Rafael Jorba: "The fearful silence of the elites has led Catalonia to disaster"

A journalist with a long career,

(Igualada, 1956) has defended the flag of the old Catalan, regenerationist and federally based, to face an independence process that has fractured Catalan society.

A political and social crisis in the face of which Jorba proposes a "second secularism", the idea of ​​reducing the emotional and sentimental burden of the political debate and focusing on the rights and duties of the citizen.

Among his published works,

(Columna, 2004) and

(RBA, 2011).

Let's start with the question that Victor Klemperer asked himself in 1934 about Germany.

How did Catalonia reach this decline?

How did a modern and prosperous society thus enter the nationalist abyss?

There is an objective reason that is valid for Catalonia and for most western countries, what the former president of the Generalitat José Montilla described as a "perfect storm."

The result of a local factor, in our case was the terrible management of the Statute by the governments of Madrid and Barcelona, ​​and an external one, the international economic crisis of 2008 that devastated the middle classes, whose fear unleashed the rise of populism .

It was the perfect breeding ground for independence.

Long before those economic and statutory crises, Catalan nationalism began to use arguments of current national populism, such as the "right to decide" or the "us alone" ... It anticipated that movement, certainly, but there is a local factor in all populism : Brexit in the United Kingdom, the "Rome thief" of the League in Italy ... The Catalan nationalists are therefore not as original as they think they are.

The electoral and social outbreak of independence is part of the global rise of populism and the mismanagement of the crisis of the Statute by the Generalitat and by successive Spanish governments.

The latter opted for a non-proactive position, a

, without realizing the magnitude of the independence movement.

There is another decisive responsibility: the silence of the Catalan elites, many out of fear, laziness or, what is worse, complicity.

Sectors of journalism, the intelligentsia, academia and the business world were guilty in their way of leading it to the abyss.

As Klemperer said in

, the "fear and silence of the cults" led to disaster in Germany. And Jordi Pujol?

Can the independence process be understood without the 23 years of his mandate?

The intellectual and political roots of the

were rooted in Pujolism, although I believe that Pujol would not have made the mistakes of his heirs because he knew that Spain is a consolidated State and that Catalonia does not have enough strength to achieve independence, but it does Spain malfunction.

When the independence of the Baltic republics, he once said that Catalonia was like Lithuania but that Spain was not like the Soviet Union.

Pujolismo cultivated the

two ways.

The first was to create a related intelligentsia, realizing that the world of culture in Catalonia after the Transition was in the domain of the communist left (PSUC) and the socialists (PSC).

Hence the creation of the Acta convergent foundation, from where people like Pilar Rahola, Salvador Cardús or Vicenc Villatoro come out, who will play a prominent role in shaping public discourse.

And second, by making the voluntary decision to go from Catalan to nationalism and then to sovereignty.

It is a turn to destroy majority Catalanism, because in its essence it combined the defense of self-government with another idea of ​​Spain.

It was more than a nationalism, it was a regenerationism.

In the correspondence between Miguel de Unamuno and Joan Maragall they share the diagnosis that Spain is going badly, even though they later disagree on the therapy to follow.

But they share an interest and a will to regenerate Spain.

While for Pujolismo, with its celebrated politics of the peix al cove, the relationship with Spain was accidental.

CiU contributed to governance with the UCD, PSOE and PP, but without getting involved in the Government of Spain.

That is why Miquel Roca and Josep Antoni Duran Lleida, who advocated this involvement of Catalan nationalism, were defeated within the Convergence.

Without forgetting the figure of Pasqual Maragall, the great and last disappointment for many Catalans who expected a change of course regarding Pujol's nationalism when he arrived at the Generalitat in 2003 ... He arrives late at the Generalitat.

If he had done it after the 1999 elections, when he beat Pujol by number of votes and an exciting project, he would have been another president.

Then there is his commitment to the reform of the Statute, which was basically a tactical move to corner pujolismo and back up the left tripartite against the government of José María Aznar.

His problem was when the Popular Party unexpectedly lost the government after the 11-M attack and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero wins.

At that time, with the PSOE in government, Maragall should have accepted the constitutional reform offered by Zapatero in his inauguration speech, among other reasons because the 2006 Statute has the same jurisdiction ceiling as that of 1979, and it would have been avoided the frontal collision.

In the end, the pact with ERC meant a flight of voters from the PSC.

For example, towards Ciudadanos, born in 2006 from that disappointment with Catalan socialism and its alliance with independence movement, Maragall and Montilla made a serious mistake in the field of what is now called a story.

The Socialists chose to have control of the councils of economic weight and gave ERC culture and communication.

It was seen with TV3, which kept the worldview of nationalism from the Pujol era intact and continued to reproduce until today a public television scheme that is more nationalistic than national.

With the process it has been even worse, the public media have exceeded all the unimaginable limits of journalistic ethics.

Returning to Catalanism, has not been the alibi of nationalism to convince a part of the Catalan population, for example, about the goodness of linguistic immersion and lead it little by little to the coup d'état of 2017?

There are those who maintain that Catalanism died with the separatist process due to that kind of betrayal.

What happens with the process is the blatant breach of consent.

The Catalan left had accepted the romantic account of nationalism, such as the one lived in the Diada about the events of 1714, its myths, its legends ... In exchange for the consensus that Catalanism did not have an ethnic root, but rather it was based on the will to be.

What the French Jules Renard describes as the "daily plebiscite".

And it is not until the plenary sessions of September 6 and 7, 2017 in the Parliament, when the so-called rupture and referendum laws are approved, when that idea of ​​consent is broken.

It is also an attack against pluralism.

A large part of the Catalan population feels betrayed by its leaders.

This is how the great victory of Ciudadanos in the 2017 elections is understood. The independence movement seeks to break with social pluralism and that is seen, for example, with sport.

Barça's 8-2 defeat against Bayer Munich provokes a message of support from President Torra.

He did not write it when Espanyol dropped to the second division.

This uniform vision of Catalonia has meant that it has only one team in first division and the Valencian Community has four this season.

Fracture, division, disaffection ... How is the patient cured?

It does not seem that you can return to that Catalan consensus you are talking about.

First, accepting one thing that the independence movement still refuses today: Catalonia suffers a deep social division as a result of the procés.

It is tied with itself and, therefore, paralyzed.

There is no government but there is no opposition, while the population continues to be the victim of an emotional auction.

You have to start doing pedagogy, put an end to silences and fear and be very clear.

Explain that Catalonia is not plural only because of the people from the whole of Spain who came to work during the 60s, it has always been plural.

In the war of succession there were Catalans on both sides, Austrians and Bourbons;

in the Carlist Wars and the Civil War, too.

As Professor Josep Maria Fradera has explained, Catalonia is part of what are called cultures of double patriotism.

Instead, the current independence movement wants to eliminate everything that does not fit with the imaginary country it draws.

See if Catalonia is plural in its essence that one of the greatest exponents of its music at the end of the 19th century, Amadeu Vives, harmonized popular music songs such as

, and at the same time he composed highly successful zarzuelas as

.

You defend federalism as the best answer to the «Catalan question», but the Spanish autonomous state is already considered by many experts as federal ... Federalism is not a co-governance technique, as we have seen during the management of the crisis of the Covid.

It is a way of linking freedom and unity, equality and diversity.

It is true that the constitutional scheme of today's Spain is close to a federal state, but more political federalism is lacking.

Both in the way of dealing with conflict resolution, as well as institutional respect.

However, I see a constitutional reform difficult now because Spain has a problem building majorities.

If they don't even agree to renew the judiciary!

At this point I am very critical of the

Spanish

because six years ago it should have activated a constitutional reform to respond by elevating the independence process.

Coinciding with the arrival of King Felipe.

An offer, I am afraid, that would never end up satiating nationalism ... It is true that, as the Canadian Stéphane Dion says, each cession for them to calm down is and will be interpreted by nationalism as a sign of weakness that leads them to raise a new claim.

The point is that the Government of Spain must make an offer to Catalan society as a whole, not just to the independentists.

This would break the existing blockade.

In this sense I frame the idea of ​​the second secularism.

In the same way that at the end of the 19th century religion passed into the private sphere and belief was reinforced, in the 21st century the sphere of feelings, what people believe, must pass to a second level and that the determining factor is the citizenship, linked to rights and duties.

Let no one force us to have to decide between feelings.

The emotional charge must be reduced to the Catalan process and put more civic charge.

Society has been fractured.

The PSC was broken, CiU, now it breaks Junts per Catalunya on that maddened path of pointing out traitors and few followers.

The national populisms in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany point to the European Union as a great totem to tear down.

Will it emerge weakened from the coronavirus crisis or will it strengthen the project?

The European project suffered the first months of the crisis, but then it was able to give the political and economic response, as happened with the financial crisis of 2012. Without the European safety nets we would have experienced a much stronger rise of nationalism, which would have led us to a cycle of authoritarian responses very similar to those of the 1930s.

Do you also link the rise of populism with the crisis of the media?

Before, I was talking about the process and the decisive role that the Catalan press has had ... Traditionally, journalism had defended that ideas are free and facts are sacred.

Now, on the other hand, with post-truth, social networks, social gatherings, have turned opinions into something sacred and facts into free.

As journalists we are often tempted that, instead of explaining and interpreting what is happening, we try to set the agenda.

And people are not stupid.

You were a correspondent in France.

How do you explain the collapse of the Social Democracy in that country? Apart from the general crisis that the social democratic project is experiencing, in France the left - and in part also the right - has been unable to carry out the reforms that the country needed.

The French is a very blocked society that flatly refuses to be changed, as Macron is discovering with the phenomenon of the "yellow vests".

That explains why the Socialist Party, with the departure of Hollande, is internally divided and suffers a collapse.

The French left is less reformist and social democratic than the German.

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