A footnote on Catalonia and Spain

Juan Carlos Monedero

Lecturer in the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid. Co-founder of Podemos.              

16.07.2024

Main debate: Unfinished Spain

‘Tot está per fer i tot és possible’ [“Everything is to be done and everything is possible”] [1].

My God, what is Spain?

José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Don Quixote

Cooling the nations

Spain has a huge problem: it is badly taught and badly learned. It is not true that the issue of autonomous competences is an absolute. If the Autonomous Communities had the powers that territories have in the United States, it is not that many would think that Spain is one and not 51, but that they would consider the nation dead. However, such doubts about America do not exist in the country of the stars and stripes and military interventions. The nation is a story, an imagined and desired community. Spain’s complex has never been with the Basque Country, even if ETA was shooting at it, but with Catalonia, because it is a large and consolidated nation. If Catalonia were to act as Madrid’s president Díaz Ayuso does – for example, by giving awards to international politicians outside the central government – not a few would call for a new application of article 155 or for the military to be sent in. If the judges were to persecute PP politicians as they have persecuted Catalan pro-independence supporters, the chatter would multiply with talk of a necessary coup d’état.

It seems that if a nation is older it is stronger, but that is actually an accessory. Going back in history, when do you have to stop to find your identity? Were Neanderthals nationals from somewhere? One book on the historical reconstruction of the Aznar era was called “Spain: from Atapuerca to the euro”. As if Neanderthals could have felt Catalan (or Spanish, someone from El Cid’s entourage or even from the Catholic Monarchs). In fact, someone as intelligent as Menéndez Pidal wrote in 1949 that someone from the court of Don Pelayo had the same idiosyncrasies as someone from Madrid in the mid-20th century. If we were to repeat in Hispanic terms Mark Twain’s exercise of transferring a 19th century American gentleman to the Court of King Arthur, we would undoubtedly be in for a big surprise. A leader of the Partido Popular or VOX would find it difficult to explain to Don Pelayo the idea of Spain of Franco, José María Aznar, Feijóo and Abascal.

Spain is a young nation that thinks it is old. Its story is intermingled with the asphyxiating stifling sackcloth of a state that, on the contrary, is very old. A state marked from the outset by an absolutist aristocracy that extinguished the municipalist fire of the Germanic and Castilian communities. And by a religion inimical to dialogue that allied itself with political power by expelling the other faiths – Jews and Muslims – from the dawn of modernity (1492). Only Amadeo of Savoy began to be King of Spain (and not of Spains, as Isabel II still was). And in the war of independence, against an invader who spoke another language, the musical genre of the jota – recalls Álvarez Junco (2001) – which served as an anthem recited that ‘the Virgin of Pilar says/ that she does not want to be French/ that she wants to be captain/ of the Aragonese troops’. Aragonese, not Spanish.

Historically, it has been the public power that has been able to assert this shared narrative called ‘nation’. But in Spain, Castile, entrusted with this task for having led the ‘Reconquest’, devoted itself to other tasks. Catholicism and Protestantism were essential in the construction of this narrative in Europe. But the state does not always succeed in resolving ethnic and religious differences within a territory. Castile was committed to the conversion of heretics. The religious orders, militarised as the armed wing of the Holy Inquisition, were often stronger than the Castilian public power. Spain, according to Antonio Elorza’s thesis, is a juxtaposition of territories arising from Castile’s failure to build the Spanish nation.

The territories annexed in the Reconquista never found any advantage in being part of a common nation. Meanwhile, Catalonia, which had no state, was building its nation (that shared symbolic fabric that interweaves shared readings of the past and present), and the Spanish nation (that shared symbolic fabric that interweaves shared readings of the past and present). Italy and Germany (this is Helmut Pläsner’s classic thesis) are latecomers. And Villacañas rightly insists: no less than Spain. When the political power was supposed to create a nation, it gave up and preferred to think of Christianity, because it was impelled by the conversion of Jews and Moors and the influence of the Inquisition.

We never sought to create a national society. We never had, before the 19th century, a shared ‘existential nation’ with common basic consensuses, so that mandates from the centre were seen as impositions. The union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon never came to fruition and both maintained different institutions. The 16th, 17th and 18th centuries saw constant negotiation between the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and the Catalan specificity which, in turn, was plural (it is clear that during the War of Succession there were opposing Cataluñas). Azaña thought in 1932 that the union of Spaniards would be achieved for the first time thanks to the Second Republic. That union is still pending. And the first step towards achieving it – or abandoning the attempt – is to recognise it. But Catalan identity in the 19th century, often intermingled with class claims, could have given the territory a state of its own. It did not, and now it is more complicated than ever.

Federalism or the fridge of nations

It would not be much of a mistake to say today that ‘Spain is no longer Spain’. Not because it does not exist, despite all its problems, but because Spaniards are finding it difficult to exist by identifying themselves as such. In other words, Spaniards are in difficulty if there are several political nations that do not consider themselves part of the constituent power represented by the 1978 regime. Put more clearly: Spain has a problem with Spain if it is true that there are several political nations that claim to be a constituent power of their own. Unless it is rediscovered as a country of countries. The Transition started with this idea, but gradually dissolved it.

The Catholic Monarchs began to consolidate the Spanish state, but the Spanish nation had to wait until the 19th century to see itself reflected in the mirror. Spain, which could have functioned as an integrating referent as long as its contours were not closed, began to mix with the laws of Castile and to hinder the possibility of being ‘Spanish’ understood as part of that plural national identity. The Portuguese reference par excellence, Luís de Camões, stated in the 16th century: ‘Speak of Castilians and Portuguese, because we are all Spaniards’ (Baños, 2014).

By contrast, Catalonia, which failed in the 17th century to become a state independent of the crown (at the very moment when Portugal was achieving it), is, as we have seen, an older nation than Spain (we could say that this places the Basque Country, articulated by Sabino Arana as a national identity at the end of the 19th century, in greater difficulty. But this is not so, since an identity, in order to exist, does not need to have carbon 14 applied to it: it is enough for a group of people to want it to).

The historical nationalities in the Spanish state share a common identity, traditions, language, habits and way of life long before the inhabitants of Spain as a whole became homogeneous. An identity composed of other identities can only survive if the small part can develop its double identity or if it eliminates it. Nation states have been good at laminating languages, cultures and peoples and homogenising territories (if there is no national problem in Argentina it is because in the 19th century they exterminated the indigenous people who were there long before the colonisers).

Federalism came to try to find a middle way, especially when states were accumulating responsibilities and demands. But for federalism to be real, it would be necessary that in Cordoba, Madrid or Albacete it would not bother that the Constitutional Court to be in Barcelona or Donostia, that the National Energy Commission should be in Jaén or Coruña, or the headquarters of RTVE should be in Bilbao or Tarragona. On the contrary, in Telemadrid, under the PP government, they have believed that Catalans speak Catalan just to annoy, and Esperanza Aguirre preferred an electricity company to be owned by Italian capital rather than Catalan. Others believe that to speak Basque, Galician or Catalan is to bark. With that kind of reading, typical of an unenlightened people, how can you not leave that house as soon as you can?

Spain: badly taught and badly learned

If Cánovas stated, during the discussion on the 1876 Constitution, that ‘Spaniard is he who cannot be anything else’, we see that the Spaniards who have not known how to be Spanish are responsible for the fact that those who can be something else have set themselves in motion. If Spain had managed to maintain the Republic, it is quite likely that there would not be the need to build its own state frameworks that a not inconsiderable part of Catalonia and the Basque Country are now expressing. A republic does not delegate its responsibilities. It would have its own developed identity and would find itself within and building that plural and integrating identity that should be the federal and republican Spain, integrated in turn into a higher sphere, which is the European Union. We are aware that for some this would be the worst betrayal of all, since Catalonia or the Basque Country would also be Spain and they would experience this as a defeat. But we can sense that it would have been an integrating solution. It would have solved the tensions by integrating them, not annulling or separating them.

That baccalaureate that grants identity would have been made with Camba and Cunqueiro, with Rodoreda and Zambrano, with Lorca and Unamuno, with Neville and Berlanga, with Martirio, Miguel Poveda, Lluis Llach, Bonet and Labordeta, together with the memory of Padilla, Bravo and Maldonado. Conclusion: Republican Spain would have been a better solution, by opening up avenues of dialogue and incorporating complexity, than independence. Above all because it would not be embarrassing to be part of that plural, cultured and tolerant Spain, far removed from the Spain of Feijóo, Rajoy, Aznar and the Gürtel, from VOX’s ‘astracanadas’ [silly situation or farce], from the PSOE’s inexhaustible pactfulness full of bad conscience, from the fear of a burning bin and indifference to compatriots – or foreigners – looking in those same rubbish bins for something to eat. When Mexican ambassador Gilberto Bosque was celebrated as a hero for having saved thousands of people from the holocaust in France, he replied: ‘It wasn’t me, it was Mexico’. A Mexico that reclaimed its republican dream and was not ashamed to feel a common spirit. Science fiction?

Would the confederal proposal work? It is not easy to bring it to fruition. Antonio Baños was betting in that direction and the non-socialist left called their parliamentary space ‘confederal’: A Spain made up of several independent states (which would include Catalonia and Portugal) as is Latin America, which is known as a cultural unity, but as a state diversity’. The Latin American reality does not allow for such closeness (although UNASUR and CELAC want to build it). The Chileans do not let the Bolivians have access to the sea; a few years ago an armed conflict between Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela almost materialised; Brazil acts as a sub-empire; and there were coups d’état in Bolivia, Honduras and Paraguay without the rest being able to stop it. Reducing identity to a mere administrative relationship does not work, as political identities have consequences for coexistence that are not resolved with the slight family-like air that the Latin American continent would have. It is not enough to say ‘plurinational’: it is necessary to build coexistence on this reality and make it viable.

Sovereignty tensions in Spain can serve to advance democratically and resolve the four major wounds we have been carrying since at least the 19th century. It would not be a bad idea to take advantage of this tension to deepen the right to decide, because when someone does not want to, you cannot convince them by force. But how can we make the federal solution count if we have not been able to build it as a valid alternative? Aren’t those who say that federalism will only awaken in ‘Spain’ when those who demand independence take their proposal to the extreme?

The causes of Catalonia’s disaffection with Spain have been summarised by Vidal-Folch (2015): a previous historical situation that has been accumulating bitterness; the ruling of the Constitutional Court (where judges with little prestige overturned a Statute agreed in the Cortes and approved by the Catalan citizens); and the fact that some of the articles that were rejected are in the statutes of Catalonia. Not to mention that some of the articles they rejected are in the statutes of Andalusia or the Valencian Community); the recentralisation of the PP (non-compliance with central public investment; administrative filibustering on the Mediterranean rail corridor; privatisation of El Prat airport; transfer of hospitals to the Generalitat; obstruction of tax collection; educational reform that seeks to ‘Spanishise Catalan children’); the economic crisis used to cover up the mismanagement of the CiU government; the absence of debate on unemployment and the crisis and the insistence on the negative fiscal balance with Spain; whether or not to continue in the EU; the call for the referendum; the pressures on businessmen; the Scottish referendum. Many issues and little will for dialogue. Which some judges have tried to resolve as if they were hanging judges.

The ‘78 regime is showing clear signs of exhaustion. In Catalonia, the rational need to overcome the crisis came together with the sentimental need for nationhood. They can quote Martí i Pol and say that ‘everything remains to be done and everything is possible’. Hence its strength. Converted into common sense. Catalonia has self-awareness as a people, beyond being for or against independence, and accompanies the recovery of the politics born as an effect against the neoliberal model. That is why they affirm in this new common sense: how can the people not decide on everything they want to decide? The rest of Spain is still watching. But it is not true that this solves any problem. That is why the amnesty for Catalan politicians was an obligation, in addition to the fact that the most conservative part of the Spanish state, the judiciary, was unjust with the referendum (as it has continued to be afterwards).

Solving Spain’s problem: beyond the ‘78 regime

Spain has not liked the difference. A Catholic country that has wanted only one truth, one king, one language, one religion, one people. In the name of this stigmatisation of difference, Moors, Jews, gypsies, Erasmists, Frenchmen, liberals, republicans and, now, those who believe that the ‘78 regime, in any of its facets – including the territorial one – is exhausted, have been expelled or eliminated. Some judges’ idea of Spain is endangering democracy. And part of the PSOE shares this view with the PP. At some point we have to stop patching things up. It is time for a constituent process that will bring us together again.

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