Abstract
En este artículo desarrollamos un marco interpretativo para comprender la trayectoria de radicalización en el “procés” catalán. Independientemente del estatus legal del referéndum en cuestión, las campañas de referéndum son capaces de crear, y de hecho son en sí mismas, oportunidades políticas. En contraste con las predicciones desde las teorías de los ciclos de protesta, cuando se cierran las oportunidades a nivel nacional y la represión se intensifica, no necesariamente se desarrolla un proceso de radicalización que contribuye al declive del ciclo, al menos a corto plazo. Como el caso catalán ilustra entre mediados de los años 2000 y finales de 2018, varios mecanismos pueden mediar este proceso, incluyendo la apropiación de oportunidades políticas, el cambio de escala hacia abajo y la convergencia del movimiento. Una densa red de asambleas locales de base reemplaza en el a las grandes organizaciones de la sociedad civil que hasta entonces, y especialmente durante las diadas entre 2012 y 2015, habían liderado la movilización social. Aunque estas asambleas ciudadanas han abrazado repertorios de acción más directos y disruptivos, estos han sido mayoritariamente pacíficos. Asimismo, este reemplazo ha favorecido la convergencia del movimiento, abriendo espacios donde activistas de un amplio espectro pueden movilizarse conjuntamente, y evitando de este modo una escalada violenta y la emergencia de grupos escindidos violentos (al menos hasta finales de 2018).
Highlights
The waves of new states emergent after World War I, the de-colonization period and the breakdown of the Soviet Union, have declined in intensity (Haklai 2015, 462), a steady trickle of nonstate nations continue to assert demands for collective self-determination in vastly differing political contexts, from Scotland and Catalonia to New Caledonia and Bougainville
Multiple cases have demonstrated that repression, or the transformation of opportunities to threats can lead to a radicalization of movements’ repertoires (Almeida 2003, 2018). This has occurred only to a limited extent in the Catalan case till late 2018. We argue that this puzzling instance of constrained escalation is a result of mechanisms that concatenate after certain eventful protests: appropriation of local opportunities, downward scale shift and movement convergence
The governing pro-independence coalition coalesced around the promise to hold a binding referendum on independence, committing to an eventual unilateral declaration of independence, providing it obtained more than 50% of the votes — notwithstanding the pro-independence majority in the regional Parliament in terms of seats, secessionist parties never won a majority of Catalan votes
Summary
The waves of new states emergent after World War I, the de-colonization period and the breakdown of the Soviet Union, have declined in intensity (Haklai 2015, 462), a steady trickle of nonstate nations continue to assert demands for collective self-determination in vastly differing political contexts, from Scotland and Catalonia to New Caledonia and Bougainville (della Porta, O’Connor and Portos 2019). Several referendums have been induced and/or appropriated by social movements in many heterogenous contexts, beyond states with constitutionally enshrined rights for citizen-initiated referendums, like Italy, or states with deep rooted traditions of direct democracy such as Switzerland. Irrespective of their legal status (institutionally endorsed, legally binding or symbolic), referendums have become epicentres of contestation in broader cycles of contention. As instances of heightened contention, referendums from below can provoke repression by incumbent powerholders, triggering processes of radicalization, understood as escalation via an interactive process from nonviolent to increasingly violent repertoires of action over time (Bosi and Malthaner 2015; della Porta 2018; Malthaner 2018).
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