Stefan Zweig wrote that history is ebb and flow, an eternal rise and fall. That is why he never agreed with the statement that she is the mother of truth and the light of the world. It is completely useless, he wrote, to look in History (with a capital letter) for the pious morality and sentimental justice of textbooks. History, he said, is that earthly shadow of the spirit of the century that never acts either morally or immorally. And neither does it punish crime, nor reward the good.
When he wrote these sentences, the Austrian writer was going through a dramatic personal moment derived from the tragic dynamics of Europe. His despair, gray in color, drowned his life and that of his wife, overwhelmed by the unstoppable deployment of the forces of evil. Zweig failed to recognize explicitly what his books on Calvino, Castellio, Fouché, Montaigne or Marie Antoinette did implicitly: offer us the possibility to contemplate, from our time, past episodes that remind us of situations we live now and that, although they cannot be solved with the formulas of yesteryear, they do help us to overcome them.
What an interesting time we are living in Spain, but what a pity it is being addressed from some sectors! Circumstances have led our country to face a real turning point, a turning point, a change of course that could solve our eternal dilemma: congenital diversity. History does not absolve us of our responsibility, but it can show us that the repetition of experienced situations suggests that we are facing a deep debate rooted in Spanish identity itself.
More than three hundred years ago, specifically in 1709, the Valencian Isidre Planes wrote about twenty pages with a title that captivates us: “Satisfacción que di a un amigo Castiliano que me escribió satírico contra los Valencianos, por haber proclamado al señor Archduke Carlos, referring briefly to what happened, and feeling bad about the introduction of Castilian laws”. It had been two years since the new king of Spain, Felipe V, had repealed the Furs of the Kingdom of Valencia, the country was occupied militarily and the New Planta Decrees (we will talk about them later, Catalan friends) ruled over the new Bourbon institutions.
Planes, despite being an ecclesiastical follower of the new dynasty, never agreed with the abolition of the laws specific to each territory. On one of these pages he wrote with clairvoyance: “Y pues Dios, being a breeder who could raise the lands in the same way, I raise them differently, and in all of Vizcaya you will not find just one orange, nor in all of Valencia a chestnut, there being nothing else in Valencia than oranges, nor in Vizcaya than chestnuts, because I wanted to need some lands from others to make this our Nature more sociable, or for other lofty purposes. It is also necessary that the laws follow, like clothing, the shape of the body and differ in each Kingdom and nation”.
The text, read in the documented books of the historian Carme Pérez Aparicio, allows me to challenge the defenders of legal uniformity and administrative homogenization. We were not, as they say, like this forever. There existed a powerful and distinct doctrinal body. And while I don’t pretend to find in the past the key to solving our present problems – in other words, I don’t propose going back to the 18th century to solve the 21st -, I do understand that the political organization of Spain is such a question repeated over time that constitutes one of its fundamental knots.
The oranges of Valencia and the chestnuts of Biscay allowed Planes to write a long letter to his “Castilian friend” trying to convince him that it was possible and desirable to maintain Spanish legislative diversity within the new Bourbon monarchy. This is Spain’s nodular problem: the intimate, familiar, at the same time historical and repeated debate about the diversity of our political constitution.
The agreement between the PSOE and Junts, signed in Brussels on November 9, acknowledges, in its antecedents, that the New Plant Decrees of the beginning of the 18th century, by abolishing the constitutions and secular institutions of Catalonia, initiated a historical journey of claims and demands that has taken different forms. Unfortunately, the drafters of the document limited the scope of the change: because Catalonia was not the only one harmed (it also affected the rest of the Crown of Aragon), nor the most punished (Valencia was not done what it was done with Catalonia, Aragon and Mallorca years later: return their civil rights).
Those decrees altered the political constitution of Spain and the general political framework and the change in the civil law of half of the crown did not only mean a legislative substitution, but a general institutional and social transformation. You need to read the classic textbook on the history of Spanish law by Francisco Tomás y Valiente to understand it. By the way, if Tomás y Valiente was murdered by ETA in 1996, that same organization murdered, four years later, another defender of Spanish legal and political diversity, Ernest Lluch.
History is not a strict governess who forces us to repeat the events of the past, but a kind companion who gently leads us by the hand so that we develop the necessary discernment about what happens to us.
