In our part of the world, the table occupies a central place in the home: family members gather around it, to eat, to do homework or to chat. It is something indispensable in politics. Outside the operating room, the table evokes moments of calm and reflection. At the start of a period of electoral agitation, turning to the image of the table will perhaps help us not to lose our calm or good humour.
In one of the rooms of the Bank of Spain there is an Elizabethan table, round, of medium diameter, equipped with half a dozen drawers; within each, a fan. It is a Council of Ministers table from the Restoration period. The ivory plaques that adorn the drawers read State (today Foreign Affairs), War (Defence), Grace and Justice (Justice), Government (Interior) and Finance. I seem to remember that there are no more tags.
The table corresponds to what are inalienable powers of every modern State. It is something that our politicians should keep in mind throughout the electoral campaigns, to avoid impossible demands and false steps.
State powers (those that a federal Constitution would call "federal") should not be subject to transfer. However, the administration of those powers, or some of them, could be entrusted to an autonomous body.
In a recent article, Andreu Mas-Colell gives as an example the possibility of a single tax agency. The enormous reluctance of the central administration to such a change does not escape him. The author attributes them to the suspicion that that step was considered the forerunner of Catalonia's independence. He is not without reason, although it may be that patriotism weighs less in the reluctance than the aversion to giving up power.
There is something, in my opinion, no less serious: in Catalonia, those inclined to independence keep repeating that any cession by the State is nothing more than a starting point on the road to independence. How should we not distrust others?
Mas-Colell is right when he says that independence is the result of either an agreement or a cataclysm. Agreement is not possible, no one wants a cataclysm, but independence refuses to face the dilemma, it does not change its speech. In the rest of Spain, that attitude produces enormous mistrust, and the institutions, however good their design, cannot make up for the lack of trust, which is mutual. This is a situation we cannot afford.
We are surrounded by threats whose contours we can barely discern, but which we know are real: climate change, the so-called artificial intelligence, war conflicts. They dominate the factors that lead to division and confrontation, within countries and between them; inequalities grow at the same time that feelings of identity are exacerbated. The union, which now involves a conscious effort against other impulses, is an indispensable condition of survival. Let's not spread a pizza on the dialogue table that everyone wants to use at their own convenience.
