What will Barcelona be like in eleven years’ time, viewed from New York? How will Catalonia be perceived on the global stage in 2024? Given the role as cultural, political and economic capital already played by the city, Catalonia will be ready to assume its position as a key player in a new, multilateral world.

© Guillem H. Pongiluppi

In a 2011 article for Foreign Policy, Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University ventured to foresee what the world would be like in 2025. She began with what she called an “exercise in humility”, looking back fourteen years to 1997, a year in which “the European Union, then still only four years old, had just 15 members; the euro did not exist […] The term BRICs – the […] label attached to the fast-growing emerging markets of Brazil, Russia, India, and China – had not yet been invented. The Internet was booming, but social media did not exist.” As Professor Slaughter put it, “a lot can change in 14 years, and rarely in ways foreseen”.

What she did foresee, however, was a tremendous increase in multilateralism, expressed through regional or­ganisations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East that would follow the EU in creating their own versions of political and economic integration. At one end of the spectrum, the UN Security Council will grow; at the other, smaller subregional organisations will be increasingly influential.

“Driving this massive multilateralization,” she says, “is the increasingly global and regional nature of our problems, combined with an expanding number of countries splitting off from existing states.”

Slaughter also proposes the possibility of a European Union “interlocked with an emerging Mediterranean Union”. This is a vision that might be dear to Eugeni d’Ors, who, in 1906 observed of the “dormant” Muslim world “its mysterious and profound unity, vigorously maintained through religion and sage language; I […] sensed the first vague indications of a sudden explosion of the quiet forces lying brooding in such a vast world.” Later, after World War I, Ors lamented the reparations and humiliations visited on the Germans: “We can only smile a bitter smile at the sophistry of those who claim to see in today’s submissions a guarantee of long lasting peace. Submission, a guarantee of peace? No, only of new struggles.” Ors’s one-word solution to the pains of crumbling Europe was “Federation”. Surely a Mediterranean Union of Islam and the European Union would have been to his liking.

Again, the view of the future is clearer from the periphery, and in particular from the city. Pasqual Maragall, former Mayor of Barcelona, and former President of the Generalitat, similarly predicted the growing irrelevance of the nation-state, as supranational entities, such as the European Parliament, and subsidiary entities, such as cities, regions, and regional coalitions, increasingly took up the tasks of governance that had formerly fallen to the central capitals. In the notes for a 1998 symposium on devolution he organised at the Remarque Institute at New York University – with Tony Judt, Richard Sennett, Xavier Rubert de Ventós, et al. – Maragall addressed the redistribution of power in Europe. “The perception of distance as a political liability is of primordial importance. People want things to be up close and accountable. The Treaty of the European Union recognizes this principle of proximity in its pre­amble, but it doesn’t make it operational in the text. Europe finds itself on the road to being more and more of a super-nation, while the regions and cities struggle to recover the powers lost with the formation of the States between 1492 and 1871. These powers are today paradoxically useful and possible at a local level and at the level of the nationalities forgotten by history, as well as those of the new administrative regions. Globalization and the recovery of identities go hand in hand.”

© Dani Codina
The mass demonstration on 11 September 2012 in Barcelona, organised by the Catalan National Assembly under the slogan “Catalonia, new European state”.

In this panorama of shifting geopolitical structures, Catalonia represents almost a test case for the potential for agile governance: it has a relatively low carbon footprint; sufficient population and institutions of higher learning to sustain a successful knowledge society; a breadth of cultural and ethnic diversity (according to sociolinguists, over two hundred languages are spoken in Barcelona) and proven capacity for integration; sufficient decentralisation of cultural institutions to allow for rapid circulation of ideas and products – the “Catalonia-City” that Eugeni d’Ors envisaged with his network of public libraries in the early 1900s; and yet an international vision and outreach that far outstrips its size and population. With Barcelona – a magnet for visitors and a beacon for the creative society – already playing the role of cultural, political, and economic capital, Catalonia is indeed poised to take off as a player in the new multilateral world.

So, following Slaughter’s lead, let us ask: What might Barcelona look like eleven years from now, from the vantage point of New York? How will Catalonia be perceived on the global stage in 2024? Let us pose the following scenario.

It is September 11, 2024. At the United Nations, the Catalan flag is hoisted and Catalonia is welcomed as a new state by the Secretary-General, who hails from South Sudan. In the wake of the Catalan plebiscite, following the 2014 referendum on self-determination, a new broad coalition party has arisen in Spain, which includes in its platform the fundamental rights of the nationalities that make up the Spanish state. The Spanish ambassador makes the first welcoming remarks.

To mark the occasion, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, and the Museu Episcopal de Vic have collaborated on a major exhibition of Romanesque and Gothic art, highlighting the Sant Miquel de Cuixà Cloister. A centre for the study of Romanesque and Gothic art, sponsored by Catalonia, France, and Germany, is being planned close by, in Washington Heights. The Polytechnic Network University of Catalonia will soon be breaking ground for an engineering incubator in concert with Stanford and the Qingdao Technology University, along the lines of the Cornell–Technion collaboration initiated in 2012.

© Dani Codina
Demonstration on 11 September 2012 in Barcelona.

Owing to Barcelona’s strategic position as the host of a coalition of Mediterranean cities, the third floor of the new Catalan Cultural Centre – the Centre will occupy four full floors of a green building on stilts in the Hudson River, designed by Carme Pinós – will house representatives of the IEMed and the Mediterranean Diet Foundation. There will be an auditorium and exhibition space, as well as offices for cultural delegations from the Balearic Islands, Valencia, Andorra and Perpignan. There is great expectation in the foodie community, as on the shore across from the Catalan cultural office a flagship Catalan restaurant and delicatessen with food (the prohibition on entering pork products has been lifted) and wines from Catalonia have been garnering attention from local and national food writers and bloggers. The Catalan ambassador to the UN is meeting with Senator Rush Holt of New Jersey to discuss exercising international pressure in favour of the Senator’s long-stalled bill in support of lesser-known languages. The Mayor of Barcelona, in town for the UN ceremony, will meet with Mayor Sinha of New York to discuss long-term plans for flood prevention. Many events are going on in Washington, D.C., where the embassy has been open for quite some time, but the symbolic significance is lost on no one: All eyes are on the UN and New York.