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REMARKS Bloomberg Businessweek October 30, 2017
○ Convivencia was how Spain proudly
held together. Its meaning is fading with
Catalonia’s bid for independence
Mariano Rajoy chooses his words carefully. He’s the prime min-
ister who refused to use the term “bailout,” insisting instead
that the financial rescue Spain received in 2012 was “a loan with
very favorable terms.” On Oct. 21, responding to the crisis over
Catalonia’s bid for independence, Rajoy invoked Article 155, a
provision of the Spanish constitution never used before that
allows Madrid to strip regional governments of their autonomy
in times of crisis. He maintained that he was not suspending
Catalan autonomy, even as he proposed removing from office
the entire Catalan executive body, transferring their duties to
corresponding Spanish ministries, and calling new elections
in the region within six months. His decision was greeted by
many Spaniards as a welcome return to the rule of law and by
many Catalans as nothing short of a coup d’état.
One thing is clear: As its politicians engage in face- saving,
bluff-calling, and other machinations, and citizens on all
sides anxiously hold their breath, Spain is careening through
the most severe constitutional crisis of its recent democratic
history. But it isn’t just constitutional; it’s also, perhaps more
profoundly, a crisis of identity. Nations derive their cohesion
and their strength from a sense of shared identity—from the
story they tell themselves about who they are as a collective.
When that sense of a shared story is eroded, the nation frays.
Several times during his speech, Rajoy explained his use of
Article 155 as a means of restoring convivencia. “Convivencia”
is one of those words whose resistance to translation is an indi-
cation of its cultural significance. It refers generally to peace-
ful coexistence among different groups, but its roots go deep.
The word is frequently invoked to describe the period in the
Middle Ages when Jews, Christians, and Muslims on the Iberian
Peninsula lived harmoniously under Muslim rule. But it was res-
urrected as a foundational principle after the death of dictator
Francisco Franco in 1975. Resting on a fiercely homogeneous
and centralized vision of the Spanish nation, his government
denied—and actively repressed—the distinct languages, histories,
and cultures of the peoples it ruled. In contrast, the democratic
state that followed enshrined plurality in its new constitution
by creating a system of 17 autonomous communities endowed
with their own parliaments and authority over areas such as
education, health care, and police. The nation that emerged
with the 1978 constitution was based, in other words, on convi-
vencia—an understanding that all citizens could say they were
both Spanish and Catalan or Basque or Andalusian.
The coexistence was never perfect. Terrorism from Basque
separatist group ETA brought extortions, kidnappings, and assas-
sinations into the early 2000s. And Spain has had its own strug-
gles integrating the North Africans, Latin Americans, and Eastern
Europeans who have migrated to the country in great waves in
the past decade or two. But as an organizing principle and a
shared basis for identity, convivencia has worked—until now.
A case in point is the world of Spain’s acclaimed restaurants
and chefs. Like millions of other Catalans, and much of the
world, Albert Raurich was horrified to see riot police smashing
school doors and beating his fellow citizens as they attempted
to vote in Catalonia’s Oct. 1 referendum on independence. In
the aftermath, the chef of Barcelona’s Dos Palillos and Dos
Pebrots restaurants reached out to other prominent chefs in
the region, encouraging them to participate in a general strike
intended to protest the violence. “But we realized it wasn’t
enough just to close our doors,” he says. “We had to explain
why we were doing it.” Together, he and a dozen or so others,
including Albert Adria, Fina Puigdevall, and Xavier Pellicer,
issued a statement objecting to the violence and calling for
dialogue. That’s when all hell broke loose within Spain’s nor-
mally cohesive chef community.
“Curses from Madrid started raining on us,” says Raurich.
“They were insulting us, calling us delinquents, criminals,
even terrorists.” Adding to the outcry from other chefs, Carlos
Maribona, one of Spain’s most prominent restaurant critics,
took to Twitter to denounce the statement as “sickening” and
to promise “I’m taking notes.” Some interpreted this as a threat
that he would use his power as a critic to punish the outspo-
ken. (Maribona, who strongly believes chefs should stay out of
politics, says the phrase “was just an expression to show that
they had made a mistake and I had noted that they made a
mistake.”) So powerful was the reaction and its accompanying
calls to boycott the restaurants in question that even some of
the chefs who signed the statement have since refused to speak
about it, fearful for their businesses. At chefs’ conferences and
collective dinners that have taken place in the weeks since, the
bonhomie built by Andalusians, Basques, Galicians, Castilians,
and Catalans over decades has given way to unease and, in some
cases, outright mistrust.
Within Catalonia, and in the rest of Spain, citizens are
finding it increasingly difficult to find common ground with one
another. A poll cited by the Catalan newspaper El Periódico found
58 percent of Catalans believe the nation’s convivencia had been
damaged by the crisis. Just like in the U.S., words whose meaning
had previously seemed straightforward—“democracy,” “law”—
are no longer stable, with each side accusing the other of grave,
sometimes criminal, misinterpretations. Even the wounded on
Oct. 1 have been politicized, with one side lamenting their great
numbers and the other claiming “fake news.” Isabel Coixet, a
Catalan filmmaker and a fervent progressive who also favors
remaining in the union, recounts being derided as fascist when
she walks her dog through Barcelona’s streets. A Barcelona-
born economics student named Natalia Casas says her neigh-
bor refused to rent her a parking space unless she removed the
Spanish flag she’d hung from her balcony.
The responsibility for that fraying lies with both Rajoy
and Catalonia’s government, the Generalitat led by Carles
Puigdemont. Catalans never supported secession in percent-
ages greater than 25 percent—most often polls put it around
18 percent—until 2011. By that point, Spain’s constitutional court,
at the request of Rajoy’s Popular Party, had repealed a new
autonomy agreement that referred to Catalonia as a nation,
and Rajoy himself, at the height of the economic crisis, had
brusquely rejected a Catalan effort to renegotiate the region’s
tax structure. More recently, his hard-line responses—sending
in the Guardia Civil to confiscate ballot boxes and physically○ By Lisa Abend