Carles Puigdemont
Experience shows us that the important thing about agreements reached with the State in relation to Catalonia is not their signature and the details that accompany them, but rather their respect and compliance, so that verifying compliance with previous agreements is a necessary condition to resolve the convenience of signing new ones.
The Spanish State is above all a machinery of power that acts as an expert system; the concrete ideology or power of the people who fleetingly represent it doesn't matter. It is a large interactive repository of knowledge about power and administration, enriched by each regime and each generation of politicians and senior civil servants of the three powers, which provides the necessary respònses to each situation in which any particular person in charge may find himself. That is to say: in the negotiation with the Spanish Government on Catalan issues, one is not only or chiefly negotiating with the minister or prime minister, but with all those who have preceded them and have poured their knowledge and experience into this expert system. With regard to Catalonia, the red lines that the Spanish interlocutor is well aware of are not those set by its government programme, nor are they the ideological framework of its political formation – usually more generous than the electoral programme –, but rather those drawn by all their predecessors who have had the responsibility to deal with it. In the debate on the national condition of Catalonia, the weight of the legacies of the Count-Duke of Olivares, king Felipe V, Primo de Rivera and Franco - to put some names under which there is a whole host of ministers and civil servants, judges and servants of the State, laws and decrees - determines even the position of political spaces that are placed ideologically at the antipodes.
For us, this is catalanphobia. For them, that is patriotism. It is the duty that they feel they have as servants of the State, over and above their ideologies that have catapulted them to power. When a judge issues a judgment, he does not do so only by making use of a legal protection, forced or otherwise; he does so with the endorsement of a complete system that has refined the persecution of a minority nation to make this persecution fit within the standards required of a liberal democracy.
Under these conditions, it is extremely risky and dangerous to enter the area of agreements with the Spanish State without taking due precautions. The probability that the power machinery will engulf you before you realise is very high.
This is where Catalanism, as a whole, has always failed. We have gone to all the negotiations with Spain, ignoring the fact that, in the culture of Spanish power, conjunctural opportunities do not open the door to structural reforms. A given government's loss of an outright majority does not prejudge that the power of the State has lost a single shred of its strength or that it feels compelled to review its position.
Attempting to resolve structural, fundamental issues taking advantage of the parliamentary weakness of a government is dangerously naive, which ignores the true power of the State. It is an exercise in self-deception that may allow one to move forward peacefully from one election to the next, but it contributes to the chronification of the conflict, which is the scenario where the strong side always wins.
By being rigourous and self-demanding, and with a large dose of realism, we reach the conclusion that the few improvements that may be obtained will never mean weakening the power of the State, so that any devolution of self-government is jeopardised and subject to the permanent vigilance and suspicion of the three powers of the State. This is what has happened hitherto.
Catalanism has too lightly neglected the construction of its own expert system. After more than 100 years of political confrontation with the State, this system should hhave been very robust by now. Perhaps this is the real difference with the Basque system, and not whether one party here more or less resembles the successful party over there. All our experience and knowledge accumulated over time have not been taken advantage of by the political leaders of the moment, who have tried to invent or innovate in relations with the State in the ingenuous hope of being the ones who can solve the grievances for a generation or more. By not feeling part of this secular chain, by not believing themselves to be the heirs of the various traditions of Catalanism that have had the opportunity to deal with the State, an extraordinary potential has been wasted that would have saved us mistakes. One of the reasons for foregoing feeling thesmelves to be the heirs to those who have preceded us is the Cainite struggle that tends to take place within oppressed and persecuted peoples, often expressed by partisan mistrust that has developed to paroxysmal levels.
Part of the Catalanists felt the obsessive need to kill Jordi Pujol's political and government work legacy because they believed that this would help them win the elections, instead of understanding that on that legacy, becoming its logical heirs, they could add their own bases of the relationship with the State, and they would thus have delivered to the subsequent generation an even more solid foundation than it had received. Instead, even today enormous efforts are devoted to deconstructing and stigmatizing the “convergents”, and it is felt necessary to tear down the stones of their legacy in order to achieve electoral hegemony. And this happens every time. It also happened with the legacy of Pasqual Maragall, which the other Catalanists tried to stigmatize simply because they had not been protagonists.
On the other side, the same interlocutor has always waited for us. The person in charge of saying "No" has change, and will change in the future. But it is always the same "No", a "No" that comes from way back and that is conceived of and designed to go far. On the other hand, at each change of era, whether due to a change of government or of the regime, we change our interlocutors, we change the language and sometimes also the objectives, with the foolish caution of erasing the merits of our predecessors to prevent their political heirs from obtaining part of the hypothetical benefits of a future agreement with the State.
The logic with which we have hitherto faced relations with the State condemns us to permanent defeat. In this field, shortcuts can be a mirage and a trap, and whoever sees in the agreements with the State a shortcut to make the effective achievement of independence easier to tread, and painless, is not telling the truth.
Paradoxically, the critics of "we're in a hurry" - some of whom are directly responsible for this line of reasoning when it came to discrediting the traditional Catalan "pactism" - are right now in an exaggerated hurry to reach an agreement with the State, as if everything relied on this tactical action.
Paradoxically, the critics of the so-called "magical independence movement" - some of whom are also directly responsible for this line of reasoning when it came to contesting the hegemony of autonomist Catalanism - are now fervent defenders of "magical pactism". A pactism that is far from demonstrating, in comparative terms, the efficacy of its predecessors, but that is advertised as a remedy that predisposes the cure of almost all our ills. Nobody explains the why and wherefore of this cure. But the product has already been enthusiastically received ... by the Spanish expert system.
We have to put into practice the strategy for the achievement of our own State. A strategy that is not linked to the temporary majorities in the Spanish Congress, nor to its correlation of ideological forces. Neither the survival of a left-wing government in Spain nor the fight against the extreme right justify any strategic postponement. It is the political milestones that it lays down as a political movement, always endorsed by large and growing electoral majorities, that have to guide the independence movement towards the attainment of its objectives.
Every organization, and every country too, has to keep in mind what preceded, the experience, the lessons learned. Learning from past and recent experience is key to preparing the political confrontation with the State, and to consolidate victories like those of October 1. Because it was not mourning, it was a flood of hope that changed the country and its relations with the Spanish state.
[1] In Catalan, "pactisme" refers to the pragmatic negotiating strategy traditionally attributed to the Catalan people, as a means of solving disputes and problems.
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