A financial frontier for Catalonia: nationalism in times of austerity

Abstract

During a period of pro-independence mass mobilizations and diminishing financial confidence, the government of Catalonia attached a traditional idea of the rural household to its market in public debt. This article analyzes how nationalistic understandings of household are mobilized to support the struggle for independence and promote austerity policies. It also examines how an ethos of Catalan kinship drives the expansion of the household frontier of finance into the political imagination of the nation. The ethnographic story of this article is about a bond that transferred 30 percent of the region’s public liabilities from institutional investors to Catalan households between 2010 and 2014. I trace out the commercial life of this bond from government offices to bank branches to a small rural town near Barcelona. This approach to financialization shows that the reconstitution of the household as another sphere of market relations has been reoriented after the 2008 financial crisis. My main argument suggests that the financialization of the household in Spain facilitates the making of a financial frontier for Catalonia in which widespread fiscal discontent is transformed into political capital.