Stefan Zweig wrote that history is an ebb and flow, an eternal rise and fall. That is why he never agreed with the statement that she is the mother of truth and the light of the world. It is completely useless, he wrote, to search in History (with a capital letter) for the pious morality and sentimental justice of textbooks. History, he said, is that earthly shadow of the spirit of the century that never acts morally or immorally. And it does not punish crime, nor reward the good.
When he wrote these phrases, the Austrian writer was going through a personally dramatic moment derived from the tragic dynamics of Europe. His leaden-gray hopelessness sank his life and that of his wife, overwhelmed by the unstoppable deployment of the forces of evil. Zweig did not know how to explicitly recognize what his books on Calvin, Castellio, Fouché, Montaigne or Marie Antoinette did do implicitly: offer us the possibility of contemplating, from our time, past episodes that remind us of situations that we live now and that, although They cannot be solved with the formulas of yesteryear, they do help to overcome them.
What an interesting time we are living in in Spain, but how sadly it is being addressed by some sectors! Circumstances have led our country to face a true turning point, an inflection point, a change of course that could resolve our eternal dilemma: congenital diversity. History does not excuse us from our responsibility, but it can show us that the repetition of situations experienced suggests that we are facing a deep debate rooted in Spanish identity itself.
More than three hundred years ago, specifically in 1709, the Valencian Isidro Planes wrote twenty pages with a title that captivates us: “Satisfaction that I gave to a Castilian friend who wrote to me satirically against the Valencians, for having proclaimed Archduke Charles, briefly referring to what happened, and feeling bad about the introduction of the Castilian laws.” Two years ago, the new king of Spain, Philip V, had repealed the Fueros of the kingdom of Valencia, the country was militarily taken over and the New Plant Decrees (we will talk about them later, Catalan friends) reigned in the new Bourbon institutions.
Planes, despite being an ecclesiastic follower of the new dynasty, never agreed with the abolition of the laws specific to each territory. In one of these pages he wrote with clairvoyance: “And then God, being a breeder who could raise the lands in the same way, created them differently, and in all of Vizcaya there will not be hardly an orange found, nor in all of Valencia a chestnut, there being no Nothing else in Valencia than oranges, nor in Vizcaya than chestnuts, because he wanted to need some lands from others to make this our Nature more sociable, or for other high purposes. It is also necessary that the laws follow, like dress, the shape of the body and are differentiated in each Kingdom and nation.”
The text, read in the documented books of the historian Carme Pérez Aparicio, allows me to challenge the defenders of legal uniformity and administrative homogenization. We were not, as they say, like this forever. There was a powerful and different doctrinal body. And although I do not intend to find in the past the key to the solution of our present problems - in other words, I do not propose returning to the 18th century to solve the 21st -, I do understand that the political organization of Spain is an issue so reiterated over time. which constitutes one of its fundamental nodes.
The oranges from Valencia and the chestnuts from Vizcaya allowed Planes to write a long letter to his “Castilian friend”, trying to convince him that it was possible and desirable to maintain Spanish legislative diversity within the new Bourbon monarchy. This is the core problem of Spain: the intimate, familiar, as well as historical and reiterated, debate on the diversity of our political constitution.
The agreement between the PSOE and Junts, signed in Brussels on November 9, recognizes, in its antecedents, that the New Plant Decrees of the beginning of the 18th century, by abolishing the constitutions and secular institutions of Catalonia, began a historical journey of demands and demands that have been taking different forms. Unfortunately, the drafters of the document limited the scope of the change: because Catalonia was neither the only one affected (it also affected the rest of the Crown of Aragon), nor the most punished (what was done with Catalonia, Aragon was not done with Valencia. and Mallorca years later: return its civil jurisdiction).
Those decrees altered the political constitution of Spain and the general political framework and the change in the civil law of half of the crown not only represented a legislative substitution, but a general institutional and social transformation. It is enough to read the classic manual of the history of Spanish law by Francisco Tomás y Valiente to understand it. By the way, if Tomás y Valiente was murdered by ETA in 1996, that same organization murdered, four years later, another defender of Spanish legal and political diversity, Ernest Lluch.
History is not a strict governess that forces us to repeat the events of the past, but rather a kind companion that gently guides us by the hand so that we develop the necessary discernment about the events that happen to us.
