Is there an ethnicity bias in Catalan secessionism? Discourses and political actions

Abstract

Many charges have been made against Catalan secessionism from a normative or ideological point of view. In this article we would like to focus on the accusation that the secessionist movement is xenophobic, racist or ethnicist. Between 2017 and 2019, and particularly since Quim Torra was named president of the Generalitat, this has been the dominant criticism in the arguments set out against secessionism. We are interested in evaluating the strength of this accusation in this contribution. In this respect, we focus on the discourse and the main legislative actions adopted by the Catalan institutions since embarking on a determined bid for sovereignty, popularly called the Process, in 2010. Our conclusion is that both from discursive and legislative points of view, it can be concluded that Catalan secessionism cannot be considered as an ethnicist movement