Politics has to do with consensus, concessions, dialogue and the search for agreed solutions to issues that are in principle insurmountable. Abraham Lincoln said that problems created by men can be solved by men. No one can be proclaimed the winner of the July 23 elections because no force can govern without the help of one or more partners with whom it will have to negotiate concessions. The culture of the pact is normal today in European countries as different as Finland, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands or Italy.
The grand coalition between socialists and populars is not on the table, although authoritative voices insist that it would be a temporary and interim solution to guarantee political stability.
The elections were considered from the confrontation between two blocs with antagonistic views on social policies and, above all, on the concept of territorial organization of the State. The litigation comes from afar. Hispanist John Elliott places it in Austria, which, from Philip II to Charles II, failed to win the complicity of the old kingdoms and haggled to swear to their constitutions. The decision of the Conde Duque de Olivares to eliminate Catalan singularity led to the War of the Reapers of 1640, which cost Olivares his position, but Catalonia lost that confrontation with Spain.
The obsession with a single Spain was one of the causes that led Philip V, the first Spanish Bourbon, to promulgate the New Plant Decree after defeating what was left of the Austracist armies that surrendered in September 11, 1714.
Another long stage of grievances began which, in many ways and at different stages, has continued until today. Arms never ended the conflict in Catalonia. And Catalonia has never emerged victorious from its confrontations with Spain either.
Jaume Vicens Vives draws these two visions that arose within the Bourbon state, driven by the attempts of popular reformism in the 18th century and the Napoleonic bayonets of 1808. Two solutions were proposed, says Vicens. One “abstract, Jacobin and uniformitarian of the Castilian and Andalusian intellectuals and another, the real, historicist and pluralist of the northern thinkers, from Catalonia to the Cantabrian mountains”.
History does not repeat itself, but it is good to know it to take into account that these two visions are still present in Spanish political life in these days of debates about the investiture and governability in the mandate that has just been inaugurated in the Spanish Courts.
I found this dedication that Ernest Lluch wrote in his last book published in his lifetime and which is entitled L’alternativa catalan: “To my friend LluÃs Foix, this book I have written in tribute to some Catalans who defended our constitutions , who could have allowed us an English or Dutch evolution, and not the French, the Prussian or the Russian, which led them to death or exile living deeply the problems of a country not very big”.
It was Catalan minds that inspired the arrival of a secular democratic monarchy in 1869, with the arrival of Amadeu de Savoy at the hands of General Prim, and those that introduced the federal republic in 1873. Both contributions be very brief and failed giving way to the Restoration of Cánovas and Sagasta which also ended badly in 1923 with the coup of Primo de Rivera, announced from the General Captaincy of Barcelona and which finally led to the end of the monarchy and the arrival of the Republic.
Catalonia cannot achieve independence against Spain and without Europe. But Spanish political and social stability will be very fragile without establishing pacts and complicities of all kinds with Catalonia and Euskadi. The parties in the process have lost votes and parliamentary representation as demonstrated by the last two elections. But the arithmetic of parliamentarianism means that the pro-independence seats, more specifically the seven that obey Carles Puigdemont, who leads Junts since Waterloo, are essential to keep the next government alive.
There is another way to articulate the plural and complex reality that allows everyone to feel at ease without losing their cultural identity and obtain more levels of self-government under the umbrella of the European Union.
