Yesterday the Parliament of Catalonia approved a motion with the votes of the three independentist parties "on the regime of 78 and the need for full sovereignty to build a nationally and socially liberated country."
In the great drawing of the increasingly comical Catalan debate, this motion is not really a big deal. It is another symbolic vote within an almost endless list of symbolic votes where the boys of the CUP, ERC and whatever it is called Convergència this week shake their fists raised in an angry manner proclaiming how very revolutionary they are. It is a text with no more legal value than expressing the opinion of the camera, without practical effects beyond the political posturing. The point is that it is also a clear, painful example of the intellectual nihilism in which political secessionism lives these days and its joyful lack of respect for reality.
The approved document shows the antidemocratic and antisocial character of the Spanish constitution, giving seven reasons to reject it. It is a peculiar list:
One does not often see such consistently erroneous lists in political documents out there, so there is no choice but to recover the old traditions of the blogosphere and review it point by point.
Said in a few words: if these seven points are essential conditions for a country to be considered democratic and social these days, under the criterion of the independentistas neither in Europe nor the rest of the world there are democracies. Let's go by parts.
1. Monarchies:
Europe is full of constitutional monarchies; Belgium, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Holland, New Zealand, Canada, Australia or Norway are beautiful democratic regimes with a hereditary head of state. Needless to say, many of them (all of the above list except Belgium) are complete democracies. In many of these monarchies the monarch has much more capacity to intervene in politics than in Spain; in Belgium today the king must decide whether to accept the resignation of his prime minister.
2. Right to self-determination:
There is no democratic constitution out there that recognizes the right to self-determination. In the unusual cases in which there has been a referendum (Quebec and Scotland) the central government has granted a vote; in the Canadian case, with many limitations (the law of clarity requires a constitutional reform in case of secession, for example). On the prohibition of federation between autonomous communities, this is a very common limitation in federal constitutions, starting with the United States (article I, section 10).
The thing about "dividing historical nations" I will take it seriously when in Valencia and the Balearic Islands there is a clamor to reunite with Catalonia.
3. Armed forces:
I encourage you to ask Jefferson Davis if the federal troops of the United States have a constitutional obligation to defend territorial integrity and the constitution. The role of the armed forces as guarantor of constitutional order is reflected in a lot of constitutions (from memory Austria, France indirectly, the United States, but there are more). The Spanish constitution is unusually explicit and adjectival in that article, but it is nothing out of the ordinary.
4. Church and religion:
Although I have never quite liked this part of the constitution, there are many countries that have explicit references to a religious denomination in its articles (see Austria, Denmark, Greece, Argentina - and they are not the only ones). In the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the head of state is the supreme governor of the Church of England, so there is not much separation.
On the rest, it seems obvious to me that parents should have the right to educate their children in a religious school if they wish; the antidemocratic would be to prohibit it.
5. Market economy:
There is a real barbarity of constitutions that establish that the country where they are in force is a market economy explicitly, and essentially all guarantee the right to private property and free trade / business in your text.
I do not know of any constitution in a reasonable country that speaks of alternatives to capitalism, with one exception: the Spanish constitution. Article 129.2 reads that the public powers "will establish the means that facilitate the access of workers to the ownership of the means of production." Both articles 128 and 129 of our constitution are delicious, and I have not the remotest idea about how they ended up in the text.
6. Pensions and health as a fundamental right:
No European constitution is stupid enough to place things like healthcare or pensions in the constitution without requiring additional regulatory development. This is partly because of a practical reason (the Spanish social security law occupies 208 pages, and only covers a fraction of the welfare state), partly because putting things in the constitution that go beyond the norms of functioning of the state and right fundamentals is a frightening idea. The list of horrors derivable from doing something like this is extensive: from a colossal lack of flexibility in public policies to the fact that these are distributive decisions, and that must be decided by voting every four years, not by the parents of the country in an irreformable document .
There is a place where this kind of rights and concrete public policies are relatively common: states within the United States. Alabama, the state with the longest constitution (310,000 words, 928 amendments) and including all kinds of births in the text (from the right to organize charitable bingos by county to taxes on mosquitoes), is a particularly crazed case, but not It's unique.
The problem, at least for a right-thinking leftist like me, is that constitutional amendments often go against social rights, like in Oklahoma and the constitutional requirement of 3/4 majorities to raise taxes. Even when the constitution has things that I like, like Connecticut guaranteeing the right to education, having this in the fundamental law has pernicious side effects. In the case of Connecticut, a myriad of lawsuits that have made much of the state's educational policy have been established through judicial sentences, not democratic debates. Including substantive issues in the constitution is a very bad idea.
7. Interest on the debt:
This is a classic of left demagogy in Spain; I talked about it when it was approved around here. Basically, if Spain or any average democratic country gets into a budget situation where it has to decide between paying interest on the debt or paying pensions, it is probably there because it can not pay those pensions without getting into debt. To declare a default (that is, a sovereign bankruptcy) would in itself create a crisis that would make it impossible for the state to maintain the socio-economic rights of the welfare state. The 135 is important in other aspects (although much less than what is usually said), but in prioritizing payments is talking about something that all governments do not want to emulate Argentina.
By the way, there are other constitutions that include similar clauses - starting with the United States (XIV amendment, fourth section).
In addition, the motion does not stop being a fascinating document. Some of the "conditions" are simply perfectly legitimate institutional arrangements (monarchy, religion), others are conscious decisions derived from doing things differently is a frightening idea (not putting healing in the constitution, embracing communism), other they are complaints about the basic organizational structures of the state (army, debt). None of the seven points refers to anything that is really antidemocratic or antisocial, and I doubt that any serious country out there can meet even half of these conditions. The independentisas, to demand democracy in Spain, have created a huge constitutional straw man, demand absurd things that nobody does, and declare themselves indignant. Again.
I do not know how you can sit down to negotiate with someone who demands that you bring him seven unicorns as a minimum condition to consider yourself a Democrat, but this is what the pro-independence supporters are asking for with this symbolic motion. Spanish democracy has serious and serious problems (and God knows that I spend my life complaining about them), but here some people seem to have come to talk about fantasies.
https://politikon.es/2018/12/19/el-nihilismo-intelectual-del-independentismo/?fbclid=IwAR2pOVoz2_iraswTu6qjVSSFeAPfTUWT1atEMKZNWUlhQpVdGoncdWZGfhc
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