To politicize is to unmask
The Minister for the European Union and Foreign Affairs, Jaume Duch, has stated that achieving official status for Catalan in Europe is easier if the language is not politicised. Nothing new: it is a very old idea, this of not politicising the language. Without going any further back, President Salvador Illa asked for it in 2021 following the ruling that required 25% of Spanish in schools. This request that politics not be made from politics is funny. And above all, a crime!
The request not to get involved in politics touches everything. It is very common in the world of sport. The Vanguard, for the Olympic Games, and in fear of a noisy protest at the king's entrance on the opening day, published on its front page the No obtained in a survey on whether one agreed to politicize the Games. As if the presence of the king, the parade led by the then prince, the national anthems and flags, the rivalries of which country took the most medals, all of this, were not political. The only thing that seems to have been doing politics, to The Vanguard, was to expose the display of state nationalism and the concealment of the nation itself.
And after language and sport, it has been said not to do politics with art, poetry, culture, education, water, the Barcelona Fair, the Mossos or the covid, with those press conferences that patriotically fought the virus, and that did not do politics. Or, still, the unusual request of Arrimadas and Colau not to politicize the demonstration for the terrorist attacks of 2017. Asking not to do politics is a version of the advice that Franco gave to a young man: "Do as I do, don't get involved in politics"Now, if it is obvious that everything has a political dimension, how can we say no without turning red? Let's see.
Whoever demands not to politicize something wants it not to be a debate that would be detrimental to them. In other words, it is a discourse typical of those who have power. But beyond the partisan struggle, not politicizing means not questioning a certain issue. status quo, not to discuss a political order that is presented as natural and that, therefore, has become invisible. To politicize, then, is to denaturalize, to make visible that which is taken for granted, which is assumed to be immutable and indisputable. In short, it is to unmask a system of domination that becomes strong, precisely, because it can present itself as "non-political."
The struggle for control of the political narrative is about that: to succeed in depoliticizing and making natural that which is not. We see it in the use of terms such as the solidarity The Catalans' fiscal policy with the rest of the Spanish autonomous communities, used to conceal a situation of economic predation. A word that, unexpectedly, has been unmasked not by the classic "Spain steals from us" - an old ERC slogan that now, with little shame, Rufián wants to pin on Junts - but by the PSOE leader Emiliano García-Page when he says nothing of solidarity, that the wealth produced in Catalonia belongs to the Spanish. Indeed, and as much as the councillor Alícia Romero asks them to stop doing politics against Catalonia - that is, to conceal the predatory will - García-Page, Felipe González and all the autonomous leaders of the PP are now those who politicise the fiscal debate, making transparent the model of economic domination that so bothers the councillor.
In the case of the Catalan language, not politicizing it means masking the situation of diglossia – the dominance of Castilian over Catalan, supported by the legally unequal treatment given by the Spanish Constitution – which explains its progressive residualization. Here, it is expressed with the saying “not making Catalan unfriendly”, of being well-educated with foreigners, of not discriminating against the poor Spanish civil servants – from policemen to judges – who are assigned to the Països Catalans or of being pragmatic and not putting obstacles in the way of the good doctor who wants to cure us. In short, expressions that disguise the existence of a linguistic conflict that is not so much between individuals – docile as we are in domination – but institutional. And politicizing the language, yes, is discovering this linguistically discriminatory climate and making the structural conflict visible so that awareness is raised and it can be fought.
Similarly, when the independence movement is blamed for having created division by politicizing the supposed safety net of autonomist unionism, what is intended is to mask the political coercion that Spanish nationalism exerts on all those Catalans who aspire to their national emancipation, not to annihilate it.