Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion by J. H. Elliott (review)

At the beginning of The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York, 1962), W. H. Auden states, "so long as a man writes poetry or fiction, his dream of Eden is his own business, but the moment he starts writing literary criticism, honesty demands that he describe it to his readers, so that they may be in the position to judge his judgments." He then goes on to answer a questionnaire devised by himself with a view to doing exactly that. Although a blow-by-blow description of any particular dream of Eden is hardly necessary to ground a judgment on Elliott's book, it will not be out of place to say that this reviewer supports the Catalan pacifist pro-independence movement and is in favor of an independent Catalan republic. After all, as Auden pointed out, "All the judgments, aesthetic or moral, that we pass, however objective we try to make them, are in part a rationalization and in part a corrective discipline of our subjective wishes."

In Elliott's words, Scots and Catalans is "the story of two self-proclaimed nations which, at least at the time of writing, do not have states of their own" (1), "an attempt to explore the origins and fluctuating trajectories of national sentiment in Scotland and Catalonia, and of the separatist movements to which it is currently giving rise" (4). Elliott's comparative study of the political trajectories of Scotland and Catalonia from the end of the fifteenth century to the present day is both extremely useful and highly successful, insofar as it analyzes a wealth of historical detail in an agile, elegant prose. Besides, it could not be timelier. After all, it appears only four years after the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and at the precise moment when nine members of a former democratically elected Catalan government, a president of the Catalan parliament, and the leaders of two Catalan civil society organizations—Òmnium Cultural and the Assemblea Nacional de Catalunya—are in prison and on trial for organizing the so-called "unilateral" referendum on Catalan independence held on October 1, 2017.

Elliott's account of Scotland's relations with the rest of the United Kingdom and, more specifically, with England, as well as Catalonia's relation with Spain or, more specifically, Castile, will leave no one in any doubt as to why today the Scots can decide their future as a nation whereas the Catalans cannot. There is a caveat, however. British Hispanism tends to see Spanish politics through the prism of Spanish nationalism, and Elliott's book, particularly its last chapter—"Breaking Away? 1975–2017"—is a case in point. Granted, the Jordi Pujol governments in Catalonia (1980–2003) can be criticized for a variety of reasons, including "clientage and corruption" (234). That being said, to suggest that "the programme of Catalanization" initiated by Pujol was tantamount to "outright indoctrination" is as mistaken as to believe that Catalan academics and intellectuals who are not in favor of independence were being harassed and intimidated in the weeks leading up to the referendum (242, 255), or to regard the 1978 Spanish constitution as sacrosanct (Elliott himself reminds his readers, "Spain had lived under eight Constitutions between 1812 and 1931" [227]). Granted, some of the (indecisions made by Catalan pro-independence politicians both before and after the 2017 referendum are at least questionable, but to turn them into an object of scorn because they infringed Spanish legality is unjustified. One would expect a scholar of Elliott's stature to be wary of the views about the "procés" (process) toward Catalan independence disseminated by El País, a prominent mouthpiece of Spanish nationalism, as well as a leading Castillian newspaper.

José Ortega y Gasset's España invertebrada (1922) is a brutal apology for imperialism and a seminal text of Spanish nationalism. Even though Elliott mentions Ortega only once (209), the concepts of "incorporación histórica" and "particularismo" (particularism) as expounded in Espa...