Norm or Exception? Political Ideologies in Nineteenth-Century Catalonia

SIOBHÁN HARTY

Kenneth Ledford has provided an insightful commentary on the two articles on Catalonia.1 He generously notes their contribution to debates on normativity in the history of civil law codification, for which I thank him. More important, Ledford raises several questions that need to be addressed before we can be convinced that "the Catalan experience can be used to refine and reshape assessments of any general European phenomena regarding civil law codification" (Ledford, 390). I shall use this space to briefly address each of his three questions.	1
First, Ledford observes that the efforts of the Spanish government to codify civil law conformed to our normative expectations about state rationalization projects in nineteenth-century Europe, even if the outcome of their efforts did not. In fact, there was nothing unusual about Catalan resistance to such efforts; the history of European state formation is replete with examples of peripheral regions rejecting state centralization. What matters here is that Spanish efforts did not work, forcing us to explain the reasons for and consequences of Spain's failure. My article focused on one important consequence: the rise of Catalan nationalism. Elsewhere, I have argued that Spain lacked the institutional capacity and power resources to centralize different forms of authority within its borders.2 I would also venture, in response to Ledford's observation, that the outcome in Catalonia was not unique in the European context: regional variation might in fact be closer to the norm than the literature on state formation has assumed. Even states with the institutional capacity to replace regional institutions, such as civil law regimes, with centralized ones sometimes chose to leave them intact: Louisiana, Quebec, and Scotland are cases in point. This form of state behavior challenges received notions of state rationalization, but we are a long way from being able to explain it.	2
Second, Ledford asks whether the Catalan case supports the view that, over the course of the nineteenth century, nationalism abandoned its emancipatory meaning and moved toward a more exclusionary and racialist one. My own view is that republicans, not nationalists, directed the emancipatory project of the long nineteenth century: in France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, republicans championed the cause of liberation and popular sovereignty against repressive monarchs. As Ledford notes, nationalism is that most modern conception of identity; I would add that it has the tendency to subsume other ideologies, such as republicanism, that bear slight resemblance to it.3 In fact, republicanism is often labeled "radical nationalism," which is nothing more than an anachronism since the republican project--opposition to monarchy--predates the nationalist one. Therefore, in asking this question, Ledford unwittingly points to another area of study, nationalism, in which the normative assumption that nationalism is the only, or at least the dominant, vehicle for nineteenth-century emancipation projects needs to be opened up to scrutiny.	3
Ledford's third point is an appropriate comeback at what I have just written and reminds me to take my own advice seriously. He warns me that in arguing that Catalan lawyers were conservative, I might be judging them by late twentieth-century standards of liberalism. Since I fully agree with him about "overestimating the emancipatory ambitions or achievements of nineteenth-century liberalism" (Ledford, 391–92), I fear that I did not state my own position very clearly. Ledford seems to suggest that Catalan lawyers could be liberals if we consider that nineteenth-century liberalism could be compatible with hierarchy and corporatism where it would advance the class interests of its adherents.	4
I agree with his general point but argue that, in practice, it becomes difficult to sustain when we try to construct the spectrum of nineteenth-century political parties and ideologies. The development of the party system in Western Europe makes clear that liberals had political commitments that distinguished them from conservatives. Therefore, liberalism had to be conceptually distinct from conservatism, not only in the minds of its adherents but also in the minds of voters. Ideologically, liberals had to be committed to individualism and to civic equality; if they were not, then liberalism would be indistinguishable from conservatism and we would be unable to explain, for example, the evolution of property rights. But if individuals were equal before the law, they were not necessarily politically equal in the minds of nineteenth-century liberals. Ledford is right to claim that it is in the sphere of politics that there were limits to the emancipatory project of liberals. The lawyers who wrote the first nationalist doctrines in Catalonia denied that individuals had equal decision-making powers in the political sphere, but they also denied that individuals had equal rights to representation. Moreover, they rejected the basic liberal assumption that individuals were equal before the law, as evidenced by Catalan property rights. The corporatism of these lawyers was based on the view that the unit that mattered in society was the family, not the individual. I do not see that it is possible to argue that liberals could reject the argument that individuals are equal before the law and still consider themselves liberals--even in the nineteenth century. At some point in time, nineteenth-century liberalism starts changing into something that more closely resembles twentieth-century liberalism. That point is usually the extension of the franchise to the propertyless. In Spain, this happened shortly after the civil code was introduced, which suggests that political liberalism was taking root.	5
Each of these questions raises additional ones about normativity and forces us to recognize that the emergence of mass politics around ideologies with which we assume we are familiar is in fact quite complex. Nineteenth-century politics is as much about defining the meaning of ideologies as it is about emancipatory struggles conducted through these ideologies. It is hoped that this forum will stimulate interest around one nation's emancipatory struggle to define its legal spirit and provoke interest in related debates.	6
Notes 1 See Kenneth F. Ledford, "Codification and Normativity: Catalan 'Exception' and European 'Norm,'" Law and History Review 20 (2002): 385–92. Ledford comments on Stephen Jacobson, "Law and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: The Case of Catalonia in Comparative Perspective," and Siobhán Harty, "Lawyers, Codification, and the Origins of Catalan Nationalism, 1881–1901," ibid., 307–47 and 349–84. 2 Siobhán Harty, "The Institutional Foundation of Substate National Movements," Comparative Politics 33 (2001): 191–210. 3 On the distinction between nationalism and republicanism, see Hudson Meadwell, "Republics, Nations and Transitions to Modernity," Nations and Nationalism 5 (1999): 19–51.

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