Jaume I And The Battle Of The Public Workers

When Jaume I of Aragon entered what was then Medina Mayurga on 31 December, 1229, he might have believed that he would be changing the course of history but only because he was in the process of kicking the Almohad Moorish dynasty out of Mallorca. Jaume could never have foreseen how else he would come to shape history. Had he, though, and had he spoken about it at the time, he would have spoken in Catalan.

Jaume's army and court would have contained civil servants. It would have had scribes and learned men whose role it was to inform and teach. There would have been apothecaries and clerks to register land and to maintain ledgers. The common means of communication for these public workers would have been Catalan.

Language is not immutable. Language is organic and cellular. It splits, it divides, it is influenced and it is corrupted, but in essence it remains the same. Dialect is formed through the organic process, but it clings to the nucleus from which it was born, and this nucleus comprises two mutual, symbiotic life forces - language is one, culture is the other.

Organic growth and change are concepts well understood by business. They are the obverse of growth through merger and acquisition. When a company acquires another, more often than not it will seek to impose its culture on the acquired firm. This imposition comes in different forms, one of which is the language of the acquiring company, its jargon and its expressions, representative of the way it does things; its culture.

Merger is mistakenly believed to be the coming together of equal partners. In business there is hardly ever such equilibrium. Merger is acquisition by another name. The creep of cultural imposition may take longer, but creep there most certainly will be.

The great merger of Spanish history was that between the Aragon of a royal descendant of Jaume, Fernando, and the Castile of Isabel. The merger formed the state of the Catholic Kings, the nascent unified Spain, but from the outset, even if Isabel didn't actually wear the trousers in her and Fernando's house, Castile wore them when it came to the relationship with Aragon. The merger was a takeover.

Fernando and Isabel gave birth not only to Catherine, she of the miserable marriage to Henry VIII, but ultimately also to Philip V and Franco. Under Philip, Castellano was imposed as the sole language of Spain. Public officials, public workers, institutions had only one form of communication. Imposition through merger had taken over two hundred years, but it was the natural consequence of the amalgamation.

But the culture of the acquired cannot be eliminated, unless the acquired is that small, that subservient, that forgetful of its own collective memory. It reasserts itself because of the nuclear symbiosis of culture and language and it can cause merger and acquisition to unravel or for the relationship to be re-thought. When this reassertion is vocalised by thousands or millions, it is impossible and impractical to seek to subjugate it.

It is hyperbole to nuance the change to the law governing language requirements of public workers in the Balearics in terms of Philip or Franco. But it is understandable if some make such a comparison. The regional government's insistence that the change in favour of Castellano widens employment opportunities for those who are not Catalan speakers is legitimate from a practical point of view, but practicality and ingrained culture, when they represent two sides of a linguistic coin, do not make for natural bedfellows, be the bed in a hospital ward or wherever.

President Bauzá's government is making a rod for its own back. At a time when it needs the wholehearted support of the people of Mallorca and the islands in order to raise the Balearics out of a pit of economic disaster, it is making disastrous errors in driving a wedge between it and many of the people. Are parents who have overwhelmingly eschewed the opportunity to have their children educated in Castellano militant? Of course they are not, but they have been made more aware of radicalism that can be the consequence of messing with culture.

The Partido Popular can brook so little argument that it excommunicates Antoni Pastor and sends him into political exile. It stands alone, its language policy rejected by the left and by the nationalist and regionalist centre-right as well as by many within its own ranks, as Pere Rotger has implied.  

When Jaume I moved on Palma, it was with battle in mind. It was a battle spoken in Catalan and Arabic, Jaume supported by his army and his Catalan public servants. Of course he couldn't have foreseen what would happen. 800 years later, a battle over public servants conducted in Catalan and Castellano.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.