Today, while tension between Catalonia and Spain ebbs and flows, a digital civil war is being fought on social media. No truce is in sight.
In the early modern period, Spain and Portugal carried out dramatic mass expulsions that affected more than half a million people of Jewish or Muslim faith. Revisiting the fate of these populations helps to put into perspective the refugee crisis that the world is currently facing.
In its criticism of the democratic deficit in Spain, has the 15M movement (initiated 15 May 2011 in Spain) challenged Philip Pettit’s theory of republicanism which gave its intellectual authority to Zapatero’s government? The philosopher draws his own conclusions on the movement and the crisis it stems from.
Critics of Catalanism often reduce the movement to a reaction based on economic and fiscal selfishness. Jeanne Moisand shows how Catalanism originally identified itself with the defence of protectionism and the Spanish empire. It was only after the latter had been lost that the Catalan economic identity became opposed to the Spanish nation.
