2 - The City Where Europe Meets the Mediterranean

Summary

This chapter analyzes three specific ideological aspects of the politics of postmodern Barcelona. While the previous chapter contextualized the 1992 Olympic Games in the global moment of the end of history, here I focus on the calculated use of the notions of the Mediterranean, Europe, and the city to deploy a specific hegemonic definition of Barcelona. I will describe this ideological redefinition as Barcelona's “urban cosmopolitanism.” Therefore, while Chapter One inscribed our object of study in a temporal frame, this chapter focuses on the spatial imaginary of Barcelona's euphoric politics during the Olympic years. My aim is to undertake a critique of some of the specific ideologies that composed this imaginary. (In Chapters Three and Four, I will inspect the physical embodiment of these new imagined spatialities in the urban renewal of the city.)

Two main sociological studies have examined at great length the political discourses at work in Olympic Barcelona. John Hargreaves' Freedom for Catalonia? analyzes the nationalist conflicts between the Spanish state and the Catalan government of the Generalitat and, less directly, the conflicts between these two and the city hall. Hargreaves describes the multiple battles that took place during the organization of the Games regarding the display of symbols, emblems, flags, languages, and protocols. He also shows how, in spite of continuing mutual antipathies, the battles for the Catalanization versus the Spanishization of the Games eventually found a quite satisfactory compromise for all parts, as the Olympic ceremonies and other main events included an equal number of Catalan and Spanish identifying marks.