Estat Català

Estat Català is a historical pro-independence party in Catalonia and is one of the oldest in Europe.

Estat Català was founded by Francesc Macià in 1922 as a political and fighting organisation whose purpose was to bring about the independence of Catalonia from Spain. During the 1920s, the party was active in the fight against the General Primo de Rivera and the monarchy. Their actions included a failed assassination attempt against the King of Spain Alfonso XIII in an operation that was known as the Complot de Garraf (Conspiracy of Garraf). Estat Català also raised a small army led by Francesc Macià to recover the south of the Principality from Prats de Molló, a Catalan territory under the rule of the French administration.

When the government of Primo de Rivera banned separatist movements, the party became clandestine and Francesc Macià went into exile. Nonetheless, Estat Català was one of the parties promoting the "Pacte de Sant Sebastià", where along with the Basque and Galician nationalists and Spanish republicans they agreed to push for a democratic process in the Spanish State (at that time it was a monarchy).

During the so called "Conferència d'Esquerres" (Conference of the left), held on the 17 and 19 of March 1931 at the "Cros" street in the "Sants" district of Barcelona, Estat Català joined the Partit Republicà Català and the political group L'Opinió to form Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya.

In April 1931, Francesc Macià proclaimed the Catalan Republic in Barcelona , and established the Generalitat de Catalunya, which was abolished by the Spanish and French troops who, in 1714, had established a borbonic absolutist monarchy with the king Philip V of Spain. Francesc Macià, with the support of a wide majority of the Catalan people, was the first president of the re-established Generalitat. In 1936 the Spanish Civil War began.

Estat Català fought actively on the war fronts, creating its own corps of volunteers, the most important being the Pyrenaic militias and the expeditionary corp that fought in Majorca.

From 1939, having lost the war, many of the combatants of the party were executed and many more died in exile where, after being put in concentration camps by the French government (who treated them like enemies) they were captured by the German nazis and deported to the extermination camps of Mathausen and Gusen. Those who stayed free joined the French Resistance and had worked intensely to help allied airmen and Jews to escape from occupied France.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Estat Català was restructured and restarted military and political action against Franco's regime.

Estat Català also gave Catalan nationalism a globalised vision of the Catalan nation: as early as in 1942, the party published the first map of the Catalan Countries which included the Principality (with Northern Catalonia included), the Valencian Country, the Balearic Islands and the coterminous area of Catalonia with Aragón (known as La Franja or "The Stripe").

At the beginning of the 1970s, the struggle against Franco increased. In response, the repression of the regime also increased.

By then, since the Civil War, many people had been arrested as a result of their membership of the FAC (Front d'Alliberament Català) and Terra Lliure (a Catalan radical independentist terrorist group). They suffered in prison and some of them were sentenced to death for their ideas. Many other militants fled into exile.

In 1975, after the death of Franco, Spain started a democratic process and in 1978 the Spanish Constitution was approved. In 1979 the Estatut d'Autonomia was approved for Catalonia.

Estat Català was not subsequently legalized, but an autonomy regime exists today. A politic group named Estat Catalá was legalized. Despite its number of members, it has been decreasing in popularity with time and it has no real political power in Catalonia.

Schism during the 80s

From the 1980s onwards, a number of militants of its youth section, removed from the majority of the party's tradition, added a tinge of ethnic-oriented and xenophobic nationalism and a penchant for paramilitary aesthetics, both of which have seldom escaped marginality as a part of Catalan independentism (arguably excluding the "Escamots" interim due to Josep Dencàs and the Badia brothers); most of the militants encouraging these tendencies have exited Estat Català in several waves since the 1990s and are now inscribed in other political options, such as Unitat Nacional Catalana [Catalan wiki page for UNC [http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitat_Nacional_Catalana] ] and the so-called "33 movement" [Catalan wiki page for the 33 movement [http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideologia_33] ] . Some facts, perhaps indicative of the political ascription of said former militants, are:
* the coincidence of the rationale behind the use of "33" ("Catalunya catalana", its initials being the third letter in the alphabet) with that of the acronym "88" (Heil Hitler) used by most European and North American Neo-Nazis.
* their purportedly frequent use of ethnic slurs such as "xarnego". [Meaning of the word (in Catalan) [http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xarnego] ]
* the widespread allegation that some of the UNC's members, leader Xavier Andreu among them, had been militants of the Spanish Neo-Nazi group CEDADE in the past [ [http://barcelona.indymedia.org/newswire/display/254846/index.php] ] . It is widely known that CEDADE, albeit founded during the Francoist regime and still connected to the traditional Spanish extreme right, used independentism as a political gambit to attract marginal reactionary segments of the nationalist population, apparently to some avail.
* the frequent inclusion, in their webpage [ [http://www.unitat.org/index2.html] ] , of articles by journalist Salvador Sostres, who has frequently flirted with social Darwinism, racism and overt xenophobia, especially towards the descendants of Spanish-speaking immigrants of the 50s and 60s. [ ["The "shitty" countries": http://www.salvadorsostres.com/v2/index.asp?dia=4&mes=2&ano=2008] ] [ ["I, the racist": http://www.unitat.cat/nacio/racista.html] ] [ ["Labor fodder": http://www.unitat.cat/nacio/madobra.html] ] [ ["Xarnego" & "Xarnegos (2)": http://www.salvadorsostres.com/v2/index.asp?dia=3&mes=11&ano=2007] ] [ ["Speaking Spanish is for poor people": http://www.periodistadigital.com/periodismo/object.php?o=243087] ] Regardless of whether or not Sostres' articles are tongue-in-cheek, it appears that their inclusion in the UNC webpage is an attempt to capitalize upon literal quotations of an especially strident brand of journalism to further a political agenda -- precisely one of the most usual accusations leveled against populists.

References

External links

* [http://www.estat-catala.net Official website of Estat Català]