Spain's economic troubles spur Catalonia separatists to take new tack

Separatist sentiment has simmered for decades, fueled by belief the region's needs are given short shrift by Madrid. As austerity looms, Catalonia's independentistas are turning to economic arguments.
Flag day in Barcelona



A protester paints a Catalan flag on the face of another demonstrator in Barcelona during a July march for greater autonomy for Catalonia within Spain. More than 1 million people took part in the protest, police said. (Gustau Nacarino, Reuters / August 15, 2010)


Catalonia is first region in mainland Spain to ban bullfighting Catalonia is first region in mainland Spain to ban bullfighting

By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times

August 15, 2010


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Reporting from Barcelona, Spain —

The economy is flailing, unemployment is sky-high and painful government cutbacks lie ahead. Now is the time, it would seem, for the people of Spain to pull together.

To Joan Puigcercos, it's all the more reason to split up.

A resident of wealthy Catalonia here in the sunny northeastern corner of the country, Puigcercos blames Spain's economic woes on the government in Madrid and what he sees as its irresponsible and discriminatory ways.

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For years, he says, officials blithely spent huge sums on welfare checks and subsidies for poorer parts of Spain, using plenty of tax money from Catalonia, while ignoring the region's needs for better infrastructure and quality public services. So now when he hears Madrid preaching the need for austerity and sacrifice from all, a different solution beckons.

"Either we give in to the politics that have always happened with the Spanish government," said Puigcercos, the leader of the Republican Left of Catalonia party, "or we try to become an independent state."

Those are fighting words in a region that already holds itself aloof from the rest of Spain. But their appeal threatens to intensify during an economic crunch that deepens Catalonians' feelings of being forced to pay for the mistakes of others.

It's a problem with echoes across Europe. Drastic budget cuts to undo years of carefree spending are already tugging at the threads that knit societies together, as workers lose jobs and public services from healthcare to libraries get slashed.

But for Spain and a few other nations, the official penny-pinching also risks aggravating tensions within their borders. In Britain, Scotland chafes against its ties to England, with nationalists urging a referendum on independence. In Italy, the prosperous north throws up its hands at being yoked to, in its view, the lazy, profligate south. French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemish bicker in Belgium.

In Catalonia, separatist sentiment has simmered for decades, fueled by the belief that the region's needs and interests, as well as its distinctive language and culture, are given short shrift by the establishment in Madrid. The region already enjoys a measure of autonomy under an official arrangement with the Spanish government, but many here say it's not enough.

Now, Madrid's austerity measures loom just as Catalonia's independentistas are turning more and more to economic arguments to bolster their case.

Residents grumble that they contribute more than their fair share to the public purse, but that too little of it returns in the form of public investment or services. A 2007 study said Catalonia gave about $9 billion more in revenue a year to the central government than it got back.

In one oft-cited example, residents allege that schoolchildren in the poor region of Extremadura have more computers in their classrooms — with the help of money from Catalonia — than students here at home.

The region has long pressed for better highways and railways because of its status as Spain's biggest exporter. But infrastructure projects across the country are likely to be put on ice as part of the government's cutbacks.

"The first figures that we have seen [show] that the proportion of cutting in Catalonia is bigger than the average for Spain.... We're going to be hurt more," said Muriel Casals, the president of a Catalan cultural organization in Barcelona, the regional capital. "We've been having these kinds of blows for a long time in history, and it's for that that we are so sensitive."

Her organization, Omnium Cultural, sent a wakeup call to the central government last month by staging the biggest show of anti-Madrid feeling in years, a protest of a ruling by Spain's constitutional court that invalidated parts of the official charter granting Catalonia some autonomy.

Hundreds of thousands of residents, many of them waving Catalan independence flags, marched through the streets of Barcelona. In an act practically tantamount to high treason, some protesters wore Dutch soccer jerseys to urge on the Netherlands in the World Cup final against Spain. (The Spanish team, which included several Catalan players, triumphed anyway.)

Elections for Catalonia's assembly this year are likely to feature harsher anti-Madrid rhetoric, with the government's austerity plan offering a convenient whetstone on which to sharpen regional resentment.

"It's time to tighten our belts, but it's time for some people to do it more than others. Why? Because we have been paying for [the rest of] Spain more than others," said Oriol Pujol, the spokesman for Convergence and Union, an autonomy-minded opposition party that could take power after the elections this fall.

Up to the mid-1990s, nationalists such as Pujol relied on romantic notions of a shared identity to enlist the support of their fellow Catalans for greater self-rule, said Joan Botella, a professor of political science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Since then, however, hundreds of thousands of migrants from other parts of Spain have settled in Catalonia, diluting the old-fashioned sense of Catalan solidarity.

So the rhetoric calling for more autonomy, or even a referendum on independence, has shifted. Newcomers from Andalusia or Aragon may shrug at warm-hearted appeals to protect Catalan culture, but they respond to hardheaded arguments about their tax money being spent on schools or hospitals far from Catalonia.

The euro debt crisis and Spain's economic troubles, including an unemployment rate of nearly 20%, only increase the resentment.

"There are many more pro-independence people who say that the crisis wouldn't happen if we were not part of Spain," Botella said.

If Catalonians had more control over the purse strings, there would be more public investment in research and development, to keep attracting talent from all over Europe, said Puigcercos, the leader of the Republican Left, one of the political parties in Catalonia's ruling coalition.

He and others would also like to see the region's seaports and airports upgraded to handle more international traffic — to Asia, for example — which would increase Catalonia's reach as an exporter.

But as long as they remain part of Spain, many residents see little chance of this happening.

"They keep saying no," said Pujol of the Convergence and Union party. "So there's nothing to do but jump over the wall and push for independence."

Spain is on a major sports streak this year

Savoring its World Cup victory, the nation also boasts champions in tennis, motor racing, the Tour de France — even the NBA.
Spain

Rafael Nadal, left, was victorious at Wimbledon in July; Spain's soccer team, top right, captured its first World Cup last month; Alberto Contador, bottom left, won the Tour de France for a third time in July; and Ferrari driver Fernando Alonso is considered a favorite to win what would be his third Formula One title later this year. (Nicolas Luttiau / Presse Sports via U.S. Presswire; Jewel Samad / AFP / Getty Images; Bryn Lennon / Getty Images; Matthias Schrader / Associated Press)




By Kevin Baxter

August 5, 2010|8:55 p.m.


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The last time Spain ruled the world it did so from the gun deck of a galleon. Then the Spanish Armada was sent to the bottom of the English Channel and the country has spent the last 4 1/2 centuries playing catch-up.

Even Chicago Cubs fans haven't had to wait that long to cheer a winner.

All of which makes this summer's Spanish sporting renaissance that much more remarkable. In the last two months, Spanish athletes have won two Grand Slam tennis titles, an NBA championship, a Formula One race and the Tour de France. And they capped it off three weeks ago by winning the biggest prize of all, soccer's World Cup.

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Quite an achievement for a country with less land than Texas and just slightly more people than California and Virginia combined.

"It is a golden age in Spain," says Xabi Alonso, a star on the national soccer team. "And we are enjoying it so far."

So is virtually everyone else with Spanish blood. For San Clemente schoolteacher Hazel Dyer, whose family ties to Spain date back six centuries, the end of Iberian ignominy in the World Cup has made her proud of her heritage.

"Oh my God, it was incredible," she says. "For us, it was like the first time Spain excelled. We are No. 1 — finally."

Alonso and four other members of Spain's first World Cup champion — goalkeeper Iker Casillas and defenders Raul Albiol, Alvaro Arbeloa and Sergio Ramos — are expected to play Saturday when their club team, Real Madrid, meets the Galaxy in an international friendly at the Rose Bowl.

And although Real Madrid's exhibition schedule, which included a 3-2 win over Club America on Wednesday in San Francisco, was planned long before Spain's triumph in South Africa, the trip has become something of a victory tour nonetheless.

"We've really enjoyed the celebrations," Alonso says, "because the achievement was very big."

Yet the World Cup win was just part of an impressive string of victories for Spain, one that began in early June when Rafael Nadal won his fifth French Open title. Less than two weeks later, Barcelona's Pau Gasol helped the Lakers to their second consecutive NBA championship. A couple of weeks after that, Nadal reaffirmed his No. 1 world ranking by winning at Wimbledon.

Then came the World Cup — which ended with Spain's 1-0 win over the Netherlands in extra time — followed closely by Alberto Contador's triumph in the Tour de France. That was Spain's fifth consecutive win in the world's most important bike race and it came on the same day race car driver Fernando Alonso won a Formula One grand prix in Germany.

The Spanish newspaper El Mundo hailed it as "a Spanish July," writing that the victories by Contador and Alonso "closed the greatest month ever in Spanish sport."

Even Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero noticed.

"Spanish sport," he said, "is on a spectacular streak."

If only the rest of the country were doing as well.

Spain's economy is suffering through its worst crisis since the end of the Franco dictatorship, with unemployment hovering around 20%, the highest in Western Europe. The figure is twice as high among Spain's youth.

Ironically, it was the booming economy that followed Spain's transition to democracy a generation ago that fueled the country's rise as an athletic power.

Beginning with the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, public and private supporters flush with cash poured billions into the construction and renovation of sports facilities throughout the country. That helped Spain's ACB become the world's second-best basketball league behind the NBA while Spain's La Liga, headed by Real Madrid and Champions League winner Barcelona, has arguably become the world's best soccer loop.

And spending on sports has remained high despite the current economic crisis, with Real Madrid and Barcelona ranking as the world's two richest soccer teams.

Improvements in nutrition and the rise of a leisure class with both the time and the money for sports, two other results of the post-fascist economic boom, have also had a huge impact on Spanish sports. It's worth noting that Gasol, Nadal, Contador, Fernando Alonso and 21 of the 23 players on Spain's World Cup winners were born after the 1978 constitutional referendum that reinstituted democracy.

"That has a lot to do with it," says Karen Francis, Dyer's twin sister who is also an Orange County teacher and Spanish soccer fan. "After the dictatorship, the fastest-growing economy in the world was Spain's. Spain had money for everything. That promoted a lot of healthy living too.

"It was an amalgamation of all of those things."

But all that recent success leads to a different kind of Spanish inquisition: What else can the country win in 2010?

Fortunately there are still a few mountains left to climb. It's been 36 years since Spain won its only Miss Universe title, for example, a drought that 24-year-old model Adriana Reveron could end this month in Las Vegas.

And though the Academy Awards won't be presented until February, the 2011 Oscars will recognize work done this year, a year that started well for Javier Bardem, who shared the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of a dying father in "Biutiful."

Spain's last Nobel Prize winner was novelist Camilo Jose Cela, who won the literature prize in 1989. Now, however, the country has a legitimate Peace Prize candidate in crusading former judge Baltasar Garzon. And if Sergio Garcia can win next week's PGA Championship, where he's finished second twice, he would be the first Spaniard to capture one of golf's four majors since Jose Maria Olazabal won the Masters in 1999.

Sound a little farfetched? Perhaps. But if you listen to Xabi Alonso, you get the feeling the reign of Spain is not about to wane.

"In different sports, the mentality is quite good," he says. "From the basic, from the youth … [there's] a lot of patience, knowing that you have to work, gradually knowing in each age what to do.

"It's a golden age at the moment. We're really proud."

kevin.baxter@latimes.com

íQue viva una Catalonia libre!

always making trouble Cibby !

Have you read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia?

Homage to Catalonia. In this account of his experiences with the POUM (United Marxist Workers Party) militia in Spain, he makes clear his commitment to both working class struggle and to socialism, and at the same time his steadfast opposition to Stalinism and its apologists. Such were the conclusions he drew from the Spanish Civil War and they were to inform his political attitudes for the rest of his life. In a later essay, 'Why I Write', he was to recall the way his Spanish experiences had 'turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.'1 It was in Spain that he first came to fully believe in the possibility of socialist revolution and it was in Spain that he witnessed at first hand the destruction of that possibility at the hands of the Communists

The struggle of the people of Catalonia was in inspiration to many and contributed greatly to the emergence of democratic socialism,

Many of the states of Europe have features of democratic socialism - and other parts of the World have followed suit. It only remains for the idiots in the US to follow.

Orwell is celibrated for being anti - stalinist/communist but his ideas on socialism are very important.


S.

People pay homage at George Orwell's grave.......

abc would be one of the pigs in 1984 a commie swine and the only thing he knows about Spain is from a package tour he took to the costa de mierda with soccer hooligans

You're thinking of Orwell's Animal Farm.

Oh! the boys in Blut's life when he's high!
He must get through a lot of these photos...........
S.