Who’s a Spaniard These Days?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/opinion/sunday/spain-catalonia-europe.html

Version 0 of 1.

BARCELONA, Spain — I had just turned 25 when I left Spain in 1987 and went to the United States to become an American writer. But during the years I spent in America, I discovered the most extraordinary thing: I was Spanish, and therefore I couldn’t escape doing what every Spaniard is supposed to do: yell instead of talk, go to lunch at three in the afternoon and take siestas.

Just kidding. But if you can bear the joke, it includes a half truth: You don’t know who you are until you leave the place you’re from.

The truth is that in 1987 almost no one in Spain would talk loudly, no one would have lunch at 3 p.m., and no one took siestas anymore (except me, and I still do).

Clichés, however, have a capacity to endure. A few appalling images of the Spanish federal police charging Catalans voting in the independence referendum on Oct. 1 handed journalists from all over an obvious theme: The oppression that marked the rule of the dictator Francisco Franco had returned; Spain, they declared, was living again in the worst of Franco’s times.

To many making that observation, it didn’t matter that the Catalan independence referendum was not just illegal, but also a fraud. It lacked the minimum democratic processes and aimed to legitimize a coup d’état that the Catalan government had set in motion weeks before. The gullible news media simply parroted the pro-independence propaganda promoted by Vladimir Putin — with his characteristic feigned detachment — portraying Spain as in a revival of the Franco era, despite 42 years of democracy and 32 as a member of the European Union.

Nonsense. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, which rates the quality of democracy worldwide, found in 2016 that there are only 19 “full democracies” in the world. Among them, ranking 17, is Spain. Being Spanish today means that you live in a democracy. Worse than some, but better than many, including, by the way, the United States, which ranks 21st.

Until recently, I had never asked myself what it means to be Spanish. The question doesn’t make sense: All collective identity is a fiction. I’m pondering it today only because of the international concern over the turmoil that resulted in Catalonia this autumn when the region’s autonomous Parliament illegally repealed — with only half of its members present and hardly any debate — the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia in violation of the Spanish Constitution and international law. This set off the greatest political crisis in Spain since democracy was re-established in 1978: The government in Madrid dissolved the Catalan Parliament and ordered new regional elections, which are to take place on Thursday.

I must explain why I have used the expression “coup d’état” to describe what is happening in Catalonia. Toward the end of the 1970s, when the Franco regime was replaced by democracy, Spain restructured the country into 17 autonomous regions, creating one of the most decentralized systems in the world. Catalonia is just one of those autonomous regions, and like Galicia or the Basque Country, it is characterized by its own language and culture. It’s also one of the wealthiest.

Since Spain became democratic, the Catalan government has had exclusive control over vital matters like education, language, culture and public works. The nationalist conservatives who have been in power most of the time have, however, carried out a thorough, surreptitious and disloyal strategy of “nation building.”

Even if they were nationalist, they were not part of the pro-independence faction, which never managed to attract more than 20 percent of the voters. But in 2012, the nationalist conservative government embraced the cause of independence. After four years of economic crisis, it was expedient to put all the blame on Madrid, and that helped distract attention from the stunning corruption in which these Catalan leaders were drowning.

This blatant and systematic attack on the rule of law is what I call a coup d’état. It might seem an inaccurate expression to those who forget that the best coups are those without any violence, precisely because they don’t seem to be coups at all. But it won’t seem inadequate to those who remember how the legal philosopher Hans Kelsen described a coup: “The legal order of a community is nullified and replaced by a new order in an illegitimate way.”

Catalonia’s separatism is not only Spain’s problem but also the European Union’s: It represents the continuity of a project that despite being portrayed as pro-European aims to destabilize Europe. This is the most dangerous consequence of the populist nationalism that brought forth Donald Trump and Brexit. This is what’s at stake with the vote on Thursday.

Is there any solution to the Catalan problem? In the short term, it depends on the election results. I’m not optimistic. It’s difficult to imagine that enough Catalans will stop believing the tons of lies that were fabricated with public funds and spread by the pro-independence cause.

In the longer term, however, things may change. Perhaps the solution could come from a constitutional reform so that Spain becomes a fully federal country, better suited to be part of a federal Europe. But that’s not enough. There needs to be a setting out of the conditions under which Catalonia could have a legal referendum on independence, similar to Canada’s Clarity Act (enacted in response to secessionist sentiment in Quebec). Of course, in a federal Europe, this law should be European, not only Spanish.

I was born in 1962 in Extremadura, in southern Spain, but when I was 4 my family settled in Catalonia. I am, therefore, an ordinary Catalan. The Catalonia of the 20th century was built by an enormous flow of people from the poorest areas of the south who emigrated to the richer north. At home we speak Catalan and Spanish, as in many other Catalan homes. I don’t feel particularly Catalan or Spanish. Or maybe I feel I’m both.

Though passions and emotions run high in the debate over Catalonia, for me, it’s just a political issue: I just don’t want to live in a place where those who rule violate the laws in the most blatant way, in the name of democracy and a supposedly oppressed homeland. The Catalan government chose the path of independence for power and glory, just as the country was finally overcoming the economic crisis, without considering the harm it could cause to its citizens.

I like the idea of belonging to the European Union, something impossible for a hypothetically independent Catalonia, as European officials have explained over and over again. It’s only natural: Europe’s union, built as a fortress against the nationalism that ruined the Continent in the 20th century, has brought us the most peaceful and prosperous era in modern history.

The European Union is the only thing that can guarantee democracy’s survival in Spain because, as the philosopher Jürgen Habermas said, national democracies cannot even defend themselves against the furious ultimatums of capitalism that spreads beyond national borders. Despite its countless defects, a united Europe is, at least for a leftist Europeanist like me, the only reasonable utopia. That is what, ultimately, being Spanish means to me: a peculiar way of being European.