In The Middle

In my review of 2008, one of the "highlights" (if one can use such a word) was that noted for 14 June - "the politics of language took to the air with demands that Air Berlin use Catalan". This provoked further comment and someone accused me of a certain anti-Catalan bias, which - as those who have been reading this blog over the years may realise - is not the case. What is, is the fact that I believe, in matters of language, that pragmatism should come before idealism.

But why am I bringing this up again? Well, because it is being brought up again by no less a figure than the president of the tourism promotion body ("Fomento del Turismo") who also happens to be the director-general for Spain and Portugal of ... yep, Air Berlin. This is a gentleman who goes by the wonderfully anglo-suggestive Germano-Iberian name of Alvaro Middelmann; the suggestion being that of a "middle man", but - as far as I am aware - "middel" is not a German word (it's mittel). Nevertheless, it is a name that hints at feet in both camps - of Spain and Germany, but he is not someone who tramps a linguistic middle ground. He's not got a lot of time for the Catalan argument.

Reported in "The Diario", Middelmann, at a tourism conference, reckons that the Balearics lose "the opportunity to attract many people with a high spending capacity" because of the language issue. He takes the line that, because the Balearics are Spain, the Castilian language should be respected. There are a lot of people who would agree with him and who would argue that it should have supremacy over Catalan in the islands and not dual language status. Middelmann, venturing into the politics of language arena, argues that the conservative Partido Popular is partly to blame for having allowed the pro-Catalan situation to have occurred, which - for those in the PP who have made their occasional anti-Catalan outbursts in the past (leader Rajoy and Calvià mayor Delgado, for example) - will not sound reassuring.

When Middelmann refers to losing people who might come and spend a fair amount of moolah on the islands, he is presumably referring to - in the main - those from Castilian-speaking parts of the Peninsula. Mayor Delgado has, of course, made this point himself (18 December: Don't Worry). If Sr. Middelmann isn't referring to them, then I'm not quite sure what his point is. For mostly everyone else, the language issue is a non-subject. How many people coming from the UK know that there are two official languages in the Balearics and that one of them - the derivations of Catalan locally - are the native tongue? Very, very few, I would suggest. And there would still be very, very few among those who have had repeat holidays, and very, very few of those who could utter a single word in Catalan. In Castilian, yes, but Catalan, no.

The language debate does not affect your everyday tourist from countries other than Spain, and nor should it. If tourists can speak a language, then it will be Castilian and not Catalan. What are tourists? Customers. What do you give customers? What they need, not what you might like them to have. Yet there are those who persist in bringing the language debate up in the context of tourism - some of them fanatics in pursuit of the fatuous. No-one is going to accede to some sort of Catalan dogmatism if it harms their tourist business, but Middelmann is just the latest to suggest that it is doing just that.

His address was part of a wider attack on the political class as a whole and the current Balearic Government in particular. He singled out the administration for criticism in terms of delays in granting licences for hotel renovations. On the same day as Middelmann was levelling this criticism, the tourism minister, Miquel Nadal, was suggesting that the simplification of procedures and the availability of credit to enable these renovations was just about to kick in. You will recall that these are all part of a drive to, at least in part, combat the economic crisis by giving the construction industry a leg-up. Middelmann may well be right to say that there have been delays, but, as has been said before, much of the problem resides with the town halls and their dealings with different government ministries. You see, it just goes round and round. The government decides on a course of action - in this case to cut bureaucracy in the granting of licences - but it is ultimately the body which, via its ministries, holds the whole thing up. Crazy.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Genesis (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MzShg7yXik). Today's title - girl group, which one?

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