“Regionalism in Catalonia under the Franco’s regime: discourses and practices” proposes to explore the continuity and influence of more or less explicit forms of regionalism within the spaces of legality and permissiveness existing during 1939 and 1975, establishing the active and permanent participation of Catalan contemporary society in the construction of the liberal Spanish state. Our hypothesis focuses specifically on the relevance of regionalist discourses and practices in the political-cultural reconstruction process of Catalonia, and the configuration and development of Spain during the second half of the Twentieth century.
The aforementioned participation has been articulated through political, economical and cultural projects, whose main characteristic is regionalism/nationalism, determined by three differential facts: the pioneering Catalan economic and industrial development, the configuration of Barcelona as a modern capital, and the existence of a Catalan culture and language which gained access to modernity. These practices and discourses had to reinterpret Catalan tradition in a restrictive manner in order to adapt to the Francoist structure, and at the same time, they had to defend with more or less forcefulness and clarity the specific interests of the regional economy, the status of Barcelona as capital and/or the Catalan culture. As in the rest of totalitarian systems, Francoism also combined coercion with several forms of transaction with the existing interests within the society.
We want to analyse how the different active agents of Catalanism articulated their interests and particularities from an ideological and political perspective, more or less complicit, in varying degrees, with the Franco’s dictatorship; and how a regionalism developed within the official structure had an impact in Catalan society and in the rest of Spain, by influencing cultural and economic policies, affecting the mutual understanding between societies and cultures and developing a number of specific undertakings and undeniable legacies.