Rocío Martínez-Sampere, 14 September 2024
Image: Dani Duch
Granada, Caribbean country
I remember as if it were today the strong impression that almost everything made on me the first time I went to the USA, in 1991. The cars seemed twice the size, the pick-up trucks were like something out of a movie, the hamburgers were incredible, the drinks were gigantic; the Nike Bruins from Back to the Future, which were a coveted object of desire here, were the most common thing there, and they came in several colours! And I was in the Rust Belt, not California or New York. I don’t know if it was ignorance, naivety or a mixture of both, but I even remember being amazed because the city where I was, Toledo (Ohio) had nothing to do with our Toledo and I didn’t understand how two such different things could be called the same.
I don’t know why this nonsense came to my mind in connection with the debate opened as a result of the agreement between the PSC and the ERC on regional funding, and some arguments (rather than not arguments) that describe it as a federal advance along the lines of the last agreement, still in force, signed by the PSOE on this issue: the Granada declaration, approved unanimously in 2013. I suspect that with these Grenada must be like with my Toledo.
No one should be upset that an asymmetrical federal development in line with our diversity is being proposed.
Ramón Jáuregui, one of the main architects of this agreement, tells it very well. The differences lie, he explains, in the fact that Granada 2013 is a comprehensive proposal on the reforms of the Spanish model and consists of 14 specific proposals and an invitation to the political agents to reach a consensus on them, as should be the case with everything that affects the constitutional bloc. Because let us not deceive ourselves, without constitutional reform (and reform of the Lofca) it is not possible to undertake the federal development of the autonomous model.
In the section on financing, there is talk of coordinated and shared finances and of the constitutional inclusion of a principle of State guarantee of fundamental welfare rights: education, health, social services and pensions.
There are as many federalisms as there are federal states. Depending on the political balances and the history of each one (the German Constitution, for example, tutored by the Allies after the Second World War to avoid a Germany that was too strong). There are more cooperative federalisms, such as Austria’s, and others that are more compartmentalised, such as Australia’s. No one should be altered, therefore. No one should be upset, therefore, because in Spain an asymmetrical federal development is proposed in accordance with our diversity. In the USA, something as fundamental and terrible as the death penalty is legislated by the states. To use, as so often happens to us, the fallacious formula of equating asymmetry with privilege is absurd and is as much as understanding equality as equalisation.
Nor is it a reason to tear one’s hair out over the fact that one of the fundamental aspects of the federal state, financing, is being pushed from Catalonia. First, because neither President Rajoy nor President Sánchez have done their homework and the reform of financing has been pending since 2015. Second, because this has been the case in many of the five funding agreements of democracy (1986, 1992, 1996, 2002, 2009) and they have meant progress in a country as strongly decentralised in basic spending as ours. What is not acceptable is to think that what affects us all can be decided partially and unilaterally. What upsets me most about the debate is that nobody really believes that the Lofca will be reformed in the direction of the agreement. It is the worst of lies: everyone is lying to each other, but they are not fooling each other. And furthermore, a fiscal reform that is not accompanied by an institutional reform (Senate, conference of presidents…), which gives decentralisation a shared and effective government of the State, is more a patch than federalism.
Federalism is the right to difference without difference of rights. As long as some continue to insist on reducing Spain to what happens inside the M-30 and others on interpreting diversity only under their parameters from the Empordà, we will make little progress. No reform of the State model is possible and sustainable without a political pact between, at the very least, PP, PSOE and the Catalan and Basque nationalisms.
This is the difference between the 1979 Statute of Sau and the 2006 Statute of Miravet (and I am not talking about the 1932 Statute of Núria). Judge where each one led us. It escapes me why we refuse to learn from recent history and some are still confused between the Granada of the Alhambra and the Caribbean country. Nothing to do with it.
https://www.lavanguardia.com/opinion/20240914/9939416/granada-pais-caribeno.html
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