development of a regime that implies countercyclical capital ratios, there are other measures that could help offset the externalities and other market failures present in the financial sector: • Prevention of regulatory arbitrage and the emergence of a shadow banking system, by extending the same rules that apply to banks to all institutions that are functionally equivalent.

• Minimum information requirements before the approval of a loan, as well as maximum loan-to-value ratios.

• Tighter regulation of rating agencies, given the public good nature of their services and the conflicts of interest underlying their current operations.

The challenge of implementation The implementation of financial stability policies of the kind described in the previous section faces a serious practical problem: the lack of incentives. To be more specific: no government is willing to undertake policies that are likely to abort an economic and

Business and Economics

financial boom. One needs an institution with sufficient independence from political pressure to be able ‘to take away the punch bowl just as the party gets going’ in the words of William M. Martin (Fed Chairman, 1951-1970) when describing the job of the Federal Reserve.

The Spanish experience of the 2000s provides a clear example of ‘negationism’ leading to inaction. Even though by 2004 institutions like the BBVA and the Banco de España, to name but two, had already warned of an overvaluation of housing between 25% and 35%, the government deflected all such warnings on the grounds that prices were justified by the outstanding economic outlook and were likely to experience an eventual ‘soft landing’ rather than an outright fall. This negationism reached its most visible manifestation in July 2007, when the then Housing Minister Carme Chacón refused to answer a question on the problem of housing overvaluation during an interview with the BBC. Despite the overwhelming evidence calling for the need to cool down the housing boom, the government maintained the fiscal

incentives on housing purchases. It also introduced programs to subsidize the rental of housing by young individuals.

Given a fixed stock of housing in the short run, such programs can only lead to higher rental rates and thus higher housing prices. Thus, and regardless of the initial intentions, measures of that sort only helped to fuel the housing boom and to divert more and more resources towards the construction sector and away from other activities, giving rise to what became known as ‘the brick economy’, which is currently being painfully dismantled.

The next few months are going to be critical in determining whether and how this implementation problem is solved, as decisions have to be made at different levels regarding the new financial stability architecture, including the determination of the institutions, existing or new, that will be in charge of the implementation of the relevant policies. The extent to which these institutions enjoy effective independence from politicians is likely to be an important factor in determining how long it will take for a global financial crisis to recur. *Jordi Galí

earned his Ph.D. in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1989.

Currently he is Director and Senior Researcher of the Center for Research on International Economics (CREI) and a Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He has held academic positions at New York University and Columbia University. He has been a Visiting Professor at MIT. He has been a co-editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association and is currently an associate editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, the Journal of Economic Perspectives and the International Journal of Central Banking. He is a Research Fellow at the CEPR, a Research Associate at the NBER, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has been a consultant to the IMF, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve and other central banks. He has been awarded several prizes and distinctions, including the Premio Jaime I (2004), the Yrjo Jahnsson Award (2005 and the Premi Societat Catalana d’Economia (2008). His research interests include macroeconomics and monetary theory.

Selected Publications: • ‘Real Wage Rigidities and the New Keynesian Model’, (with O.J. Blanchard), Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, forthcoming.

• ‘Monetary Policy and Exchange Rate Volatility in a Small Open Economy’, (with Tommaso Monacelli), Review of Economic Studies, vol. 72, issue 3, 2005, 707-734.

• ‘Monetary Policy Rules and Macroeconomic Stability: Evidence and Some Theory’, (with R. Clarida and M. Gertler), Quarterly Journal of Economics, January 2000.

• ‘The Science of Monetary Policy: A New Keynesian Perspective’, Journal of Economic Literature, December 1999.

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Interview

Montserrat Abelló ‘We are our own worst enemies’ Interviewed by Eva Piquer* Photos by Xabier Miquel Laburu

Montserrat Abelló (Tarragona, 1918) would have liked to have had a house with a view, ‘but I am happy with just seeing a bit of sky’. That’s how positive and lively this 91-year old writer and translator of poetry is, who works with such admirable energy. She published her first book of poetry, Vida diària (Daily Life), in 1963, after returning to Catalonia following twenty years of exile in Chile. In this last decade, the ‘dean of Catalan poets’ has received numerous awards in recognition for her literary career, such as the Creu de Sant Jordi (Saint George’s Cross), the Premi d’Honor de les Lletres Catalanes 2008 (Honour Award for Catalan Arts) and the Premi Nacional a la Trajectòria Professional i Artística (National Award for a Professional and Artistic Career). ‘They give me awards because of my longevity. When I was young and pretty, no one took my photo, but now that I’m old and ugly, everybody does ’, she says smiling.

You have lived almost a whole century. Do you believe that humanity has progressed?

Yes, but very slowly.

Sometimes it feels as if we’re going backwards.

Not as bad as that. Take slavery, for example.

Just think what was going on not so long ago, the amount of people that died then… Killed in cold blood, natives, black people…

Some forms of slavery still exist. Prostitution, for example.

That’s true, but it’s very different. At that time they killed thousands of people. Whole families, children… And all for money, as a business. In this sense things are better. But there are also ar-

eas in which they haven’t improved at all. Sometimes, when this happens, it’s not so much due to external enemies, but because of democracy itself, which is not fully democratic. If during the Spanish Civil War democratic countries, with their non-intervention, hadn’t stopped helping us in our fight against Franco the fascist governments in Europe wouldn’t have grown. The war in Iraq is a crime from every point of view, but it was promoted by people like Bush and Aznar who are supposed to be respectable. Problems always come from within. Take the Catalan language, for example. When it was most persecuted we were up against an enemy that was clearly visible. But now everyone is relaxed and, suddenly Spanish comes out of nowhere and no one realises that in no time at all they’ll have us completely dominated, because Catalan is what identifies us. Quite often we are our own worst enemies.

Catalan International View

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Interview

Are we better off than before, in spite of everything?

No: the most glorious time I have lived was during the Republic. We’ve never been better off than we were during the Republic. It was an enormous opening in many aspects. I see it from the point of view of education, which is what I know better. at schools and universities we had the most wonderful teachers. The military uprising came at a moment of glory. They are so frightened that when something turns to the left just a little, they create an upheaval I’m thinking of two contexts I know well: here and in Chile. In neither case were there communists (in spite of the fact that I don’t find communism to be horrible, rather that it has been badly applied), by which I mean that there was no extreme movement; we were simply a little more advanced. There was a lot more liberty, a lot more culture. Ideologically we were leaning towards the left a little, which is how it should be. They say that the freedom I experienced when I was young is reflected in my poetry, and I think it’s true. The people who were born after me lived through their youth during a period of Franco’s reprisals. Nevertheless, in my poems you can see that I have experienced freedom.

I found my own way of feeling poetry reflected in Sylvia Plath. Both of us had arrived at the same conclusion, in the same period, via parallel paths

How did the Civil War affect you?

Something that bothers me when people speak of the Civil War is when they take the events in the novel La plaça del Diamant (Diamond Square),

by Mercè Rodoreda, as if they were the absolute truth. It’s simply not so, it is only one aspect of it, one part of the truth, which is not to say that it isn’t well explained. During the war I was eighteen years old and I wasn’t frightened of anything and I never felt that people were desperate. We were so absolutely certain that we were right¡ I was also lucky in that no one in my family was killed. But 48

it’s not true that everyone was frightened: If it had been the case the war wouldn’t have lasted so long.

We went through nearly all the war in Barcelona.

My father was a naval architect. He retired from the Navy because they did what we on the left always do: pass laws that are unfavourable for us. In order to keep away those in the army or the navy unloyal to the government they were allowed to retire on full pay. My father, who to become a naval architect had enlisted in the navy, and didn’t have a military spirit in any sense, took advantage of the opportunity and retired, But, the majority decided to organise themselves and go against the Republic. And that’s what happened.

Once the war was lost you went into exile for twenty years…

I always say that my exile was more like a holiday that went on too long. After France and Great Britain we went to Chile when the Second World War broke out. Coming from a Europe in upheaval and thinking of a Spain that was so repressed, we had a period of calm in Chile. The climate was very pleasant, we Catalans were highly respected and there were magazines published in Catalan, so you didn’t feel you were losing your language. It was a very welcoming country and we were much better off there than we would have been here. We always meant to return, we knew we were only there temporarily.

And remaining in a country, even if it is for a long time, isn’t like living there forever. The shock brought about by the birth of my third child led us to forward our return. So we came back before Pinochet took power. We were spared that bitter experience.

Having a child with Down’s syndrome inspired you to write…

There are things you carry around inside you and you can’t find a way to bring them out. My third child’s Down’s syndrome was a very great shock, it was something I had never thought about before and it grew my need to write. It caused a convulsion. Both joy and disappointment always cause a commotion Unfortunately, for poetry disappointments even more. We only pay attention to the muses when we’re sad.

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Interview

Are the happy moments more intense with a child that has Down’s syndrome?

Having Down’s syndrome is painful, especially for those who suffer from it. My son knows his own limitations. In fact, he might have more common sense than most people. There are those that say that having a child like him is a blessing. I don’t agree: something that is bad for him can never be a blessing for you. It may be that having him even brings you some satisfaction because you love him, but life is so hard for him… My son Ferran is very aware of everything and always tries to look on the bright side of things. This is a real virtue. On the other hand, there are people who have everything and still haven’t enough.

Does true poetry need to arise out of necessity?

Yes, I think it does, all works of art arise from the need to express something. I chose poetry as a form of expression because I wanted to show that things are not just black and white, that there are

many shades of grey. When one reads a poem, everyone may see something different in it. I don’t give a title to my poems because it limits them and I want those who read them to be able to make it theirs, from their own experience, which often doesn’t coincide with the poet’s. I only have one poem with a title: Retorn which I translated as Homecoming.

Your poetry, centred as it is on the power of the bare word, is very modern. You were ahead of your time.

They always say that I started late in life and it’s not true. What happened is that to write poetry I thought the use of metre and rhyme was necessary, and I did so, but as I didn’t like what I wrote I gave it up. With the birth of Ferran, I started to write without thinking about it, leaving out rhyme and meter and I felt that it was good. I showed it to Joan Oliver and he supported me a great deal.

Many years later, when I published the anthology Cares a la finestra - 20 dones poetes de parla anglesa del segle xx- ( Faces at the Window -20 English-

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speaking Women Poets of the 20th Century), I discovered that Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich became great poets when they had given up metre and rhyme, basing their poetry on the deep meaning of each word and its internal rhythm. And I found my own way of writing poetry reflected in Sylvia Plath. Both of us had arrived at the same conclusion, in the same period, via parallel paths.

The awards I have received are a great honour, but they don’t make me a better or a worse poet. My biggest prize has been the ability to publish and to feel that I have such support As a feminist, are you happy with where we are, or do you believe that there is still a lot of work to be done to attain equality?

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From the point of view of poetry, there are now a lot of good women poets, and we speak on a whole range of topics that hadn’t been dealt with before.

We aren’t better or worse, we’re different. I also talk a lot about the body, it is a part of me. I have no sympathy for those women who say they are not feminists when in fact they are. I haven’t much sympathy for Rodoreda for example, as she said she wasn’t a feminist. Then how come she wrote the novels that she wrote? What’s wrong with being a feminist? It’s not that I go around with a flag, but I’m a feminist because everything I am faced with makes me be one. I was given the Honour Award for Catalan Arts and I see that, in 40 years, the prize has only been awarded to three women. It’s a shame. There are so many good women poets in the world and so few of them have been translated.

So I prepared and translated an anthology of poetry written by women. This is my feminism. The writer Isabel-Clara Simó said in an article that she will be a Catalanista as long as she feels opressed

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Interview

due to linguistic reasons. When this attitude dissapears she will just be Catalan, that’s all. Well I say the same about feminism. It’s not that I go around fussing about it, it’s that we are forced to defend ourselves. When I wrote Vida diària I didn’t want to make it so obvious that it was a book written by a woman. Surprisingly, years later the feminist movement adopted it as its own. My daughter made me see that there were some very feminist poems in the book. Obviously it was feminist because I wrote what I felt. For me, poetry is the truth, and you can’t hide the truth. If there’s no truth, if it isn’t real, poetry loses its deep meaning.

Is there a long way to go before women can stop being feminists?

This also depends a lot on ourselves. In this sense we have come a long way in the individual sense, but not so far in the collective sense. They treat me very well, but read a study on Catalan poetry in the twentieth century and see how many female poets are mentioned: you’re lucky if they mention one. And it’s always the same one.

Have you ever felt less valued within Catalan literature as a result of being a woman?

No, as I said before, individually I’ve never felt less valued. I’ve always had the good fortune to be surrounded by people I highly regard, that really appreciate me. Joan Oliver, Francesc Parcerisas, Feliu Formosa and Maria Àngels Anglada. amongst others, have been my friends. Thanks to my translations I’ve never had problems in getting published, and I have neither felt a special need to publish. Maria-Mercè Marçal made me realise that after my first book I hadn’t published anything for eighteen years. But, for me, those eighteen years had flown by. I taught, I had personal problems, I finished my degree- I was so busy that I didn’t think about publishing and wasn’t at all worried, which was good for me. I have never expected any sort of prize. When they gave me the Saint George’s Cross I thought they wanted me to do a translation. The awards I have received are a great honour, but they don’t make me a better or a worse poet. My biggest prize is having had the opportunity to publish and to feel that I have such support.

Carles Riba once said of you that you write, ‘a poetry in a minor key’.

Poetry written by women was usually classified in this way, and that’s just how it was. Nowadays, I like poetry that rhymes less and less. Rhymes are good specially when you don’t notice them.

Do you believe that women need to be twice as good as men in order to receive half their recognition?

It is possible, yes, but I really prefer being a woman to being a man. I feel sorry for men. I think we have a much deeper inner life. For men it’s harder. To think that prostitution is considered necessary makes one rather sad.

What things from the twenty-first century would you say were unimaginable five or six decades ago?

It may well be that computers are what have changed the world the most. What for me is difficult, for children nowadays is as easy as ABC. It’s similar to the revolution brought about by electricity. I don’t understand computers, but then neither do I understand electricity and I still plug things in and unplug them. I do the same with computers.

I see you write on a computer.

Yes, I’ve used computers since they came out.

I can’t believe how I did so many difficult translations with a typewriter and carbon paper. I bought an electric typewriter when it came out, but it didn’t last long because computers came out soon afterwards. This is the second one I’ve had. Anyway, computers won’t change things a great deal because we won’t change much either. I basically use the computer as a typewriter; I don’t have much time to use the Internet. When I need to find a piece of information, I do find it useful, however. I still use a conventional dictionary when I translate as I’m used to it and I soon find what I’m looking for.

I see you’re currently working on a translation.

I’m translating a book by Margaret Atwood, and it’s superb. I love translating and what is more,

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I first found recognition as a translator. But I know that now my work as a poet is being recognised, because people like it and enjoy reading it.

I’m a good translator of poetry because I’m a poet, but more so because I know English well. English is a language that phonetically is very similar to Catalan How do you see yourself? As more of a poet or a translator? Are they two complementary endeavours?

I’m a good translator of poetry because I’m a poet, but more so because I know English well.

English is a language that phonetically is very similar to Catalan. My translations read well because they keep the rhythm of the original. I think I have a certain gift for translating poetry.

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Have you ever written a poem directly in English?

Yes, sometimes the idea comes to me in English. But I’ve never published them. I have also translated poems from Catalan into English, like those by Maria-Mercè Marçal.

You learnt English when you were very young, thanks to linguistic immersion. Do you think it’s the best way to learn a language?

We lived in London for a couple of years when I was six years old, at the age when you learn to read and write. My father was transferred there and I went to an English school. I haven’t stopped reading in English since. I even used to argue with my older sister in English. I believe Catalan should be taught the same way as English. Without much grammar. They teach Catalan in a way in which everything seems to be an exception. English is taught through grammatical structures, but with little reference to grammar.

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Do you still write? How often?

I work all day, translating. I write poems when something causes a spark. When that happens I start to write the foundation of the poem on whatever comes to hand. If I don’t get it on the computer right away I sometimes can’t read my handwriting afterwards. When that happens I’m not upset, I feel that the poem can’t have been very good.

You say you write because you love life. How about death, does it frighten you?

No, not at all. I’m convinced that when you die you find out what you didn’t know, a secret is revealed of something that appeared so difficult to understand. I saw my husband pass away. When he died, he looked at me and he smiled with such deep happiness that it gave me a great feeling of peace… for that reason I don’t feel anxious. Natu-

ral events can’t be so illogical. We imagine death from our point of view which is limited.

But the idea of becoming nothing at all is frightening…

- Life itself is a miracle. Life is much more difficult to explain than death.

It must be upsetting to see your peers pass away, it’s as if your world was being extinguished.

This doesn’t happen to me, my world is the present, I’ve never lived in the world of old people.

If I think about old people, I think of my mother and not myself. I’ve always had young friends. I even write some love poems now because I still have the same feelings as before. Growing old doesn’t make you see things differently. Nowadays I won’t run down the street because I can’t, but neither do I want to. Nevertheless, I’m still the same person as ever.

*Eva Piquer (Barcelona, 1969). Writer and journalist. Works for the Avui newspaper where she coordinates the cultural supplement and the culture section. 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).

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Europe

Alsace and the Franco-German question

by Marc Gafarot*

When in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian conflict an old teacher lamented to his pupils that French would no longer be the language of instruction at school level, perhaps he never pictured another teacher, a German, doing just the same some centuries earlier, mourning the fate of German in that territory.

The history of both cultures is one of unfair concurrence rather than of generous overlapping. If today the situation has changed it is due to the dramatic penalties inflicted on Germany following the Second World War. It is a fact that Alsatians have become more culturally French since the end of this conflict than they had ever been in the past.

However one cannot assert that French has been totally unfamiliar in these lands.

The Oaths of Strasbourg written in 842 are considered the first written text in the Old French language and involved a set of documents of mutual pledges of allegiance between the sons of Louis the Pious. The Marseillaise was also first sung in that city. Ever since, Germany and France have kept an eye on a piece of land that both countries have reasons to claim as their own.

Needless to say France, both as a country and a civilization, has never found any moral impediment to glossing over her country’s non-French speaking cultural heritage. “Soyez propres, parlez en français”. This old motto has inspired several generations of French and does not seem likely to change. Until a short time ago it was believed that the Germanic element had to be extirpated. French politicians, 54

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across the whole political spectrum, pursued this policy to the very end.

This region that has been at the crossroads of Europe since Roman times has witnessed the way big powers traditionally deal with diversity.

On both sides Alsatians have been described as truly French or German while simultaneously being regarded with suspicion. Colonel Dreyfuss was perceived by many nationals of both nations as a man of double allegiance by being both a Jew and an Alsatian. The Alsatian question was solved to a great extent with the conclusion of the Second World War. Politically Germany had to abandon any attempt to re-take this territory and linguistically the German language, and its Alsatian variant, had to be neglected. To a great extent the French can rightly claim victory.

The Alsace region’s unique history has created an area in which the majority of its inhabitants tend to identify themselves more with Alsace than with France. Regionalism here is stronger than elsewhere in France. Also the vernacular language is here more present than other regions of the hexagon with their own language. This region has at one time been Germanic in language

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and culture but with enclaves of French linguistic dominance. In this respect it resembles Flanders, which was also once part of the Carolingian Empire.

In 870 A.D. the empire of Charles the Great was divided amongst his three children under the Treaty of Mersen.

In the not-too-distant past for the German Empire, (re)gaining control of the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine was an event of momentous political and symbolic significance. The euphoria that followed the Great War’s conclusion and Alsace-Lorraine’s return to France, however, was short-lived. The recovery of the border provinces involved far more than the reacquisition of lost territory, and the reimposition of French rule proved far more difficult than popular opinion and the politicians had expected, influenced as they were by a massive and ever-present nationalistic literature on the region.

French officials and the military arrived with an ethnic vision of the borderland.

In an attempt to re-direct Alsatian and Lorraine identity, a cleansing policy was initiated to find good and bad Alsatians. Between 1918 and 1920 the French thus undertook massive purges of Alsatian and Lorrainer society and reinstated French in schools for a generation instructed completely in Ger-

man. Traditionally, from a French perspective integrating this territory with the rest of France has meant getting rid of their German characteristics. Right up to the present day, accommodation has not been a common practice. The Germans, for their part, were no better in their dealings with French-speakers.

Article 1 of the Peace Treaty between France and the new German Empire stipulated the cession of the two provinces. Bitter protests were held against the new tenant as illustrated by a massive vote against German domination. In contrast to other states of the German federation, Alsace was directly ruled by the imperial government.

Bismarck himself was aware that from the viewpoint of nationality, the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine would be a source of weakness and instability for Germany. Nevertheless, when he demanded the transfer of Alsace-Lorraine to the German Empire, it was not on the grounds of ethnicity, language or culture (which he treated as beneath contempt).

Rather, Bismarck’s view was influenced by strategic and geopolitical considerations, the conviction that the new Germany had to be adequately guarded from the West against the reemergence Catalan International View

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of French aggression, and by the desire to obtain popular support for Prussia inside Germany. In this, amongst other things, the Iron Chancellor had very little in common with Hitler. On the question of justification, he appears to have been pleased to regard the annexation as an acquisition by right of conquest, justified by the consideration that France was a nation with a record of constant aggression and this implied a need to extend the frontier.

It is a fact that Alsatians have become more culturally French since the end of the Second World War that they had ever been in the past For the first time the method of annexation by simple transfer was anachronistic. It was the old method, which had appeared normal and natural at the Congress of Vienna. A century earlier the transfer of the population to a victorious sovereign was no longer the norm.

In the nineteenth century, with its growing belief in national self-determination and plebiscitary voting, such a path undertaken in defiance of the wishes of the population was losing favour with the political mainstream. A serious dispute over Germany’s legal right, as conqueror, to impose her will on a defeated France, did not arise. The acquisition of AlsaceLorraine by the German Empire in 1871 was legally valid. Between 1871 and 1914 Alsace-Lorraine became known in political discourse, in schools and in the popular imagination as the ‘lost provinces’ or the ‘twin sisters’ without which the nation could not be whole. This region became the sentimental homeland of French nationalism. Alsatian towns were considered quintessential to French identity. It cannot be overlooked that in the period from 1870 to 1914, while Alsace was part of the German Reich, the new Republican authorities tailored 56

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the new French nationalism and French identity to the values of the new Republic. Even for those who felt completely French it was not a pleasant surprise once the Germans were out and the new French administration subsequently in.

The privileges obtained from Germany like the maintenance of the Napoleonic Concordat (still in place today) and an embryonic welfare state, were elements antagonistic to the values of post-war France. The French imagery depicted ‘the lost provinces’ as the twin sisters in sorrow. This was highly debatable since most Alsatians adapted to German rule and discontent only emerged when the natives learnt about their second-class status compared to other German territories, and her direct dependency on Prussia. The (re)emergence of an autonomist movement proved that the Alsatian question was far from being solved even under the Germans. In 1870, in the words of a French historian, Alsace might well be German by race, but it was French by choice. The Germans may well differ on that view. As for the Alsatians themselves? No one bothered to ask the locals.

During wartime on the German side there was an inclination towards a suspicion of Alsatian and Lorreiners’ loyalty to fight on their side. This attitude would find its counterpart after the conflict was over and many Alsatians were sent to concentration camps by their French ‘liberators’. During this period the Alsatian movement was somehow criminalized as was the Flemish movement within Belgium by their Waloon counterparts. These attitudes continued well into the post-war years and reappeared during and after the Second World War. As for France, it was simple to deliver identity cards of good and bad Alsatians and Lorreiners, thereby completely disrupting both societies. More than 110,000 Germans living in Alsace crossed the Rhine back into Germany

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between late 1918 and late 1920. Political dissent did not go unpunished and many socialists and nationalists had to flee the country, such as those that proclaimed the 11 day Independent Republic of Alsace-Lorraine in 1918. The outcome of the war was one of breaking the unity of society and as a result the autonomist movement suffered significant losses. From 1871 to 1918, French paneregists made a case for the liberation of the ‘sorrow sisters’, particularly during the war years. They did so by portraying a completely bogus view of reality, in order that the myth be restored, at any price. The state classified individuals into four categories, A, B, C or D, depending on their birthplace, the birthplace of their parents, and sometimes that of their grandparents. It often took on ridiculous proportions, since some of the region’s staunchest Francophiles had German blood and were, consequently, classified as second rate. By labelling people according to their ethnicity, the French provoked profound divisions within Alsatian and Lorrainer society, and helped worsen the social cement that kept communities together. The state’s objective was to strengthen its authority and create multiple categories of Alsatians and Lorrainers with different rights. This recriminatory climate left profound scars amongst the population and led to a climate of fear and bitterness. The Alsatians were taught not to cherish their cultural heritage. And many did just that.

During the Second World War, Alsatians were drafted into the Wermacht

as they were seen as part of the German nation. It was thus the turn of the Germans, as the new rulers, to once more categorize good and bad Alsatians. The immediate post-war era marked a time in which Alsatians no longer liked themselves. The old ghosts were haunting again.

Alsatians had to cope with the growing suspicion of French people who assumed they had collaborated with the German invaders. After 1945, Alsatians learnt to relinquish their traditions and customs of German origin. Only a few artists and some old and loyal autonomists lamented this situation. After WWII Alsatian identity, Catholic faith, and the German language for the first time ceased to be seen as synonymous in the public pronouncements of religious leaders. Once more, a linguistic policy intended to cleanse German was ruthlessly implemented. The French also conquered the ultimate resort of the German language. The Concordate with the Holy See and a more generous welfare state were the only reminders of those years. Once again Alsatians were told to dislike themselves and opt out for the language of the former invader.

Then came the European Community a true success story for the economy and the peace of the continent. Nonetheless, the diversity and plurality of stateless nations, despite official propaganda, have always failed to be on the agenda. Or as Shakespeare might have put it, ‘much ado about nothing’.

Alsace: between France and Germany

*Marc Gafarot Holds a degree in Humanities from the Universidad de Navarra, an MSc in European Studies from the London School of Economics and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of Liverpool. As a journalist and political commentator he has worked from London for Bloomberg LP, in Latin America for Summit Communications and served as a Parliamentary Adviser at the European Parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg. Gafarot currently works as an external consultant in International Affairs for Catalan International View. He has written a book on Flanders and Federalism in Belgium called ‘La mort de Bèlgica? La gradual i pacífica emancipació flamenca’ (The Death of Belgium? the Gradual and Peaceful Flemish Emancipation) and co-authored The Student’s Guide to European Integration.

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Germany: land of consensus

by Martí Anglada*

With this autumn’s general elections, Germany has returned to a formula of government that has traditionally formed a part of the Federal Republic’s history: one of the main parties (in this case the Christian Democrats of the CDU-CSU) has joined with one of the minor parties (in this instance the liberal FDP) to form an absolute majority in the Bundestag. Once upon a time the liberals were the only small party capable of forming a government, whether with the Christian Democrats or the Social Democrats. They were known as a ‘hinge party’.

Now the German political scene is more complex and there are currently three small parties: the FDP, the Greens and Die Linke (the Left). While a coalition composed of the CDU and the Greens governs some of the federal states, on a federal level there have only been three types of coalition in recent years: CDU with the liberals; Social Democrats (SPD) with the Greens and the ‘grand coalition’ of the two main parties, CDU and SPD. The latter formation governed for the last four years. The consensus that has characterised German politics since the Second World War has one incipient division, represented by Die Linke. In issues such as Afghanistan it is the only party that opposes the participation of the German military in the NATO force.

The neo-Nazis in the NPD have never been able to enter federal parliament. Clearly they not only fail to form part of the consensus; one could almost say their very presence in opposition helps to keep the five parties in the Bundestag united.

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This autumn’s elections have, therefore, seen a shift away from an exceptional formula of consensus, characterised by the grand coalition, with a move towards a normal formula of a majority (in this case of the centre-right) with a broad underlying consensus. Looking at the situation since the reunification of the two Germanys, now that celebrations are being held for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one sees that following the era of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the sixteen years (1982-1998) in which he governed and administered the process of reunification, there have only been two out of a possible three coalitions of high probability: Schroeder (SPD)Fischer (the Greens), from 1998 to 2005, and Merkel (CDU)-Steinmeier (SPD), in the last four years.

Viewed in this way, the current centre-right coalition heralds a new period in post-reunification Germany.

This is also the case if we consider that with the new CDU-FDP government a period of intense reforms of the Ger-

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man welfare system comes to a close (Schroeder’s Agenda 2010 and the salary constraints of the grand coalition years). A new era, for sure, but not a step backwards in the reforms since, we should remind ourselves, the German state rests on a broad consensus.

in 2009). Of these 5 million, roughly a half are due to abstentions, people angry with its party showing loyalty to a Christian Democrat leader, while the other half are equally angry voters who have opted for Die Linke.

It is also a new era for the centre-left and left-wing parties. The major lesson from this autumn’s elections has once again been that when a major party (the SPD) forms a coalition under the leadership of its main rival (Chancellor Angela Merkel of the CDU), they end up paying a high electoral price (a fall of 11 points, from 34 to 23 percent of the votes). The Social Democrats have lost approximately five million votes (from 15 million in 2005, to 10 million

The current centre-right coalition heralds a new period in post-reunification Germany We should remind ourselves that this new force, which took almost 12 percent of the votes, is partially made up of dissidents from the left-wing of the SPD who abandoned the party in protest against Schroeder’s Agenda 2010 (dissidents led by Oskar LafonCatalan International View

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to Schroeder, never forgave them for the split).

With the new changes to the leadership of the SPD a new era is truly beginning in which both parties, situated as they are in opposition, will start to collaborate more and more closely. It is therefore, a new era for the left, which may have the surprising effect of integrating Die Linke more in the German system of consensus, since it appears unimaginable that the Social Democrats will distance themselves from the pro-Atlantic Alliance stance that forms a basic part of their identity.

Germany has seen a shift away from an exceptional formula of consensus, towards a normal formula of a majority with a broad underlying consensus taine) and in part of former communists from East Germany. Up until the elections the SPD-Die Linke relationship was very difficult, and in many cases inexistent (the leadership of the SPD, seeking continuity with respect

The Greens, the third element in the current opposition, will undergo a change in their position in this new era. Following the Schroeder (SPD)Fischer (Greens) government’s environmental policies, with the promotion of renewable energy, the halting of the construction of new nuclear power stations and the setting of 2021 as the limit on the lifespan of the 17 nuclear reactors Germany currently has (policies which the great coalition left unchanged), the Greens lost centrality in the political debate. Now the government coalition of the CDU and the liberals plans to extend the lifespan of the nuclear power stations, and the ensuing debate will in turn give the Greens a prominent role. Nevertheless, the ruling parties have also dismissed the idea of building new nuclear power stations for the moment, since the general consensus is still in robust health and does not break so easily.

*MartĂ­ Anglada 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 United States correspondent for TV3 (1987-1990). He has also been an international political commentator.

His latest book is Afers no tan estrangers (Not So Foreign Affairs) published by Editorial Mina (part of Grup 62).

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Asia

Political change in Japan

by Elisabet Cortiles i Taribó*

Whereas the United States voted for the future in November 2008, Japan voted against the past on the 30th of August this year. It was a punishment vote against the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), that had governed the country for more than half a century (aside from eleven months during the mid-90s) and that has now lost the confidence of its citizens and with it, power.

The LDP, a party that emerged after the Second World War with the arrival of democracy to the country, ensured that a nation that was physically and emotionally destroyed by the atomic bomb and defeat was transformed into the second world power. Its economic policies had a stunning success until the end of the 80s, when the housing and finance bubble burst. Since then the Liberal Democratic Party had unsuccessfully tried to lead Japan out of the economic crisis. Its poor handling of the situation, corruption within the party, lack of leadership, periods of recession and an increase in unemploy62

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ment have all led the Japanese to lose their patience. Although not particularly partial to change, the public had no alternative but to vote for the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), that was established just eleven years ago. The majority of the party’s members are politicians that were disaffected with the LDP and decided to form a new political group. A good example is the new prime minister and leader of the DPJ, Yukio Hatoyama, himself a former member of the ranks of the Liberal Democratic Party. Indeed his grandfather was one of its founders.

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With a voter turnout of some 70%, the Democratic Party of Japan gained an absolute majority in the lower house. They went from 113 seats to 308, forming a coalition with two minority parties, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the New People’s Party, thus gaining even more support in parliament. This majority adds to the one it already holds in the senate and that it must try to maintain in the upcoming elections of July 2010 if it wishes to go ahead with its proposed reforms unopposed.

Mari Matsumoto, a Tokyo housewife, explains that the LDP’s main error was to ‘distance itself from the public and not to have listened to their needs’. Her husband, a New York marketing executive, adds that, ‘the Liberal Democratic Party failed because it didn’t appreciate how difficult the current economic situation is for the Japanese middle class’.

Hatoyama’s electoral campaign focused precisely on emphasising that the electorate would be the party’s main focus of attention. He promised to improve the standard of living of the Japanese with more, improved social policies. One in particular is a family benefit of 192 euros a month for every school-age child, which is in addition to the 2,600 euros parents receive when a baby is born. The thinking behind the measure, aside from social welfare, is to fight against the ageing of the Japanese population. According to the World Health Organisation, Japanese life expectancy stands at 83 years, the highest in the world, while the birth rate has not stopped falling since 2006. The ageing population has not only led to a loss of workers, it has led to increased expenditure on pensions. Japan’s ministry of health calculates that in 2025 the government will spend more than 1,000 million euros on pension payments.

Aside from benefits for families with children, Hatoyama’s government also wishes to make secondary education free, increase the minimum wage, increase farmers’ subsidies and eliminate tolls on the motorways. All in all, these are initiatives that the Japanese look forward to, but view with some uncertainty.

Masahito Abe, a young salesman who lives in a small city close to the capital, warns that, ‘the DPJ has not clearly outlined where it will get the money from to carry out its proposed measures’. Hatoyama’s social reforms are valued at the astronomical sum of 54,000 million euros in 2010 and a further 125,000 million the following year. These figures are seemingly incompatible with Japan’s public deficit, which represents 180% of GDP, and one of the highest debts for a developed nation.

China will soon take second place in the ranking of world powers and Hatoyama needs to improve diplomatic relations with the Asian giant in order to take advantage of its economic impulse How will the new government manage to deal with public debt and finance its social reforms? According to Hatoyama, the key lies in changing the economic model and reforming public administration, two pillars the Japanese government have never managed to move.

Japanese civil servants are seen to be among the most bureaucratic in the world and have become a hidden power in the government’s shadow thanks to the control they have over public spending. The new prime minister has Catalan International View

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promised to reduce bureaucracy and use the savings thereby generated on his social policies. In order to carry this out, the government will create the National Strategy Office that will include civil servants from both the public and private sector who will be charged with designing the new Japanese administrative system. The Office, headed by the new Deputy Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, will also supervise the administration of the budget and decide on Japan’s political priorities.

by the LDP has turned against them.

Many Japanese who had given their lives to the company have been laid off and have witnessed first-hand how companies now prefer temporary contracts to lifetime commitments from their workers. The newly appointed Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Masayuki Naoshima (a 63-year old former unionist), has announced that he will negotiate reforms with the large companies as soon as possible in order to stabilise the precarious job situation that exists at present.

The new Japanese government does not wish to end the historic relationship it has with the United States, but it does wish to move out from under its shadow in order to enjoy more independence

Daisuke Ito, an estate agent and his wife Esther Carrillo, a Catalan translator of Japanese, both feel, ‘the economy will only recover when the Japanese regain their trust in the government. The poor economic situation arises out of uncertainty for what will come, which leads people to save rather than to spend. If no one buys anything, businesses make losses and have to lay off workers. It’s a vicious circle’.

Through such measures, Yukio Hatoyama also plans to cancel the large infrastructure investments initiated by the previous government. According to the prime minister, all too often the concession of public works contracts has been the result of an ‘old boys’ network’ between the LDP and the large companies. It is a relationship that for years has ensured the LDP have remained in power and public capital has gone into the hands of the country’s companies.

This economic model, which worked such miracles after the Second World War, has now become outdated. The ageing population, a strong fall in exports, coupled with the global economic crisis, has made the system unsustainable. The direct consequence of the situation is the highest unemployment rate since the end of WWII, standing at nearly 6%.

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In order to stimulate internal consumption, Hatoyama’s government has committed itself to freezing VAT on products, reducing petrol prices and more importantly, enacting social policies to improve public welfare in order to stimulate consumption.

The make-over of the Japanese economic model also includes a rethink of its relations with other Asian countries. Japan is conscious of the fact that soon China will take its second place in the ranking of world powers and its need to improve diplomatic relations with the Asian giant in order to take advantage of its economic impulse.

One of the first concessions the new government has made is in stopping its visits to the Yasukuni temple.

This Shinto temple is where soldiers that have fallen in battle are remem-

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bered, including a dozen or so accused of war crimes for their actions in China. The controversial visits to the temple by the former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi provoked a serious diplomatic conflict between China and Japan, which Hatoyama’s new government has no interest in reviving.

The new prime minister also wants to improve relations with India, the Philippines, Malaysia, South Korea and Australia. Indeed, according to Hatoyama, ‘the natural allies of Japan aren’t the West, but rather our neighbouring countries’. This does not mean that the new Japanese government wishes to end the historic relationship it has with the United States, but it does wish to move out from under its shadow in order to enjoy more independence. To this end, the Japanese leadership have announced the desire to reform the pacifist Constitution drawn up in 1946, in order that

the country can form an army. This is a reform Hatoyama tried earlier in 2005 with a project that ended in failure. He may attempt it once again, in spite of the opposition of some of the members of his own party and of the parties with which he has formed the coalition. There is also the possibility of closing the American military bases in Okinawa and the end of the agreement under which Japan has to resupply US warships that are in the Indian Ocean. These are all issues that could heighten tensions between the two nations. In reality the Japanese have more important preoccupations to resolve, with the economic stagnation that has lasted nearly two decades being the main one. The majority of the public did not vote for the new government because they thought they were capable of overcoming the problem, but rather because they saw the previous government, the LDP, as being incapable of doing so. *Elisabet Cortiles i Taribó

Holds a degree in Journalism from Universitat Ramon Llull (The Blanquerna Faculty of Communication Sciences). She specialised in international journalism at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London.

She directs the Tots pel Món (Everyone for the World) section of the Tots per Tots (All For All) programme on COMràdio. Cortiles has presented the news on Channel 8tv and covered the 2007 uprising of the monks in Burma for RAC1. Member of the Commission for Audiovisual Diversity of the Audiovisual Council of Catalonia (CAC) and a journalist and audiovisual producer for the Espai Àfrica-Catalunya.

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A journey through Kabul in a Toyota Corolla A special report from the Afghan capital

by Nicolás Valle*

The suspension of my Corolla screeches like a wounded animal every time we go over a pothole. My driver, Khaliljatullah, knows all the shortcuts to get from one side of Kabul to the other in the shortest possible time, which means going down dusty, unpaved roads populated with holes the size of craters, that soon fill up with water during the rainy season. Old Toyotas are a common sight in the Afghan capital where they are used by taxi drivers, small businessmen and civil servants. They are also the vehicle of choice for suicide bombers as they provide a guarantee of anonymity.

To drive in the city one needs to understand a long list of rules that did not exist just three years ago. There are checkpoints throughout the city and enormous cement walls form a series of concentric circles, reminding one of fortifications from the Middle Ages. It is a country within a country, dubbed ‘Hescostan’ in reference to the enormous Lego blocks that make up the walls. They were invented by the British company Hesco Bastion Limited and allow solid barriers to be erected in a rural or urban environment in a short time. The capital of Hescostan is the Afghan president’s residence and the headquarters of the United States army. Entry is totally forbidden without an official pass. A press pass has no effect and Khaliljatullah’s pass is only good for the controls in the commercial areas of the city. The wall is kilometres long and in some places exceeds five metres high. Within Hescostan there are wide avenues, streets and parks where once upon a time the city’s residents could go about their business unhindered.

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We try to get in and three armed men block our way with shouts. The driver tries yet another attempt at persuasion that is all part of his daily routine. The guards respond in monosyllables. They are neither soldiers nor police, but rather private security guards.

Hesco Ltd. is not the only foreign corporation that is getting rich in this war fought in the heart of Asia. There are dozens of private security companies operating all over the country. In Kabul there are thousands of guards everywhere: they guard official buildings, embassies, the headquarters of human rights organisations, hotels and countless private residences. There is even an enormous airship tethered above the city that observes everything.

It is said that it is an espionage system developed by Israel. The walls and private guards are jointly responsible for an oppressive atmosphere that hangs over the Afghan capital. On one hand, it is the result of the almost logical consequence of the urban terrorist offen-

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sive undertaken by the Taliban in 2006.

It involved a technique practically unheard of in Afghanistan: the car bomb driven by a suicide driver. On the other, it is the cause of the discontentment of a large part of the civilian population with respect to the Europeans and Americans, men and women who came in order to restore democracy and protect them and who have ended up walling themselves up in barracks and luxury houses.

Statistically speaking, Kabul is one of the safest places on Earth: a small area continually patrolled by armoured cars equipped with high calibre weapons and foreign military patrols, backed by uniformed and plain-clothed police, private security operatives and special

Burkas are once again part of Kabul’s sights, as they were under the Taliban

forces soldiers. Nevertheless, it has one of the highest levels of common crime in the world. In fact, most members of the public are not afraid of the Taliban militia, but rather the organised gangs.

This cruel paradox is most apparent on Chicken Street. Khaliljatullah has had to drive around for a long time to find a parking space for the Corolla as close as possible to what in earlier times was seen as a kind of Afghan Rodeo Drive.

Nowadays the road has been closed to traffic by enormous bollards driven into the tarmac. The road is full of jewellers, Catalan International View

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The great fiasco for Europe and the United States is in having failed a people with promises of a change that has not materialised carpet sellers, leather workers, antique dealers and souvenir sellers. The majority of the shoppers are foreign military personnel, diplomats and international observers who are passing through the capital. It is a good place to buy traditional rugs or lapis lazuli bracelets. The American military decided to close the street to put an end to attacks on foreigners and now the shopkeepers have to employ porters to ferry their goods from the main road to their shops.

Worst of all, the shopkeepers of Chicken Street are the favourite victims of the gangs dedicated to the kidnapping industry. This is what happened to Said68

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ullah, owner of the last but one shop in the street, at the end on the left. One evening two armed men entered his shop and took him away at gunpoint.

No one saw a thing. He told me he was detained for two days at an unknown location. He was tortured, leaving horrific scars on the right side of his stomach and his back. I would prefer not to go into the details of what he told me about his experience. The nightmare ended when his brother, who is also a shop-keeper, paid the 50,000-dollar ransom the gang demanded. Saidullah says that he has been keeping track of the advantages of having foreign troops on Afghan soil. So far, the losses outweigh the benefits.

Closed-off streets and insecurity have changed the perception of many Afghans as to the role of foreigners.

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minutes at a time in order that the convoys of diplomats can pass by in their inaccessible cars with tinted windows.

The old Corolla feels as if it will fall apart every time a group of armoured vehicles overtakes us on the right at top speed. The last in the group carried a French flag, the ones before them were from Italy or Turkey. For the Afghans they are all the same: foreigners.

theft or assault. There is also a form of ‘high class’ corruption, however: million-dollar construction contracts, hospitals that are never built, the extortion of businessmen and so forth. Out of this stinking swamp of corruption has grown Afghanistan’s nouveau riche: men that have grown wealthy on bribes, government contracts and in particular, drug trafficking.

There is often talk of the failure of NATO and the United State’s military mission. It is undeniable: the Taliban have established stable positions just 30 kilometres from Kabul, their military and terrorist activities have increased five-fold in just three years and they now have a presence in 80% of the districts in the country. Nevertheless, there is little talk of political failure. Washington and Brussels have tolerated the restoration of an ignominious regime that, in reality, is the main cause of the civilian populations’ unrest with respect to the system that was born out of the ashes of 9/11. The strategists in the Pentagon justify the abandonment of a political strategy in favour of a military one, thanks to a form of democratic disability located in the Afghans’ genes.

Eight years of Western tutelage have done nothing to allow the country to join the club of emerging democracies on any level. What is worse: President Hamid Karzai’s regime is responsible for unspeakable levels of political depravity.

The majority live in the Sherpur neighbourhood, in the north of the capital. This is the only place in Kabul where our Corolla fails to go unnoticed.

Only luxury 4x4s inhabit the streets.

No one parks on the streets. Everyone has an enormous garage in their mansion, protected by armed guards and impressive walls. In the past, Sherpur was a lower-class neighbourhood, but five or six years ago the residents were expelled by the illegal expropriation of property and extortion. In spite of the West’s best intensions, Afghanistan continues to export 93% of the paste used in the manufacture of heroin.

The price of opium has fallen 20%, but nevertheless it continues to be an extraordinarily irresistible business for the corrupt caste that rules the country.

Even the president’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is implicated. He is suspected of being one of the main drug barons2. It is difficult to convince the Afghans that change has begun. Parliament itself contains representatives of the country’s corrupt power centres: warlords, drug traffickers, tribal chiefs and a long etcetera. There are also misogynist, corrupt leaders that have still failed to demonstrate the least intention of bringing about any form of freedom of expression or gender equality. Women continue to be seen as permanent minors, without any power to represent themselves in a business deal or a court case. Violence against women has increased on the domestic level as well as on the collective level, as witnessed by

Afghanistan is currently the fourth most corrupt country in the world1. A few years ago it was in the middle of the league table of corruption. Bribery is a daily occurrence. Everything has a price and the police and civil servants ask for it: 3 euros to drive your lorry through a road-block, 15 euros to speed up some simple paperwork in the ministry of transport, 3,000 euros for the release of a family member arrested for

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1 Figures from the latest report by Transparency International. http://www. transparency.org/ 2 Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Afghanistan Heroin Trade’. The New York Times, 5/10/2008.

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the public floggings. The women’s prison is full of women condemned for adultery, a legal process that allows one to get rid of an inconvenient daughter or an unwanted wife.

From the windows of the Corolla I can see the hustle and bustle of Shar-e Naw shopping district. I have time to observe the pavements as the car moves forward slowly thanks to the traffic jams. Burkas are once again part of Kabul’s sights, as they were under the Taliban. It is no wonder that millions of Afghans failed to vote in last August’s elections. Official figures speak of a voter turnout of 50%, but independent observers put the figure at below 35%. In these elections Karzai has beaten all records for a lack of scruples for holding onto power: he has allowed the return of the bloody warlord Abdul Raschid Dostum in order to obtain the vote of the Uzbek tribe; he negotiated an Islamic code that is restricts women with Hazara Shia clerics in order to secure the support of this ethnic group of Mongol origin; and negotiated with Taliban leaders in the Kabul district for a suspension of terrorist activity on election day. The icing on the cake is massive electoral fraud that affected more than one and a half million ballot papers3.

3 ‘Sacked envoy Peter Galbraith accuses UN of ‘cover-up’ on Afghan vote fraud’. The Times, 1/10/2009.

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Public disaffection is inevitable when faced with a parliament plagued with warlords, druglords and now NGO-lords as well. This is the latest group of swine and riff raff to come to power in Afghanistan. Currently, the country is the temporary home to some 5,000 foreign citizens officially dedicated to humanitarian aid, reconstruction work and political monitoring. They all receive high salaries as compensation for the risks involved in their work. They live in privileged ghettos and dine in the twenty or so restaurants dotted around the city that Catalan International View

are reserved for foreigners, such as the Atmosphere and the Sufi, surrounded by high walls and armed guards. The majority of Afghans are unable to enter these places, where Western men and women eat succulent steaks and drink mojitos and Californian wine. Ordinary taxi drivers like Khaliljatullah are unauthorised to pick up passengers from outside these establishments. Only two companies have authorisation and their drivers need impeccable credentials.

A large part of the international aid is absorbed by these foreigners, but none of them would be in Afghanistan without an Afghan partner to help with the ‘paperwork’. These are the NGO-lords, who conduct their business mounting ad hoc companies in order to benefit from projects financed by international institutions or European NGOs. Only a fraction of the money that is sent ends up being invested in the projects themselves.

This is the status quo that the West does not know how to change. The problem is that the military strategy does not work either. Eight years have passed and the Taliban have regrouped and have won the support of a population marginalized by central government, disenchanted with promises of reconstruction and all-too-frequently the victims of bombing by Western aircraft: mistakes or collateral damage. There are 100,000 foreign soldiers, more than half of which are American.

The White House has the dilemma of sending more troops, changing tactics, or both. General McChrystal himself, the commander of foreign troops in Afghanistan, has recognised the need to send more soldiers. Not to ensure victory, he says, but to avoid defeat. He is also warning that we need to change our military tactics: put an end to aerial bombardments and above all else, win back the confidence of the civilians by becoming more involved in the protec-

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tion of villages and roads. Doing so will mean risking the lives of more marines and we all know how the White House wants to avoid images of coffins draped with the American flag returning home.

In trying to resolve the conflict, Obama is attempting to not be caught between two public opinions: the Afghan and the American. Nevertheless, his doubts are a distinct improvement on the Bush administration, who always thought that if deaths were inevitable they might as well be Afghan civilians, as opposed to American marines.

of a change that has not materialised, obliging women to live under a misogynist system and forcing everyone to choose between bastards and riff raff: warlords, tribal chiefs, drug traffickers and the corrupt. The diplomats, investors and humanitarian workers have not collaborated fully either. The parallel world that has been established behind walls and barbed wire insulates them from the misery and frustrations of the people they officially want to help, and it distances them from their hearts.

Nowadays, many Western foreign ministers want to include talks with moderate Taliban in this change of tactics. Ultimately, it is a disappointment for those that are tired of including more bandits in power. The great fiasco for Europe and the United States is in having failed a people with promises

I finish writing in my notebook and find myself cynically showing my European passport in an attempt to avoid the traffic jam caused by a military patrol. Khaliljatullah laughs: the attempt has failed; the Corolla has run out of petrol.

*Nicolás Valle (Acehúche, 1964). Journalist for the foreign news desk of TV3 (Catalunya Television). Author of ‘Ubuntu. Estimada Terra Africana’ (Ubuntu. Beloved African Land. Published by Proa, 2008). He carries out a range of academic tasks at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He previously worked on the foreign desk of the Avui newspaper. He specialises in African current affairs, a continent in where he has travelled extensively.

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South Ossetia in Russia’s Shadow

by Natàlia Boronat i Rovira*

When you arrive in South Ossetia by road from Russia, one sees a series of posters of the ‘thank you, Russia’ kind. They serve to remind one of the official Russian and South Ossetian version of the lightning-fast war of August 2008 between Tbilissi and Moscow for control of this republic that ‘Russia saved from Georgian aggression’.

Another poster says, ‘Ossetia is indivisible’, in reference to the historical division of Ossetia, which extends along the two sides of the Caucasus mountain range and was annexed by the Russian Empire at the end of the eighteenth century. With the disintegration of the Soviet Union it was divided between two states: Russia and Georgia.

A little further on, the first signs of the war are a series of Georgian villages that are abandoned and in ruins, indiscriminately destroyed by Russian forces as part of the so-called ‘Operation Forcing Georgia to Peace’ when they crossed the border to defend this breakaway Georgian republic from the attack launched by Tbilisi on the night of the 7th and 8th of August against Tskhinval, the capital of South Ossetia. In order to escape the Russian counter-offensive, the majority of the population of the Georgian enclaves in South Ossetia had to flee and take refuge in Georgia.

The Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvili, stated at the start of the war in 2008 that the attack was a response to an invasion by Moscow’s army and Russian provocation against Georgian villages and peacekeeping soldiers. The latter formed part of a mixed contingent that ensured peace in the republic, alongside Russian and South Ossetian troops.

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The Kremlin firmly denied it had sent its troops to South Ossetia before the conflict and also condemned Georgian provocations and American military support for Georgia. Moscow interpreted the attack as Georgia’s attempt to re-establish its territorial integrity, an indispensable precondition for membership of the NATO club.

Some Russian analysts believe that Saakashvili was convinced he would not achieve his goal, since Russia would come out in defence of South Ossetia, but he needed to show Georgian public opinion he had tried.

Thanks to Russian political and economic support, both South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the other breakaway Georgian republic, have enjoyed de facto independence from Georgia since the 90s, while remaining officially unrecognised. These two territories were two of the so-called ‘frozen conflicts’ of the post-Soviet arena since, with the collapse of the USSR, they did not wish to form part of Georgia. The ensuing wars of the 90s against Tbilisi’s central power displaced thousands of Georgian citizens.

According to a report commissioned by the European Union led by Heidi Tagliavini, a Swiss diplomat who is a specialist on the Caucasus, Georgia started the war of August 2008 when it

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began massive bombing of Tskhinval.

Russia responded with a disproportionate armed response and moved outside of the strict confines of the conflict zone, which is to say it entered land where Georgia’s ownership was undisputed.

The report blames both countries for being responsible for rising tensions that ended in armed conflict. It was unable to support Tbilisi’s version of events that says the Russian army entered South Ossetia before Georgia launched its attack. It does, however, agree that there were some mercenaries and soldiers of other Russian forces involved, aside from the peacekeeping troops. More significantly, the report blames both sides for having violated international law and places the death toll at 850.

With Georgia’s surprise midnight attack, shortly after Saakashvili announced on television a unilateral

ceasefire following the incidents of that same week, Georgia handed Russia the perfect excuse for crossing its borders.

It had a reason to defend the citizens of South Ossetia, who had been provided with Russian passports. During preceding years Georgia had accused Russia of wanting to annex the two breakaway Georgian republics.

The report blames both countries for being responsible for rising tensions that ended in armed conflict Following the five-day war of 2008, Moscow recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia’s independence, a move that was condemned by the international community. Only Nicaragua and Venezuela have followed Russia’s lead.

A week after American President Barack Obama told the Kremlin that Catalan International View

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Georgian territorial integrity was the main sticking point between the two countries, the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited South Ossetia, in defiance of Georgia and the West. The visit took place in July 2009, shortly before the celebration of the first anniversary of the war.

South Ossetia has become Russia’s nearest platform to the energy routes that transport oil from the Caspian Sea towards Europe without passing through Russia

Fatima Marguiieva, Professor of History at the University of Tskhinval, South Ossetia’s capital, believes that her people have the right to independence since they formed part of the Russian Empire before Georgia existed as a state. Following the 1917 Revolution they went on to form part of Georgia as part of the USSR. Like many people in Tskhinval, Marguiieva believes that at different periods of the twentieth century, ‘Tbilisi applied fascist, assimilationist policies towards the Ossetians’.

For years Russia has used South Ossetia and Abkhazia’s aspirations for independence as a bargaining chip in their tense relations with Georgia. This has been more in evidence since 2004, when Tbilisi’s foreign policies turned more towards the West, becoming the United States’ ally in the Caucasus and planning to enter the Atlantic Alliance.

This would mean NATO’s presence at the gates of an unstable Russian Caucasus. South Ossetia and Abkhazia are part of the main divergences between the West, which sees Georgian territorial integrity as nonnegotiable and Russia, which has increased its military presence after having recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia’s sovereignty.

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A year after the war, the population that is left in South Ossetia is thankful to Russia. Oksana Khubejova, a 24year old South Ossetian photographer, expresses a widely-held point of view when she says that the Russian president, ‘took the right action at the right time’, when he decided to send Russian troops to South Ossetia to confront Georgia’s attack and ‘we should be thankful for that’.

For many who lived through last year’s war, such as Ira Kuzàieva, who spent her savings on buying guns for her sons in 1989 in order to stand up to the Georgian aggression she saw coming, ‘Moscow saved us from genocide’.

Natalia, a young political scientist from South Ossetia who works in Russia and does not wish to use her full name for security reasons, is also thankful to Moscow for saving her people.

However, she does not feel that Russia wants to defend the South Ossetian population; rather she is convinced that ‘the Kremlin is only interested in land’. It is strategically important because of its location on the other side of the Caucasus mountain range. With the military presence in South Ossetia, Moscow has a platform nearer to the energy routes that transport oil from the Caspian Sea towards Europe without passing through Russia. An example is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Nabucco gas pipeline project, the European Union’s plan to ship gas from Central Asia and the Caspian without entering Russian territory.

Koko Dzutsate has spent 20 years of his life fighting the Georgians as part of South Ossetia’s militia. He believes that it is a coincidence that they have had Moscow’s support, since ‘Russia’s strategic interests have coincided with the South Ossetian liberation movement’. The militia considers that, ‘Mos-

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cow sees this land as a military base that could stop a possible expansion of NATO in the Caucasus’.

A second winter without a roof over their heads In Tskhinval, reminders of the war are still very much in evidence exactly one year after: windows covered with plastic as people have no money to buy glass, buildings ruined by the Georgian bombings, with those still standing scarred by bullet holes, the darkness at night time because the street lighting does not work.

The victims of the conflict received an initial compensation of 1,100 euros immediately after the war, with a promise to those who had lost their homes that they would have a new one by this winter. As the winter of 2009 approaches, however, the homeless complain that the cold is coming and they are worried about passing another winter at the mercy of the elements in the inadequate tents that have been provided or having to stay with family members once again. The houses they were promised for the 1st of December 2009 are far from completion.

A movement has emerged in South Ossetia that opposes the current President, Eduard Kokoity, who is seen as corrupt, embezzlement of Russian economic aid and the silencing of dissidents, many of whom have had to take

refuge in North Ossetia because they feel unsafe in Tskhinval.

Fatima Marguíieva, who dreams that South Ossetia will one day become a democratic state, feels that people are too frightened to say what they think.

Speaking freely has cost her house detention for possession of illegal weapons, ‘everyone has guns at home after the 20 years we’ve been through. But in my case they’ve punished my political position’. The professor has condemned the corruption surrounding the president and the fact that the government has forgotten the victims. Marguíieva feels very tired, ‘after so many years suffering under Georgia’s fascist policies’, because, ‘we finally found freedom and now we have to put up with this tyrant’.

Complaints that the reconstruction work is preceding so slowly and the suspicions that those involved in the South Ossetian government are pocketing part of the aid money Russia donates for the rebuilding has led some South Ossetians not directly linked to politics to take their case straight to Moscow. They hope that the Kremlin will bring order to the republic. South Ossetian citizens have written a letter to the Russian president and prime minister as they are seen as their only hope. The letter calls on the Russian authorities to, ‘save us once more’, this time, ‘from the moral extermination’ taking place of the families in the republic that lost their property.

*Natàlia Boronat i Rovira (Salomó, 1973). Holds a degree in Information Sciences from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and in Slavic Philology from the Universitat de Barcelona. Since 2001 she has spent most of her time in Russia. She worked in St. Petersburg as a Catalan lecturer at the State University and in the tourism industry. She now lives in Moscow, where she works as a freelance journalist for different Catalan media organisations and reports on the current situation in the Post-Soviet area.

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Human rights and universal jurisdiction: the demands of ‘never again’

by Gerardo Pisarello* and Jaume Asens*

Violations of human rights constitute an indelible stain on humanity’s long history, especially when they involve crimes that seriously offend it or harm it thanks to their cruelty. In order to overcome this, societies have attempted to design mechanisms that avoid impunity and which afford victims and their families adequate protection. The attempts have been legion and have met with varying degrees of success. Defeat has often been the result, although some partial victories have been achieved. The debate surrounding universal jurisdiction, which is to say the possibility of state judges having the authority to try these crimes, independently of who has committed them or who has been the victim, is proof of such progress.

The first halting steps to seriously confront the question of responsibility for crimes against humanity date from the Second World War. The tragic experience of Nazism highlighted the need for a ‘never again’ to the extermination and the systematic imposition of inhumane and degrading treatment based on social, ethnic, national or similar reasons. The promise of this ‘never again’ materialised in documents such as the United Nations Charter or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In order to defeat the ghost of the Nazi horror, the Nuremberg trials established the principle that there are state crimes with no statute of limitations, that do not allow immunity, 76

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whoever the perpetrators may be and wherever they may have taken place.

Unfortunately, it soon became quite clear that this principle was not equally valid for both the victors and the vanquished, for those who had power and those who had lost it. Other equally despicable state crimes, such as the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden, or the later Stalinist purges were relegated to a realm of more or less impunity. In spite of a policy of double standards the latent promise of ‘never again’ continues to resonate into the future.

The continued existence of all manner of wars and outrages ensured that

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international law articulated following Nuremberg, the Convention Against Genocide, part of the Geneva Conventions on the right to wage war and the Convention Against Torture, was adopted both within states and in their relations with others, at least formally.

In light of this slow, oft-resisted process the conviction took hold that it was necessary to create independent, efficient tribunals and international commissions with a capacity to try crimes against humanity, thereby avoiding impunity. In a similar vein, an idea gradually took hold that these reforms would only occur if the local tribunals themselves contributed to a public debate as to the reach of said crimes and as to the means by which they can be prevented.

In Spain’s case, the principle of universal jurisdiction emerged as a direct consequence of the ratification of the before-mentioned conventions and treaties. This was the case when the Constitutional Court overruled the Supreme Court in the case of the acts of genocide committed in Guatemala.

In this way, different Spanish courts rushed to meet their legal obligations to investigate and try acts such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, irrespective of the origin of the victims or the perpetrators. Many of the cases had an important international impact and led to many countries being able to come to terms with a dictatorial past that in many ways had been immune from prosecution. One of the most notorious instances was Catalan International View

The Nuremberg Trial

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that of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, detained in London on the orders of the Audiencia Nacional (the National Court of Spain). In spite of the fact that Pinochet was eventually released on ‘humanitarian grounds’, the case played a decisive role in Chile and also countries such as Argentina, adding support to arguments in favour of abolishing pro-amnesty and full pardon laws, that had been passed with the intention of allowing the perpetrators of such atrocious crimes to go unpunished.

The tragic experience of Nazism highlighted the need for a ‘never again’ to the extermination and the systematic imposition of inhumane and degrading treatment of human beings Pinochet’s arrest marked a turning point. On one hand it served to give support to the different national and international movements in the fight against crimes against humanity, irrespective of the nationality of the perpetrators, where they took place, or the origin of the victims. On the other, it served to send a warning to the political class in general: employing the state’s apparatus to murder and torture, while subsequently ensuring one’s own immunity, is not without risk. It will always be possible that universal legal jurisdiction will come into play and those who have committed genocide or torture will have to answer for their acts. This served to strengthen one of the arguments the illustrious Cesare de Beccaria considered especially effective when it comes to preventing certain crimes: convince the perpetrators that they will not find immunity anywhere on earth.

As a result of the Pinochet case, the arguments in favour of universal justice gained in strength. Gradually, a global 78

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order began to emerge that allowed international courts and bodies to interact with national courts and bodies, such as the truth and reconciliation commissions, with the objective of ensuring ‘the right to truth’ and avoiding immunity from such heinous crimes.

Nevertheless, the fruits of this process proved to be contradictory.

On one hand, the majority of international tribunals created for the persecution of crimes of this type have only served to bring to trial those responsible for violations of human rights who have been ‘defeated’ politically or in a war. Examples are the UN’s Special Courts for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, or the mixed courts in Sierra Leone or Lebanon. Nevertheless, when an attempt has been made to establish impartial international courts, such as the International Criminal Court in 2002, the veto of nations such as the United States, Israel and China has been immediate. In the eyes of public opinion, the international courts appear on a global scale to be an attempt to maintain the principle that all powers, whether public or private, must respect human rights. However, thanks to their own limitations and the way in which the most powerful countries use them, these supra-state courts remain an ineffective tool in the search for justice and in seeking redress for the victims of crimes against humanity.

As an alternative to these limits, some state tribunals began to employ universal jurisdiction to try crimes against humanity, where allowed for by the law. The basic idea was that the voluntary, deliberate failure of any state to meet its international obligations called for the intervention of another that, as a representative of the international community, would take on or overcome said deficiencies. In was not a case of introducing an exception to the rule of

Opinion

territorial sovereignty, but rather to extend its reach, in the light of universal jurisdiction. The existence of voluntarily adopted state obligations in the matter of human rights thus led to a decline in the classical understanding of the notion of sovereignty. All states, as delegates or representatives of the international community, should and could exercise their jurisdiction in the face of especially serious crimes that break the rule of law beyond their own borders. If a state fails to act, another may legally take on the role, so long as they respect the legal guarantees that international law on human rights dictates.

Paradoxically, one of the first courts to employ this form of argument was Israel’s Supreme Court. After the Second World War, many of those accused of having committed atrocious crimes had fled to other countries, in particular to parts of South America. One of them was Adolf Eichmann, a highranking Nazi with German citizenship who was a refugee in Argentina.

Eichmann was kidnapped and shipped to Israel, where he subsequently stood trial and was sentenced to death for the crime of genocide carried out by the Nazi regime. Israel was not the delicti comissi court, but the Supreme Court justified the competence of the Israeli courts with specific reference to the principle of universal jurisdiction. In terms of legal procedure Israel’s actions were clearly inadmissible. The idea behind the sentence was more attractive, however: every time a serious international crime is committed, apart from the victims themselves, the international community is hurt.

Beyond the principles themselves, the recourse to universal jurisdiction was to meet with contradictory degrees of success. Its invocation has met with less resistance when it has been employed by state tribunals with sufficient inter-

national political support and/or when those on trial have lacked such support.

In the remaining cases it has come up against the resistance privileges granted to the most powerful.

Spain’s example is most enlightening in this regard. The principle of universal justice operated without controversy so long as it did not interfere with the development of diplomatic relations and international negotiations. As a result it met little resistance when dealing with the boarding of ships carrying drugs in international waters, even when Spain was not the intended recipient of the cargo and it had no connection with the acts. On the contrary, when it was used to persecute crimes against humanity carried out by citizens of countries such as Rwanda, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and Argentina, the criticisms and pressures increased dramatically.

While such pressures were thought to lack sufficient political force the trials continued. The situation changed, however, when great powers such as China, the United States and Israel came under the legal spotlight. When the courts tried to bring under public scrutiny events such as crimes committed in Tibet or against followers of Falun Gong, CIA rendition flights, the murder in Iraq of the journalist José Couso, the tortures in Guantanamo, or the massacres in Gaza, the Spanish government finally felt obliged to bow to the pressure of realpolitik and to consider the need for a reform of universal legal jurisdiction.

Many of these initiatives were clearly justified, however. The allegations of crimes against humanity made against the United States and Israel have been supported by numerous reports by international organisations, NGOs and human rights bodies, many of which are based in the countries Catalan International View

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The recourse to universal jurisdiction has met with less resistance when it has been employed by state tribunals with sufficient international support and/or when those on trial have lacked such support involved. What is more, the State of Israel is one of the countries that has least respected resolutions made by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, by maintaining practices that have been outlawed, such as ‘selective assassinations’, or the torture of prisoners. In this context, the actions of the Spanish courts had the undeniable benefit of creating a debate as to the terrible crimes that were occurring, both in the countries that were supposedly responsible and in those of the victims. The concept of establishing investigative commissions and even of 80

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beginning legal proceedings to apportion blame was considered in the United States, Palestine and in Israel itself.

Eventually, the ‘reason of state’ won.

In spite of recognizing the illegal nature of many of the acts carried out by the Bush administration, President Barack Obama announced that ‘we have to look forward and not back’. It is an argument that, taken to its logical conclusion, would stall any attempts to apportion blame for crimes committed by the state apparatus. Likewise, the Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni revealed to the media her intention to put pressure on the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs Miguel Ángel Moratinos in order to guarantee immunity from prosecution for the military and those responsible for torture and assassination.

The outcome has been that the Spanish government has set limits on

Opinion

the universal jurisdiction of its tribunals. These limits include confining the court’s jurisdiction to cases in which there are Spanish victims, to where those responsible are in the country and to cases in which an international tribunal or a court from the country concerned is not in the process of prosecuting the crimes. This decision is a sad chapter in the fight against impunity in grave crimes. This opinion is shared by legal bodies and organisms such as the International Federation of Human Rights or the Pro Human Rights Association of Spain, who have seriously criticized such measures.

Perhaps in the eyes of the government, as well as a large part of the opposition, it appears to be an efficient manoeuvre and the only response pos-

sible in diplomatic terms. Nevertheless, concerning as it does representatives of institutions that aspire to gain credibility through invoking human rights and the rule of law, it is a dangerous balancing act. The effect will be that from now on, many will understandably believe that institutional justice is more than anything justice at the service of the winners and the powerful, and never against them. The spread of this precept brings with it an undoubtedly de-legitimising effect. Above all, it strengthens the idea that in order to make ‘never again’ effective against state crimes, calling for it in institutional spaces is not enough: it is necessary to make it heard beyond them, frequently against their own narrow political interests.

*Gerardo Pisarello

*Jaume Asens

Holds a PhD in Law. Professor of Constitutional Law at the Universitat de Barcelona and VicePresident of the Observatory of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Holds a degree in Law and Philosophy and is a doctoral student in Political and Social Sciences. He is a lawyer and member of the defence commission of the Col·legi d’Advocats de Barcelona (the Barcelona Bar Association).

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Catalan International View

81

Science and Technology

The reputation and reliability of information in the digital realm

by Vicent Partal *

The Internet has brought about enormous changes in the way in which we receive and consume information. More recently, however, it has begun to make changes to the way in which we create information and its social impact, leading to a rethinking of the role and credibility of the traditional media and the media in general.

The changes are largely occurring because the sources of news are public.

Until now, the work of journalists has essentially been opaque to the reader.

They had access to sources that were inaccessible to the public, from press releases and agency reports to direct contact with the protagonists of the news. The journalist wrote up their view of this collection of information, whether correct or not. This has now radically changed since the public can investigate news at first hand in much the same way as a journalist. We are also surrounded by free channels of information that bring us news at the same speed as the journalists. When in the last United States’ presidential campaign Barack Obama announced his choice of vice president by SMS, the news reached the most influential 82

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journalist in Washington and the lowliest party activist in a far off valley in Oregon in the same instant. This gesture was highly significant.

A second factor is that the concept of a foreign press no longer exists. This automatically raises the level of the freedom of expression and thought.

Nowadays, thanks to the web, any media organisation from anywhere in the world is local. The spread of automatic translators make them still more so.

This has a double significance. On one hand it is no longer possible to control the media, since it is impossible to control the media in the whole world. A prime example is Berlusconi’s scandal with the female escorts in Italy. The incident erupted when reports appeared in other media organisations in the EU,

Science and Technology

which were subsequently avidly read by the Italian public, anxious for information. Another example is the enormous following British media organisations such as the BBC and The Guardian have in the United States, particularly in the reporting of the events in Iraq and Afghanistan. The readers go over the heads of the overly-timid local media, accessing foreign media. In Spain, following the Madrid bombings, virtually all of the large media organisations, including those on the left, initially supported the version of events that was manipulated by Aznar. Nevertheless, they were unable to prevent their readers from accessing more critical and rigorous, digital information that in many cases came from a foreign source. One can recall for example, that while no one asked those connected to ETA whether they had anything to do with the attacks, an interview with Arnaldo Otegui in the ClarĂ­n newspaper of Buenos Aires was one of the most

read of the day. Especially by readers in Spain.

World Connection Density

This is not the whole story, however. The fact that media organisations can no longer be considered ‘foreign’ is bringing us a different vision of the world. A new wave of sources, blogs and testimonies are appearing to counter the views of the large media organisations with their essentially vested interests. These new sources are able to tell us what is really happening better than anyone, in spite of the chaos. The recent events in Iran are a case in point.

A new wave of sources, blogs and testimonies are appearing to counter the views of the large media organisations with their essentially vested interests A third fundamental change being brought about by the Internet is one Catalan International View

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of plurality. The fact that nobody only accesses one website increases the level of pluralism and makes the manipulation of news more difficult. While it is normal for someone to read only one newspaper, thereby becoming a prisoner of the newspaper’s information and its intentions, I have never heard of anyone who only visits one website. What is more, they do not limit themselves to websites compiled by journalists, meaning they considerably broaden the spread of opinions and possible viewpoints they may be exposed to. There is still the considerable part played by email as a means of finding and distributing news among colleagues and acquaintances. Its efficacy in this sense is outstanding and produces a qualitative leap forward in terms of the transparency of information, although sometimes we receive an overdose of news.

Questioning the reliability of the media and the trustworthiness of the news should not be a rhetorical, academic exercise, but rather a daily obligation Finally, one of the most innovative elements that we have witnessed in recent years is the socialised production of news brought about by blogs and social networks. It is a phenomenon that is both incipient and disturbing while being difficult for news organisations to swallow. The impact of these phenomena is even greater since the crisis within the traditional media has many facets and it is easy to see that one of them is the great mistrust that it generates among many sectors of society.

This lack of confidence is produced by the growth of the large media organisations. The larger they become, the more removed they are from their readers and the closer and more connected they become to the establishment. The fact 84

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that these large media organisations often have business interests in diverse sectors leads to questionable behaviour that challenge their credibility. It is an open secret, for example, that El PaĂ­s newspaper will rarely print a bad review of a book published by Alfaguara (a publisher owned by the same media group). When we discover that veritable icons of the press such as Le Figaro are owned by a proprietor that also manufactures fighter planes, everything seems uncertain and the doubts grow.

The construction of large media organisations that no longer have information as their rasion d’etre is a serious threat to journalism that has been heard with unusual force in recent years. It is also one of the reasons why the Internet is so successful, since it offers a concrete, visible, immediate and consistent alternative to the degeneration of the arguments and traditional forms of journalism.

Another factor we should not forget is that the almost-constant technological revolution that the Internet is undergoing allows us to do new things on a daily basis that were almost unthinkable a few months ago. For this reason, the process of critiquing and even substituting the traditional media has found a major ally.

The move from modems to broadband, initially in businesses and institutions and later for home use, has opened up a new area for the digital media. At first one had to go online to read the news. This is no longer the case. In fact, one need not have a computer at all, as the Internet can be accessed on a telephone. The spontaneity and ease with which it is possible to open an Internet browser and take a look at what is going on is astonishing. The spread of broadband, which can also be mobile, allows an ever-increasing access to

Science and Technology

digital information. It also means that television as we currently see it is directly threatened by the web, following a similar path to that of printed news over the last ten years.

While hardware is becoming simpler, the simplification of the processes of editing and publication on the web is absolutely amazing. Nowadays, with blogs, WordPress and other editing software that is easily available on the market, one no longer needs to be technically inclined or have a knowledge of HTML in order to publish information and comments on the web that have the appearance and the speed of the professional media. There is even the start of a space for the production and distribution of multimedia material. The phenomenon of the podcast emerged before the idea of a form of global radio on demand, based as it is on devices such as the iPod and programmes distributed in the mp3 format, that are often made by a lone individual.

Podcasting is a distinctly P2P (peerto-peer) phenomenon, which is to say it is typical of a totally decentralised network. The best-known example of P2P is Napster, with its use of the mp3 format. Together they permanently revolutionised the way in which people transmit and exchange music. Virtually bringing an end to the old model of a well-established music industry, obliging it to completely rethink the way in which it works. For some time now I have asked myself where the Napster

of information can be found and what the next phenomenon will be that will make us all rethink the way we consume information, thereby attacking the media’s economic base. I have no clear idea as to what will happen, but I suspect that its presence is much closer than we imagine and that when it erupts it will devour the current media with the same strength and speed as the mp3 format and Napster devoured the world of record companies and the distribution of music. Perhaps there will be some new developments, such as the ever-present RSS feeds, or a combination of these with blogs, might give us a clue.

In the current context, questioning the reliability of the media and the trustworthiness of the news should not be a rhetorical, academic exercise, but rather a daily obligation for every reader, for every citizen, as a practical activity. The dangers that most certainly exist are at present mostly due to the industrial proclivity of the traditional journalistic profession, rather than the chaos generated by the new media. It may be worth pointing out that, etymologically speaking, profession means obligation. While it is true that the Internet has given us powerful tools with which to broaden freedom of thinking, the capacity to contrast and the freedom of expression also oblige us to be ever-vigilant as to the information we receive. Only from our own critical capacity can we aspire to understand the world.

*Vicent Partal (BĂŠtera, 1960). Journalist and director of Vilaweb.

He is considered one of the pioneers of the Internet in the Catalan Countries. In 1994 he created the first Internet news service in Catalonia called El Temps Online. In 1995 he created Partal, Maresma &Associats, a consultancy company dedicated to the use of the Internet and facilitating access to it. From this company emerged the Catalonian directory Infopista, which gave rise to Vilaweb in 1996. The latter is the most popular electronic news in Catalan; with more than fifty editions all round the world.

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Green Debate

The green economy:

reinvention or capitalism in disguise?

by Pere Torres*

A ‘Green New Deal’, a sustainable economy: this was the great slogan when the enormity of the economic crisis made itself known. The United Nations and the European Union were among the more enthusiastic parties. They soon produced reports to this effect. It did not seem to require a major effort. The majority of ingredients have been talked about for years; in fact they have been applauded for years. Nevertheless, no political or business leader has dared go beyond the rhetoric. The reason: the healthy state of the economy. Now, however, the situation is ripe for these old ideas to be given a second hearing. I shall try to examine some of the concepts in this article that takes as read that there are four main elements to constructing a sustainable economy: the energy model, the production model, the model of wealth estimation and the fiscal model. They are inextricably linked, but in this article I shall only examine the first two. The word limit rules!

The energy model Let us begin with a historical observation: every great economic age has depended on its own form of energy.

When we were hunter-gatherers our main source of energy was muscular.

When we developed stable settlements, developed agriculture, animal husbandry and the production of crafts, we were sustained by biomass, principally wood.

The Industrial Revolution gave way to fossil fuels, which is where we find ourselves at present. If we are proposing a post-industrial economy, it seems logical that we must entrust it to another source of energy.

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It has its own logic: every energy source has a limit to its capacity to satisfy human requirements. There comes a time, however, when demand outstrips supply and the energy goes from driving the engine to putting a brake on growth. Nowadays, the enormous quantity of fossil fuels that we consume means our reserves are rapidly declining and resources are increasingly difficult and expensive to obtain, prices increase and speculation flourishes. At the same time, massive consumption means that negative externalities are turned into problems with an enormous impact, such as air pollution in cities or climate change.

Green Debate

Humanity’s future development cannot be sustained by fossil fuels, although it is unthinkable (and unnecessary) that they should disappear, especially natural gas, which has a satisfactory environmental behaviour.

Nonetheless, they must cease to be the major part of the energy pie in order to make way for complimentary sources.

The major players will be energy sources that do not emit greenhouse gases. This viewpoint is not questioned by anyone who has examined the data and understands the cause. The only uncertainty is whether it is better to wait until market forces bring about this situation, or on the contrary, encourage it to occur more quickly and, perhaps, less painfully.

To this end, a real transition towards a green economy does not consist of praising renewable energy or even of promoting it. In reality, the conditions for substituting fossil fuels with a combination of alternative sources must be established that, by offering more benefits, avoid causing the same problems.

The American economist, Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, sees this proposal as being divided into four parts: relying on the superiority of renewable energies, rethinking buildings so that they contribute to the generation and conservation of energy, promoting hydrogen as a means of storage and reconfiguring transport networks and energy distribution so that they are intelligent (the so-called ‘smart grids’). This is one suggestion, there are others. Nevertheless, it shows how radical the changes need to be in this field, not simply a matter of putting up wind turbines and solar panels as energy accessories.

If we are proposing a post-industrial economy, it seems logical that we must entrust it to another source of energy

The production model A sustainable economy, however, goes beyond this. If we look once again at history, the Industrial Revolution profoundly modified the working practices of agriculture and crafts.

It was a true revolution in the concept and methods of production. In order to Catalan International View

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Green Debate

make economic development sustainable we need another theoretical revolution in the means of production.

A strategy for a sustainable economy that defers a resolute reform of governance is not very credible Here we find that ideas are more embryonic, more confused. Ideology plays an important part. For a while now, there have been a proliferation of movements that defend de-growth, slow food, self-sufficiency, local alternative currencies and so on. Now that tariff barriers are falling, it appears we are raising ‘ethical’ barriers that, in the name of a more ‘ecological’ world, call for local production, especially in the food sector. I am not sure if returning to the pre-industrial agrarian model is the optimal solution to overcoming the industrial one. For now, the few broad studies that have examined our understanding on this topic have not found significant benefits in either the nutritional or environmental aspects of such production. On the other hand, what would be the effect of this on many communities in the Third World that hope to find a way out of poverty with the export of agricultural products to the West? Here is one of the defining questions of the model: domestically produced products or global commerce?

In my opinion, we still need useful tools for measuring the benefits of one or the other and the answer that must be sought depending on the product or the service. Clearly, each side is ready to defend its viewpoint. To repeat: in this area, ideology is still more influential than knowledge.

Another battle takes place over waste. The only way to overcome waste is to delete the word from the diction88

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ary. When we classify a material as waste, our mind makes two associations: that it is dirty and that we should throw it away. One cannot construct a sustainable economy with these prejudices. The key is in transforming lineal design (raw material-product-waste) into circular design (raw materialproduct-raw material). This change has been suggested for many years now.

The pioneering work led by Robert U. Ayres some twenty years ago with the United Nations University is well known. He called it ‘eco-restructuring’, while others give it the more generic title of ‘industrial ecology’. These ideas are once more taking on a new vitality, with renewed proposals that inspire theorists who understand the language of modern communication. One could mention, for example, a book which has made a large impact, Cradle to Cradle,

by William McDonough and Michael Braungart (North Point Press, 2002). It is an attempt to understand that everything that a business produces should be something it can sell, whether as a product for the consumer or as a raw material for another company.

Creation is another aspect of production in which fundamental change can also be detected. On one hand, as Henry W. Chesbrough explained in Open Innovation (Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, 2006), large businesses are abandoning the closed culture of research and development in order to open it up, both to look for external innovation and to offer their own. We can also see confrontation between Internet users and the audiovisual sector for copyright protection. It is a serious culture shock, between a competitive vision of creation (that of industrial societies) and a cooperative, interactive vision that could become a characteristic of informational societies. In short, there are enough reasons to think that creativity

Green Debate

(from innovation to art) will need to learn how to generate income via other means than the current ones.

All of these questions as to the model of production, as well as many others ruled out by the brevity of the article, are those that will decide whether we move to a sustainable economy or not. Thinking that we make progress through ostentatious but marginal acts, such as eliminating plastic bags from supermarkets is naïve.

Partial conclusion In the energy model and productive model, as with the measurement of wealth and the taxation system, the changes have to be profound, a total rethink, to be carried out even while there is doubt as to the success of the measures. For this reason we run the

risk of employing overly-conservative attitudes and succumbing to the temptation to merely pay lip service to the measures. They serve to paint the façade of the building while leaving the interior unrestored.

This gives rise to another important question: who is responsible for taking decisions? Political power or businesses?

Councils or international organisations?

Traditional states or national communities that wish to have the capacity to make decisions on the events that affect them? The viability of a sustainable economy also depends on how decisionmaking power is redistributed. In this aspect, conservatism is even stronger.

At the same time, a strategy for a sustainable economy that defers a resolute reform of governance is not very credible. This brings to mind a question the French ask which seems especially pertinent: vous dites ou vous faites? *Pere Torres

Biologist and environmental consultant. After some time spent on research (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), he joined the Government of Catalonia in 1991. He was in turn secretary of the Catalan Inter-university Council (1991-1993), head of the Environment Minister’s staff (1993-1995), general director of Environmental Planning (1995-2000) and secretary for Regional Planning (2000-2003). Since 2004 he has done consultancy work in public management, sustainability and land use planning and has been a regular contributor to the International Institute for Governability and the Cerdà Institute.

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A Short Story from History1

The birth of modern submarine technology Although the idea of submarine navigation dates from the times of classical Greece (the first evidence of the use of submarine devices comes from the battle of Tiros and the Punic Wars of the 4th and 3rd century before Christ), the birth of modern submarine technology is very much linked to the life of the Catalan politician and inventor Narcís Monturiol.

The Catalan politician and inventor Narcís Monturiol

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This year sees the 150th anniversary of the first immersion of his Ictineo, or fish-ship as it was named at the time, which took place in Barcelona’s harbour in 1859. The rudimentary artefact was made of wood and was manually propelled. The first test was an experiment in order to prove that submarine navigation was possible without any external assistance, as Monturiol had theorised in a publication the previous year.

Catalan International View

It is worth noting that in its original conception, the Ictineo was conceived by Monturiol as a peaceful use of technology, specifically for the exploitation of coral, at that time still very abundant on the Mediterranean coast. Due to the exorbitant costs of the project’s development and the difficulties he encountered in obtaining sufficient private funding, Monturiol turned to the government of the Spanish Queen Isabel II for the necessary funds.

Nevertheless, Monturiol’s political activities were always considered too radical by the Queen’s ministers.

A known republican and follower of the Cabet Utopian school, in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s he was the editor of several magazines, (including The Fraternity), which where closed down by the government, forcing Monturiol into exile in France in 1848-1849, and his disappearance from public life from 1855-1857. The inventor’s political background and the closed-minded attitude that was endemic among the Spanish political and military

elite of the 19th century left Monturiol without the support the government had initially promised. A promise which was more thanks to public enthusiasm resulting from the 1859 tests and the support of key intellectual figures of the time, than the government’s own belief in the invention.

However, Monturiol managed to develop a much-improved version of the submarine, the Ictineo II, which was successfully launched in 1864, again in Barcelona’s harbour.

This was the first mechanically propelled submarine in history to successfully travel underwater. It also counted on an artificial atmosphere which was regenerated indefinitely

and counted on another of Monturiol’s revolutionary inventions, a double hull. Once more, the bureaucratic machinery of the state and a lack of private capital reduced the enormous potential of this new invention, which was finally sold and broken up for scrap in 1868, the same year that the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ was to send Queen Isabel II into exile.

Original blueprints signed by the inventor

For a time a controversy existed between Monturiol and Isaac Peral regarding the paternity of the new submarine technology, but finally in 1889 the latter explicitly recognised Monturiol’s leading role in a letter he wrote to him.

This section is coordinated by

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Catalan International View

Manuel Manonelles i Tarragó

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The Artist

Gregori Iglesias

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The Artist

a sideways connection between Paul Auster and Gregori Iglesias Little Pol finds a copy of The Moon Palace.

You do not understand how, but out of all the books, his hands always, inevitably, alight on a crucial work. The volume has now been turned into a jumble of lines, colour splashing the blackness of the type.

I never know if you hear our voices, or if they are drowned out by the sounds in your head that stop you sleeping.

When the sounds in your mind give you no rest, no chance of finding that longed-for moment of silence, you go to your bookshelf and reach for The Moon Palace, just like young Pol. If it has already been taken by his simple, intuitive hands, hands silently complicit with innocence, you take down another title by Auster, any will do, and open a page at random. Just like Pol, except that he, in his simplicity, is ruled by chance, while you take refuge in sought-for coincidence; a coincidence that is dreamt of and longed for.

They told you not to go out today, but your head is exploding and your anguish is urging you to break down the walls. You leave and take the road to a new place with unfamiliar streets and

unknown faces. You do not wait for coincidence, which is the motor behind Auster’s writing, but provoke it... the sounds in your mind fade out and are replaced by sounds from your imagination.

Starting with a film-still of that coincidence, everything happens almost as if you were following a film script that resonates into the future and the past. Then the words from the book you have left half open on the bench in your studio.

That morning was filled with the criss-crossing of strangers, moving up and down in the spaces of Can Framis. Finding refuge in front of one of your libraries, I thought about how the most important thing is to intuit absences and follow their trails left in paint, as in your books, which survive the collapse of the roof which sheltered them. And there, your characters come in from the light outside, from cracks opening in the walls of the building, attracted by that other light intuited in unopened pages. It is the same process you use with the letters on show in the exhibition, in the sealed envelopes with texts unread by you, which are only to be opened by anonymous gallery visitors.

Glòria Bosch

Espai Volart Carrer Ausiàs Marc, 22 08010 Barcelona Tel. 93 481 79 85 Fax. 93 481 79 84 espaivolart@fundaciovilacasas.com

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A Poem Curated by Enric Bou Chair in Hispanic Studies, Brown University of Providence

THE BLIND COW Joan Maragall Colliding her head against the trunks, Advancing emptily towards the water, Alone goes the cow. She is blind.

At the toss of a stone too purposely thrown The young lad has emptied one eye, And swollen the other over: The cow is blind.

She goes to drink from the fountain she is used to, No longer as steady as before Nor with her companions, but alone.

Her sisters, by glens and knolls, By the silence of meadows and river banks, Ring their cowbells as they graze Fresh grass at random. She would fall.

She bumps her nose into the worn sink, And recoils, affronted, but returns, And bows her head to the water and drinks calmly.

She drinks little and without much thirst; afterwards, she raises To the sky, enormous, her horned head With a grand and tragic gesture; she blinks Over the dead dolls, and returns, Orphan of light under the burning sun, Hesitating over unforgettable paths, Brandishing in languor her long tail.

(Translated by Jordi Torres)

Joan Maragall (Barcelona 1860-1911) was the leading poet and essayist of Modernisme. He introduced Nietzsche to the Iberian Peninsula readership and was acutely aware of the many contradictions in culture and politics at the turn of the century. In Arthur Terry’s incisive evaluation, ‘Though his engagement takes many forms, his underlying sense of poetry as an instrument of metaphysical exploration is never allowed to exclude an awareness of the immediate problems of his own society’. In one of his best-known poems, ‘Oda Nova a Barcelona’ (A New Ode to Barcelona, 1909), he sees Gaudí’s unfinished church the Sagrada Família is a ‘mystical example’ for future generations. His essays which were published in the Diario de Barcelona are crucial to understanding Catalonia’s dreams and tensions during his lifetime.

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