The Catalan crisis: an empirical analysis of the contestation of "democracy" and "Europe" in parliamentary debates (2012 – 2021)

The Catalan crisis was a political debate in which the concept of “democracy” was contested. Despite being a polarized debate, both pro and anti – independence political elites took the concept of democracy as the core of their argumentation, resulting in a rhetorical dispute over the resignification of the concept. This contestation developed within a conceptual framework comparable to the populist crisis experienced by most European countries during the 2010s: disaffection towards the rule of law, references to a homogeneous people, enthusiasm towards direct forms of political participation, etc. Moreover, both sides of the debate were pro-European, so they also argued on which versions of democracy fit best with the idea of “Europe”, “European values” or the EU. In sum, the Catalan crisis was also a European crisis in which political elites contested both democracy and Europe. This paper is an empirical analysis of how domestic elites constructed their own conceptions of democracy and Europe during the Catalan crisis (2012-2021). The primary sources will consist of Parliamentary debates from both the Catalan and the European Parliament. The paper will show that different conceptions of democracy can lead to different representations of Europe, proving that rhetorical analysis on democracy are crucial to address the discursive construction of the EU as a polity.