Human rights do not exist in nature. They are not written in any fossilized rock, nor in any gene. They are either a moral requirement, or a convention (like money, bitcoin, or state borders): solidly shared "fictions", forged through much suffering, but which work as long as enough people believe in them. The French Revolution happened at a very specific moment of political and social upheaval, and the Universal Declaration of 1948 is a child of the trauma of World War II. And even today, although it may not seem so, it is far from being universally recognized.This fragility is also evident in our own country. The liberal consensus on the preeminence of the individual is no longer undisputed: increasingly, voices from both the left and the right are calling for its relativization in the name of something "superior" (the nation, the community, security, progress...). This is not new. Fascism already subordinated individual rights to the might of the State and the nation, and communism (China today is the clearest example, the USSR rested on an overly Western imaginary to last) relativizes individual rights in the name of the "common good" or the rights of the working class or the single class. Ideologies antagonistic in origin, but coincident in the “necessity” that individual rights be, at the very least, relativized.A legal (or philosophical) figure like human rights cannot exist without a sufficient social base. To put it plainly, to have liberal rights, you need liberals. As a viable political project (not as an abstract idea, but as a system that someone defends and enforces with laws and courts), they need a middle class, a certain segment of the liberal bourgeoisie. There are no principles that can sustain everything, no matter how much they appear in a sacred or constitutional text: someone must embody them, someone must vote for them and defend them with constancy. Historically, this role has been played by the urban middle class: people with enough wealth and education to desire stable rules, protected property, and basic legal institutions that can withstand the (otherwise essential) turbulence of history.Without parties with a real social base, liberal principles become blurred like drops in the rain or like a promise from socialists. The problem, now quite visible, is that the middle class is not an eternal fact: we see it being squeezed and polarized towards the extremes now that the social ladder, clamorously, is stopping. It happens here and it happens in a good part of the West.
Catalonia is a particularly clear case study: from the end of the 19th century, it had a thriving bourgeoisie that, with all its defects (and its undeniable tendency to protect its interests), at least configured a new Catalanist consensus that abhorred peninsular totalitarisms and caudillismo. The matter held up quite well, even creating the beginnings of a prosperous arcadia, deeply competitive and creative, with a not insignificant line of social consciousness and with the incorporated audacity of aiming to modernize (or liberalize) Spain. But the unionist (and employer) gunmanship of the 1910s and 1920s, the revolutionary radicalization of the 1930s, and the parallel military coup, led to a Civil War that demonstrated the fragility of our liberalism. The confrontation between the two sides led to the disappearance in combat of a Catalanist middle class that could overcome these extremes or, even, materialize an alternative and independent state system.Today, the Western middle class has been eroding for decades: stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, a widespread feeling that the rules of the game no longer protect anyone. When this happens, parties that defend the liberal framework lose their social base and votes, and space is gained by offers that promise to "save" the nation at any cost. Even above the rights of the individual, or those of minorities.Catalonia, as already happened in the 30s, must precisely represent the liberal and humanistic alternative. That is why the 2017 referendum was so important, and that is why it was so basic to defend its result until the end: it is hard to imagine anything more liberal, more inclusive, and more in harmony with human rights than allowing a people to vote. The world will be Catalan or Taliban, as Bill Clinton said, and in this, if we don't mess it up like imbeciles, our contribution may precisely consist. Who knows if our recognition.
