Abstract
This chapter introduces the more empirical part of the book. It charts the emergence of the Catalan and Flemish national movements using Miroslav Hroch’s three schematic phases in the development of nations. Phase A is a period of scholarly interest; Phase B is characterised by national agitation; and Phase C is the time of a mass national movement. The analytical focus of the chapter lies on the process of construction of the two national projects around language, and the degree to which they opposed or embraced liberalism in its relationship with the state. The chapter draws attention to the differences between the two cases that occurred in Phase C, and the way they created the conditions for the emergence of two different linguistic disputes.
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- 1.
Or, more accurately, Verlooy lauded the group of geographically circumscribed dialects that would later become the standard Dutch of Flanders and the Netherlands, the Standaardnederlands. The ‘Union of the Dutch Language ’ (Nederlandse Taalunie), an institution established by the Belgian and Dutch governments in 1980, was instrumental in introducing a common orthography. For reasons of exposition, in this chapter, I commit a voluntary anachronism and I treat the language in a unified sense. I make references to historical texts that refer to the ‘Netherlandish language ’, which also refers to the Dutch language .
- 2.
In this chapter, Catalanist (catalanista) or Catalanism (catalanisme) is used in a broad sense. Similarly to the use of the term Flemish Movement, it refers to cultural and political groups demanding the protection of the Catalan language and-or political autonomy for Catalonia .
- 3.
The coexistence of these two levels is unsurprising, for it is typical of national movements to have a high culture of intellectuals and artists projecting a vision of a society and sustaining debates about the past and the future; and a popular culture enabling people to interpret their present, engage in collective action and communicate (Keating 2001: 11).
- 4.
It is worth noting that there is no consensus on this point. Jo Tollebeek (2003) has argued that Flemish Dutch was seen as the crucial distinguishing factor from France and that the bilingual nature of Belgium was used as a crucial argument to create and perpetuate different national histories.
- 5.
Interestingly, the activists of the Flemish Movement disagreed about which language to advocate, debating between the standardised Dutch as it had developed in the Netherlands since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a standardised Flemish vernacular. They finally opted for the former, which is why today the written language of the Flemings is quasi identical to the Dutch of the Netherlands, but the spoken language has remained different, either a local dialect or a form of general Flemish (schoon Vlaams) now often called an in-between language (tussentaal) which is more like a continuum between standard Dutch and the variety of local dialects (Deschouwer 2003).
- 6.
And, indeed, at times liberal and socialist politicians worked together with Flemish Catholic politicians, as in the case of the 1910 linguistic law put forward by the Drie Kraaiende Hanen or ‘Three Crowing Hens’, who were indeed the Catholics, Liberals and socialists, respectively.
- 7.
These included, among others, the Administrative Law of 1873, the Education Law of 1883 (which broke the monolingual French structure in secondary and higher education in Flanders ), the creation of a Royal Flemish Academy for Language and Literature in 1886, and the gradual introduction of legislation to remove injustices in the field of criminal law in 1889 (Witte and Van Velthoven 1999: 77–78).
- 8.
Industrialisation and increased levels of education resulted in a growth of Flemish social groups who were sensitive to language issues and who did not wish to be confronted with language discrimination in their aim for upward social mobility. The language struggle during those years concentrated more clearly on the dissemination of the standard language (Deschouwer 2003).
- 9.
The ‘Delegation of Catalan Teaching’ (DEC) of ‘Òmnium Cultural ’ (1961) and ‘Escola de Mestres Rosa Sensat’ (1965) were the two most important associations in the struggle for the presence of Catalan in education . They agreed on the two main goals (students should not be separated for linguistic reasons and they should finish compulsory education knowing Catalan and Castilian ), which incidentally the legislator introduced in the linguistic laws of 1983 and 1998, but they disagreed on the method. The DEC defended that the schooling system should be ‘in Catalan language and content’ regardless of the language spoken at home by the students, while ‘Escola de Mestres Rosa Sensat’ defended a form of school bilingualism in which each student should be taught in their family language but all in the same class, using two blackboards and teaching first in one language and later in the other (Arenas and Muset 2007: 33).
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Cetrà, D. (2019). Nationalism in Catalonia and Flanders. In: Nationalism, Liberalism and Language in Catalonia and Flanders. Comparative Territorial Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-08274-1_4
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