Film director Jean-Luc Godard used to say that every camera frame was a moral choice. With the same emphasis we can say that there is never an innocent look at a map. The map is the most lethal artifact that humans have ever created. Lighter than a book, that printed sheet of a few centimeters, loaded with signs and conventions, is capable of provoking wars, creating and annulling loyalties, building and destroying a nation. That is why we will rarely find an innocent look on him.
In the personal diary of someone who was Mussolini's Minister of Foreign Affairs and married to his daughter, Galeazzo Ciano, shot in 1944 by his own father-in-law, we can find one of the best examples of this perverse gaze. On March 15, 1939, with Italian theatricality but with the veracity of a direct witness, Ciano notes: “Madrid falls and, with the capital, all the other cities of red Spain. The war is over. It is a new and formidable victory for fascism: perhaps, so far, the greatest... Il Duce is radiant. Indicating the geographical atlas open on the Spain page, he says: “It has been open like this for almost three years, now enough is enough. I know we have to open it to another page.” Albania is at its heart.
Every world conflict, just look at Ukraine or Palestine, begins and ends with a map. The 19th and 20th centuries witnessed the great cartographic literacy of the planet, a literacy that usually goes unnoticed in contemporary analyzes when talking about the creation of national sentiment. The map has accompanied our societies, identifying them, delimiting them, differentiating them, placing them in an environment, with friendly neighbors or furious enemies.
Catalonia, between the 17th and 18th centuries alone, saw the publication of up to 66 different maps (which reach the extraordinary number of 152 if we incorporate their variants, as recounted by the specialist Montserrat Galera). These seventy maps were building the political culture of the country, shaping its identity, forging, from its repeated image, a common space engraved in the minds of those who observed it for generations. Does Catalonia exist? There was its map, which is even more relevant. The first known printed map of the Principality dates from 1603 and was commissioned by its Generalitat.
We Valencians had it almost twenty years before: in 1584 as a loose leaf and in 1585 in the Latin edition of the atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by Abraham Ortelius (the Flemish Örtel). A political entity like that Kingdom of Valencia appeared in the eyes of the world as a constituted entity, as a differentiated society. Let us imagine the book of 1585 circulating throughout Europe at the time, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from the Atlantic to the Aegean and entering the libraries of merchants, notaries, princes and cardinals throughout the continent. The modern political and social identity of the Valencians (like that of the Catalans twenty years later) began to become plastic with the map, both facing inward and facing outward. It was the business card of the time and from that moment on it was repeated, with improvements and variations, hundreds of times.
That the map of the Valencians was born two decades before that of the Catalans is not any relevant data on which to build a thesis, beyond a certain local pride, but it does allow us to reflect on the concept of how identities are constructed and can be useful to talk today about political relations from respect for a political tradition. The relationship between Catalonia and the Valencian Country has generally been observed from a linguistic and cultural relationship perspective (for better and for worse). For more than twenty years, some of us have also wanted to explore new dynamics from economic budgets and material flows, common interests and infrastructure projects. A third vector, which is cartographic inheritance as a community political expression, should also be part of this panoply of analysis.
Because the history of a territory's politics is the history of its cartographic existence. The map is a framework that models political perceptions, fed back by its governing institutions. Sometimes, the map precedes the territory, other times it succeeds it, as in Catalonia and the Valencian Country.
In Italy, the joint map of the Italian peninsula arrived long before its reality as a unified nation in 1861. Long before, maps were already circulating that began to create the image of a country that did not yet exist. Once Italy was unified, the publication of the nation's maps increased exponentially and the first educational law of the transalpine country, the Riforma Copino (1867), was established – according to the leading expert in the history of Italian cartography, Professor Edoardo. Boria – that all classrooms in the kingdom should have a large wall map of the new homeland of the Savoys, Cavour and Garibaldi. In other places, the map arrived after the creation of the State: Walter Benjamin, when he visited the Soviet Union as soon as it was born as a political reality, did not fail to observe that the only rival to the infinitely repeated image of Lenin was the map of the new USSR.
When a country provides itself with a map, it affirms and defines its political territorial reality. Let us never despise the map as a great maker of political stories. He was born for it.
