Wolfgang Munchau
"Complexity is moving faster than our ability to build consensus," says Wolfgang Münchau at a dinner organised by his publisher, Jordi Nadal, in Barcelona. The author of Kaput. The end of the German miracle explains, a few days before the elections, how the German crisis has become structural due to the dominance of manufacturing companies that compete with each other and seek to optimize competitiveness by reducing costs. For the founder of Eurointelligence and former journalist of the Financial Times, the German economy has focused solely on competitiveness over innovation, without laying the foundations for the technology companies created in the 21st century. The European environment is hostile to companies and Münchau believes that regulation is suffocating artificial intelligence and data companies in the EU.
Austerity in Germany has lasted too long and infrastructure has become ossified. The result is a deep economic crisis and an agitated society that seeks answers outside the traditional parties and points to immigration.
The conversation leads to the idea that Germany's decline may also be Europe's decline. For Münchau, the Great Crisis should have been a community awakening that will no longer be possible today due to the rebirth of nationalism. The fact is that "change through trade" has not gone well and tyrants also trade without needing to embrace democracy.
I find Munchau's pessimistic outlook excessive. However, while Europe will find it difficult to get ahead if Germany fails, the problems can only be solved at a European level. Neither China nor the US are the answer for Europe today. As Xavier Marcet says, "there is a space between China and the US, and it is called Europe."
Josep Pallach
Jordi Pujol tells me: Josep Pallach "was much more powerful than me." This is said by a man who will soon be 95 years old, who led the Generalitat for 23 years and his party with an iron fist and who is worried about how he will go down in history. Pujol attends the presentation of the book by the historian Joan Safont, Josep Pallach, politics and pedagogy (Editorial Pòrtic). Among the attendees, all kinds of "disaffected" and "totally disaffected" to the regime, in the words of the Francoist police reports, and a zero row with the president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, that of the Parliament, Josep Rull, and the presidents Aragonès and Pujol. It is curious how the figure of the leader of the Moviment Socialista de Catalunya today inspires a transversal respect. The years have consolidated his memory, essential to understand socialism in Catalonia. It also allows us to see our infinite loop in perspective. Pallach's concerns fifty years ago have survived him.
Democracy is built in school with education, which is also political and forms critical and civic-minded citizens, and language is fundamental, as are the Generalitat and the country's institutions.
And what is his socialism? It is that of a Catalanist party and of Catalan obedience that defends self-determination through federation. In his words: "It is very difficult to be a PSOE socialist when you are Catalan."
Pallach was a man of action, but also pragmatic, possibilist. A social democrat when it was not fashionable to look north, Reventós considered social democracy "a process of degradation of socialism."
The spirit of a dialoguing, possibilist Pallach, far from totalitarianism, hovered over the first row of the presentation at the Jaimes bookstore.
Timothy Snyder
Snyder writes in On freedom: "In the struggle between you and the world," Kafka says, "take the side of the world."
Freedom is not us against the world but us in the world, Snyder explains, and I'm reminded of Vance's speech in Munich. Emerging from the jungle of money, power and spectacle that the US government has become, he cries out against the cordon around the European far right. Trump's vice president allows himself the luxury of addressing European democracies with a virulent, arrogant and illiberal diatribe. The speech is part of his ideological war in support of the far right of Alternative for Germany. Illiberal propaganda disguised as a defense of freedom of expression and worship. A speech full of lies, small anecdotes turned into a category and rhetoric that leaves the traditional conservative right knocked out. JD Vance told the assembled diplomats that "there is a new sheriff in Washington." Vance is right about one thing: the risk in Europe is within the continent, but it is not our system but its ultra-partners, turned into Trojan horses of the reaction represented by Trump, Vance and Musk.
