Nationalism Versus Solidarity. a Necessary Conflict? José T
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Nationalism Versus Solidarity. A Necessary Conflict? José T. Raga* Humanity, with all the fascination arising from its potential, its achievements and outstanding results through the ages, must, in fairness, acknowledge that its works and the results of these works have occurred, as might be expected, cyclically. So much so that dazzlingly brilliant cycles in terms of knowledge, scientific and technological breakthroughs, profundity of thinking… have followed periods of obscurity, regression as regards material matters and the inherently human aspect of spirituality, periods which have plunged all this potential, inherent to man, into the depths of sterility, sadness and cowardice in the face of social challenge. More often than not, an evolutionary interpretation cannot be applied to these cyclical behaviours, but rather that they come about through revolutions which, breaking away from the existing structure, construct a new structure, new limits, new principles, all of these ad experimentum: for the better or for the worse of humanity. I. The scope of the problem. Now that the 20th century has ended and the 21st has begun, in terms of culture, thinking, political and social doctrine, tragic wars have broken out and so too have other conflicts with less physical violence. These new forms of rupture, featuring intellectual violence capable of changing the natural course of events, through the inoculation of ideas, manners and even habits, in fact cause, perhaps without blood, real social transformation; and also, ad experimentum. All these movements – we are thinking of the rebellion of the “beat” generation, the hippy movement and even the revolution represented by the May 1968 events in France – have had some ingredients with the capacity to charm. The last “pacific” social rebellion movement in Spain is known as the movement of los indignados 15 M (due to the fact that it was created on May 15, 2011), which resulted in mobilisation against the established systems on October 15 of the same year. The overtones of the movement are clearly authoritarian – Marxist, fascist, Nazi, anti-European. The doctrine of the Church is quite expressive and constant with respect to the dangers of man when he subscribes to an ideology, losing his freedom and, with it, the capacity for discernment. Warnings referring to the dangers of a long list of ideologies – theoretical or practical, doctrinal or factual – which we must bear in mind so as not to find ourselves, consciously or subconsciously, absorbed by their intrinsic political tendency. The dangers are many. It is sufficient to remember those associated with materialism, consumerism, hedonism, agnosticism, nihilism, relativism, laicism, racism, fundamentalism, messianism, totalitarianism, nationalism… on which the Popes have warned because they denigrate and diminish the human person, separating him from the path wished for by God, the path for which he was ultimately created. Of the aforementioned terms, we shall allow ourselves to isolate one which is worth considering in greater detail, because it constitutes the essential part of this work. We are, naturally, referring to nationalism, that in Spain appears and disappears sequentially, in relation with other variables such as, for example, the weakness of central government. The ambiguity of the term “nationalism”, at least in colloquial language, makes it advisable for us to make some reference to it. The Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (Real Academia Española – RAE) – given that we are referring to Catalan nationalism – defines nationalism as “1. Fervent feeling of belonging to a nation, and identification with its reality and history. 2. Ideology of a people who, affirming their status as a nation, aspire to the constitution of the nation as a State”.[1] The first of the two definitions provided by the Dictionary of the Spanish Language should not generate conflicts with the solidarity of a people, united by this sense of belonging to their nation and engagement with its values and history. Every member, without exception, feels himself to be a part of the nation as such and, regardless of how profound this feeling might be, it does not prevent each of the remaining members of the community from feeling their belonging with identical profundity. Nonetheless, the fundamental question regarding this definition revolves around what determines that identity, which, at a historical point in time, enabled the application of the gentilic term with which a people is identified, differentiating it from all other peoples on the globe. - 1 - Can a blood group – as suggested by the Basques – determine the elements of belonging to a human community? For others it will be the cultural legacy in abstract form, or continuity of collectively enrooted habits and customs, or simply the place in which one lives or the language in which one expresses oneself. Nonetheless, all this can exist without the members of a community feeling their identity in terms of their being and in the way of being. “A people is built by distinguishing itself from and asserting itself against others; and whether it goes on to acquire historic dimensions depends on its justified pretension to «be more» and not on its adherence to age-old ways of harvesting grain, of invoking the evil eye, or being less or more sober, suffering more or being prouder. It is not just psychological or external circumstances that give shape to a collective life, because what is decisive will always be the way in which the man positions himself in these circumstances, whether they be material or human”.[2] It is, therefore, chimerical to speculate, as some historians do,[3] on the Greek and Roman origin of the Catalans, given that the Greeks, with a well-documented commercial spirit, set up two ports in the northern Mediterranean of the Iberian Peninsula – Ampurias (Emporion) y Rosas (Rhode) – around 500 BC, and at the end of the third century BC in the case of the Romans. Current-day Catalans have nothing to do with those Greeks, in the same way that the Spain of today has nothing to do with the Roman Hispania. Hispania was exactly that, i.e., Roman, and, therefore, not Spanish. In other words, being Spanish, Italian, French or German is not determined by a geographic factor, but rather by the fact of sharing in the first person and consciously forming part of an identified community, in addition to the gentilic terms commonly used, due to a desire of belonging that is irrefutably supported by the historic lines that define such terms. For this reason, there is neither a Celtic Spain nor an Iberian Spain, in the same way that the Goths and Visigoths were not Spanish either. In the words of Américo Castro, it can be stated that “True Spain has been, what for me is, a splendid combination of humanity, made up of three castes simultaneously, based on the fact of the person being Christian, Moorish or Jewish, and divided… in three faiths, in three ambitious struggles, in a succession of agreements and ruptures”.[4] This confluence of the three castes, conceived in its origin from the perspective of harmonic co-existence, more due to necessity than civic ideals would, sooner or later, lead to conflict between them. It was obvious that the three castes needed each other, if only due to, long before the term was used in economic doctrine, what much later would become known as division of labour. A division built on an incipient specialisation in the production tasks of towns belonging to each of the three castes. A necessity that would eventually stimulate co-existence rather than conflict. For this reason, what we now call Spain and its people, the Spaniards, are the continuity of those Christians who suffered persecution, marginalisation and humiliation in long-past eras. This and none other would be, with the briefest possible description, the process that would forge the people we now call, because they were and they are, Spanish. Neither are we far removed from the temptation, very common amongst Spaniards, who prefer to ignore what Spain was, and its determinants in the construction of what Spain is today. Far from sterile grandeur, but also with the responsibility arising from the silences that scorn what many within and outside the nation ponder with enthusiasm, our reflection must focus on where the raison d’être of the Spaniard is to be found in its most complete dimension. “To attempt to supress the past, adopting a head-in-the-sand attitude, is an inane and ineffective activity. To wish to recommence Spanish life starting from now, as if nothing had occurred previously, is another form of «scrambling» that only provides grounds for vain gesticulation…”[5] It is fair to acknowledge that, in current times, more than a few Spaniards can be included in this group which tries, at all times, to construct Spain from scratch. Perhaps they are not ignorant of the historical background but they disown it and deliberately ignore it, so as not to be attracted by, and much less be in admiration of, the achievements associated with it. “Spain was not something that possessed a proprietary, fixed existence on which fell the occasional «influence» of Islam, as if it were a «trend» or the result of life in «those times». Christian Spain «was made» while it incorporated and ingrained within its life, that which forced it to create its links with Muslimism and Judaism”.[6] A struggle which had its origins in a profound recognition of the reality of the life of three peoples, three castes, each with its religious direction, with its transposition of faith to activities of a temporal order, coexisting in a difficult balance of interests which would put an end to the predominance of the Christian world.