Film director Jean-Luc Godard used to say that every camera shot was a moral choice. With the same emphasis we can say that there is never an innocent look on a map. The map is the most lethal artifact ever created by humans. Lighter than a book, that printed sheet of a few centimeters, loaded with signs and conventions, is capable of provoking wars, creating and annulling loyalties, building and destroying a nation. That is why we will rarely find an innocent glance at him.
In the personal diary of the one who was Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mussolini and married to his daughter, Galeazzo Ciano, shot in 1944 by his own father-in-law, we can find one of the best examples of this perverse look. On March 15, 1939, with Italian theatricality but with the veracity of a direct witness, Ciano notes: “Madrid falls and, with the capital, all the other cities of red Spain. The war is over. It is a new and formidable victory for fascism: perhaps, so far, the greatest… Il Duce is beaming. Pointing to the geographical atlas open on the Spain page, he says: “It’s been open like this for almost three years, now that’s enough. I know that it is necessary to open it on another page”. He has Albania in his heart.
Every world conflict, just look at Ukraine or Palestine, starts and ends with a map. The 19th and 20th centuries witnessed the great cartographic literacy of the planet, a literacy that usually goes unnoticed in contemporary analyzes when talking about the creation of national sentiment. The map has accompanied our societies, identifying them, delimiting them, differentiating them, placing them in an environment, with friendly neighbors or with furious enemies.
Catalonia, between the 17th and 18th centuries alone, saw the publication of up to sixty-six different maps (which reach the extraordinary figure of 152 if we include their variants, as counted by the specialist Montserrat Galera) . These seventy maps built the political culture of the country and shaped its identity, forging, from its repeated image, a common space engraved in the minds of those who observed it for generations.
Does Catalonia exist? His map existed, which is even more relevant. The first known printed map of the Principality dates from 1603 and was commissioned by its Generalitat. The Valencians had it almost twenty years earlier: in 1584 as a single sheet and in 1585 in the Latin edition of the atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum by Abraham Ortelius (the Flemish Örtel). A political entity like that Kingdom of Valencia appeared in the eyes of the world as a constituted entity, as a differentiated society. We imagine the book of 1585 circulating in Europe at the time, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from the Atlantic to the Aegean and entering the libraries of merchants, notaries, princes and cardinals across the continent. The modern political and social identity of the Valencians (like twenty years later that of the Catalans) began to become plastic with the map, both inwardly and outwardly. It was the introduction card to the society of the time and from that moment it was repeated, with improvements and variations, hundreds of times.
That the map of the Valencians was born two decades before that of the Catalans is not a relevant fact on which to build any thesis, beyond a certain local vanity, but it does allow us to reflect on the concept of how identities are constructed and can be useful to talk about political relations today from the respect of a political tradition.
The relationship between Catalonia and the Valencian Country has generally been observed from the linguistic and cultural perspective (for better and for worse). For more than twenty years, some of us have also wanted to explore new dynamics from economic budgets and material flows, common interests and infrastructure projects. A third vector should also form part of this panoply of analysis, which is cartographic heritage as a community political expression.
Because the history of the politics of a territory is the history of its cartographic existence. The map is a framework that shapes political perceptions, fed back by its governing institutions. Sometimes the map precedes the territory, at other times it follows, as in Catalonia and the Valencian Country.
In Italy, the joint map of the Italian peninsula arrived long before its reality as a unified nation in 1861. Long before that, maps were circulating that began to coin the image of a country that did not yet exist. Once Italy was unified, the edition of maps of the nation increased exponentially and in the first educational law of the transalpine country, the Copino Reform (1867), it was established – the top expert in the history of cartography explains it Italian teacher Edoardo Boria – that all classrooms in the kingdom had to have a large wall map of the new homeland of the Savoys, of Cavour and of Garibaldi. In other places, the map arrived after the creation of the State: Walter Benjamin, when he visited the Soviet Union so it was born as a political reality, did not fail to observe that the only rival of the image, endlessly repeated, it was Lenin’s map of the new USSR.
When a country is equipped with a map, it affirms and defines its political territorial reality. We never underestimate the map as a great maker of political stories. He was born for this.