Antonio Avendaño, 25 August 2024
Image: The president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès (i) and the new president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Salvador Illa (d), during the death of Salvador Illa. EP.
The Procés began with money and ends with money: Mas called it Fiscal Pact, Illa and Montero call it Singular Financing, Borrell calls it Concert…
Ortega’s idea that Spain was the problem and Europe was the solution was not, like others of the philosopher’s, a brilliant or merely ingenious idea: it was a true maxim, a true assertion. A century later, there can be little doubt in this respect: Spain is among the most pro-European countries in Europe, although here too the spectre of that same far right that has been sweeping the continent for years and whose hallmarks include an anti-Europeanism with a broad brush and pugnacious short-sightedness that has taken hold in very significant segments of the population not only in the most politically peripheral Europe but also in central countries such as France, Germany and Italy.
One hundred years later, Spain is no longer the problem, among other things because in 1986 it found in Europe the solution that had been hidden throughout the 19th century and three quarters of the 20th century by the pale political and ecclesiastical elites in whose hands the management of society and the State had been in the hands of the latter. Towards the second decade of the new century, Catalonia became a problem to whose solution, partial no doubt but in any case promising, our membership of the European Union contributed decisively. Unwitting heirs of Ortega’s idea, the pro-independence supporters put into circulation the idea that, for Catalonia, Spain was the problem and Europe the solution: the idea did not bear fruit simply because, at that point in the century, Spain had already been Europe itself for several decades.
Farewell to Ortega’s Spain
Independentism convinced itself and tried to convince the Catalan social majority that we were still in Ortega’s Spain and that, therefore, the solution was a Catalonia outside of that Spain but integrated into Europe. Naturally, such squaring of the circle was not viable. Nor was it, nor will it be, as long as the social and electoral majorities in Catalonia do not change substantially. And for now they have not: Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya has already understood this, but not Junts, or not so much Junts as its leader Carles Puigdemont, without whose particular political, judicial and even purely biographical vicissitudes it is impossible to understand the delirious course of the post-Convergent formation, a good part of which must certainly be quite fed up with living those interesting times that, nevertheless, so seduce and intoxicate its treacherous leader.
After the investiture of the socialist Salvador Illa and once the anti-state, anti-constitutional and anti-Spanish, but also largely anti-Catalan, chapter that we have come to call ‘El Procés’ is behind us, Catalonia’s relationship with Spain and above all with itself has changed markedly. The social majority of the Principality no longer wants to leave Spain, but it will hardly accept coming out empty-handed from the political and emotional quagmire it got itself into. The problem is no longer Spain, but it is, and continues to be, money. Money not only as money, but also as a political symbol, as a distinguishing feature, as the effective materialisation of a ‘primus inter pares’ truncated by the so-called ‘coffee for all’.
A little more, a little less
The Procés – which, as happened with the Transition, has earned the right to be written in capital letters – began with money and ends with money: Artur Mas called it the Fiscal Pact, Salvador Illa and María Jesús Montero call it Singular Financing, Josep Borrell calls it the Concert, Alberto Núñez Feijóo calls it a Tort and Santiago Abascal calls it Treason. In any case, it is about money, over which negotiation is always possible. Difficult but possible because the main question is ‘how much’: how much do you need, how much do you deserve, how much do you want, how much do I give you, how much do I keep?
In this regard, the problem for the socialist president Pedro Sánchez is that what the socialists Illa or Montero maintain is nothing like what the socialists Page or Borrell maintain: for the former the discussion is purely federalist and is roughly limited to what we would call, with Machado, ‘a little more, a little less’, while for the latter it is a question of principles where what is relevant is not the ‘how much’ but the ‘what’, a ‘what’ whose content and whose make-up are for them purely, simply and blatantly confederal.
In the same way that a century ago Ortega and the regenerationists before him argued that any solution for Spain was through Europe, by imitating the laws, institutions and customs of Europe, it could now be argued that today any solution for Spain is through Catalonia, not naturally in the sense of imitating laws, institutions and customs that are basically confederal in nature, institutions and customs that are basically the same as on this side of the Ebro, but in the sense of providing the Principality with a sufficiently dense and stable institutional and financial fabric to allow us to say goodbye to the damned interesting times we have endured for the last five years and, above all, to convince the majority of Catalans – not all, of course: that will never happen – that Spain is no longer the problem. To think that El Procés can really be left behind without giving anything in return is unrealistic: as unrealistic as it was in its day to believe that independence in the framework of the European Union was a piece of cake.
https://www.elplural.com/politica/cataluna-problema-solucion_335878102
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