Spain as a colony

The history of Spanish constitutionalism is not comforting. Furthermore, it is unfortunate. And it can be much more so if there are many, and they are, and persevering political forces determined to erode the 1978 Constitution with the invaluable help of the PSOE and the coalition government chaired by Pedro Sánchez and some serious contradictions of the democratic right and of dangerous radical drifts.

The more times the socialist leader and the president of Congress (like yesterday, in another speech outside the institutional record) claim to comply with the Magna Carta, the more evident it becomes that they violate it in its letter and/or in its spirit.. There is no need to justify this opinion by the institutional deterioration in which we are immersed and which is so obvious. It would be enough to refer to the explicit agreements with ERC, Junts and PNV and the implicit one with EH Bildu, to make sure that with one hand the Constitution is promised before the King and with the other a kind of disloyalty is perpetrated against it that is no longer even subtle: nothing less than a foreign diplomat acts as mediator between the PSOE and Puigdemont in a non-EU country and historically as evocative of these tasks as Switzerland.

One century and six constitutions

This Constitution follows the path of all previous ones since 1812: expire without any reform. The great constitutional texts are durable and the new generations are effectively and emotionally linked to them to the extent that they collect modifications that occur within a permanent general framework: national sovereignty and unity, basic freedoms and rights, the separation of powers, territorial unity and self-government of nationalities and regions and parliamentary monarchy. The key to constitutional sustainability is not revisionism but reformism.

Our great democratic backwardness stems from a historical lack of political and social disruption in the 18th century, as occurred in the United States with its Constitution of 1787 and in France with its Revolution in 1789.. The distinguished historian Miguel Artola (Los afrancesados) already wrote that our country had “lost” the century in which political modernity was forged..

Here, the long Constitution of 1812 (384 articles) had a brief validity, until only 1814, and two replacements (one with the pronouncement of Riego in 1820, which covered the so-called liberal triennium, and another, very briefly, in 1836). After her, the Royal Statute of 1834 was drawn up, which governed the country for a sad two years.. Then, the Constitution of 1837, which was followed by that of 1845. After the dethronement of Isabel II (1868), General Prim promoted that of 1869, which he proposed, and obtained between 1871 and 1873, an elected monarchy that in February of that year ended with the resignation by himself and his heirs of King Amadeo from Savoy.

The Italian king leaving for Portugal and proclaiming the First Republic in a bad way was all the same nonsense, to the point that the new federal regime did not have a Constitution but rather a project as interesting as it was useless.. In 1876, the Constitution of the Bourbon Restoration was approved, which was believed to last, but the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera between 1923 and 1930 sent it to the same place as all the previous ones: to failure.. Then came the Second Republic (1931) and the fundamental laws of the dictatorship, a horrible Civil War through.

The national question, unredeemed

This one, from 1978, with 45 years of validity, was thought to be the good one, the definitive one. It is on its way, however, to follow the pattern of all the previous ones: expire without reform. The ruling class, intellectually and civically impoverished, attributes its inevitable genetic decay to the rigidity of these basic norms.. It is a historical lie: in Spain it is not that the constitutions are imperfect and dysfunctional. That has been the repetitive and devious alibi of the mediocre politicians who have devastated our country.. Clumsy in the past, clumsy today.

The reason for the dissent has been recurrent: the unredeemed national question. Every territorial articulation has ended in a brawl, even if we go back to dates prior to the birth of Basque and Catalan nationalisms, which are emotional excrescences and mythological historicisms germinated in the heat of the failure of the Spanish national project of the late 1800s.. In Spain, the destructive fervor is imperishable and manifests itself in the same way: identity introspection, the claim of privilege as a measure of difference and the categorical abuse of territorially limited social traits that, being respectable, become absolute and justifications for segregation.

The national question was reasonably resolved in the 1978 Constitution. Not anymore. Because we have entered the dismissal phase, which does not aim at reform but rather at repeal.. Spain, in national terms, is in a post-mortem state, because it is not likely that there will be a reformist pact.. The once autonomous statutory vitality has been amortized without replacement, despised in the face of the totemic value of the supposed Catalan and Basque political nations that prey on a socialism that once again systemically fails constitutional Spain, without the right having learned from history that different results are only obtained by making and practicing different policies.

To be fair, the rigor mortis of the national body is the responsibility of Sánchez and the PSOE that he leads. Because while it is incoherent to claim to be a constitutionalist and to refuse the mandate to renew the governing body of the judges, it is much more serious and definitive to rewrite history, amnesty criminals for commercial reasons and negotiate the future of the nation abroad and clandestinely..

What separatism wants

The separatists, who are installed in a self-referential supremacism, want a confederal State that, strictly speaking, is nothing other than an international treaty with reservation of the sovereignty of the parties (Switzerland abandoned the confederation to go to the federal State, although it maintains historical tradition the name of Helvetic Confederation), but they are cruel to the nation to colonize it. There is no intention of destroying it completely, but rather of converting it into the hinterland of the interests of Basque and Catalan nationalism.. A purpose of submission. It must be noted that both PNV and Bildu as well as ERC and Junts maintain expansionist desires (a kind of Germanic Anschluss) on Navarra, those, and on the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands, these. In other words: Spain would be useful to them as a market in all its variants.. It is the commercial reification of the Spanish nation. That's what they are at.