On Thursday, the parliamentary groups of PSC, ERC, Junts and ‘commons’ announced an agreement to tweak the language policy law giving legal coverage both to the current reality of the presence of Catalan and Spanish at school (the first, as the main vehicular language and the second with a weight that goes from the mere subject to a percentage that has nothing to do with the original concept of immersion) as well as the adjustments that must be made, school by school, to guarantee an inalienable objective: that all students finish their schooling with an active command of both languages. Agreement from which a sector of Junts has noisily dropped without it being clear at this time what the majority position of the party is.
It should be remembered that rulings such as the one that imposes 25% of school hours in Spanish are the result of a previous refusal to accept the reality of the legal framework in which the teaching of the language moves, established in previous rulings of the Constitutional Court: Catalan may be the “centre of gravity”, but Spanish cannot be excluded as a teaching language, although it is the Generalitat that can and must determine to what degree. Only in the face of the repeated refusal to do so did the court decide to impose a fixed quota, an arbitrary action that could have been avoided if it had acted more intelligently and realistically, in the terms that the agreement reached precisely provides. Establish that center by center, depending on the level of use and knowledge of Catalan and Spanish, the weight of the languages is distributed according to objective pedagogical criteria (not based on mere social pressure) are considered appropriate. A series of particular linguistic projects that in many sociolinguistic contexts with little social use of Catalan can be equivalent to the traditional concept of immersion, and be more flexible in others. There are well-founded reasons to defend that this commitment not only adjusts to the needs and the will of a social majority, but that it could be legally sustained.
Sectors of the independence movement have distanced themselves from this agreement, denouncing little less than the end of the school in Catalan, with various arguments. Defending that the law must establish that Catalan (as the CUP argues) must be the only vehicular language leads down the same path that has done so much damage to the pro-independence project (and to the country), that of the frivolous denial of the reality, legal and social. If the refusal of sectors of Junts is based on electoral calculation (leaving ERC alone making agreements with PSC and ‘comuns’) or the insistence on obtaining benefits from the conflict, preferring contempt and the consequent judicial reaction, we would be, once again, before a attitude of irresponsible partisanship that has nothing to do with the defense of the Catalan language. If it’s all due to trembling legs at the angry voices in the growing self-referential bubble of independence in the networkJunts would be demonstrating little character of the government party.
“Seeking a broader agreement” to stop the pact already signed, referring only to related entities, does not seem like a valid excuse either. Hopefully that broader agreement could include not less sensitivities than those that have been conjugated in the text registered in Parliament, but more. The future of Catalan needs it to be a shared cause, not an instrument on the part. The pact for the language should advance along this path, an even more general and ambitious objective of which the agreement reached on Catalan at school should only be a first step.