Historians, Nationalism, and the Catalan Independence Process.

Abstract

History and nationalism have maintained deeply problematic relationships in Catalonia in the past and continue to do so today. It is true that the use and abuse of history constitute fundamental features of all nationalisms; however, in the Catalan case, this tendency reaches obsessive and even extreme proportions. In Catalonia, history occupies a particularly significant place in reflections on both the present and the future. Catalan nationalists attach great importance to the construction of a narrative of the past capable of generating collective identity and underpinning political interests and projects. History has served as a fundamental instrument in the process of nationalizing society.

The national-nationalist narrative of Catalan history was hegemonic throughout the twentieth century and remains so in the twenty-first. Historians, in particular, have played a significant role in its formulation, dissemination, and justification. This narrative has either been consciously crafted by historians for Catalan nationalism or subsequently appropriated by it, with or without their consent. Its intellectual genealogy extends from the conservative patriotic neo-Romanticism of Ferran Soldevila to the romantic national-communism of Josep Fontana, while also encompassing authors such as Antoni Rovira i Virgili and Jaume Sobrequés, as well as the earlier provincialist and regionalist precedents established by Víctor Balaguer and others during the nineteenth century.