Collective Intentionality And Discourses About Secession In Catalonia

Collective Intentionality

&

Discourses About Secession in Catalonia

Marc Collado-Ramírez

University of California, Berkeley & Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Philosophy 199

Supervisors: Prof. Jennifer I. Hudin & Prof. John R. Searle

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SUMMARY

I. Timeline of the Catalonia/Spain relationship 6

II. The social and political composition of Catalonia 17

III. Research questions 33

IV. Theoretical framework 36

V. First results 45

VI. Political implications of the research 57

References 59

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I want to acknowledge Elisenda, Cinta, and the post-cos for their valuable contributions

that shaped my assumptions for this paper. I want to thank Professors Jennifer Hudin and

John Searle for supervising my first independent research project. I am grateful to Berkeley

Social Ontology Group for allowing me to give a talk about this research at their meeting.

The ideas presented here are a result of many helpful contributions and feedback from that

talk.

No hay en el mundo pues un mayor pecado

que el de no seguir al abanderado.

(George Brassens, adapted by Paco Ibáñez)

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Preface

This research belongs to the field of collective intentionality. It focuses on how collective

intentionality works in the making of the secessionist movement in Catalonia, specifically

in the formation of its collective discourses.

In the first section, I draw the timeline of the recent history of Spain and Catalonia in order

to understand how we got here, and what events shaped Catalonia as it is nowadays.

In the second section, I describe a statistical picture of how Catalans are, in terms of

support to secession, national identification, primary language, vote to political party, place

of origin, etc. I try to see what kinds of features are different between people who support

secession and those who don’t.

In the third section, I argue why these phenomena are worth being studied, and I state my

research questions.

In the fourth section, I describe a theoretical framework to understand nationalism. I state

the main sources of Catalan national identification. I define the notion of Collective

Network.

In the fifth section, I give the first results of my research. I discuss what is the kind of

mental state that allows people to identify themselves as Catalan. I state that there are two

different Networks for being Catalan, I explain both of them, and I justify why one of them

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leads to support secession while the other one doesn’t. I also describe different Networks

for secessionism.

In the sixth section I discuss the political implications of my research in understanding

current political events of Catalonia, and I summarize my findings.

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I. TIMELINE OF CATALONIA/SPAIN RELATIONSHIP

Before we make any analysis of the secessionist movement, it is a must to take a look to the

historical events that took place in Catalonia and Spain, at least to the times of the Spanish

Civil War, the Franco years, and the transition to democracy.

Francoism. Spain = Franco.

During the Spanish Civil War, Franco identified himself with the symbols of Spain, in

order to legitimate himself. We can easily find posters, graffiti and the like showing a

portrait of Franco —or his name— with hails to Spain or the flag of Spain (see Figure 1). It

must be noted that the flag of Spain (striped red-yellow-red) was changed under the

Spanish Republic to red-yellow-purple, as the red-yellow-red combination represented the

Bourbons and the monarchy. Hence, the mere use of the red-yellow-red flag that was

recovered by the Falangists was meant to symbolize not just Spain, but a Spain under

Franco. As a consequence, we can see in some

posters that there was no need to mention Franco

or the Falange —the red-yellow-red flag was

enough. The identification of Spain as a political

entity with the Francoist regime had consequences

in the future. For example, flags of some regions

that claimed themselves as being nations (e.g.

Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia,

Andalusia…) were used to symbolize freedom, as Figure 1.

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opposed to the oppressive flag of Spain. Why did it happen? Let’s take the case of

Catalonia. Since the Francoist troops invaded Catalonia in January 1939, most sources of

Catalan identity were prohibited. The Falangists detested Catalan culture, so they banned

the use of Catalan language in public. It was not only admonished to use Catalan in the

street, but Catalan was taken out from the schools and from all institutions of the state.

Admonishments had the form “if you are Spanish, speak Spanish”. This served as a

reinforcing reminder that Spain was a unified entity that didn’t contemplate any

inhomogeneity inside. This contrasts with the rights and privileges that the Republic

conferred to Catalonia, allowing it to have its own Parliament and to have self-government.

At that time, right-wing parties attacked those measures for ‘breaking Spain’. According to

them, the only recognition of the validity of the claims from Catalonia was considered to be

an attack to the unity of Spain. This is mainly how Catalonia was conceptualized by the

right-wing parties under the Republic —including the Falange—, and by the Francoist

regime. Advocates for the rights of Catalonia focused his claims on this anti-Catalan aspect

of the Francoist ideology.

The transition to democracy. ‘Catalunya = Llibertat’.

The Francoist regime was coming to an end in the death of Franco in 1975, but was

followed by six years of transition to democracy (1975-1981). During these times, there

was a widespread social movement that defended the cause for Catalonia being a nation

(“catalanisme”). Confronting the idea of Spain being an authoritarian regime that wanted to

whitewash the diversity of cultures, nationalities and languages, catalanisme identified

Catalonia with the pursuit of freedom. For example, writing the word “llibertat” (freedom)

on the Catalan flag (see Figure 2). This happened altogether with an identification of the

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Spanish flag with the Francoist regime. One of the key claims of the catalanist social

movement was to approve a Statute of Autonomy for Catalonia. Catalan political parties

agreed on a text in 1977 (Estatut de Sau), that was brought to the Spanish parliament in

Madrid, where it was amended in several ways by the two main parties —the conservative

UCD and the social democrat PSOE. For example, they rejected the statement of Catalonia

being a nation. In response to that, the nationalist component of the vindication was

reinforced — see Figure 3, in which a bumpersticker says “we are a nation / we don’t want

any cut on the Statute / we will keep being a nation”. This event shows that there is some

sort of understanding that the Spanish parliament is an exterior entity that exerts force

against Catalonia and its demands. We can therefore expect that the sense of belonging

from people who identify themselves as Catalan, and defend its status of nation, is very

problematic/troublesome. This example is also a prelude for the future: multiple initiatives

of all kinds that come from the Catalan parliament are blocked by the Spanish parliament or

government. Every time this happens, it reinforces the frame of Catalonia being an entity of

its own, in antagonism with Spain. Nonetheless, the Statute of Autonomy that was passed

Figure 3. Figure 2.

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by the Spanish parliament was also voted in favor by a vast majority of Catalans in a

referendum in 1979.

23 years of nationalism in government

The first election to the Catalan parliament was in 1980. They were won by the center-right

nationalist party Convergència i Unió (CiU), whose leader was Jordi Pujol. Pujol was a

Catalan nationalist militant during Francoism, and he became popular for being imprisoned

in 1960 after a protest. As founding member and leader of Convergència i Unió, Pujol

became president of the Catalan government and remained in office for 23 years. The kind

of nationalism performed by CiU consisted on identifying the political party with

Catalonia. The interests of the party were therefore presented as the interests of Catalonia.

This strategy was worked out, for example, in posters for election campaigns. The portrait

of the leaders or the name of the party was

presented altogether with a Catalan flag. This

image came with a slogan that reinforced the

partisan-to-national identification. For example,

“no one will do more for Catalonia” (see Fig. 4)

or “the only Catalan parliamentary group in

Madrid” (see Fig. 5), implying a distinction

between Catalan parties and non-Catalan parties.

According to this frame, the other parties do not

represent Catalonia. There is another example in

which the identification is straightforward: Figure 4.

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“everything will be better if Catalonia is strong in

Madrid”. In this slogan, the party doesn’t ask

people to vote for them, but they ask people to

vote for the country, as the word “Catalonia”

directly stands for “Convergència i Unió”. At the

same time, the slogan also sets a frame in which

Catalonia and Madrid (standing for the Spanish

parliament or Spain itself) are two distinct entities

that hold a relationship in which Catalonia has a

position of disadvantage and needs strength. In

sum, in the period 1980-2003 there has been a

constant identification between the ruling party,

the president and Catalonia.

At this point, I have reviewed some events and partisan strategies that I see as fundamental

to understand the historical, political, social and cognitive ground that allowed

secessionism to grow, but I haven’t explained secessionism itself. I consider that between

2003 and 2014 there have been five major events that are key to understand the rise of

secessionism.

(1) 2006. Catalonia votes a new Statute of Autonomy

In 2003, the socialist party, along with two more left-wing parties, formed a tripartisan

government that brought to an end 23 years of center-right nationalism in power in

Catalonia. One of the measures that they put forward was the approval of a new Statute of

Figure 5.

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Autonomy, as it was considered that the old one was no more useful. The Statute that was

passed in the Parliament of Catalonia considered Catalonia being a nation. The president of

the Spanish government at that time, the socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez-Zapatero, promised

to “support the Statute that the Parliament of Catalonia would pass”. Even though he

promised not to make any cuts into the text, when the Statute came into discussion at the

Spanish parliament, both the conservative Partido Popular and the social democrat PSOE

criticized the project for it being a threat to the unity of Spain. For example, Alfonso Guerra

—a former president of PSOE— said in a meeting that they “bumped off the Statute” (nos

hemos petado el Estatut). Meanwhile, Partido Popular started a campaign collecting

signatures against the Statute, demanding that the Statute should be voted in a referendum

not by Catalonia but by Spain as a whole. According to the conservatives, if Catalonia

wants to be defined as a nation, they need recognition by the majority of Spaniards — a

very unlikely event. These are two examples of a business as usual: the Catalan institutions

make a demand, and the Spanish institutions immediately refuse it. Nonetheless, the

socialist party allowed some demands in the Statute to pass, and the text was then approved

in referendum in 2006.

(2) 2008. The economic and financial crisis begins

The financial crisis stroked in 2008, and it helped the conflict between Catalonia and Spain.

The flow of money shrank, so the issue of distribution became troublesome. Catalonia has

been always one of the regions that contributed the most to the Spanish national budget.

According to a report by the Ministry of Finance about the fiscal balance in 2005, Catalonia

gave an 8.7% of its gross domestic product to the rest of Spain. Even though it is normal in

any country of the world that the richer regions have a fiscal deficit between what they give

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to the whole country’s budget and what they receive back, many reasons led some Catalans

to reject the fiscal gap and reclaim the full amount of their tax money. They renamed fiscal

gap as “fiscal pillage” (espoli fiscal). People in Catalonia that think within this frame

provide reasons to see fiscal gap as unfair. Some of the reasons that I find are related to a

negative portrait of the regions that have a positive budget balance — specifically

Extremadura and Andalusia. There are two good examples of this kind of argument. The

first example is a speech by the nationalist CiU leader Josep Antoni Duran-Lleida in which

he said “while Catalan peasants can’t pick fruit because of low prices, in other places in

Spain, with the money we give in terms of taxes to the whole State, they get a rural

employment subsidy to spend the morning or the whole day in the bar”. A second example

is a slogan used by CiU in 2014 —“The subsidized Spain goes against the productive

Catalonia”—, in which they wanted to protest against the Spanish budget, that according to

them was lacking investments that the Catalan government demanded. The second example

is logically related to the first: given that Catalonia has a negative budget balance and

Andalusia has a positive budget balance, and given that Catalonia is considered to be

contributing to the general progress of Spain more than Andalusia does, Catalans deserve

their tax money and there is no reason for Catalans to pay a part of their GDP to less

productive and “lazier” regions. Another way of reasoning against fiscal gap is arguing that

“there are 16 thousand millions of euros that go to Madrid and never come back”, so

instead of focusing on why the other regions don’t deserve that money, they provide

reasons for why Catalonia needs this money, and the well-deserved goods that all this

money would make if it went back to Catalonia. For example, there is a poster by the

Catalan left secessionist party Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya that explains why they

think Catalonia needs the tax money from the fiscal gap.

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What do we stop doing as a result of the Spanish fiscal pillage every…

… second: give one free school meals grant

… minute: hire a doctor

… hour: build a preschool

… day: introduce an additional hour of school

… week: pay all the unemployment subsidies

… month: stop all budget cuts in healthcare

… year: build the Mediterranean Corridor train line until Algeciras

The situation presented in this frame is that negative fiscal balance is bad for Catalonia.

Nonetheless, the demand for investments does not entail a demand for secession in itself.

As we will see in further detail, a spoken complaint of an injustice against Catalonia can

come altogether with unspoken assumptions such that Spain is not reformable, that the

Spanish state cannot change, that the Spanish state will never pass a fair deal with

Catalonia, and the like. By adding up the demand for investments in Catalonia with the

Catalan tax money that is given to the Spanish state, and the assumption that the Spanish

state will never make those investments, now there can be an entailment that leads to

secessionism: Catalonia should be a state of its own, collect its own taxes and make the

investments the country needs. Here is a summary for the entailment:

1. Bel (Spain is a state that collects tax money from Catalonia)

& Bel (Catalonia needs investments to be paid with tax money from Catalonia)

& Bel (Spain is not making the investments that are needed in Catalonia)

& Bel (Spain is not getting back the whole part of the taxes from Catalonia)

& Des (Catalonia has the whole part of the tax money from Catalonia)

& Des (Catalonia makes the investments that are needed in Catalonia)

2. Bel (Spain will never get back the whole part of the taxes from Catalonia)

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& Bel (Spain will never make the investments that are needed in Catalonia)

∴ Des (Catalonia is a state that collects tax money from Catalonia)

I have provided examples that are ground for the first component of the entailment but I

haven’t provided any examples for the second component. Such an assumption is formed as

a result of many years of witnessing demands from Catalonia that have been rejected in the

Spanish parliament. Of many possible ones, the sentence issued by the Spanish

Constitutional Court against the Statute is an example of an event that reinforces the idea of

Spain being irreconcilable with the demands of Catalonia.

(3) 2010. The Constitutional Court issues a sentence against the Statute

In June 29th 2010, the Spanish Constitutional Court issued a sentence saying that 14 articles

of the recently approved Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia were unconstitutional. The most

prominent articles that were turned down were the article that declared Catalonia being a

nation, and the article that declared that Catalan should be the preferential language in

public administration. Two weeks later, in July 10th 2010, 1.1 million people gathered on a

rally against the Constitutional Court’s decision, under the slogan “We are a nation, we

have the right to decide”. Even though the rally was called to defend the right for Catalonia

to self-determination, some people inside the rally claimed for secession straightforward.

This phenomenon inside the rally can be generalized to the whole Catalan society of that

time. According to the polls made by the polling institute Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió, at the

beginning of 2010, 40% of Catalans wanted Catalonia to be an autonomous community

within Spain, while 20% of Catalans wanted secession. At the end of 2010, Catalans who

wanted an autonomous community fell to 35%, while secessionism rose to 25%. I think

that the court’s decision and the rally that followed caused this shift. It is slight at first, but

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consistent through time, because endorsement to secession starts to steadily grow, while

endorsement to staying in Spain as an autonomous community starts to drop continuously.

(4) 2011. Conservative PP wins Spanish election

The fourth event that I consider key to understand the rise of secessionism is the victory of

the conservative Partido Popular (PP) in the Spanish parliamentary election in November

20th 2011. The arrival of PP to power increased significantly the intensity of the conflict

between the Spanish government and the Catalan government. The PP introduced some

people in cabinet that had an extreme aversion to Catalan nationalism. For example, the

Minister of Education José Ignacio Wert declared that he wanted to “Spanishize” the

Catalan students, by means of making Spanish to be a compulsory language in schools, at a

higher level than Catalan. Catalan nationalists as threats against the Catalan identity, its

self-government and its language considered speeches like this one.

(5) 2012. Massive rally in favor of secession

The fifth key event that was determinant was a rally in the September 11th 2012, the

national day of Catalonia. 1.5 million people gathered in a rally that explicitly claimed for

secession. It was somehow endorsed by the regional government, by the President and by

the nationalist parties, both left-wing and right-wing. I consider that this massive rally was

significantly different from the one in 2010, for it was not a reaction against a recent event

against Catalan national identity, but a result of years of confrontation between the

governments of Catalonia and Spain. There were two major outcomes from this rally — a

political outcome and a social outcome. In the political sphere, the rally was followed by a

shift in the political agenda. The president of the Catalan government declared that he had

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listened to the claims of the people, and that he was willing to start a process toward

secession. With this goal, he called for an election two months afterwards. In the social

sphere, secessionism rapidly rose in the polls as the hegemonic trend (see Figure 6). Before

2010, the polls showed that, when asked about the relationship between Catalonia and

Spain, the main body of Catalans was in favor of keeping the autonomous regime (35-

42%), or in favor of a federal state (30-40%). Secession was at that time a minor option,

with only 15-22% of Catalans in favor of it. As said before, the Constitutional Court’s

sentence in 2010 started a trend in which secessionism rose steadily and the non-

secessionist options started to shrink. Right after the September 11th 2012 rally, in only six

months, the support to secession boosted dramatically from 32% to 48%, becoming a

hegemonic trend in Catalonia. This gives us an intuition: people who identify themselves as

“catalanistes” (people who sympathize with the idea of Catalonia being a nation) left

behind the defense of a stronger autonomy, moved forward and switched to straightforward

endorse secession. This move was not a peak or a bluff. Opposite, the trend has remained

steady until nowadays. Since the beginning of 2013, 45-50% of Catalans are in favor of

secession, 20-25% want a federal state within Spain, and 20-25% defend the status quo.  

Figure 6.

Blue line for autonomy, red line for federalism, green line for secessionism, purple line is irrelevant. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2006-2014, published in Revista Crític.

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At this point, I think I have provided enough background to understand how we got here. In

the next section, I want to provide a more thorough depiction of the political opinion of

Catalans. By means of revising polls from early 2015, I will describe the traits that

characterize the people who endorse secession, and clarify the main differences that they

have with the people who don’t.

II. THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL COMPOSITION OF CATALONIA

In order to portrait the ideological configuration of Catalonia, I will use the political party

that people vote as a primary source of data to sort people who are in favor and against

secession. For a greater understanding of the reader, I will now provide a brief description

of the Catalan political system.

The Catalan political system

There are 8 political parties in Catalonia. The political map is configured in a double axis: a

national axis (Catalan national identification/Spanish national identification), and a

socioeconomic axis (left/right) (see Figures 7 and 8 next page). In the Catalan nationalist

side, here are three parties that defend secession, both on right wing and left wing:

• CiU - Convergència i Unió (Convergence and Union): a center-right, Catalan

nationalist party. They were in government between 1980 and 2003, and they are

now in government again since 2010. They define themselves as nationalists, and

even though they didn’t endorse secession until 2012, they do now as a means to

achieve “the national climax” of Catalonia. CiU has 50 seats out of 135 in the

Parliament of Catalonia.

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• ERC - Esquerra Republicana de Catalonia (Republican Left of Catalonia): a center-

left, secessionist party. ERC gives support to CiU’s government with its 21 seats in

Parliament.

• CUP - Candidatura d’Unitat Popular (People’s Unity Candidacy): an extreme left,

secessionist party. It has 3 parliamentary seats.

Besides the three secessionist parties, there are a variety of parties that do not defend

secession and represent diverse overtones of the Catalan society.

• PSC - Partit Socialista de Catalunya (Socialist Party of Catalonia): a left party that

used to defend ‘catalanisme’, but does not endorse secession. It was in government

between 2003 and 2010, but it is now in demise, having only 20 seats out of 135.

• PP – Partido Popular (People’s Party): a right wing, Spanish nationalist party that

opposes secession. PP is in government in Spain. They have 19 seats in Parliament.

• C’s – Ciutadans (Citizens): a centrist party whose whole political action supports

Spanish nationalism and opposes secession. It has 9 seats in Parliament.

Catalan Nationalism

NATIONAL AXIS

Spanish Nationalism

Left Right

SOCIAL AXIS

Figure 7.

Parliament of Catalonia (as resulted from the 2012 election)

Figure 8.

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• ICV-EUIA – Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds-Esquerra Unida i Alternativa (Initiative

for Catalonia Greens-United Alternative Left): a green left coalition that defines

Catalan nationalism but does not endorse secession. They have 13 seats in

Parliament.

• Podemos (We can): a newly born left party that is on the rise throughout Spain. It

does not endorse secession, but respects the idea of Catalonia being a nation. It is an

important agent in Catalan politics but they haven’t run in any election for the

Parliament of Catalonia.

In the following analyses, I will identify people who say that they vote CiU, ERC and CUP

as ‘secessionists’, and people who vote any other party as ‘non-secessionists’. It must be

noted that ‘non-secessionists’ means that voters of those six parties overwhelmingly do not

have the desire for secession. This intuition is supported by data from Centre d’Estudis

d’Opinio (2015). As displayed in Figure 9, secessionists concentrate their vote in CiU, ERC

10%

48% 30%

64% 56% 36%

32% 14% 8% 13%

43%

77% 52%

9% 28%

21%

24% 72%

88% 81%

6% 11% 12% 31%

Desired political status for Catalonia * Political party

A region of Spain An autonomous community of Spain

A state within a federal Spain An independent state

Figure 9. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2015.

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and CUP, and their support is vastly conformed by secessionists. Meanwhile, just a few of

secessionists vote any of the other political parties. None of the parties that do not endorse

secession have more than 10% of secessionist voters. For this reason, we can conclude that

supporting secession is related with voting certain political parties. I will make this

assumption from now on.

Support to secession has to do with national identification

The distribution of national identification in Catalonia is uneven (see Figure 10). About

55% of people identify mainly as Catalan (“only Catalan” or “more Catalan than Spanish”),

10% identify mainly as Spanish (“only Spanish” or “more Catalan than Spanish”), and 35%

are in the middle. My guess to explain why it is uneven is that Catalan identification is

more weighted in the extremes, in the sense that people who identify themselves as Catalan

tend to stress that fact. Instead, people who identify as Spanish tend to put both identities at

the same level.  

5% 6%

36%

23%

26%

4%

National identification

Only Spanish

More Spanish than Catalan

Equally Spanish and Catalan

More Catalan than Spanish

Only Catalan

Doesn't know/Doesn't answer

Figure 10. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2015.

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People who identify themselves as “only Catalan” or “more Catalan than Spanish” tend to

support secession more than average (see Figure 11). At the other side, there is very short

representation of secessionists among people who identify themselves as “equally Catalan

and Spanish”, “more Spanish than Catalan” or “only Spanish”. From this figure, we can tell

that only people who identify themselves as Catalan primarily are the ones who engage

with the process toward secession. Same way, people who have some Spanish identity

systematically tend to refuse secession. We have therefore reached a first result: national

identity is strongly related with support to secession. In order to understand this relation,

we need to examine first how national identification works. What is ‘to be Catalan’? What

is ‘to be Spanish’? These questions about the ontology of collective identities that I will

take seriously and will constitute the key issue in the phenomenon that I am dealing with in

this investigation, and goes as follow: is there some feature in the statement ‘I am Catalan’

that leads to support secession?

Figure 11. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2015.

05% 04% 10%

63%

95% 92% 89% 82%

26%

03% 07% 08% 11%

Only Spanish More Spanish than Catalan

Equally Catalan and Spanish

More Catalan than Spanish

Only Catalan

National identification * Vote on secession

Doesn't know

No

Yes

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It is compelling to see the extremes: 95% of people who identify themselves as only

Catalan say that they would vote “Yes” on secession, and 92% of people who identify

themselves as only Spanish say that they would vote “No” on secession. I think this is

compelling because it shows that the old idea that each national community has to have a

state structure is still prevailing. Furthermore, we should think about the vast consequences

of finding such differences in the Catalan society. It is hard to imagine Catalonia as a

unified community that has very different sense of belongings within it. I will say some

more about this forward, but I think that political differences in society —such as being

left-wing or right-wing sympathizer— do not constitute a real division in society compared

to differences based national identification. The left-wing division in society does not

presuppose that the leftist side of the country should constitute its own state, and so should

do the conservative side. Conversely, they are contesting for power over one single

community. National identities give us a division that challenges the sense of unity to the

community, for they question the very sense of belonging. I think that the data shown in

Figure 11 is compelling for the issue that I am discussing, and will be a key idea for this

research.

Support to secession has to do with the place where a person and their family is from

There has been some debate about the demographic composition of people who are in favor

or against secession. On the one hand, according to the stereotype that non-secessionists

have, secessionism is a thing of “deeply rooted Catalans” (catalanes de toda la vida) whose

parents and grandparents were also born in Catalonia. On the other hand, according to the

stereotype that secessionists have, people who don’t endorse secession are mainly

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immigrants from the rest of Spain and their offspring. According a poll from Centre

d’Estudis d’Opinio (2014, see Figure 12), both stereotypes are —unsurprisingly— in the

right direction. The three secessionist parties (ERC, CiU and CUP) get their vote mainly

from people whose mothers were born in Catalonia, while the biggest group of voters in all

the other parties is formed by people whose mothers were born anywhere else in Spain.  

Looking further at place of birth and place of birth of parents, we can see a similar trend,

with some nuances. As we can see in Figure 13, the difference consists on representation of

voter demographic profiles across parties. People born in Catalonia whose parents were

also born in Catalonia are an overrepresented voter profile in secessionist parties (51-57%),

while underrepresented in any other parties (4-11%). A similar pattern happens with people

born in the rest of Spain, but in the opposite way. These voters are underrepresented in

secessionist parties (6-8%), while way overrepresented in parties that are overtly against

secession (50-68% for C’s, PSC and PP).

Political party * Place of birth of mother

Born in Catalonia Born anywhere else in Spain

Political parties in favor of secession

Political parties opposed to secession

Figure 12. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2014.

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A different pattern exists for people born in Catalonia whose parents are from the rest of

Spain (in Figure 13, bright orange is for just one parent and dark orange is for both

parents). This voter profile is present in a similar proportion across both secessionist parties

(35-37%) and overtly anti-secession parties (24-34%). For some reason that I would like to

know, Podemos (60%) and ICV-EUiA (48%) get the major part of their support from

people born in Catalonia whose parents are from the rest of Spain. These two are leftist

platforms that don’t support secession but do not campaign against it — they sympathize

with the right of Catalonia to be recognized as a nation. Besides this short digression, the

key issue with birthplace is the evenness or unevenness of representation of each profile.

People born in Catalonia with parents also born in Catalonia have an uneven representation,

because instead of appearing in a similar proportion across all parties, they are assembled

Political parties in favor of secession

Political parties opposed to secession

People born in Catalonia with parents from the rest of Spain

People born in Catalonia with parents from Catalonia

People born in Spain

Figure 13. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2015.

Political party * Place of origin

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and overweighed in of secessionist parties. The same unevenness happens with people born

in other regions of Spain, but in the opposite direction. This leads us to the idea that the

message of secessionist parties is directed toward Catalan natives, while the message of

non-secessionist parties is directed toward people with diverse origins within Spain. The

analyses here presented didn’t include people born abroad because they don’t appear to

cause any effect in the pattern.

National identification and support to secession have to do with primary language

Linguistically, Catalonia is a fragmented society that has lots of nuances. It is a bilingual

society in which almost everyone knows how to speak both Catalan and Spanish.

Nonetheless, people tend to use one of the two languages primarily: 45% of Catalans prefer

Catalan, while 37% prefer Spanish, and 15% can’t tell which one of the two is more

prominent (see Figure 14). At first glance, when people from such a bilingual society are

asked in a poll which language they use more frequently, it looks like their response could

be somehow vague, or a random choice between the two. Nonetheless, data shows that

Figure 14. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2015.

45%

37%

15%

3%

Primary language

Catalan

Spanish

Both

Other

26

differences between respondents exist and constitute real linguistic communities. As we

will see, when we look to references to identity, linguistic communities differ, and they do

so again when they are asked to support or not to support secession.

When it comes to national identification, linguistic communities are not evenly spread (see

Figure 15). 81% of people who identify themselves as “only Catalan” say that they are

Catalan speakers. In contrast, Catalan speakers only represent 11% of people who identify

themselves as “equally Catalan and Spanish”. Spanish speakers constitute the majority of

the “only Spanish”-identified and “more Spanish than Catalan”-identified groups.

Complete bilingual speakers are more evenly represented through different national

identifications.

Taking a look within linguistic communities, we can find that there is a major difference

between them when it comes to secessionism (see Figure 16 next page). While support to

Figure 15. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2015.

03% 05% 11%

58%

81%

17%

91% 84%

50%

13%

03%

32%

02% 10%

38% 28%

16%

36%

15%

Only Spanish More Spanish than Catalan

Equally Catalan and

Spanish

More Catalan than Spanish

Only Catalan Doesn't know

National identification * Primary language

Other

Both

Spanish

Catalan

27

secession is a defining feature of the Catalan-speaking community (77% of them do), this is

rare in the Spanish-speaking community (only 9% of them support secession). We find

nuances in the part of the population that states complete bilingualism, as there are both

supporters and opponents of secession present in it. To wrap it up, we can suggest that

linguistic communities can be the basis for supporting secession or not.

National identification, primary language and support to secession are related to the TV

channel in which people watch the news

There has been much debate about the fact that Catalan TV channels focus too much on the

so-called Catalan process toward secession. There has been criticism against the Catalan

regional public television for giving too much importance about secessionism, shading

other major events happening in the rest of Spain and in the world. For this reason, I want

to examine a possible relation between the TV channel in which people watch the news and

support to secession.

77%

38%

09%

36%

17%

53%

83% 40%

06% 10% 08% 24%

Catalan Both Spanish Other

Primary language * Support to secession

Doesn't know

No

Yes

Figure 16. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2015.

28

16%

62% 78%

05%

09% 05%

34% 36% 18%

27% 13% 12%

07% 22% 21% 12%

05% 06% 06%

05% 14% 24%

07%

Only Spanish More Spanish than Catalan

Equally Catalan and Spanish

More Catalan than Spanish

Only Catalan

National identification * TV channel

La Sexta

Cuatro

Antena 3

Tele 5

TVE 1

8TV

Canal 3/24

TV3

72%

12%

40%

8%

9%

5%

3%

25%

11% 17%

9% 17% 7% 5% 2%

6% 22% 19%

Catalan Spanish Both

Primary language * TV channel

La Sexta

Cuatro

Antena 3

Tele 5

TVE 1

8TV

Canal 3/24

TV3

Catalonia-wide TV channels

Spanish-wide TV channels

Figure 17. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2015.

Catalonia-wide TV channels

Spanish-wide TV channels

Figure 18. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2015.

29

First of all, the majority of people who define themselves as mostly Catalan (91% of “only

Catalan” and 70% of “more Catalan than Spanish”) watch the news in Catalonia-wide TV

channels (Figure 17 on the page before). On the other side, people who don’t have a strong

Catalan identity (70% of “equally Catalan and Spanish”, 90% of “more Spanish than

Catalan” and 92% of “only Spanish”) watch the news in Spain-wide TV channels. An

intuitive explanation could be that people who feel they belong to a territory want to know

information about that specific territory. Language can also provide an explanation. It must

be noted that TV3 and the other two Catalan TV broadcasters give the news in Catalan,

while Spain-wide ones do it in Spanish. In fact, as seen in Figure 18, the vast majority of

Catalan speakers (85%) watch the news in Catalan TV channels. On the other side, the

majority of Spanish speakers (86%) watch the news in any of the Spain-wide TV channels.

The distribution in the case of people who speak Catalan and Spanish indistinctly is way

more even (48% in Spanish TV channels, 52% in Catalan ones). Furthermore, supporting

secession is also related with the TV channel in which people watch the news (Figure 19

next page). Voters of political parties in favor of secession massively watch the news in

Catalan TV channels (mainly TV3). Opposite, voters of non-secessionist parties tend to be

way more diverse, with a lot more presence of people who watch Spanish-wide TV

channels (like TVE or La Sexta).

There are three statements that can be said about what does it mean in Catalonia to watch

the news in a certain TV channel: that people tend to watch the news in TV channels that

place the focus in the same territory they feel they belong to; that people who support

secession tend to watch Catalan TV channels, while people who don’t tend to watch other

TV channels; and that people tend to watch the news in TV channels that speak their

30

primary language. This looks like a complex picture, but I interpret it as being rather

simple. What I see is a division between two communities: an important group constituted

by people who speak Catalan, state that they are more Catalan than Spanish or only

Catalan, vote political parties that support secession, and watch the news in Catalan TV

channels; and another important group constituted by people who speaks mostly Spanish,

state that they are equally or more Spanish than Catalan, vote parties that don’t promote

secession, and mainly watch the news in Spain-wide TV channels. We can call the first

group “secessionists”, and the second group “non-secessionists”. In the middle of these two

groups, nuances exist. Giving enough importance to watching the news in a specific TV

channel for its power to generate a worldview, the possibility that results is that we have

two communities that not only have different sociological features, but also have different

structures of thought, and even different ways to see and understand the world.

Political party * TV channel

Figure 19. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2014.

Political parties in favor of secession

Political parties opposing secession

31

Support to secession has to do with nationality statement

In the series of polls that I am using to get a better understanding of the phenomenon, there

is a question that directly asks people to state their national identity with the verb “to be”.

Earlier we used the ‘national identification’ variable (“only Catalan”, “more Catalan than

Spanish”, etc.), which is a measure that presents a gradient between both identities. In

regard to this variable, we found before that people tend to have stronger opinions in favor

or against secession in the edges of the gradient. In order to address the point of the two

different communities that I have commented right before, I want to us a ‘nationality

statement’ variable, that allows us to point directly to the two alleged communities, and see

if our guess is right.

First of all, people who say “I am a Catalan” constitute two thirds of the population of

Catalonia. The other third of the people who live in Catalonia don’t share the belief of

being Catalan. Now, we should ask whether or not the predicates “I am Catalan” and “I am

Spanish” constitute two separate communities in terms of support to secession. When we

cross the two variables (see Figure 20), we find out that there is a lot of heterogeneity

within the Catalans and the Spanish. Leaving out of the analysis the issue of Spanish-

identified people, it is clear that secessionists are salient within people who have the belief

“I am a Catalan”. Nonetheless, it barely represents half of it — there are too many nuances.

Earlier on this section we posed the question ‘what does it mean to say “I am Catalan”?’.

From the information presented in Figure 20, it looks like we should also bring forth the

question ‘how many meanings does to say “I am Catalan” have?’. At least, we should find

two different meanings. In one meaning, “I am Catalan” comes together with “I want

secession”. In the other meaning, “I am Catalan” does not come together with “I want

32

secession”. The first meaning applies to 55% of people who say “I am Catalan”. The

second meaning applies, at least, to some of the other 45%.

I think that all the facts and data presented in sections I and II constitute enough evidence to

think that there’s something going on in Catalan society that is worth to analyze with

further detail.

01% 10% 04%

15%

54%

20%

24%

24%

42%

55%

04%

14%

05% 08% 20%

I am Catalan I am Spanish None

Nationality statement * Desired political status for Catalonia

I don't know

An independent state

A state within a federal Spain

An autonomous community of Spain

A region of Spain

Figure 20. Source: Centre d’Estudis d’Opinió 2015.

33

III. RESEARCH QUESTION

As said before, the question that leads this research examines what features do national

identities have in order to support secession. Further questions arise instantly. What is

about collective identities such as ‘being Catalan’ or ‘being Spanish’ that make the Catalan-

identified people to support secession, and Spanish-identified ones not to? If the

construction of a new state structure is supported on the basis of national identity, what

kind of arguments do people give in favor of the new state? What is the link between the

fully emotional sense of belonging to a national community, and the emotionless building

of a bureaucratic state structure? How people characterize the new state, given that identity

is on the basis of their support? I think that these questions lead us to think about secession

a political movement that is qualitatively different to other political movements (e.g. trade

unions, political parties, advocacy campaigns), for emotions are at the ground to start

campaigning but are not in the final goal of it (e.g. to pass a law, to make the government

do or stop doing something). Political movements based on national identity such the one

we are examining (and we just saw the data that confirms that secessionism is based on it),

even though they claim for structural changes in the state and in society, have emotional

states as the goal —more specifically, collective emotional states. I will give some

examples taken from a nationwide campaign called “The time is now” (Ara és l’hora): “I

want a country full of color and happy faces”, “I want a country in which I can be

comfortable”, “I want a country that gives opportunities to my children”, “ I want a country

I can feel proud of”, or “I want a country in which I can feel free”. Regarding these sample

arguments, I think that in order to get a whole picture of how support to secession comes to

being, we should not only take a look on the political and social sides of it —e.g. place of

34

birth, primary language, political affiliation. We should also place the focus on the

cognitive side of it: the emotions, beliefs, desires, and all kind of mental states invoked.

Placing the approach on the mind rather, we can see ‘being Catalan’, ‘being Spanish’ and

‘wanting secession’ as collective mental states. Using Searle’s vocabulary, I see that such

mental states do not belong to the realm of individual intentionality but to collective

intentionality, because the I-intentionality is insufficient to create the conditions of

satisfaction. Such mental states require an intentionality in the we-mode, for it is impossible

to have a national identity out of one single person. For example, “I believe I am Catalan”

as a part of a “we believe we are Catalans”, and “I desire secession” as a part of a “we

desire secession”. I want to stress the point that collective intentionality is a must: if there

were no such collectivity that calls itself Catalonia, the individual belief of being Catalan

would lose the meaning. In the examination of these collective mental states, we should ask

about their illocutionary force —in other words, what kind of mental states they are. As we

know from Searle (1983), the conditions of satisfaction of a mental state stand against a

network of other mental states, so we should give an account for what other mental states

provide meaning to the belief of being Catalan, the belief of being Spanish or the desire to

secession. In a nutshell: in order to know why Catalan-identified people tend to support

secession, we should be able to provide the collective cognitive structure that is needed to

have the mental state of wanting (i.e. desire) secession.

In this paper, I’m focusing on the collective intentionality secessionism and I’m leaving out

non-secessionists. I think that looking at the first group closely enough constitutes a big

research challenge. Namely, the research questions are the following:

• What is the ontology of the desire for secession?

35

• What is the ontology of being Catalan”?

• What are the different networks that give meaning to being Catalan that lead to have

the desire for secession?

The ultimate goal is to contribute to current debates about whether or not Catalan society is

divided between secessionists and non-secessionists. A research project based on social

ontology has a say on this, for it can clarify what is to be secessionist, what is to be non-

Secessionist, and what is to be Catalan. I want to provide evidence in discourse that there is

not only a political and social division, but also a cognitive division between the

secessionist Catalans and the non-secessionist Catalans. I want to provide also the cognitive

mechanisms to explain in what consists the division.

36

IV. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

a. Nationalism

In order to get an understanding of how the basics of nationalism work, I want to take into

account Sluga’s work on the most momentous nationalist movement in Europe’s history —

German National Socialism. According to Sluga (1993), the German political field of 1933

was characterized not only by a specific conception of time, in terms of the teleology of

national progress, but also by one of space. The alleged political space of the German

nation didn’t correspond to the borders of the German state at that time.

In general, political institutions and actions are meant to benefit a specific local condition

—i.e. they are meant to obtain, hold, and enhance the locale of a certain group of people.

What is characteristic of nationalism is that political space is taken to be the homeland of a

people in the sense that it is either the place of their actual possession, the site of their

presumed origin, or a place they aspire to. The group may be seen as a linguistic, cultural,

or economic community: as a family, tribe, or race; as one body pursuing future happiness.

All these forms of description flow together in the common concept of nation (Sluga 1993).

Furthermore, nation is a complex that adds up different sources of personal identification.

As Comas-d’Argemir (2014) claims, identity is contrastive. It serves the function of

differentiating oneself from one another. In the formation of a volkgeist (people’s spirit,

national spirit or national character) multiple criteria apply, and not all of them consist on

placing oneself on a piece of land. Rather, there are shared economic and cultural facts that

are taken to be part of that national character. For example, in Catalonia, economic facts

such as austere behavior is taken as being part of the Catalan character, and cultural facts

37

like human towers (castells) are also considered truly Catalan to the core. Therefore, we

should note that national identity has a lot of edges.

Furthermore, what stands out in German nationalism is the fact that the definition of the

political group and its space was conceived in terms of a sharp boundary and a complete

opposition between the inside and the outside of the boundary of political space. All kind of

politics was based on the distinction between friend and enemy (Sluga 1993).

Nationalism after German national socialism has undergone big changes. Modern

nationalism focuses its demands in making it possible that national communities, such as

Catalonia or Scotland, can have their status recognized, usually by claiming them to

become states of their own. Nationalism puts the focus of its political action on enhancing

the community of its own, disregarding in more or less extent the interests of other

communities. These movements, though, don’t create a strict boundary between the ‘us’

and the ‘others’ that leads to violent conflicts. Nonetheless, nationalism is about reminding

everyone that the boundary exists, and that having that boundary is for the good — to

preserve a certain political, social or cultural milieu that is threatened by the state’s

structure, and the like.

b. Catalan national identification

I summarize the main sources of Catalan national identification in three elements:

language, filiation and oppositional discourse.

Language

The history of the rise of nation states demonstrates the importance of having a common

language as a necessary prerequisite for the construction of a national community. Without

38

a doubt, the existence of the Catalan language and its survival against all odds has made it

possible for Catalonia to have a special status. Catalonia has never had a nation state

structure. The special status that Catalonia has is due to the institutional empowerment that

the autonomous government of Catalonia has given to the use of Catalan language. This

trend goes in an opposite way to the one taken by other minor languages in Europe —e.g.

Breton or Occitan in France, Rhaeto-Romanic in Switzerland. Lack of support from public

policy has led these languages to progressively disappear under the power of the official

language or languages of each nation-state. It is fair to say that the existence and

persistence of a national community in Catalonia is supported by the persistence of Catalan

as a language used for everyday life. According to a qualitative study from the Catalan

institute for the study of public opinion, the criterion for national adscription is fairly open:

it is broadly understood in Catalonia that any person that speaks Catalan language can

consider herself Catalan (Centre d’Estudis d’Opinio 2013). Regarding this account, the

Catalan linguistic community constitutes the core of the Catalan national community. The

consequences of having language use, and not territory, as a ground for national

identification, are two. First, a person that speaks Catalan but has never lived in Catalonia

can consider herself a member of the Catalan community. Second, a person that lives in

Catalonia but doesn’t speak Catalan can be excluded from the Catalan national community.

In other words, a person can be an inhabitant of Catalonia but still not be a member of

Catalonia as a community. The government of Catalonia has executive powers on different

policy areas, but doesn’t have a state structure that can define what counts as a citizen de

iure. Because the government of Catalonia doesn’t have the power of a nation state to

define who counts as a citizen of that nation state, there is no top-down declaration of the

status function of being a Catalan. By top-down, I mean some kind of legislation that

39

declares what counts as a citizen of a nation state, and achieves collective acceptance

thanks to the power of that nation state. There is no such thing in Catalonia, though.

Therefore, membership to Catalan society is left to different bottom-up collective

recognitions of what thing counts as the Catalan society. Is it the population of inhabitants

in the territory of Catalonia? Is it the community of Catalan-speakers? I defend the idea that

we will find different collective recognitions of what counts as the Catalan society as much

as different groups of people define it. Whatever the constitutive feature is for each group

of people, the existence of Catalan language is a unique feature of the people that live in the

physical territory of Catalonia. This is an unavoidable fact that all the definitions of what

the Catalan society is need to regard. We will need to investigate then what is the role that

all the different communities give to the Catalan language within the collective Network

that supports their views on the status function of being a Catalan.

Filiation, kin and generational rootedness

In the study mentioned before (Centre d’Estudis d’Opinio 2013), discourses of people

about their feelings about Catalonia reflect what the authors call “patrimonalization of the

territory”. The country is understood as an extended expression of the family. In this sense,

the love for your family (that brings you to life) is extended to the love for your country

(that gives you a place to live). The resources of the family field are projected upon the

field of the territory or the political nation. Purely physical and geographical instances are

then understood as material resources that are available to be appropriated. The main

example of this is the use of the personal pronoun in reference to a geographical piece of

land: my village, my country, my people, my home, my land. The national identification is

40

understood as a necessary relationship of filiation to the country, as natural as kin and

family.

Oppositional discourse

Identity as a sociological concept is understood as a stance taken by an individual or group

of individuals that makes them unique, and puts them in a contrastive relation with the rest

of individuals or groups. Identity-as-contrast operates in a way that divides the social world

in two groups: We (that hold that stance), and the Others (that don’t hold it). This

distinction works for identity and identification purposes at all levels of social life. The

identity of “mothers”, for example, is defined as a set of traits that the rest of the world (the

“non-mothers”) doesn’t have: the non-mothers aren’t 9 months pregnant, non-mothers

don’t bear a baby, etc. In the case of mothers, the distinction is mainly applied as a

universal social category. Other sources of identity are not only contrasted universally but

also operate as a contextual contrast. For example, the identity of “construction workers” is

not only built in contrast with “non-construction workers”, but also (and mainly) in contrast

to the other workers that don’t work in construction. The identity is meant to operate in the

specific context of workers. Having that said, in the case of national identity, the contrast is

also specific to a context. It is true that the Catalan identity can be a stance that is taken in

contrast to the other part of the universe that is not Catalan. This kind of stance operates in

discourses that stress the universal singularity of Catalan culture, and the cultural

phenomena specific to Catalonia that distinguish that country from any other in the world

(e.g. Catalan literature, human towers). Nonetheless, this is not the approach that is

interesting to this research. Because Catalonia lacks having the status of a nation state, it

does not make sense to state that Catalan national identity operates in contrast to any of the

41

other 192 national identities backed by recognized nation-states. Otherwise, because

Catalonia is struggling to define its own identity while it is inside the Spanish nation state,

we can say that the main field in which Catalan identity works is the specific context of

identities inside Spain. What is “Catalan” is defined in contrast and opposition to what is

“non-Catalan” within the boundaries of Spain. Namely, Catalan identity is built in

opposition to Spanish identity. For the fact that Spanish government has always dealt with

Catalan national identity as an anomaly, there have been numerous attempts to implement

policies of uniformization —e.g. the Constitutional Court amendments to the Catalan

Statute of 2006 are good examples of that. There are also discourses on how Catalonia has

a different nature in contrast to Spain: cultural (“Catalonia has folklore and traditions that

are not found anywhere else in Spain”), political (“Catalonia has a multi-party system, as

opposed to Spanish two-party system”), civic (“there is no patronage or corruption in

Catalonia”), etc.

c. Collective Network

The notion of a collective Network to support any collective mental state is the application

of Searle’s notion of Network and Background of individual Intentionality to collective

Intentionality (Searle 2009). In Searle’s account, the satisfaction of the content of an

intentional state stands against a Network of other intentional states. For example:

Statement: Bel (Spain robs Catalonia)

Network: (i) Bel (Spain is a state)

(ii) Bel (Catalonia is an autonomous community of Spain)

(iii) Bel (The Spanish state collects taxes)

42

(iv) Bel (People living in Catalonia are citizens of the Spanish state)

(v) Bel (The Spanish state collects taxes from people living in Catalonia)

(vi) Des (Money from Catalan taxpayers to stay in Catalonia)

(vii) Bel (Tax collection from Catalonia is bigger than investment in Catalonia)

(viii) Bel (There are 16 millions of euros that go to Madrid and never come back)

(ix) Bel (Spanish people live on behalf of Catalan people)

(x) Des (The distribution of wealth within Spain to be fair)

In order for the conditions of satisfaction of an intentional state to be satisfied, the

conditions of satisfaction of the intentional states in the Network need also to be satisfied.

We can give a variety of supportive intentional states in the Network. Some supportive

intentional states of the Network are required for main the intentional state to satisfy its

conditions of satisfaction. In the previous example, supportive intentional states (i) to (v)

are required by the main intentional state to make any sense of it. Some other supportive

intentional states are required in the Network to provide references of context, acting as

meaning-fillers that provide complete comprehensibility and adequacy to a given

intentional state. In the example before, (vi) provides some context of the desire of the

speaker, (vii) and (viii) provide concreteness to the meaning of the verb “robs” (in what

exactly consists the robbery, how much is it robbed), while (ix) and (x) provide moral

judgments that are subsumed in the intentional state. The summary for the idea of the

Network would be like “how do you come to have this intentional state?”. In other words

“why do you believe this?”, “why do you have this desire?”, etc.

In cases in which beliefs, desires, and other intentional states are represented collectively in

the We-mode, the Network that supports those intentional states needs also to have

43

collective representation. The conditions of satisfaction of a collective intentional state are

satisfied if there is collective representation of those conditions of satisfaction being

satisfied. Lack of collective representation leads to failure in the conditions of satisfaction.

In the example offered before, the belief about Spain robbing Catalonia exists only under

the condition that there is a certain amount of the Catalan population that agrees on certain

presuppositions (i.e. share a Network of supportive intentional states). It is the case that

Spain robs Catalonia if that subset of Catalan population agrees on Spain robbing Catalonia

as being the case.

For people who don’t share any of the contents of the Network, it won’t be the case.

Differences in a Network of intentional states lead to differences in satisfaction of the

propositional content of the intentional state. For example, there is an important group of

people in Catalonia who disagrees with (vi) —Des (Money from Catalan taxpayers to stay

in Catalonia)—, because they don’t think that tax money from Catalonia belongs to

Catalonia, but it belongs to the entire Spanish state. For the fact that they don’t want their

tax share to stay in Catalonia (¬vi), for them it is not true that the money from tax pay

doesn’t come back (¬viii), because it comes back as an investment from Spain as a whole,

that affects Catalonia positively. Following with this idea, it doesn’t make sense either that

Spanish people live on behalf of the Catalans (¬ix), for the fact that everyone pays its fair

share. Even if it were the case, it wouldn’t make sense either that the distribution of wealth

is unfair (¬x). As a result of all these Network differences, for these people it won’t be the

case that Spain robs Catalonia.

44

There is another case that constitutes the kind of analysis that I will do regarding what has

been found in the polls. It is the case when a one mental state has different meanings for

different people. This happens because there are mental states whose conditions of

satisfaction stand against more than one Network. For example:

Statement: Bel (I am a man)

Network 1: (i) Bel (gender is natural)

(ii) Bel (I have male genitals)

(iii) Bel (there is a natural behavior relative to being a man)

(iv) Des (to be true to masculine natural behavior)

Network 2: (i) Bel (gender is a social construct)

(ii) Bel (I am socially seen as a man)

(iii) Bel (there is no natural behavior relative to being a man)

(iv) Bel (men have social roles assigned)

(v) Des (to fulfill social roles assigned to men)

The example shows how the propositional content of a mental state (e.g. being a man) can

be satisfied for all even though there is a huge divergence between how it is satisfied. This

way, people can agree on mental states even though they understand them with very

different meanings.

45

V. FIRST RESULTS

a. The illocutionary force of being Catalan

In order to clarify the relationship between being Catalan and being secessionist, we should

know first of all what kind of mental state is “I am Catalan”. There are two concerns:

propositional content and illocutionary force.

The first one is about the propositional content, for there are different wordings in Catalan

that have slightly different meanings: jo sóc català (I am Catalan) or jo em sento català (I

feel that I am Catalan). The first wording can be used for birthplace or citizenship purposes,

and also for national identification. The second one only has the national identification

purpose. I think this is the case because being from somewhere has the connotation of an

unintentional imposition of a belonging to a territory. Opposite, feeling that you are from

somewhere is an intentional decision to join a community. In other words, you feel engaged

with that specific territory and the people living in it. This is my intuition, but I don’t have

knowledge or evidence enough to claim that the ultimate propositional content of Catalan

national identification is “to feel that you are Catalan”. Moreover, my goal is to see that

there are different ways to be part of a group of people that lives in a bounded piece of land.

I am just taking this condition under examination. The wording “to feel that you are

Catalan” requires an additional condition — the intention or desire to be Catalan. For this

reason, the propositional content I will examine is “I am Catalan”.

The second issue is the illocutionary force — by means of what kind of mental state you

think “I am Catalan”? My two guesses are belief or declaration. If “I am a Catalan” were a

46

collective belief, the truth conditions would be set by collective acceptance, and it would

work this way. First we would have kind of a non-spoken checklist of necessary conditions

that you must have in the Network of other beliefs that support your being Catalan —like in

the example in the prior section. Second, the Network would need to be collectively shared

and accepted. In other words, there needs to be a minimum consensus on what is to be

Catalan. This leads us to see an inconsistency: you can only say “I am Catalan” if there is

some collective assignment of function to you that allow you to say “I am Catalan”.

Moreover, the belief of being Catalan has a very different way to fulfill its truth conditions

to other beliefs like “it rained this morning” or “my sister is 30 years old”. In the two latter

examples, you just need some folk knowledge about the state of affairs in the natural world

to check their truth. Opposite, the truth conditions of the belief “I am Catalan” need to

check social phenomena — being Catalan is not a part of the natural world, it is created by

society. More specifically, in order to for the belief about being Catalan to exist in

someone’s mind, some human collectivity needs to create “Catalanity”. In other words, you

can’t have the belief “I am Catalan” without the declaration “we are Catalan”. The

declaration creates a status function of “being Catalan”, and allows people to have the

belief. Therefore, the belief about “being Catalan” exists, but it is just the individual

expression of a status function declaration “I am Catalan”. In the “X counts as Y in C”

notation, it would be “I count as Catalan in all contexts”. The X term is the “I”, so the

person who declares is the carrier of the status function. The Y term is the status function of

being Catalan. I don’t know how to characterize the C term for context, as you can identify

yourself as Catalan anywhere in the world, so I would say “all contexts” without further

examination for it is does not give problems for the central topic we are dealing with.

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As Searle (2009) notes, status functions have deontic powers: positive powers (rights and

entitlements) and negative powers (duties and obligations). This will need further research,

but some of my intuitions are that the status function “being Catalan” carries positive

powers such as the right to vote in Catalan elections, the right to be part of Catalan culture,

the right to engage in civic life, the right to judge about “Catalanity” of other people, the

right to speak publicly without being contested, or the right to be considered a good citizen

in Catalonia. Negative powers of being Catalan would be like the obligation to respect the

traditions and observe the holidays (e.g. Sant Jordi instead of Saint Valentine’s), or the

obligation to defend your country (e.g. to argue in favor of Catalonia in Christmas dinners

with family from all across Spain). I think that, for some people who declare themselves

Catalan, one of the negative powers they assume are the obligation to support secession, or

the obligation to attend the rallies in favor of secession on September 11th, the National Day

of Catalonia. Having this said, there are some issues that are worth to be noted. I don’t

think that the examples of deontic powers I have provided are strong. I think that they are

pretty banal and don’t allow me to state that they really exist, so this part needs more work

on supporting evidence. Moreover, I can’t find how negative powers in this case create

desire-independent reasons for action. The only case in which I can state that this is the

case is the obligation of supporting secession, which provides a desire-independent reason

to defend the secessionist ideas in arguments, and to attend secessionist rallies and

meetings.

b. The two main Networks of support

The declaration “I am Catalan” stands against a Network. The satisfaction of the mental

states in the Network is required in order for the declaration to be valid. In other words, the

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speaker (as the X term) needs to fulfill some requirements (i.e. having a Network of other

mental states) in order for her to be able to say “I am Catalan” (the Y term). I want to make

a strong claim, and here it goes: there are two main Networks of support to the declaration

“I am Catalan”. Consequently, there are two groups of people who have different ways of

thinking (i.e. different Networks) about what counts as Catalan.

The first Network has at its core the belief “I live and work in Catalonia”. Accordingly,

there is a group of people who collectively declare themselves Catalan for the reason they

live and work in Catalonia.

The second Network is a subset of the first Network. Notwithstanding, it is a different

Network because it has additional intentional states as requirements, such as the desire to

be publicly recognized as Catalan, the desire to speak Catalan, or the love to Catalonia.

Namely, the core mental state in the second Network for the declaration of being Catalan is

the desire to be Catalan. Accordingly, for this second group of people, living and working

in Catalonia is not enough for anyone in order to be declared Catalan. It requires though the

intention to be Catalan, in the sense that the person who says she is Catalan needs, prior to

that, to have an active desire to be Catalan, and love everything that Catalonia represents —

its language, its culture, and the like.

My argument is that the second Network, given some conditions, naturally leads to desire

secession, while the first Network doesn’t. The entailment can work like this:

Des (to be Catalan)

& Bel (Catalans pursue the best interest for Catalonia)

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& Bel (the best for Catalonia is secession)

∴ Des (secession)

The key issue here is under what conditions people can believe that the best for Catalonia is

secession. As said in the first section of this paper, since 2006 the Spanish state structure

(by state structure I refer to the government and its members, the Parliament and its

members or the court system) has performed actions that damaged the idea that Catalonia

can progress inside of Spain — e.g. the sentence against the Statute, or several attacks to

the use of Catalan language in schools. In reaction to these attacks, some people stopped

thinking that Catalonia could fit inside Spain, and started thinking that it was better for

Catalonia to be a state of its own. Briefly, these are the conditions that have allowed people

who have the desire to be Catalan to logically desire secession.

There are many differences between the two networks that I haven’t mentioned yet. In the

first one —Bel (I live and work in Catalonia)—, to desire to speak Catalan is not required

for someone to declare herself to be Catalan. Opposite, in the second one —Des

(secession)—, it is a must for someone to be Catalan that he has a desire to speak Catalan.

In the first network, being Catalan is always compatible with being Spanish. In the second

network, under the conditions above presented, being Catalan is not compatible with being

Spanish, for the fact that Spain as a political entity is conceived as an antagonist agent

against Catalonia. In the first network, feeling love for Catalonia is not required in order to

be Catalan. In the second network, you cannot be Catalan if you don’t love this country —

you need to express positive feelings for Catalan culture.

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As said before, the desire for secession is a logical consequence of the second network,

while it is not in the first network. If the definition of being Catalan is merely the

recognition of birthplace, workplace or living place, engaging or not in pro-Catalan or pro-

secession political ideas is not related with being Catalan — you just are Catalan, no matter

what. Conversely, if the definition of being Catalan includes a desire to be Catalan, and

there is a debate in society between secessionists and non-secessionists, it's inconsistent to

go against the country you want to defend. In other words, given a context in which there

are people who defend secession for Catalonia and people who don’t, the desire to be

Catalan is only consistent with the desire for secession.

Because the context described is the one that is happening in Catalonia, there are some

problematic consequences. There are people who live and work in Catalonia and declare

themselves Catalan (people with the first Network), but don’t agree with the secessionist

project. From the point of view of the second Network, in order for people who live and

work in Catalonia to be truly and fully Catalan, they need to have the desire to be Catalan.

Therefore, from this point of view, there are Catalans of two kinds: the good Catalans, and

the bad Catalans. According to this characterization, good Catalans want to be Catalan,

desire secession, love Catalonia, and defend Catalonia. Meanwhile, Catalans who don’t

have the sense of belonging to Catalonia as a nation, people who even oppose to the idea of

Catalonia being a nation, and people who are indifferent about it, are not as good as the first

group of good Catalans that I described — from the point of view of ‘good Catalans’, the

ones that don’t agree with their nationality are ‘bad Catalans’. Therefore, the definition of

Catalonia that secessionism performs is highly problematic. From their cognitive structure,

not all of the 8 million people who live in Catalonia are actually Catalan. Reminding data

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from Figure 10, 33% of people in Catalonia define themselves as Spanish, so these people

are instantly out of the Catalan national community. Moreover, not everyone who defines

him or herself as Catalan wants secession (as shown in Figure 11, 26% of people who are

more Catalan than Spanish and 82% of people who are equally Catalan and Spanish don’t

desire secession). Namely, not everyone who lives in Catalonia is part of the Catalan

national community. Given the possibility that Catalonia became an independent state,

there could be a serious issue with people who don’t share the desire for secession, who are

exactly half of the population. If secession were declared, how many Catalan people would

recognize the declaration? Moreover, we don’t need to go much forward to see the

cognitive division to turn into a social division. At the moment, Catalan politics is

undergoing a so-called ‘process toward secession’. Notwithstanding this process is defined

by people who works under the second network — the secessionist one. Non-secessionists

don’t see their voices counted at the same level, as the political agenda is imposed on them.

Then, it is not only that there is a part of Catalonia that is not part of the Catalan national

community. The issue is even bigger: there is a part of Catalonia who is systematically out

of the political debate, given the fact that the debate (if such) is defined in terms of the

exclusionary criteria in which secessionist cognitive structure works. Hence, the cognitive

division that I am presenting constitutes a serious issue for the potential political and social

consequences that it triggers.

c. Sub-Networks for secessionism

Different groups of people provide different reasons to support the desire for secession. In

this section, I want to focus on the different ways that people can argue in favor of

secession, providing descriptions of the different sub-Networks that coexist within the

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Network against which the desire for secession stands. I will describe four sub-Networks

that I have found in evidence: economic secessionism, identity-based secessionism, civic

secessionism, and secessionism as “wish box”.

Economic secessionism

There is a generalized idea that people have when they think why secession is good in

terms of money: Spain robs Catalonia (Espanya ens roba). This idea can be a result of

different kinds of logical chains between mental states. I described earlier in section IV

how a logical chain could be in order to come to the conclusion that Spain robs Catalonia.

Another way to argue for this is to have the belief that Spanish tax redistribution is unfair or

against Catalonia’s will, altogether with the desire that tax money from Catalonia stays in

Catalonia, and the desire of Catalonia to be richer. This belief about an economic disparity

becomes a core idea in the ‘economic secessionism’ sub-Network, for the fact that people

who say that also have the belief that an independent Catalonia would be richer with the

money that is sent to Spain by means of taxes. In these terms, an independent Catalonia is

better than Catalonia being an autonomous community inside Spain. The argument is as

simple as I have just described it. I consider that this is a sub-Network because it is a

structure of mental states that doesn’t require strong nationalist feelings in order to become

secessionist. My guess is that this kind of argumentation is important in people who is

secessionist but don’t share the nationalist component with the rest of the secessionist

movement.

Nonetheless, it is possible to build economic secessionist arguments with nationalist

components. For example, it is said that Catalonia is the third region in paying taxes and

53

the tenth in getting the taxes returned by means of investments. The ranking does not

constitute by itself a grievance against Catalonia — for example, in the same ranking,

Madrid is the first to pay and the twelfth to receive, and they don’t claim secession. There

must be something else that leads Catalan people to claim secession with economic

arguments. I have found examples in evidence of how nationalism informs economic

secessionism. For example, CiU —the political party in government— posted a tweet in

which they said “The subsidized Spain lives on behalf of the productive Catalonia”.

Another example is an image that is being shared on social media in Catalonia, in which it

is said, “I am sponsoring a public servant in Extremadura. The pay that I am taken away of,

it is paid to him”. The reasoning behind consists on the belief that Catalonia is transferring

money to poor regions of Spain. In addition to that, Catalonia is defined as productive

while the poor regions of Spain are defined as unproductive. From these, the belief that

poor regions of Spain don’t deserve money arises. The second example also shows that

there is also an intentional state of liking fiscal sovereignty and disliking fiscal solidarity.

Identity-based secessionism

I give the name “identity-based secessionism” to the sub-Network that has at its core the

intentional state Love (Catalonia). It can have several meanings, such as the desire for

Catalonia to preserve its own language, the desire for Catalonia to preserve its own culture,

and even an intentional state of hate against Spain. In general, arguments for secession

based on identity place their focus on defending things that are considered to be part of the

Catalan nation: people who identify primarily as Catalan, the use of Catalan language,

cultural phenomena that are considered to be part of Catalan culture, historical phenomena

that are considered to be milestones in Catalan history. According to secessionists, Catalan

54

language, cultural phenomena that are specific to Catalonia, and even the mere existence of

Catalonia as a nation is threatened by the Spanish state. Another feature of identity-based

secessionism is the frame in which Catalonia is a protagonist entity that has Spain as its

antagonist entity. This kind of Network structure allows to give meaning to speech acts like

one by the President of Catalonia Artur Mas, who posted a tweet in which he compared the

process toward secession with a football game: “My strategy for the game that we play in

Catalonia is that the ones from home (els de casa) go together.” The response from

hundreds of tweeters was to denounce that this tweet considered that only people who want

secession are “the ones from home”, excluding non-secessionists from the concept of

Catalonia.

Civic secessionism

There is a current of opinion inside secessionism whose primary argument is the belief that

Catalonia is more ‘civilized’ than Spain. Accordingly, Spain is seen as a corruptive and

inefficient state. Meanwhile, they hold the belief that an independent Catalonia would be a

more efficient state than the Spanish one — in terms of better investments, better

infrastructures, better redistribution of wealth, better social justice, and no corruption. This

comes altogether with the desire that this will be the case in the future. An example of this

kind of secessionism is a tweet from the Catalan sociologist Salvador Cardús, who posted a

tweet identifying corruption with Spain. He gives the example of Lluis Millet, a CEO

convicted in the biggest case of corruption in the last 20 years: “Corruption in Catalonia is

a consequence of the Spanish-ation of Catalonia in the last decades. In which think tank

was Millet a donor? Of FAES!”. FAES is the name for the think tank of the conservative

and antisecessionist Partido Popular — the ruling party in Spain. Cardús defines two

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entities in his tweet: Catalonia and Spain. Catalonia is defined as not having corruption,

while Spain is defined as having corruption. Spain is shown as an external force that inserts

corruption into the uncorrupted Catalonia. This is an example that shows how secession can

be defended mainly by means of praising the civility of Catalonia.

Secessionism as wish-box

The last sub-Network that I have found is a set of beliefs and desires according to which

secession will solve everything. As a piece of example, I’ve chosen 20 of the arguments

that were collected in the campaign “Now it’s the time” (Ara és l’hora). Secessionism as a

wish-box allows people to say everything they don’t like, and desire that this will be

changed in a future Catalan state. The first set of arguments is composed by desires about

changes in the political and social situation:

I want a country where the court system is fast and free.

I want a country where citizens’ opinions are heard.

I want an energetically responsible country.

I want a country without corruption or budget cuts.

I want a country where everyone writes the laws.

I want a country that is more egalitarian.

I want a country where people are at the center of everything.

I want a country that is internationally recognized.

I want a country where my grandma can make ends meet

I want a country where everyone can get a job.

I want a country where creating a company is easy.

I want a country ruled by commonsense.

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The second set of arguments I want to show is composed by ultimate wish box arguments. I

mean: people give them to argue in favor of secession, while they don’t have any

connection to politics —or it looks like.

I want a country where there is ice cream for dessert every day.

I want a country where it rains only on school days.

I want a country where only kisses make people shut up.

I want a country where being a child means being happy.

I want a country full of colors and smiles.

I want a country where I can feel comfortable.

I want a country where the strength of the will can do everything.

I want a country where people say good morning to their neighbor.

Different sub-Networks for a unified Network of the desire for secession

I have shown different ways by which people can argue in favor of secession. This doesn’t

entail that there are different communities inside of the secessionist movement who prefer

one kind of argument to another — that’s my guess. Some of the sub-Networks that I have

shown here may apply more strongly to some groups of people more than other ones. I

don’t know to what extent this may be true, but the key point is the following: all the sub-

Networks presented are present in a unified collective Network for the desire of secession.

This means that, with more or less degree of acceptance, all of the sub-Networks are

somehow present in every secessionist mind. Collective recognition of many kinds of

secessionist arguments generates a sense of unity for the secessionist movement —because

they collectively hold a similar Network of previous beliefs and desires. I think that this is

one of the strengths of this social movement, and it explains why the secessionist

movement still goes on as a united platform built by different sensibilities.

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VI. POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE RESEARCH

The results presented above show a pretty complex picture of public opinion in Catalonia.

There is an inequality of public speech and public opinion in Catalonia, for secessionists —

as we have seen— self-legitimate themselves as the true and actual Catalonia, while non-

secessionist public speaker are constantly attacked on TV platforms. This is very

problematic, as it doesn’t allow a public debate where all voices are equally heard.

Moreover, secessionism awards legitimation to itself, while confining movements against

secession to the land of the absurd. The voice of secessionism uses the image schematic

understanding of Catalonia being an entity of itself, while according to non-secessionism,

Catalonia is a part of a bigger entity that is Spain. This is a complication for public debate,

as secessionists can claim that they represent Catalonia as a whole, while they can accuse

non-secessionist public speakers to be intruders, representatives of an oppressive Spain.

Besides that, secessionism also awards rationality to itself, as the discourse of

‘convincement’ only offers to option: to be rational (and therefore embracing

secessionism), or to be irrational (for refusing to accept the arguments in favor of

secession). The two claims I have just delivered are highly polemic, but I think it is worth

to offer such a view from the evidence presented in this paper, and see how further research

accepts or denies my claims.

In summary: the Catalan division between secessionists and non-secessionist is rooted in

cognition. The main source of division, I think, is from the definition of what holds for the

Declaration “I am Catalan”: people who believe that they are Catalan for the fact of having

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the belief that they live and work in Catalonia tend not to support secession; meanwhile,

people who believe that they are Catalan mainly because they want to be Catalan tend to

support secession. As we saw in Figure 14, according to the non-secessionist mindset, the

belief “I am both Catalan and Spanish” is true. According to the secessionist mindset, being

Catalan and Spanish at the same time is almost impossible —or very improbable. For this

reason, when talking about the politics of identity, the main issue is reciprocal non-

resonation: people don’t understand to each other because they have very different

Networks about the same idea —in this case “being Catalan”.

I think that current public debate in Catalonia will need a total reform if a real debate is

wanted. At this time, only secessionism and radical anti-secessionism is leading the debate.

Indifferent non-secessionists (those who don’t agree, but are not Spanish extremists) are

absent from the debate. Their engagement is key to include a diversity of voices in the

debate. The possibility of an independent Catalonia cannot come supported only with less

than half of Catalan population. I don’t think that an independent Catalonia can survive

without collective recognition from at least 75% of the population. This means that there

should be a significant part of the non-secessionist Catalans who are likely to ‘buy’ an

eventual secession.

At this time, non-secessionism does not have a collective Network. Rather, there are

different points of view that can be more or less tolerant with the idea of secession. I have

not examined their views here, but I think that the current leadership of the debate by

secessionist forces has one of its causes at the lack of unified collective Network for the

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desire of “not secession” — if such is the propositional content. Further research should

clarify this significant part of the Catalan population.

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