A study coordinated by Joaquim Rius, professor of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the Universitat de València, and prepared in collaboration with the University of Barcelona, advises of the tendency of cultural recentralisation of the Spanish State. The difficulty of elaborating a more plural vision, according to the experts, comes from the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court, the concentration of the cultural infrastructure in the capital city of the State, or the fact that it has never been set out a decentralisation following a federal model, among other factors.
The researchers Joaquim Rius and no Mariano M. Zamorano have analysed the relationship between federalism, cultural policies and plural identity in the Spanish State, through the development of the cultural competences and the comparison of the Spanish model with other such as the Anglo-Saxon and the French one on one side, and the one of Quebec (Canada) on the other side. They consider that ‘a growing instability of the system in current politics, which denies in different aspects that Spain is a federal state’ is taking place.
Thus, and according to the work published at the magazine ‘Publius: The Journal of Federalism’, ‘the central administration of the State has stablished a political control and strongly symmetric dynamics between the 17 regions and two autonomic cities’, and therefore the result ‘does not correspond to a federal government that acts as a coordinator between federated parts or that is representative of the existence of a cultural and national diversity’.
The work of Rius, professor of the Faculty of Social Sciences and of Zamorano, ‘Federalism, Cultural Policies, and Identity Pluralism: Cooperation and Conflict in the Spanish Quasi-Federal System’, relates the current cultural model of the Spanish State with other methods such as the French one. ‘There is an important centralisation of the cultural infrastructure in the captital. That indicates that it is the continuation of a centralist scheme inherit from a totalitarian state and inspired by the interventionist French model that promotes national identity’, he said.
Furthermore, as it is exposed among the conclusions of the study, ‘in more than 30 years the general administration of the State has not established any democratic organisation that promotes culture of national minorities, its languages or its artistic creations.’ In this regard, the work points out: ‘Instead, the cultural policy of the autonomic communities has been conceived as a showcase to legitimise its existence in the context of decentralisation and, increasingly, as a resource for the economic development and a tool for the promotion of Spanish culture in a national and international level’.
The research marks as a turning point in the cultural relationships between the general administration of the State and the autonomic communities the sentence of the Constitutional Court (TC) of 2010 about the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia of 2006. ‘The statute was trying to protect the power of Catalonian authorities in matters of culture against the invasions of its competences that have been happening since the beginning of democracy, when the Statute of 1978 determinates the exclusivity of the responsibility in this area. On the other hand, the sentence of the Constitutional Court insists in turning it into a competence in which it is produced a whole concurrence or a competence parallelism, as a source of inefficiencies and conflicts’, points out Joaquim Rius.
President of the Constitutional Court.
Moreover, the sentence of the TC makes an also unfavourable interpretation of the article 149.2, according to the researchers, about the concept of ‘service of culture as essential attribution’ and to the duty of facilitating the ‘cultural communication between autonomic communities, according to them’. ‘This concept, according to the sentence, allows to elaborate a basic unitary legislation, opening with it a via for the intervention of the general administration of the state in the cultural autonomic policy’. This leads to ‘competence, constitutional and statutory lack of definition: a factor opposed to the federalisation of the State on cultural matters and that becomes a reality in recentralisation actions like the plans of intangible heritage, that far from promoting cultural diversity in terms of multiculturalism are used to promote controversial elements of a unitary and traditional conception of identity, as it is bullfighting’.
Solutions built on consensus
Joaquim Rius and Mariano M. Zamorano advocate for consensus to solve the situation, through the development of common mechanisms and aims of cultural cooperation within the framework of cultural diversity. ‘Otherwise, this dynamic of cultural policies is moving towards a political and identity conflict’. In their work, authors also mention that just a new political and constitutional scenario will allow federal cooperation on cultural matters.
As an example of interference on cultural matters on the part of the State, experts participating on the study mention the case of Platea, a cultural programme promoted by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport through the National Institute of Performing Arts and Music. Its aim was to support the presentation of performing arts shows in spaces of the local entities, for what an agreement with the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces.
New book by Joaquim Rius
‘Treinta años de políticas culturales en España. Participación cultural, gobernanza territorial e industrias culturales’ (‘Thirty years of cultural policies in Spain. Cultural participation, territorial governance and cultural industries’) is the title of the book of which Joaquim Rius is co-author and that has just been published on ‘Publicacions’ of the Universitat de València. The work analyses the cultural policies as a factor that has turned into a key element in the configuration of the agents of the political system, in the territorial development, in the generation of new leisure and consumption practices, and in the construction of collective identities.
The work pays attention to a subject that was, until now, scattered and without systematize. Rius, along with Juan Arturo Rubio (University of Antonio de Nebrija), have collected the participation of the main specialists on this area to analyse the core of cultural policy. It also deals with the influence in the political and institutional framewark, the identity factors (where it has also participated Mariano Zamorano) and the international context as factors that condition the cultural policiy and explain its evolution.
Article:
Joaquim Rius-Ulldemolins, Mariano M. Zamorano: ‘Federalism, Cultural Policies, and Identity Pluralism: Cooperation and Conflict in the Spanish Quasi-Federal System’. Publius: The Journal of Federalism volumen 45 number 2, pp 167-188
doi:10.1093/publius/pju037
Last update: 7 de march de 2016 07:00.
News release
