Kleptomaniac state

The State’s Fear

Bam­bery and Kere­van are par­tic­u­larly good on the 20th-cen­tury his­tory of the Span­ish state. Francesc Cambó and the Lliga Re­gion­al­ista sought a cer­tain de­gree of Cata­lan au­ton­omy, but they feared the an­ar­chists more than Franco, so sided with the lat­ter, who would de­fend their prof­its. The dic­ta­tor­ship or­gan­ised not only ter­ri­ble ex­e­cu­tions, im­pris­on­ments, poverty and theft, but con­stantly sought to break the power of Cata­lan cap­i­tal. The shock­ing flight of com­pa­nies to reg­is­ter out­side Cat­alo­nia after the De­c­la­ra­tion of In­de­pen­dence was an echo of the dic­ta­tor­ship’s shift of Cata­lan com­pa­nies to Madrid in the 1940s and ’50s.

The au­thors fol­low through to the Tran­si­tion and mod­ern democ­racy. They argue that Spain, though a major cap­i­tal­ist state in­te­grated into the EU, has a num­ber of par­tic­u­lar de­mo­c­ra­tic deficits: the fail­ure to break with Fran­coist eco­nomic power and po­lit­i­cal cul­ture in the Tran­si­tion, a monar­chy ap­pointed by the Dic­ta­tor, no cleans­ing of tor­tur­ers and fas­cists from the state ap­pa­ra­tus, and a very small rul­ing oli­garchy con­trol­ling banks and major com­pa­nies. PP and PSOE politi­cians, en­cour­aged by ’re­volv­ing doors’, have been happy to func­tion as lack­eys of this oli­garchy.

Cor­rup­tion is in­te­gral to how this sys­tem works. Cat­alo­nia Re­born con­tains sev­eral fas­ci­nat­ing sketches on the Franco fam­ily, Aznar’s friend the ill-fated Miguel Blesa and Josep Piqué (re­mem­ber him? Ex-maoist and ’lib­eral’ PP leader), among oth­ers.

An­other strong fea­ture of the book is its chap­ter on the dirty war in the Basque Coun­try. Well-doc­u­mented, the au­thors show the re­sponse of Span­ish gov­ern­ments to both ETA and the much wider move­ment for Basque in­de­pen­dence. The state sought un­con­di­tional sur­ren­der, but not ne­go­ti­a­tions. Why?

“…This nar­row po­lit­i­cal at­ti­tude... rep­re­sents the fears of... the Span­ish oli­garchy that any re­treat from the 1978 con­sti­tu­tional set­tle­ment will open the flood­gates to re­form and sweep away their priv­i­leges.” The same fear gov­erns the state’s re­ac­tion to today’s Cata­lan move­ment.

Ne­go­ti­a­tion or Mo­bil­i­sa­tion

Oc­to­ber 27’s De­c­la­ra­tion of In­de­pen­dence was not a se­ri­ous at­tempt to or­gan­ise an in­de­pen­dent state. There was no lead­er­ship after the De­c­la­ra­tion, sym­bol­ised by the ab­sence of a Macià-type bal­cony speech. What might have hap­pened in the days fol­low­ing the De­c­la­ra­tion? The con­sellers/eres could have at­tended their of­fices to or­gan­ise the new state. Puigde­mont could have called on the mass move­ment to as­sem­ble at the con­sel­leries and the Gen­er­al­i­tat to de­fend the Re­pub­lic. In­stead, the move­ment was left rud­der­less.

This was avowedly to avoid blood­shed, which is highly cred­itable. How­ever, it also re­veals a po­lit­i­cal weak­ness: re­ly­ing on ne­go­ti­a­tions, whether with the Span­ish Gov­ern­ment or the EU, in­stead of mo­bil­is­ing the mass move­ment. This book shows how it is the pres­sure from below for in­de­pen­dence and so­cial jus­tice that has in­ter­vened time and again to push for­ward the process.

The book has an un­for­tu­nately large num­ber of typos and spelling mis­takes, re­flec­tion prob­a­bly of its im­me­di­acy. De­spite this ir­ri­ta­tion to a pedant like me, Cat­alo­nia Re­born is both bold and re­fresh­ing. It at­tempts to side­step no con­tro­ver­sies and it pro­poses a strat­egy for both the Scot­tish and Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence move­ments.