The frontiers on the long strip of land marked out in light green
along the Mediterranean Sea on the map behind the midday weatherman on
Catalonia's TV3 public broadcaster have little to with the borders of
the region that votes for its parliament on Sunday. Modern Catalonia
stops at the coast and the borders of Aragón, Valencia and France – as
a separate map also used on the Temps Migdia programme shows.
But this second map describes a far bigger area known as the Catalan
Lands, a sort of Greater Catalonia that stretches 200 miles south to
Alicante, north beyond the French city of Perpignan and across the
seas to Mallorca and the other Balearic Islands. Daily maximum and
minimum temperatures are given for places such as Ibiza or Fraga in
Aragón.
"These are areas where Catalan is spoken," explained Muriel Casals,
president of Òmnium Cultural, a foundation whose mission is to teach
and protect the Catalan language – but which is now also threatening
to help lead a tax rebellion against the Spanish exchequer. "We see
any attempts to attack the language in those places as a threat,
because it shrinks the language's boundaries."
Some, such as Isabel-Clara Simó, a Valencia-born writer and candidate
for Barcelona with the Catalan Solidarity separatist party, are hoping
separatist spirit spreads "by contagion" to the outlying region. "That
looks a bit premature," said Alfred Bosch, a parliamentary deputy for
the separatist Catalan Republican Left party. "If they want to join
then, of course, they would have all the assistance they want from our
party. But it depends on them."
And Artur Mas, president of Catalonia, told the Guardian: "We are not
going to make territorial demands. With the rest [of Spain] we can
have good neighbourly relations. We can do things together like defend
a common cultural and linguistic space or a common economic area. But
it is one thing to do that and another to have territorial ambitions.
We don't have them at all."
Simó's wait for contagion may prove eternal. "There are some cultural
affinities, but there is little support for the idea here," said Ximo
Puig, leader of Valencia's socialists. "In fact there are even
anti-Catalanists in Valencia and the right uses that to win votes."
Indeed, conservative politicians in the region that lies south of
Catalonia have sometimes tried to argue that Valencian and Catalan are
not even the same language. "That is ridiculous," said Simó.
In the Balearic Islands, where some view Barcelona with the same
degree of suspicion that Madrid provokes in many Catalans, a regional
government led by Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy's People's
party has just stopped funding to the Ramon Llull foundation, which
promotes Catalan culture abroad – and is named after a 13th-century
Mallorcan writer.
"The Balearic Islands will never form part of the so-called Catalan
Lands as long as I am president," said the regional leader, José Ramón
Bauzá, in a newspaper interview. "Baleares is part of Spain and we are
delighted with that."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/19/catalonia-outlying-regions
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