THE CATALAN COMMEMORATIONS of the third centenary of the end of the Wars of the Spanish Succession (1714)– which are associated in Catalonia with its conquest by the Spanish state and the subsequent abolition of independent Catalan political institutions– were a turning point in a debate, held in numerous scholarly books, at academic congresses and in media articles, aiming to reinterpret the past conflict between the Spanish state and Catalonia from the perspective of the present historical configuration at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The debate culminated at a historical conference entitled ‘Spain against Catalonia’, convened by the public Institut d’Estudis Catalans, which counted among its participants a wide range of professional Catalan historians, many of them internationally recognised. This event triggered a massive media and political conflict in Spain and prompted some Spanish political parties and the Spanish Attorney General to attempt (unsuccessfully) to ban the conference, an unprecedented occurrence in post-Francoist Spain.

Historical discussions on the Catalan question have been a permanent site of debate in the Spanish state at least since the nineteenth century, but they were in general restricted either to the academic sphere or to elite circles. This state of affairs was transformed by the political conflict created by the Spanish state and the Constitutional Court from 2003 onwards. It began with the amendments made to the new Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia, approved by the Catalan parliament through the legislative action of the Spanish parliament in 2006. The new Statute expressed the political aspirations of Catalan society after years of public consultation that culminated in a referendum earlier that year. The definitive clash occurred in 2010 with the Constitutional Court's decision to remove many sections of the Catalan Statute. The Court explicitly stated that Catalonia was not a ‘nation’ in any political sense. The political conflict surrounding the Court's decree came at a time when the effects of the euro crisis were being felt most dramatically by the population. The budgetary cuts imposed by the central government on Catalonia had a multiplying effect with respect to the political consequences produced by the Constitutional Court's decision and the executive action of the Spanish government.