The Barcelona provincial institution birthday this May 15 two centuries of history, a bicentennial in 2022 that it shares with the other three Catalan councils and with most of the rest of Spain. A celebration that causes surprise because the history of the councils is generally unknown, and in Catalonia it is still too often it seems that only the autonomous institution has historical legitimacy. The councils are born as a result of the liberal revolution, the Constitution of Cadiz (1812), and they are an instrument of modernization that faces the repression of absolutism to the point that they do not take hold until 1836.
The case of the Barcelona Provincial Council is surprising to say the least because we are facing undoubtedly the most important Catalan territorial administration of the 19th and 20th centuries, for several reasons. In the province of Barcelona there were a series of sociodemographic and economic changes as a result of the industrialization and of urbanization process that turned it into a unique territory, to which the provincial institution had to respond in communications, charity, education, health or culture. Has been an intermediary administration between the municipalities, as well as the social, economic and political groups in Barcelona, with the central liberal State. The Diputación often played a role of supraprovincial coordination, for example, on roads, and institutional substitution in the absence of regional government.
The stage of Commonwealth of Catalonia (1914-1923), better known to the general public, is the voluntary sum of the four councils, under the leadership and with the budget of the Barcelonan. Self-government did not come until the brief period of the Second Republic, and with democracy it did not really begin to advance until 1980. Therefore, the Barcelona Provincial Council is not only by default, but also due to the very ambition of its leading sectors, the most important Catalan territorial administration in those two centuries.
It is true that during democratic transition there was the implicit that the councils would disappear with the recovery of self-government. There was a misunderstood Catalanist tradition of hostility towards the councils, as if they had been more pro-Francoist than the city councils, when the dictatorship subjected all institutions to strict government control. And yet, nothing that would happen after 1983 to relocate the role of the provincial entity in the new Catalan institutional system was foreseen in 1977. Let us not forget that Josep Tarradellas he is president of the provisional Generalitat and also of the Diputación until 1980, during which time the provincial institution acts as the embryo of autonomy, with money and civil servants. Subsequently, all the attempts of ‘pujolismo’ to absorb or eliminate the councils in the eighties, for ideological reasons, but also because of political rivalry with the socialists, failed before the Constitutional Court.
Related news
the controversies territorial organization laws (LOT), served to settle the Metropolitan Corporation of Barcelona and to create county councils, but not to strengthen supra-municipal cooperation, while the role of the councils was clarified with the Regulatory Law of the Bases of the Local Regime (1985) and the Regulatory Law of Local Treasury (1988). With the first, they ceased to be a peripheral administration of the State, to situate themselves in the local sphere, with functions of assistance and cooperation to the municipalities, and with the second good financing was guaranteed based on the population criterion, which for the Diputación de Barcelona has been a guarantee.
Since then, what has happened is a complete institutional reinvention, creating the figure of the intermediate local government, today fully consolidated in the 2006 Statute. It is a model of cooperation that expands to the rest of the Catalan and Spanish councils, and that has overcome the proof of political alternation, since between 2011 and 2019 the four Catalan councils were governed by pro-sovereignty forces. The bicentennial should serve to recognize their complex role in the history of Catalonia, without prejudice, from full institutional normality.