"The concept of 'nation' describes a group of people that is constituted from their customs and traditions." This is how the free encyclopedia Wikipedia begins the description of the term 'nation', adding: "It is a society aware of primordial ties and only exists because its members confess to being part of it."
Despite the innocence contained in this description, there is an effort in official Spain to demonize the term 'nation'. Proof of this is the uproar that arose last week, regarding some words that the president of the Generalitat, Pascual Maragall, uttered while visiting the Lehendakari, Juan José Ibarretxe; where he stated that the Basque Country and Catalonia are "two nations and that each has its own path"; subsequently, Maragall defined Spain as "a nation of nations".
The "nation of nations" is nothing new. The phrase appeared a few weeks ago in an editorial of the newspaper 'La Vanguardia', which used it along with others as a semantic field, as follows: "If in the world there is a State of states (Germany), a people of peoples (Europe), a land of lands (Castile), a country of countries (France), a culture of cultures (The West), a community of communities (United Kingdom), can't there be a nation of nations?".
If we were to transfer this debate to the Canary Islands, we must accept that it is not precisely the customs and traditions that structure the feeling of belonging to the territory of the Canarian population. To reflect on these things, a large group of young people met in the Canarian town of Guía to break down the reasons for Canarian nationalism. There were two intense days, in which we obtained some conclusions about the feeling of belonging to the Canarian land that the inhabitants of the Islands have. A feeling that has very little to do with ethnicities, languages or reinvented histories, and a lot to do with the uniqueness of knowing that they are residents of a unique territory. The awareness of their uniqueness is what has made it easier for the Canarians to look at history with perspective, thus associating the non-existence of a national identity with the ancestral neglect with which the Spanish State has treated the Islands.
That Canarian national identity, with its ups and downs, is what has been built in the last decade, due to the presence of nationalists in the autonomous governments. To the point that today no one denies the stable existence in Canarian society of a significant collective will to assert itself as a differentiated community; and as such, it does not renounce that everything that affects the Islands should be decided in the Canary Islands: Management of ports and airports, sovereignty over the oceanic waters of the interior of the Archipelago and also of the jurisdictional ones, decision-making capacity on the ordering of the coastline and citizen security, control of residence of those who arrive to the Islands, and so on.
No one in their right mind can deny that in recent years we Canarians have advanced in the self-government of the Islands, from that belief the young people gathered in the Northwest of Gran Canaria came to the conclusion that this period is excessively short. A simple anecdote in 500 years of centralist administration, which sometimes has had flashes of military occupation, and most of the time, has been with features of colonial administration. Convinced of this, we decided to continue persisting in the national will of self-government, expressing it with the slogan: "Canarias es Nación" (Canary Islands is a Nation), which will preside over the Congress of Young Nationalist Coalition Canaria that we will celebrate in Gran Canaria in the second half of April.
Pablo Rodríguez Valido
Insular Vice President of Nationalist Youth of CC