(I)  BACKGROUND
(II) THEORETICAL REVIEW

•         Print Capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and the Rise of the Nation
•         Targeted Media, the Post-Industrial Revolution, and New Forms of Nationalism
•         The Internet and New Forms of and Possibilities for Nations and Nationalist Mobilization
•         Virtual Communities
•         Definitions

•         Nation
•          Nation-Building
•          Nationalism

• Appendix I:    Map of the Catalan Lands
• Appendix II:   Results of Virtual Referendum
• Appendix III:  Data Sheet (With List of Nationalist Organizations)

 

Benedict Anderson has argued that the 15th century invention of the Gutenberg printing press set in motion a long-term process in which a new categorical identity was created—the "nation."1  This centuries-long process was eventually joined by the ideational innovations of citizenship and the self-determination of nations and by the profound societal transformations of the Industrial Revolution. The end result was a fundamental re-organization of the way the world’s peoples were divided. By the time the Industrial Revolution accelerated in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, previously "cultural" communities—Hungarians, Catalans, Irish, and Venezuelans, inter alia—began to demand the presumed right to self-determination to which their newly awakened "nations" had an inherent right. Thus began a global transition en masse to an era of nationalism and increasing internal homogeneity within a global system of nation-states.

How was this possible? David Elkins maintains that in order to answer this question, one must first recognize that each form of cultural, ethnic, or national community is a function of its development within a specific historical context. In the early modern period, incipient forms of mass media were important: "…inexpensive multiple copies of books, pamphlets, and newspapers were among the key components in the consolidation of territorial political organizations. The invention of the printing press, thus, had revolutionary effects and buttressed the evolving assumptions about territoriality."2 Similarly, different types of ethnic communities may be constructed out of new circumstances in the future. The present technological circumstances which could serve as the framework for a new manner of "imagining" communal entities center on the increasing exploitation of targeted forms of media, which take advantage of the latest developments in telecommunications technology.3 When these combine with large-scale social change, as occurred in the Industrial Revolution, the change could be dramatic.

We can track this process as it has developed over the course of the postindustrial revolution. During its initial stages in the 1960s, Western Europe experienced the rise of new state-seeking nationalist movements—the Scottish and Welsh in Britain, the Bretons and Occitans in France, and the Basques and Catalans in Spain — in states that had previously been perceived as consolidated nation-states.4 As the postindustrial revolution has progressed, and the paradigmatic postindustrial, "targeted" forms of media have begun to take shape, however, these movements have come to be complemented by newer, even smaller state-seeking nationalist movements: from such small and marginal movements as Alaskan or Hawaiian nationalism in the United States to Canary, Andaluz, Valencian, Balear, Aragonese, and Lleonese nationalism in Spain. One crucial element is advanced telecommunications—many of these latter movements currently exist more on the World Wide Web than in the real world.5

Why should that be the case? Advances in telecommunications technology, particularly satellites and computer-mediated communications (CMCs), have brought about a transition from the traditional mass media of the Industrial era to the form that will predominate in the postindustrial epoch—targeted media. These targeted, or "addressable" media, with "specialized and more homogeneous audiences," might serve as the framework for new forms of communally based identities.6

One of the most promising types of new cyber communities is the "virtual national community." In this study I will investigate this community by examining how the nation and nationalists in the Catalan Lands have penetrated the new "virtual" social space of one of the most important components of the new targeted media—the Internet. The central research question for the investigation—What is the scope and nature of national existence and nationalist activity in the Catalan-speaking cyberspace?—is hence both exploratory and broad. The investigation of this question is important because it will help us understand (i) how targeted media are different, (ii) how old movements exist and new ones form on a new medium, and (iii) what we can expect in terms of on-line manifestations of nationalism in the future. This last point is crucial: it is highly plausible that though the "cybernation" will never actually replace either the traditional nation or the nation-state, it may yet become an important form of community in the postindustrial future. Moreover, since the postindustrial revolution has not reached its end-point and the new forms of CMCs have only just begun to reach mass audiences (especially outside of North America), the world-wide development of virtual nationalist movements is only at its earliest stages. Because this relatively new phenomenon has yet to be studied in depth, the present study assumes a particular relevance.

Since one can reasonably expect that the post-Industrial Revolution’s impact would be felt first in more economically advanced societies (i.e., those that have already fully passed through the Industrial Revolution), it makes sense to study the phenomenon in an advanced industrial state. By this criterion, the Catalan Lands comprise an excellent case. Not only is Catalonia located in a fairly rich state, but it has the highest percentage of Internet users in the country.7 It is also one of those rare cases—along with the Baltic states in the former USSR—in which the periphery is wealthier than the center. In short, we should be able to presume that, of the established state-seeking nationalisms of the world, those in the Catalan Lands are at the forefront of the phenomenon of virtual nationalism. Moreover, the examination of an "established" case of nationalism (i.e., one with demonstrated staying power) like that in Catalonia will also allow us to see clear distinctions between old and new forms of mobilization.

The paper will begin with some brief background information on nationalism in the Catalan Lands. From there, the theoretical foundation for the investigation will be presented. First, I will summarize the literature dealing with the connection between new forms of media, large-scale social change, and nationalism. This discussion will include components on (a) the Industrial Revolution, (b) the post-Industrial Revolution, and (c) the new qualities of CMCs. Secondly, I will review the burgeoning literature on virtual communities and on-line political activity, especially that which is germane to a discussion of virtual ethnic and national communities. Finally, I will provide working definitions of "nation," "nation-building," and "nationalism," which will be used to help organize the analysis of the on-line nation that follows.

The analysis comprises an in-depth investigation of the Catalan nation and nationalist activity in its on-line form. Using the tripartite structure afforded by the three definitions noted above, I will proceed with an analysis and categorization of the manifestations, the types of activities, and the forms of mobilization that are associated with the nation, with nation-building, and with nationalism. A central component of the analysis of the latter will be the cataloguing and analysis of all the nationalist Catalan groups that were found in a comprehensive on-line search.8 I will analyze the most salient characteristics of these groups, their activities, their goals, and their relationship to IRL nationalism. Throughout, I will make comparisons between the virtual and the IRL nationalist communities, as well as between old and new forms of nationalist mobilization. In the final section, I will discuss the study’s practical and theoretical implications and attempt to generate extrapolations concerning what form the "virtual nation" may take in the future.

Els Països Catalans, or the Catalan Lands, constitute the cultural remnants of a once-powerful Middle-Age empire, whose domain now encompasses Roussillón in the south of France, the Sardinian port city of Alghero, Andorra, and the three Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands.9

In the immediate post-Franco era, excited calls emerged for a renaixença (renaissance) of the common identity and language of these lands and the creation of some sort of political unification.10 The new constitution, however, forbade the merger of autonomous communities at the same time that it allowed for the creation of individual autonomous communities for the three regions. Moreover, once the autonomous communities were established and held their first elections, it became clear that both the independence and the "unification" routes had only limited political and electoral support. The vast majority of citizens in the three autonomous communities were either in favor of the status quo or of only a modest expansion of autonomy within the Spanish system.

Complicating the issue for the nationalists, nationalist parties and movements in the Catalan Lands have been split across two main dimensions: (1) regionalist versus pan-Catalanist orientation and (2) leftist versus rightist ideology. The more left-wing pan-Catalanists, who advocate the unity of the Catalan language and some sort of political unification of the Catalan Lands, have been frustrated by the centrist and right-wing "regionalists," who propound a nationalism representing some subset of the Catalan community (e.g., Valencianism, Balearism, etc.).11

In the Autonomous Community of Catalonia, votes for regionalist-nationalist parties in the elections have typically hovered around 40% for the Christian Democratic regional-nationalist coalition Convergència i Uniò and 10% for the pan-Catalanist, pro-independence Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC). In the other two Autonomous Communities, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, there has been very little support for the pan-Catalanist political parties, while the regionalist-nationalist parties such as Unió Mallorquina and the Partit Nacionalista Valencià have had difficulty attracting more than 10% of the vote in elections above the municipal level.12

In short, the pan-Catalanists have had very little success electorally in the face of the regionalist challenge. The pan-Catalanists, however, have been the most adept at availing themselves of the new political and cultural spaces opened up by the recent explosion in computer-mediated communications (CMCs). It is apparent that these Catalanist activists have initiated a far-reaching project to create an on-line community that will not only protect and unify Catalan language and culture but also effect some sort of institutional and economic unity among the Catalan Lands. In spite of the fact that the Spanish and French states will not permit the unification of the region, the nationalists believe that they can still build a de facto pan-Catalan community on-line. A recent culmination of this effort occurred in April 1997, when organizers of the world’s first virtual referendum invited Catalans from around the world to vote (unofficially) on whether or not the Catalan-speaking regions should separate from Spain and France. The final tally indicated a 97.25% level of support in favor of separation.13 As one nationalist declared, "The virtual Catalan state can declare autonomy even though the real-world Catalonia cannot."14
 

Print Capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and the Rise of the Nation

The crux of the argument presented here is that the development of new types of media—especially when combined with profound social and ideational change—can effect significant changes in predominant forms of societal organization. In both the Industrial and the post-Industrial Revolutions, a confluence of technological, social, and ideational change has brought about widespread transformations in forms of communal organization. Probably the key communicative change in terms of determining the form that the community would take was the invention of the printing press. Namely, the invention of the Gutenberg press (and its business counterpart, "print capitalism") set about a change in the manner of conceptualizing one’s community—it could, as a result, be "imagined."15 At the same time, it privileged the role of language in determining the boundaries of the community:

In Anderson’s view, the invention of the Gutenberg press permitted large-scale editions of books; capitalism needed such large-scale editions. Since massive potential audiences did not exist for Latin, though, these mass editions would have to be printed in the more widely spoken vernaculars. The first example of such a publication was Martin Luther’s Bible.

One fundamental barrier still had to be surmounted: the vernaculars could more correctly be described as linguistic "islands" than as unified linguistic "families." The imperative of print capitalism for large bodies of linguistically homogeneous populations both favored and facilitated the rapid homogenization of written versions of the vernacular. Luther’s Bible is again instructive: his transliteration of a northern German dialect soon became the written standard¾ Hochdeutsch¾ for almost the entire range of the Continental Germanic vernaculars.18 More often than not, these "dialects" of German had theretofore been mutually unintelligible.

In effect, Anderson argues that within each regional Babel, one vernacular will emerge victorious to become the basis for intra-territorial linguistic rationalization. A final step in the nation-building process, according to Anderson, was that the large-scale printings in the linguistically rationalized dialects permitted readers to "imagine" the others who were reading the same literature.19 These linguistically homogeneous "imagined communities" then served as the basis for the development of the modern nation.

The Industrial Revolution proved to be the key to the ultimate success of this development. Ernest Gellner and other structuralist theorists (starting with Gellner’s intellectual forebear Karl Deutsch) have posited that nationalism, as either an ideology or a social force, is to a large extent a by-product of the Industrial Revolution. Gellner argues that not only is nationalism endemic to modern states, but that it is an inextricable concomitant of modernization. According to Gellner, this process of modernization entails a "productive system...based on cumulative science and technology"20 and a rationalized, large economic zone, which in combination requires a "mobile, literate, culturally standardized, interchangeable population."21 In essence, what is demanded of modern society¾ based on objective, inescapable imperatives¾ is a strong degree of cultural homogeneity. The basis of this homogeneity is the national "High Culture," which is transmitted via a process of "exo-socialization" in a national education system. In short, "it is not the case...that nationalism imposes homogeneity, it is rather that a homogeneity imposed by objective imperative eventually appears on the surface in the form of nationalism."22

Targeted Media, the Post-Industrial Revolution, and New Forms of Nationalism

One way to characterize this entire period, which lasted until approximately the mid-20^th century, would be as "the Age of Homogenization." This era began to come to a close at the end of the First World War.23 With the birth of the post-Industrial era in the 1960s, a new epoch has begun—the age of "consolidated heterogeneity." Leaders of nation-states that were previously considered to be "homogeneous" (e.g., France, Spain) "discovered" that there were important minority groups within their borders. They also discovered that these groups—far from disappearing—were instead becoming stronger.

I thus argue for an alteration to the Andersonian thesis. Whereas print capitalism demanded large bodies of linguistically homogeneous readers, the targeted or "addressable" media of the post-Industrial era allows small, dispersed linguistic communities to exist and even thrive, a situation that was simply not possible in the Industrial and pre-Industrial eras. Could the new targeted media facilitate new ways of "imagining" the community (e.g., without territory), much as print capitalism did in previous centuries? If one looks at the rapid development of conceptually innovative "cybercultures,"24 I believe that such a prospect must be seriously considered.

The Catalan Lands serve as a good example of the changes that are occurring. At various times since the thirteenth century, Latin, Castilian, and Catalan have all taken turns being the dominant written language. Even at the height of linguistic diversity on the Iberian peninsula, there were only five written languages: Latin, Castilian, Catalan, Basque, and Galico-Portuguese.25 Written variations of the latter four, as Anderson would have predicted, became increasingly homogenized with the advent of print capitalism.

In contrast, in the late twentieth century the peninsula is on the verge of a sharp increase in the number of standardized written languages. The increased capabilities for both computer-based self-publishing and computer-mediated storage and diffusion of language materials means that the homogenizing trend may be reversing. Not only will attempts to perpetuate Catalan, Castilian, Basque, and Galician succeed, but there is an ongoing attempt to create "imagined communities" based on the linguistic domains of "Andaluz" and "Canary" (formerly merely "Castilian"), "Aragonese" (a dialect of Occitan), "Lleonese" (essentially a Portuguese-influenced Castilian), and "Valenciano" and "Balear" (dialects of Catalan).

David Laitin adds that the emergent coalition in Europe between the Eurocrat centralizers and the regionalists such as the Catalans will further a multicultural model of state consolidation.26 He contends that the recent developments in Europe are analogous to the modus vivendi that has arisen in India, where a "3± 1" language constellation (i.e., the majority of people have to learn English, Hindi, and the official language of their state) is the fundamental basis of national unity.27 Laitin argues that the 2± 1 constellation crystallizing in Europe will be central to the development of a European identity:

The Internet and New Forms of and Possibilities for Nations and Nationalist Mobilization

Before beginning the analysis of the on-line Catalan nation, it would be useful to briefly outline the ways in which the new forms of targeted media—and especially CMCs—can effect such changes in societal organization. There are several contradictory interpretations of the impacts that computer-mediated communications will have on society.

Not all predictions are optimistic. Ricard Faura i Homedes presents a particularly pessimistic view of the computer-mediated era, especially as far as it concerns such small cultures as Catalonia. Faura i Homedes’ primary fear is that small cultures are imperiled in both the virtual and real worlds by the increasing liberalization and globalization of the world’s economic, social, and cultural spheres—where "globalization" actually translates into "Americanization."29 Furthermore, on the portion of the Internet that is not controlled, the much-touted anarchy is actually a barrier to access. In short, Faura i Homedes believes that the Internet will not help small cultures like the Catalan survive; on the contrary, with English as the "official language," this new medium is only part of a larger trend of increasing homogenization of the world’s cultures.

Nicholas Negroponte presents an argument that is on the flip side of the same coin. His argument is that nationalism will not be able to survive the transition to a globalized Information Society. He feels that nationalism will wither away—not because of American hegemony, but because it is an anachronism.30

Others recognize the connection between postindustrialism and the emergence of "small" nationalisms but do not understand the most important underlying reasons. Ernst Haas, for instance, declares that "I cannot convince myself that [the mini-nationalisms of Western Europe] constitute solutions to the cross-pressures of postindustrialism."31 This misses the point. It is not that the nationalists in these movements are spurred by a negative reaction to the forces of modernity, but that the postindustrial trend towards smaller, more decentralized, more participatory forms of government dovetails with the new "mini-nationalisms" of Wales, Brittany, and Catalonia.

Anthony Richmond, in contrast, manages a more nuanced approach to the ramifications of the postindustrial revolution for the future of nationhood and nationalism. Richmond maintains that "the emergence of postindustrialism has profound implications for the future of ethnic consciousness, ethnic organizations and ethnic nationalist movements."32 However, while he predicts a decrease in nationalism, he foresees no decline (and even a possible increase) in ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heterogeneity:

(a) Qualities of the Internet

As discussed above, the Internet and other forms of satellite and computer-mediated telecommunications are what David Elkins refers to as targeted or "addressable" media.36 Targeted media is qualitatively different from the industrial-era mass media in several respects:

1. Increase in rate of information dissemination.38

• Up-to-date information.

2. Ubiquitous information exchange (without regard to geographical and national boundaries).

• Globalization of conflicts.
• Geographically broader social movement sector.

3. No central authority.

• Potential for media self-determination.
• Self-definition of identities.
• Personalized editions of news, information, etc. This refers both to the user’s ability to access information in an uncontrolled fashion and to create personalized editions of the media output that is found in those searches.

4. Interactivity.
5. Decreased Cost.
6. Multimedia.
7. Hypermedia.

• "Point and click" links to other Internet addresses.

8. Data Storage & Processing.

• The access to and processing of quantitative and survey data.
• On-line libraries, bookstores, and other literary collections.
• The ability to store, access, and publish a tremendous amount of linguistic and cultural materials.

9. Multi-tasking.

In order to better appreciate what changes in organization and mobilization the new qualities could effectuate, a short discussion of how they translate into "resources" would be helpful. The issue of resources on the Internet is still very much a matter of debate: some are proven; some are speculative; some are doubtful. Esteve Granés has posited that the Internet:39

• facilitates the diffusion of beliefs and values;
• favors communication and coordination between different networks of social movements;
• permits the establishment of new networks of recruitment;
• strengthens new forms of collective protest;
• highlights the universal character of many intransigent problems, and;
• increases the efficacy of an organization.

Figure I portrays the basic path through which the qualities of this medium will impact the outcomes of nationalist mobilization:41
 

Figure I. The Effects of the Internet on Social & Political Movement Forms and Outcomes

                    à New Action Repertoire

New Qualities of the Internet à New Resources à New Forms of Organization à Outcomes

                   à New Forms of Mobilization

The present study is more concerned with the right than the left half of this graph (i.e., forms, action repertoire, and outcomes). In the analysis section, along with the primary examination of the on-line nation, nation-building, and nationalism, I will identify new forms of mobilization, significant outcomes, and new additions to the action repertoire.42
 

The diversity of communities in cyberspace is almost as great as in real life. Scholars have responded by conducting research on the context in which these "electronic communities" develop, the interaction between designers and users, and the communities that result from this interaction. Pioneering theoretician Howard Rheingold maintains that CMCs provide a venue for the construction of on-line communities that are every bit as important for the "community members" as IRL communities.43 The resultant "cybercultures," according to Ricard Faura i Homedes, are "sometimes imagined and invented, but are capable of creating new identities…."44 The only essential basis for coalition is shared interests.45 At least in theory, these communities transcend the previously limiting mobilizational factors of not only geography, but also the traditional socio-economic bases of coalition: race, religion, culture, class, gender, age, and class.46
 

The two types of virtual communities with the greatest relevance to on-line nationalism are resistance movements (which are often explicitly nationalist in character) and virtual ethnic groups. Although both resistance movements and the types of nationalist communities being built in the Catalan Lands are different in terms of the means used in their campaigns (namely the use of armed struggle), they are both similarly distinct from Rheingold’s "virtual communities" in several key respects. First, virtual communities are designed to bring together peoples who share some common purpose or interest, irrespective of geography, gender, or sociopolitical status. In contrast, the resistance and nationalist movements are intended to transcend, not geographical, but rather geo-political boundaries. In some cases, the end is to bring people from a certain cultural-geographic area together in order to transcend the political boundaries separating these people. In others, they are intended to bring together people from one particular culture and to consolidate a virtual version of that culture as a first step in the expansion of that identity in IRL communities.

Resistance communities, however, often build a bridge to the pure cybercultures when they resort to the use of virtual "solidarity communities" to help them achieve their territorially centered goals. Such communities are becoming ever more prevalent on the Internet. The most prominent example thus far is the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, which pushed the envelope in terms of the possibilities for Internet-based resistance activities. Because of the region’s isolation, its lack of communications technology, the censorship of the Mexican press, a large diaspora population based in an advanced country (mainly in the American states that are contiguous with Mexico), and deep interest within the "global village" concerning the plight of an ethnically based revolutionary peasant movement, Sub-commander Marcos and his FZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Front) army became the beneficiaries of a crucial "technological column" that likely saved them from untimely death.47 In short, the work of a geographically dispersed group of people willing to mobilize and rapidly disseminate information on-line about events that were transpiring in a place thousands of miles away (that most of them had probably never even heard of before) probably proved to be the key to the willingness of the Mexican government to cooperate with the guerrillas.48 The implications of this movement for the future sovereignty or national security of states has even led the Department of Defense to commission a study on the possibilities of such movements.49
 

David Elkins argues that ethnic communities are either geographically concentrated or geographically dispersed. Until recently, what the "dispersed" ethnic communities lacked was the regular, "dense" social interaction necessary to perpetuate their cultural and linguistic heritage. However, the supplanting of the industrial-era mass media by the "targeted" or "addressable" media of the postindustrial era is beginning to make it possible for dispersed ethnic communities as well to have the type of meaningful social interaction that is vital for cultural survival. When these communities avail themselves of the latest technologies in telecommunications, especially computer-mediated communications, they are potentially transformed from declining, dispersed ethnic communities into viable, "virtual" ethnic communities.50

I would add that this argument can be extended to at least two types of concentrated ethnic and national communities: (a) those "concentrated" groups without a large enough market to support a conventional cultural infrastructure (e.g., Balear), and (2) those groups whose language has been or currently is repressed (e.g., Catalan).

The Valencian Community, for instance, is going through a contentious process of linguistic "normalization"—away from Castilian and towards the use of Catalan. This move is contentious both in the debate over the proper future role for Castilian in the Community as well as in the debate over whether the language to be "normalized" should be català or valencià. No matter what the outcome, if Valencia becomes "Valencianized" in real life, the catalanistes within the Community could nevertheless maintain regular, dense interaction in a Catalan nation on the Internet. The point is, that as access to addressable media increases, it becomes more difficult to homogenize the peoples within state boundaries.
 

Since the phenomena included under the rubric of "nationalism" can be hard to grasp—they cover a broad range of ideas, processes, groups, and actions—it is important to classify the activities and forms that I intend to analyze. Instead of merely discussing "the nation" (or "nationalism") on the Internet, it would be more fruitful to delineate the nation into its three most important constituent parts—nation, nation-building, and nationalism. Each of these three distinct concepts, moreover, is associated with discrete types of activities. By highlighting these differences, any discussion of the various forms of the "nation" writ large will be inherently more comprehensible.

1. Nation

As argued earlier, the Ideational and Industrial Revolutions created a world both intellectually and institutionally divided into nations. In these revolutions, geographically concentrated communities were transformed into nations: groups of people who believe that they have the right to self-determination based on the belief they are both sufficiently homogeneous (internal) and sufficiently distinct from other territorially delimited groups of people (external) that they constitute a nation in their own right.

As implied earlier, the basis for this belief in homogeneity (and the basis for the creation of boundaries between nations) could be ethnicity, geography, culture, language, or even geography. In the Catalan Lands, the crucial boundary between Castile and Catalonia, for example, appears simply to be a combination of territory and language. The activity component of this definition is quite simply involvement in the dense social interactions of that nation.

2. Nation-building

One of the most important distinctions to make in any analysis of nations and nationalism is between state- and nation-building. State-building, according to Cynthia Enloe, is "the creation and entrenchment of statist institutions (Enloe 1978, p. 338)," whereas nation-building is generally defined as the development of a common national identity to which basically all citizens of the nation, however it is "imagined," can relate and transfer their loyalty. As such, it should be considered a subset of the term "identity-building."

The activity component associated with this process is two-fold: (1) that which helps create boundaries between different nations, and (2) that which fosters a recognition among members of the community that their group is indeed a nation (which has an inherent right to self-determination). Furthermore, this nation-building activity could be either active or passive. For the purposes of this study, active nation-building would include the following: (a) fostering a new sense of common identity in an on-line community, (b) institutionalizing aspects of the IRL common identity in an on-line community, or (c) utilizing on-line services to facilitate boundary-formation in the IRL national community. Nation-building would be passive in those cases where an individual or group may not actually be trying to "build" any nation, but merely provide a service that happens to be useful to the virtual or IRL nation-building enterprise, such as a site operating only in Catalan, a page with hyper-links to other Catalan sites, or a site containing a "library" of Catalan books, etc.

3. Nationalism

Just as "socialism" refers to both an ideology as well as activity based on that ideology, so can "nationalism" take the form of both ideology as well as loyalty to or action on behalf of the nation.51 Notwithstanding such apparent clarity, there are several potential difficulties with this concept. Like with nation-building, there is often "conceptual confusion" between nationalism and a related concept: patriotism. Most useful, I would argue, is a classificatory system that has "nationalism" refer to loyalty to the nation, and "patriotism" to loyalty to the state.
 

Nation

The "nation" comprises all those people who subjectively feel that they belong to that nation. In practical terms, the only way to ascertain whether a particular person is a practicing member of a nation is whether he is involved in the "dense" social interactions that take place within that nation. As argued above, the primary determinant of nationality in the Catalan Lands is language. This means that language use in Spain is a surrogate for national affiliation. Just as David Laitin argues that reading a Catalan-language paper "marks" one as a nationalist while reading a Spanish-language paper is "unmarked" (i.e., does not indicate nationalist identity),52 I presume for the purposes of this paper that participation in the virtual Catalan-language space marks one as belonging to the Catalan nation.53 It is important to keep in mind, though, that there is more than one "Catalan" nation. Beyond the Catalan, there is also the virtual Valencian, Balear and, at any even smaller level, Mallorcan nation.

The simplest and most frequent manifestation of on-line nationality is simply communication in one of the national languages. Before this communication can take place, however, there needs to be the proper infrastructure. Before the development of computer-mediated communications, the construction of infrastructure meant building libraries, developing radio and television stations, opening bookstores, and founding newspapers and publishing companies. All of this costs a lot of money and is also geographically concentrated and organizationally centralized. In contrast, in the computer age, the construction of infrastructure is not only less expensive, but less centralized. This means that the virtual libraries, virtual bookstores, virtual meeting places, virtual publishing houses, virtual magazines and virtual radio stations can be built by individuals or small groups of individuals, without the need for a great deal of centralized coordination and control. Moreover, much of the infrastructure of the Internet comprises software, and in many cases the software does not have to be built so much as downloaded. This software can normally be downloaded from the Internet almost instantaneously—and then added to the framework of an on-line community nearly as fast—one individual and one "piece" at a time. In the end, the structure that is built is often anything but insignificant.

The infrastructure of the Internet has several needs peculiar to the medium. First of all, in order to function in the national language, both software and the information on how to use it have to be made available in the targeted language. Moreover, there has to be the provision of on-line services that are typically used on the Internet (e.g., search engines, chat rooms, etc.). The infrastructure does not have to be built, however, within the geographic boundaries of the Catalan Lands. One of the most interesting uses of the technology to transcend geographical boundaries is the Internet Federation of Ultra-Territorial Catalan Entities (FIECE). This is an NGO existing only in cyberspace, with the sole purpose of uniting all Catalan peoples and all the pro-Catalan cultural and political organizations that exist outside the boundaries of the Catalan Lands. In North America, for example, there are Catalan cultural "casals" in Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Toronto dedicated to the diffusion of Catalan culture.54

Another possibility arising from the technology is that interested people from around the world are able to create the institutions that will sustain the Catalan nation. A good example is the home page of Mary Martin, a Catalanophile in Louisiana whose cultural and political Recursos Catalans ("Catalan Resources") page is by far the most hyperlinked site of any personal home page in the virtual Catalan universe that I encountered.55
 

  

There is a wide variety of services and activities available to the on-line nation. These run the gamut from libraries to chat rooms to classified ads to news media to cyber-cafes and on-line technical support. One rapidly growing service is Internet radio, a service that has been facilitated by the development of Real Audio software technology. One of the most popular on-line Catalan radio programs is Catalunya Ràdio, which allows the Net surfer to listen to the same live radio broadcasts that can be heard on any normal stereo. The capabilities of the Internet, of course, are expected to go far beyond this, especially as Real Video and computer-based video technology continues to advance. One benefit of the Internet is that it is a cheaper and more personalized medium than traditional radio or television formats. The data storage function of the Web, for example, allows the listener to select from among a variety of recorded radio programs in addition to the live broadcast. This "radio à la carte" is wholly consistent with the trend towards targeted forms of media.
 
            Vilaweb
Perhaps the most useful provision of these services—and probably the prototype for the future—is via such virtual "villages" as Vilaweb, whose hyperlinked interface is represented above. From this interface, the user can access practically any on-line service imaginable—and normally in Catalan. This type of centralized virtual village has the capability of being the primary mediator between individuals and the dense social interaction required for the maintenance or extension of a particular nation.

It is important to point out that the Vilaweb helps to create an on-line Catalan community. There is no "Valenciano" or "Balear" equivalent.

Another matter to consider is that it will take more time and further research to determine the full implications of what participation in such on-line communities means. It is crucial, for instance, to gain a better understanding of how strong the solidarity that is formed in these groups actually is in comparison to that in IRL communities.

Nation-Building

The number of web-based groups that are actively engaged in the construction of either the Catalan, Valencian, or Balear national identities is, not surprisingly, much smaller than the number of groups and individuals who simply participate in those on-line nations.

Coordination with IRL Nation-Building Activity

Tirant lo Blanc is a civic association dedicated to the normalization of the Catalan language (referred to as valencià in this poster)56 within the Valencian Community. One of the most salient campaigns to be coordinated throughout the Catalan Lands has been for the labeling of products in Catalan, or at the very least in both Catalan and Castilian. This poster, as it appears on the web site of Tirant lo Blanc, comes merely as a visual image to accompany the information about the IRL campaign for "Etiquetatge en català" ("Labeling in Catalan"). The use of this "virtual" poster is no different than putting up a poster in real life. In effect, this type of activity is merely replicating IRL activity in a different forum.
 
 

Virtual Additions to IRL activity

The Correllengua ("language run") is an annual event involving marches and other events designed to defend the language and the culture of the Catalan people from what it sees as the two biggest threats: linguistic domination on the one side from Castilian, and linguistic secessionism from the other side from the Valencians and the Balears. Every year the main protest march is in a different city of the Catalan Lands. In 1996, the first "Internet Column" was organized. In the words of Agustí Cerdá, the coordinator of the Bloc de Progrès Jaume I, the "Internet has served as a vehicle of the solidarity of dozens of co-citizens from around the country and the world who wanted to accompany the thousands of Valencians who physically ran."57 It is difficult to see how the addition of "dozens" of virtual participants would make any significant difference to the goals of the movement organizers. Nonetheless, the potential for this type of virtual mobilization is vast.

Virtual Activity

In order for the virtual Catalan nation to function as a nation, it is imperative that individual members of the nation have regular, dense interaction on-line in Catalan. In order to maximize the potential for such interaction, it is necessary to have a full range of Catalan-language software. Accordingly, mobilization in favor of Catalan-language software is an integral component of on-line nation-building.

Activities in this sphere have been much more productive than the Correllengua example mentioned above. A prime example is the on-going "Campaign in Defense of Software in Catalan!" This movement is primarily an Internet-based campaign, and can be examined as a paradigmatic example of the forms of and possibilities for virtual nationalist campaigns. In fact, the Internet is the ideal venue for such protests, since the companies targeted by the campaign have a supreme economic interest in what goes on in cyberspace. The owners of companies such as Netscape will respond to the demands of the activists to the extent that the latter can convince the former that a sufficient market exists for their products in any particular language. There is no better way, I would argue, to show a company that a large body of potential customers exists for Catalan-language software than to mobilize protests en masse via the Internet.

An anonymous organizer for the campaign agreed, stating that, "Software in Catalan is, today, minimal—when not practically non-existent—and we believe that the Internet offers us the ideal framework to demand it."58 This is exactly what the nationalists did. Targeting Netscape first, and demanding a version of Netscape Navigator in Catalan, the activists created the above two icons that were hyper-linked to the campaign’s home page. Then, the organizers promoted the diffusion of these hyper-linked icons throughout the virtual Catalan universe by making them available to the most popular Catalan search engines and "virtual villages" (such as Vilaweb). The level of diffusion achieved was quite extensive. Countless individuals displayed these and other nation-building and nationalist icons on their home pages; whenever a visitor would "click" on one of these icons, she would automatically be transported to the campaign "headquarters" (the home page). Once there, the visitor could, with little more than typing in her name and clicking on another icon, send the following message to Netscape: "Jo també vull programari en català! I too want software in Catalan!"59 Moreover, within a few more clicks of the mouse button, this individual could download the icon to her own web page.60 From then on, as long as the campaign lasts, interested participants merely have to click on their campaign icon in order to receive updates, new calls for actions, or congratulatory remarks.

This campaign highlights the possibilities for rapid, de-centralized diffusion of information in the virtual world of the nation-builder. The costs for both the organizers and the diffusers (such as my hypothetical visitor) were extremely low, yet the mobilization was ultimately effective. Shortly after the campaign began, Netscape offered the Castilian version of Navigator with a new spell-checker in Catalan. Organizers for the campaign noted that while it is not a complete success, the new version of Navigator represents a step in the right direction. Moreover, organizers noted that Microsoft Explorer now has a Catalan-language version, and felt confident that it is only a matter of time before Netscape realizes the potential of the Catalan software market.61

Miscellaneous Activity

Two of the most common additions to the virtual action repertoire are "guest books" and "links pages." On-line guest books—where visitors to a web site can "sign in," leave their name, and write comments for others to see—may be useful in helping both to build solidarity among current members and to recruit new ones. The comments in these books help answer the questions that potential activists want to know about the group, its members and its successes and failures. (e.g, "Who has been here before I?" and "What type of people belong to this group?").

A links page is another feature that is found on the majority of web pages. These pages include "hyperlinks" to any other individual or organization that the host site finds interesting. For many of the pan-Catalan organizations, the types of organizations that are normally linked are (1) other left-wing organizations, (2) other Catalan nationalist organizations, and (3) other non-Catalan nationalist orgranizations (e.g., Scottish). These findings indicate a broadening or widening of the social movement sector both geographically and conceptually (i.e., both across territory and across movements).

Nationalism

A central component of the analysis is a cataloguing of all those nationalist groups based in either the Catalan Lands or the Catalan-speaking "ether" that could be found in a comprehensive on-line search whose primary mission is pertinent to the political national development of the Catalan Lands—in any of its possible regional or pan-Catalan permutations. This classification was practicable only because of the relatively small number of "nationalist" groups relative to those involved in "the nation" or in "nation-building." Because of the overwhelming number of individuals and groups in both the nation and nation-building, a similar scheme would not have been practical.62 In the end, this search yielded 43 groups. After the data was collected, the information was entered onto a spreadsheet with the following variables: (1) type of group (e.g., political party), (2) ideology (e.g., socialist), and (3) political goal for the nation (e.g., independence).

These data can be used to provide information about the types of nationalist groups, their ideologies, and their primary political missions. This information is summed up in the three following pie charts and a crosstab between ideology and political goal.
 

The first pie chart breaks the groups down by type. As can be seen, political parties play an important role in virtual nationalist activity, comprising 42% of all organizations. As might be expected, wholly virtual groups are also involved. Still, the combination of "e-zines" (electronic magazines) and "cyber-organizations" only makes up slightly more than 16% of the total number of groups. What is perhaps most enlightening is the advanced level of participation by youth and student groups, which collectively comprise approximately 31% of the total. This could be evidence of either the increased awareness of computer-based communications within the youngest age cohorts of this society or of a higher level of nationalist affiliation among Catalan youths.
 

The second pie chart contains much more telling information. Together, right-wing and centrist nationalist organizations comprise merely 30% of the total. The remaining portion is composed of an admixture of Social Democratic, Communist, and Revolutionary Marxist nationalist organizations. This finding diverges from the results of a content analysis conducted by Kevin Hill and John Hughes of a large selection of Usenet political discussion lists (focusing mainly on those lists with a focus on topics that would be of interest to Americans): they found that, on the whole, liberal and left-wing groups were both less active and more poorly organized on the Usenet than were the more conservative groups.63 This was an interesting discovery, given the ideological origins of pathbreaking networks such as the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (WELL). In effect, it seems that there is no a priori justification for ascribing the ideological predominance of Internet-based activities to either the left or the right. What does make sense is that the most radical groups would be over-represented on the Web. Given their lack of finances and the smaller number and greater geographical dispersion of their members, these are the groups with the most to gain from such web-based activity.

The final pie chart is equally revealing. This is also perhaps the most interesting information for the study. Namely, the chart addresses the question of what the nationalists strive towards as a political end. What we can see is that just over 20% of the groups advocate devolution for one of the regions, while only another 7% are in favor of a general increase in autonomy for all the regions of the country via an increase in the local powers of the federal arrangement. Seventy percent of the groups, on the other hand, desire some form of unification for the Catalan Lands, with 46.5% of the total advocating the full political independence of Els Països Catalans.
 

The combination of the information in the final two charts is summarized in Table I.

Table I. Crosstab of Ideology by Political Goal
 

Ideology	Independence (PPCC)	Devolution (PPCC)	Devolution (Catalunya)	Devolution (Valencia)	Devolution (Balearics)	Increased Federalism	Other	Total
Centrist	1	3	3	4	1			12
Left Wing	13	4				2	1	20
Marxist	2	2				1		5
Revol. Soclsm.	3							3
Right Wing				1				1
Other	1	1						2
Total	20	10	3	5	1	3	1	43

What is most striking about the data is the clear relationship between left-wing ideology and the desire for pan-Catalan political union. In fact, the only groups to advocate some form of devolution for just one of the regions are those with a centrist or right wing ideology.

Coordination with / Information about IRL activity

This type of nationalist activity is not different from the nation-building example. This Web site, from the Party for Independence, merely contains a "virtual poster" with information about an IRL protest, in this case one against the royal wedding that took place in Barcelona in October of 1997.64 Again, this is no different from IRL activity.

We can see that not all groups are taking full advantage of the possibilities of CMCs. This shows that there are different levels of sophistication among Internet nationalist organizations (though this is not surprising).
 
 

Virtual Additions to IRL Activity

   
 
 
This picture was taken at the annual Ja n’hi ha prou! ("Enough already") protest. This protest, organized by the group Bloc Jaume I, is centered around "a vindication of the national rights of the Catalan people." The upside-down giant float is meant to be a representation of the Bourbon king, Philip V, who defeated the Catalans in the War of Spanish Succession in 1714. Some Catalans believe this date was the end of their political freedom, and have since taken to hanging puppets of King Philip upside down on the anniversary of the defeat in the war. Similar to the Catalan software campaign, this event has a virtual complement to the IRL protest. The organizers of the protest encourage nationalists to "hang" a hyper-linked "poster" ("Com pertoca, Felip V, cap per avall!") on their web sites around the time of the protest in order to both signal to others their nationalist affiliation and permit others to join in the protest.65 This is a free poster that can be infinitely reproduced at practically no cost, and which serves both an "identification" ("marking") function and—via its hyperlink quality—as a multi-forum/multi-function gateway.

Virtual Activity

The ultimate form of virtual mobilization was centered on the virtual referendum on the independence of the Catalan Lands that took place in April of 1997. The above hyper-linked icon was, just as with the Cap-per-avall campaign, diffused throughout the Catalan cyberspace in preparation for the referendum. The referendum, though obscure, received advanced press in most of the major Spanish newspapers. Moreover, impartial advisors were employed to ensure that the vote tally was fair. The results were perhaps not surprising: almost 98% of the voters proved to be in favor of the proposed separation (see Appendix II). In the end, though, judging by the low number of voters (about 1,500 people out of the approximately 10 million potential citizens of the Catalan Lands and 300,000 Internet users), one can infer that the referendum may have done little more than "preach to the converted."

Miscellaneous Forms and Activities

Radical groups are over-represented in the Catalan-speaking cyberspace. Several reasons for this have already been discussed. Many of these groups, especially the most radical, also have foreign "bases" (i.e., their web page is on a foreign Internet Service Provider). This might be a safe move for extremist organizations—it would be extremely difficult, for example, for the Spanish government to shut down a web page that is hosted in Washington, DC. However, in the case at hand, the use of foreign home offices may have less to do with the fear of repression than with the fact that, in a medium that obeys no geographical boundaries, activists will "build" their organizations wherever the conditions are most favorable. Quite simply, North America offers some of the most inexpensive Internet services in the world.
 

We have seen that the nation was constructed ideationally and institutionally via profound changes in the way people worked, lived, and thought. During the Industrial Revolution, these transformations rapidly accelerated, effectuating a rapid increase in the homogenization of peoples. In the post-Industrial era, this trend has been reversed—again because of a combination of ideational, economic, social, and technological changes.

Computer-mediated communications are now the premier technological component of this revolution. As the Catalan case demonstrates, targeted media such as CMCs have already led to changes in the forms and capabilities of nationalist mobilization. These changes will only accelerate and proliferate as we enter the next millenium.

What does the analysis suggest about the future form of the nation? The preliminary evidence suggests that it may become a lot smaller than it now is, especially if such regional identities as the Valencian or Balear are able to successfully "build" their respective nations. On the other hand, the national affiliations could get larger, especially if the "European" identity ever takes hold among the citizens of the EU. A third possibility also exists. It could be that citizens of Europe will hold multiple identities, with a regional national identity (e.g., Catalan) perhaps overlapping a larger national identity (e.g., Spanish), and with a supra-national affiliation superimposed on top of both of these.

Another important conclusion is that nation-building is currently more important than nationalism. With regards to the latter, the development of computer-based communications has led to the use of the Internet essentially as an additional tool for IRL nationalists. In contrast, the technological capability of the Internet to transcend geographical boundaries, provide access to tremendous stores of linguistic and cultural materials, and facilitate the rapid mobilization of members and the even more rapid dissemination of information means that both the promotion of particular minority languages as well as the involvement in dense social interactions in those languages will facilitate the crystallization of minority identities in the future. In this regard, the development of CMCs has been a true breakthrough. The post-Andersonian phase of national development has now begun.
 

^{1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1993.}

^{2. David J. Elkins, "Globalization, Telecommunications, and Virtual Ethnic Communities," International Political Science Review (1997): pp. 143.}

^{3. Ibid., p. 139.}

^{4. Not coincidentally, these nationalist movements occurred at the same time as a number of other protest movements—feminism, peace, environmentalism, and gay rights—came to the fore. Some social analysts began to argue that such movements comprised a common set of movements—"new social movements" (NSMs)—and that the development of such NSMs had its roots in a larger societal transformation that came to be referred to as the "post-Industrial Revolution." Among the first to comment were Alain Touraine, The Postindustrial Society (New York: Random House, 1971); Daniel Bell (1973); and Samuel Huntington, "Postindustrial Politics: How Benign Will it Be?" Comparative Politics (1974).}

^{5. These new movements come in a variety of strengths: The Canary nationalist movement is quite important, while others, like the Alaskan, appear to be virtual "lost causes." See the home page of The Alaskan Independence Party. URL: www.polarnet.com/End_of_Road/soapbox.dir/aip.dir}

^{6. Elkins, p. 139.}

^{7. Approximately 300,000 in early 1997. Ana Montserrat and Salvador Achondo, "Catalonia Trying to Establish ‘Virtual State,’" Wired 24 April 1997. URL: www.wired.com/news/politics/story/3385.html}

^{8. Methodological details are in the "Analysis" section of the paper.}

^{9. See Appendix I for a map of the Catalan Lands.}

^{10. During the Franco regime there was limited armed resistance, first in the guise of the Maquis, and later, with the group Terra Lliure ("Free Land"). Although the latter did successfully mount several bombing campaigns, the armed struggle never enjoyed widespread support among the populace and remained quite small (cf. opposite situation in the Basque Country). When the few remaining members were arrested in preparation for the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992, the group—and with it the armed struggle for the Catalan Lands—died.}

^{11. These regionalist identities, furthermore, are usually accompanied by the view that the locally spoken variant of Catalan (i.e., Valenciano, Balear, etc.) is itself a distinct language rather than a dialect. Such "linguistic secessionism," as it is referred to by the pan-Catalanists and the majority of Catalans within the Principality of Catalonia, has sparked intense protests from those advocating the essential unity of the language.}

^{12. Pro-Catalan political activity is practically non-existent outside of the three Spanish Autonomous Communities.}

^{13. See Appendix II for the results of the referendum.}

^{14. "Catalunya Trying to Establish ‘Virtual State.’"}

^{15. According to Craig Calhoun, "Anderson’s central contribution is to explain how communicative forms figured in creating the categorical identity or imagined community of the nation itself." Craig Calhoun, "Nationalism and Ethnicity," Annual Review of Sociology 19 (1993): p. 234.}

^{16. Ibid., p. 200.}

^{17. Anderson, Imagined Communities.}

^{18. Essentially all the dialects except those in what is now the Netherlands.}

^{19. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1993.}

^{20. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984): 36.}

^{21. Ibid., p. 36.}

^{22. Ibid., p. 39.}

^{23. Woodrow Wilson’s "Fourteen Points" explicitly declared that the self-determination of peoples should be the organizing principle for post-War Europe.}

^{24. Howard Rheingold argues that "virtual communities" can be just as important for the "community members" as in-real-life communities. Virtual Communities. URL: www.well.com/user/hlr/vcbook/vcbookintro.html}

^{25. David D. Laitin, Carlotta Solé, and Stathis N. Kalyvas, "Language and the Construction of States: The Case of Catalonia in Spain," Politics & Society 22 (March 1994): p. 18.}

^{26. David D. Laitin, "The Cultural Identities of a European State," Politics & Society 25 (September 1997): p. 278.}

^{27. Ibid. p. 282.}

^{28. Ibid. p. 299.}

^{29. Ricard Faura i Homedes, Construcciò ideològica d’Internet: Una anàlisis antropològica de l’impacte de les Autopistes de la Informació a Catalunya, Paper presented at the InetCat ’96 conference. 6/11/96.}

^{30. Nicholas Negroponte, El Mundo Digital (Barcelona,: Ediciones BSA, 1995): p. 272.}

^{31. Ernst B. Haas, "What is Nationalism and Why Should We Study It?" International Organization 40 (Summer 1986): p. 743. Haas states that, "Autonomous Wales, Brittany, or Euskadi are no more likely to deal successfully with the turbulence of the welfare state than are the governments from which they wish to secede."}

^{32. Anthony H. Richmond, "Ethnic Nationalism and Post-Industrialism," in John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith, eds. Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996): p. 296.}

^{33. Ibid., p. 297.}

^{34. Ibid., pp. 297, 299.}

^{35. This is precisely the strategy of many contemporary Catalan nationalists.}

^{36. Elkins, p. 139.}

^{37. Ibid., p. 144.}

^{38. Nils Zurawski, Ethnicity and the Internet in a Global Society. URL: gea01.pangea.org/inet96/e8/e8_1.htm. The next three qualities also come from Zurawski.}

^{39. Esteve Espelt Granés, Internet: un nou recurs per al desenvolupament dels moviments socials. URL: www.pangea.org/inetcat/prog/p52A/index.htm. The resources noted in this bulleted list are all from Granés.}

^{40. Zurawski, Ethnicity and the Internet.}

^{41. For a complete discussion of the manner in which the unique qualities of the Internet and other forms of targeted media engender new forms of mobilization, see Gregory D. Saxton, "Social Movement Theory and On-Line Nationalist Activity," (Unpublished manuscript) 28 June 1998.}

^{42. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (New York, NY: Cambridge UP, 1994).}

^{43. Howard Rheingold, Virtual Communities.}

^{44. Faura i Homedes, Construcciò ideològica d’Internet.}

^{45. Rheingold, Virtual Communities.}

^{46. In fact, this medium is particularly well adapted to postindustrial, post-Material forms of organization. On-line venues facilitate the rapid formation and coordination of groups; easily enable people to mobilize around single issues; and permit ephemeral, protean responses to political challenges. More so than perhaps any other form of political community, on-line political mobilization is ideally suited to the values and sensibilities of the "post-Materialists"—Ronald Inglehart’s postindustrial heroes. See Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.}

^{47. "There are many parallels between the current situation in Chiapas and the drawn out civil war in Guatemala, yet the Guatemalan military has been able to nearly kill with impunity while the Mexican military received a coordinated, international attack literally hours after they mobilized their troops. The reason is netwars are effective…, and when they are used they have been very influential." Jason Wehling, Netwars and Activists’ Power on the Internet. March 1995. URL: www.teleport.com/~jwehling/Netwars.html}

^{48. For a detailed discussion of the precise strategies used and the effectiveness of these strategies, refer to Wehling (1995).}

^{49. Charles Swett, Strategic Assessment: The Internet. July 1995. URL: www.fas.org/cp/swett.html}

^{50. Elkins, p. 139.}

^{51. I see neither any inherent insurmountable problems with this nor a better solution. Lowell W. Barrington reaches much the same conclusion in, "‘Nation’ and ‘Nationalism’: The Misuse of Key Concepts in Political Science," PS: Political Science and Politics 30 (December 1997): pp. 712-716.}

^{52. David Laitin and Guadalupe Rodríguez Gómez, "Language, Ideology, and the Press in Catalonia," American Anthropologist 94 (March 1994): 12.}

^{53. But not necessarily as a nationalist or a nation-builder.}

^{54. See, for example the home page of the Casal dels Catalans de California. URL: www.eng.uci.edu/~pulido/casal}

^{55. Mary Martin’s Home Page. URL: catalunya-lliure.com}

^{56. Many groups that believe in the essential unity of the Catalan language will nonetheless make concessions to regional political realities by referring to the language as "valencià" in Valencia and as "mallorquí" or "balear" in the Balearic Islands.}

^{57. Augutí Cerdà, Correllengua ‘96: Columna Internet. (http://vilaweb.com/AREES/placa/corre.html)}

^{58. Campanya en defensa del programari en català. URL: www.estelnet.com/catbbs/prog-cat)}

^{59. Ibid.}

^{60. If this is technically or financially not feasible, there is always the possibility of simply "bookmarking" the site (so that it can be recalled instantaneously the next time the user is on-line).}

^{61. Campanya en defensa del programari en catalá.}

^{62. N.B. The data was collected over a three month period ending in December 1998. Originally, an attempt was made to collect data on nation-building groups and individuals as well. What overwhelmed the project was the sheer number of entities, the wide variety of activities and goals, and the different levels of intensity vis-à-vis the nation-building enterprise of these entities. This said, in the next version of the paper, I would like to apply the same type of analysis to one subset of nation-builder: the language rationalizer (those whose primary mission is to "normalize" the use of Catalan or one of its variants within a particular territory). Since language (Catalan, Balear, Valencian, or Castilian) is a relatively accurate indicator of national affiliation within the Catalan Lands, then one can determine which "nation" a particular entity is attempting to build by its advocacy of one dialect over another.}

^{63. Kevin A. Hill and John E. Hughes. "Computer-Mediated Political Communication: The USENET and Political Communities" Political Communication 14 (1997): p. 3.}

^{64. Translation: "No to the Royal Wedding. We Catalans do not have a king!" Partit per la Independencia Home Page. URL: www.independencia.org.}

^{65. Bloc Jaume I Home Page. URL: www.estelnet.com/cap-per-avall. Translated, the virtual poster reads, "As is needed, Philip V, head down!"}