Constitutional patriotism and nationalisms

SPAIN / By Cruz Ramiro

Take a look at the Spanish political panorama, adrift in recent decades with territorial issues, or simply “nationalist”, all that toll of the State to “plurinationality”, and do the same with the European in this third decade of the 21st century, and one can't stop being amazed. Due to the similarity of the predicaments. And by the difference of the solutions. “Fragmentation” is the common diagnosis prescribed so differently. Centripetal and regulated in Europe or centrifugal and anarchic in Spain. And it is that, in essence, any pro-independence party, PNV, Bildu, Junts or ERC, resembles, like two peas in a pod, in its nationalist postulates the extreme right. These make a stopper in Europe, those make a sink in Spain. Any enlightened, universalist or cosmopolitan compromise slogan is a tall tale.

Europe, beaten by the ravages of global crises and the emergence of a world in a geopolitical key, probes its integration in pursuit of everything. Here, questioning the Transition and its founding text, the Constitution of 78, is not even a national design, it is for the benefit of part. While the European project, a model for overcoming nationalism, is built on the strength of the rule of law, here, a delayed detonation of the same gives in servilely before them.

How not to qualify this “progress” as regressive, retrograde and reactionary. This drive for identity, this subtle xenophobia of our pro-independence Basques and Catalans to which the Government pays homage, has already been experienced to the point of paroxysm. That is precisely what Europe knows about.. After the world wars, German political science forged an antidote to its legacy, constitutional patriotism.. One that we would do well to learn in these moments of such institutional instability.. At the end of the day, as Santayana said: “Peoples that do not keep their past in mind are doomed to repeat it.”

In an attempt to recover a feeling of filiation to the country, without being held hostage to the invocation of identity traits, the German philosopher Habermas, a type of left (sic), promulgated this concept of constitutional patriotism. A community love for the laws, for the constitutional framework that governs it. And, in a classic, republican sense, like the one that could evoke a Cicero in ancient Rome or a Machiavelli in the Florentine State.. Come on, just like here with the Constitution of 78.

“Patriotism is to nationalism what health is to cancer”, I extract from another text. The first part of a felt love, but measured, to the territory in which one was born or grew up, pure contingency. The second makes of it a supine criterion of political priorities, a religion to be professed in all rules.. So hypocritical as to ignore the real world of the 21st century and the intricate web of interdependencies. So arrogant as to run against a spirit of civilization in what it has of cultural improvement.

When in the last two decades the parliamentary dynamics of income to the pivotal, Basque and Catalan nationalist parties has stagnated, the recent political guideline of our country is forged by circumventing our Constitution, as by default. Violence over basic constitutional precepts, beginning with “free and equal” and continuing with solidarity and inter-territorial cohesion, goes from surreptitious to obscene. Socialism, champion of equality, distributing perks and privileges among citizens of various categories.

The reissue of Frankenstein promises sadomasochistic pornography at the height of the moral and public integrity of the conductor. Self-determination referendum, amnesty, debt forgiveness, the FLA to auction, etc.. The perk to particularism is officiated as embezzlement to the State. It will be that nationalism was not so “appeased”, because indeed its nature is insatiability.

Without state pacts, we already point to an entire lost decade. The Constitution can be amended, without a doubt, but under the expected qualified majority of three fifths of Congress and an absolute majority of the Senate. What is glimpsed, without lights and stenographers with their backs to the staff, a poke in a poke, will materialize with the lax use of language and semantics, with legal tightrope walking, in the worst of “postmodern” politics.. Cool postmodernism, it is known, prides itself on not needing coherence or logic, and rejoices in legislating feelings.

The defection, the felony of the Frankenstein reissue, comes, then, to double power: to the constitutional framework and to the sign of the times, the European zeitgeist. When it is necessary to arrange, here it is confused. As if we had not been able to learn from our own history, succumbing to the territorial question. The effort, the dedication, the care, of 70 years to build the current EU, cannot rescind the cardinal purpose of overcoming nationalisms, according to Zweig, “the worst of all plagues”.

The affinity of the European Rules of Law in its programmatic parts, those that affect fundamental rights and freedoms and its organic functioning, is the voussoir of the entire political-legal structure that is Europe.. In that architecture, a kind of cathedral where constitutional patriotism is housed, without the rigor of law, the entire building falls. With Poland, now dedicated to strengthening the fight in Ukraine and winning integers, it is already a glimpse of which country accumulates tickets for the ban