The Catalans National Identity Through the Prism of Science-Based Journalism: a Bibliography Study

Abstract

In the context of the recent years’ events, the problem of Catalonia’s national identity is relevant not only for Spain but for Europe in general. The long-lasting academic debate between supporters of Catalonia’s independence and those who advocate its integration with the titular people of Spain has led to emergence of a large number of researches and journalistic works that analyze nationalism, inter-ethnic cooperation, public relations, features of propaganda and crowd manipulation, and other important issues. The article describes and analyzes the various approaches to studying the problem of the Catalans’ national identity, the dynamic of the thought and its national features in Spanish academic discourse in the period from early 2000s to the present. In that period, Spanish academic community formed several schools of thought focusing on the problem of national identity of particular regions. Although the schools have opposing views on the problem, they all take into account political, economic, social, cultural and linguistic factors that are able to generate scenarios of the nation’s development and face modern challenges. What makes the approaches different is interpretation of the ways and models of people unification, and analysis of the centuries-old traditions. The division of the research works on Catalan’s nationalism by the language criteria into Spanish-written and Catalan-written ones is almost equal. However, there is a stable trend to political or ideological biasing of academic texts, which results in them acquiring elements of journalistic style.