The article was published on February 27, 2001 in the newspaper El País with the title Madrid se va.” Its author, Pasqual Maragall, offered an interesting hypothesis about the dynamics that were being implemented in the configuration of the territorial debate: “There is from the periphery the feeling that Madrid is leaving Spain. That plays another league, the world league of cities.” More than twenty years later, the hypothesis has been confirmed. Madrid is not only leaving, it is gone. Its formidable capacity to attract and aspire economic, financial and human resources, together with The concentration of institutional power, infrastructure and the enormous tax advantages it offers, which some describe as “dumping”, has turned it into a reference, also symbolic, of enormous power that, as Maragall said, places it on another level, very ahead of the peripheries that make up the Spanish geography.
Madrid is gone and its strength is capable of conditioning politically, economically, culturally and, also, in the media, the dominant narrative, the framework of debate, of discussion, in every corner of Spain. Even in the field of events, since what happens in Madrid is a matter of conversation in the most remote corners of some peripheries that only gain prominence in this ecosystem when tragedy emerges. Isabel Díaz Ayuso knew how to define it better than anyone: “Madrid is Spain”. And from that position, which synthesizes a particular “national” vision, Madrid marks, as has never happened before, the tempo of reality, and grows in prominence when the “other” nationalities try to oppose the dominant model. Until any other perception or reading of the territorial debate is seen as an anomaly if it is intended to modify the already consolidated system. Or even worse, that claiming resources from absolute loyalty and the dialogue is literally ignored. It is enough to see the level of execution of the General State Budgets in Madrid and in other peripheries to verify it; It is scandalous.
Madrid is leaving and its strength surpasses parties, companies, associations or individuals established in its geography. Madrid is, in itself, an ideology, in which its parts, from civil servants to politicians, fit without questioning it, assume it, take care of it, perpetuate it, and in which a disturbing and mistaken confusion between State and Nation has been forged. , typical of that “banal nationalism” that Michael Billig spoke of and that even transcends political parties and elites. Still in 2023, after decades of development of the Autonomous State, there are senior officials who confuse the State and the central government when designing and promoting public policies.
In parallel, the peripheries (and I am not talking about Catalonia or the Basque Country, although they could also be included) are weakened, sometimes due to their own mistakes, in a process more typical of a Jacobin, Frenchified State, than the almost impossible federal model. , as some claim, with little success. The difference, or better the deep diversity in Alain Gagnon’s accurate definition, is observed not as wealth, but as a problem, and it is Madrid that has achieved the decision-making capacity to judge what is right or wrong, in a dominant moral position , which generates a subsidiary structure, with a nuclear epicenter facing peripheries whose economic, social and political agents are desperate to be heard in the institutional watchtowers.
The process, in terms of socio-economic dynamics, is not far from the concentration and prominence of the great European metropolises, from Paris, London or even Berlin. But it is important to know that the 1978 Constitution was designed so that this was not the case, to compose a State where a decentralization process was attempted, a rebalancing of forces and resources, which would guarantee territorial cohesion. Time, and many interests, have played against it, and no matter how much institutionality tries to change this reality, it seems reasonable to conclude that Madrid is not leaving, it has left, with all its consequences. Maragall concluded his article by saying that “if Madrid goes that way alone, it may be that one day it will be found that the rest of us are all going somewhere else together.” It is already happening, to our regret.
