Chronicle of an announced coup d'état. José Varela Ortega

    

    José Varela Ortega

Chronicle of an announced coup d'état

 The secessionist nationalism of Esquerra and CIU -by this order, to the extent that the maid governs the house presided over by the lady- has formulated a unilateral declaration of sovereignty, with the purpose of presenting it for processing at the table of the Parliament of Catalonia, its subsequent debate - and probable approval, according to the political forces that make up that assembly. It is not a mere declaration of the so-called "right to decide", a political redundancy, to the extent that the citizens of Catalonia have been deciding, election after election for more than thirty years. But, an interesting nonsense because it allows for some functional ambiguity that gives enough room to negotiate a constitutionally viable exit.  

On the contrary, what is intended to be processed, debated and approved, has no way out. And it does not have it because the proclamation of a new subject of sovereignty breaks, unilaterally, with the current constitutional order and, even more, with the constituent principle, under which sovereignty resides in the group of Spanish citizens, and not in one part. It may be considered legitimate, from certain nationalist assumptions, but its illegality does not offer room for discussion. I will not go into the appeal to the Wilsonian principle of self-determination for historical modesty and respect for the citizens of Catalonia, presents. And for those of the past: badly, it can be considered a country subjected or colonized, to a leading region of the whole of Spain, to the point of dictating for centuries the economic policy of the State, imposing tariffs (read, taxes) to the rest of the citizens to shield their products against foreign competition. Let us also run a stupid veil over the declaration of becoming a State of the European Union, which, in any case - and if the secession is consummated - would consist of standing in line with Turkey in its application for membership.

The question here is the illegality announced. A unilateral rupture that does not respect the procedures of current legislation to revise the Constitution. A decision in which the sentence precedes the trial, which was as Gabriel Naudé - the librarian of Cardinal Mazarin - defined the coup d'état. An example of the policy of "direct action" where the "part" acts as the whole, to formulate it in Ortega terms. The typical procedure, according to which too many Spaniards became accustomed, from year eight, goes for more than two centuries, to settle their differences, breaking with all "orderly tradition of power and obedience" - in the words of a great Catalan historian , Jaume Vicens Vives- to replace a culture of legality with criminal habits of rebellion and "leadership", which Costa and then Maura first said, introducing us into an economy of violence that relegated us to that social landscape of bullfighters, bandits, smugglers, guerrillas, rebel soldiers and other slaughterers.  

With the Transition, walking "from the law to the law", instead of jumping on it, we thought we had gotten rid of that spell. However, it seems that Mr. Mas has wanted to sit on this payroll of the "Spanish" policy and tries to return us to a tortuous path of rupture and illegality through a coup d'état. The same as Lt. Colonel Tejero or General Milans on February 23, 1981. That in this order there are no tanks? Nor were there with the Captain General of Catalonia, Miguel Primo de Rivera, in September 1923: not a soldier in the street. The blow was given by telegram. King Alfonso XIII accepted the fait accompli of the military Directorate and endorsed it in violation of the Constitution, allowing six mandatory months to pass without convoking Cortes. Let no one be deceived. Primo de Rivera had a lot of opinion after his telegram, especially in Catalonia. They are going to have to explain to me, more slowly and by their order, then, why the telegram of a Spanish nationalist was as bad as I think, but, on the other hand, the resolution of a Catalan nationalist is adorned with great virtues. The truth is that both look like two drops of water, because both are illegal and unconstitutional breaks. And both put the country in a sea of ​​sargasso, unknown, stormy and full of risks: once broken the principle of legality, anything goes and the impossible becomes probable.

Outside the law, there is no democracy, as the ancients discovered from the Protagoras. The law was "the indispensable complement" of the isègoria and eleutheria- the right to speech and freedom that characterized the Athenian regime - and, to the extent that it was its guarantee, "freedom presupposed the rule of law" (Romilly ). Since then, "the idea of ​​democracy can not be separated from that of rights" (Touraine). Therefore, you have to take rights seriously, Dworkin called a classic book. In Rome the idea was given a twist. We are servants of the law ut liberi esse possumus, writes Cicero in his Pro Cluentio. In this way, law became the principle of political organization, identifying Libertas with law, and justice with a positive right, not the other way around. The origin of democracy, then, is an agreement of rules, equal for all citizens. A pact in law, in which, to greater popular participation, greater "rule of law". The title chosen by the American historian, Martin Ostwald, for his work summarizes the idea: From popular sovereignty to the sovereignty of the law. A government of laws, not of men, "said Madison in El Federalista," because, Rousseau explained, freedom always follows the same fate as laws, reigns and perishes with them.Affirmations that, without a doubt, reverberate almost literally reflections of the classics. Tito Livio, at the beginning of the second book, defines the new regime of freedom, after the fall of the kings, by the fact that the imperium, the power, rests on the laws, not on the men. 

For that matter, we should not confuse, as our grandparents did in 1923, apparent tranquility with irrelevance. The coup d'état announced to us in this January 2013 may take on a softness in the forms, but it barely hides a background of enormous transcendence and gravity. An adventure whose risk did not escape Don Antonio Maura in a similar situation, now ninety years ago. When the general ruined the Constitution of 1876 in a Morse clatter-not, not with a sword stroke, and went to see the famous Mallorcan politician to ask for his cooperation, he dismissed him with indifference, convinced that, with the blow, opened "a dark future" for the country. "This man is crazy," he confessed to his son Miguel, future Minister of Interior of the Republic, "this is the end of the Monarchy, a republic will come, then a great cataclysm and then the military again."

However, Alfonso XIII accepted the telegram with an air of normality and the new Board almost complacently. Eight years later he was in exile. His grandson, the King Don Juan Carlos, should not receive or accept a document that questions his own legitimacy, as a representative of national sovereignty, expression of all Spanish citizens, and that, as such, is not "the patrimony of any family or person ", as was written in Cádiz two centuries ago.