Doctoral Dissertation Research: Financial Nationalism, Banking Systems, and Citizenship: The Case of Catalan

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University of California-Davis doctoral student Jorge Nunez, supervised by Dr. Alan Klima, will undertake research on the relationship between culture, nationalism, and banking system reform. The research will be conducted in the industrial Catalonia region of Spain, which is appropriate because in 2010, with the aim of solving liquidity problems derived from the 2008 global financial crises, the Generalitat of Catalonia launched a public debt package sold directly to citizens in the form of bonds. The project was named "Seny," which means sanity and good judgment in Catalan and appeared to address Catalan citizens active in a long-standing political struggle for Catalonia independence. Despite various critiques coming from mass media, social movements and political parties, the Generalitat's strategy was a successful financial operation creating an over-demand twice the size of the initial offer. The objective of this research is to study what made Catalan citizens wager on this risky investment and what more general lessons this case might offer about nationalism and debt reform in the global economy.Jorge Nunez will conduct fieldwork in Barcelona, Tarragona, and Girona as well as the French Catalan region. He will employ a combination of ethnographic methods including in-depth interviews, focus groups and participant observation in order to gather empirical data amongst key actors, such as public servants, financial experts, and citizen investors. This project will contribute to the understanding of emerging forms of financial nationalism in the aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis in the Euro zone. By investigating the financial system to shed light into the issue of nationalism in Catalonia, this study hopes to produce new conceptual tools to look at the cultural articulations of citizenship, nationalism and the banking system. This research will also add empirical information about processes of financial integration in an era of regional monetary unification. Funding this research supports the education of a graduate student.