Suchergebnisse

Catalonia, in common with other nations, has long been concerned with the question of identity and difference. Its problematic relationship with Spain has led to an emphasis on differentiating itself from its larger neighbour (if we are to accept, as most Spaniards do not, that Catalonia is not Spain), a situation complicated by the loss of the Spanish colonies of Cuba and The Philippines in 1898, and the Spanish Civil War and subsequent dictatorship from 1936 to 1976. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the construction of a Catalan identity followed a similar route to that taken by other European nations such as England, Ireland and, indeed, Spain, including an emphasis on rural values, activities and the countryside, and the conversion of specifically local traditions into national past times. It is only in the last ten years or so that this model of Catalan identity has been recognised for what it is - a model constructed and encouraged for and by specific nationalist political interests. Ironically, Catalonia's identity abroad has also been constructed and manipulated for political purposes, but from quite a different perspective. Orwell's /Homage to Catalonia/ (1938) narrates an extremely blinkered version of the Spanish Civil War which has achieved iconic status as a result of cold war politics. Subsequent portrayals of the Spanish Civil War - Valentine Cunningham's /The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse/ (ed.), Penguin, 1980, or Ken Loach's 1995 film /Land and Freedom/ base their arguments unquestioningly on /Homage to Catalonia/, perpetuating a view of the nation's recent history that is both reductive and inaccurate.

A review essay of a book by Alex Seglers Gomez-Quintero, Musulmans a Catalunya: El repte de l'integracio I la llibertat religiosa (Muslims in Catalonia: The Challenge of Integration and Religious Freedom), Barcelona: Angle Editorial, 2004.

This paper aims to present a brief approach to non-voting in Catalonia. Its development will be half way between a case study and a wider reflection on the issue. That is to say that although focusing discussions and examples on the features of Catalan nonvoting, many of the subjects arosen and some of the hypotheses laid seek to have a much more general validity. The paper is structured in three sections: in the first one we will try to give a general diagnose of the subject by analysing Catalan non-voting from a comparative perspective, looking at differentiated behaviours depending on the election level and on responses to the political context. We will emphasize the unfinished character of the explanations of each of these phenomena. In the second section we will summarize some of the most basic evidences on the subject that have been pointed out by electoral geography and sociology in Catalonia, which will help us to define some of the necessary explanatory elements. Finally, the last section will contain some hypotheses and reflections. We shall present there the main components that we think should conform an explanatory model of non-voting, and will briefly discuss this behaviour's rationality and its political importance. ; Peer reviewed