https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5605-5295
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ABSTRACT
Nationwide interregional redistribution has recently become a salient political issue in several wealthy regions in Europe, to the point of becoming a powerful motivation for pursuing political independence. Catalonia is a case in point. Rather than focus on the core of the nationalist movement, the present ethnographic study approaches its margins: it examines how working-class second-generation immigrants from southern Spain living in Barcelona voice their disapproval of what they see as an unfair territorial redistribution within Spain that allows for generous social protection in their parents’ places of origin in the poor South at the expense of the hard-pressed workers in the productive North. The second generation’s critique of interregional redistribution is a way of denouncing economic hardships in the absence of an effective alternative discourse for explaining inequalities within Catalonia. However, rather than expressing some sort of welfare chauvinism following a nationalist Catalan–Spanish divide, these particular fiscal grievances can be better understood against the background of migratory memories and subjectivities, and particularly of the imagination concerning the urban–rural cleavage. Ultimately, this ethnographic case invites us to recognize multiple and embedded rationales of social sharing, which I attempt to encompass within the concept of the ‘moral community of redistribution’.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The gross domestic product (GDP) per capita for Catalonia, the fourth richest region in Spain, is 58% higher than Andalusia and 60% than Extremadura, the poorest regions.
2 In the third quarter of the 20th century, roughly 2 million people from the rest of Spain (mainly from the South) migrated to Catalonia. Coming from rural areas, most of them swelled the ranks of the Catalan urban working classes. Today, these people and their descendants make up almost half of the Catalan population.
3 Since the 1980s, the Catalan ‘fiscal deficit’ vis-à-vis Spain has averaged between 3% and 9% of its GDP, depending on the method used (Dalle Mulle Citation2018, pp. 46–47).
4 A Spain-wide poll (Garmendia & León, Citation2022) shows that Catalan respondents are those who disagree the most (followed by Euskadi and Madrid, the richest regions) with the statement ‘the fiscal system should tax the richest regions to transfer resources to the poorest ones’.
5 As in all ethnographic fieldwork – especially when it is conducted in urban areas – random, fleeting encounters occur with people who are not aware of the researcher’s role. Although interactions of this sort provide valuable contextual information, in this article the informants who have been quoted verbatim (although their real names have been changed) are those who were aware of my role as a researcher and with whom I interacted either in conversations or in interviews.
6 Notwithstanding this perception, the PER unemployment regime is just one of the many particular sectorial unemployment programmes that exist in Spain, but probably the one with the most modest benefits: a monthly payment of scarcely over €400 for a maximum of six months issued to about 200,000 people in Andalusia and Extremadura.
7 See Hadjimichalis (Citation2018) for the role that cultural and geographical stereotypes about European southerners played at the EU level as a moral justification of austerity policies and how these same stereotypes were reproduced within southern countries in relation to their southern regions.