The Catalan elephant in the Spanish room
Fifty years later, we're still dealing with it. monothemeToday's Spain bears little resemblance to that of half a century ago, when the dictator died in his bed. Neither the Church nor the army wields their power, and a profound social and economic transformation has taken place. Basque terrorism is also a thing of the past. What, then, remains of the endemic problems inherited from the 19th century and fossilized by the 20th-century dictatorships? The same old age-old issue: the Catalan elephant in the Spanish room.
Historian Josep M. Muñoz, former director of The Advance and biographer of Vicens Vives, in the essay An infinite sorrow (Arcadia) reviews the dissatisfaction, both Spanish and Catalan, with the system of autonomous communities, which in 1980 the historian Pierre Vilar described as "an artifice rather than a building." Now we know that it is a poorly constructed building, with precarious foundations and uncooperative neighbors. But, apparently, irreformable.
Shortly before his death, Franco asked one last thing of his heir, Juan Carlos:Your Highness, all I ask is that you preserve the unity of Spain"The great obsession. He didn't ask her to watch out for the communist threat, to safeguard the strength of the Catholic Church, or, I don't know, to worry about the future of his family. No. What emerged was his eternal national impulse, which shortly thereafter would be enshrined in Article 2 of the 1978 Constitution: 'The Spanish Constitution, common and indivisible homeland of all Spaniards, recognizes and guarantees the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions that comprise it and solidarity among them all.' As Muñoz reports, according to what he wrote in his memoirs, 'dictated' in Moncloa by the high military command. From a melancholic present, Muñoz emphasizes the failure of the four attempts in the last half-century to find a solution to the Catalan dispute: the Transition (with Tarradellas's initial break with the past, which regressed after the coup attempt of February 23, 1981), and the Pujol era (one of mutual distrust)." chronic), Maragall's (the reform of the Statute, which also aimed to reform Spain and ended up radically curtailed), and the pro-independence reaction (a democratic revolt that crashed against the wall of the State and against its own naiveté). Not generous at all. At its worst, downright belligerent. Hair? Right now, the strange love-hate-jealousy triangle between the PSOE and ERC is starting to leak. If something miraculous comes out of it, it will be a miracle. "Incomplete," marked by the divorce from the cultural world, or when it opens the chapter on the reform of the Statute with an ironic quote from Joan Fuster: "A failure is not improvised," a statement that could also have served to head the section on the Process. And to end, a glimmer of hope, also ironic: "As Samuel Beckett said, better." Although, if the path ends up being marked by the resentment inspired by the Aliança Catalana d'Orriols, we cannot rule out that our success in crashing will be even more phenomenal.
