Natacha Polony: "On the right of peoples to self-determination"

Our politicians are watching, in a kind of embarrassed stupor, the dislocation of a neighboring European state, and their silence only underlines the total lack of reflection, from one end of the chessboard to the other, on this that structures and perpetuates political communities. Catalonia and Spain tear each other apart, and nothing. Not a word. At most, a forced declaration by Emmanuel Macron assuring Madrid of its support, in the name of solidarity between States and the diffuse fear of contagion.

It is however perfectly absurd to attempt any parallel between the Spanish configuration and our noisy separatism. Firstly because Spain is a monarchy composed of multiple nations whose history could not be erased by the centralizing will of Francoism. Secondly, because the current catastrophe is very largely explained by the way in which Mariano Rajoy's party voluntarily overturned the consensus voted in 2006 in absolute respect for the Constitution by the Catalan and Spanish Parliaments.

But beyond the analysis of responsibilities (which the French media would do well to recall, evoking for example the frightening lie of the government of José Maria Aznar and Mariano Rajoy in 2004, accusing the Basques of ETA of the attacks of Atocha station to hope to win the elections; any politician is disqualified for life by such cynicism), the question is to understand why Catalans no longer know how to articulate their Catalan identity with their Hispanicity. Simple question of fiscal selfishness? The explanation is so tempting. But then, what about Germany and its obsession with not paying for European neighbors? Because that is what is at stake: democracy is only possible as the expression of a “demos”, of a people, within the framework of a fundamental law which organizes the modalities of this expression. A people, that is to say a political community brought together by a desire to shape a common destiny and by what Ernest Renan called a “legacy of memory”.

Why does a part of the Catalan people no longer recognize itself as a component of the Spanish people? Why are the peoples of the European continent not touched by the idea of ​​considering themselves as a European people, despite the proclamations and injunctions of some of their leaders? The feeling of sharing with one's neighbor more than a fortuitous promiscuity is the product of a history and a social organization. And it is indeed the whole paradox of liberal societies to deploy a limitless individualism, considered as the ultimate stage of emancipation, to destroy all cultural transmission in the name of the freedom to build oneself, to be astonished then the weakening of the ties of belonging and their recomposition through essentialized identities. It is not only a weakening of nation-states that causes this ideology of reducing individuals to the status of monads reduced to their economic dimension, it is also, in reaction, an aspiration for community ties without which human beings cannot be fully accomplished.

Spain is not only a state in which some of the leaders have not quite put an end to the Francoist past, and whose Constitution bears the mark of the compromises that had to be accepted so that the army was willing to allow democratic transition, it is also a nation which, like its European neighbours, has given up offering its citizens a common democratic horizon, in order to impose on them a pure management of globalization and its economic and human consequences. Should we be surprised to see people finally dreaming of a democratic horizon, the hope of starting from scratch, in a new national pact? This does not prevent illusions, since everyone puts into this pact what suits their vision of the world, Carles Puigdemont's troops aspiring to be part of a European economic area that they support, when the CUP imagines a society decreasing and anti-liberal.

But if the French situation has nothing to do with it, it is not insignificant that Corsica saw the victory, in the recent elections, of the nationalists, while the FN made a perfectly derisory score. The anger, the feeling of democratic dispossession which undermines trust between peoples and their rulers encourages us to imagine new democratic links, closer, more alive. This aspiration is noble, as long as it articulates identity strata and does not exclude in the name of an essentialized identity.

In this context, the role of politicians is to imagine forms of democratic organization that will give citizens back full control of their destiny rather than locking them into constitutions and treaties whose sole purpose is to keep them in the right path.