Intergroup Communication: Spain
Authors: Viladot Ma.Àngels 
Published: September 2017

Intergroup communication in Spain focuses mainly on the interactions between the Spanish state and the coexisting national minorities. Spain is a state divided into autonomous communities, three of which—Catalonia, Galicia, and Basque Country—are denominated historic communities, having their own languages that coexist co-officially with Castilian, the official language of Spain. Because national identities are not fixed, but mutable in the face of political, economic, and social circumstances, the dynamics established between Spain and these historic communities are a recurring theme of study and analysis. However, research conducted from the perspective of intergroup communication is very scarce. The mutability of national identities is explicitly stated in an alarming way in the current highly conflictive intergroup communication between the Spanish state and Catalonia. This autonomous community has progressed from a cultural claim in the 19th century to a pact-based ethnopolitical vindication from the 1980s until the beginning of the 21st century. However, the Spanish state, from its stance as a unique and essentialist nation, is facing a Catalonia that claims recognition as a nation and a strong self-government. These demands have led to a strong polarization between the parties, to such an extent that the conflictive escalation has led Catalonia to consider secession.

Intergroup communication between Spain and the historic communities is strongly influenced by the historic circumstances of upheavals and defeats suffered because of the application of the power of the Spanish majority, willing to renounce to its richness of cultural and linguistic variability in exchange for the unity of a single Spain, and because of the ethnolinguistic vitalities of the historic minorities. Each historic community has a different ethnolinguistic vitality, as well as different feelings of injustice and legitimacy about its situation. Galicia has suffered a strong ethnolinguistic assimilation into the Spanish group of Castilian speakers, and in the Basque Country, a highly significant part of the population now feels as Basque as Spanish, while the demands for separatism are decreasing. On the other hand, Catalan-speaking communities—some ten million people—even with variations among them, have a high relative ethnolinguistic vitality and, driven by feelings of injustice, they act with strategies of competence and communicative divergence, to which the Spanish state is responding, with both strategies of silence and a strong normative enforcement. These differences in the balance of power between Spain and the historic communities have been one of the main factors that have motivated different levels in intergroup communication.

These conflicts will require imaginative solutions that allow the national group to achieve their aspirations and to overcome the Catalonia-Spain confrontation, a struggle that began more than 300 years ago. Some solutions are being proposed today, for example, to achieve a European federalism in which Europe is structured in layers, governed by principles of subsidiarity.