The moral community of redistribution: interregional fiscal grievances in working-class urban Catalonia

Abstract

Nationwide interregional redistribution has recently become a salient political issue in several wealthy regions in Europe, to the point of becoming a powerful motivation for pursuing political independence. Catalonia is a case in point. Rather than focus on the core of the nationalist movement, the present ethnographic study approaches its margins: it examines how working-class second-generation immigrants from southern Spain living in Barcelona voice their disapproval of what they see as an unfair territorial redistribution within Spain that allows for generous social protection in their parents’ places of origin in the poor South at the expense of the hard-pressed workers in the productive North. The second generation’s critique of interregional redistribution is a way of denouncing economic hardships in the absence of an effective alternative discourse for explaining inequalities within Catalonia. However, rather than expressing some sort of welfare chauvinism following a nationalist Catalan–Spanish divide, these particular fiscal grievances can be better understood against the background of migratory memories and subjectivities, and particularly of the imagination concerning the urban–rural cleavage. Ultimately, this ethnographic case invites us to recognize multiple and embedded rationales of social sharing, which I attempt to encompass within the concept of the ‘moral community of redistribution’.