Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel (Samuel Johnson)
Four years ago a new Statute of Autonomy was approved for Catalonia. The process involved an original draft being approved in Catalonia, amended by the Parliament in Madrid, and the amended version being approved in a referendum against the opposition of the separatist party ERC (Left Republicans). The conservative PP also opposed it and referred it to the Constitutional Court. This move was purely political. The PP, which had run an anti-Catalan campaign, opposed things in the Catalan Statute that it accepted in other places.
Unfortunately, the Spanish Constitutional Court turned out to be a shambles. Life – my life anyway – is too short to follow the goings-on in detail but there have been judges staying on after they should have retired, others retiring and not being replaced, some failing to recuse themselves when they should have done so, and all in all it has been a political farrago that robbed the court of a large part of its credibility.
Nevertheless, this week the court finally, after many failed attempts, agreed on a common position and made its ruling. Fourteen sections of the Statute (of the 80-odd that the PP had submitted) were ruled out and others were subject to interpretation. The main points are:
- Catalonia can call itself a nation if it wants to, but the name has no legal or constitutional validity.
- Catalonia’s separate Bar Council cannot be entirely independent of the Spanish one but must ultimately be subject to it.
- Catalonia’s separate Ombudsman Service cannot be entirely independent of the Spanish one but must ultimately be subject to it.
- Catalan can remain the main language used in schools but there must be more use of Spanish.
- Catalan cannot be the ‘preferential’ (i.e. in practice the only) language used by the public authorities.
Legally, this does not seem to be a very big deal but the political reaction has been huge. The Nationalist (CiU) leader Artur Mas responded to this ruling on a case brought by the PP with an attack on Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister of Spain. Why? This takes us to the root of the problem.
There was a time when Socialists in Spain were opposed to Nationalism and stood for solidarity among people rather than nations, with a view that Spain should have a federal system rather than the system of autonomous regions with varying, and constantly increasingly, powers that we have now. It is said by Catalan Nationalists that PSOE is merely a Spanish Nationalist party, indistinguishable from the PP. Clearly, PSOE is a Spanish party and the present government with a Socialist PM represents the Spanish State, but any PSOE Spanish Nationalism at that level is minimal compared to what we see in other places, such as Catalonia. It is impossible to imagine Zapatero leading a march with a gigantic Spanish flag, followed by thousands of people, yet the Catalan Socialist leader José Montilla led just such a demonstration with a gigantic senyera (the Catalan flag) yesterday. What is going on?
It’s the devil that waves the flags. (El Roto, El País, 14-3-06)
The rot set in with a leader of the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC), President of the Generalitat (Government of Catalonia) and former Mayor of Barcelona called Pasqual Maragall, who moved his party to a more Nationalist position. He was followed by a man called José Montilla. The name is important; it is not Catalan. Montilla was born in Cordoba in Andalusia and when he became President of the Generalitat there was a certain amount of muttering from Nationalist quarters, some of it in public, that a xarnego (immigrant from elsewhere in Spain) had no business being the President of Catalonia, especially one who spoke Catalan with a pronounced Spanish accent. That has blown over now but it seems to have left Montilla with an unfortunate need to prove that he can be as catalinista as anyone else. This in turn set him and his party on a collision course with PSOE in the rest of Spain.
The rest, as they say, is history. The culmination yesterday was the disgusting sight of a so-called Socialist marching with a flag that could be contender for the Guinness Book of Records, in support of a Nationalism that is rejected by Socialists in the rest of Spain. He has appropriated the Catalan flag, which should represent the people and country neutrally, for a particular political purpose, and he is in great danger of dividing Catalan politics between Nationalists and non-Nationalists rather than between left and right. We know what great damage such a division has done in the Basque Country. Are we to see it replicated in Catalonia? There are elections later this year. Can anything be done to stop the flag-waggers achieving domination? Already we are seeing a backlash. Today’s ABC has a cover printed with the Spanish flag and the word España. A reference to tonight’s football match perhaps. Or perhaps not.
What hope is there? What can a non-Nationalist like me do? As a leftwards-leaning Liberal Humanist (Liberal in the British sense, Humanist in the continental sense) I have always known that there is no Liberal party as such in Spain. I have in my time voted for both Socialists (who are in fact perfectly civilised Social Democrats) and for CiU, mainly because they had a good man called Ignasi Guardans in the European Parliament. However, I have no natural political home anywhere here. The PP holds no attraction, not only because of its political position and its own liking for flag-wagging but also because far too many of its members seem to be downright crooks. There is a new, small party in Catalonia called Ciutadans, loosely associated with UPyD in the rest of Spain. They are rather too centralist for my taste but they might turn out to be the best bet. Not that I have a vote, of course, but I do try to decide in each election who I would vote for if I actually could.
Harvey’s law states: The number of flags to be seen at any political, state or other (e.g. sporting) event is in inverse proportion to the level of intelligence, culture and sanity to be found at that event.
Finally, I quote from Gulliver’s Travels:
… the two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu. Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty's grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown. These civil commotions were constantly fomented by the monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the exiles always fled for refuge to that empire. It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death, rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end. Many hundred large volumes have been published upon this controversy: but the books of the Big-endians have been long forbidden, and the whole party rendered incapable by law of holding employments. During the course of these troubles, the emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate by their ambassadors, accusing us of making a schism in religion, by offending against a fundamental doctrine of our great prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran). This, however, is thought to be a mere strain upon the text; for the words are these: ‘that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.’
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