Is there an ethnicity bias in Catalan secessionism? Discourses and political actions

Abstract

Many charges have been made against Catalan secessionism from a normative or ideological point of view. In this article we would like to focus on the accusation that the secessionist movement is xenophobic, racist or ethnicist. Between 2017 and 2019, and particularly since Quim Torra was named president of the Generalitat, this has been the dominant criticism in the arguments set out against secessionism. We are interested in evaluating the strength of this accusation in this contribution. In this respect, we focus on the discourse and the main legislative actions adopted by the Catalan institutions since embarking on a determined bid for sovereignty, popularly called the Process, in 2010. Our conclusion is that both from discursive and legislative points of view, it can be concluded that Catalan secessionism cannot be considered as an ethnicist movement.

October 2017 in Catalonia: The anarchists and the procés

“…That is, a nationalism with little ethnic overtones and mostly civic, democratic and progressive in nature (cf. Vergés‐Gifra & Serra, 2022).…”

“…7 7 Although some authors have argued that the importance of language in Catalan nationalism makes it more ethnic than usually admitted (see Álvarez‐Gálvez et al, 2018), other studies have confirmed that Catalan nationalism lacks an ethnic bias, despite accusations of xenophobia and racism by Spanish nationalists (Vergés‐Gifra & Serra, 2022). …”