In an article entitled "Y el Estado seguía allí" (5/II/2018), Santos Juliá wrote: "Since it burst onto the scene, in the last decade of the 19th century, a constant of political Catalanism has been the propensity to take a step forward every time he perceived a weakness, a crisis, in the Spanish State. (…) Catalanism has never renounced the idea that any progress in Catalonia's autonomy was a concession wrested from a weak State". Today, political Catalanism has largely become separatist, seeing the growing weakness of the Spanish State accentuated under the ignor Zapatero, increased by the passive Rajoy and culminated with Sánchez, who has sold amnesty to the Catalan separatists in exchange for the investiture lentil dish.
Have we thus reached the end of the road that leads to the independence of Catalonia and of the communities that dare to follow it? Some think so, but perhaps they are wrong to confuse the nation with the State. Because it is true that the State appears to be in crisis, due to the mistreatment it has suffered at the hands of those who had the highest obligation to defend it, and they have instrumentalized and betrayed it for their own benefit and that of their gang, it is to say, of his party. But the nation – the Spanish nation – is not yet inert. The poet who called Spain "dead" was wrong, just as those who, to see their State humiliated and in the hands of politicians who sell it, consider the road to independence to be an expeditious one, err.
In this line, I am clear that after the amnesty - a surrender of the State to those who struck a blow against it - will come the exaltation of plurinationality (Otegi is clear). That is to say, when Catalonia, Euskadi, Navarre, Galicia and all of them are determined to do so, they will proclaim themselves - through the mouths of their respective nationalists - as political nations (not just historical and cultural ones), while denying Spain its status as a nation, affirming that it is only a State. And, therefore, they will say that the current autonomous state, which is rejected as an ill-fated imitation of a federation, must be replaced by a confederal structure that, once established, must leave the door open to self-determination of the "authentic" nations. All this imitating the transition, that is to say, "from law to law", with the technical assistance of the progressive majority of the Constitutional Court.
But that may not be the case. Some historians raise the question of whether, in Spain, the State or the nation is weak. I am clear: the State is weak and the nation is strong. Spain is a nation of crushed stone with poor iron health. So much so that its strength has historically managed to compensate for the State's fragility. A State "more or less liberal, characterized by its unpredictability, slowness, poverty and timidity", as defined by Manuel Azaña in his first text on "the Catalan question", published in 1918. And how does the Spanish nation manage to survive despite the successive crises of the State? Because of the stubborn adherence of the majority of its citizens to an idea of Spain understood as a cultural and political community shaped by geography and by a shared history, in which the most radical manifestation is to constitute an area of immediate solidarity. And it is this firm and stubborn underlying national reality that has made, and perhaps will still make, the State democratically overcome the grave risk it finds itself in today, if a part of its voters abandons those who have weakly deserted the defense of Spain against those who want to destroy it.
Even if it is an apparently completely irrelevant fact, this national adhesion emerged strongly on the day of Princess Eleonor's swearing-in, in the endless applause that followed the swearing-in. Hence the importance that the Spanish constitutional monarchy has today as a factor of national cohesion. The King serves the continuity of the Spanish nation with dignity, efficiency, good style and strict subjection to the Constitution. We look to the future with hope: helping to forge it is everyone's task.
