**1. Introduction**

Anniversaries are one of the classical types of *lieux de mémoire* that the French historian Pierre Nora lists in his main work of the same name (Nora 1984–1992). Due to their value as representations of history, the power to define commemorations very directly represents instances of the production of history. They constitute multiple sites to which certain values, meanings, and emotions are attached and around which the struggle to define history takes place1. Over the past seven years, the celebration of the National Holiday of Catalonia on September 11, the *Diada*, has grown into a popular mass demonstration that has, once again, become a channel for political demands, as it was in the transition to democracy in the late 1970s after the death of Dictator Franco. During the more than 30 years between these two periods in time, the celebration of the *Diada* was taken over and institutionalised

<sup>1</sup> For discussions of the process of creation of commemorations, see Trouillot (1995) and Zerubavel (2003). For a critical discussion of Nora's concept and of its relation to national master narratives, see Humlebæk (2018).

by the regional Government and the political parties in Catalonia. Thereby, the National Holiday, paradoxically, lost most of the popular support and mobilisation potential it had had just a few years before. The number of participants in the celebrations in Barcelona has thus fluctuated from over a million in 1977, dropping to a few tens of thousands over the period from the early 1980s to 2011, to again exceed one million participants several times since 2012.

In 1976, just over nine months after Franco's death, the *Diada* celebration was activated by a wide range of organisations and still illegal political parties, and it was linked to the central demands of the transition to democracy in the Catalan context, namely democracy and self-government. These thoughts were easily merged into the historical significance that the *Diada* had had since its invention as a memorial day in the late 1800s. Since 2012, the *Diada* has again been activated especially by the civil society organisations that have made secession from Spain their main goal, and the demands associated with the celebration are therefore their political demands for independence. They are thus not completely in line with the predominant interpretations of earlier periods of politicisation of *Diada*, ye<sup>t</sup> the organisers chose this anniversary for their demonstrations of the movement's popular support. Giori argues that this is because civil society organisers did not want the demonstration to be a "reactive" event against any current political issue, but a proactive one that could cover mobilisations on a number of autonomy-related issues (Giori 2017, p. 289).

Now, the *Diada* has been celebrated eight times since its reinvention in 2012, and a certain fatigue seems to be spreading in relation to the mobilisation power because, among other things, the demands around which the celebration has been constructed have not materialised. The question remains how the organisations behind the successful mobilisation will try to maintain the popular mobilisation around the *Diada* or whether the celebration in a kind of bound cyclic movement returns to earlier participation levels. In this article, we will examine the apparent paradox that when civil society organisations are in charge of the *Diada* celebration, the result is a more politically charged event that mobilises a much larger proportion of the population than when politicians and political parties organise the celebration. Further, when political parties are in charge, the *Diada* not only mobilises far fewer people, but usually takes on a much more cultural and festive character compared with the explicitly political *Diada* demonstrations organised by civil society actors since 2012.

We investigate the recent period of activating the *Diada* since 2012 using qualitative interviews and ethnographic data in order to examine how activists and participants perceive the *Diada* and how the present perception is related to their memory of past commemorations. In particular, we want to gauge to what extent civil society organisations or political parties are driving the mobilisation around the *Diada*.

## **2. State of the Art**

Issues related to Catalan secessionism are central to current scholarship on European integration, nationalism, and territorial politics. Moreover, the debate about nationalities and nationalism is directly related to a more general debate about citizenship, diversity, and collective rights. The terminology used, however, is both unclear and heavily politicised, such as the distinction between a "nation" and a "region". Catalonia is thus sometimes described as a "nation without a state" (Keating 2001) and Catalan nationalism as "regional nationalist" (Keating 1988). The most common term in the literature, however, is "minority nationalism" (Lynch 1996; Elias 2009; Keating 2014; Griera 2016). This term works for two reasons. It shows how sub-state polities stand in a relationship to a larger whole, in this case the majority nation, and it tells us that the parties who support this ideology represent, or aim to represent, national collectives who desire statehood. Catalan politics is heavily impacted by Spanish politics; however, many of the Catalan political parties would want it to be otherwise. To some extent, the recognition of such regions as nations is predicated on the larger, majority nations' approval (Guibernau 2013, p. 369). However, as Burchardt notes, the question of who constitutes majority and who constitutes minority is quite ambiguous in stateless nations (Burchardt 2017, p. 699). Although the

people who identify as Catalans are certainly a minority within the Spanish state, they are a majority within their own territory.<sup>2</sup>

In fact, Keating has specifically described the independence movement in Catalonia as one of the "new nationalisms of Western Europe" due to its non-essentialist, inclusive, and staunchly non-ethnic character, clearly distinguishing them from far-right movements or ethno-nationalist politics (Keating 2008, p. 334). He has argued in favour of reconceptualising nationalities as "nonspatial cultural communities and endowed with various forms of nonterritorial rights" (Keating 2004, p. 373). Guibernau has even gone so far as to term the Catalan pro-independence movement "emancipatory nationalism" for its focus on democratic self-determination and progressive politics. Guibernau argues that those Western liberal democracies in which state and nation are not coextensive and where strong minority nationalist movements have emerged, such as Catalonia, Flanders, and Scotland, are examples of an emerging type of "deepening of democracy" (Guibernau 2013, p. 327). Although some authors, such as Thomas J. Miley, have argued for seeing Catalan linguistic identity as an ethnic component (Miley 2007), there is a wide consensus in the literature on Catalonia that ethnicity and ancestry have little to do with being Catalan (see for example Brandes 1990; Desfor Edles 1999; McCrone 2007; or Dardanelli and Mitchell 2014). The Catalan language can work both as an ethnolinguistic marker of inclusion or, as others have suggested, as a vehicle for the integration of foreigners and non-nationalists into a wider "Catalan culture" (Conversi 1997, p. 4). The dynamics of this socio-linguistic process are best explored in more specific texts (such as Woolard 2005; Conversi and Jeram 2017; or Wilson-Daily et al. 2018).

Specifically for the *Diada*, very little has been written on and, to our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt at a thorough empirical investigation of the most important political event in Catalonia, combining historical and ethnographic analysis that covers the current modern period. The *Diada* has been mentioned *en passant* in other works (such as Conversi 2002; Llobera 2004; or Crameri 2014, pp. 75–82), and Llobera made an analysis of the *Diada* from the 1970s to the early 1990s (Llobera 1996), but no sustained analysis of the political evolution of the event from its reinvention until the present epoch ye<sup>t</sup> exists. Likewise, Michonneau has written an interesting historical account of the creation of the anniversary and its early celebration, and Anguera has written a couple of extensive accounts of the *Diada* from the origins in 1886, but none of them includes the period beyond the Civil War (Michonneau 2001, pp. 165–77, 229–51; Anguera 2003, 2008).

Nevertheless, Rubio has made an interesting comparative rhetorical-discursive analysis of the official speeches of the regional presidents on the respective national days in the Basque Country and Catalonia and, as such, comes close to our object of inquiry. However, the analysis only covers the period from 1980 to 2004 and thus omits precisely the important changes of the last decade and a half (Rubio 2015). Further, although Pablo Giori argues, as we do, that the *Diadas* since 2011 have clearly been taken over and organised by civil society actors, such as the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) and Òmnium Cultural (Giori 2017, p. 286), his analysis of the *Diada* goes a di fferent route than ours and focuses more on cultural elements such as Catalan human towers or *castellers* during the event. Lastly, Rodon et al. (2018) have performed a novel and illuminating social media analysis using Twitter data from the 2016 *Diada* but did not include a historical analysis of the evolution of the *Diada* or qualitative, ethnographic data on the contemporary understandings of the *Diada*.

Several authors such as Crameri (2015), Dowling (2017), and Della Porta et al. (2017) have noted the contemporary vitality of Catalan pro-independence civil society, although a minority of scholars have labelled the Catalan independence movement elite-driven and populist (Barrio et al. 2018). However, few have developed analyses specifically of the *Diada* and memory spaces. Kathryn Crameri (2015)

<sup>2</sup> According to the Catalan bureau of statistics, *Centre d'Estudis d'Opinió* (CEO), 79.9% of the population of Catalonia identifies as Catalan, with 34.2% also identifying to some degree as Spanish. Exclusive Spanish identities are at only 6.5%. This is in contrast to Spain in general, where 24.7% consider themselves exclusively Spanish (Centre d'Estudis d'Opinió (CEO) 2019, p. 16).

has thus argued that civil pro-independence associations such as the ANC are playing an increasingly significant role in Catalan politics, e ffectively putting pressure on the Catalan governmen<sup>t</sup> (Crameri 2015, p. 104), and Andrew Dowling (2017) notes that the 2012 *Diada* was organised outside the structures of political parties by the ANC. Similarly, social movements scholar Donatella Della Porta has argued that the Catalan independence movement is a "paradigmatic example" of a campaign initiated by civil society, which institutional actors and established politicians have later attempted to co-opt. (Della Porta et al. 2017, p. 31). This analysis corroborates our argumen<sup>t</sup> that a range of actors both institutional and coming from civil society are attempting to activate and control the *Diada*. These di ffering understandings of the purpose of the *Diada* significantly change the nature of the celebration between the more cultural and the more political. Our focus on this interplay between civil society and established politics nuances claims that the Catalan independence movement is either fully elite-driven or fully bottom-up.

Our study thus contributes to the incipient but flourishing study of the Catalan independence movement and to the more established study of commemorations and *lieux de memoire* in Spain, addressing both a methodological lacuna and a thematic one. The combination of historical analysis and ethnographic data provides us with ample data to both trace the evolution of the *Diada* as a cultural and political event, and to perform a thorough and multifaceted analysis of how leaders and activists in the Catalan independence movement perceive it and activate it in contemporary Catalan politics, focusing on the interplay between civil society and more established political actors.
