ARTICLE Is there an ethnicity bias in Catalan secessionism? Discourses and political actions Joan Vergés-Gifra 1 | Macià Serra 2 1 Philosophy Department, University of Girona, Catalonia, Spain 2 Public Law Department, University of Girona, Catalonia, Spain Correspondence Joan Vergés-Gifra, Philosophy Department, University of Girona, Catalonia, Spain. Email: joan.verges@udg.edu Funding information Institut d'Estudis de l'Autogovern, Grant/Award Number: 2017 IEA 00007 Abstract Many charges have been made against Catalan secession- ism from a normative or ideological point of view. In this article we would like to focus on the accusation that the secessionist movement is xenophobic, racist or ethnicist. Between 2017 and 2019, and particularly since Quim Torra was named president of the Generalitat, this has been the dominant criticism in the arguments set out against seces- sionism. We are interested in evaluating the strength of this accusation in this contribution. In this respect, we focus on the discourse and the main legislative actions adopted by the Catalan institutions since embarking on a determined bid for sovereignty, popularly called the Process, in 2010. Our conclusion is that both from discursive and legislative points of view, it can be concluded that Catalan secession- ism cannot be considered as an ethnicist movement. KEYWORDS Catalonia, ethnicism, nationalism, political discourse, secessionism, Spain 1 | THE POST-REFERENDUM SCENARIO AND THE REVISIONIST ARGUMENT REGARDING CATALAN NATIONALISM After the autumn of 2017, in which the 1 October referendum was held and the parliament of Catalonia proclaimed the Catalan Republic on 27 October—a proclamation which was never made effective—the criticisms against the Cat- alan secessionist movement became ever more virulent. Especially in the Spanish context, accusations branding Cat- alan secessionism as (i) dangerous nationalism, (ii) led by bourgeois elites, (iii) having a largely rural, not very urban, Received: 10 March 2020 Accepted: 2 October 2020 DOI: 10.1111/nana.12716 © 2021 Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism and John Wiley & Sons Ltd Nations and Nationalism. 2021;1–16. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nana 1