Repression and Resistance in Catalonia

Abstract

This paper focuses on a dialectic of repression and resistance at work in the most recent wave of contentious politics in Catalonia. It emphasises the brief but certain resurgence of a discursive and performative repertoire recollecting Catalonia’s revolutionary past in the wave of contentious politics that has swept the region over the past decade, since the onset of the so-called Eurozone crisis. The paper seeks to provide an interpretation of the region’s recent cycle of contentious politics through the lens of state repression. It hones in on an emblematic moment, from the spring of 2011, associated with the Indignados movement. It pays particular attention to their violent removal by the police from the Plaça Catalunya in May, and to the attempt to surround the Catalan Parliament to disrupt the budget debate the following month. It contends that the violent repression of the Indignados movement in Catalonia by the “regional” authorities is best understood as a reflex response to an incipient challenge to existing constellations of hierarchical and oppressive social relations - a challenge that echoed, indeed threatened to revive, long-suppressed memories of the region’s revolutionary past, to “blast” this past “out of the continuum of history,” to “appropriate its memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger” (Benjamin). This moment of violent repression by the Catalan authorities proved the precursor, the condition of possibility, for the subsequent re-channelling of contentious politics within the more comfortable confines of hierarchically-structured, nationalist imaginaries.