Liberating Spaces

This video shows a group of Catalan policemen infiltrated among the demonstrators protesting against the cuts the political parties were voting in the Catalan parliament yesterday 15/06/2011. According to many sources these people were the source of the first violence against the police, which gave way to the police to act against the demonstrators. These seem to be a premeditated strategy to delegitimize these protest movements.

As a friend of mine was saying yesterday while having dinner, what politicians should do is to listen, and not complaining about “how undemocratic” these demonstations are. Unfortunately, they are not listening, instead they are accomplices of cover actions against their own people. Shame on them…

…and if you read Spanish “Estrategias del poder para desprestigiar movimientos sociales: el caso #parlamentcamp”

On May 15, something extraordinary started in Spain. On that day, a network of Spanish citizens under the banner Democracia real YA! (Real democracy, now!) called for demonstrations all around Spain to protest against a corrupt political system, with its epicenter in Madrid’s Plaza del Sol. This has ignited the powder of indignation accumulated during these last years against political and economic elites that use their positions for their private benefit, being the bailout of the bankers the maximum expression of this alliance of the crooks. As in other places, the Internet has played a key role in the mobilisation of citizen for expressing their rights. On Twitter, people are using hashtags #spanishrevolution #notenemosmiedo #nolesvotes #acampadasol #acampadabcn…to tell, express, protest, coordinate, call for more and more action. On Facebook, the page of the campaign Democracia real YA has already more than 225,000 likes, and a petition to ask the Junta Electoral Central (Board of elections, regulating and supervising good proceedings during elections) to revoke a decision to ban any demonstrations during Saturday, “reflection day”, has at this moment 165,000 petitioners.

In February this year, in one of my posts I said:

In well-established democracies these technological changes may facilitate revolt against the privileges of the political class – from the pettty corruption of letting the taxpayer pay a hotel room in a private trip to the big commissions attached to public procurement contracts -, and the manipulation of state structures for the benefit of the few, those with money and position to influence, sometimes even determine, how we are governed – above all the financiers, who with arrogance move money, take money as they please.

This is the citizens’ revolution. Those who enjoy democratic citizenship use it to stop the crooks, the corrupt, the greedy profiting from the loopholes that an imperfect system – as it always will be – offers them for their private gain.

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When Spain won against Germany in the World Championship semifinals, a sports newspaper published in Madrid, As, headlined its front page with a ‘Visca España!’ in recognition of the origins of game played by ‘La Roja’. This is quite a symbolic expression of integrative definition of Spain.

Abroad, by all nationalities, I’ve been asked any times whether I wanted an independent Catalunya from Spain. I’ve always replied with a ‘it depends on how you define Spain’. If you define it as a centralized nation-state where other cultures other than the Castilian are marginalised from its identity, I definitely don’t want to be part of it. But if you define it as an integrative entity of diversity, where language, culture, actions, emotions and thoughts from its ‘pueblos’ (communities) are respected at the same level as the Castilian (for example when Catalan would be taught in Spanish schools as part of our rich patrimony, worth protecting and promoting), then yes. I want to be Spanish. Identity is not a static thing. It moves and changes with history. We contribute to its definition. For this we need leaders that pull us in one direction or the other. It’s up to us to choose these leaders.

Today, there is an interesting article in El Pais about the effects of Spain’s achievements in the World Cup, the use of ‘Visca España!’, the fact that the game style is from Barcelona and Spain’s brand.

Most of the world knows. Tomorrow Spain will play against Netherlands in its first World Championship final. They will win. What you don’t know is that the day before, that is today, there will be a huge demonstration in Barcelona in protest of the use of the Constitutional Court’s decision against some important articles of the new Catalan Statute (l’Estatut) (a kind of Catalan Constitution). It is ironic that this manifestation of the problems of vertebration of a nation-state that has struggled from its beginning to integrate a dominating Castilian culture with its peripherical partners coincides with the biggest success in Spanish sport history. Furthermore, the core of the skilful Spanish football team is mostly composed by Catalans or people from Barcelona FC, one of the most important symbols of Catalan national aspirations. Irony of fate.

My identity has always been a mixed feeling. On the one hand, my grandfather (my mother’s father) was from Madrid and all his children have a strong feeling of being Spanish, understood as mainly speaking Castilian and understanding Spain as one unity with a common culture. On the other hand, my grandfather (my father’s father) felt himself as a Catalan integrated in an ideally plural Spain, where all different cultures could learn from each other and live together.

Myself, I feel Catalan, but I also feel Spanish. I feel Catalan because I understand and share a common culture that surrounds me. I feel this culture as unique (as other are) and worth preserving and protecting. I love the mountains, rivers, cities, towns and sea of Catalunya. I feel it is my country, the land where I was born, where I lived for 25 years. It is the land loved by the people I love. Though my mother tongue is not Catalan (my mother and father always spoke to me in Spanish), when I hear someone speaking it I feel at home.

I feel Spanish because I feel comfortable and myself when I speak Spanish. My behaviour and culture reflect in many acts and words what others all around the peninsula do and say. When I think of love and sex, I imagine passion and depth, an act that joins two people beyond its mechanics and physical pleasure. When I think of Spain – of Sevilla, Toledo, San Sebastian, Formentera, Ronda or Madrid – or I am with Spaniards, I feel at home.

These two identities are for many hard to combine. In my mind and heart they do exist together. And I feel happy about it. At then end, what is really important as humans is not what we “objectively” think is true, but how we feel about it. And I feel good about being Catalan and Spanish at the same time. I just wish others could listen more to their feelings and make their mind an accomplice of them. Perhaps we all will understand that we share more than we think.

Artur Mas, leader of the Catalan center-right party CiU (with whom I am, by the way, ideologically far from close. In fact I am not close to any political party) talks about the Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Rodriguez Zapatero, in an interview from the Plaza Mayor de Madrid in the Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia today:

La mejor definición de Zapatero la he encontrado en el Diccionario marítimo español. En la letra Z aparece la palabra zapatero: “Dícese del que maniobra o ha maniobrado mal, o no entiende la maniobra”.

Translation: The best definition I found of Zapatero is in the Spanish maritime dictionary. In the letter Z one may find the word “zapatero”: “It is said of the person who maneuvers or has maneuvered badly, or does not understand the move.”

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On May 13-14 the Catalan ombudsman (Síndic de Greuges) is holding the first conference on the right of access to information organized by a public institution in Spain. I am particularly proud of this event because I’ve been working on it since September 2009. It is for me an important step forward to get a real right to access public sector information in Spain.

Among many others, speakers at the conference include Steve Wood (from UK Information Commissioner office), Natasa Pirc (Slovenian Information Commissioner), Emilio Guichot (Subdirector, Spanish Ministry of the Presidency), Dave Banisar (Senior Legal Counsel, Article 19), Helen Darbishire (Director, AccessInfo).

You can access the programme of the conference (in Catalan) here.

During the conference there will be live online streaming. More info soon.

This week is ending. I’ve been (still I am) in Moscow for a week of teaching at the MGIMO, as I do every six months. On the academic side, no big changes or problems – well, besides a drunk student who told me in front of the rest of the students that “this year everything is changing”, for I will have to start teaching in Russian (!), because he couldn’t understand English and my subject interested him very much (ignoring the fact that there was very good simultaneous translation!). I took it as a funny anecdote anyway, similar to the email I got last year from the worst-translator-ever, who was complaining that he got fired because of me.

The big news for me are that while I was in Russia, I could do politics in Spain. I could participate as a blogger and citizen in the massive online protest against the surreptitious provision included at the end (and some say in the last minute) of Prime Minister Zapatero’s new Ley de Economía Sostenible (Law for a Sustainable Economy), currently being read by the Spanish Parliament. This provision modifies the Spanish Information Society Law passed in 2002. It creates a new Commission for Intellectual Property (Comisión de Propiedad Intelectual) in the Ministry of Culture. And, according to the interpretation I concur with, it gives to this Commission powers to shut off a website or online service infringing intellectual property rights without judicial intervention. This set off a viral fire on the web in a matter of hours. Twitter was the main conduct through which this increasingly candescent political momentum ran. The morning after the law proposal was presented to the Parliament, a (still) unidentified group of “journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators” had written a Manifesto for the defence of the rights of Internet users (Manifiesto en defensa de los derechos fundamentales en Internet).

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A group of journalists, bloggers, professionals and creators want to express their firm opposition to the inclusion in a Draft Law of some changes to Spanish laws restricting the freedoms of expression, information and access to culture on the Internet. They also declare that:

1 .- Copyright should not be placed above citizens’ fundamental rights to privacy, security, presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.

2 .- Suspension of fundamental rights is and must remain an exclusive competence of judges. This blueprint, contrary to the provisions of Article 20.5 of the Spanish Constitution, places in the hands of the executive the power to keep Spanish citizens from accessing certain websites.

3 .- The proposed laws would create legal uncertainty across Spanish IT companies, damaging one of the few areas of development and future of our economy, hindering the creation of startups, introducing barriers to competition and slowing down its international projection.

4 .- The proposed laws threaten creativity and hinder cultural development. The Internet and new technologies have democratized the creation and publication of all types of content, which no longer depends on an old small industry but on multiple and different sources.

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In October 2008, the Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, promised a law on access to public information.

Now it seems that the Spanish government is in the late stages of preparation of a draft Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information. According to ABC, the law is imminent.

The Cabinet intends to submit to Parliament the draft Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information “in coming weeks”, even before the controversial reform of the Religious Freedom Act, admit government sources.

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