Grandson of the philosopher Ortega y Gasset, José Varela Ortega (Madrid, 1944) is the heir of a race set in liberalism and reason. Publish Spain A story of greatness and hate (Espasa). It is not a story to use or an ideological allegation, but a neat essay of more than a thousand pages in which it addresses the past of our country from the prejudices and stereotypes that hang from the national image. President of the Ortega-Marañón Foundation and director of the Revista de Occidente , he is a doctor from the University of Oxford. Author, among other volumes, of political friends. Parties, elections and caciquismo in the Restoration (1875-1900) and the gentlemen of the power and the democracy in Spain .

Is Spain a 'weird avis'? I don't think so, Spain is diferent is pure topic. I was educated with a Hispanicist, Raymond Carr, who began by telling me that he was not a Hispanicist. Spain has peculiarities, like any country, but not a past so different from the United Kingdom or France. The Spaniards of the 20s and 30s, before 1936, had ingrained the idea that the history of Spain was much less bloody than that of some of our neighbors. Voltaire admits that Spanish monarchies are less bloody and vindictive. The Civil War marks and returns to a romantic imprint. The idea is that the Spain of 36 was a distorted mirror of what was going to happen in Europe. There was a climate of terror and horror, which is what happened on our continent between 1914 and 1945. That Europe is a peaceful continent is not true. Do we Spaniards have a tendency to skip the rule of law? Possibly, since the invasion of 1808 there has been a tendency to cramp with everything and throw in the middle street. That is what Vicens Vives says, a great Catalan historian, and Cánovas before him. The French invasion took the country out of its boxes. What we call the War of Independence is a political and social revolution, but also a rupture of the constitutional and legal order. The idea of ​​national sovereignty is invented by that: to answer the fact that Napoleon would have placed the border in the Ebro. It is said: here the country is not broken up except by the will of the Spaniards as a whole. If you review all the democratic constitutions since 1812 you will see that two articles that are repeated in all of them are those that indicate that the country is not the heritage of anyone because sovereignty corresponds to the whole citizenship of the nation. That is why now the King cannot access the claims of the Catalan nationalists. And that is the main difference with the United Kingdom, where sovereignty is not of the citizens, but of the Parliament, among other things, because Carlos de Habsburgo cut off the head of the rebel Castilian procurators, while, a century later, the English parliamentarians cut off Carlos Estuardo's head. Why does the government of the day not explain all this clearly to prevent the independence propaganda from spreading among the international press? The work of the Ministry of Communication has been pathetic. The most experienced foreign correspondents told me that they were meeting to talk about the Catholic Monarchs ... If in any country around us someone breaks the law, they put him in jail. Another thing, being fair, is that the independentistas are right when they consider excessive that the preventive detention is extended almost two years. Not only for imprisoned politicians, but for everyone. Are we a solid nation? It is a nation with some complexes, but much stronger than what many people believe. It would be a serious mistake on the part of Catalan and Basque nationalism to believe that it can be put to the end with everything of a coup leader. I lived during the Franco regime and I don't like any nationalism. Mitterrand was right when he said that nationalism is war. Those nationalisms want to remake the Peace of the Pyrenees, which is from 1659, but varying borders makes Europeans very nervous because we have a very bad experience. The separatist drive is explosive for Europe. We already saw it in the former Yugoslavia. Savater affirms that "the national symbols of Spain reinforce the rule of law and, in that sense, are not negligible." Do you agree? It is true. Marianita Pineda's flag [19th century liberal executed in the Ominous Decade, during the reign of Ferdinand VII] was not exactly rojigualda, but it is the one that embodies democracy, equality and the nation of citizens. There are two types of nationalism. One revolves around the concept of free and equal citizens. Another is that of blood and territory, based on ethnicity, differences and race. That is not the French, Spanish and Italian tradition. And, by the way, this thing of ethnocentrist nationalist tribalism has nothing to do with the traditions of the left, which basically go back to the Enlightenment. Do you think that the left has bleached that "nationalist tribalism"? Man, don't you assume his postulates openly, but neither does he fight them, as Marxist thought did before. With exceptions such as Nicolás Redondo Terreros or Joaquín Leguina, the left does not adopt a belligerent position to fight nationalism ideologically. It deals with these separating, ethnocentric and tribal things, instead of defending the universalist and internationalist principle of the left. This is what Felix Ovejero calls the reactionary drift on the left. A few years ago I wrote in the Third Abc that, in these morganatic capitulations with nationalism, the left has left something more than feathers of its programmatic identity. It has emptied of ideological content. He has punctured in philosophical bone and that is not amended in a chalaneo of percentages. A discourse more interested in identity than in similarity; focused on ethnicities, instead of humanity; in nationalism, before internationalism; that traffic equality by privilege; which translates cultural difference into sociopolitical inequality, confusing the right to difference with the difference in rights; that promotes historical rights at the expense of individuals; that speaks of territories, instead of free and equal citizens; that, instead of demanding the right to equality and preaching the virtue of solidarity, it calculates fiscal balances, not individual and progressive taxes ... Such a speech, in short, will liquefy the left. The collaboration with the nationalists cannot also be imputed to the right? What is right is a bit of nonsense. They get nervous as soon as they say something because they are accused of Franco and still enter the rag. What do you think of the political blockade now? Everyone is in a theater and it seems that people like it. When one in politics does theater, he does not know how to do anything else. Look, I wondered before about the peculiarities of Spain. Well, I don't know of any top-level country in which there is a politician who copies his thesis and does not resign. Unusual. That is not done. And if it is done, you have to recognize it and pay a price. In 2013, in an interview in 'El Cultural' of EL MUNDO, he said: "There are conditions for the emergence of a demagogue eager for power, that there are many, but also requires talent to sell his populist product and that, fortunately , it's harder. "For now, the lack of that talent has saved us. It is moving that a Peronist Leninist like Pablo Iglesias turn to the King to solve the negotiation of the investiture. Unlike what Kennedy said, he thinks that everyone can be fooled all the time. Next time he will go to see the Nuncio to solve the issue! Weren't we left that his thing was to pasokizar the PSOE and assault the Winter Palace? But, indeed, populism has not been able to put together the one it has assembled in Italy, the Netherlands or the United Kingdom. What we have is a collection of inane and quite illiterate people, with an excessive ambition like all politicians. Every professional politician has a vanity without limits. In La fiesta del goat , Vargas Llosa portrays Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo as a man who lived comfortably, but who didn't care about wealth. For him, wealth was a means to finance the drug of power. Have you seen this poor man who chairs us on duty teaching the children La Moncloa? Le tourné du propriétaire! It is touching! But all the lords of power are like that. Things as they are. Don Gregorio Marañón del Conde-Duque already said it: he wanted power as the miser the gold. The dichotomy between the 'militant Spanish' and the 'indolent Spanish', which appears in the descriptions of the Venetian ambassadors in Felipe's court II, is one of the central ideas of your book? The word militant will clarify it in a second edition. I mean a militant not in the purely warlike sense, but constant, enterprising and energetic. That type of Spanish, that there is and there was, in front of the indolent that is the party and nap. Both stereotypes oppose. And it is true that the Spanish of the Enlightenment swallow the stereotype of the indolent propagated from France by Voltaire, Montesquieu and Diderot, who paints Spain as a Catholic and fanatic country, and contrary to modernity. They swallow it despite the fact that the stereotype is made by people who had never stepped on Spain. When do the characterizations that still hang from the image of Spain emerge? In the imperial era. The reconquest of Granada has a huge impact on Europe. And that of America produces an admiration without limits. The rise of the Hispanic monarchy and culture dazzles. Much later, Romanticism was essential to create the image of passionate, rebel and exotic Spanish, in which the ancient and primitive is considered fascinating. What images are associated with 'the Spanish'? Now to a much richer and more complex image than in the past, but the idea that we sell since the 19th century persists: colorful, party, fun, animation, good weather, life in the Street. Professor José Carlos Mainer said that Spain "has exoticism within itself, which is a privilege and a condemnation." It is true. How do we combine selling computers and building AVE trains with the Andalusian idea of ​​flamenco? Can be done. 80 years ago, Italy had an operetta image. Today it is associated with design, good taste and beauty. In the intellectual diatribe between María Elvira Roca Barea ('Imperiophobia and black legend', Siruela, 2016) and José Luis Villacañas ('Imperiofilia and national-Catholic populism', Rag Language, 2019), which side is it on? They are books of very different entity and both different from my approach. The one at Roca Barea taught me many things and I think she should not enter into any controversy with a little book that has no interest. Fighting the black legend seems exaggerated and somewhat anachronistic. The subject is of a completely different nature: I have serious doubts about the ability of today's Spaniards to undertake cyclopean exploits such as the conquest of America. What do you remember about your grandfather, Ortega y Gasset? I will start by saying that I was innocent of the product. I saw him every day until he was 12 because he ate at home. It was very funny and gave us many gifts. He asked us many things and we asked him too. His house was lined with books. But it was a strictly family relationship. In his speech 'Rectification of the Republic', delivered on December 6, 1931, Ortega proclaimed: "If the Constitution of course creates the organization of Spain in regions, it will no longer be the one Spain, who is facing two or three indóciles regions, but they will be the regions among themselves who are confronted, being able of this luck to be majestically over their differences the national, integral, state and only sovereign Power ". What would you say today? Well, that paragraph would only be possible to verify with a profound reform of the Senate as a territorial Chamber. But, in any case, it would be unfair and pretentious for me to try to supplant your opinion. He was moderately pessimistic at the time of believing, as the Azana thought before the war, that the territorial problem could be solved by talking to politicians. I thought it was much more complicated. It is also true that in the Statute of Catalonia, in 1932, much more care is taken in teaching than that which was taken in the Transition, perhaps for complex ones. Then, an article was introduced that authorized the State to create educational institutions in the region's territory at any level and that the teaching in those state centers was in Spanish. The liberal inheritance that Ortega and Marañón embodied survives in the politics of our days? Not on the same terms, but I think people are much more liberal in the background. Tolerates discrepancies, is more dialogue and violence has been renounced, something that did exist in the 20s and 30s. ETA loses the war because people do not want violence. Dr. Marañón said that being liberal is an attitude and a way of being. The Spanish before, however, did not forgive corruption and falsehood. The Lerroux party, which was an important political force in the center, sank by small corruption that would make us laugh today. Fernando Cos-Gayón, who was a minister at the end of the 19th century, died in 1898 and his family could not afford the funeral. And that man was many years Minister of Finance!

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

ImpressionSocial study: Spanish egalitarianism

Liberal comments The PP and its maquetos

Thoroughly the right grouping