His huge private library –read, not accumulated–, the interest in renewing the syllabus with each course to broaden horizons and the ability to relate periods and themes have made Enric Ucelay-Da Cal (New York, 1948) an Olympic historian. His hundreds of articles have marked many of the historiographical debates on Catalan nationalism in recent decades and his analytical capacity has produced El imperialismo catalán (2003), the particular Ulisses of the subject.
If his knowledge has not been transferred, introductions to the margin, to more than a dozen books or works on European or world history, it has been due to the lack of an editor capable of taming the torrent of references and information that the emeritus professor of the University Pompeu Fabra intends to include in each volume. Also why, once a historical plot has been understood, the search for interrelationships has led it to open new fronts before closing the previous ones. With that any project becomes an eternal work in progress.
The pages of El Mediterrani català (1931-1939) are an example of this. Enciclopèdia Catalana commissioned a choral volume from him that was to be part of the collection Història, Politica, Societat i Cultura dels Països Catalans, directed by Borja de Riquer. Ucelay-Da Cal created a team so that everyone could participate in everything and approached the project as a total history of the territories that he was asked to explain. A conventional approach was sought and the complexity and elevation of the tone of the volume relegated it to a cajon in 1995.
What happened was a house brand. Also the influential populist Catalonia. Image, culture and politics in the republican stage (1931-1939) (1982) arose from the preparation of material for a project that did not materialize. The tout court approach of the work that is published thirty years late is indebted to this other and recovers approaches that already appeared in it.
The large amount of information does not make it an easily digestible text, but, as always in a text by Ucelay-Da Cal, it is a guarantee of suggestive and challenging ideas. The main one: the overcoming of a political label 'Països Catalans' by a geographical one 'Mediterrani català' to weave a history of Catalonia, the Valencian Country, the Rosselló and the Balearic Islands in the thirties addressing the different speeds of the regionalist projects, nationalists and republicans from each territory in a Spanish, European and North African context.
Starting from a look at the autonomist models in the interwar period and the role of the second cities, it is detailed why Blasquists and Valencian Catholics championed a provincial strategy to promote in Madrid, while the Catalanists cemented autonomy in Barcelona. A perspective that, had it been published at the time, an average reader could have combined with the debate on Valencian nationalization that Joan Fuster and Ernest Lluch had maintained in the seventies.
It's not clear today. Arnau Gonzàlez Vilalta, instigator of the recovery of the volume, regrets in the presentation that in Catalonia the intellectual debate based on the publication of an essay is barely possible, as it was in the nineties. It's likely
In any case, the Catalan and Valencian roads, the Balearic satellite and the spiritual refuge of the independence movement –Prats de Molló, Argelers, Perpignan– that Roussillon has become, with hardly any native Catalanists, is completely topical. The volume contributes to a better understanding of why.
