Catalonia’s bid for independence seems to have involved a major political puzzle for considerable parts of the European public, including academia. In response to the puzzle, there has been a recurrent inclination to perceive Catalan sovereigntism as an additional symptom of the larger malaise which has in recent years entailed the rise of nationalism, populism, and welfare chauvinism all over the Continent. The paper will argue that such views are a blatant misinterpretation of the Catalan process. At the same time, it will hold that the significance of recent political developments in Catalonia goes way beyond the opening of a new round of the conflictual relationship between the Spanish state and an ever contentious periphery.

What is at stake today in Catalonia is not just finding an adequate response to the old question of how to accommodate particular national identities in liberal-democratic states by relying on some version of the minority-rights-cum-territorial- autonomy formula. The issue rather is how to find democratic ways to change the foundations of pre-democratic forms of statehood. Seen against this background, the Catalan process calls for a thorough re-assessment of the meaning of sovereignty in complex polities and thereby bears a great potential for democratic innovation. We are confronting a phenomenon that has little to do with an anachronistic resurgence of nationalism or with a particular version of South European populism. On the contrary, the driving force of Catalan sovereigntism has been and is a popular republicanism with a substantial transformative impact. That this impact is hardly appreciated at the level of the European Union is one of the tragic ironies of what is currently happening between Brussels, Madrid, and Barcelona. To the extent that it stands by the side of the Spanish government in the conflict, thereby prioritizing the Europe of the states vis-à-vis the Europe of the citizens, the Union is ultimately undermining the very normative promises that once sustained its constitution.

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This workshop is part of the Economic History Workshop series in the Department of Economics and is co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

The social and political process that a significant part of Catalan society is engaged in needs to be explained analyzing its origins some ten years ago and its current state of development. At present no one can reasonably predict the future evolution and eventual outcome of this impressive democratic challenge to twenty-first century Europe.

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To RSVP, please send email to luisrr@stanford.edu.  You may request a copy of the workshop paper at the same time.

On March 27, 1492, a few days before the Edict that expelled the Jews from Spain, the royal chronicler Alfonso de Palencia (1423-1492) published his Castilian translations of two works by the famous Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War and Against Apion.  Palencia’s volume, Guerra judaica con los libros contra Appion, thus exemplifies the tension between two facets of Josephus’s writing:  his fierce critique of Jewish sectarianism and stubborn resistance to Imperial order and his eloquent defence of their religious and cultural traditions. This paper explores the cultural and political significance of these Spanish translations in the light of the events leading up to 1492 and it considers whether Palencia appropriated this Romanized Jewish historian in order to open up a space for religious minorities in the new imperial order ushered in by the Catholic Monarchs. To do this, I read Palencia’s translations against other contemporary texts by and about Jews and conversos, and consider the marginalia of sixteenth-century readers found in extant copies of the 1492 edition.

The broader issues raised include: the ambivalent alignment between the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘State’ (both terms need to be historicised); anti-judaism as a ‘way of thinking’ (to borrow David Nirenberg’s term); the meaning and limits of early modern tolerance.

This talk is part of the Theoretical Perspectives of the Middle Ages workshop.

Co-sponsored by The Europe Center, Stanford Humanities Center, Iberian and Latin American Cultures and the Department of Religious Studies.