Abstract
By analyzing transitional government documents and political campaign material from the 1979 municipal elections in Barcelona, this chapter explores the process by which their language and images with reference to culture moved from being a conceptualization of the citizen as a critical, creative, and transformative subject, one modeled on the grassroots activist of the late-Francoist period, to another where residents were invited to celebrate a city where political agency had become redundant, and consensus the norm. The main argument here is that cultural policies and culture in general served the purpose of managing the local population, and contained its political activism by means of making culture and politics discursively indistinguishable. This is possible because culture in this time incarnated democracy more than the economic or even political realms, as it took the role of demonstrating that the institutions were making democratic life, democratic everydayness, possible, and with it, they were providing the means for the full humanity of citizens to emerge. I argue that it is in culture, so understood, that the freedom-seeking impulse of the anti-Francoist movement was channeled by government, and in culture where it was adapted to the needs of celebration and forgetting conflict.
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Notes
- 1.
Jorge Semprún, Spanish Culture Minister in the PSOE government from 1989 to 1991, points to this Ministry as a democratic invention of the first Spanish governments after the dictatorship, one created by imitating the French model: “Democratic Spain set up the Ministry of Culture by taking inspiration from the French model. It is a French jacobin invention, very important for France, mostly from the time when those ministries incarnated the will of the state, common interest. It is a democratic invention.” It is also significant that he distinguishes the Spanish cultural policies at the time from those of its German counterparts: “Germany positioned itself [in the early 1990s, MPB] toward a neoliberal conceptualization of the circulation of cultural goods” (2014: 160–161).
- 2.
For an account of it see Borja et al., esp. 79–94. Writing in 1977, with the Transition in full swing and democratic municipalities not yet a reality, they state that grassroots associations have created “a network of collective life and social organisation” (1977: 83) which “has legitimized a series of social rights which the administration has had no choice but, to a greater or lesser extent, to accept” (Ibid., 81, emphasis in the original). Of their independence from institutions they say: “Organisms are created in the city that are totally autonomous from the State, with representation and mass appeal. This is a phenomenon that cannot be assimilated to the particular authoritarian Spanish system” (Ibid.).
- 3.
- 4.
“The citizens movement’s own logics leads to the proposal of social transformations as a means to achieve a more egalitarian and communitarian city, to the all-encompassing struggle for the State’s democratization in order for the socialization of the means to manage urban power” (Borja et al. 1977: 94, emphasis in the original).
- 5.
The different angles of their public intervention is so itemized by Borja et al. (1977: 84–85):
Associations not only encompass political actions relative to life conditions in the neighbourhoods but, by multiplying their recreational and cultural activities, they become too an important axis of social and collective life development. They also widen the scope of their demands: social (prices), political (amnesty and public liberties) or cultural traditions (education, urban planning, work relations, youth, etc) turn into ways of overcoming the strict traditional framework of neighbourhood concerns. Populations are reached through different means: street exhibitions, newsletters, popular celebrations. Alternative solutions to administrative projects or omissions are devised, as well as plans for specific areas (education, health) or single-issue ones (concerning a square or block). They establish relations with the Administration, coming together with them in committees with supervision powers. At the same time, neighbour collectives turn into political platforms through a double process: the politicization of their claims and their neighbour leaders, and the presence of political forces that can through them get closer to and directly address the wider population.
- 6.
For a detailed program of what the PSUC proposed in terms of popular control of the municipal power, see Borja et al. (1977: 109–114).
- 7.
See PSC-PSOE, “Entra” and “Los socialistas” for some of these rare examples.
- 8.
See, for example, how in “Guanyem la ciutat” (Let’s Win The City), a socialist brochure addressed to young people, culture appears connected to leisure and the right of youth to organize and own it in order to avoid being only interpellated by capitalist consumption. The possibility of creating this new type of non-alienated culture depends here upon the building of spaces like the already mentioned casals, esplais (community organized and publicly subsidized play schemes for local children), colònies (community organized and publicly subsidized residential holidays for local children) where it will take place. (p. 10)
- 9.
A Barcelona-specific PSC-PSOE poster by Horacio Elena, another well-known illustrator of children’s books, of very similar characteristics to the one analyzed here can be found in the brochure “Entra amb nosaltres a l’Ajuntament” (Come In With Us To The City Hall).
- 10.
I want to thank Noemí de Haro for calling my attention to Sánchez’s work during the Spanish transition.
- 11.
See the text here http://respuestahistoria.blogspot.com.es/p/la-constitucion-de-1978.html. Last access January 27, 2016.
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Balibrea, M.P. (2017). Culture Is to the Social Materialization of Democracy as the Critical Subject Is to Democratic Citizenship. In: The Global Cultural Capital. The Contemporary City. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53596-2_4
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